Fire and Fog

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The world exploded around Lan Martak, stars orbiting wildly about his head, the very planet tipping and gyrating and sending him to his knees. The walls of the pyramid- shaped stone chamber first cracked and then turned to powder. The floor beneath his feet became transparent and he hung suspended over a bottomless pit.

And wind- Wind seared his flesh, threatening to strip his bones clean. Squinting, arm up to protect his face, he looked into the galeforce wind and saw an all too familiar figure: Claybore.

The chalk- white skull showed thin fracture lines- and this gave Lan hope. He had put those cracks in Claybore' s skull. And he could do more, ever so much more.

" This is silly, Claybore," he said, fighting to keep his face covered. " You attack with only wind?"

" Surely a man of your vast ability recognizes an air elemental when you encounter one," the other mage said with studied politeness. " If you don' t like it, I' ll stop it. Now!"

The sorcerer' s newly attached arms rose and formed a steeple over the skull.

Lan dropped into the pit.

He felt his stomach jerk and the air whistling around him in a new direction. The wind he could tolerate. To allow Claybore to cast him downward meant only death. With a surge of effort, he formed a new floor under his left foot. A solid patch took shape under his right and stopped his insane fall. Slowly, the hardness spread, merged with other spots, rose.

He again faced Claybore, the floor substantial once again.

" Very good," said Claybore. " The illusion is not a common one. You defeated it nicely. Your skill has grown to rival mine."

Lan did not reply with words. He sent his own air elemental shrieking mindlessly for Claybore' s body. He hoped to catch the sorcerer off balance and knock him to the floor. With any luck the skull might smash into the stone and crack further.

Luck was not with him. Claybore easily withstood the writhing, screaming puff of air and dismissed it with the wave of a hand. Lan realized then how important those arms and hands were to Claybore. They not only augmented his power, they gave him command over a new set of spells.

" Surrender!" Lan said, using the Voice. The vibrancy of the tongue within his mouth caused the onset of a headache unlike any he had felt. He immediately stopped and the shooting pain diminished and finally went away entirely.

" You cannot use my tongue against me like that, fool," said Claybore, now turning to his usual manner. All pretense of politeness stopped. " I can give you undreamed of powers. You still learn. I know!" The jaws of the skull clattered together emphasizing the words that were not spoken but were still heard.

" You can give me nothing, Claybore. You seek too much power. You must be destroyed."

" Why try?" asked Claybore, his tone curious. " You oppose me, but why? What is it to you? There isn' t the hard core within you to make power your goal."

" I don' t want dominance over others," said Lan. " I want freedom from that power. You won' t impose your will on me or anyone else."

" And you don' t want to impose your will on others?" asked Claybore, as if genuinely surprised at finding a fact he had not ever considered to have existed.

Lan Martak spun about, his fingers strewing sparks. The powdery ruins of Lirory Tefize' s chamber snapped back into their original form.

" Your illusions fail you, Claybore."

" Do they?" the sorcerer asked softly. " You find the simple ones. The more complex ones might amaze you- had you the wit to see them."

Lan shifted uneasily at those words. Something gnawed at the corners of his mind, as if Claybore had given him a crucial clue to unlocking the dismembered mage' s power. He groped for the clue and failed to find it.

" Lan?" came a hesitant voice. " Are you all right? You look strained."

He blinked and lost sight of Claybore, his physical eyes now doing the " seeing" for his mind. Kiska k' Adesina stood before him, the expression on her face a mixture of emotions he couldn' t put into words. Whatever he read there, true caring was not present.

" I' m fine," he said. " Claybore started an attack. Didn' t you see what he did?"

The woman shook her head, a brown shimmer of hair circling her face. She pushed a vagrant strand back and simply stared at him.

He heaved a sigh. The visions Claybore sent were designed strictly for him. The battle they fought was a personal one and need not involve others- unless drawing others into the conflict aided one of them. Lan tried to figure out how best to use Kiska against Claybore and failed. The mage had made no mention whatsoever about her capture; it was as if this was a problem belonging to Lirory and since the gnome had perished, the matter was closed.

" It won' t be long before we have one last meeting," said Lan. " The time is drawing close. I sense the powers mounting all around and: and I can' t control them." The insecurity of his position troubled him strangely. Never before had he worried over this to such an extent. He held more power than any mage except Claybore and now he hesitated, now he doubted himself.

" You tire so easily," said Kiska. " You do need to rest. Don' t let Claybore force you into a battle you can' t win."

" What' s it to you?" Lan flared. " You are his chief commandant now that Silvain is gone. You should be thinking of his welfare, not mine. Or is that the way it really is? Are you thinking of Claybore' s victory? Is this part of it?"

" Lan, how can you say that?" Kiska' s words soothed him enough that the edge of anger left. Only confusion remained. He turned from her to go to the table holding Lirory' s grimoires. Placing both hands on the table, Lan leaned forward, head down and eyes closed tightly.

It was growing harder to concentrate.

" Nothing seems right to me anymore. Claybore' s words bother me."

" He is your enemy."

" He seems more and more like me. Or I' m adopting his philosophy." That idea made Lan even more uneasy. If Claybore weren' t changing, then he had to be the one becoming more like the disembodied sorcerer. They fought- but were their motives so different now?

He started to speak and found it impossible. Lan' s eyes flashed open and he saw the room had again turned transparent. The slightest movement caused him pain; all he knew as the gut- twisting agony lodged deep within him was that he had failed. Self- pitying, he had let down his guard and now all was lost.

He waited for Kiska to say something, to chastise or to praise. The words never came. Lan retraced the course of their conversation and came once more to the point of her being Claybore' s chief architect of destruction on a dozen worlds- Claybore' s pawn.

Just as he was Claybore' s pawn.

From deep within boiled the power that had once been his and that Claybore had cunningly buried with his spells. The pain in arms and legs lingered, but Lan forced movement into them. He straightened and found the dancing light mote that had become his constant companion. The light mote appeared indistinct, blurred, far away. He coaxed it closer and set it to blazing like a million stars.

Pain dissolved from his body like snow melts in the morning sun. The walls of the room became translucent, then opaque. He cast a spell to insure that Claybore would never again be able to confuse his senses with such conjurings again.

" Claybore," he said softly. " This is one battle that will be fought to the bitter end. One or the other of us will not survive it. We cannot continue together in the same universe, not like this. One of us will perish."

Ghostly, mocking laughter greeted him.

" We are immortal, you and I. Survive this petty difference of opinion? Of course we will. Both of us. The real question you ought to ask is the loser' s condition."

" If I have to, I' ll scatter your body back along the Road. Terrill did it once. I can do it, also."

Laughter. And pain.

Lan doubled over as his insides ripped apart. For a moment he forgot this was a duel of magics. Ruled only by the physical, he sensed his life force slipping away, his body being torn asunder. He reached once more for the depths of his power and came away empty. This attack, as simple as it was, had defeated him.

Lan Martak felt life draining from him.

And then the flow stopped. Seizing the opportunity, he summoned forth his light mote. The light familiar entered and suffused through his body, leaving him weak but in control once more. The memory of pain and the need to avoid further anguish allowed him to fend off Claybore' s renewed attack. The other mage sensed his spells failing and hurled more and more potent, less and less subtle ones at Lan.

They failed. And Lan found conjurings of his own that he hadn' t realized he knew to cast against Claybore.

" Pressure," he muttered. " Pressure unlike anything you have ever felt!"

Claybore let out a scream that almost deafened Lan. The spell compressed the sides of Claybore' s skull, producing more and deeper cracks. The jaw came unhinged and clattered to the floor.

" And more," said Lan, the power his once again. He didn' t understand why the sudden change had occurred within him. He accepted and used it. To defeat Claybore now meant freedom all along the Cenotaph Road, for him and for Inyx and Krek and everyone else. The conquering grey legions Claybore commanded would soon fall into disarray without their mage- general.

The spell crushed down on Claybore' s body, compressing the torso and breaking the reattached arms. Lan almost cried aloud in triumph when he saw the Kinetic Sphere- Claybore' s heart- slowly being squeezed from the chest cavity. Victory was within his grasp. And still the power flowed to him.

" This can' t be," moaned Claybore. " It won' t be!"

Lan staggered as his spells rebounded and found: nothingness. Claybore had vanished from between the anvils of his magic.

" Where did you go?" he cried out. " Let' s finish this now, once and for all!"

Only deathly silence greeted him. He had been close, so very, very close and now victory had been stolen from him. Claybore had eluded him at the last possible instant. Lan sent his dancing light mote forth to seek out Claybore. Long minutes passed and the mote reported no trace of the other sorcerer. Disheartened, Lan propped himself against a table and wondered how he might find Claybore, who had obviously fled this world and traveled the Road.

As he worked out this problem, a new one occurred to him. He sensed another powerful presence on this world, in Yerrary.

" Lirory' s dead," he said aloud.

" Lan, you look so drawn. What' s happened?" Kiska k' Adesina' s concern struck him as hollow and a lie. She cared nothing for him. But even as he thought this, other emotions surfaced and his view toward her softened.

" Claybore has left Yerrary- even this world. I can' t track him down. I' ll have to follow him to other places, but there' s a power emanating from down below I had not felt before. Or rather, I have felt it before."

" You' re not making sense."

Lan realized the woman was right. His confusion centered on the familiarity of that power center and the impossibility of it. The other time when he had flagged in battle with Lirory and Claybore, this source had opened to him with the same feeling of elusive recognition. What it was stayed just beyond his grasp, yet he knew it.

" Stay here," he said to the woman. " I' ve got to explore and see if I can' t get some answers."

" I' m coming with you," Kiska declared.

Lan started to protest but didn' t find it within him to tell her no. He motioned and she hurried along, matching his long strides as he found all the right corridors and down ramps to take him into the newer parts of Yerrary still being dug out from the living bedrock of the planet. The excavations were abandoned and he had to step over piles of rock and go around large boulders, but his stride was sure and his destination plain in his mind. The place he sought glowed with a dark power and drew him like a magnet pulls iron.

" Where are we going?" Kiska asked him.

He didn' t answer. He pushed aside rock, jumped back as the poorly buttressed roof sent down a shower of small stones and dust, and kept on until he came to the chamber Claybore had visited. Traces of the other mage lingered; Lan sensed the magical residues indicating physical presence. Whatever lay within this room was important enough to demand that Claybore actually be here.

" What' s this cistern?" asked Kiska, going up to the low rock wall and cautiously peering down into the blackness. She shivered and looked away. " I don' t like it, whatever it' s for."

" I' ve seen it before. On my home world." Lan experienced a dizziness as sensations rushed in on him.

" It' s only a well."

" It' s more," he said. Lan looked around the room and saw no sign of life. For a crazy instant he considered shoving Kiska into the pit to satisfy the blood urges of the entity living at its bottom- if the pit had a true physical bottom. " Wait here. I' ll return in a few minutes," he said.

Kiska started to follow, but a minor spell rooted her to the spot, her muscles frozen. Lan Martak walked like one still asleep as he traced his way through the diggings and came to a chamber with pipes and vats. His mind had slipped into a curious fugue state, not fully rational and yet knowing what to do. None dared stand in his way now, even if his movements appeared mechanical, alien.

He hardly glanced around the huge room, even though he had never seen it before. Streams of burning water poured down the stone walls all around as pipes leaked and vats were decanted. The troughs spiraling down from above were filled to their rims with the acid water that continually poured from the outer sky.

Hopping out to see who invaded his domain came the toadlike Eckalt.

" What is it?" the creature demanded. " My time is precious. You interrupt important work. There' s water to be: aieee!"

Lan made a quick pass with his hand and stifled the toad- being' s words. Still as if he walked in a daze, Lan returned to the chamber containing the cistern. Eckalt half- hopped, half was dragged by the spell Lan had cast. Without allowing the being another word, Lan physically picked up Eckalt and dropped him into the pit.

Amid the curtains of blackness came a stirring.

The Resident of the Pit spoke.

" Lan Martak, we meet once again. It has been a considerable time for you and only a fraction of a second for me."

" Resident of the Pit," he said unsteadily, " did you aid me in my duel with Claybore?"

" The questions most important are those least asked. For the true question, look into your own soul and study what you find. But perhaps those answers are the hardest to accept."

" You did help me?"

" I gave you nothing but the vision of what powers you truly commanded."

" What is this?" asked Kiska. " There' re things moving down inside the well, but I can' t make them out. Is this a ghost?"

Lan ignored her, as did the Resident.

" If you only revealed what was already inside of me, why can' t I defeat Claybore? Can I?"

" Claybore is a cunning mage and a powerful one. He has claimed to be immortal."

" He said I was immortal, also."

" Lan Martak, many make the claim. Few actually are. And those select few are the damned."

Lan went cold inside.

" Explain, Resident of the Pit. What do you mean by that?"

" Your destiny lies not on this world but on another."

" Where Claybore retreated?"

The Resident didn' t answer directly. The obliqueness troubled Lan more than prediction of complete failure would have.

" Decisions are never easy. The past must be laid to rest before the future can be born."

" What are you telling me? Will I defeat Claybore? If he' s immortal, I can' t kill him."

" You, too, are immortal."

Lan' s mind raced. The wording answered the question. Claybore hadn' t lied about this. Lan looked down at his body as if seeing something new. Immortal? The idea was hard to accept.

" I can' t die?"

" Physical death is not your primary concern," said the Resident of the Pit.

" Claybore is," said Lan. " I need to find him. Give me the powers I need to find and defeat him."

" Give you the powers?" came the answer after a long pause, as if this astounded the entity within the well. Lan couldn' t tell if it was scorn or amusement locked within this answer.

" He' s still more powerful than I am. Give me what I need to destroy him."

" Claybore imprisoned me. I cannot give you power to destroy him. That is one condition of my servitude."

" Then tell me where I can find him. You' re a deity. You can do that much. You once said your being spread across all space and time. You have to be able to find him."

" For millennia I have been trapped and virtually powerless. All I could do was keep shifting Claybore' s parts about to keep him from recovering them, but he has grown far too strong for that ploy now. Other weapons must be used."

" Tell me!" cried Lan, frustrated.

" Use your own instincts. Consider Claybore and his immediate goal. Would he abandon his legs?" The voice of the Resident faded and the stirrings in the shadowy depths of the well began to subside.

But Lan hardly noticed. He came out of his inner fog and smiled when the answer came to him.

" Claybore' s legs are still here. They' re locked in a chamber over there." He pointed at a solid rock wall.

" Where?" asked Kiska eagerly.

" Some miles off through solid rock, but there, still there. No, Claybore wouldn' t abandon them. He needs those legs. And he didn' t flee when I began to triumph over him. He only hid. He' s around somewhere. He' s got to be!"

Lan again sent out his light mote and again it returned without discovering Claybore' s hiding place. Frustrated, he sat on the rim of the well and thought even harder, his mind once more beginning to really function. Nothing was wrong with his logic. Claybore had simply outsmarted him, made better use of the magics at his command.

Lan' s fingers traced out a simple triangle in the air in front of him. He began the chant to produce a scrying spell he' d found in Lirory' s grimoire. At first the air remained calm and only the threesided frame burned with activity. Then Lan found the right combinations of minor spells and a picture formed within the perimeter.

" He is still within Yerrary!" he said. The familiar skull loomed starkly and then winked out. But Claybore' s defeating the magic didn' t matter. He had found out the sorcerer hid. That information alone made the effort worthwhile.

" You have become his equal," said Kiska.

The woman sat beside him on the rim, her leg brushing against his. Her hand reached out hesitantly, lightly brushed his, then moved upward to undo the fastenings on his tunic. Lan watched in silence, his heart feeling as if it would leap from his breast.

" I want you," Kiska said softly. Her words came out choked with emotion.

Lan started to brush her off, to push on and complete what he saw as his mission- to destroy Claybore' s legs. But welling up from deep within came emotions Lan couldn' t control.

" And I want you," he said in a weak voice. Their lips met, crushed together passionately. Then their bodies pressed tightly and they slipped to the cold rock floor. Neither noticed, neither minded as they slowly twined and untwined, each movement carrying them closer to their mutual goal.

Lan looked down into Kiska' s desire- wracked face and felt the dizzy confusion of emotions vying for supremacy. She was his most hated enemy, the woman sworn to kill him, and now he made love to her. He saw the same contradictions mirrored in her face even as he moved above her, his hips swinging and hers lifting upward.

Faster and faster they moved together until the world burst around them.

Lan sank forward, his arms circling Kiska' s thin body. The woman' s brown eyes blazed with unholy glee as she gazed past his shoulder and at the silent Inyx standing in the entryway, her face pale and her hands shaking. Inyx had witnessed it all and Kiska took sadistic pleasure in knowing it.

Without a word, Inyx turned and walked off. Her once confident stride now faltered and she stumbled twice within Kiska k' Adesina' s sight.

Kiska immediately turned her attention back to Lan Martak, began doing small things, intimate things, and soon enough they were again passionately engaged.

Kiska k' Adesina' s revenge had been fed but not sated. That would come. Claybore had promised her that it would come. Soon.