[33]

 Once he was above the entry level's ceiling Breaker discovered that most of the tower was an empty shell; there were no intermediate levels, no floor across the beams that supported that ceiling, but simply a bare stone cylinder, some fifty feet in height, with a stone spiral up the center leading to the floor above.

And there were two voices coming from that upper level, one of them definitely the Leader's; he hastened his pace.

And then he stopped dead, just as his head reached the level of the floor, when he heard the Leader say, "I suppose they've realized they're trapped by now. You're sure there's no way they can escape?"

"I certainly hope not," the other voice said—a thin tenor Breaker did not recognize, but mat he supposed must be the Wizard Lord's real voice. Up until now he had only heard the Wizard Lord speaking through animals, but this voice sounded human. "I suppose that eventually the Swordsman might manage to hack his way through the doors, but it should take hours, at the very least, and I'd expect my maids to warn me." Breaker's hand trembled, and he felt ill. "You can't just tell where they are?" the Leader asked. "Not with those confounded ara feathers the Swordsman has—I'm not the Seer." At that, Breaker's hand fell to the feathers in his belt, the feathers he had bought from a passing guide to ward off bad dreams. They had apparently done more good than he realized.

"No, you're the Wizard Lord," the Leader said. "You're supposed to have all our magic."

"I have my own magic, not yours. Eight times as much, yes, but not the same."

"How long do you think I should wait before luring in the others?"

   "You know them better than I do. My maids are undoubtedly setting up the next corridor by now, if you want to get on with it."

   "Oh, there's no hurry. After all this time I want to enjoy this."

   "You enjoy it? Betraying your comrades?"

   "Of course! The seven people in all Barokan my magic can't affect, and who don't have the sense to see that our magic should make us rulers, and who dragged me halfway across Barokan in the rain—of course I enjoy knowing where their folly has brought them."

"It's not all seven. The Thief is still back on her farm outside Quince Market, with her husband and brats."

   "It's six of them; that's good enough for now."

   "We've only trapped two so far."

   "The dangerous two."

   'True enough."

Breaker heard the gurgle of wine being poured. He swallowed bile.

   "Was it hard, keeping up the pretense for so long?" the Wizard Lord asked.

   "Sometimes. But they were all so very sure of themselves—the idea that one of the Chosen might want to join you in ruling Barokan doesn't seem to have ever even occurred to them. Even when I kept telling them not to make any plans, not to make any sort of serious preparations, they never got suspicious—you probably didn't need to set that stag on me at all."

"I was trying for the Swordsman," the other said. "But then I couldn't just ignore you. If I had, they might have realized something was wrong."

   "I know, and I'm sure it removed any doubts they might have had. Later I was a bit worried that the Thief's refusal to accompany us might get them thinking in unfortunate directions, but apparently it never did. I was very relieved when she didn't come along, you know—she thought differently from the others, more sensibly, not all caught up in our preordained roles, so she might have been harder to fool, and of course her magic would make her hard to capture and hold. And I almost couldn't believe our luck when the Seer said she wasn't going to set foot in the tower—if she'd been here I couldn't have sent them down into the cellars, she'd have known where you were."

   "I was planning to shoot her, rather than the Speaker, for exactly that reason," the Wizard Lord replied. "But having them both out of the way was even better. Though you know, she must know where we are, that the two of us are up here and the others are downstairs—I wonder what she thinks of that?"

   "She probably thinks it's all part of some grand scheme of mine, some ploy to convince you to surrender." The Wizard Lord snorted derisively. "As if I would ever give up any of my magic! It's all that makes life worth living."

   "As you say. I always wanted to be a wizard, or at the very least a priest, but I couldn't find any wizards to train me, and the ler back home in Deepwell wouldn't have me. Becoming one of the Chosen was the only magic I could get."

"You could do worse. After all, here we are!"

   It might just be a trick, Breaker told himself. This might all be some scheme to get the Wizard Lord to lower his guard. After all, the Leader knew what the Wizard Lord had done, knew about the deaths and disasters he had caused.

   "Here we are," the Leader agreed. "And you know, when they're all captured, and the Council has been dealt with, I think I might just go back to Deepwell and gut all the priests.

If the ler there won't have me, why should they have anyone?"

"Indeed, indeed! A toast, then, to the priesthood of Deepwell—may their deaths come soon!" Glasses clinked. If that was a trick, it had succeeded too well—Breaker was convinced. There was no need to say anything like that as part of a ruse.

The Leader was as mad, as evil, as the Wizard Lord.

That explained so much. It explained the disorganization, the lack of planning the Chosen had suffered—it hadn't been simple inexperience, but that the man charged with organizing and planning had been working against them. It explained why the Seer had accepted the Wizard Lord's lies about Stoneslope for five years—it had been the Leader who told her, the Leader she trusted, the Leader whose opinion she respected, the Leader who had been scheming with the Wizard Lord all along. Those voices in the night—that must have been Boss and the Wizard Lord conspiring together, making their plans, discussing the next move.

"Now, I think it's time to bring in the others," the Leader said, after a moment's silence. "What do we have planned for them? I don't want to foul anything up at this point."

   "Can you separate them, so they'll be easier to deal with? Individually they shouldn't be any problem—the Beauty can't seduce my maids, the Scholar's knowledge won't help him here . . . "

"Is that why all your servants are female? The Beauty?"

"Of course! I thought that was obvious, and I still don't know why Goln Vleys didn't do it."

"I don't either—Goln Vleys must have been a fool."

"All of them must have been. I'm not."

   "Goln Vleys didn't need to fight a Speaker. The Council hadn't invented that role yet. The Speaker can break most of your spells."

   "The Speaker has an arrow in her leg—she's the least danger of any of them, now!"

   'True. So we have a cripple, an old woman, a pretty little nothing, and a harmless tale-spinner. Suppose I tell them that you're going to surrender after all, and resign, and that you have healing magic you've agreed to use, and the Beauty can help Babble in, while Seer and Lore wait with the wagon? Then later I can ask them to come in and lend a hand with the cleanup."

"That should work. I'll have my maids ready another corridor."
And Breaker heard a wineglass set down, and footsteps approaching, and he knew that the time had come at last.
He charged up the last few steps.

   His training and countless hours of practice kicked in immediately, and as he had been taught he took in his surroundings as swiftly as he could, looking for foes and traps and anything he might want to use as a weapon, all while keeping much of his attention on his intended target. The room at the top of the tower was round, of course, lit by five windows spaced around its circumference; cluttered shelves covered much of the walls between the windows. Several chairs were scattered about. A small table with three chairs stood to one side, a bottle, corkscrew, and two glasses upon it, and the Leader seated comfortably in one of the chairs. And halfway between that table and the stair was his enemy, his target, the Wizard Lord.

The Wizard Lord was a little below average in height, a little thinner than most, wearing a loose gray robe that might once have been black; he had unruly brown hair, and a surprised look on his face—though Breaker supposed anyone would look surprised to have a swordsman come bounding up the stairs at him like that. He jerked aside at Breaker's sudden emergence, and dove for a staff that leaned against a nearby chair, and even as he did one hand was scrabbling at his robe, clearly groping for a hidden talisman.

   For an instant, as he saw the Wizard Lord as an ordinary man rather than a mysterious magical presence, Breaker thought he should offer the man one last chance to surrender—after all, up until now he had always had his secret final defense in the form of the Leader's treachery. Now that that was exposed, he might see reason.

       But the ghosts of Stoneslope, the memory of little Kilila's screams, the months of dismal rain, burned homes, drowned fields, and bloody butchered animals, all swept over him in a wave of weary anger, and Breaker did not bother saying a word before knocking the staff away with the sword and then thrusting the blade through the Wizard Lord's unprotected heart.

It was easy, astonishingly easy. This was the moment that all his practice, all his training back in Mad Oak, had been meant for, and now that preparation paid off; he had no trouble at all in slipping his blade past the Wizard Lord's arm, past the man's last desperate attempt to ward off his doom, and punching the point through cloth and skin and flesh, putting his shoulder and muscle and weight behind the blow.

For a few strange seconds, as he struck, everything seemed to slow down; Breaker was horribly aware of the feel of the sword in his hand, the resistance the blade met as it scraped across a rib, pushed through muscle much tougher than he would have expected in so small a man, and pierced the Wizard Lord's beating heart. He heard the tearing of the robe's fabric, the rattle as the dropped staff hit the floor, the sound of the Leader's chair being pushed back. He saw the Wizard Lord's mouth and eyes go wide, saw the man's eyes glaze over, and dark blood bubble up in his mouth. A choked gasp came from the Wizard Lord's throat, cut off almost instantly by the surge of blood. From the corner of his eye Breaker saw the Leader fall backward, across the chair he had been sitting in a moment before, and sprawl awkwardly to the floor. He was no threat, not yet; Breaker could take the time to be sure that the Wizard Lord was dead.

But that did not take long at all. He could see the light going out of the man's eyes as they rolled back, could hear his breath catch and cease, could feel his heart spasm into stillness around the sword's blade. The Wizard Lord was dead.

A weird feeling of anticlimax struck him; he had just killed a man for the first time, and no ordinary man, but the

Wizard Lord himself—and it had taken a single thrust, catching the man by surprise, and really, physically it hadn't felt very different than killing a dog or a deer.

   But at the same time he knew it was different. The expression on the dying wizard's face was nothing like anything he had seen on a mere beast, and he knew it would haunt his dreams.

And the air was alive with tension, a tension he could not immediately explain.

   But then time sped up again, and the tension was released, and as storm winds whipped at him, though he was still in a closed room, as voices sang and screamed in his mind, as light flickered and blazed across the walls and ceiling, Breaker realized what was happening.

Many of the ler that had been confined by the Wizard Lord's spells, the natural forces he had trapped in charms and talismans, were released by his death, and were escaping back into their own world.

   "No!" the Leader cried from where he lay. "No! All the magic!"

   Breaker jerked his sword from the Wizard Lord's chest, and let the corpse fall heavily to the rough plank floor; bright blood dribbled from the wound and formed a spreading pool on the wood. Then Breaker stepped away from the stairs and turned to face the fallen Leader.

   "He enchanted me!" the Leader said, looking up at Breaker's face. "I swear by my soul, he had me bound to him! He knew my true name, he made me betray y o u . . . . "

"Shut up," Breaker said, setting his lamp on the chair where the wizard's staff had rested.

   "No, really, he had me in his spell! I know it's not supposed to work on the Chosen, but he'd found a way . . . "

   "Shut up," Breaker repeated. "I'm not going to kill you— at least, not yet, not if you shut up. It's not my job— and what would be the point?"

   "But I didn't. . . "

   "Just shut up, will you? It doesn't matter anymore. He's dead—I killed the Wizard Lord. Our job's done. It's over."

The Leader blinked up at him, at the bloody blade of his sword, and fell silent.

   "One thing, though," Breaker said. "You're going to pass on your talisman, first chance you get. You've had your turn, you'll say—you understand? There probably won't be another Dark Lord in our lifetimes anyway, but I'm not taking any chances—if you still have that talisman in a year's time, then I'll kill you. You understand me?"

The Leader nodded desperately.

"And the Thief, and the Seer—their time's up, too. You tell them that." "Me?"

   "You—you're the Leader. We aren't going to tell them what happened here—there's no reason to. You and I escaped the trap together, and we killed him. Why should we say anything else?" "Yes, yes! Of course. We don't. . . I don't want any trouble . . ."

   "One year," Breaker said. "No more. And sooner would be better." Then he knelt and wiped the blood from his sword on the Wizard Lord's robe.