The Very Best of Tad Williams (8 page)

“I cannot believe that,” said Dondolan. “Elizar? The Devourer?”

“Believe what you will. There was always more to him than you folk on the Council understood. Whatever the case, he became fixed on the idea of securing the Amulet of Desire, which can grant its possessor whatever gift he most wants. He spent many months—a year, almost—pursuing its legend down many forgotten roads, in old books and older scrolls. He spoke to creatures so fearsome I could not even be under the same roof while they were conversing.” The memory still seemed to make Feliks fearful, and yet proud of his bold master. “At last the time came. Deep in our cavern home in the Darkslide Mountains, he prepared the spells. I helped him as best I could, but I am just a servant, not a necromancer. I stoked the fires, polished the alembics, brought the articles he needed from our reliquary. At last the hour came when the spheres were in alignment, and he began the Summoning of the Empty Gods.

“He had been nights on end without sleep, in the grip of a fever that I had never seen in him before, even on the night before Herredsburn, when dominion over all the world was still at his fingertips. Pale, wide-eyed, talking to himself as though I was not even present, he was like a prisoner desperate for release, whether that release came from the opening of the prison door or from the hangman’s rope.”

Feliks sighed and briefly wiped his eyes while Dondolan tapped impatient fingers.

“The spell went on for hours,” the small man continued, “names shouted into the darkness that hurt my ears. At one point I fled, terrified by the shadows that filled the room and danced all around me. When I came back, it was because I heard my master’s hoarse cry of triumph.

“He stood in the center of his mystical diagram, holding up something I could barely see, something that gleamed red and black...”

“Something cannot gleam black,” Dondolan said—a trifle querulously, Bannity thought. “It makes no sense.”

“Little of what had happened that night made sense, but I will not change my tale. It gleamed red and black. Elizar held it over his head, crying out with a ragged voice, ‘My greatest wish made real...!’—and then the roof collapsed.”

“Collapsed?” said Bannity. “How? I thought you were in some mountain cavern.”

“We were,” Feliks agreed. “I still am not certain how it happened—it was like being chewed in a giant’s mouth, chewed and chewed and then spit out. When I woke up, we both lay on the slope beneath the entrance to the lair, which was choked with fallen rock. Elizar was as you see him now, crushed and silent, his head all bloody, poor fellow. The Amulet was gone. Everything was gone. I helped him up and we stumbled and crawled down the hill to a cotsman’s deserted shack—the owner had fled when the mountain began to shake. I shaved my master’s head and doctored his wounds. We ate what supplies the cotsman had laid in, but when we ran out, we had no choice but to become wandering beggars.” The small, wrinkled man spread his hands. “
I
can do no magic, you see.”

“Was the boy in the village, the one Elizar sent to Eader’s Church, the first to be...touched?”

Feliks shook his head. “My master took a few people’s hands, mostly folk who gave generously to our begging bowl, and sometimes things happened. None were harmed, all profited,” he added, a little defensively.

“And you,” Dondolan demanded. “You must have touched his hands many times since this occurred. What of you?”

“What could happen? I already have my heart’s desire. All I have ever wanted was to serve him. From the first moment I saw him outside the Academy, I knew that he was my destiny, for good or bad.”

Dondolan sighed. “For bad, certainly, at least until now. You are not a true villain, Feliks, but you have served an evil man.”

“All great men are thought evil by some.”

“Not all great men graft the heads of wild boars onto the shoulders of peasant farmers,” Dondolan pointed out. “Not all great men wear the skins of other wizards for a cloak.”

“He killed only those who turned against him,” said Feliks stubbornly. “Only those who would have killed him.”

Dondolan stared at him for a moment. “It matters little now,” he said at last. “As I said, Kettil will have heard by now, and guessed who is here. The archmage will come, and things will change.”

“Then we must go,” said Feliks, rising to his feet with a weary grunt. “We will move on. There are still places we can live in quiet peace, if I only help my poor master to keep his hands to himself.”

“I dare not try to stop you,” Dondolan said. “I fear to wake your master if he really sleeps inside that battered skull—I admit I was never his match. But even if you flee, you will not outrun Kettil’s power.”

It does not matter. What will be, will be
, Bannity thought to himself, but a little of his newfound peace had gone with Eli’s unmasking.
Whether Elizar is a man transformed or a villain disguised, surely what happens next will be as God wills, too. For who can doubt His hand when He has shown us so many miracles here?

But Eli would not leave the wood, despite Feliks’ urging. The mute man was as resistant as a boulder set deep in mud: none of his servant’s pleas or arguments touched him—in fact, he showed no sign of even hearing them.

Dondolan and Bannity, armed with the knowledge of the miracle worker’s true identity, convinced the suddenly terrified village elders that for a while, at least, the crowds should be kept away. With a contingent of solders from the nearest shirepost, hired with a fraction of the profits from the long miracle-season, they cleared the forest of all the supplicants, forcing them out into the town and surrounding fields, where local sellers of charms and potions gleefully provided them with substitute satisfaction, or at least the promise of it.

Even as the last of the camps were emptied, some of the latest arrivals from beyond the village brought news that Kettil Hawkface himself was on the way. Some had seen nothing more than a great storm swirling around Thundering Crag while the sky elsewhere was blue and bright, but others claimed to have seen the archmage himself speeding down the mountain on a huge white horse, shining as he came like a bolt of lightning. In any case, those who had been turned away from Squire’s Wood now had something else to anticipate, and the great road that passed by the nameless village was soon lined with those waiting to see the most famous, most celebrated wizard of all.

Father Bannity could not help wondering whether Elizar sensed anything of his great rival’s coming, and so he walked into Squire’s Wood and across the trampled site of the camp, empty now but for a couple of hired soldiers standing guard.

Inside the tent wrinkled little Feliks looked up from eating a bowl of stew and waved to Bannity as if they were old friends, but Elizar was as empty-faced as ever, and seemed not to notice that the crowds of pilgrims were gone, that he and Feliks were alone. He sat staring at the ground, his big hands opening and closing so slowly that Father Bannity could have counted a score of his own suddenly intrusive heartbeats between fist and spread fingers. The man’s naked face and shaved scalp made the head atop the black robe seem almost like an egg, out of which anything might hatch.

Why did I come here?
he asked himself.
To taunt the blackest magician of the age?
But he felt he had to ask.

“Are you truly gone from in there, Elizar?” The priest’s voice trembled, and he prayed to God for strength. He now realized, in a way he had not before, that here sat a man of such power that he had destroyed whole cities the way an ordinary man might kick down an ant-hill. But Bannity had to ask. “Are you truly and completely empty, or is there a spark of you left in that husk, listening?” He had a sudden thought. “Did you bring this on yourself, with your magical amulet? When the time came for your heart’s desire to be granted, did God hear a small, hidden part of you that was weary of death and torment and dark hatreds, that wanted to perform the Lord’s work for your fellow men instead of bringing them blood and fire and terror?”

Eli did not look up or change expression, and at last Father Bannity went out. Feliks watched him go with a puzzled expression, then returned to his meal.

He came down the main road with crowds cheering behind him as though he were a conquering hero—which, after all, he was. Bannity watched the people shouting and calling Kettil’s name as the wizard rode toward the village on his huge white horse, the same people who only days before had been crouched in the dirt outside Eli’s tent, begging to be let in, and the priest wondered at God’s mysterious ways.

Kettil Hawkface was younger than Bannity would have guessed, or else had spelled himself to appear so. He seemed a man in the middle of life, his golden hair only touched with gray, his bony, handsome face still firm in every line. His eyes were the most impressive thing about him: even from a distance, they glittered an icy blue, and up close it was difficult to look at him directly, such was the chilly power of his gaze.

Bannity and Dondolan met the archmage at the edge of the wood. Kettil nodded at his fellow wizard, but hardly seemed to see the priest at all, even after Dondolan introduced him.

“He is in there...” Dondolan began, but Kettil raised his hand and the lesser mage fell silent.

“I know where he is.” He had a voice to match his eyes, frosty and authoritative. “And I know what he is. I have battled his evil for half my long life. I do not need to be told where to find him—I smell him as a hound smells his quarry.”

Strange, then, that you did not find him before,
thought Bannity, then regretted his own small-minded carping. “But he is not the monster you knew, Archmage...”

Kettil looked at him then, but only a moment, then turned away. “Such creatures do not change,” he said to Dondolan.

Bannity tried again. “He has done much good...!”

Kettil smirked. “Has he revived all those he killed? Rebuilt the cities he burned? Do not speak to me of things you do not understand, priest.” He slid down off his massive white horse. “I will go, and we will see what devilry awaits.”

Bannity had to admit the archmage was as impressive as legend had promised. He strode into the forest with no weapon but his staff of gnarled birch, his long hair blowing, his sky-blue robes billowing as though he still stood on the heights of Thundering Crag. Bannity looked at Dondolan, whose face bore a carefully composed expression that betrayed nothing of what he was thinking, then they both followed the Archmage Kettil into Squire’s Wood.

To Bannity’s astonishment, Eli himself stood in the doorway of the tent, looking out across the great clearing.

“Ho, Devourer!” Kettil’s voice echoed, loud as a hunting horn, but Eli only looked at him incuriously, his large hands dangling from his sleeves like roosting bats. “I have found you again at last!”

The hairless man blinked, turned, and went back into the tent. Kettil strode after him, crossing the clearing in a few long paces. Bannity started to follow, but Dondolan grabbed his arm and held him back.

“This is beyond me and beyond you, too.”

“Nothing is beyond God!” Bannity cried, but Dondolan the Clear-Eyed looked doubtful. A few moments later little Feliks came stumbling out of the tent, flapping his hands as if surrounded by angry bees.

“They stand face to face!” he squawked, then tripped and fell, rolling until he stopped at Bannity’s feet. The priest helped him up, but did not take his eyes off the tent. “They do not speak, but stare at each other. The air is so thick!”

“It seems...” Dondolan began, but never finished, for at that instant the entire clearing—in fact, all the woods and the sky above—seemed to suck in a great breath. A sudden, agonizing pain in Bannity’s ears dropped him to his knees, then everything suddenly seemed to flow sideways—light, color, heat, air, everything rushing out across the face of the earth in all directions, pushing the priest flat against the ground and rolling him over several times.

When the monstrous wind died, Bannity lay for a long, stunned instant, marveling at the infinite skills of God, who could create the entire universe and now, just as clearly, was going to dismantle it again. Then a great belch of flame and a roar of rushing air made him roll over onto his knees and, against all good sense, struggle to sit up so he could see what was happening.

The tent was engulfed in flame, the trees all around singed a leafless black. As Father Bannity stared, two figures staggered out of the inferno as though solidifying out of smoke, one like a pillar of cold blue light, with flame dancing in his pale hair and beard, the other a growing, rising shadow of swirling black.

“I knew you but pretended, demon!” shouted Kettil Hawkface, waving his hands in the air, flashes of light crackling up from his fingertips. “Devourer! I know your treachery of old!”

The shadow, which had begun to fold down over the archmage like a burning blanket, instead billowed up and away, hovering in the air just above Kettil’s head. A face could be seen in its roiling, cloudy midst, and Bannity could not help marveling even in his bewildered horror how it looked both like and unlike the silent Eli.

“I will make sure your dying lasts for centuries, Hawkface!” shrieked the dark shape in a voice that seemed to echo all the way to the distant hills, then it rose up into the air, flapping like an enormous bat made of smoke and sparks, and flew away into the south.

“Master!” screamed Feliks, and stumbled off through the woods, following the fast-diminishing blot of fiery blackness until he, too, disappeared from sight.