A small woman, stripped to leathers, barefoot, bra.s.s knuckledusters winking on both hands, called in a steady voice, "I am Knucklebones of Karsus. I have listened to the tales of your tribe, and the arguments over custom, but one rule is clear. A person too young or too old or too ailing to fight may choose a champion. I claim the right to fight for Sunbright!"

Tumult, bickering, squabbling. Someone argued, "He is none of those!"

Knucklebones answered, "He was ailing before he began the fight!"

"But she's not one of us!" came a cry.

"No matter!"

More noise, customs, and curses hurled back and forth.

Knucklebones cut to the chase, pointed her finger at Magichunger, and called, "Do you accept?"

"I do!" the man yelled before thinking.

"Then stand aside!"

Stooping, Knucklebones caught Sunbright's arm, levered him up, and pa.s.sed him to Monkberry and a few willing hands. Sunbright finally found his voice. "You're a miracle ... in disguise?"

"A gift from the G.o.ds," she quipped. She picked up his sword. "I said I'd help however I can."

Helpless, and knowing protest was useless, the shaman didn't argue. "You'll need a few years'

practice to heft that sword," he said.

"This pig iron? This crowbar?" A brittle laugh. "I've all I need here."

Handing the sword past the ring, the tiny thief approached the towering Magichunger. He'd wrapped a hasty bandage around ribs, his only wound. The redhead sneered, "Sunbright sends a half- grown girl to fight?"

"I've seen forty summers, stripling!" the part-elf shot back. Sunbright blinked. He hadn't known she was that old! "And I talk with this!"

Stooping to a knife-fighting stance, she whipped out her long elven blade. Dark, casting no reflection, it seemed invisible in the night.

Magichunger watched as if hypnotized, a chicken staring down a hawk. He muttered, "T'will do you no good. If I kill you, Sunbright has to fight the next duel. If you kill me, t'will do no good either, for you must fight the rest."

"One battle at a time," cooed the veteran of a thousand duels. "First, I'll flay your stinking hide. See if you have a heart."

Despite his long sword, Magichunger gulped, but he grabbed the pommel two-handed, c.o.c.ked it over a shoulder, and aimed to slice the thief in half. Knucklebones tensed.

"Hold again!" boomed a voice. "I stop this fight, and all others!"

Sagging in his mother's lap, Sunbright lifted his head at the new interruption. Monkberry wept tears of joy. "There," the old woman said, "is our miracle!"

Chapter 10.

"Praise Jannath the Golden G.o.ddess! It works! It works!"

Carried away, Candlemas whirled and grabbed the first person at hand, a wispy lesser mage named Jacinta. Two other mages laughed to see the chubby mage dance with the young woman, then laughed harder when he grabbed their hands and swung all three in a circle. Farm hands, gathered to witness the miracle, clapped their hands and hooted and stamped their feet.

The scene was a remote valley amidst steep hills covered with ash and elm trees, bottomed by a trio of jewel-like lakes. At the head of the valley was a small square keep of black stone and a few peasant cottages. The floor of the valley, split by a glistening stream, was not farmed in typically ancient meandering lots, but quartered with geometric precision and planted with every type of grain crop: wheat, barley, rye, spelt, oats, bran, timothy.... It was near a small bridge over the stream, at the sharp edge of the wheat field, that magicians capered like children.

"Whew!" Candlemas huffed to a halt. Two hundred and fifteen years old, he was still in his prime, but long hours and good food had slowed him down. Dressed in a plain brown smock and rope sandals, pudgy and bald with a bushy black beard, an observer would never know Candlemas was a leading mentalist of his time. In fact, hardly anyone in the Netherese Empire, archwizard or lowest peasant, knew where Candlemas was, or what he'd been attempting. And after three long years- "I've done it! We've done it, for you've all helped, my friends! And you shall reap the rewards, and the ages shall sing praises to your names! But come, let us watch!"

With brown, work-worn hands, Candlemas parted wheat stalks and ran amidst them. Lifting his head high, he could see how, ahead in a wandering line, wheat was stained a bright red like rust. But when he brushed the stalks with his hands, the red dust was knocked free to shimmer down like fiery snow and disappear amidst the yellow stalks. Candlemas laughed at the sight.

"Oh, they will sing praises to my name, just as Sunbright prophesied!"

"Milord?" asked Jacinta, who was thin and colorless as wheat. "What prophecy is that?"

"Eh? Oh, it was-it's a long story," he said. "Never mind. Look ahead! The spell has jumped the line! It's working on the barley!" He let out another fierce howl that almost cracked his throat, then stopped running, and stood puffing and grinning.

"You see," Candlemas told the three gathered mages, "I knew, I mean, a shaman friend of mine ...

This rust, this crop blight, began-what was it-four years back? From the start I knew it was trouble.

Lady Polaris brought it to my attention in Castle Delia, and ordered me to fix it-as if that were simple. The rust ate the heart of the wheat, hollowed the kernels into empty sh.e.l.ls, then it spread to other grains, even jumped to apple trees and peaches, which made no sense. A disease stays with its host, usually. It doesn't attack everything living. I thought we'd never figure it out, but a friend of mine, a barbarian shaman if you can believe it, prophesied I would find a cure, and we have!"

The mage's voice trailed off as he remembered his enforced adventuring to the future. How frustrated he'd been as steward to the estates of Lady Polaris, when suddenly he was ripped up and transported to the future, where he witnessed the destruction of the empire.

And he remembered how, returned to his own time, he'd found a new goal in life, and succeeded.

This morning, as the sun rose, he'd brought out a potion, one of thousands he'd experimented with. It contained brimstone and antimony, quicksilver and iron filings, fennel and cuckoo's pintel, and lungwort and foxglove. He'd chanted to Mystryl, Mother of Magic; and Jannath, Grain G.o.ddess, She Who Shapes All. He'd invoked spells by the dozen: Prug's plant control, Anglin's wall, Fahren's glitterdust, Shan's web. Then, kneeling, almost weeping with exhaustion, he'd dumped the potion at the roots of the rust-ridden wheat that gleamed like blood in the dawn light.

And performed a miracle. For the earth bubbled and seethed where the potion spilled, and a soft green glow enwrapped the leaning stalks of wheat. Like a green fire, the spell whisked through the field. And where it touched, rust fell away like dust, leaving the young kernels green and healthy and growing, fit food for man and beast. Nor did the spell quit, but took strength from the land itself, and spread out in rippling waves, cleansing all the crops of the blight and moving on to purify more growth.

For the first time in decades, Candlemas looked out over his work and felt pride. The last successful spell he'd completed had been-when? When he'd jerked himself and Sunbright and Knucklebones back from the future. Yet that glow of pride, his second-greatest accomplishment after today's, still haunted him, for in that moment he'd lost the only woman he ever loved. She'd chosen to remain with her beloved city, and had died with it. Since then, Candlemas had been alone.

"I wish," he murmured aloud, "I wish Aquesita could see my triumph. That would make it perfect..."

"Perfection isn't for mortals," scratched a voice behind him. "It's for G.o.ds, and the dead. Such as am I.".

Startled, Candlemas and his attendant mages whirled to confront-a monster.

The creature loomed over them like some scarecrow burned to cinders. Its mineral-glistening body was naked, without ears or eyelids, like nothing they'd ever seen. Yet, as Candlemas stared into the monster's bulging blue eyes, he found something familiar.

"You!" Candlemas shrieked. "Jergal get thee gone! I know you ... by all the G.o.ds!"

"Yes!" From the slash of a mouth came a dry chuckle, "You know me. You helped give me this hideous form!"

Despite himself, Candlemas backed from the monster, but tripped in a tangle of wheat and fell on his fat rump. The lesser mages scattered through the grain. The farm folk were long gone.

Enjoying Candlemas's terror and surprise, the black monster casually raised claws to either side.

With a whispered incantation, "Worm food!", twin bolts of dull brown lightning exploded from its palms.

Candlemas watched in horror as the bolts overtook his a.s.sistants, enfolded all three in brown carapaces like insects. Then the brown hulls split in a hundred places like old parchment. For an eyeblink, the mage saw all three standing frozen, as if unharmed. Then they fell apart.

First to drop off where their fingers, ears, noses. Their flesh split into thousands of long, wriggling tubes, like maggots or earthworms. The skin of their faces followed, leaving their skulls bare. Their brains boiled into writhing pink nests of worms, as did their organs. Within a minute, the humans were reduced to heaps of insect-like obscenities wriggling and boring through fresh white bones.

Candlemas was too stunned to look away, to fall down, to be sick. He just stared, until the monster rasped again, "Like that spell? I learned it in the deeps, dear Candlemas. I learned much in my own personal h.e.l.l. Amusing, isn't it, when you think I created the place? That I couldn't know it?"

"What?" The pudgy mage craned up to the monster's staring blue eyes. "Your own ... oh, by the Pitiless One."

"No pity," cooed the monster. "Only pain. I'd fashioned a pocket of h.e.l.l to punish my enemies.

You, among others, for you betrayed me. But Polaris, she who'll die most exquisitely, turned the tables on me. She stripped me of skin, remember that? Peeled me like a chicken so I'd feel the punishments with every nerve end. Then she hurled me into my own private h.e.l.l for a year, that I might suffer for my disobedience. And how long ago was that, dear 'Mas?"

"Wh-What?" the mage stuttered. He couldn't look away, hypnotized like a bird before a serpent.

"Uh, it was a-a year-"

"It wasn't!" the monster shrieked. The banshee wail stabbed into Candlemas's brain. "A year pa.s.sed! And another! And a third! Years longer than my sentence, when every day, every minute was a seething torment of agony! Polaris forgot me!"

"But, but how-"

"I escaped! I grew this hide you see. I formed a whole skin from the rock walls that were my prison. I clad myself in stone, unpierceable, unstoppable. I became this hideous creature to escape the world of fiends, to enter the world of men, to get my revenge!"

"But you were-"

"Beautiful?" the flint monster thundered. "Ravishing! Gorgeous! l.u.s.ted after by men, envied by women! And look at me now!"

Candlemas remembered.

While he had been steward, responsible for the outbuildings and lands around Castle Delia, inside was another official, the castle chamberlain, responsible for the kitchens, dining halls, wine cellars, guest rooms, and great hall. A vibrant, brilliant, dashing mage with a cascade of beautiful red hair and glowing skin, a woman in love with herself, and the image in her mirror. A woman grown bored with her duties, who'd picked fights with Candlemas, plagued him at his work, and finally trapped him into ever-more dangerous and foolish bets, with the barbarian Sunbright as their p.a.w.n.

And all the while, the chamberlain had plotted to steal the seat of Lady Polaris, until the white- haired archwizard's iron hand clamped down, peeled the living skin from her chamberlain's flesh, and she cast her servant into h.e.l.l-to be forgotten.

And driven insane....

"Sysquemalyn, I ..." Candlemas moaned. He didn't know whether to plead, or offer pity, or run for his life. "Sys, you must understand. I didn't know Polaris kept you locked there. I've been away from Castle Delia. I left years ago, and never looked back. I a.s.sumed Polaris-"

"You a.s.sumed wrong!" The h.e.l.lsp.a.w.n reared against the summer sky and hooked hands like eagle talons over him as she screamed, "You didn't care! And for that, you die!"

The pudgy mage just barely threw up Vald.i.c.k's forcecage before sizzling chain lightning, some variant of Volhm's chaining, exploded around him. Electric bolts scorched the air, charging it with ozone. They struck Candlemas's shield so hard he was rocked to his knees, felt the charred earth blistering hot under him, felt the temperature rise within the cage by hundreds of degrees. He'd cook unless he dispelled the forcecage, but Sysquemalyn-she might as well be Shar, the Lady of Loss and Anger-loomed and waited. And prepared another spell, for she shrieked from a gash of a mouth like a cleft in broken rock.

"Like that, dear 'Mas? Wait until I set your bones afire to burn within you! Wait until I boil your eyes in their sockets, till I curdle your brain! You'll live three years of my pain in the longest seconds of your short life!"

Candlemas scrambled to his feet, and banged his head on an invisible section of forcecage. It was so hot it seared his bald pate and made him yelp. Yet he realized part of the cage was missing. She'd actually unconjured his spell!

Wondering at her awesome power, he stumbled backward over scorched earth, found wheat burning everywhere from the lightning. Smoke roiled to the sky at all hands. Vaguely he hoped his rust-cure spell, his precious work of three long years, escaped the havoc.

Then he prayed he'd escape alive. Sysquemalyn pouted and blew out cheeks like split rocks.

A stinking cloud of yellow-green gas enveloped Candlemas. Instantly he retched on the poison. His head wanted to explode for sneezing, his eyes watered, he gasped and gagged and choked for air. He flapped his arms, shambled left and right, but the cloud followed him like a harpy. Then he was breathing it, and vomiting at the same time, and choking on his vomit. He burned, for the cloud contained acid. His scalp and hands and nose and ears p.r.i.c.kled, grew stippled with blood. To open his eyes would blind him. Already he felt pinpoints of acid in his eyes like the claws of tiny imps.

In his darkness came a grating laugh, "Like the smell? I lived with it for months at a time, when the air in h.e.l.l was too foul to breath or burn! Taste it! Enjoy it!"

The mage's blundering feet left soil, squished in mud, and with tearful grat.i.tude he splashed into the stream that cut the valley. Bathing his aching face and bleary eyeb.a.l.l.s, he tried desperately to think of a spell-any spell-to drive Sysquemalyn away, or else cover his escape. A levitation spell might float him out of range, or a shadow door let him wriggle away. Even Undine's door, with no idea of his destination, would be enough. Perhaps he had a chance. He didn't hear her insane laughter.

Heat belched all around him. Brimstone bubbled just under his nose. He was afire. His smock ignited, as did the skin on his elbows and knees. He screamed at the sudden pain, and forced his eyes open to see this new attack, to get away.

The water was gone. Instead, the creek bed roiled with black, sticky tar. Huge gas pockets burped sulfur. Things charred and long dead floated on the surface. The tar was near boiling, and Candlemas was elbow- and hock-deep in it. It stuck to his face and neck, and burned where it touched. He wailed with fright and agony as he plucked himself free and grabbed for the sh.o.r.e.

The monster Sysquemalyn was there to meet him. He grabbed gummy gra.s.s near her craggy, twisted feet. "Hot, dear 'Mas?" the monster cooed. "Let me cool you."

A hand like a knot of thorns closed on his arm. He tried to yank free, but could not. The flint hand was powerful as a chain yoked to oxen, and it dragged him on tarry elbows and knees across burnt gra.s.s and ashes. At first Candlemas felt nothing, though the hand smoked on his upper arm. Then he saw it was not smoke, but ice mist. Frost dusted his bicep, then ice. The chill spread down his arm until it was numb. Steam rose where ice met hot tar, with Candlemas's flesh trapped between. He struggled to get his feet under him, to rise, but the monster dragged him like an anchor. When she let go, he collapsed onto the dirt path between smoldering crops. The whole sky was black now, or so it seemed to his seared eyeb.a.l.l.s under tar-heavy brows.

"Sys, please ..."

"No pleases, please," mocked the monster. She loomed against the sky like a lightning-killed pine.

"Nothing can save you. You know you'll die, don't you? But not soon, not fast. A little at a time." She lifted her splayed foot and stamped down hard.

Candlemas couldn't move his numbed arm, and the foot crashed down like a boulder off a mountain. He heard fingers break and twist, felt the stamping vibration through the ground more than through his shoulder, which burned as if afire. Writhing, kicking gluey feet to roll away, he glanced at his arm and shuddered, almost sick. The flesh was not just chilled, it was frozen solid, dead forever.

Broken in a dozen places, held together by skin.

"I bit your arm off once, remember?" From the scratchy throat issued-almost-the soft cooing wheedle the beautiful Sysquemalyn had employed years before, "Had it torn off by a yellow fiend, actually. That jolt will seem the gentlest caress after a day or two."

"Please," Candlemas wept with pain, "please, Sys. What do you want?"

"Want?" A mad shriek again. The claws flew high over the bald shining head. "Death, in all its forms, to all my foes!"

With a wildcat wail she stabbed down, fingertips sparkling. Candlemas was hoicked into the air, pulled in five directions as if by wild horses, and spun wildly. The world became a blur with dozens of flint monsters craning over him keening a death chant. He felt blood surge in his head, saw his vision cloud, saw blood squirt from his sundered arm. When Sysquemalyn suddenly shrieked a halt, the mage stopped so quickly his legs broke. Waves of pain and nausea rolled over, and suffocated him.

More frightening, Sysquemalyn vacillated between sane and insane, shrieking one minute, cooing the next as if playing her own games. She might torture him for days, heal him as needed, then continue. For years, even, her thirst for revenge unquenched.

A coo, "That's three limbs. What do to with the fourth? Smite the skin with exploding boils, perhaps?"

Hanging in mid-air, three limbs distorted, Candlemas knew he couldn't escape. He could only live and take it. To fight was useless.

At least in this form.

Biting his tongue, Candlemas reached for the only escape he could imagine outside death. Yet it was a form of death, for what he planned would leave him as something else. If he survived.

But pain tore at his mind, and soon he'd lose his reason. Become a babbling horror like Sysquemalyn, hung between the world and sanity.

Reaching deep inside, Candlemas conjured words to a spell he'd never attempted, wasn't even sure he remembered. It was long ago he'd read of it, but now it came back, like opening a cobwebbed drawer to find a diamond sparkling within. Or a scalpel.

Grinding his teeth against pain, he grunted the weird, twisted sounds of Quantoul's selfmorph.

The change was instant. An observer wouldn't have known if Candlemas truly changed, or merely swapped himself with some other-worldly horror. For the thing that suddenly hung in air was a purple granite cone taller than Sysquemalyn. Its bottom was hollow and ringed with savage teeth. Tentacles dangled and flapped. Two blind eyes like milky pearls started from its side.