Paul Thompson - The Wizard_s Fate

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.

He left a substantial amount of gold in Egrin’s care, courtesy of Mandes’s treasury, with instructions to bestow it on the sorcerer’s victims. With Egrin’s stoic but heartfelt farewell in his ears, Tol rode off at midday.

The snow was gray mush in the streets. As Tetchy made his way through the town’s bustling lanes, Tol saw again the faces of his youth: Lord Odovar, whose life he’d saved to begin his adventures; wise Felryn, who even in death had helped him defeat Mandes; Narren, killed years ago in the battle against XimXim; Fellen the engineer, Frez, Darpo, Tarthan, and the rest of his handpicked band of foot soldiers who had perished in the long war with Tarsis.

Just before passing through Juramona’s wall, Tol’s route took him by a tavern. The door swung open, and the piping of a flute came to his ears. The sound reminded him of Crake, the clever flutist and quick-witted archer. He had once been Tol’s closest friend and later his bitterest foe. He, too, was dead.

Yes, Juramona teemed with ghosts.

Tol rode south, choosing an oblique course to the capital, one that would take him by his family’s old farmplace in the hills southwest. He hadn’t been there in six years, but he found the site readily enough.

It looked much as it had six years earlier, except that knee-deep snow now covered most of the ruined house and derelict pig pens. The walls of the root cellar where Tol’s mother had stored vegetables against difficult winters had collapsed, leaving a shallow depression overlaid by snow.

He sat silently, looking over the barren scene. Snow flecked his beard and dappled Tetchy’s sleek black hide.

A solitary figure caught his eye. Draped in many layers of fur, the fellow walked slowly up the path from the old onion field. Tol rode slowly toward him. He recognized the trappings of a fur hunter-a coil of rawhide snares, wicker basket carried on the back, the knobby club for dispatching trapped prey. The trapper crunched along atop the snow, his feet supported by woven willow snowshoes. Tol’s father had worn such snowshoes. He hadn’t seen their like in twenty years.

He greeted the trapper. The fellow halted, regarding the mounted warrior uncertainly.

“Greetings, m’lord.”

For a moment Tol thought the stranger recognized him, then with a flash of memory, realized the peasant likely would address any mounted stranger that way.

“How fares the fur trade?”

“Well enough, m’lord, well enough.” The trapper gestured to the lead-gray sky, adding, “Snow’s good for business.”

The fresh snow would make tracking the trapper’s prey-rabbit, stoat, and fox-much easier.

“Are you a local man?” Tol asked.

“Lived here all my life, m’lord.”

“Did you know the family who lived on that farm, over yonder?”

“That I did. Bakal and Ita, yes.”

Tol’s heart beat faster. “What became of them?”

The trapper rubbed his bearded chin with a mittened hand. “Lemme see, it’s been a while. Bakal, he took sick some winters back. Ita took him to the city to find a healer. Never come back.”

To his family and this trapper, “city” would likely mean Juramona. Was it possible his parents lived in the town he’d just left? He shook his head at the idea. Bakal would never have abandoned his holding, not as long as he drew breath.

The trapper was edging away, thinking the conversation at an end, but Tol asked, “What about the children? They had three, two girls and a boy.”

“Long wed and moved on. Don’t know about Nira, but I think the older girl, Zalay, lives over by Gooseneck Creek with her family.”

“And the son?”

“Oh, left a long time ago. Went into the army, I think.”

Tol was surprised. Had the local folk forgotten him, or did they not identify Bakal’s son Tol with the famous Lord Tolandruth?

He let the trapper go on his way. Snow flew from the man’s shoes as he hurried by, looking back now and then to make certain he wasn’t being followed. Tol wasn’t offended. The fellow must have had encounters with warriors before. No peasant craved the company of armed, mounted men.

Continuing south, Tol encountered hunters and herdsmen, peddlers, itinerant healers, and vagabonds of every stripe. Their ranks were thin, it being the winter season, but the life of the Eastern Hundred endured regardless.

A day out from Caergoth he began to meet a steady stream of travelers making for the city. They were not tradesmen, but refugees. They moved in small caravans of four to eight ox-drawn wagons. More than a few wagons were being drawn by people, the oxen having died on the trek. By the cut of their clothes and the accents he heard, Tol figured them for easterners, from outside the empire. There were a lot of them, and as he drew closer to Caergoth, their numbers grew. By the time he reached the walls of the city, the snowy fields were black with a mob of miserable foreigners, all seeking the protection of the imperial governor.