Aquamancer (mancer series Book 2) (35 page)

Without conscious thought the Journeyman Wizard turned to the relatively cool stone wall beside the passage from which he had just emerged. He made a scooping and hurling gesture with both hands and muttered a chain of powerful words.

As if a giant hand had plucked it out of the cavern wall, a great mass of solid, unmelted stone hurled itself into the abyss, half filling it with debris. The mountain roared in fury but before it could tear away the cooler stone, Douglas flung a second and a third handful after the first.

The last filled the burning abyss to the level of the floor on which he—and Emaldar—stood.

“Come this way!” he shouted. “Hurry, Emaldar!”

She couldn’t see or hear! He dashed across the bridge he had made, protected by the Fireproofing Spell from the blast-furnace heat of the volcano’s interior. Reaching her side, he flung part of his spell about her, quenching the flames that were about to destroy her beautiful face.

Grasping her firmly, he shouted in her ear to follow him back across the temporary bridge, but she shook her head.

“I cannot see!” she screamed in agony. “I am blinded!”

“Come, anyway,” insisted Douglas. He set their feet on the bridge just as the whole chasm filled with an intense and gleeful flash—the volcano sensing victory.

“Oh, no you don’t,” cried the Wizard. “I am a Pyromancer and you must serve me! Down, down and back to your place, Mountain Fire!”

He added a few choice, desperate magical words of the strongest sort he knew, and for a brief moment the fire halted and retreated into the abyss as if in startled dismay. No one told Fire what to do, and yet...

In that moment promising safety for them both, the Witch Emaldar wrenched herself free of Douglas’s grasp and dashed ahead of him onto the crumbling bridge.

Out of the Journeyman’s protecting spell, she screamed with her last breath, burst entirely into flame, and turned to black ash, which was swept away by the volcano’s blasts of burning gases into the abyss, gone forever!

Part Three

Coven Destroyed

Chapter Twenty

The Eruption of Blueye!

Myrn, moving in a cloud of steam from her own spell of protection, would have missed her way had she not heard his dismayed shout. Turning swiftly toward the sound, she dashed down the wildly tossing tunnel, calling his name aloud. She stopped only in time to avoid crashing into Douglas, who had sprung from his temporary bridge before it collapsed, its thunder drowned in the greater shriek of the mountain in agony.

“Come! I know the way,” Myrn screamed at the top of her voice, clutching Douglas’s arm.

“She’s gone! Dead!” cried Douglas into a sudden and frightening silence.

“You’re burned! You can’t do more than you have,” said Myrn, holding him tightly in her own arms, letting her protective magic flow over them both as Douglas’s spell threatened to weaken. “Let’s get out of here, Douglas!”

“Which way?” asked Douglas, regaining his common senses. “The way I came is blocked.”

“Follow me,” said Myrn firmly, pulling him along by the hand. ‘The Feather Pin will lead us out.”

Twist and turn, climb up and slide down, the pin would not let them take a wrong step. The two Wizards trotted as fast as the rolling, bucking floor allowed them to go. Behind them, the mountain renewed its self-destructive fury, but they managed to outrush the swelling inferno until, at last, they caught a breath of intensely cold outside air.

They burst from a crack in the mountain wall onto a broad, flat shoulder of rock overlooking the entire Coven Vale.

“Take a breather,” panted Douglas, either a command or a request, or both. “The Witch is burned. I tried to save her, but she ran away from me!”

“Let me take a look at your hurts,” said Myrn. But first she kissed him. Their lips were badly scorched, blistered, and in great pain, but neither minded at all.

With the Water Adept’s assistance he stripped the burned and smoldering tatters of his clothing from his shaking, pain-wracked body. The cold air of the mountaintop burned like new flame, making him cry aloud for a moment. His Wizard’s gown was a total loss, but his inner clothing was unburned and had protected his skin. It steamed with his body’s escaping moisture in the cold air.

Myrn made a rapid pass with her hands. A cool, sweet shower fell from the sky, quenching the last of the fires in their clothing and hair, moistening their lips and eyes. Douglas moaned in relief, but arched in renewed pain as his poor body realized it was terribly hurt.

“I’ve got to get us off this mountain,” cried Myrn. “Oh, if I only had one good healing spell! Can you remember one?”

Douglas, clear headed despite his burns, held up his hand. “Wait a minute. I think...”

Remembering, he reached for the sodden ruin of his gown and found what was left of the left sleeve. Fumbling within its depths, he produced a tiny swirl of green leaves.

“A four-leafed clover!” cried Myrn, clapping her hands. “How marvelous! Just what we need!”

Douglas, drained by the effort, slumped to the hard ground. The sound of his breathing grew ragged and rapid.

“Hurry, or you’ll lose him!” Myrn cried to herself.

She fell at once to massaging gently the Journeyman’s ravaged face and neck, then his arms and feet and above his heart with the tiny but powerful plant. He cried out, then groaned and tried to pull away, but Myrn held him tightly with one arm, continuing to apply the healing herb.

Finally, the young man on the ground heaved a tremulous sigh and relaxed, appearing to fall into a deep slumber, breathing steadily and easily.

Myrn then touched the clover to her own eyebrows and other crisped parts of her body, hands, ears, and ankles. She finished and looked carefully at her fiancé to see if she had missed any bums.

They were all completely healed and disappeared without scars. Douglas awakened with a start and reached out for her.

“Let me have the clover. I’ll treat you,” he said, in a strong although hoarse voice.

“I’m fine,” said Myrn, holding out her arms to show him. “You got the worst of it.”

“I’m afraid the worst is yet to come,” coughed Douglas. The mountain was now swaying like a flagpole in a hurricane, threatening to shake them off their high perch. “Let’s fly for Pfantas. We’ll be safe there.”

Myrn nodded and, taking Douglas firmly by one hand, she whispered the Feather Pin’s Power Words once more. They rocketed into the air just as the whole mountain peak beneath them gave a tremendous lurch and slid into Coven Vale, falling in slow motion to block the course of the stream above the town itself.

Above it all they then heard a high, earsplitting shriek, as if Blue Teakettle were boiling over, magnified a thousand times.

“The lake,” gasped Myrn, glancing back. “Its rim has burst!”

The boiling waters of the crater lake cascaded down the volcano’s side, exploding into live steam as it overtook streams of molten rock from side fissures.

“Come on!” shouted Douglas, tugging at her sleeve.

“But it will destroy the road below Coventown,” said Myrn. “All those people fleeing down the mountainside before it...”

She stopped still in midair, screaming a spell at the top of her voice. At first the rushing, falling, boiling waters of Blueye Lake didn’t seem to hear. Then suddenly they seemed to back up and turned in their course, flowing as swiftly to the north as it had a moment before flowed toward Coven Vale.

A great rift opened and the lake waters plunged into the new chasm. The sides of the rift directed a jet of superhot steam straight upward—a thousand feet, two thousand, a mile or more, where it cooled rapidly and began to rain down as a fine, still-warm mist, washing dust and mud before it.

Luckily, the mud flowed infinitely slower than the waters had. By the time the great avalanche had reached Coventown and its castle, the refugees had topped a far ridge and reached relative safety. Myrn’s magic had done the trick.

Douglas and Myrn watched in horrified fascination as the steaming mud flow delivered a tremendous blow to the yards-thick castle walls, and carried them away as if they were made of sand. The tallest tower toppled into the vale, the sound of its collapse lost in the overall din.

“Will it quiet down now?” asked Myrn, smiling tremulously at Douglas. “The mountain has spent its pressure for the while, I hope.”

“No way to tell. Let’s get to safety,” said Douglas. He allowed himself to be carried swiftly through the air, heading east and a bit south, toward Pfantas.

The ground below them jumped and twisted as lesser earthquakes spread from an epicenter within the mountain.

The feeling of dire tension and pressure was finally lessening and they flew on through warm rain toward the darkened horizon. At last they passed over untouched forests and sighted Pfantas’s steep cone ahead.

Douglas pointed to the hillside clearing he and the Sea Otter had selected as a campsite when they first came to Pfantas. As they touched down on the bit of smooth, green lawn he had planted—it seemed a great, long time before—there came an unimaginably loud explosion from Blueye.

Treetops above them were whipped in demonic fury by gusts of gale winds. Looking back, they saw a rocketing, spreading plume of black and red smoke, coruscated with white-hot flashes of lightning.

“She blows!” shouted Douglas above the infernal racket. He swept Myrn into his arms and they clung together, watching in awe as the cloud rose and rose, higher and higher, straight up into the clear afternoon air.

At last it slowed and began to spread westward with the high-level Sea winds from the east. In the wake of the streaming cloud, back-lit by the lowering sun in the west, torrential rain fell on the barren Emptylands beyond the Tiger’s Teeth.

“Well, it may do the least damage in that direction, I guess,” said Myrn, expertly calculating wind, altitude, and direction. “The watershed in that direction slopes toward Emptylands and the Great Steppes, according to Augurian’s old maps.”

“Always the Aquamancer,” said Douglas in mock surprise. “Water, water, everywhere!”

“As for me,” snorted the pearl fisher’s daughter, “I’ve had my fill of fire for today—and tomorrow and tomorrow, also.”

“But not of Fire Wizards,” said Douglas, “I hope.”

“Of course not!” She grinned at her betrothed.

The pair walked hand in hand to the very top of their hill to view the scene of destruction.

Where the rising badlands beyond the pine forests had been was now a vast steaming, barren, bleached plain. Of the mountain itself nothing remained but a low, smoldering, still-quivering stump. In the far distance, several other mountains spouted flames and gases, hurling vast chunks of glowing rock into the air, higher than the strongest birds could fly.

“What of the others?” asked Myrn. “Did they get out in time?”

“I don’t know,” answered her husband-to-be. “If they are far back there, there is little anyone can do for them. But if they had time...”

They flew back along the road to Coven as far as the edge of the pinelands, looking for survivors. There came at last a shout and, dipping down in that direction, they found a crowd of people, led by a tattered young man with a tall staff bearing a makeshift pennant of white and red.

“There’s Willow!” cried Myrn, “and the Coventown people, I think. If Cribblon reached Pargeot, Marbleheart, and Caspar in time, and I’m almost sure he did, they’ll be waiting for us in Pfantas!”

They hailed young Willow, who left his exhausted band of ex-slaves to rest on soft, fragrant pine needles under the restlessly tossing conifers, and came to meet them. They embraced each other and all three cried tears of relief and joy to find each other safe once more.

“I’ve no idea,” began the boy, wiping his nose on his sleeve. “I think most of ‘em left when I called to them to get out.”

“I’m sure some poor people got caught in the steam and the mud,” said Douglas, soberly. “It was so awfully quick.”

“Set your people to camp in the hills by that stream there. There’s good water in the creek and shelter under the trees. We’ll send them food and clothing from town,” said Myrn.

“If there are enough handkerchiefs among them, I can make them into tents,” said Douglas.

“And Wong Tscha San will help, I’m sure. You haven’t met him, but he is a much more powerful Wizard than are either of us, yet,” said the Apprentice Water Adept.

They said farewell to Willow and flew as swiftly as the pin could take them—which, as Finesgold had said, was really fast!—across the pinelands, over the creek with its two-plank bridge, and to the back gate of Pfantas, landing on Main Level.

Crowds of citizens who had been watching the eruption of Blueye and the destruction of Coven in mixed horror and gratification rushed to greet them and get the latest news.

At Pfantas Inn they were greeted with immense relief by Caspar, Pargeot, Marbleheart, all looking none the worse for their escape from the volcano, Cribblon and Wong.

Said he, pulling a comic face, “I stayed behind and enjoyed this pleasant village on its hill as much as the fireworks you provided. Most fitting!”

“You mustn’t believe him,” said Featherstone. “He has worked very hard to help us!”

“It was the least I could do, after the kind hospitality you have shown me,” said the Choinese gentleman. “Besides, it has been so long since I worked my little spells, I vastly enjoyed it. Mostly, we planted flower beds and arbors of new trees.”

“When the eruptions began, he told us we would have victims to feed and injured to heal, so we’ve set up hospitals and kitchens,” added Featherstone.

Pargeot greeted Myrn a bit sheepishly.

“I could think of no other way to help you than to give myself up to the Witchservers,” he confessed.

“Dear Pargeot!” Myrn laughed fondly. “Do you realize that if you had not, I might have taken two or three days to annul Emaldar’s hex? The mountain would have blown up long before I got there and hundreds would have died horribly, including Douglas, Cribblon, and Marbleheart.”