Magician’s End (60 page)

Grudgingly, he conceded that the enemy, the Dread, had been clever to plant tethers into this realm, and to protect them by making them beautiful, engendering feelings of love and joy in those who became aware of them: even the Valheru admired that genius as he watched it turn to ash below him.

Then came the silence, and he realized the last of the Sven-ga’ri was gone.

A howl erupted from deep within the ruby dome, a sound of such anger and despair that it caused every living being to pause and look toward E’bar. The shell flickered as if energy shifts were running like courses of waves through a lake, ripples getting larger with every passing moment.

‘What is that?’ asked Liallan.

Sharing a meal in the quickly erected pavilion with her was as odd a collection of beings as Liallan had ever imagined entertaining: a prince of Elvandar, a human woman knight of a religious order, three taredhel magic-users, and others who had been coming and going all day.

A messenger hurried in and knelt before her.

‘Speak,’ she instructed.

‘Cetswaya says there’s been an upheaval inside the dome. Powerful magic has been unleashed and we should be ready.’

‘Order the warriors to take up position.’

Liallan stood up and left the pavilion, followed by her guests. Calis said, ‘I should find Arkan.’

Liallan looked at the son of her most hated enemy and said, ‘He will be with his clan, somewhere over there.’ She pointed to the large outcrop of rock the magicians had been using as a reference point to bring in supplies and other magic-users. ‘Why?’

Calis shrugged. ‘You get used to having certain people around.’ Then his smile broadened. ‘And he is a little quick to focus on his left, and neglect threats from his right. That could get him into trouble.’

The Prince of Elvandar hurried off and the human woman warrior, Sandreena, came to take his place, pausing to pull on her gauntlets. ‘I’ve been around those two enough to know they’d die to protect one another; I’ll never understand the blood feud between your people.’

Without taking her eyes off Calis’s retreating back, Liallan said, ‘You’re correct, human. You will never understand.’

Sandreena hurried along. The magic-users followed, leaving Liallan alone with her servants. At last she turned and quietly said, ‘Bring me my armour.’ She looked at the sky above. Storm clouds were gathering, seemingly drawn to the strife down below as the ruby dome began to flicker and tremble. Softly, the leader of the Snow Leopards said, ‘Few will be around to finish what we start here, now.’

Pug felt the upheaval, as did the other magicians. He, along with Miranda, Nakor, and Magnus had been stunned for a few minutes before regaining their senses. Pug stood and studied the situation. He saw Cetswaya instructing various magic-users while moredhel warriors were deploying to answer any threat. He motioned to Magnus, Miranda, and Nakor to come close. To Nakor he said, ‘Can you go fetch Ruffio, please?’

Nakor returned in a minute with Ruffio and Pug said, ‘I imagine everyone here felt that … whatever it was?’

Miranda said, ‘It felt as if something … tore loose?’

‘I get the sense something is thrashing around inside the dome, Father.’ Magnus looked in the direction of the dome. ‘It’s changing.’

Pug looked at the magicians controlling the dome and saw that they were starting to exhibit signs of distress. ‘Magnus, see if you can tell what’s going on. Look at the elven magic-users. They appear to be—’

A sudden ripping sound was accompanied by screaming as a rent in the dome materialized. A flood of dark figures erupted through the tear and battle was joined.

The horrors that came flooding out of the breach were smoky shapes with glowing red eyes, massive shoulders tapering to trailing tails upon which they effortlessly glided along. They lashed out with claws and lunged to bite with fangs, but no wounds appeared where they struck. Rather, those unfortunates whom they wounded suffered shrivelled flesh and felt a numbness spreading from the wound. A slash to the throat or a deep wound in the chest, and the afflicted would die without breath, their heart stilled. A blow to the head and vacant eyes would herald brain-death. Steel hurt, but didn’t kill them. But it drove them back, as stalwart Sentinels and moredhel warriors furiously attacked. Magic destroyed the monsters – a magician’s fiery blast, a cleric’s spell of destruction, or a Spellweaver’s enchantment. Slowly, the onslaught of smoky horrors was pushed back to the dome.

Pug, Magnus, Miranda, and Nakor walked slowly toward the dome, destroying every smoky apparition that stood before them. Pug found a moment to look past the attacking Dread and examined the dome. It was wavering, despite the containment spell. He could sense that the thing that lay at the heart of the dome, at the rift in the centre, was attempting to push itself up and out of the pit, to gain full entrance into this world. There was a sense of desperation that hadn’t existed before the surge of energy they had all felt moments before.

Pug moved to a knot of magicians and Spellweavers who were being defended by a dozen moredhel warriors. With a wave of his hand, he sent a curtain of scintillating, white-hot energy that swept away a large group of Dread who were poised to overwhelm them.

One of the moredhel glanced over at Pug and for the briefest moment Pug thought he saw gratitude on his face, then the warrior returned his attention to the next wave of attackers. Pug put his hand on the shoulder of the nearest magician and closed his eyes, lending his senses and magic to the spell engaging the dome.

We have an opportunity
, Pug sent mentally to his son, Ruffio, Miranda, and Nakor.

What?
came the reply from all four.

The creature at the heart of the pit is frantic. I think that wrenching feeling we experienced is related to this. It is trying to get out prematurely
.

Nakor’s voice entered their minds.
When I lay dying on the Dasati world, I saw the Dreadlord rising through the dimensional rift, and it took time. The life energy it was using was enormous, yet it was moving slowly. If you are right, Pug, the Dread in the pit will need more energy. Be cautious.

What are you thinking?
asked Miranda.

Pug said,
Ruffio, send word to the waiting magicians and priests worldwide that it’s time to start linking up the magic chain. It will take an hour or two, but once it’s in place, I think the Dread in the pit will be vulnerable.

Ruffio replied,
I will
.

You dropped a portion of Kelewan’s moon down the last rift, Pug,
said Nakor.
What are you planning this time?

We won’t be able to fully re-establish this dome for an hour or two. When we do get control back, I want to invert the spell, twist it inside-out, and push back with everything we can muster and drive the Dread back into that pit, then fix the inverted spell in place as a ‘stopper’, and collapse these mountains in on it.

Nakor said,
What about the dwarves to the south?

Ruffio, can you send word to King Dolgan and his people that they should move to the south end of their valley?

I will
, said the younger magician and then they felt a void as if he had vanished.

Nakor’s voice returned to Pug’s mind.
I’m not sharing this with the others. Can you control this?

I must,
replied Pug.
There is no other choice. If the Dread flood into this realm, we and every other living thing on this world will die. And from here it will move out to other worlds.

I saw the void in the Fifth Circle, Pug. It moves slowly. Perhaps we could come up with a different solution?

Miranda said it moved ‘slowly, but inexorably’ when she described it,
observed Pug.
We must keep it from entering entirely
. He paused, then added,
Everything we’ve encountered from the first attempt to reach the Lifestone to the incursion of demons and Dasati, all of it was to clear the way for the Dread to enter this realm. Here is where they need to be if they are to reunite with what Macros called ‘Mind’, and return everything to that perfect state of timeless bliss.

Timeless bliss
, said Nakor with a mental chuckle.
That doesn’t sound so bad
.

Except for everything we’ve ever known ceasing to exist. If time is returned to that state, nothing that has ever occurred will have happened. All we know will never have existed. Inverting the rift is our only hope
.

No one knows more about rifts than you, Pug,
said Nakor,
but this is unprecedented
.

The threat is unprecedented,
replied Pug and Nakor had no answer to that.

They worked to push back the Dread emerging from the dome, and when it was at last closed off once more, Pug dived mentally into the lattices of energy. He described what he saw to the others while they attended to the needs of the failing magicians. Several had been rendered unconscious or otherwise incapacitated by the fury of the breach, and magicians who had not fully recovered were being asked to return to hold the barrier.

Pug worked for nearly an hour before he was forced to take a rest and withdraw his mind from the energy matrix formed between the intersection of the elven magic and the dome energy. He took stock of the situation around him and saw that at least a dozen moredhel dead had been gathered together and a funeral pyre was being built. He walked over and took a moment to bow his head in acknowledgment of their sacrifice, then trudged up the hill to where Magnus stood watching over the dome.

‘Father,’ said the tall magician in greeting.

‘How are you holding up?’

‘Better than you, from appearances. You need to rest.’

‘No time,’ said Pug. ‘We have the dome contained for a while, but I don’t know if everything we need will be in place in time. It feels as if it will break again soon, and next time I don’t think we have the resources to close it down. When it breaks, that is when we must be ready to turn the spell in on itself, even if we’re not entirely ready. We have to attempt to seal the rift and drive the Dread back to the void.’

‘I know more about rifts than anyone except you,’ said Magnus. ‘I have grave concerns whether this will work.’

‘As do I, but if the dome tears again, we will have no choice but to act at once. Which is why I need you to do certain things to improve our chances.’

‘What?’ asked Magnus, stepping off the rock upon which he had been observing the dome.

‘There are two stages to this undertaking,’ said Pug quietly. ‘We can all work on the preparation – you, me, Miranda, Ruffio, Nakor, the Spellweavers and shamans. When we are ready, however, there are only two of us who can do what comes next.’

‘I don’t like the sound of this, Father.’

‘Nor do I,’ admitted Pug. ‘But there’s no choice in the matter. I need you to act as the conduit for all the magic energy that is going to be routed to us through the chain of magicians and priests worldwide. You are the only magician who has the strength and ability to not be overwhelmed and consumed by it, Magnus. Even Ruffio, who is a prodigious talent, is years away from being able to manipulate those energies. I’m not sure even I could sustain it for very long. And in any event, I need to be in the rift, ensuring that the power you send me does as it is supposed to do.’

‘In the rift?’ asked Magnus, his face a mask of disbelief. ‘You’re going to pull everything in on top of yourself?’

‘I have to be close to the rift to gauge how best to apply the inversion spell, then I have to force the Dread back down into the pit.’

‘Why not simply ask the sun to reverse itself?’ said Magnus bitterly. ‘How long do you expect you’ll survive even trying to reach the rift?’

‘I have the means to protect myself from the entities that have been flooding out of the dome,’ said Pug. ‘Long enough to reach the centre of the city and then after that …’

‘Do you believe you can survive this, Father?’

Pug was silent for a moment. ‘Honestly no, but then I’ve felt that way before.’ He looked at Magnus. ‘When we went to the Dasati home world I wasn’t certain either of us would survive.’ He sighed. ‘And Nakor didn’t, despite our thinking he somehow did.’

‘I know,’ said Magnus. ‘The longer we’re around those two demons, the harder it is to remember they are not who they seem to be. But we’ve always considered risk.’

‘There is no risk,’ said Pug, suddenly impatient. ‘It’s a certainty we’ll all die if the Dread break through to this realm in strength. It will consume everything it touches, growing stronger by the minute while we weaken. We could flee to the Hall and find another world, and eventually we would succumb to old age, or some other mishap, but that thing in the pit would be swallowing worlds ages after we were gone – everything in this realm would be gone!’ He shook his head and lowered his voice. ‘And this is different,’ he said. ‘From what Macros showed us, this would be a tipping of a balance so profound that everything we imagine as real would return to the primal state. Nakor and I just discussed this a few minutes ago.

‘It doesn’t matter if it takes a day or a year or thousands of years, but eventually we’d all be inside that perfect, blissful ball of … whatever it is, or was, before creation. And none of this,’ he waved his hand, ‘will have happened. Time will be as it was before. This … thing will not only obliterate everything that is, it will engulf everything that ever was.’

Magnus was silent for a long moment. Then he said, ‘Was there ever so bleak a possible outcome?’ He looked at his father and smiled. ‘May I offer a suggestion?’

‘Certainly.’

‘As a boy you told me more than once about your first experience within the void, shutting down the Tsurani rift, and how you returned with Kulgan’s staff as a guide. How it tethered you to him. I would like to be a tether, if I may.’

‘I’m listening,’ said Pug.

‘You know me as well as anyone can. If you can just reach out to me at the last moment, if possible, I will do everything in my power to pull you back to safety.’