Arch Wizard

Chapter Twenty-Four

Rod Everlar swallowed, and retreated another step. In grinning silence the skeleton advanced, still beckoning to him in a friendly, even coquettish manner.

The grinning skull stared at him as if its dark, empty eye-sockets could somehow see him clearly, and trailed-or rather, shed, at every eerie step-tresses of what once must have been a spectacular head of long, trailing hair. From the skeleton's bony shoulders hung the crumbling gray wisps and tatters of what Rod now saw had once been an elaborate and probably very beautiful gown, with flared shoulders and an upthrust collar, gathered down into a tight-laced, corset-like middle portion that descended to a be-gemmed triangular pelvic panel from which in turn blossomed out a broad, full sweep of skirts. That were crumbling, ever so slowly and sighingly gently, into dust.

Rod swallowed again, his mouth suddenly very dry. If that thing touched him…

… what? What would happen?

Yes, this was a walking skeleton, probably animated by, or controlled by, the wizard Malraun. And even if he hadn't seen far too many horror movies, there was something horrible, something grotesquely not right, about a silent skeleton beckoning to him in an alluring manner, as it-she-

The skeleton stopped, put both hands on its-her-hips, and struck a pose. Then it raised one hand languidly and drew its forefinger slowly across its lower line of teeth, parting its jaws slightly as if it licking its finger with a tongue that was no longer there, empty eyesockets fixed on his eyes.

Suddenly Rod felt his fear fall away from him like a wet and heavy cloak dropping from his shoulders. He blinked, astonished at how calm he now felt.

"Wait," he almost said aloud. "I'm a fantasy writer. I can handle this. She looks horrid, yes, but what if she's just a lonely walking skeleton…"

She put her head to one side, like many a movie star he'd seen in films, flirting. Rod shrugged, smiled, and offered her his hand to shake.

As smoothly as any real movie star, she shifted her hips and stepped past it without taking it, moving to embrace him.

He stood his ground, skin no longer crawling, as those bony limbs closed around him-chilling him to the bone.

The cold of her embrace was so intense that he gasped, and had to fight for breath-and by then, the empty eyesockets were staring up at Rod Everlar from just below his nose, and both of her bony hands had risen to close around his throat.

She was trying to throttle him!

"Well, that was stupid of me," Rod panted, trying to break free. Magic flared into glowing visibility up and down her arm-bones as she resisted him, its force making her grasp tremendously powerful.

Not strong enough, however, to keep Rod from hurling himself to the ground and rolling-in a sudden dust-cloud of disintegrating skirts and flailing skeletal legs that made him sneeze violently and repeatedly, sending fingerbones rattling and bouncing in all directions.

She kept firm hold of him, though, that staring skull and those searingly cold, claw-like fingers sinking deeper into his throat, choking him… and bruisingly deeper and tighter…

Lying on his side, now, one knee thrust forward to keep himself that way despite her kicking bones, Rod clenched his teeth, fought for breath, and patiently opened pouch after pouch along his hip-belt of six pouches, and started thrusting the contents of each against the gleaming bones of her wrists.

The glowing and sparkling dust from the little drawstring sacks in the first pouch made her stiffen and sigh, but loosened her grip not at all.

The magical halo around her bones flared into angry brightness at the touch of the first of the seven rings from the second pouch, but that was all it did. Feeling his way along the fine chain he'd looped through all of the seven rings, Rod touched the second ring to the skeleton that was trying to murder him. Nothing happened.

The touch of the third ring, however, made her to stiffen, and a different hue of cold fire appeared out of nowhere to race up and down her limbs.

Suddenly those strangling fingers were gone from his throat. The skeleton arched and surged against him, thrusting and shifting herself up his front just as a small and squirming neighbor's child had once tried to clamber up Rod from his lap, until their noses-his a nondescript point of living flesh, hers a grotesque hole above a line of even, ever-bared teeth-were touching.

"Thank you," she whispered, her words blowing icy vapor into Rod Everlar and chilling him into shuddering helplessness. "Telrorna thanks you for her freedom. Free to die at last… I curse Malraun for every cruelty of his binding, for every moment of my enslavement… but you… I thank you, sir, for my death…"

And as Rod fought to master his shivering and make some sort of reply, the skull broke off those bony shoulders and rolled away.

Then the skeleton slumped, crumbled, and fell apart, leaving him lying alone on the floor amid eerie wisps of what had once been a gown, with a magical ring flickering and crumbling to nothing in his fingertips.

Its sighing destruction tickled his fingers, and then was gone.

In a bedchamber in Darswords, the wizard who liked to style himself Malraun the Matchless jolted awake atop a bound and helpless Aumrarr, shouting in pain.

Then, even before his cry could form words, he slumped down again, senseless, his wits overwhelmed by the roaring tumult within them, as a mind linked to his own burst apart at the height of silently shrieking its savage fury at him.

The dying of that mind rocked his own; Malraun was just-and only just-able to recognize the feel of the thoughts so harming his before his own mind collapsed into chaos. He was suffering the destruction of Telrorna, a sorceress he'd slain long ago, then animated in undeath, and magically bound to himself to serve as his thrall.

One among many.

Now one less among many.

Through the Doom's binding that linked them, Malraun's pain stabbed into the brain of Taeauna of the Aumrarr, lying bound beneath him. She whimpered, more dazed than awakened, and arched in pain not even her own, straining momentarily against her bonds… ere she fell back into limp, sagging silence.

On the far side of the chamber door, the guards who'd flung open a door at the sound of Malraun's shout and rushed across an outer room to wrench open the bedchamber door, skidded to sudden, reeling halts at the sound of the wingless Aumrarr's whimper.

The younger guard shot the older one a doubtful look, only to see that elder warrior was relaxing and starting to leer.

Barring the younger guard's path onward with the sword he'd already drawn and tapping a finger to his lips in a clear signal for silence, the veteran guard closed the bedchamber door in careful silence, then wordlessly started shooing his younger fellow back across the outer room.

He was grinning broadly and shaking his head as he did so. It took the younger guard only a moment or two to start to blush.

The great front doors of Malragard boomed and shuddered as five charging beasts-with a sixth drifting past low overhead, its many yellow eyes glaring-crashed together in the doorway, each determined to be the first out to maraud, freed to slay and maim and-

Lightnings suddenly erupted from the doorframe, a score of angrily-crackling blue bolts that raced from limb to quivering muscled bulk to roaring-in-pain maw, stabbing upward to transfix the flying monster from a dozen directions at once, holding it shuddering in midair.

As beneath, lightning flashed again and again, and monsters writhed, spasmed, and sank down. Malraun's doorwarding magics, prepared long ago for just such a task, ably and brutally sought to hold his six guardians to their guardianship.

In the heart of that surging tangle of flashing pain, the wolf-heads snarled and snapped at the helmcat and the slitherjaws, who snapped and bit back with fierce enthusiasm. The gliding horror's tentacles flailed everywhere, and the stabspider reared back in quivering frustration, its legs too delicate to risk amid the thunderous collisions in the doorway.

Overhead, the flying maw shuddered, vomiting showers of sparks and defecating floods of more sparks as it burned internally. Pincers clattering in pain, it reeled back into the hall, followed precipitously by five rolling, biting beasts, as the most sorely hurt among them sought to win free of their torment by driving their fellow guardians back from the doorway, so they could flee into the lightning-free hall they'd just come from.

In this, they succeeded; the lightnings fell silent as the guardians fell back into the entry hall.

There came a moment of shared, panting relief-and then a moment of dreadful silence, as all six guardians suddenly spasmed in helpless unison.

Out of the empty air around them burst the wordless shout of a wizard hurled into wakefulness by pain, then stricken senseless by that same agony.

That cry ended as abruptly in Malragard as it had in Darswords-and so was still ringing from end to end of the entry hall as the guardians burst into frantic action again-this time, striking viciously at their fellow beasts, now seeking not to get to freedom or pursue the two humans who'd fled, but just to murder each other.

In Yintaerghast, a blue and scaly Doom of Falconfar rolled over, groaned once, and sat up.

How had he come to be lying on the floor, with a spell-scroll in his hand?

By the Falcon, he must have been tired…

Well, enough slumber for now! He had a new world to conquer-hopefully before Malraun's armies managed to lay waste to much more of this one.

Smiling wryly at that thought, Narmarkoun stood, unrolled the scroll, and nodded at its familiar symbols. Striking a pose and clearing his throat, he carefully cast Lorontar's long-lost spell again, his voice seeming to gather great strength during the incantation, until it was rolling thunderously through the dark vastnesses of Yintaerghast and echoing back to him like the deep roar of a buried titan.

As he finished, notes that had been scribbled at an angle across the lower end of the scroll shone forth brightly. Narmarkoun peered at them with interest. He'd noticed them before, somewhere and some when…

Ah, yes. They must be the work not of Lorontar, who had so boldly and ornately written the spell above them, but of some later, lesser apprentice.

He nodded, resolve hardening. When Malraun was destroyed and his own hold on Falconfar had been secured, identifying and hunting down this scribbler-if the man still lived; Lorontar probably had held little love for those who dared to comment on his magecraft-would be both prudent and entertaining.

Yet enough thoughts of the idle future; if he was to become the only Doom in Falconfar, his entire attention now must be given to the spell he'd just cast so successfully.

Narmarkoun allowed himself a faint smile. This time, he'd focused his casting not on Rod Everlar, but on a vivid scene he'd noticed in Everlar's mind long ago, at his first spying upon the man of Earth. It was a view across a vast gathering of fortresses, tall towers of stone thrusting into the sky like dead mens' fingers or the standing, limbless tree trunks of burned forests. "Skyscrapers," Everlar's mind had termed them, which must be an Earth name for these squared, many-windowed towers.

One in particular Everlar had been interested in; a tower darker, smaller, and older-looking than most of the others, where no less than seven "publishing houses" had offices.

Narmarkoun didn't know all that such a house was, but he knew what noble "houses" were, in Falconfar. Proud families born to rule, and all too often possessed of too much pride and too little consequence. He also knew that Everlar thought of them as keeping far too much coin for having too little a hand in producing things Everlar wrote: books like spellbooks, but unlike the laboriously copied tomes of apprentices, these were swiftly-created copies-thousands of copies-of the same book.

Was Earth then teeming with wizards? But no, surely not; if such a lack-spell bumbler as Rod Everlar could write books-aye, "books," far more than one, over a long stretch of seasons, for so the man's thoughts ran, and surely he couldn't lie to himself convincingly enough for this Doom of Falconfar not to notice-and not be shunned or his tomes burned as worthless, those books must be other than magecraft, and their writers less than wizards.

The spell had been a good one, ablaze with power and bright in focus. Narmarkoun could feel it racing out from Yintaerghast, all Falconfar dimming around and behind him as he kept his thoughts with it. A mighty magic, its weavings more deft and elegant than anything he himself had yet managed, something he could admire and study and trust in. Yet…

Yet this casting was as chancy as the drag of a fishing boat on the Sea of Storms, weighting a line with sacks of stones to make their hook go deep. He'd shunned the mind of Rod Everlar to seek someone else still in this other world, this Earth, whose mind held the same view of a particular city, a view centered on thoughts of the older skyscraper called the Hardy Building, where publishing houses held sway, that Everlar held in his mind.

So his spell was racing on and reaching out, a bright spark slowly falling and dimming in vast darkness, seeking… seeking…

Finding!

He was in an unfamiliar mind; one he'd never felt before.

A mind that felt warm, yet faint, a mind somehow ale-brown and worldly at first seeming, then the pale green of eager youth as he sank into it. It was not resisting or even noticing him as he drifted down, yet was neither bestial nor addled. A sleeping mind, then.

Asleep and dreaming… of the Hardy Building and the publishing houses there… and thinking of them with excitement.

And dreaming of Falconfar, too!

At first Narmarkoun felt a stab of alarm, a rush of dark foreboding. Before he could mask it, it tainted the mind around him with shadowy apprehension, flowing out through the dream like ripples across a pool that has just received the plunging arrival of a stone.

Narmarkoun's momentary fear softened as he drifted deeper, learning why this sleeper was dreaming of riding hard and fast across Galath with bare and alluring Aumrarr winging low overhead. A sensual dream now darkening into fears of lurking watchers pursuing this Mike as he rode, awaiting the best chance to burst forth and do harm…

This dreamer read and re-read books written by Rod Everlar, whom he thought of as the "creator" of the "imaginary" world of Falconfar, a world this dreamer, this Mike, longed to be real.

Yes! Of course the spell would find such a mind, and seize upon it. Now, did this Mike know anything useful? Such as the names of other Shapers, others who wrote books for the houses in the Hardy Building castle?

Again, yes! A tall, lean bearded man with a waxed mustache, named Geoffrey Halsted, who betimes worked together with Mario Drake, a shorter, bespectacled bearded man who breathed out smoke constantly.

There were two other Shapers this Mike had met once, both of whom awed him more than Halsted and Drake. Lean, darkly handsome, dangerous-looking men that Mike thought might really know how to swing swords and calmly kill people, smiling all the while. Loners, not friends who worked together or with anyone. One was named Sugarman Tombs, and wore "formal suits," whatever those were, of black over white. The other wore boots and garments that were always black and silver, and was called Corlin Corey. They wrote…

As Mike started to think of various books, in a welter of imagined faces and places, his dreams thinned, and Falconfar fell away, nigh forgotten as he rose toward wakefulness.

No! Narmarkoun hastily lent his own memories of the Galathan countryside to the sleeper, his own remembrances of galloping knights, proud-spired castles, and smiling gowned women-and Mike was with him again, eager to see more, mind flaming with excitement. So much excitement, in fact, that he was soaring toward wakefulness again, and-

The spell faded, very suddenly, leaving Narmarkoun cold and alone in darkness.

He was standing in a dark and empty chamber of Yintaerghast, blinking at a scroll, the warm and excited mind he'd been drifting through utterly gone. Leaving him clinging to four faces, and the names Mike had attached to them. Geoffrey Halsted, Mario Drake, Sugarman Tombs, and Corlin Corey.

His thralls, in time soon to come.

If they were stronger of will and imagination than this Everlar, yet biddable by his own will or his spells, they could be his greatest treasures.

He, Narmarkoun, could dominate their minds, so their writings would change Falconfar in ways large and small, to be what he wanted it to be. To give him rule over it that none could challenge, or would dare to… or in the end, would want to.

Yet to do that he'd have to cast the spell again and again-and the magic of the scroll was now exhausted.

Oh, it still set forth the incantation and displayed the sigils, and so could be used to work a casting. Yet the power Lorontar the Lord Archwizard of Falconfar had bound into those sigils so long ago was gone, consumed in taking him to the distant mind of Mike.

If he wanted to work the spell again, right now, he lacked any means to power it except his own vitality.

The force of life that kept his heart beating, his lungs drawing breath, his thoughts racing, and the strength in his thews.

Narmarkoun hesitated, reluctant to take even a single stride down that road-for wizards who drain their own lives risk much, even when they have no foes, and are safely hidden from the curious and hungry prowling beasts-and then shrugged, struck his pose again, raised the scroll, smiled, and lifted his voice in the incantation.

It took a lot from him, even more than he'd expected, stealing it away with silken skill as his voice rose and his free hand traced the gestures that gathered and shaped power…

It had seemed to take much longer than last time, but the spell was cast. As it raced forth through the void again, Narmarkoun clung to it, vaguely aware that he felt weak and sick, that he was trembling and staggering forward blindly across the empty room in Yintaerghast to keep from falling, his arms heavy and ponderous, yet seeming somehow no longer fully part of him…

Find not Mike this time, but one of the four: Halsted, Drake, Tombs, or Corey. Narmarkoun mentally shuffled through the four faces, wondering which of them might be asleep right now, or drowsy, and so provide him easiest entry into their mind.

Not that he even knew if day or night now prevailed across the part of Earth where that city of towers rose. Mike had been asleep, yes, but it did not follow that the sun was down. Even in holds where hard toil was the rule and harder-eyed overseers with whips saw to it remaining so, exhausted night servants slept by day, and slaves dropped and dozed whenever no watchful eye was keeping them at work.

He clung to the racing magic, cursing silently to himself.

Were this spell to fail now, it might be a long time ere he dared cast it again. He felt weak and sick; it had cost him much-leaving him far weaker than he dared let himself get, when any weakness Malraun got hint of could bring his rival a-hunting Narmarkoun in an instant, slaying spells at the ready.

Images blossomed around him in the void, amid bright racing torrents of wakeful thoughts; the memories and workings of scores of minds, his magic gliding slowly down through them, dimming slightly, descending…

Into a bright sequence of images; the Hardy Building, then an echoing glossy marble chamber with a row of metal cages inset in one wall, behind gliding doors polished smoother than any cell Narmarkoun had ever seen; a metal box, within, that ascended as fast as an arrow sent speeding by a strong bowman; a room with a desk, and smiling women behind it; fat men in garments akin to the dark finery worn by Sugarman Tombs, books with brightly painted covers, of fanciful dragons and impossibly beautiful women and swords that burned with blue fire…

Drake! He was in the mind of Mario Drake, who was dreaming of triumphantly accepting an apology from one of those fat publishing house men in the Hardy Building office, someone called Saul Heldrake, waving fat-fingered hands and exclaiming that he'd never thought The President's Boyfriend Was A Wizard would sell so well-an image that faded quickly, as the mind quickened toward-wakefulness!

Narmarkoun tried to make himself still and dark, to pry at none of the thoughts around him and to think of nothing at all but deep, serene oblivion. The mind all around him soared, but then slowed, dimmed, and drifted down into deeper slumber again.

Trying not to let any of the relief he felt flood out into Drake's mind, Narmarkoun peered cautiously at the nearest memories, seeking to move with them rather than turn to one and then another.

Almost immediately he found a flood of very similar half-remembrances, darkly coiled and tangled like many fists of knotted snakes around the edge between dreaming and wakefulness. Memories of countless brief nightly awakenings, all of them. It seemed Drake was a writer who often came half-awake to jot down what he'd been dreaming about, and kept notebooks handy when sleeping.

That he read when awake, and called on for what he thought of as his "bread-and-butter-makers," his "Howard colliding with Burroughs by way of Lovecraft fantasies."

Well, whatever those were-and Drake seemed mightily pleased by them, and by how many of them he'd penned, down the years-they could only be improved by a little Falconfar.

Narmarkoun drifted a little deeper into the sleeping mind, until he passed through the ongoing drifting restlessness of the man's current dream, and hovered vast and dark beneath it.

Then, surging up into the dreams swiftly and relentlessly, he shared his own vivid memories, and feelings about Falconfar, pouring into Drake's mind vivid scenes of his dead playpretties smilingly yielding to him, the soaring mountains of Galath against a sunrise, flying low and fast over the vast green Raurklor on the mighty back of a hastening greatfangs-and then that same beast, on an earlier day, rising up to tower against a stormy sky, its three heads all opening their great jaws in anger, its eyes aflame…

Drake's mind shrieked, plunged into nightmare and spasming in sheer terror. Narmarkoun hastily fed out images of the great beasts he tamed and bred that he'd always found splendid and inspiring: a pair of greatfangs he'd nursed and trained, flying off together on their first hunt as he watched them from afar. Huge and terrible in their sleek, majestic dark might, great wings and necks and long, long tails silhouetted against a stormy sky-

Sudden brightness drenched and blinded the Doom of Falconfar, exploding all around his dark knot of self-awareness in the mind he'd invaded, in a wild and surging chaos of shouting fear that swept away all dream-images and threatened to overwhelm Narmarkoun himself. It was going to crash down on him, to sweep him away-

It struck, and he was lost.