Wrath of a Mad God

by Raymond E. Feist

  “Bek,” said Hirea, almost as if it were a question. “I have trained many warriors, human, some among the greatest of my lifetime, but that one is not a natural being. From what I know of your race, no human should be able to do what he does, and now, no Dasati can do what he does.” He looked at Pug. “What is he, really?”

  “I think he’s a weapon,” said Pug. “But only Nakor knows for certain.”

  Hirea removed his sword belt and laid it on an empty bunk.

  He stretched out on another. “Then we must wait.”

  Pug said, “But not for long.” To Magnus he said, “No matter what Martuch finds out, tonight we must find Nakor.”

  Miranda was nearly frantic at the reports coming through the rift from Kelewan. A massive assault was under way in the Holy City. Despite the estrangement between her husband and the leadership at Stardock, many of those at the Academy were still friends or agents.

  From all reports, a wave of thousands of Dasati had literally erupted through a rift in the chamber of the High Council.

  No Tsurani in that room or within half a mile of it had survived.

  The Imperial Guard, except for those around the Emperor at the old Acoma estates, had given their lives defending the Tsurani nobles. Alenca and half a dozen Tsurani Great Ones had died within minutes of the start of the assault. Others had arrived in response to the alarm and most had been killed as well. Most magic appeared to have no effect on the Dasati, though one enterprising magician who survived managed to do so by the expedient method of dropping a massive stone statute on two Deathknights. Thinking back to her own encounter with the lesser Dread up near the Peaks of the Quor, Miranda wondered 2 2 8

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  why she hadn’t thought to use her powers to pick up a boulder and drop it on one. It might have worked.

  Miranda sat back in the chair usually occupied by Pug, feeling overwhelmed. Caleb entered a few minutes later.

  “More word from Kelewan.”

  “What?”

  He handed her the message. “The last Dasati died less than two hours ago. Some were weakened, apparently, by exposure to the Tsurani sun or because of something in the air that sickened them. Whatever the cause, the last Deathknight was overwhelmed in a market square by a dozen merchants who tore it apart using tools and kitchen implements.”

  “It’s nice to know they can die,” said Miranda bitterly.

  “What else do we know?”

  “There are as many as fifty thousand dead or wounded.”

  “Gods!” she exclaimed. “That many?”

  “It’s estimated that ten thousand Dasati came into the city in three locations, two in the Imperial Palace—one right in the heart of the High Council’s meeting chamber, while they were in session, one in the center of the administrative suite where all the palace functionaries work, and the third in the richest merchants’

  quarter in the Holy City.”

  Miranda had already read a report which indicated that the High Council had been sitting when the attack came. She still had no word on the sum of the damage, but given the number of dead and wounded Caleb relayed, she was certain the damage had been appalling. “Varen.”

  “How do you know?”

  “The Dasati could not have known how to do this much harm in so focused a way. Varen had to have told them. In a single attack they’ve decapitated the Empire of Tsuranuanni.”

  “There’s still the Emperor,” said Caleb.

  “But who is there to command?” Miranda stood and began to pace as was her wont when under stress. “Eldest sons?

  Daughters? Wives? The leadership of every house in the Empire has been disrupted, which means every political party and every clan as well. Right now the balance of power in the Empire is 2 2 9

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  completely overturned, and for every house that has an eldest son groomed to rule and step into his father’s place, there are a score who are torn by grief and without effective leadership.

  “This is a far worse disaster than had the Emperor been slain.”

  Caleb said, “At least he lives.”

  “Yes, and that gives the Tsurani a single advantage.”

  Caleb asked, “What is that?”

  Miranda turned and said, “Blind obedience.”

  Caleb’s expression turned doubtful. “How does that become an advantage if there’s no effective leadership?”

  “The Tsurani need generals. We can give them generals.

  They just have to be ordered to obey foreigners—”

  “And if the Emperor orders them to obey generals from Midkemia, they will,” finished Caleb.

  Miranda said, “Now, how is that meeting Tomas asked for coming along?”

  “Everyone who is willing to come will be here by sundown.”

  “Good, I don’t know exactly what Tomas will say to everyone, but I have a pretty good idea. I’ve only met him a few times, but from what your father has said about him, he’s hardly a man to panic, but I think he’s worried, Caleb.”

  “Did Father ever speak to you about the Dread?” He sat down in a chair in the corner.

  Miranda sighed. “There are lots of things your father doesn’t talk about, mostly from the early days. I think it has to do with a lot of different things.”

  “Such as?”

  Caleb was not the sort to probe idly, so his mother knew him to be genuinely interested. She realized once again how different he was from Magnus and his parents. As the only member of the family without the ability to practice magic, he was always somehow detached from their shared experiences, no matter how much they tried to include him in their lives and how much they loved him.

  Miranda said, “I don’t have much time before Tomas’s meeting, but I can speculate a little.” She closed her eyes as if remembering something, then said, “I also haven’t talked a great deal about my youth, and I am older than your father.”

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  He grinned. “You’ve told us not to remind you.”

  She returned the smile, for while she was truly not vain, she played the role as a way of nettling her husband and children. It was one of her failings, but a tiny one. “What you remember, it’s real. It doesn’t matter how accurate your memory of something is, it is real to you. What you perceive as reality is reality.”

  “I’m not sure I understand,” said Caleb.

  “I have no doubt, because of all of us, you most of all live in a real world, Caleb. You don’t deal in the abstracted concepts of magic. You live a life of things you can touch, see, smell. You are out in the forests hunting, tracking—” She interrupted herself.

  “If you see bear tracks, let us say. Artfully fashioned, created by some manner of bootmaker, it’s a pair of boots worn by a man to make it look as if a bear had passed.”

  Caleb shook his head. “The depth would be wrong, because a bear weighs—”

  Miranda raised her hands. “That’s not the point. Let us suppose I use magic to create perfect bear prints and you encounter them. What do you think?”

  “Perfect?” he asked, not sure that was possible. Shrugging, he said, “Fine, I find these perfect bear tracks. I think you’re a bear.”

  “Exactly. You follow them expecting a bear and until the moment you discover I was making the tracks, you think ‘bear, bear, bear.’ And then when you discover it wasn’t a bear, what happens?”

  “I don’t know. I’m supposed to laugh at the joke?”

  She almost rolled her eyes, but resisted the temptation. “Until the moment you discover I made the tracks, if your brother showed up and asked you what you were doing, you would say you were tracking a bear. But from the moment you discover I made the tracks, you think ‘Mother made the tracks.’” She looked him in the eyes. “Do you understand?”

  “I’m not entirely sure I do.”

  “Your perception changed. From that moment onward, whenever you think of that set of tracks or tell
the story to someone else, it’s ‘Mother made those tracks.’ You might even tell 2 3 1

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  someone, ‘I thought it was a bear,’ but in your mind there was no bear.”

  “There was no bear,” said Caleb, now looking more confused.

  Miranda laughed. “If I hadn’t given birth to you, I’d wonder who your parents really were.”

  “I’m not stupid, Mother.”

  “I know,” she said, laughing harder. “It’s just that you like only the real world of things you can touch, feel, and smell.”

  Her humor vanished. “Your father lives in a world of the mind, more than anyone I know, including myself or your grandfather.

  He may someday be eclipsed by your brother, but Magnus has a lifetime of experience to go through to catch up to your father.

  Your father is like others, though, in that his life experiences are real to him, and his perceptions of those experiences may have changed, but not his feelings about them. ”

  Caleb suddenly understood. “So I can remember how I felt when I thought I was tracking the bear, even if now I have stopped thinking of it as a bear!”

  “Yes! Your father went through a great deal of pain and suffering in his youth, and he’s endured much since then, but the tribulations he faces now are being faced by a man with a lifetime of experience and hard-earned lessons.

  “But the feelings of his youth, muted they may be, are still the feelings of his youth, and are remembered the way he felt at the time he lived them. Did he ever tell you of Princess Carline?”

  “Not that I can recall.”

  “She was the daughter of Lord Borric, and by adoption Pug’s

  ‘cousin’ of sorts, but when he was a lad in the kitchen at Crydee Castle, he thought himself in love with her. Fate conspired to give him the opportunity to press his suit, and then took it away from him, when he was captured by the Tsurani. She eventually wed a friend of his and became Duchess of Salador, and she died.

  But somewhere within your father is a tiny memory, a distantly recalled echo of a boy’s love for an unobtainable princess.” She paused. “He misses his wife,” she added calmly.

  Caleb took a second then said, “Katala.”

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  “I know your father loves me, and in many ways I am his perfect match, as he is mine, but to be as powerful as your father is, and to stand helplessly by and watch the woman you love die of a wasting disease . . .” She sighed. “More than once I have tried to imagine what that must have felt like, and I can’t. And he misses his children.”

  Caleb nodded. William and Gamina had both died in the battle for Krondor, at the end of the Serpentwar, years before Caleb’s birth. “It is easy to forget that I had a brother and sister who died before I was born.”

  “But your father loved them desperately. And he never for-gave himself for his estrangement from William at the time of William’s death. It’s one of the reasons he has never tried to tell you which path in life you should take.”

  Caleb shrugged. “I thought Father let me go wandering around, hunting, fishing, and trapping, because I was useless at magic.”

  Miranda smiled gently. “If Magnus had wanted to wander around, hunting, fishing, and trapping, your father would have let him. That was the lesson he learned from William.”

  “So Father doesn’t talk much about the past.”

  “No, mostly because he doesn’t need to dredge up the painful memories; he has enough pain right now to deal with.”

  “So you’re saying Father never talked about the Dread.”

  “Only a little, and I suspect he’d say much the same that Tomas has and will say.” She stood up. “We must go. I really didn’t mean to talk so much about your father, but the question you asked put me in mind of something that has long since been a struggle for me, the part of my husband I cannot touch: his memories and feelings for his first family.”

  They fell silent, and at last Caleb said, “I worry about him, too, Mother.”

  Miranda’s eyes welled up and she blinked. “You’d think after all we’ve been through I’d get used to—” She cut herself off and stood up. “We need to go and speak to our guests.”

  Caleb followed his mother through the long halls of the villa until they reached a clearing to the west of the largest building on the island, save for the empty castle on the distant bluffs over-2 3 3

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  looking the sea. A series of benches had been erected, forming a semicircle. Miranda had called together forty of the most powerful magicians not in the Conclave, an equal number of clerics of the various orders—most of whom had already reached an agreement with the Conclave, or who were more or less favorably disposed to them, and four of the most senior members of the island community. Many of these gathered folk greeted Miranda and Caleb, others were intent upon their own conversations. She ignored the preening representative of the faction known as the Hands of Korsh at the Academy. Keshian traditionalists only slightly less hidebound and reactionary than the other faction, the Wand of Watoomb, they were too caught up in their own self-importance to be of any political use. The good thing was that they had isolated themselves from social conflict and national politics so effectively that neither the Kingdom nor the Empire viewed them as a threat. Had either monarchy possessed a hint of just how much magical ability existed on the Island of Stardock, she was certain their reactions would be quite different. She also liked the fact that Stardock drew attention away from Sorcerer’s Isle. To the rest of the world a mad magic-user,

  “the Black Sorcerer,” lived here alone. Over the years that guise had included her father, her husband, Nakor, and any number of students adept enough to scare off pirates or more innocent vessels that had wandered off course. A little blue light sparking in a tower window of the old castle, some horrible noises, and if necessary a hideous illusion or two on the beach below, and they gave this place a wide berth.

  Now Sorcerer’s Isle resembled a spring garden party at the royal palace at Roldem, save that there were few beautiful ladies and no dashing young courtiers present.

  Miranda said, “Thank you all for coming,” and all conversation stopped. “Tomas of Elvandar should be here in a while.

  But before he arrives, I wish to say something.

  “Each of you is known to the others, if not by sight, then by reputation. Each of you is here because you are acknowledged as both a master of your arts and an influential member of your particular orders or societies. I can do no more than beg you 2 3 4

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  to believe that what you are about to hear from Lord Tomas, as fantastic as it may sound, is the truth.” She heard the dragon approach before she turned and saw it. Those sitting in the semicircle in front of her looked up in astonishment.

  Caleb walked over to stand next to his mother and whispered, “Gold is better.”

  The dragon Tomas rode now dwarfed the red one he had ridden earlier. This majestic creature had a head the size of a freight wagon, and its wingspan could have covered the entire width of the main building on the island, with the tips touching the ground. The massive dragon touched down as lightly as a leaf fluttering from a tree and Tomas leaped down from its shoulders, more of a drop than jumping from a rooftop. He thanked the dragon and it sprang into the air, spiraling away in a steep climb into the evening air.

  Without preamble, Tomas said, “That you are here means that Miranda and Pug have confidence in you, and confidence will be required. I bring you a warning, and it is most dire.

  “I am named Tomas, Consort to the most radiant queen, Aglaranna, ruler of Elvandar. I am by her appointment and the consent of her subjects Warleader of Elvandar. I wear the mantle of Ashen-Shugar, Ruler of the Eagles’ Reaches, and carry his alien memories, though I am as mortal as any here. I have been allotted a longer life span than other humans, but I know that eventually death awaits me.

  “I have
traveled beyond the stars and into the Halls of Death herself, and have spoken with gods and demons. I tell you this so that you may know something of what I am, and what I have seen, for now I must speak of the Dread.

  “Some of you may know the name from your ancient lore, others may have never heard it, but in the end, it is all the same, for you know nothing of them. I am the only mortal being on this world who knows of the Dread, save one, and he has traveled a long distance hence. So, put aside any preconceptions you may have and listen.”

  Caleb whispered, “He just told us all to forget about the bear, didn’t he?”

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  His mother nodded.

  Tomas began his tale.

  When he had finished, the word that best described the assembled magicians and priests was “shaken.” Without embellishment or dramatics, Tomas had told them the tale of the Valheru’s first and only encounter with the Dread, in a realm called “the Boundary” by the Dragon Lords. It was a place between the realms and the Void and, like the Hall of Worlds, the City Forever, and the Garden, a place that defied rational description.

  Tomas said, “There is a place, the Peaks of the Quor, in that part of Great Kesh closest to the Island Kingdom of Roldem.

  It is there we discovered a leak in the barriers of reality, a place where this world and the Boundary coexisted. Somehow children of the Dread—beings almost benign by the standards of the Void—found their way into the Boundary and then from there into this world. They were playing: yet that play was deadly.

  Miranda and I excised their existence from this world and I hope that ended the risk, but I asked for you all to be here today to warn you that there is a possibility the risk is not over. For if the Dread ever find their way into our realm, we shall have almost no time to respond.”

  “How can we respond in any rational fashion to a threat such as the one you describe?” asked the High Priest of the Order of Dala in Krondor. The elderly cleric wore his simple white robes today rather than the richly embroidered raiment of his office.