Mage Quest - Wizard of Yurt 3 Read Online Free PDF

something else on his mind but didn’t like to press him. I turned on a few more magic lamps to brighten the dark corners and got up to pour more wine.
    “It wil be good to see my family,” the chaplain said unexpectedly as I handed him his refiled glass.
    “Your family?” Joachim rarely spoke of his family, although I knew he had at least one brother. I had the sense from something he had once said that he had been supposed to inherit the family business and a certain coolness had crept into his relations with his relatives when he decided to become a priest instead, but I had never had any details.
    “Yes.” He glanced at me briefly, then looked away. “My brother has been asking me to visit for close to a year now. He says I should realy meet his children before they grow any bigger, which is true, but I did not feel I could take the time away from my duties here. He wrote again this week and asked me to stop and see them on our way to the East. They’re only a short distance off our route, so when I talked to the king about it he said we would al go there. Now I’m trying to remember how long it’s been since I’ve seen him.” So that was what had been on Joachim’s mind, I thought. I was relieved that he had not been worrying about the bishop. The bishop intermittently imagined some undue influence on the chaplain from his friendship with a wizard, although as far as I could tel, I had never been able to influence Joachim in anything.
    “You’ve seen your brother at least once since I became wizard here,” I said. “You met him over in the cathedral city of Caelrhon.”
    “Six years ago,” said Joachim with a nod. “But I haven’t seen my brother’s wife since I left home for the seminary, and I’ve never seen their children at al.”
    “Is there any particular reason why he wants to see you now?”
    “He didn’t say specificaly,” said Joachim, his dark eyes distant. “In his last letter he hinted at some problems coming out of the East and affecting the family business. For a moment, I even wondered if it might have something to do with Sir Hugo’s disappearance, but that would be too much of a coincidence. After al, almost al luxury trade is connected to the East in some way.” I waited to give him a chance to say something more about his brother. When he didn’t and silence again stretched long between us, I used his mention of Sir Hugo to bring the topic back to the major purpose of our coming quest.
    “What do you think can have happened to Sir Hugo’s party?” I asked. I myself had no good ideas in spite of six weeks of theorizing. Although Zahlfast and the other masters of the wizards’ school seemed relieved that someone had volunteered to go look for Evrard, they also had no ideas.
    “Death, ilness, imprisonment, loss of money, loss of wil to return,” said Joachim, which seemed to sum up the possibilities. “If they are dead, I am glad they were first able to visit the holy sites where Christ’s feet trod.”
    I decided not to respond to this last comment. Instead I said, “It is a perilous journey, even now.”
    “It must always be somewhat tense in the East,” the chaplain agreed. “Politicaly, there are a few independent governors stil left over from the fal of the Empire, then the emirs, and the royal Son of David—
    and that’s only the beginning. It must be complicated on a religious level because the Children of Abraham and the People of the Prophet also have holy shrines in the Holy Land, as wel of course, as the Christian shrines.”
    “Don’t they al worship the same God?” I asked. If the organized Church had always lacked interest for me, comparative religion held even less.
    “There is only one true God,” said Joachim dryly.
    “I’ve mostly been thinking about the glamor of the East,” I said, deciding that now was not the time to learn more comparative religion. “Al the different peoples and cultures. The spices, the flowers, the