The Wizard_s Fate e-2

by Paul B. Thompson

  The man ceased his cries but only stared at Tol in mute horror. One of the elder women spoke.

  “The aerie, sir! The aerie!” She pointed behind Tol at a collection of towers sprouting from the highest tier of the fortress.

  He released his grip, and the hapless servant crumpled bonelessly to the floor. To them all, Tol said, “If you want to live, get out.”

  The woman whimpered something about ogres, and Tol told her the two guards were dead. He turned to go as she began organizing her compatriots to flee.

  Tol crossed the courtyard and entered the center door in the middle tier of the fortress. Room after room he traversed, all filled with Mandes’s possessions. Rolls of tapestries and carpets, golden bowls, silver pitchers, richly appointed furniture-the ill-gotten gains extorted from the noblest families in Daltigoth piled in careless heaps, seemingly without plan.

  Most of the rooms had magical globes to illuminate the way, but these darkened one by one as Tol passed by and the nullstone drained them of power. When he found a corridor lit with simple flaming torches, he took one.

  The silence of the fortress wore on his nerves. No whisper of sound penetrated the thick walls; all he heard was his own breathing and the echo of his footsteps. He found himself alternately creeping quietly or stomping deliberately through the empty halls. At one point, he accidentally knocked over a marble statue. It crashed to the floor and broke into large pieces.

  “Hear that, wizard? Tol of Juramona is here!” he shouted.

  Smashing the figure was so satisfying, he attacked the rest of the statues lining the passage ahead of him. All were female figures, delicately draped or fully nude. He broke one after another, planting a booted foot on the pedestals and sending the alabaster bodies toppling. His destructive fury abated when he reached the final statue. Glancing up at the face of the lone statue standing in a sea of broken alabaster and drifting dust, he paused. Its features reminded him of Valaran, right down to the dimpled smile and the small notch at the top of its left ear.

  He looked back over shattered statuary filling the passageway. The heads of two other figures lay nearby-they resembled Valaran as well. All the statues bore her features! Worse, the stumps of broken arms and headless necks were oozing beads of red liquid, exactly the color of blood.

  Repulsed, Tol fought free of the debris. It must be an illusion. But the nullstone protected him against illusions, didn’t it? Perhaps Mandes had caused the statues to be filled with real blood in a bizarre attempt to distract Tol from his purpose, but how could he have known that Tol would break them?

  Ridding his mind of the distracting questions, Tol knocked the head from the last statue. “Next you, Mandes!”

  At the end of the passage, a tightly curved stair rose through a hole cut in the floor above. A glimmer of red was visible beyond the rim of the opening. Tol drew his saber and climbed slowly, keeping the torch low.

  The red glow was strange. It quivered like a reflection on a pool of water. A gust of air rushed by Tol’s face and, wary, he halted halfway up the steep stair.

  An oozing mass of gel came out of the darkness at the top of the stair. Translucent and thick like the white of an egg, the quaking mass poured down the steps straight at him.

  He dropped the torch and fled, wounded shoulder and battered ribs screaming with every hasty footfall. A faint hissing told him the wall of gel was close on his heels. He had no idea whether it was poisonous or if Mandes simply intended to drown him in a gelatinous flood.

  Two steps from the bottom, Tol hurled himself into space, landing on the only statue still standing. The heavy statue rocked with the force of the impact but remained upright. Tol wrapped his arms around the headless figure. Clear gelatin, as cold as the deep sea, surged around the pedestal. The level rose higher and higher, but there was no place for Tol to go. He could only watch as waves of cloudy albumen flowed beneath him.

  Fortunately, the magical flood never rose above his knees, and soon the flow down the stairs ceased, and the frigid gel vanished entirely. Neither Tol’s clothing nor the stones of the passageway around him showed any signs of dampness. It was as though the stuff had never existed at all.

  Tol climbed down gingerly. He took another torch from a sconce and mounted the stairs again. This time the distant red light did not quiver; no murderous gel stood between it and him. He ascended cautiously.

  The air in the chamber above was dank and chill. With his torch, he lit sconces along the near wall. Their light revealed a vast, low-ceilinged hall. In contrast to the cluttered rooms below, it was empty. The floor was covered in native slate, and an elaborate design of circles and lines had been drawn in dark red paint on the bluish-gray stone. The red light emanated from the design. In its center, facing away from Tol, sat a high-backed chair. The top of a balding pate was visible over the chair’s back.

  Tol strode around the chair, eager to face his old foe, but with every step he took, the chair moved, always keeping its back to him. He picked up the pace until he was almost jogging, but he made no better headway. Halting abruptly, he realized it wasn’t the chair that moved, but rather the design on the floor-the circles within circles were rotating the chair away from him.

  Furious at the childish delaying ploy, Tol drove the point of his saber into a joint between two stone slabs. The floor shuddered briefly then was still.

  He took a tentative step, then another. The floor did not move. He left Number Six where it was, anchoring the room, then, moving quickly around the high chair, he came face to face with Mandes.

  The sorcerer sat stiffly upright in the high-backed chair. His eyes were closed. He wore a cloth-of-gold robe much like the one Tol had seen him in at the contest on the Field of Corij. His hair, now more gray than brown, hung loose past his shoulders. His ungloved hands rested on the chair’s curving arms-the right hand was pale, the left dark.

  Tol drew his dagger.

  “In the name of the Emperor of Ergoth, I charge you, Mandes the Mist-Maker! Surrender at once and face the empire’s justice!”

  There was no response at all. Tol moved closer. Mandes’s eyelids snapped open. In the reddish light, his pale blue eyes looked black.

  “You’re a fool, Tolandruth,” he intoned. “You came despite my warnings. Even if you don’t care for your friends’ lives, I thought you did care about the empire you claim to serve!”

  “I know my duty!”

  Tol moved closer still, traversing the invisible protection Mandes had woven around himself. Time and again he felt the flicker of heat on his face, but the nullstone dispelled the magic as he pierced one sorcerous layer after another.

  This easy, even contemptuous disregard of his spells left Mandes open-mouthed with shock. He began to tremble. Close to him now, Tol saw the whites of his eyes were completely covered with a web of fine, bloody lines. Tiny droplets of moisture gleamed on his high forehead, pinkish blood-sweat.

  “This is impossible!” Mandes’s voice cracked. “What are you? No man could do what you do!”

  “I’m only a man, not even nobly born, remember?” Tol pointed his dagger at the sorcerer. “Stand up, Mandes, and face what’s due you!”

  When he didn’t comply, Tol raised the blade high to strike. Mandes flung out his white hand, crying, “Wait! If I am to die, at least tell me how you can withstand every spell I cast, every supernatural creature I raise to stop you?”

  Tol smiled. It was not an expression of happiness, but of savage pleasure, and Mandes flinched visibly.

  “I have a millstone.”

  Mandes blinked, brow furrowing at the unfamiliar word. He palmed pink sweat from his face with a trembling hand.

  “I’ve heard rumors… tall tales,” Mandes finally said. “Waramanthus, the elf sage, tried his entire life to fashion such a thing and failed! The great Vedvedsica wrote of such devices, but he said none had survived the Age of Dreams.”

  Tol’s level gaze transfixed the shaken sorcerer. “He was wrong.”

&nb
sp; Mandes’s chin dropped to his chest. Twisting his mismatched hands in his lap, he began to sob.

  Before Tol could react, the sorcerer yanked his swarthy hand hard. The dark limb came out of its sleeve. As it rose in the air, Mandes snatched a saber from beside his chair and tossed it toward the disembodied limb. The dark hand caught the weapon deftly, fingers closing tightly on the hilt.

  The muscular arm drove Tol back with viciously precise thrusts, and while he was engaged, Mandes escaped.

  The levitating limb was far nimbler than any opponent Tol had ever fought, and its saber far outreached Tol’s dagger. He could do nothing but parry again and again. A precisely timed slash laid open Tol’s cheek, and the next came within a hair’s breadth of his eyes.

  It required all Tol’s training and wit to hold his own. The ensorcelled arm was lightning-fast.

  He had a desperate idea, and worked feverishly to retrieve the nullstone from its secret pocket while holding the arm at bay.

  The limb beat him back all the way across the vast hall, to the very door through which Mandes had escaped. Tol’s ribs ached. Blood from his cheek was smeared across his face, mixing with sweat, stinging his eyes-

  The arm made a simple but shockingly fast lunge at the spot between Tol’s eyes. Tol dropped, and the curved iron blade slid through his hair. The sword tip pierced the door panel behind and hung up there, just for a instant.

  That was all the time Tol needed. From below, he rammed his dagger through the palm of the flying limb. There was a momentary tug of resistance, then the point passed through. He had the hand!

  He continued the motion, driving his dagger into the door panel. The hand dropped its sword, and the arm hung, impaled, flailing, fingers flexing madly.

  The severed limb did not bleed. To Tol’s horror, the fingers ceased their furious motion and closed on the blade. The hand drew itself forward, forcing more of the iron shaft through the flesh of its palm.

  Keeping pressure on the hilt, Tol touched the millstone to the dagger blade. There was no effect on the writhing hand, but when he pressed the braided metal directly on the brown fingers, the grotesque parody of life was finally over; the limb went limp.

  Instantly, the stench of putrefaction filled Tol’s nostrils. He freed his blade and stepped quickly back. The years of lifelessness, held at bay by Mandes’s magic, overwhelmed the limb, and it began to decay before Tol’s eyes. In moments it was little more than bones and stray bits of rotted flesh.

  He flung open the door to follow the sorcerer.

  Although Mandes had fled the hall, he couldn’t easily escape this isolated peak. The corridor beyond the door was dark, but Tol felt a faint breeze on his face. The air wasn’t musty or dank, but fresh, with the tang of the mountain in it. He followed the draft.

  It led him to another spiral stair, narrower but longer than the one he’d climbed earlier. He ascended cautiously. The breeze grew steadily stronger as he rose.

  The stair ended on a tiny landing where a plain wooden door barred his way. Fresh air blew in through a gap between the bottom of the door and the stone floor.

  Tol’s booted foot lashed out. “Mandes! I have you!” Another kick. “You can’t escape me!” A third kick.

  The fifth blow broke the iron latch, and the door swung open. Beyond was a turret room, the very highest of the old fortress’s many towers. A window opening gaped opposite the door. Mandes stood in the opening.

  Wind whipped the magician’s golden robe around his legs and flung his hair wildly about his head. Beholding the bloodstained avenging fury in the doorway, Mandes fairly convulsed with terror.

  “You can’t kill me!” he said shrilly. “I am the greatest sorcerer of this age!”

  “You’re nothing but a murderer many times over. Your head will decorate the wall of the Inner City!”

  Beyond the rogue sorcerer, Tol could see the wizard’s paired griffins circling, pulling their flying golden coach, trying to approach the tower. They were confounded by the mountain, which severely limited their room to maneuver, and by the howling wind, which alternately threatened to dash them against the fortress and lift them high above it.

  Mandes rested his forehead against the stone. His shoulders shook. Tol thought he was weeping, but when the wizard lifted his head, Tol realized he was laughing.

  Mandes declared, “With me dies your life as you know it, Tolandruth! Your emperor, your army, and all the things you love shall pass away!”

  “Your threats are meaningless, betrayer!”

  “No, it happens even now. A greater evil than anything I ever dreamt of will sit upon the throne of Ergoth!”

  Tol hesitated. “Is it possible to undo what Nazramin has done?”

  Mandes mastered himself again. “Only I could undo it, if I live.”

  Tol weighed the possibilities. Spare the evil he’d finally cornered to fight worse evil elsewhere? Mandes was a conniving villain, and Tol’s credo had always been a simple one: destroy the enemy when you find him; don’t worry about one you may meet tomorrow.

  Mandes saw the judgment in Tol’s countenance. He knew his fate was sealed.

  Only two paces separated them. Tol lunged just as Mandes leaped away, arms outspread, trying to catch the side rails as the flying coach whisked past. Tol felt golden fabric whisper through his fingers, but it was too late.

  Mandes laughed. He was gone!

  For the space of two heartbeats, he believed it. Then the shifting winds lifted the passing coach, his hands closed only on air, and the terror of his mistake struck home. Mouth stretched wide, Mandes shrieked all the way down to the craggy rocks far, far below.

  The griffins, freed of Mandes’s hold, broke their traces and flew off, trumpeting their freedom. Moments later, the flying coach shattered to glittering fragments in the crevasse below the fortress.

  Tol sagged to the floor, his rage spent.

  He didn’t know how long he sat, unmoving, his mind an exhausted blank, but it was the coldness of the wind that finally broke through his stupor.

  With Mandes’s death, the mist wall and the unnatural warmth protecting the summit had dissolved. Sundown was coming, and the normal cold was swiftly reclaiming the citadel. Soon ice would engulf everything. Tol’s injured face and shoulder were stiffening. He needed to reclaim his furs and get down the mountain.

  Before the daylight failed, he performed one last task. He scrounged enough rope from Mandes’s jumble of possessions to lower himself into the ravine below the fort. On the rocky slope not far from the ruined coach, he found the sorcerer’s mangled corpse. For once the letter of Ergothian law suited Tol’s purpose. He had spared the Dom-shu chief Makaralonga this fate years ago. He would not spare Mandes.

  The rogue wizard’s head would return with Tol to adorn the palace at Daltigoth. His body would feed the vultures of Mount Axas.

  Epilogue

  No Way Home

  Snow was falling the day Tol began his journey back to Daltigoth. The snow had started the night Mandes died and continued without pause. It was not a blizzard, but a steady, soft accumulation that shrouded the world in stillness.

  Mandes’s hired mercenaries had vanished by the time Tol came down from the fortress. With winter settling quickly upon the heights, they’d wasted no time departing for warmer and more profitable climes.

  Although Mandes’s spells had dispersed with his death, strange occurrences continued on Mount Axas. When Tol reclaimed his and Early’s horses, he found the winged Irda statues had vanished from their plinths. On the pedestals where they’d stood for countless centuries, all that remained were the imprints of two clawed feet. Likewise the crouching lion statues were gone. The snow around their bases was unmarked; there was no sign anyone had dragged the statues away, nor were there any paw prints.

  Tol wrapped Early’s body in a broad length of fine Tarsan linen taken from Mandes’s hoard. Riding Tetchy and leading Longhound bearing the kender’s body, he made a slow descent of Mount Axas. Halting in
a high valley filled with aspen and birch trees, he buried his brave companion. Even in the gray light of a winter’s morning, it was a beautiful spot; in spring, it would be spectacular.

  Purged of his decade-long thirst for vengeance, Tol felt empty. He rode along the trail to Juramona, pondering the price of his revenge. The empire was free of an evil force, but many good people had given their lives to bring that about, and Tol had no idea what awaited him in Daltigoth. Had Mandes’s vision been true? Was Ackal IV lost, mad, and his vicious brother now seated on the throne?

  It took him two days to reach the Eastern Hundred, and two more to wade through the snow to Juramona. When he arrived, Tol discovered that many more days than he’d reckoned had passed since he and Early had departed for Mandes’s mountain.

  “I almost mourned you for lost!” Egrin declared, upon seeing Tol again. “It’s been twenty days since you left us!”

  Tol shook his head doggedly, dislodging the snow that had collected on his head and shoulders. “Can’t be,” he muttered. “Two days to the mountains, a day in the fortress, two days out, two to cross the Hundred-seven days. I’ve been gone seven days.”

  Egrin rested a hand on his shoulder. “You’ve been away twenty days.”

  Indeed, it transpired, much had happened in that time. A courier had arrived from the capital with a sealed missive for the marshal. The seal was unfamiliar, but the letter proved to be from Prince Nazramin. Now titled “provisional regent for the ailing emperor, Ackal IV,” Nazramin wrote that the empire was in safe hands and the Marshal of the Eastern Hundred should stand ready for further orders.

  “What will you do?” asked Tol, upset at this confirmation of Mandes’s awful vision.

  “Wait for my orders,” Egrin replied. He could do nothing more-or less.

  Tol tarried two days in the city of his childhood, soaking his tired body in casks of hot water and allowing Healer Ossant to attend his wounds. Although Egrin urged him to remain longer, Tol knew he needed to move on. He must learn the fates of those he’d left in the capital, and truth be told, he found Juramona too full of ghosts.