Sagaria (83 page)

He raised his hand, the same hand that had hurled the lethal thunderbolt at Samzing.

“
Zorax lit
—” he began.

Something small and reddish-brown snaked from Sagandran’s pocket. Moving too swiftly to be seen as more than a blur, it sped across the floor and climbed the robes of the Shadow Master.

“Flip!” said Sagandran under his breath.

The rodent streaked along Arkanamon’s outstretched arm and, pausing for just an instant, he sank his teeth deep into the wrist of the sorcerer of darkness.

The Shadow Master let out a yell of astonishment and fury, and tried to shake his small attacker free.

At once, the spell that had been binding Perima dissolved. Looking bemused, she took a couple of steps before realizing that time had passed without her.

Sagandran chose the moment to pick up Xaraxeer. The blade of the mighty sword was still no more than a lackluster slice of dead metal.
But,
he reflected,
its edge is as sharp as a razor. Is Arkanamon truly immune to
mundane 
weapons? If he’s struck, can he feel no pain? Sustain no injury? Even Flip’s teeth are drawing blood.

The Shadow Master gave a last convulsive jerk of his arm, finally loosening himself from Flip’s savage bite. The small brown form flew in a rapid arc across the room and smacked with a terrible wet noise against the marble wall, then slid sickeningly to the floor.

Sagandran’s grief almost blinded him.
No way can the little guy have survived that! Now I’ve lost not just one best friend, but three.

“You bastard!” he yelled at the Shadow Master.

Arkanamon’s fury as he clutched his bleeding hand was now so strong that Sagandran felt it as a solid force.

“Enough!” bellowed the Shadow Master. “I have let this futile charade go on long enough.”

Sagandran whipped the blade of Xaraxeer through the air, then began to advance upon the tall, black-robed figure of their tormentor.

“Stand back, accursed boy!”

Sagandran blenched but kept moving forward. “Make me.”

“Death shall make you.”

The Shadow Master’s lips were moving once more in the ancient unhallowed tongue of the shadow sorcery.

This is it,
thought Sagandran.
This has got to be it. We’ve taken away all the reasons he might have had for sparing us, and I’ve driven him into a rage that’s beyond madness. Mom, Dad, Grandpa – I wanted so much to see you all again! Even Jennifer. Sir Tombin, Samzing, Perima, Flip, Memo, Cheireanna – doomed because of me! What have I done? Why was I chosen? Why did it have to be me?

A clear, cool voice spoke inside his mind.
Because, Sagandran, you are The Boy Whose Time Has Come.

Queen Mirabella! How could she be here?

Whatever you do, Sagandran, do not abandon your hope, your faith in the benevolence of fortune. The prophecies say that if you have come this far, you should be able to persevere until you prevail over the Master of Shadows. Trust in the power of the stories about you that have already been written, and your feet will be guided in their proper course.

All very well for Queen Mirabella to say, but she wasn’t facing the most powerful sorcerer in the three worlds. Sagandran prepared to face death. Yet he didn’t. A small part of him was repeating, over and over again, a few of the words Queen Mirabella had spoken. “
Do not abandon your hope. Do not abandon your hope. Do not abandon your hope. Do not abandon your hope.
” He was still alive. The least he could do was refuse to relinquish himself to the arms of death
without struggling to the very last. While it seemed that all was lost, there was still a chance.

“Arkanamon!” cried a voice that Sagandran had thought he would never hear again. “Arkanamon, have you forgotten so much?”

The Shadow Master turned his head incredulously. “Samzing,” he hissed.

“None other.” The wizard spoke with a mild disdain. He was standing by the balustrade, the scorch mark on the chest of his robe still smoking. Yet this wasn’t the Samzing whom Sagandran had come to love. He seemed larger, taller, more erect. His voice was that of a robust man in his prime. His beard was still gray, his hair likewise, and his eyes shone with a bright white flame.

“But how—” began the Shadow Master.

“You – yes you, Arkanamon – have cured me of my age, of the mental frailty that has incapacitated me since I fell to your treacherous blow. Don’t you remember what was foretold, back in Qarnapheeran when we were both young?”

The Shadow Master looked uncomprehending.

Memories came flooding back to Sagandran: standing in the council room of the Elemental Orders back in Qarnapheeran, and Perima questioning Renada and Fariam as to whether Samzing would ever recover the full strength of his powers, which were lost to him when Arkanamon had dealt him that near-fatal blow.

Fariam had said, “There’s a cure in theory, but in practice, no, there isn’t.”

Renada had continued, “The only cure would be for Samzing to be subjected to the same spell again.”

Perima had pressed the point, “You mean, be smitten by another thunderbolt?”

“If he could survive the blast,” Renada had answered, “then he’d be cured. But, of course, he couldn’t survive the blast.”

Except that Samzing
had
somehow miraculously survived the blast. Just as Renada had predicted, the trauma of the thunderbolt had opened up all the old connections in his mind. Sagandran wondered if Arkanamon realized just quite how formidable a foe his adversary had now become.

Evidently not.

“You’re tougher than I thought,” snarled the Shadow Master, “like a scrawny old game hen that should have been slaughtered long before. But the butcher’s block cannot be avoided for long.”

He spun his hand in a pattern that seemed to be only partly within this plane of reality and a ball of scorpions appeared, hovering in the air. Their tails flicked faster than the eye could see, and the creatures breathed white-hot
flames. With an almost languorous twitch of his wrist, the Shadow Master sent the knot of venomous predators streaking toward the other wizard. Less than half a yard from Samzing’s unperturbed face it halted, the hissing of the frustrated creatures swelling until it became almost deafening.

Then, slowly, it began to inch back toward the Shadow Master.

Eyes widening in consternation, Arkanamon moved his hand again, this time conjuring up a flight of wickedly barbed arrows carved out of glistening ice. Poison dripped from their tips. They shot toward Samzing but, like the tangle of scorpions, never reached their target. Instead, they melted in an instant and flew over the edge of the balcony to fall as poisonous rain on the ground below.

Arkanamon was in a frenzy of ire. His eyes were incandescent with hatred as the ball of scorpions slowly neared his chest. Sagandran watched as the beasts turned their attentions to this new potential prey: the Shadow Master who’d created them.

With a scream of thwarted wrath, Arkanamon tried to conjure up a spell that would uncreate them. Sagandran could almost see the rules of Shadow World magic resisting the sorcerer’s efforts. In this realm, only malevolent magic had power.

“This – shall – not – be!” roared the necromancer, realizing the futility of his strivings to unmake the predators and trying to duck and weave out of their way. “This – shall – not – be!”

Again his hands were in rapid motion. A thicket of dagger-sharp thorns sprang up around him, restricting his movements but also shielding him from the sting-tipped tails of the scorpions long enough to fashion another spell.

Out of the murky sky behind Samzing came a dragon, vast and red-scaled, its wings covered in claws, its feet tipped with ferociously long curved talons, its mouth an insanity of needled teeth. The dragon blasted a ball of turbulent flame at Samzing’s back, but the wizard didn’t even deign to turn. The fire could come no nearer to him than a couple of inches, bathing him in an aura of magnificence that served only to make him seem even more imposing. Twenty yards out from the edge of the balcony, the dragon’s wingbeat suddenly became uncoordinated and the beast collapsed in upon itself, fluttering like a broken umbrella as it pirouetted out of sight toward the ground.

“Sagandran,” called Samzing, his voice almost drowned out by the rumbling as the pillars and walls of the great room shook. Cracks were appearing across the black marble of the walls and diagonally up the shafts of the pillars. The two halves of one of the columns shifted along the fault line and then it disintegrated with a mighty, clamorous crash that seemed to shake the entire Palace of Shadows to its foundations.

“Sagandran,” the wizard repeated. “I’m holding him. Now’s your chance. Seize the crystals!”

The two crystals.

The two crystals that were on Arkanamon’s leaden crown.

And Arkanamon’s leaden crown was on Arkanamon’s head.

Sagandran paused. He couldn’t believe what he was about to do. If he thought about this for more than a split second, he’d end up not doing it.

Go, Sagandran! Go!

Was that Queen Mirabella’s voice in his mind, or his own?

Neither. It was Perima screaming in his ear.

For the past three seasons, his soccer coach had been trying to teach Sagandran how to swoop in, intercept the ball and, in the same movement pass it on to one of the attacking forwards. In the end, the coach had more or less given up. Sagandran either stumbled in his run, misjudged the pace of the ball or, on one famous occasion, tripped over his improperly tied bootlaces.

This time, here in the Palace of Shadows, he got it right.

If only his soccer coach could have seen it.

Instead of their characteristic jerking lope, his legs took him in a fluid, curving sprint across the floor to where the Shadow Master stood in intense conflict with Samzing. Without hesitation, his arm snaked out and plucked the crown from the necromancer’s head so lightly and gracefully that the Shadow Master might not have noticed its departure, even had his mind not been so totally consumed by his sorcerous duel.

Then Sagandran was on the far side of the chamber. He was not entirely certain how he’d got there, but he was convinced that his limbs had performed a miracle of an infinitely higher magical order than anything the two battling wizards could ever hope to achieve. But he couldn’t stay here. At any moment, Arkanamon might break free of the cage of spells that Samzing had conjured and send a bolt of death Sagandran’s way. Sagandran had to stay in motion and to present as hard a target as he could.

The chamber door flew open and a dozen or more Shadow Knights tumbled in, attracted by the thunderous commotion. Tomaq was at their head, gripping the shaft of a gigantic spiked mace.

Behind them, impossibly, was Sir Tombin. Beside the Frogly Knight, Cheireanna grinned.

Sagandran felt faint for a moment. Sir Tombin was dead. Samzing had said so and Samzing never lied. The last time Sagandran had seen Sir Tombin, the Frogly Knight had been possessed by a desperate final stillness.

This could not be.

And yet it was.

The Frogly Knight twirled a stolen Shadow Knight sword through the air in front of him so that the blade sang. His grin was nearly as broad as Cheireanna’s.

“These swine are mine.”

“I think I’ll explain a little later,” he added in answer to Sagandran’s gape of incredulity. “It seems that I have to engage in old-fashioned hand-to-hand combat against these miscreants,” he said, raising his gloved fist in a fast sideward and backward motion that caught an advancing Shadow Knight right in the face.

“Suffice to say that—pardon me for a moment.” He swiftly snatched Xaraxeer from Sagandran and struck out with the sword, which plunged into the chest of a Shadow Knight, all the while aiming a forceful kick at the face of another. “Suffice to say, you should’ve given a little more credit to young Cheireanna here. She found the ancient healing fountain of Tamshado, and thanks to her, I’m alive. I was given a second chance. But now you really have to excuse me.”

The Frogly Knight twirled Xaraxeer through the air in front of him so that the blade sang, and he grinned. “These swine are mine,” he repeated.

As Sir Tombin advanced, Tomaq seemed to want to retreat, but the cram of men behind him held him in place.

“Take Perima with you, Sagandran,” barked the Frogly Knight. “I can hold off these goons for as long as need be, but you must go now.”

Sagandran looked desperately at the chamber’s doorway. No escape there. It was blocked by the armored men. The only other way out of the great hall was the opening onto the balcony. But below the balcony there was a sheer drop all the way to the ground far below.

“How?” he yelled.

Already Xaraxeer had lashed out, cruelly tearing Tomaq’s throat apart. The big lieutenant went smashing to the ground, the countless sharp protrusions on his armor starring the marble floor over and over again as he writhed in his final agony.

Hooking the heavy crown over his forearm, he ran back toward Perima. He turned to gaze hopelessly at the doorway. Sir Tombin had felled another Shadow Knight, but more of the armored warriors were arriving. Samzing and the Shadow Master appeared to be lost in some kind of magical stasis that was devouring all of their energies.

There was a
whoosh
of air from behind Sagandran and the regular beat of wings.
Oh no, that damned dragon is back.
He spun round.

Outside the balcony window, its wings rising and falling regularly as it hovered, was a creature he recognized, yet didn’t recognize.

Perima had no such doubts.

“Snowmane!”

Yes, Snowmane. But a new Snowmane, one that looked more like the Pegasus of Greek myth.

Sagandran glanced back at the fray. Cheireanna had scooped up the great mace that had fallen from Tomaq’s gloved hand as the Shadow Knight sprawled to his death, and was now wielding it with professional zeal. As she drove the massive spiked ball into a Shadow Knight’s chest, crumpling his breastplate and the bones beneath, she turned to give Perima and Sagandran a leer of demented glee.