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Authors: Robert Silverberg

Legends: Stories By The Masters of Modern Fantasy (26 page)

BOOK: Legends: Stories By The Masters of Modern Fantasy
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The water hissed and steamed as it hit the sphere, leaving behind clouds of white vapor to drift away in the gentle dawn wind. The molten form blackened at the touch of the water cascading over it, and yet the intense inner heat melted the glassy surface again as fast as the water cooled it, making the whole thing bubble and boil in midair, a pulsing sinister menace.
Transfixed, Abby let the child slip to the silty ground.
The little girl’s arms stretched out. “Papa.”
He was too far away to hear her, but he heard.
Zedd turned, at once larger than life in the midst of magic Abby could see but not begin to fathom, yet at the same time small with the frailty of human need. Tears filled his eyes as he gazed at his daughter standing beside Abby. This man who seemed to be consulting with spirits looked as if for the first time he were seeing a true apparition.
Zedd leaped off the rock and charged through the water. When he reached her and took her up in the safety of his arms, she began to wail at last with the contained terror released.
“There, there, dear one,” Zedd comforted. “Papa is here now.”
“Oh, Papa,” she cried against his neck, “they hurt Mama. They were wicked. They hurt her so …”
He hushed her tenderly. “I know, dear one. I know.”
For the first time, Abby saw the sorceress and the Mother Confessor standing off to the side, watching. They, too, shed tears at what they were seeing. Though Abby was glad for the wizard and his daughter, the sight only intensified the pain in her chest at what she had lost. She was choked with tears.
“There, there, dear one,” Zedd was cooing. “You’re safe, now. Papa won’t let anything happen to you. You’re safe now.”
Zedd turned to Abby. By the time he had smiled his tearful appreciation, the child was asleep.
“A little spell,” he explained when Abby’s brow twitched with surprise. “She needs to rest. I need to finish what I am doing.”
He put his daughter in Abby’s arms. “Abby, would you take her up to your house where she can sleep until I’m finished here? Please, put her in bed and cover her up to keep her warm. She will sleep for now.”
Thinking about her own daughter in the hands of the brutes across the river, Abby could only nod before turning to the task. She was happy for Zedd, and even felt pride at having rescued his little girl, but as she ran for her home, she was near to dying with grief over her failure to recover her own family.
Abby settled the dead weight of the sleeping child into her bed. She drew the curtain across the small window in her bedroom and, unable to resist, smoothed back silky hair and pressed a kiss to the soft brow before leaving the girl to her blessed rest.
With the child safe at last and asleep, Abby raced back down the knoll to the river. She thought to ask Zedd to give her just a little more time so she could return to look for her own daughter. Fear for Jana had her heart pounding wildly. He owed her a debt, and had not yet seen it through.
Wringing her hands, Abby came to a panting halt at the water’s edge. She watched the wizard up on his rock in the river, light and shadow coursing up around him. She had been around magic enough to have the sense to fear approaching him. She could hear his chanted words; though they were words she had never heard before, she recognized
the idiosyncratic cadence of words spoken in a spell, words calling together frightful forces.
On the ground beside her was the strange Grace she had seen him draw before, the one that breached the worlds of life and death. The Grace was drawn with a sparkling, pure white sand that stood out in stark relief against the dark silt. Abby shuddered even to look upon it, much less contemplate its meaning. Around the Grace, carefully drawn with the same sparkling white sand, were geometric forms of magical invocations.
Abby lowered her fists, about to call out to the wizard, when Delora leaned close. Abby flinched in surprise.
“Not now, Abigail,” the sorceress murmured. “Don’t disturb him in the middle of this part.”
Reluctantly, Abby heeded the sorceress’s words. The Mother Confessor was there, too. Abby chewed her bottom lip as she watched the wizard throw up his arms. Sparkles of colored light curled up along twisting shafts of shadows. “But I must. I haven’t been able to find my family. He must help me. He must save them. It’s a debt of bones that must be satisfied.”
The other two women shared a look. “Abby,” the Mother Confessor said, “he gave you a chance, gave you time. He tried. He did his best, but he has everyone else to think of, now.”
The Mother Confessor took up Abby’s hand, and the sorceress put an arm around Abby’s shoulders as she stood weeping on the riverbank. It wasn’t supposed to end this way, not after all she had been through, not after all she had done. Despair crushed her.
The wizard, his arms raised, called forth more light, more shadows, more magic. The river roiled around him. The hissing thing in the air grew as it slowly slumped closer to the water. Shafts of light shot from the hot, rotating bloom of power.
The sun was rising over the hills behind the D’Harans. This part of the river wasn’t as wide as elsewhere, and Abby could see the activity in the trees beyond. Men moved about, but the fog hanging on the far bank kept them wary, kept them in the trees.
Also across the river, at the edge of the tree-covered hills, another wizard had appeared to conjure magic. He too stood atop a rock as his arms launched sparkling light up into the air. Abby thought that
the strong morning sun might outshine the conjured illuminations, but it didn’t.
Abby could stand it no longer. “Zedd!” she called out across the river. “Zedd! Please, you promised! I found your daughter! What about mine? Please don’t do this until she is safe!”
Zedd turned and looked at her as if from a great distance, as if from another world. Arms of dark forms caressed him. Fingers of dark smoke dragged along his jaw, urging his attention back to them, but he gazed instead at Abby.
“I’m so sorry.” Despite the distance, Abby could clearly hear his whispered words. “I gave you time to try to find them. I can spare no more, or countless other mothers will weep for their children—mothers still living, and mothers in the spirit world.”
Abby cried out in an anguished wail as he turned back to the ensorcellment. The two women tried to comfort her, but Abby was not to be comforted in her grief.
Thunder rolled through the hills. A clacking clamor from the spell around Zedd rose to echo up and down the valley. Shafts of intense light shot upward. It was a disorienting sight, light shining up into sunlight.
Across the river, the counter to Zedd’s magic seemed to spring forth. Arms of light twisted like smoke, lowering to tangle with the light radiating up around Zedd. The fog along the riverbank diffused suddenly.
In answer, Zedd spread his arms wide. The glowing tumbling furnace of molten light thundered. The water sluicing over it roared as it boiled and steamed. The air wailed as if in protest.
Behind the wizard, across the river, the D’Haran soldiers were pouring out of the trees, driving their prisoners before them. People cried out in terror. They quailed at the wizard’s magic, only to be driven onward by the spears and swords at their backs.
Abby saw several who refused to move fall to the blades. At the mortal cries, the rest rushed onward, like sheep before wolves.
If whatever Zedd was doing failed, the army of the Midlands would then charge into this valley to confront the enemy. The prisoners would be caught in the middle.
A figure worked its way up along the opposite bank, dragging a child behind. Abby’s flesh flashed icy cold with sudden frigid sweat. It was
Mariska. Abby shot a quick glance back over her shoulder. It was impossible. She squinted across the river.
“Nooo!” Zedd called out.
It was Zedd’s little girl that Mariska had by the hair.
Somehow, Mariska had followed and found the child sleeping in Abby’s home. With no one there to watch over her as she slept, Mariska had stolen the child back.
Mariska held the child out before herself, for Zedd to see. “Cease and surrender, Zorander, or she dies!”
Abby tore away from the arms holding her and charged into the water. She struggled to run against the current, to reach the wizard. Part way there, he turned to stare into her eyes.
Abby froze. “I’m sorry.” Her own voice sounded to her like a plea before death. “I thought she was safe.”
Zedd nodded in resignation. It was out of his hands. He turned back to the enemy. His arms lifted to his sides. His fingers spread, as if commanding all to stop—magic and men alike.
“Let the prisoners go!” Zedd called across the water to the enemy wizard. “Let them go, Anargo, and I’ll give you all your lives!”
Anargo’s laugh rang out over the water.
“Surrender,” Mariska hissed, “or she dies.”
The old woman pulled the knife she kept in the wrap around her waist. She pressed the blade to the child’s throat. The girl was screaming in terror, her arms reaching to her father, her little fingers clawing the air.
Abby struggled ahead into the water. She called out, begging Mariska to let Zedd’s daughter go free. The woman paid no more heed to Abby than to Zedd.
“Last chance!” Mariska called.
“You heard her,” Anargo growled out across the water. “Surrender now or she will die.”
“You know I can’t put myself above my people!” Zedd called back. “This is between us, Anargo! Let them all go!”
Anargo’s laugh echoed up and down the river. “You are a fool, Zorander! You had your chance!” His expression twisted to rage. “Kill her!” he screamed to Mariska.
Fists at his side, Zedd shrieked. The sound seemed to split the morning with its fury.
Mariska lifted the squealing child by her hair. Abby gasped in disbelief as the woman sliced the little girl’s throat.
The child flailed. Blood spurted across Mariska’s gnarly fingers as she viciously sawed the blade back and forth. She gave a final, mighty yank of the knife. The blood-soaked body dropped in a limp heap. Abby felt vomit welling up in the back of her throat. The silty dirt of the riverbank turned a wet red.
Mariska held the severed head high with a howl of victory. Strings of flesh and blood swung beneath it. The mouth hung in a slack, silent cry.
Abby threw her arms around Zedd’s legs. “Dear spirits, I’m sorry! Oh, Zedd, forgive me!”
She wailed in anguish, unable to gather her senses at witnessing a sight so grisly.
“And now, child,” Zedd asked in a hoarse voice from above, “what would you have me do? Would you have me let them win, to save your daughter from what they have done to mine? Tell me, child, what should I do?”
Abby couldn’t beg for the life of her family at a cost of such people rampaging unchecked across the land. Her sickened heart wouldn’t allow it. How could she sacrifice the lives and peace of everyone else just so her loved ones would live?
She would be no better than Mariska, killing innocent children.
“Kill them all!” Abby screamed up at the wizard. She threw her arm out, pointing at Mariska and the hateful wizard Anargo. “Kill the bastards! Kill them all!”
Zedd’s arms flung upward. The morning cracked with a peal of thunder. As if he had loosed it, the molten mass before him plunged into the water. The ground shook with a jolt. A huge geyser of water exploded forth. The air itself quaked. All around the most dreadful rumbling whipped the water into froth.
Abby, squatted down with the water to her waist, felt numb not only from the cold, but also from the cold knowledge that she’d been forsaken by the good spirits she had always thought would watch over her. Zedd turned and snatched her arm, dragging her up on the rock with him.
It was another world.
The shapes around them called to her, too. They reached out, bridging
the distance between life and death. Searing pain, frightful joy, profound peace, spread through her at their touch. Light moved up through her body, filling her like air filled her lungs, and exploded in showers of sparks in her mind’s eye. The thick howl of the magic was deafening.
Green light ripped through the water. Across the river, Anargo had been thrown to the ground. The rock atop which he had stood had shattered into needle-like shards. The soldiers called out in fright as the air all about danced with swirling smoke and sparks of light.
“Run!” Mariska screamed. “While you have the chance! Run for your lives!” Already she was racing toward the hills. “Leave the prisoners to die! Save yourselves! Run!”
The mood across the river suddenly galvanized with a single determination. The D’Harans dropped their weapons. They cast aside the ropes and chains holding the prisoners. They kicked up dirt as they turned and ran. In a single instant, the whole of an army that had a moment before stood grimly facing them were all, as if of a single fright, running for their lives.
From the corner of her eye, Abby saw the Mother Confessor and the sorceress struggling to run into the water. Although the water was hardly above their knees, it bogged them down in their rush nearly as much as would mud.
BOOK: Legends: Stories By The Masters of Modern Fantasy
13.82Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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