Paul Thompson - The Wizard_s Fate

Tol asked them about Mandes but couldn’t make himself heard over their distress. He grabbed the nearest fellow, a man about his own age, shook him hard and repeated his demand for information.

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?”