They would cast him in the pit, but so what? Eaganar would die all the same, unless the magic answered his summons.
Why would it not answer his summons?
He was dying.
Then he died.
Eaganar’s eyes glazed over and his lifeless body slumped limp on the ground. His spirit drifted free of its broken container and floated a moment.
Many things could happen to a slain wizard’s spirit. They were not like the souls of most men, which were only energy which dissipated a short time after death to be reabsorbed into the cosmic balance. A wizard’s life-force could endure.
If only that life-force could cast a spell, a single spell, Eaganar might endure forever. But even he would fade away in time unless he found a way to anchor himself to this plane. It meant he would be trapped in this foundation for all time, but at least he would continue. It would not end here at a primitive’s spear tip.
Dimly, that energy which was all that lived of Eaganar sensed a shimmering, humming presence nearby. It emanated from below, from the heart of the mountain. It resonated everywhere, though. It was all connected. The earth and the sky and the rain and the sea and the raktar and the people of the jungle and the jungle itself were all one piece, and at its heart was the greatest power Eaganar had ever felt.
If he could reach that power, he knew he would triumph yet. He could become the god of this plane in truth. He stretched toward it eagerly.
Chapter 66
The Choice
Mithris was in a place that was not a place. He had not moved, not gone anywhere. He knew he was still in the nowhere place, in the power of the foundation crystals. But now there were…details. They were vague, but they were there.
In the distance, the suggestion of a horizon. A division between land and sky. He had a body and he could feel the air on his arms. He was not alone. Rethbrin and Melendra stood before him. They were both stunned, and they stared at him in wonder.
Mithris looked down at himself. He no longer wore the ragged robes he’d had on when he’d been thrown to the volcano.
Instead, he wore a rich robe of velvet and silk in deep burgundy red trimmed with gold and silver filigree. The soot and dirt were gone from his exposed skin and he gleamed as though freshly bathed. He felt stronger than he had before, his weakness and exhaustion rinsed away.
The crystals, he realized. This place was nowhere, and nothing in it was real. It was a pocket of existence created by the crystals, and they had granted him these clothes. He wondered if there was any particular reason for it, but he would not complain.
Melendra, in particular, seemed impressed by the sight. Mithris felt himself blush.
Was it not your wish, Mithris? Vapor sounded amused in his head. Did you not wish to rid yourself of magic? To find a place where you could dwell, away from your enemies and those who would hurt you? In the Final Foundation, you can even settle down to grow beets if that is still your desire.
Mithris drew in a sharp breath, and at last he understood. For a moment, he was overcome.
“You did this for me?” he whispered.
“Eh?” snapped Rethbrin. The old wizard took a step closer, peering at Mithris. “What’s that, lad?”
“The crystals,” Mithris explained. “They’re here. Speaking to me.”
“Ah, splendid!” Rethbrin clapped his hands. “I take it you’ll have this all sorted soon, then, and we can be off back home.”
Melendra’s head turned slowly, carrying her eyes back and forth between the two wizards. She did not know where she was or what was happening. She more than half believed she was dead, and this was the afterworld.
“Erm,” said Mithris. “Well. Let me ask about that, actually.” Rethbrin scowled at him, but Mithris shook his head and turned half away from the ancient mage to concentrate on communicating with Vapor and the others.
We can hear you just fine, said Depths, sounding amused.
Yes, agreed Vapor. If you wish to return to the fifth foundation, we can transport you there. But you must decide now. The final cracks are closing, and this reality will be shut off soon.
Mithris nodded. The course seemed clear. He turned back to Rethbrin. “Get ready,” he said. Rethbrin nodded, but there was really nothing else to do to prepare.
“Wait.” Mithris held up his hand. He had forgotten Eaganar.
Eaganar’s body has died, Tempus informed him.
But his energy has not yet dissipated, added Absence. Mithris thought that sounded ominous. He considered. Was there some way for Eaganar to be reborn?
But even if that could happen, the dark magician would be trapped in another dimension, a plane of reality where he could not use any magic. What harm could he do then? What would it matter to Mithris, safely back home?
But then again, Vapor was right. He had wished for this. A world without magic. He could truly be rid of wizards if he stayed. But what was there in this world for him?
“What now?” groused Rethbrin.
“I’m…not certain.” Mithris did not mean it as an answer to Rethbrin’s question. Rather, he spoke to Vapor and the rest of the crystals.
You must choose, Mithris. We can only send you back if you choose…
Melendra screamed. Mithris whirled in time to see a cloud of misty shadow swooping down out of the indistinct sky. As it descended on her, Melendra beat at it with her hands and backed away in fright. The smog coalesced, forming the shape of a man. Details resolved themselves and suddenly Eaganar stood before them.
The evil wizard seized the girl by the shoulders. She struggled and squirmed but he pulled her close and wrapped one arm about her neck, choking her from behind. He held here there, half in front of him like a human shield.
“So, this is where you’ve been hiding!” he spat.
This is very, very bad, said Vapor.
Mithris didn’t need a foundation crystal to tell him that. He stared at Eaganar in horror.
Chapter 67
Arcane Power
“How?” Mithris shook himself, disbelieving but unable to deny the evidence of his eyes. Eaganar was here, in this nowhere place. His foe was not defeated. Angry resolve growing, spurred on by the look of terror in Melendra’s bulging eyes, Mithris stepped forward.
“How many times will you devil me, Eaganar?” he demanded. “How many times must I defeat you before you admit yourself bested?”
“You think I will ever bow to you, whelp?” Eaganar cackled with the dry laughter of a corpse. “Never!”
We don’t know how he did it. Vapor’s voice was urgent. But he’s managed somehow to…grab hold of us. Not the crude protrusions you have seen and carried, but the raw and ethereal essence which is our true form. He is somehow able to…to shape the energy.
Mithris felt his blood run cold. Master Deinre had worked his whole life trying to shape energy. Mithris himself had an inborn talent for it and even so it had taken him many months of practice to be able to do it intentionally, or with any degree of actual control.
Eaganar could not do it. He had never been able to, and Mithris had been certain the vile sorcerer would never master the trick.
In death, his spirit was freed from its restraints, said Tempus. We can resist him, but only for a time. Mithris! Stretch yourself out to us!
“I notice the way you stare at this girl, boy,” taunted Eaganar, who of course could not hear the silent conference only Mithris was privy to. “You’re going to watch me kill her. I’ll deal with you after.”
Rethbrin surged into motion, hurling himself at the evil wizard. Eaganar’s free hand shot up and a bolt of crackling energy shot forth, taking Rethbrin in the chest. The ancient grandmaster was flung back off his feet to sail through the air.
Mithris growled deep in his throat. He hated Eaganar, had always hated him. He despised everything his nemesis represented, but now — for the first time — he felt a fury in his heart that even Master Deinre’s death had not been able to inspire. His fingers clenched into
tight, white-knuckled fists of rage as he glared death at his foe.
He looked at Melendra, who still struggled. She was wearing herself out, her struggles growing weaker.
This was what came of wizards, he told himself. Melendra had never hurt anyone, he was sure of it. She was an innocent. She had lived her entire life in this dark magician’s shadow, and he had poisoned her entire world. Eaganar had corrupted her people. He had used them to pursue his mad vendetta, and now he meant to snuff her out like an insignificant insect.
Mithris would not allow another innocent to die at this man’s hands. He would not allow such a beautiful woman to perish on his account.
“No,” he declared, lifting one hand. As he spoke, he opened himself to the power he knew was all around them. He felt it surrounding them. He felt Vapor and Depths, Terra and Ember, Tempus and Absence. He hung at the center of their combined storm. He breathed in their thunder, and he channeled their lightning.
“No,” he said again, louder this time. “I won’t let you, Eaganar. I won’t let her die and I won’t let you win.”
He sensed what he had to do. In a way, the crystals planted the spell in his mind. But in another way, it had always been there. It was as though the words were imprinted on the folds of his brain from birth. The arcane sounds dribbled from his lips with a naturally flowing ease, and his fingers wove through the air as he built the spell.
Eaganar hissed angrily, and shouted an incantation.
The spells resolved in the same instant, crashing together in the space between the dueling wizards. Eaganar howled, his hands clawing at the magic in the air as he attempted to seize control of Mithris’ spell.
But Mithris had been doing that sort of thing for a while now, and he reached out and took hold of each flow of magic as though gathering a handful of tiny threads together. He twisted Eaganar’s spell, folding it into his own.
Sweat slid down the sides of his face and Mithris gritted his teeth in concentration. It was working. A hole opened in the air behind Eaganar. Wind whipped through the screaming portal. Eaganar’s eyes widened in shock and he screamed denial.
Careful, Mithris! It was Vapor. The crystal was shouting in his head. There is only so much power you can use in this place. When it is gone, we’ll be unable to send you back.
“I’m not going back!” Mithris answered aloud, only realizing he had made the decision after the words left his mouth.
Still wielding the massive flow of energy, Mithris turned his eyes briefly to Melendra. He wondered if she would want to get to know him better when this was over. Then he looked to Rethbrin, and his heart sank.
He couldn’t condemn Rethbrin to stay behind, living out the rest of his life cut off from the magic he had studied for all his long centuries of life. Mithris felt his resolve falter, and the magic bucked wildly in his ethereal grasp.
Eaganar sensed the momentary hesitation and pounced on it.
The shrieking wind died and the portal Mithris had summoned, a portal that led only to the void between foundations and final oblivion, began shrinking in size.
“You’ll never stop me,” crowed Eaganar. “I will destroy you all!”
Chapter 68
A World without Magic
Eaganar fought to wrest control of the power from Mithris. If he succeeded, the battle would be over. Mithris knew the dark wizard would strike instantly, and there would be no time to regain control. They had summoned very nearly the limit of energy available in this strange place between the worlds, and Mithris could hear the foundation crystals’ lament in his head.
They were being destroyed, he realized. This final foundation had been meant as their final act, and in cutting it from the lattice of the other foundations they had begun their own destruction.
Mithris saw one chance. One chance only, to defeat Eaganar and save Rethbrin. It meant an end to Vapor and his other friends, but Mithris had no choice.
Do it, said Vapor. There was no fear in the foundation crystal’s voice. Do it, Mithris. We have prepared ourselves for this.
Mithris nodded silently and made his move. He released his hold on the magic, thrusting it at Eaganar. The evil magician recoiled in shock; he had never expected Mithris to surrender voluntarily.
Eaganar’s moment of surprise undid him. Before the wizard could assert his will onto the full torrent of power streaming from the foundation crystals, an invisible wave of raw, unshaped power slammed into him. It passed through him like a million unseen arrows, piercing his half-solid spirit body and pouring into the portal Mithris had summoned just before it winked closed.
Eaganar rocked back in agony. His control slipped. Mithris seized the flow back from his foe, wrangling the runaway magic like a ranch-hand roping a runaway steer.
He caught it and it jerked him forward, staggering. But Mithris held on and twisted, forcing the power into a new flow which he controlled. He pulled back. His portal bulged as if something too massive to pass through pressed against it from the other side. Streams of nothingness extended from the doorway to oblivion, pulled on invisible hooks Mithris fashioned from the power he held.
These tendrils of dark nothing wrapped themselves around Eaganar. He writhed and screamed at their touch. His form began dissolving. He threw out his arms, arching back and howling in torment.
At the same time, a new portal opened. It was small, the spell only weakly resolved, but through the small aperture in the empty air Mithris could see a familiar forest and a tall, slender spire. Deinre’s tower gleamed in the slanting light of a rising sun.
Mithris waved a hand, muttering a brief incantation. Rethbrin, understanding Mithris’ words, gave Mithris a knowing nod of goodbye as he was lifted from the ground and sent flying through that second portal just before it snapped out of existence.
The flow of power cut off abruptly. One moment, Mithris commanded every ounce of magic in this entire realm. The next instant, there was no magic. It was as if there never had been.
In the same heartbeat of time, as the magic vanished, so too did Eaganar and the dark portal to the void.
Existence winked out again. Mithris knew a moment of nothingness. He had just enough time to wonder if his spell had backfired, if he had destroyed himself along with Eaganar, and then reality returned.
He found himself standing on a ledge high above the burping, boiling lake of fire. A body lay at his feet, and all the people of the village stood close by. They stared at Mithris in stunned amazement. All of them, that was, save Melendra.
The girl stood at his side, just on the other side of Eaganar’s corpse.
That corpse began to shimmer, and then it dissolved into nothingness.
The four burly young hunters who were holding Lothar down on the ground released him, rising slowly and backing away with wide eyes locked on Mithris and Melendra. They had seen these two fed to the Inferno. Their bodies should have been consumed by the lava. Yet here they stood, unscathed. They each wore glorious robes of a deep, dark red threaded with silver and gold.
The villagers began to kneel. It was only a handful at first, individuals dropping singly to their knees. But soon the rest followed suit, and all knelt before Mithris and Melendra as if they were returning gods.
The young woman at his side turned wide eyes on Mithris. She appeared stunned. But then, with a tiny shake, she broke tears of happiness.
He tested the air, probed the ground. He sensed no ley lines, no residue of magic. It was gone. The cracks were sealed. The Final Foundation was alone. He was alone.
Mithris looked at Melendra again. No. He was not alone. Then he looked out over the kneeling villagers, and made an exasperated sound.
“Mithris has brought me back from the afterworld! He saved me,” Melindra said to her village. With tears continuing to flow down her cheeks, she grabbed Mithris’ hand and brought it to her forehead.
These people thought he was a god. And why wouldn’t they? He had just come back from the dead and they had never seen magi
c before. What a concept? A world without magic.
Mithris surprised everyone by laughing out loud. It was a hearty laugh, the laugh of a man no one was trying to murder. The laugh of a man who’d finally rid himself of wizards.
“You can all get up now,” he shouted to them. Heads lifted to reveal puzzled frowns. “I mean it,” Mithris insisted. “Get up. Nobody needs to kneel.”
Melendra’s expression was shocked. “But you are chosen of the gods,” she told him. “Are you sure you want to stop them, Mithris?”
There was something in the way she said his name that made his heart swell. He shook his head, but could not help the grin that spread over his face.
“No, no, no,” he said. “I am not chosen of the gods. I’m just a wizard…Well, I guess I’m not even that any more. I’m just a man. And if I let them start doing treating me as something more than a man, then they’ll expect us to tell them what to do. Every time there’s an argument, they’ll want us to settle it. Whenever there’s some danger, they’ll beg us to solve it for them.”
Cocking his head to one side, Mithris chuckled as a thought struck him. “That sounds way too much like being a wizard, actually. Yeah, no.” Louder, he called to the villagers. “Get up already!”
They rose slowly, unsure.
Mithris was sure, on the other hand. He turned back to Melendra. “These people threw you in a volcano. You don’t really want to spend a bunch of time with them, do you?”
“They wanted to kill me because they trusted in the Great Master. I’m starting to see just how much he lied to us now, about everything, but you must understand that there is kindness here among these people,” she said, then shook her head. “If you feel you must punish them—”
“Now, don’t start that—” Mithris protested, but she waved a hand at him.
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