Angst (Book 4)

by Robert P. Hansen

  “It’s melting!” Master Renard said. “The ledge beneath the man is melting!”

  Dagremon was getting close to them. What was she going to do when she reached them? Was she going to help Angus? Or was she going to hinder him? He glared at them, trying to will himself to be there. But he wasn’t there, was he? It was the worst possible thing for a soldier to experience: being too far away from a companion to help him in a fight. It wouldn’t be so bad, but he still didn’t think of Angus as being able to take care of himself. He knew he should—those spells he was hurling at the man were potent ones—but if Dagremon turned against him…

  He shook his head and stared at Dagremon. Her horse was flying steadily on, and the staff she carried was glowing like it had when she had told them that Giorge couldn’t stay at her inn. Only, this time it was even brighter. He frowned and tried to dismiss the thought again. It was too impossible to imagine….

  Dagremon suddenly lurched sideways out of her saddle as if something he couldn’t see had reached out, grabbed her shoulders, and jerked. It had happened so quickly he hadn’t even been able to worry about her falling before she was dangling from the reins of her horse. Then she started rocking back and forth until her foot caught in the stirrup and she was able to pull herself back into the saddle. She turned to the west and looked down at Embril for a long moment, but kept riding forward, toward Angus. It wouldn’t be long before she landed—if Embril didn’t stop her.

  He frowned. Wasn’t Embril the one who had taken The Tiger’s Eye? Isn’t that what Angus wanted to get back? That would mean that Dagremon wasn’t after Angus or The Tiger’s Eye, wouldn’t it? What was she after, then?

  They were approaching the tunnel Angus had made with his wand, and even with the fire burning on the plateau it would soon be too dark for even Master Renard to see what was happening. They had to rest the horses, and they wouldn’t be able to go any further than the tunnel until tomorrow. He wished he could risk traveling at night, but not with the sheets pulled over their heads and the mushroom smoke breathing down their necks. If only there was something he could do!

  Dagremon landed on the ledge about the same time they reached the tunnel, and Hobart let Ortis lead Leslie into the tunnel while he stood beside Master Renard with the moist sheet covering his mouth and nose. “What do you see?” he asked him.

  “Very little,” Master Renard said. “The spell has ended.”

  Hobart frowned. “All right,” he said, trying to imagine what was happening on the ledge. “Describe to me what you saw.” He paused and added, “Tell me about the man Angus parleyed with, first.” He clenched his teeth and braced himself for what was to come, then listened as intently as he ever had, only occasionally asking a question to clarify what Master Renard was saying. All the while, he kept his eyes on the ledge, where a fierce orange stream was entangled with a bright green one, like two serpents trying to eat each other’s tails.

  What are they doing up there? he wondered. And why isn’t Giorge dead?

  19

  A part of Magdel seemed to die when she heard Giorge say, “I am Symptata,” but most of her simply acknowledged what she had already suspected: the curse wasn’t over. Giorge had died and Symptata had taken control of his body, just like the fungus had taken over the corpses in Symptata’s tomb. No, that wasn’t quite right, was it? Giorge was still there with Symptata. She had talked to Giorge when he had admitted taking The Tiger’s Eye. And the poem said they would be joined, didn’t it? But Symptata was the one fighting with Angus, and she had to stop him. She had to save Giorge.

  “The Tiger’s Eye is in a place you will never be able to find,” Symptata taunted Angus. But that wasn’t true! Magdel had found it, and she had put it where she hoped Giorge wouldn’t find it. Now she had to get it back.

  The ledge beneath Giorge started to glow orange and the stone bubbled, but Giorge seemed to be unaware of it. He laughed and calmly walked through the lava toward Angus. Angus backed away and looked as if he were about to jump off the cliff when a little pony rode onto the ledge. Its rider—an elf!—leapt from the saddle and thrust a staff out in front of her. A beam of orange light streaked toward Giorge, but Symptata screeched and countered it with a green beam of his own. The two streams of light intertwined, whirling around like ropes dangling loosely in the wind.

  I have to do something! she thought. They’ll kill Giorgie! She reached for the poniard in her belt, but before she could draw it, a large hand firmly gripped the back of her cloak and tunic and lifted her easily off the ground.

  “Easy,” Lieutenant Jarhad said as he deposited her on the saddle in front of him. “You’ll get trampled.”

  “No!” she protested. “I can stop this!”

  Lieutenant Jarhad turned his horse to join his retreating men. “Hold still!” he ordered as she squirmed in his grasp.

  “You don’t understand!” she cried. “I can help him!”

  “Wizards fight alone,” Lieutenant Jarhad grumbled. “It is best to let them be.”

  Magdel bit back the sharp retort and tried to bring her emotions under control. She could help Giorge, but in order to do that, she had to convince Lieutenant Jarhad to help her. There was only one way to do that. “I know where The Tiger’s Eye is,” she said.

  Lieutenant Jarhad stiffened but didn’t slow the horse down. A few seconds passed, and then he said, “Embril’s box. You put it in there the other night, didn’t you? That’s why it was padlocked when I woke up.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  He hesitated a few more seconds, and then shouted, “Halt! Form a defensive line!” As his men complied, he weaved his horse through them until he was next to the pack horse that had Embril’s chest secured to it. As he dismounted, he shouted, “Kaleb! Help me get Embril’s chest down from here.”

  Magdel stayed on the horse and tried to watch what was happening to Giorge, but she couldn’t see much. The green and orange ropes struggled with each other, and Angus had jumped off the ledge to get out of their way. Streaks of flame snapped from his fingertips, but—thankfully!—they didn’t seem to be doing anything when they hit Giorge.

  “Break the lock,” Lieutenant Jarhad ordered.

  “No!” Magdel shouted as she turned to them and slipped off the horse. “Let me.” She tugged a pick out of her belt and knelt in front of the lock. The only light was the soft, sepulchral orange glow from the fire on the plateau, but she didn’t need any light to pick the simple padlock. It sprang open in less than ten seconds, and she lifted the heavy lid and thrust it away from her. She tossed book after book aside until she could see Symptata’s box and the pouch containing The Tiger’s Eye. As she reached for the box, she surreptitiously slid the drawstrings of the pouch around her fingers, and as she lifted the box, she brought the pouch out with it. She made a show of dropping the box to give herself an opportunity to tie the pouch to the loop under her arm, knowing the darkness would keep them from noticing what she had done. Then she picked up the box and turned back to the horse.

  Lieutenant Jarhad wrapped his heavy hand around her shoulder and stopped her. “What are you doing?” he demanded.

  She looked up at him and said, “Angus wants The Tiger’s Eye. It’s in this box, and I’m going to give it to him.” It wasn’t true, but she made it sound as if it were. If he caught sight of the pouch… “Symptata—” she had almost said Giorge “—doesn’t want him to have it. It will stop the fight.” His grip held firm for a long moment, and when it loosened, she turned to the horse and said, “Boost me up!”

  As Lieutenant Jarhad reached for her waist, she tucked The Tiger’s Eye under the box and nestled it against her abdomen. Then she was airborne for a brief moment before settling in the saddle.

  “Let her pass!” Lieutenant Jarhad called as she did her best to coax the reluctant horse forward, toward the mayhem in front of them. The orange and green ropes seemed to be knotted together in a stalemate with Angus fluttering around them, flicking useless flames at Sy
mptata.

  The horse didn’t want to approach the battle. She didn’t blame it; she didn’t want to approach it either. She did her best to keep it moving forward, but the horse wasn’t listening to her very well. If I live through this, she thought, I’m going to have Giorgie teach me to ride. Her breath caught in her chest as the thought continued on its own, If he lives through it, too. She had grave doubts about that.

  She made it most of the way to the battlefield before the horse balked for the last time and refused to go any further. It snorted, stamped its feet, turned around, and started running from the melee. Magdel leapt neatly from the saddle and rolled into a crouch. A moment later, she was running toward Angus and was about to call his name when Embril swooped up from below the ledge just a dozen feet in front of her. Embril waved her hands and pointed at Symptata—at Giorge!

  “No!” Magdel cried. “Embril! Stop!”

  But it was too late. The spell sent Symptata flailing into the cliff face. He slid down the cliff and settled into a crouch. The orange rope wrapped around him and Symptata screamed. It didn’t even sound like Giorge. Then the green rope doubled up on itself and pulled the orange one away.

  “I have The Tiger’s Eye!” Magdel shouted as she ran up to Embril. She reached up and tugged the pouch free of the loop and held it out to Embril. “Here it is!” She said as Embril half-turned toward her. “Giorgie didn’t take it,” Magdel gasped, her heart pounding as another screech erupted from Symptata. “Symptata did. It was the curse,” she finished as she came to a stop in front of Embril. “Take it back!” she pleaded as she thrust the pouch into Embril’s hands. She paused and desperately held out Symptata’s box. “We have to end the curse. The Skull’s in here,” she continued. “It has to be destroyed.”

  Embril stared at her as if she wasn’t hearing what she was saying, and then she blinked abruptly and her eyes widened. She nodded and grabbed for the box. She half-turned, paused, and thrust the pouch holding The Tiger’s Eye back into Magdel’s hands.

  “Get back,” Embril said. “Keep it safe.” Then she leapt off the cliff and flew toward Angus. She shouted at him, and when he finally turned toward Embril, the flames fled from his fingertips.

  Then Magdel turned and ran back toward the patrol—but she didn’t run very far before she stopped and turned around again.

  20

  Angus raged inside. His flame magic was impotent against Symptata’s shield, but what else could he do to help Dagremon defeat him? At least her staff’s magic was holding Symptata at bay, and maybe the minor distraction of his own spell could tip the balance to her favor. But what had Symptata meant about The Tiger’s Eye being hidden from him? How could it be? His Firewhip shouldn’t be more than a dozen feet long, but it was shooting out three times that far. It would only do that near a nexus of flame, and that’s what The Tiger’s Eye drew to it. It was even making the spell last far longer than it should have.

  Symptata suddenly lurched through the air as if he had been clouted by a giant fist. He struck the cliff face, and Dagremon’s magic swarmed in around him as she tried to rip the apparition from Giorge’s body. But Symptata recovered quickly and forced Dagremon’s magic away from him. Angus tried his Firewhip again, but Symptata’s shield had not been disrupted. It should have been; at the very least, the impact with the cliff should have broken his concentration, but it hadn’t. It wasn’t Giorge’s body that was using the magic; it was the apparition wrapped around it, and that apparition—Symptata—seemed impervious to the damage done to Giorge’s body.

  “Angus!”

  The call was from his left, and he immediately recognized the voice. Embril he thought as he turned toward her and felt the flame magic flutter away from his grasp. She’s alive, he thought, suddenly quite numb, quite calm. Embril was flying toward him, and she had a box in her hand. It looked familiar—like the ones from Giorge’s curse.

  “Angus!” she cried again as she fluttered up to within a few feet of him, stopped, and hovered in place. “Do you have your wand?” she asked. “The one you used on Hellsbreath’s wall?”

  He stared at her. She had taken The Tiger’s Eye, hadn’t she? She was in on Commander Garret’s plot to seize control of the kingdom. She—

  The Tween Effect is affecting me, he thought with sudden clarity. I’m acting like Giorge did when—

  Embril isn’t dead.

  They didn’t kill her.

  She hadn’t taken The Tiger’s Eye.

  She had been the one who had struck Symptata.

  She—

  “Yes,” he said, his mind whirring, his vision narrowing so tightly that he could see only her lovely face shrouded in that luscious red hair.

  “Good,” she said, lifting the box. “We have to destroy this.” She glanced at Symptata and added more softly, “His skull is in it.”

  His skull? Angus repeated to himself. Symptata’s skull? No, not Symptata’s. The Viper’s Skull. Giorge had completed it!

  Angus nodded and flexed his arm to release the wand into his hand. “There!” he said, pointing at the ledge between the patrol and the battle between Symptata and Dagremon. As they started toward it, he cast his Lamplight spell. It was much brighter and far hotter than it should have been, and he hurriedly maneuvered in close enough to Embril to attach it to Symptata’s box, and then rapidly veered away from her to avoid a collision. As he flew into position just off the edge of the ledge, he went through the first two motions that would release the wand’s power, and then waited for Embril to drop the box onto the ledge. As she moved away from it, he made the final movement and directed the wand’s energy at the box.

  Thunder roared, and he was propelled backward by the recoil. He lost his grip on his Flying spell and started to drop—but he only fell a short distance before Embril scooped him up in her arms and flew them up to the ledge. Symptata’s green magic was gone, and Dagremon’s staff pinned Giorge against the mountainside. Embril flew them over the hole the wand had just made and hovered in place for several seconds. The Lamplight was still there, but there was no sign of the box.

  “It’s gone!” Embril said as she carried him to the edge of the hole and gently set him down next to it. But instead of letting go of him, she wrapped her arms around his neck and clung to him. She shuddered against him and her mewling sobs filled his ear. “I thought you were dead,” she whimpered.

  Angus slowly, carefully wrapped his arms around her and buried his head in her hair. He sighed. No, he thought. She didn’t betray me at all. It was Commander Garret….

  21

  Voltari stepped onto the panels of his machine and cast the spell that would transport him to the nexus. He rematerialized over a lake of lava bubbling up from the bowels of a volcano and hovered there. He smiled. It was a toothless, almost gleeful smile that didn’t last long. There was something wrong with the nexus. The flow of energy was subsiding! It was as if it was being siphoned off and sent elsewhere. He frowned. It shouldn’t be happening. Nexus points never moved, but this one seemed to be doing just that. He would have to act quickly, while there was still enough energy remaining in it to fuel his machine. He started weaving together the intricate, complicated knots that would connect his machine to the magic of the nexus….

  An End of Things

  1

  “Master Taro,” Abner asked as they turned off the road to Wyrmwood. “You are sure it is wise to travel into The Tween?”

  Taro laughed. Wisdom had nothing to do with what they were doing. Wisdom would have told him to stay at the shrine and let his last days fade away in peace. Wisdom would call him a fool. No, he was not wise at all, but he was driven by a passion that burned deep within him, one that was fueled by the visions he had seen. “I am not a wise man, Abner,” he admitted. “A wise man would have sent a younger one on this quest.” So would a wise god, he thought. “I do this because it must be done. I do this because that dreadful look in the wizard’s eyes has haunted me ever since I first saw it. I do this because
no one else can.”

  Abner was silent for some time, and then he asked, “What will you do when we catch up with him?”

  Taro looked at the young man and wondered why he had suddenly become so talkative. He had been so trusting, so pleasant all this way, and now he was asking questions—annoying questions. Taro didn’t know what he would do; he only knew that he had to do it. He hoped Angus would know what to do. He turned away and looked at the valley they were riding into. It was a long, wide valley full of scrubby little bushes that pretended to be trees. Rocks stuck up at odd angles all over the place, and some of them were bigger than the shrine. The road followed the valley around the base of the mountain to the north and Grand Master Fredrick assured him that the road would climb up the side of that mountain as it curled around it. If he followed the road, he would come to a ledge that crossed the big mountain behind this one, and at the end of the ledge he would find the plateau he had seen in his vision. That was where he was going, because that was where he would find Angus.

  “I will tell him of the visions,” Taro said, his voice soft. “All of them.”

  Abner looked at him and frowned in thought. Then he said, “You did not tell Hobart about all of your visions, did you Master Taro? Or the Grand Master?”

  Taro shrugged. “No,” he admitted. “There is one that is for Angus alone. It is his choice, and it must be made by him.”

  Abner stared ahead of them as their mule cart plodded along. After a time, he sniffed the air and said, “A fire burns, Master Taro. The air is heavy with its stench.”

  Taro nodded. That’s because the plateau is already burning, he thought to himself. The trees have been nearly consumed in my vision, and it takes a long time for trees like that to burn. He leaned back and frowned. He was going to be late again, and there was nothing he could do about it. Would Angus wait for him? He looked to the west. The sun was beginning to set. The sky was free of clouds, but there were hazy streaks of red and orange already gathering around the sun.