“Ahhh You don’t know my Dire Darkest Master as I do,” the black cloud snapped and crackled. “He’d accept my gift of destruction of his enemies... and add me to the list, as well! He’ll never even begin to understand why I fled on the final night of Last Battle.”
“I fled that field myself,” Cribblon murmured sadly. “And my own Master, the powerful Aeromancer Frigeon, turned and fled also. I was ashamed for a long time, but finally came to realize... nobody was a hero that day. Not even Flarman Flowerstalk, sometimes called Firemaster.”
“I suppose you’re right.” The blackness seemed to heave a tremulous sigh. “But your fellow Wizards evidently understood and forgave themselves and you. My Master... doesn’t know what forgiveness could ever be!”
The two, the middle-aged Journeyman and the lost shard of The Darkness, fell silent. Bronze Owl couldn’t be sure, but it seemed the poisonous atmosphere was clearing a bit.
“In any case ...,” Cribblon began to say.
“What else can I do?” wailed the Servant mournfully. “You wish to destroy me! The Darkness would—will certainly—destroy me! If I could just stay hidden somewhere, perhaps he might eventually forget, if not ever forgive, my cowardly defection!”
“From what little I know of your unforgiving Master,” the Aeromancer went on quietly. “I wouldn’t count on ever being forgotten nor forgiven.”
The ebony cloud heaved another rasping sigh, one filled with self-pity, sorrow, fear, and utter frustration.
“I must try!” it said at last with a sound akin to grinding teeth. “Even if for a just little while I want to survive, Journeyman! Can you understand that?”
“I was in much the same situation for over two centuries myself,” Cribblon admitted. “I thought everyone else had been destroyed or was in captivity or distant hiding ... even Flarman Firemaster himself!”
“Well...,” the cloud said, interested despite himself. “What changed your mind?”
“One day I was kind to a complete stranger. He’d been severely injured by a Black Witch’s magical burning. I nursed him back to health and some measure of sanity. He started me thinking that maybe others of my kind were still alive, doing what they could for themselves and their fellows, no matter how badly harmed, how wickedly savaged. In time I was able to go back and face them, and I found they had long since forgiven me my cowardice. In fact, they understood it, from what they had been through themselves!”
“B-B-But,” objected the Servant, “in my case? Endless Darkness, I know, will never forgive nor allow me to come back to its service! Never! And... I’m not at all sure I want to go back!”
Another long silence between them. Bronze Owl would have held his breath, if he’d had breath to hold.
“What do you want, then?” wondered the Aeromancer.
The Servant of Darkness swung from side to side, as if pacing back and forth. Cribblon waited. Bronze Owl leaned wearily against a huge, clear, red crystal set half into the wall beside the entrance, waiting, also, and listening.
“My best course seemed to be to make myself strong. Then The Darkness might consider me as an ally. If I managed to overwhelm or even just to cripple your Fellowship—especially Flarman Firemaster and the terrible Water Adept—the Darkness might be forced to deal fairly with me ... perhaps.”
“I may know your former Master’s evil nature better than you,” Cribblon sniffed. “It’s totally selfish! Completely evil! It would accept your conquests, as you say, and then turn and destroy you....”
“I know that!” screamed the Servant in anguish. “Don’t you think I know that? But it would be a delay, and a tiniest atom of a chance to survive!”
“A friend of mine, a young Fire Adept named Douglas Brightglade, has an alternate suggestion... if you’d care to hear it.”
“Brightglade! I’ve heard a little of him. He drove me from the Darkest Mountains, you know. Surprised me. Stole my prisoner. I never thought the Fellowship would forgive Frigeon, after all he’d done against the members of the Fellowship.”
“Frigeon was once my own Master, you see,” whispered the Aeromancer.
“I-I—well, no, I didn’t know that.” gasped the cloud. “Your own Master? But—”
“It’s a very long story,” the Aeromancer Journeyman interrupted. “But, if you’d like to hear it, I’d be happy to tell it.”
“We’ve plenty of time,” rumbled the Servant. “Tell me your tale.”
“A long time ago, as Men reckon time, I was apprenticed to the Master Aeromancer named Frigeon. He was already involved in the struggle against your World-devouring Darkness. You don’t need me to tell you more of that, do you?”
“No, I was there, doing my part, carrying out orders,” admitted the cloud.
More than an hour later Cribblon stopped talking, for he’d reached the end of his story.
The black cloud hung very still now in the center of the great, round chamber at the heart of the meteor, neither moving nor speaking.
Bronze Owl remained as still as the crystal against which he rested.
“I wish ...,” said the cloud that was the Servant, “I really do wish...”
Cribblon remained silent, patiently waiting.
“I’ve had a taste of a sweet, sweet freedom,” the cloud said at last, settling slowly to the floor of the chamber. It flattened out wearily. “I could never go back to being a Servant of The Darkness. I think I realized it from almost the very beginning.”
Silence.
“What does the Wizard Brightglade suggest?” the cloud asked, extending a tendril of gray-green smoke uncertainly toward the waiting Aeromancer.
“Douglas says there is a place where you could be free ... perhaps forever. Perhaps until The Darkness is finally defeated. A place of peace and, yes, loneliness, too.”
“I prefer to be alone, I find,” said the weary Servant. “Where is this place?”
“You might remember,” Cribblon said. “It’s the place, Douglas says, from whence your kind came in the Very Beginning. You should be right at home there. The great open spaces between the vast wheels of stars?”
“Nice, empty, quiet, wide, timeless, peaceful place? I recall it, now you speak of it! Would I be safe there? Left to myself?”
“Nobody can guarantee that, of course. But your Darkness seems to have forgotten it, even if it was once its home. And, Douglas says it’s great... huge ... vast... very nearly unending!”
The Darkness Servant was silent again for a long time and, at last, sighed deeply. The sound, like a gentle forest breeze, was one of contentment, of hoped-for peace, and of a decision reached, at last.
****
“Well,” said Pyromancer Flarman Flowerstalk. “How long has it been?”
Litholt consulted a watch pinned on her blouse.
“Seven and a half hours, figuring from when the noise stopped and the heat began to cool,” she replied. “What are you thinking, Flarman my dear?”
“Either poor Cribblon has been utterly destroyed by the Servant... or it has flown,” guessed Black Flame.
“But Cribblon would have sent Bronze Owl to tell us, to warn us, in either case,” Flarman said, stroking his beard as he always did when he was perplexed. The heated air made his whiskers flay about and crackle with blue sparks.
“I don’t think anything has happened to Cribblon,” said Litholt. “Perhaps he’s succeeded, after all. This silence is rather encouraging. Wicked things always have trouble staying silent, I’ve noticed.”
The walls around them suddenly creaked, cracked, and shimmied.
Flarman sat down suddenly and Litholt grasped a bit of stalactite to keep from tumbling also.
“Earthquake!” squawked the Albatross. “Time to get out of here, sir and madam!”
“I won’t leave Cribblon in there alone!” cried Flarman. “You others ... get back to the surface, quick as you can! I’m going after the Aeromancer....”
Litholt stooped, gathering the two Familiars, the bird
to her shoulder, the cat to her bosom. The floor heaved and the walls creaked again as she strode back the way they’d come.
Flarman plunged down the twisted corridor into the buried meteor, the way the Air Adept had gone, calling his name.
Almost at once he ran into the Journeyman, trotting back toward him, followed by the Bronze Owl on the wing, clattering loudly.
“Back!” shouted Cribblon, spinning Flarman about and facing him the way he’d come. “Run! It won’t be safe here for many more minutes, Magister!”
Flarman allowed himself to be hustled from the meteor, which was now quivering like a living thing and making frighteningly loud snapping, banging noises, as if someone were smashing china against a stone wall, piece by piece, and crunching the pieces underfoot.
Bronze Owl sent the bright watch-light shooting ahead of them. Almost at once they began to climb the fumarole vent, scrambling for foot-and handholds, gasping for breath. There was no sign of Litholt and the Familiars.
“They’ve flown on ahead,” Flarman guessed. “And I’m too old for scrambling like this, friends. We must fly!”
He coughed a string of spelling words, spread his arms, and lifted his feet, snatching the startled Cribblon by an arm as he shot past him. Owl flapped his tarnished brazen wings with an urgent clatter and a bang and flew ahead, shepherding the yellow Wizard-light before them, up the steep passage.
“Better tell me what’s going on,” Flarman yelled over the tumult of their flight.
“No time! No breath!” rasped Cribblon. “Wait ‘til we get to open air!”
It seemed like hours, but was really just minutes, before they popped out of the fumarole vent like a cork and shot high into the cool air, just behind the hurtling Litholt and her passengers, and just ahead of a great, roaring cloud of incandescent gases and glowing, white-hot cinders.
Flarman took the Geomancer by the arm and they followed their bronze guide north to the empty city on the rim.
They spotted Douglas, Myrn, Augurian, and Marbleheart with Lesser Dragon, standing and watching, not yet fully aware of their danger.
“Load up! Clear off! Head for the beehive hills. Get clear!” screamed the Pyromancer and the Journeyman.
Douglas, Myrn, and the Water Adept, followed by the Sea Otter, dashed to board the Dragon, who spread his long wings at once and leaped high into the air to follow the hurtling Pyromancer.
Ahead of them Stormy carried Black Flame in his claws.
“We should be safe on the shortgrass hills,” shouted Cribblon over the rising thunder behind them. “The Servant...”
Before he could explain, they’d cleared a low, sandy valley separating the crater from the grass-clad beehive hills.
Flarman pointed at a rounded, low hillock ahead, and flew straight to it, with the others following.
Douglas was off Lesser Dragon as soon as the Dragon’s claws touched the ground.
“What is it,” he shouted to Flarman.
“I have absolutely no idea,” the Pyromancer panted. “Ask Cribblon!”
“We’re safe now, I think,” the Aeromancer gulped. He spun on his heel and flung out his arm, pointing. “Look!”
The Wizards’ party faced south. From this height they couldn’t see the floor of the crater, but they saw, suddenly, a brilliant, hot, red-orange glow shooting out of its depths, high into the evening sky, piercing the looming rain clouds, lighting the entire eerie scene with a jack-o-lantern glow.
There came then a roar like ten thousand granite boulders charging down a steep mountainside. An eye-searing column of the brightest white light shot straight up, lighting the empty desert for miles and miles around, brighter than full day.
From the depths of the crater erupted a rough, glowing, green sphere, its lower surface ablaze with thundering jets of fire, red and blue and eye-searing white.
“The Servant!” shouted Cribblon. “He’s on his way into farthest space!”
The ball of red-hot, white-hot, blue-hot glare seemed to pause a timeless moment, orienting itself to the just-risen moon.
With a roar greater than any before, it rose higher into the night sky, curved gently to the east and a bit to the south ... and in a blink became an arrowing streak of light.
In three quick heartbeats its roar died away to a murmur and it became an attenuated line of fire pointing straight for the moon.
“It’ll miss the moon by a finger’s breath,” Cribblon estimated once the hum of the meteor’s flight faded to a distant throbbing, then to a low whisper.
At long last the trace disappeared into the crowded field of background stars. Still the watchers stood on the grassy hilltop, saying nothing, just watching.
A new crash and a flash burst suddenly upon them. The thick thunderclouds had moved over the scene and a pelting, cold rain began to fall, soaking them all.
“Augurian! Master!” Myrn screamed.
“No fear!” said a voice from the darkness. “I saw no reason to turn off the waterworks. Cool things down.”
Myrn flung herself into the Water Adept’s arms in relief, hugging him fiercely. Douglas and Flarman rushed to embrace them both. Augurian’s Familiar shook the raindrops from his tail feathers and gave a shrill whistle of relief.
“What happened, if I may ask?” wondered Marbleheart, the first to recover his breath and wits.
“Not here!” Douglas said. “Look, the crater is boiling.”
A vast cloud of superheated steam shrieked from the depths of the hole left by the departing meteor. Already the white-hot edges of the pit were cooling to cherry red. The city of the Sandrones had disappeared completely in the blast of the relaunched meteor. Hot steam mingled with the rain clouds. Sheet after sheet of lightning flashed across the crater in constant thundering.
“My Queen wants to know if it’s safe to stay here,” a worried voice hummed in Douglas’s right ear.
“Oh, Rod, old boy-bee!” Douglas greeted him. “I should think perfectly safe! Wouldn’t you, Flarman?”
“Not only that,” added the older Pyromancer, “but the birds and the bees and the beasts will find Sandrovia Crater a much more pleasant place to live hereafter, I should think, once that new lake cools down a bit. Plenty of hot bathwater for all!. Good for daisies and bluebonnets, as well as lilacs and rhododendrons and azaleas, too.”
“Thank you, Wizards,” hummed Rod. “That was quite a fireworks show!”
The rain continued in a torrent, showing no sign of stopping anytime soon. Climbing aboard Lesser Dragon’s broad, wet back, the nonfliers in the party settled down for a wet trip to Indigo Deep.
On the way, although everyone was tired and ready for sleep, Marbleheart insisted Cribblon explain what they had just witnessed.
“It’s all very simple, really,” said the modest Journeyman. “The Servant remembered his home between the star-clusters. He decided to take your advice, Douglas, and go home.
“The hurry he ... it... was in to leave was not because of fear, but because the most direct path to the spot in the outer firmament he wished to reach was about to set behind World. He was afraid if he waited longer, he’d have to go the long way round, y’see. Sorry if it frightened anyone! He thought it was necessary.”
“Who’s frightened?” snorted the Sea Otter. “Great show, taken all in all! You weren’t scared, were you, Tomcat?”
Black Flame pretended to be peacefully asleep in Flarman Flowerstalk’s large and comfortable—and thoroughly damp—lap.
A herd of forty magnificent winged horses waited for them at Indigo Deep.
Failing to find the Wizards’ party on the Ebony shore, King Priad and his daughter had led their people south to Sheik Harroun’s hill fortress.
“It was a hard decision,” Princess Indra admitted to Myrn. “We weren’t sure if you needed us to help capture that... what did you call it? ... Servant of Darkness?”
“By the time you could have gotten there, my pet, everything was resolved, but we certainly appreciate your co
ncern,” cried Myrn, hugging the pretty winged horse about the neck.
“Now, we’ve got together a coterie of powerful Wizards—and some great Journeymen and Familiars, too,” Douglas said, once they’d told their story to everyone’s satisfaction. “It remains to do at least one more bit of magic here, and the sooner the better!”
Priad, who was a strongly built chestnut stallion with flashing white wings, looked at his wife and his daughter fondly.
“We ... er, ah....” He hesitated. “Well... if I may, good sirs?”
“What do you want to say, Majesty?” asked Myrn, hugging the filly fondly for the second time.
“My father and my mother and my people... well, they wonder if... by any chance ... they could remain as they are? When it comes down to it, you see,” Indra said hesitantly, “my people prefer to remain beautiful, strong, flying horses and poets ... rather than mere king and queen, knights and ladies!”
Flarman laughed aloud in both delight and surprise.
“You can make that choice, of course,” he chuckled. “If you change your minds, we can always send someone along later to de-spell you.”
“The life of a flying poet,” said King Priad seriously, “has much to say for itself. I have to say, however, that my daughter Indra... well, she’s not so sure.”
“Indra!” exclaimed Myrn Brightglade. “You wish to return to your former shape? Ah! I begin to understand! Well, and good!”
“I see,” Douglas said slowly. He also had observed the reunion of the flying horse and the High Desert Sheik’s poet son. “Magisters? Would it be possible to restore just the one little flying horse?”
“No problem!” Flarman chuckled. “If Princess Indra is sure she wants it that way.”
“I have no doubts at all” the filly insisted most firmly. “I love Saladim, and wish to marry him. And he loves me, and would even if I remained as I am, but...”
“Say no more,” Litholt told her, clucking sympathetically. “We ladies must sometimes leave close family and faithful for love! There are worse reasons, I can tell you from hard experience, my dear. Shall I handle the special transformation for her, Flarman? I have some little knowledge in such spellings, you remember.”
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