Wizard at Large (36 page)

“Play-King!” she whispered with a hiss. With her free hand, she pulled the stopper on the bottle. The Darkling crept forth, wizened spider's body dark, sticklike, and covered with hair. Red eyes gleamed and fingers curled on the bottle's
edgQ.
“See, precious one?” the witch asked softly and pointed. “See what comes to amuse us?”

Neither Ben nor Questor moved. They became statues, waiting to see what would happen next. The Darkling crept about the lip of its bottle like an anxious cat, searching here and there, whispering and hissing words that no one but the witch could hear. “Yes, yes,”she soothed, over and over, bent down now. “Yes, little demon, they are the ones!”

Finally, she looked up again. Her free hand slipped the stopper into her robes, and her fingers stroked the fawning demon. “Come play with us, High Lord and Court Wizard!” she called over. “Come play! We have games for you! Such games! Come closer!”

Ben and Questor held their ground. “Give us the bottle, Nightshade,”ordered Ben quietly. “It doesn't belong to you.”

“Anything I wish belongs to me!” Nightshade screeched.

“Not the bottle.”

“Especially the bottle!”

“I will bring the Paladin, if I must,”Ben threatened, his voice still quiet.

“Bring whomever you like.”Nightshade's smile was slow and wicked. Then she whispered, “Play-King, you are such a fool!”

The Darkling shrieked suddenly, leaped upward, and thrust its tiny crooked fingers toward them. Fire and shards of iron flew at them with the blink of an eye, slicing through the hazy afternoon air. But Questor's magic was
already in place, and the fire and shards of iron passed harmlessly by. Ben's hand was about the medallion, his fingers closed upon its metal surface, the heat beginning to surge through him. Light flared less than a dozen yards off, and the Paladin appeared, white knight on white charger, a ghost come out of time. Fire burned in the medallion, then surged outward through mist and gray to where the ghost took form. Ben felt himself ride the light, borne on its stinging brightness as if a mote of dust, carried from his body as if weightless. Then he was inside the iron shell, and the transformation had begun. A second more and it was completed. Iron plates closed about, clasps, straps, and buckles tightened, and the harness latched in place. Ben Holiday's memories faded and were replaced by those of the Paladin—memories of countless battles fought and won, of struggles unimaginable, of blood and iron, of screams and cries, and of the testing of courage and strength-of-arms on distant fields of combat. There was that strange mix of exhilaration and horror—the Paladin's sharpened expectation of another fight, Ben Holiday's repulsion at the thought of killing.

Then there was only the feel of iron and leather, muscle and bone, the horse beneath, and the weapons strapped close—the Paladin's body and soul.

The King's champion surged toward Nightshade and the Darkling.

The lance of white oak dropped into place.

But the witch and the demon were already fusing hatred and dark magic to produce something they believed not even the Paladin could withstand. It climbed out of the hollows behind them, born of green fire and steam, clawing free of the mists and the haze, a huge, lumbering thing as white as the Paladin himself.

It was a second Paladin—of sorts.

From behind the shield of his magic, Questor Thews blinked and stared. He had never seen anything quite like
this monster. It was a perversion—a joining of what appeared to be a huge, squat, lizardlike creature and an armored rider twice the size of the knight-errant, all twisted and sprouting weapons of bone and iron. It was as if some impossibly warped mirror had produced a distorted image of the Paladin, as if that image had been reflected in the most loathsome way possible and given life.

The monstrous creature—a single being—wheeled from the hollows* rim and lumbered to meet the charge of the Paladin.

They came together with a thunderclap of sound, white oak and bone shattering, iron scraping and clanging, beasts grunting and shrieking their pain and anger. They slid off each other and passed by, dust and debris flying. Back around came the Paladin, discarding the remains of his lance, reaching down for the battle axe. The creature of the witch and demon slowed, turned, and seemed to swell in size, growing as if fed by the force of the conflict, lifting until it towered over everything.

All eyes were fixed at that moment on the creature.

Questor Thews made a slight motion with his hands. He seemed to shimmer, disappear, then reappear looking vaguely translucent. No one noticed.

The Paladin attacked, battle axe swinging. Nightshade and the Darkling fed their combined magics into their creation, shrieking with delight as it swelled even further, then lifted on its hindlegs and waited. It was as big as a house now, a mass of sluglike flesh. The Paladin rushed it, and the creature surged forward, trying to crush its attacker. The earth shook with the force of its weight as it struck. The Paladin just managed to slip past, the battle axe ripping along the beast's thick hide. But the wound closed over almost at once. Magic gave the creature life, and magic was not subject to the laws of man and nature.

Back came the Paladin, broadsword drawn now, the gleaming blade cutting and hacking with tremendous fury.
carving lines of red along the length of the beast. But the wounds closed as quickly as they were made, and the creature kept lunging for the knight, waiting for its chance. Nightshade and the Darkling urged the monster on. The witch's face was rapt with pleasure. The demon's tiny body was stretched taut. Magic surged from both of them, feeding their creature, keeping it strong. They could see that the beast's lunges were getting closer now to the attacking knight. It would not be long now, they knew.

From within the cover of the decimated Bonnie Blues, Abernathy and Willow watched silently. They, too, could see how this fight was going and could tell how it was going to end.

Then something strange happened.

The creature suddenly lurched upward and began to shrink.

It shuddered as if stricken with a poison. The Darkling saw it first. The demon shrieked with anger and disbelief, raced down Nightshade's black robes, and thrust its spider arms out to feed its pet more magic. But the creature failed to respond. It continued to shrink, flinching back now from the blows of the broadsword struck by the Paladin, stumbling and tottering away as it felt its life drain from it.

Nightshade saw it now, too, screamed in fury, then made her own determination of the cause and wheeled suddenly on Questor Thews. Fire as dark as pitch flew from her outstretched hands and enveloped the wizard. Questor Thews erupted in a pillar of smoke and ash. Willow and Abernathy gasped in horror. The wizard had disappeared completely.

But the creature was still shrinking. And now something was happening to the Darkling as well. It was doubled over, writhing on the ground at Nightshade's feet, twisting as if the same poison that had infected its creature had infected it as well. It was shrieking something at Nightshade, who bent quickly to listen.

“The bottle, mistress!” it was saying. “The bottle has been sealed! I cannot find the magic! I cannot live!”

Nightshade still had the bottle in one hand. She stared at it uncomprehendingly, finding it unchanged, undamaged, the stopper pulled, the neck open. What was the demon screaming about? She was mystified.

A short distance away, the creature of the witch and demon's magic had breathed its last, crumbling completely into dust. The Paladin ground it beneath his charger's hooves and wheeled about once more. Nightshade looked up from the bottle in confusion. The Paladin was coming now at her.

Only then did she think to reach down to test the bottle's opening. Blue wizard fire sparked and bit at her, and she jerked her fingers back.
“Questor Thews!”
Willow heard her shriek in fury. The Darkling was barely moving, clinging to one sleeve. The witch snarled, clasped the bottle by its throat, and prepared to send her own magic surging into its blocked opening.

She was too late.

The Paladin was almost on top of her.

Then Questor Thews seemed to explode out of nowhere right in front of the witch, seizing the bottle before she could think to react, snatching it quickly away. Nightshade shrieked once and lunged for the wizard just as the Paladin reached her.

Fire seemed to erupt from everywhere at the point of impact.

No longer within the concealment of the Bonnie Blues, but running to reach Questor Thews and Ben, Willow and Abernathy drew up short, wincing from the sound and the heat. Fire flared, seemingly of all colors and shapes, exploding into the mist and gray like a geyser out of the earth.

Then the debris settled, and Nightshade and the Paladin
were gone. Questor Thews was on his knees, both hands clutched tightly over the top of the bottle, watching stone-faced as the Darkling writhed on the scorched earth and turned to lifeless dust.

Ben Holiday returned to himself, lightheaded and dazed, with the medallion still warm against his chest. He started to sway and topple over, but then Willow was there, holding him upright, and Abernathy was beside her, and he managed to smile and say, “It's okay now. It's over.”

The four friends sat quietly at the site of battle and talked about what had happened.

Nightshade was gone. Whether she had been destroyed by the Paladin or escaped to trouble them another day, none of them knew. They could recall the moment of impact—a flare of light and a glimpse of the witch's face. That was all. They were not willing to bet that they had seen the last of her.

Strabo was gone, too. He had lifted into the sky almost immediately at the battle's conclusion, winging his way east without a backward glance. They could only imagine his thoughts. They were certain they had not seen the last of the dragon.

The Darkling, they hoped, was gone for good.

So, with any immediate danger dispelled, Ben was able —with occasional interjections from Questor—to explain to Willow and Abernathy how the puzzle of the Darkling had been solved.

“The secret was the bottle,”Ben said. “The Darkling lived in the bottle and never left it completely for long, even when freed from it, so there had to be some logical tie between them. Otherwise, the demon, who was always so anxious to be let out, would have simply abandoned its prison and gone its way. I thought, what if it can't leave the bottle? What if that's where it gets its power? What if the
magic comes from the bottle, not the demon, and the demon stays with the bottle because it has to, if it wants to continue to use the magic? The more I thought about it, the more sense it made.”

“So the High Lord suggested to me,”Questor broke in eagerly, “that if the magic came from the bottle, then shutting off the bottle would cut off the Darkling's power.”

“The trick was in doing that without letting Nightshade know what was happening—and then getting the bottle back before she could do anything about it.”Ben regained control of his explanation. “So while the Paladin was engaged in battle with the Darkling and Nightshade, Questor used the magic to shrink himself down and slip over to hide in the bottle's neck. He became its stopper. He left an image of himself so that Nightshade wouldn't know what he was up to. What Nightshade ended up destroying, when she guessed that Questor was behind the loss of magic, was just the image.”

“You might have alerted us to that much, at least!” Abernathy interrupted heatedly. “You scared us to death with that trick! We thought the old… Well, we thought he had been fried!”

“Questor sealed off the bottle,”Ben continued, ignoring his scribe's outburst. “That shut off the source of the Dark-ling's power and rendered Nightshade's own magic, which was focused on the bottle's, useless. It all worked exactly the way we had thought. By the time Nightshade figured out what had happened, it was too late. The creature was done, the demon was too weak to help, and the Paladin was bearing down. Questor surprised Nightshade by jumping out at her the way he did, full-size again, and snatching back the bottle. She couldn't do anything.”

“What we hadn't anticipated, of course, was the extent of the effect that sealing off the bottle would have on the Darkling,”Questor cut in again. “The demon drew not
only its magic from the bottle, but its life as well. Once it was shut outside, it could not survive.”

The four glanced as one at the small pile of dust some dozen feet away. A fresh breeze had come up. Already, the flakes were beginning to scatter.

It was Monday morning in Seattle, nearing noon. Miles Bennett sat in one of the waiting areas of the United Airlines Annex at SeaTac Airport waiting for the arrival of Flight 159 out of Chicago O'Hare. Elizabeth's father would be on that flight. It had taken Miles most of the weekend to track him down and arrange for his return. When he landed, they would drive out to Graum Wythe and begin making the necessary arrangements to dispose of Michel Ard Rhi's estate.

Miles stared out the Annex windows momentarily into the gray, overcast day. It was funny how things worked out.