Free Below the Wizards' Tower (The Royal Wizard of Yurt Book 8) by C. Dale Brittain Page A

some kind
of ceremony they do every year, and the person who usually does it is
sick.   It isn’t you, is it?   Because he told me I looked sort of like
the man who usually does it, which is why he picked me.”
    “The man who usually does what?” I
demanded, wild with curiosity.
    “Well, insult the priests.”   Marcus picked up a bit of cheese rind
and nibbled at it, but there was really no cheese left.   “He told me they have this special
backwards day every year, where the priests are insulted rather than being
treated with reverence, so they don’t forget their humility.   Though I must say,” he added
thoughtfully, “if I were trying to remind priests of their humility, I would
have them dress in rags, not fine vestments.”
    Annual ceremony indeed!   But that then explained why the dean and
the rest of the cathedral chapter had been so frosty with me.   “And they had you locked up for playing
your part?” I managed to ask.
    “No, that wasn’t until this
evening.   I was just thinking where
to have dinner, since at the moment I have plenty of money, when the guardsman
picked me up.   ‘Dangerous vagrant’
was the term he used.   I’m glad you
came along!” he added cheerfully.   “I really didn’t want to spend the night sober in a cell, next to some
drunks.   I only like to associate
with drunks when I’m drunk myself!   You never told me—why did they pick you up?”
    “For being you,” I said, thinking
fast.   The air cart was the
key.   Elerius had borrowed it from
the school and had said he would have it back late this evening.   Therefore, he must be the man who had
hired Marcus, to play a role in a complicated plan I could not even imagine,
and he must be long gone from Caelrhon.   He would have tipped off the municipal guard to a “dangerous vagrant,”
and been safely back in his own kingdom doing something innocent, by the time
Marcus talked his way out of the mayor’s court.   It almost made sense….
    Unless Elerius had an accomplice to
shuttle Marcus back and forth— Caelrhon’s own
royal wizard?   Or some carnival
magician Elerius was manipulating for his own purposes?
    And suppose Elerius really had been,
as he said, using the school’s air cart for an innocuous errand for his king,
and some other wizard had acquired an air cart of his own.   Purple flying beasts, I had heard, were
fairly common up in the borderlands of the land of wild magic, and it shouldn’t
be too hard to find an old one about to expire anyway and turn its skin into a
cart.
    Every time I thought I had the
answer, or a piece of an answer, all my suppositions fell apart.   I tried mentally probing the street
outside, to make sure that we were not discovered.
    No sign of Elerius or any other
wizard—unless he had his thoughts well protected.   But there was something there, not in our square, over closer to the cathedral.   Something radiating
powerful, unfocused magic….
    A creature from the land of wild magic, not locked up safely in the school cellars but
somewhere here in Caelrhon.   I went
cold all over.
    “What, exactly, did you say to the
cathedral priests?” I got out through frozen lips.
    Marcus looked down for a moment, then met my eyes with a rueful expression.   “I’ve always hoped that I would never
hurt anybody—except perhaps me—so I really do feel bad about
it.   I must have been insulting far
beyond what the man who usually plays the part does!   And it’s not much of an excuse that I
was only saying what I was told to say.”
    “Which was?”
    He gave an embarrassed chuckle.   “I told the priests that I was the Royal
Wizard of Yurt—thinking, of course, that they would know at once that I
wasn’t really a wizard, and that Yurt probably isn’t even a real kingdom.   But maybe they didn’t.   First I quoted them the old saying,
‘There are three that rule the world, the wizards, the church, and the
aristocracy,’ and added that the greatest of