4
Rap had always known that the battle would be brief, for that was the way of sorcery, but he had not expected such instant catastrophe. For a moment the transition took his breath away.
Then he pulled his wits together. The five pixies were still in a state of shock. He slammed power at them with all the feeble strength he could summon.
“You!” he barked at Toom. “That way. You—take the west . . . Summon all the mundanes!” He distributed the four cardinal points and turned to the fifth pixie, Raim. “Adjust the Way!.
They nodded, and rallied.
Then he looked to the four mundanes. Gath and Kadie were already standing at his side, white-faced and bewildered. Inos and the imperor came running up.
“Where is everybody?” Shandie demanded.
“At the Chapel,” Rap said. “We must join them or—” Temptation opened before him like a chasm. The war was as good as lost. The ancient barrier had offered a slim chance, but now it had fallen he could see no hope at all. Two thousand sorcerers! Odds of four or five to one—Zinixo was going to win in a pushover.
So . . .
So even if the Almighty did not detach the College from the real world, Rap himself and the archons might be able to do so. The alternative Thume would continue to exist. Assuming every sorcerer in the College had children and a wife or husband, it would be inhabited by a couple of thousand people. That was a viable population, and some of the sorcerers might manage to scramble back aboard before the severance was complete.
“There are two Thumes,” he mumbled, struggling with honor and conscience. “The Almighty may be able to cut us off from the real world. If he does that, then he can never recapture us.”
He stared in dismay at the wife he loved, his son and daughter. What would be their fate if Zinixo caught them? And what would be his own? Thume was a pleasant land. The four of them might dwell there in peace for the rest of their days. Kadie and Gath could survive to adulthood and find partners among the younger pixies. He and Inos would grow old in contentment, dangling grandchildren on their knees. It would be exile, but a safe exile.
It was the fate he had chosen for the fairies. When he had been a demigod and had banished their race forever from the real world, he had not doubted that he was doing them a favor. Why, now, should he not choose the same solution for himself and his loved ones? The alternative was defeat and probably the most horrible deaths a mad sorcerer could devise.
Shandie and the kids stared at him in bewilderment.
But Inos understood, and her green eyes flashed disapproval. “Desert the cause?” she said
“The cause is lost!”
“Duty?”
Duty. Once before she had given him that answer in similar circumstances. Long ago, the two of them had faced a decision even more tempting than this one. Rap had known five words of power then. Five words alone destroyed, but five words plus love made a God Together they could have taken on immortality, eternal bliss, and infinite authority. Together they had chosen duty instead.
Gath and Kadie, then? Leave them? But they were not children any longer. What right had Rap to make this decision for them?
None. But he had no time to explain it all. The archons were calling out to the mundanes, their voices echoing along the web of power to the farthest ends of Thume. Men and women and children were answering the occult summons, hurrying to the Way. Raim had changed the settings, so the Way now led only to the Chapel and whatever was happening there. There was no time to explain and reflect, so Rap would have to decide, and Inos’ expression told him what his decision should be.
“We must go to the Chapel,” he said. “Come on!”
He grabbed Kadie’s hand and started to run over the grass to the white path. He sensed the others following.
Fool! he thought. Fool!
The Way sloped steeply through the forest now, and it was packed with refugees. Men bore toddlers on their shoulders, women and youngsters carried babies, and children milled around them all. Even the adults reacted with terror at the sight of demons, so Rap used sorcery to mask himself and his companions and clear a path ahead. The five of them ran, five people hand in hand, pelting down the slope Raim had just created.
The trees became larger, thicker, darker. The air took on the muggy scents of jungle. Shandie and Gath kept gasping out questions. Inos and Kadie were trying to explain-the Chapel was the center, the site of power, the heart of Thume.
And also Keef’s tomb, Rap thought, but the Chapel existed on both planes. Once there, they would be back in the real world.
Even before the ancient ruin emerged from the forest, he could feel the crackle of sorcery and hear its echoes. The battle had reached the Chapel already. A mob of mundanes milled in dark confusion before the entrance. Still towing Kadie—who in turn towed Gath, Inos, and Shandie—he plunged into the undergrowth.
“Back door!” he shouted over his shoulder. Swamp sucked at his legs, branches tore at his eyes. He fought his way through the tangled vegetation, around the corner of the crumbling ruin, and along to the little side portal. He arrived panting, covered in mud to his thighs. The handle resisted his efforts to turn it, so he exerted power again, ripping the door bodily from its hinges and hurling it away.
Gath murmured an appreciative “Wow!” in the background. Rap dived through, and his chain of followers followed. Battle raged in the great chamber like a thunderstorm.
To the left, the torrent of mundanes had poured in through the two entrances and then congealed, barring any more from following. The vestry must be packed solid behind them, while those who had entered stared in bewildered terror at the contest in progress.
To the right, the few hundreds of the righteous were being driven steadily back on Keef’s grave in the far corner. Thaile was in the front rank, with the leaders around her—Lith’rian, Raspnex, Thrugg, Twist, little Ishist, and some others. Fire and thunder clamored over them. Behind them the lesser sorcerers struggled to maintain their meld against the searing pain of manifest power.
And in the center stood the Almighty.
Of course it was only an illusion—Zinixo would never risk his own hide in a battle. But the human mind sought explanations and that vortex of raw power demanded form. Thus Rap saw the usurper himself, shining in black fire and three times the height of the tallest jotunn. Wielding the melded force of his minions, the giant dwarf hurled havoc upon the retreating defenders. The Chapel trembled in the blasts of power.
Disaster! Rap gazed in despair upon the unequal struggle and knew that he had arrived in time to see the conclusion, no more. The outcome was inevitable. Nothing could resist the Almighty.
Nothing Rap could do would make the slightest difference. For a moment he considered flight, but he knew he could never force his way back up the Way now. He released Kadie and took Inos in his arms.
“It’s all over!” he shouted through the echoing thunders. “We have failed!”
Shandie shouted, “No! Do something!”
Inos kissed her husband’s cheek and hugged him. Gath said, “Oh, shit!” in a manly baritone.
Then his prescience warned him. He yelled, and grabbed hold of Kadie.
The resistance collapsed. All of the assorted freedom fighters tumbled helpless to the floor: imps, gnomes, jotnar . . . Only Thaile remained, a tiny defiant figure wrapped in the angry blasts of the Covin’s power. For a heart-rending moment the demigod alone defied the overweening sorcery.
Then Thaile also yielded. She cried out and was wreathed in fire. Brighter and brighter she blazed, echoes of her despair tearing at the onlookers. Despair and surrender-it was the inevitable fate of Keepers.
“Let me go!” Kadie screamed, struggling wildly in her brother’s clumsy embrace.
Rap’s heart was being torn apart. A God’s prophecy rang mercilessly in his ears: You must lose a child! This was what had been foretold. The fate of Pandemia swung in the balance now, and this was why the God had spoken. This was where duty led.
“Let her go!” he barked.
“But, Dad!” Gath protested, trying to avoid Kadie’s kicks. She was squirming and clawing like a wildcat. Thaile’s howl was a knife in the eardrums, her flames blazing ever brighter. “Let her go, I said!”
“But, Dad—”
“I know! Let her go!” Rap grabbed the pair of them. For a moment all three of them wrestled together, until Rap hauled Kadie free from her brother’s gasp.
And released her.
She ran. Gath tried to follow. Rap hung on to him, and then it was Gath who was the wildcat, fighting, kicking, screaming warnings. Inos, also, dived forward, and Rap somehow won a hand free from his other struggle to grab her arm. Again there was a three-way tussle.
Kadie raced across the empty floor, skirted the towering triumph of the Almighty, and hurled herself upon the blazing demigod. Inos screamed and turned her back. Rap still struggled with a son frantic to go to the rescue of his twin. Gath was taller, but all bone and sinew, and he could not break free of his father’s muscle. There could be no rescue.
For a moment princess and pixie clung to each other in incandescent embrace. White inferno roared in the Chapel. Clothes, hair, flesh dissolved in brightness greater than the sun. Sobbing, Gath slumped limply to the floor.
There was nothing left. They had gone. The vision faded, except for green after-images. Darkness flooded back into the Chapel, stillness and sorrow.
“You knew!” the boy howled, staring up at his father in disbelief.
Rap turned away, unable to meet the awful accusation in his son’s face.
He had known ever since Gath came safely back to him that Kadie was the one he must lose, and he had been fairly sure how it must happen.
“Yes, he knew!” Inos said, and her glare was worse. “I hope he thinks it is worth it.”
Kadie, Kadie!
The sorcerers were scrambling to their feet and bowing to the obscenity that rejoiced in the center, the exultant mirage of the Almighty. They were all votaries now. The ice on Keef’s grave had melted.
The battle was over. Zinixo had won.
His monstrous image turned to look at the mundanes. Especially at Rap.