6
Garric stepped out of the circle. Ash from one of the words of power felt soft and warm under his bare heel. He knew he had to move immediately, before his growing fear froze him where he was.
The ash couldn't protect him any longer. He knew that, but he knew also that if fear mastered him he'd cower in the circle like a fool anyway.
"Come," the Hooded One repeated. He gestured with the long rod in his hands; violet light gleamed from the tip. "Come to Malkar, humans."
Tenoctris laughed. "I watched your false throne shatter on Yole, wizard," she said. "The same will happen to this one, as you know."
She stepped out of the circle of ash also. In her hands was another paper wrapper, which she deliberately rolled into a tube, a wand of power. Its crude simplicity implied scorn for the wizard she faced.
The surf rumbled in anger. This was an evil place, for all the quiet beauty of its setting.
"I'm surprised a hedge wizard like you even had the ability to bring the boy to me, old woman," the Hooded One said. He didn't shout, but his voice echoed from the sea and sky regardless. "I appreciate your efforts though. Perhaps I'll kill you quickly as a favor for your help."
Garric stepped forward, putting himself between Tenoctris and the throned figure. He drew the Sword of Carus. Ruddy moonlight washed its blade like a river of blood.
"We've come for Ilna," Garric said. The sword felt as natural in his hand as the sand did beneath his toes, but he was speaking; the youth who'd grown up in Barca's Hamlet, not the king poised within him, grinning with a joy that wolves would recognize.
When Garric's fingers touched the steel, the throne and figure lost solidity to become as insubstantial as the moonlight itself. This was an illusion then; the Hooded One wasn't really in this place.
The ghost figure reached into his sleeve and came out with a mannikin he held in his palm. "This is your Ilna," the Hooded One said. "What will you give me to have her back, human? Will you give me the Throne of Malkar?"
When Garric faced the choice, it was his personal reality that mattered. Not great questions of good and evil, empire and chaos, but the safety of the friends whose lives twined with his.
"I'll give you your life, human," Garric said. "I'll take Ilna back to my own proper world and not trouble you so long as you don't trouble us."
It was the truth—Garric's truth. Tenoctris wouldn't agree, nor probably would King Carus; but it was Garric's honest answer.
Not that it mattered. The Hooded One would never accept any terms but his own. This wasn't a fight Garric was provoking; but the fight would come nonetheless, and Garric wouldn't walk away from it now even if he could.
"You show no more intelligence than I expected from a Haft barbarian," the Hooded One said. Neither of his opponents were cowering at his feet, and he was noticeably angry. "Old woman, tell him that he can't touch me here."
Garric wasn't afraid anymore. It helped that he was pretending to be unafraid, because the image of courage tended to become reality. As for Tenoctris—she didn't seem to care enough about the material world for it to matter to her whether or not she remained in it herself.
"I know that you can't be harmed in this place save by a person from your own time, wizard," Tenoctris said. "We haven't reached your real self yet."
"I haven't permitted you to reach the plane on which I exist in a material sense!" the Hooded One thundered. He stood up and banged his staff on the base of the throne beside him. "I'm responsible for you being here, not your own efforts! Do you plan to attack me, old woman? Do you?"
"I don't have the physical strength, wizard," Tenoctris said. Her voice was calm and almost playful, it seemed to Garric. She knew something he didn't, and the Hooded One didn't know it either.
Or she was bluffing, of course.
The Hooded One pointed his wand toward the sea. Water spouted as if on a rock at the edge of the breakers.
"You've met liches, I believe," the Hooded One said. "Lesser wizards create them from the souls and bones of drowned sailors, but I have something special for the two of you."
The sea foamed about an object rising a hundred feet from shore. A whale broaching....
It stood up slowly; it was thirty feet tall and shaped like a man. Its legs were pillars, inhumanly thick to support the torso's enormous weight. The bloody moonlight gleamed from the great single eye in the middle of the creature's forehead.
It began walking in from the sea. Surf sprayed and spat as if the legs were stone breakwaters.
Garric had crawled through the rib cage of a giant like this when he'd escaped from the dreamworld. Now he faced another, clothed in gelatinous gray flesh. The creature carried a club, its shaft a young tree to which was lashed a head of gleaming jade as large as a horse's skull.
"A prehuman race," the Hooded One said. He cackled with laughter. "But I've picked the soul of a great warrior to animate the form to my will. Do you remember him, hedge wizard?"
Tenoctris had knelt and was chanting over the symbols she'd drawn in the sand. Garric knew that the old woman didn't have the power to oppose the Hooded One directly, but he was glad to know that she hadn't given up. He took a firm grip on the sword hilt and started forward.
"This is the Duke of Yole!" the Hooded One said in triumph.
Lightning struck Garric. Colors and sound blazed about him, but he had no consciousness except of roaring conflagration. His flesh tingled with a shock as great as that of diving into the winter sea.
He was lying on the sand. King Carus, bearded and wearing the gleaming diadem of Garric's dreams, stepped out of the stone relief. His strong hands helped Garric rise. Carus unbuckled the sword belt and cinched it about his sightly fuller waist, then took the sword itself from Garric's willing fin- gers.
The Hooded One was a black figure on a black throne again, though Garric was too aware of the illusion to be frightened by its seeming solidity.
Carus smiled broadly at Garric and said, "You've brought me where I wanted to be, lad. Better late than never, hey? You take care of your end and leave Duke Tedry to me."
Carus whirled the sword above his head. "Haft and the Isles!" he cried. With a peal of bloodthirsty laughter he charged the giant just striding heavily from the surf.
For a man to attack a creature so large should have been ridiculous, but there was nothing ridiculous about Carus. His left hand held the scabbard to prevent it from flapping against his thigh, and his boots sprayed sand behind him.
Carus had waited a thousand years for this moment. The size of the body his enemy wore wouldn't change the outcome.
Garric threw back his head and laughed. Good might not triumph, but one evil man would receive the end he deserved even though it was delayed by a thousand years.
The figure on the black throne screamed and slashed his staff down. The cosmos tilted on more than three planes.
Everything was gray. Garric heard Tenoctris continuing to chant. His feet were down, but the direction of down shifted again and a third time without any material change. Garric extended his arms for balance and touched the old woman's tunic, though he couldn't see her in the shimmering gray blur.
The world changed a fourth time. Garric stood in a room of flaring torches and stone walls dripping with condensate. Water pooled on the floor, and there was a strong smell of the sea.
Ilna lay beside the black throne, on which sat a hooded figure no more than the size of a tall man. The wand he held was pulsing with angry amethyst light.
"He had the choice of facing your ancestor there, or bringing us here to his lair with him," Tenoctris said at Garric's shoulder. "This is the Hooded One. This is the real man."
Garric strode forward.
The Hooded One rose and struck his staff down again. The cosmos shifted around Garric.