A Handful of Men: The Complete Series

by Dave Duncan

  Rap’s mouth was suddenly drier than the heart of Zark. He could not comprehend such numbers. Where had all those sorcerers come from? No wonder Zinixo had been displaying confidence! “We also have a demigod on our side.”

  With his eyes still closed, Jaurg smiled at him over blond heads. “Then it should be a good fight.”

  Gath was registering worry in the background. “We can win?”

  Jaurg turned to the voice and smiled again. “No, Atheling my liege, we cannot win. But it should be a good fight.”

  Odds of four to one? It would be a fight, but not a very good one.

  “We must coordinate our strategies,” Rap said, suddenly aware that even jotnar might be easier to handle than a mixture of touchy warlocks, archons, a demigod, sophisticated elves, and deadly cannibals —

  A scream of agony rent the morning, stilling the babble of conversation. Everyone stopped talking to stare. Over in the pixie sector, old Archon Neem had fallen writhing to the grass. Spectators were backing away hastily. In the ambience, he was enveloped in black flame. A moment later and a few paces away from him, Archon Puik erupted in black flame, also.

  Each archon was attuned to the section of border he guarded.

  The Keeper’s cry told the company what they had all already guessed. “Rally!” Thaïle shouted. “Meld! The attack has begun!”

  3

  Thaïle had not dared use foresight on the events of this fateful day, but she had guessed all along that the cause was hopeless. Had there been any chance of victory at all, her predecessor would not have capitulated so easily, for Lain had been no weakling; only certainty of failure could have driven her to despair. The testimony of the cobbler Jaurg had thus been merely confirmation. Overhearing it, Thaïle had peered into the very depths of his soul, suspecting a deeply buried treachery. She had discovered only a peaceable young man, honest and sincerely obedient to the Gods and the Good. A very unusual jotunn, in fact.

  Mundane logic alone said that disaster was inevitable. Even were the two sides evenly matched in strength, the issue could not be in doubt, for the Covin’s thousands were united under the will of the Almighty. The diverse assembly in the Meeting Place had no discipline, no unanimity, no single vision. These ragtag revolutionaries had no practice in acting together. They even lacked an overall leader. Thaïle herself, for all her superhuman power, was a naive country lass, inexperienced in command. Rap was a midget sorcerer and too much a decent human being to be a successful general — he had a statesman’s vision, but he lacked the arrogance needed to impose his own will on everyone else. The two warlocks were so wary of each other’s distrust that neither dared exert himself lest he provoke a rupture.

  At Thaïle’s command the company tried to meld and produced only a welter of confusion. Each of the twelve races making up the Thumian army rallied to its own leader first. Then imp clashed with jotunn, gnome with djinn, merman with anthropophagus, elf with dwarf. The fauns tried to argue. Trolls froze in horror and pixies shattered like glass.

  In essence the Covin was hurling raw power at the barrier over the Qoble Mountains, where Neem’s sector joined with Puik’s. The contest held no more subtlety than two mountain rams battering heads together beside a herd of ewes. Normally the physical world would have paid no heed, but in this case the energies released were so great that the earth shook and avalanches tumbled from the crags. Soon streams were boiling and forests smoked.

  The real battle was staged in the ambience. There, too, there was only insistence against resistance. Thaïle could observe the truth but mere sorcerers interpreted the ambience in metaphor. Different observers saw it in different ways, and she was overwhelmed by all the conflicting reactions around her. Many saw fire — white, red, and black. The jotunn mostly visualized a rampaging horde of warriors. Dwarves saw mighty hammers and merfolk giant waves. Struggling against this massive confusion, the Keeper fought to sustain the ancient walls and rally her supporters at the same time.

  Every one of the five hundred seemed to be calling on her — advising, beseeching, arguing, lamenting, while Neem and Puik thrashed in terminal agony. The Meeting Place roiled with fear and anger. Reduce the perimeter, launch a counterstroke at Hub, divide the army into columns… Five hundred sorcerers clamored with five hundred plans and suggestions.

  One tiny voice trilled on a different note. One small thread of emotion was different from all the others. Puzzled, Thaïle managed to spare a transitory fragment of attention for that one, and saw Kadie’s frightened mundane green eyes staring at her.

  “You all right, Thaïle?”

  Sympathy? That’s what it was! Someone cared for Thaïle herself.

  “Yes, I’m fine!” she said aloud. She smiled gratefully and turned her attention back to the Qoble front.

  Too late. The thousand-year sorcery collapsed, Puik and Neem dissolved utterly, and the Covin’s wrath raged untrammeled into Thume.

  And there, for a moment, it was balked. The stony eyes of the Almighty glared around, seeking an enemy. He found no army drawn up in battle, no fortresses to overthrow or cities to besiege. He saw only sleepy rustic countryside and a scattered population of herders, fishermen, and peasant farmers. Typically, he reacted with wanton spite.

  Pixies began to die. Bolts of power struck them down as they reaped and tilled. Men at their labors, women tending children, the children themselves at play — a wave of death surged forward over the Accursed Land. Cottages exploded in flame, livestock fell lifeless. Watermills and beehives burned. Nothing in the War of the Five Warlocks or the innumerable wars before it had ever been more cold-blooded than this systematic annihilation.

  The Meeting Place stiffened into paralysis. Horror froze the defenders as the destruction spread.

  King Rap was the first to recover. “Keeper!” he bellowed. “They have found the Gates! Abandon the College quickly!”

  Abandon?… Then Thaïle saw what the faun had seen. The Covin had just discovered that there were two Thumes. The mass slaughter was being inflicted on the real land, the home of the pixie folk. Above that, glimmering everywhere in a silver web of sorcery, lay the network of the Way, spreading out from the Chapel, linking Meeting Place with Library, Commons, Gates, Market, and all the facilities of the College. Innumerable threads led off to the humble Places where the sorcerers lived with their mundane partners.

  It was all horribly vulnerable. As soon as the Almighty realized where his enemies were hiding, be could detach the web from the real world. He need exert a mere fraction of his power to do that, and in an instant he would hold Pandemia unopposed, for the College would be gone forever, and everyone in it also.

  Thaïle blazed out a command: “To the Chapel! Archons, round up the mundanes and bring them, also. Now!”

  Thunder rumbled over the sunlit Meeting Place. The sorcerers vanished, leaving an empty space of much-trampled grass and clumps of bedraggled shrubs. Half the cabanas were in need of repair and an incongruous Nordland longship listed, to starboard in the lake. Only the six surviving archons remained — plus the imperor, Queen Inosolan, Kadie, and Gath.

  “Hey!” Gath said. “Where did everybody go?”

  4

  Rap had always known that the battle would be brief, for that was the way of sorcery, but he had not expected such instant catastrophe. For a moment the transition took his breath away.

  Then he pulled his wits together. The five pixies were still in a state of shock. He slammed power at them with all the feeble strength he could summon.

  “You!” he barked at Toom. “That way. You — take the west… Summon all the mundanes!” He distributed the four cardinal points and turned to the fifth pixie, Raim. “Adjust the Way!”

  They nodded, and rallied.

  Then he looked to the four mundanes. Gath and Kadie were already standing at his side, white-faced and bewildered. Inos and the imperor came running up.

  “Where is everybody?” Shandie demanded.

  “At the Chapel,” Rap s
aid. “We must join them or —”

  Temptation opened before him like a chasm. The war was as good as lost. The ancient barrier had offered a slim chance, but now it had fallen he could see no hope at all. Two thousand sorcerers! Odds of four or five to one — Zinixo was going to win in a pushover.

  So…

  So even if the Almighty did not detach the College from the real world. Rap himself and the archons might be able to do so. The alternative Thume would continue to exist. Assuming every sorcerer in the College had children and a wife or husband, it would be inhabited by a couple of thousand people. That was a viable population, and some of the sorcerers might manage to scramble back aboard before the severance was complete.

  “There are two Thumes,” he mumbled, struggling with honor and conscience. “The Almighty may be able to cut us off from the real world. If he does that, then he can never recapture us.”

  He stared in dismay at the wife he loved, his son and daughter. What would be their fate if Zinixo caught them? And what would be his own? Thume was a pleasant land. The four of them might dwell there in peace for the rest of their days. Kadie and Gath could survive to adulthood and find partners among the younger pixies. He and Inos would grow old in contentment, dangling grandchildren on their knees. It would be exile, but a safe exile.

  It was the fate he had chosen for the fairies. When he had been a demigod and had banished their race forever from the real world, he had not doubted that he was doing them a favor. Why, now, should he not choose the same solution for himself and his loved ones? The alternative was defeat and probably the most horrible deaths a mad sorcerer could devise.

  Shandie and the kids stared at him in bewilderment.

  But Inos understood, and her green eyes flashed disapproval.

  “Desert the cause?” she said.

  “The cause is lost!”

  “Duty?”

  Duty. Once before she had given him that answer in similar circumstances. Long ago, the two of them had faced a decision even more tempting than this one. Rap had known five words of power then. Five words alone destroyed, but five words plus love made a God. Together they could have taken on immortality, eternal bliss, and infinite authority. Together they had chosen duty instead.

  Gath and Kadie, then? Leave them? But they were not children any longer. What right had Rap to make this decision for them?

  None. But he had no time to explain it all. The archons were calling out to the mundanes, their voices echoing along the web of power to the farthest ends of Thume. Men and women and children were answering the occult summons, hurrying to the Way. Raim had changed the settings, so the Way now led only to the Chapel and whatever was happening there. There was no time to explain and reflect, so Rap would have to decide, and Inos’ expression told him what his decision should be.

  “We must go to the Chapel,” he said. “Come on!”

  He grabbed Kadie’s hand and started to run over the grass to the white path. He sensed the others following.

  Fool! he thought. Fool!

  * * *

  The Way sloped steeply through the forest now, and it was packed with refugees. Men bore toddlers on their shoulders, women and youngsters carried babies, and children milled around them all. Even the adults reacted with terror at the sight of demons, so Rap used sorcery to mask himself and his companions and clear a path ahead. The five of them ran, five people hand in hand, pelting down the slope Raim had just created.

  The trees became larger, thicker, darker. The air took on the muggy scents of jungle. Shandie and Gath kept gasping out questions. Inos and Kadie were trying to explain — the Chapel was the center, the site of power, the heart of Thume.

  And also Keef’s tomb. Rap thought, but the Chapel existed on both planes. Once there, they would be back in the real world.

  Even before the ancient ruin emerged from the forest, he could feel the crackle of sorcery and hear its echoes. The battle had reached the Chapel already. A mob of mundanes milled in dark confusion before the entrance. Still towing Kadie — who in turn towed Gath, Inos, and Shandie — he plunged into the undergrowth.

  “Back door!” he shouted over his shoulder. Swamp sucked at his legs, branches tore at his eyes. He fought his way through the tangled vegetation, around the corner of the crumbling ruin, and along to the little side portal. He arrived panting, covered in mud to his thighs. The handle resisted his efforts to turn it, so he exerted power again, ripping the door bodily from its hinges and hurling it away.

  Gath murmured an appreciative “Wow!” in the background. Rap dived through, and his chain of followers followed.

  Battle raged in the great chamber like a thunderstorm.

  To the left, the torrent of mundanes had poured in through the two entrances and then congealed, barring any more from following. The vestry must be packed solid behind them, while those who had entered stared in bewildered terror at the contest in progress.

  To the right, the few hundreds of the righteous were being driven steadily back on Keef’s grave in the far corner. Thaïle was in the front rank, with the leaders around her — Lith’rian, Raspnex, Thrugg, Twist, little Ishist, and some others. Fire and thunder clamored over them. Behind them the lesser sorcerers struggled to maintain their meld against the searing pain of manifest power.

  And in the center stood the Almighty.

  Of course it was only an illusion — Zinixo would never risk his own hide in a battle. But the human mind sought explanations and that vortex of raw power demanded form. Thus Rap saw the usurper himself, shining in black fire and three times the height of the tallest jotunn. Wielding the melded force of his minions, the giant dwarf hurled havoc upon the retreating defenders. The Chapel trembled in the blasts of power.

  Disaster! Rap gazed in despair upon the unequal struggle and knew that he had arrived in time to see the conclusion, no more. The outcome was inevitable. Nothing could resist the Almighty.

  Nothing Rap could do would make the slightest difference. For a moment he considered flight, but he knew he could never force his way back up the Way now. He released Kadie and took Inos in his arms.

  “It’s all over!” he shouted through the echoing thunders. “We have failed!”

  Shandie shouted, “No! Do something!”

  Inos kissed her husband’s cheek and hugged him.

  Gath said, “Oh, shit!” in a manly baritone.

  Then his prescience warned him. He yelled, and grabbed hold of Kadie.

  * * *

  The resistance collapsed. All of the assorted freedom fighters tumbled helpless to the floor imps, gnomes, jotnar… Only Thaile remained, a tiny defiant figure wrapped in the angry blasts of the Covin’s power. For a heart-rending moment the demigod alone defied the overweening sorcery.

  Then Thaïle also yielded. She cried out and was wreathed in fire. Brighter and brighter she blazed, echoes of her despair tearing at the onlookers. Despair and surrender — it was the inevitable fate of Keepers.

  “Let me go!” Kadie screamed, struggling wildly in her brother’s clumsy embrace.

  Rap’s heart was being torn apart. A God’s prophecy rang mercilessly in his ears: You must lose a child! This was what had been foretold. The fate of Pandemia swung in the balance now, and this was why the God had spoken. This was where duty led.

  “Let her go!” he barked.

  “But, Dad!” Gath protested, trying to avoid Kadie’s kicks. She was squirming and clawing like a wildcat Thaïle’s howl was a knife in the eardrums, her flames blazing ever brighter.

  “Let her go, I said!”

  “But, Dad —”

  “I know! Let her go!” Rap grabbed the pair of them. For a moment all three of them wrestled together, until Rap hauled Kadie free from her brother’s grasp.

  And released her.

  She ran. Gath tried to follow. Rap hung on to him, and then it was Gath who was the wildcat, righting, kicking, screaming warnings. Inos, also, dived forward, and Rap somehow won a hand free from his other
struggle to grab her arm. Again there was a three-way tussle.

  Kadie raced across the empty floor, skirted the towering triumph of the Almighty, and hurled herself upon the blazing demigod. Inos screamed and turned her back. Rap still struggled with a son frantic to go to the rescue of his twin. Gath was taller, but all bone and sinew, and he could not break free of his father’s muscle. There could be no rescue.

  For a moment princess and pixie clung to each other in incandescent embrace. White inferno roared in the Chapel. Clothes, hair, flesh dissolved in brightness greater than the sun.

  Sobbing, Gath slumped limply to the floor.

  There was nothing left. They had gone. The vision faded, except for green after-images. Darkness flooded back into the Chapel, stillness and sorrow.

  “You knew!” the boy howled, staring up at his father in disbelief.

  Rap turned away, unable to meet the awful accusation in his son’s face.

  He had known ever since Gath came safely back to him that Kadie was the one he must lose, and he had been fairly sure how it must happen.

  “Yes, he knew!” Inos said, and her glare was worse. “I hope he thinks it is worth it.”

  Kadie, Kadie!

  The sorcerers were scrambling to their feet and bowing to the obscenity that rejoiced in the center, the exultant mirage of the Almighty. They were all votaries now. The ice on Keef’s grave had melted.

  The battle was over. Zinixo had won.

  His monstrous image turned to look at the mundanes. Especially at Rap.

  5

  Dawn had long since reached Hub. Lord Umpily had not the faintest idea how long he had been crouching in his seat in the Rotunda. His limbs were cramped, his clothing clammy with sweat. He could guess that the decisive struggle of the war was being fought and that he was trapped in the middle of the enemy’s army. He suspected he was liable to be destroyed with it if his own friends won; he would certainly be executed as a spy if he were detected, but the worst part of his torment was that he had no idea how the battle was going! Ignorance was driving him crazy.