The Wizard King (49 page)

“
Crede omnino
,” she commanded, looking down on his now-puny form. “
Crede omnino quae vides, quae audis.
” Believe. Believe all that you see and hear…

The Sage dropped to his knees in terrified homage; his mind was so occupied keeping the impossible pain of the crystals at bay that he had little left with which to fight her deceptions. It was madness and death should he allow the crown’s pain to reach him; he had no strength to question what he saw—no powers of reason to doubt that this was anything other than the divine visitation it seemed. Even Archbishop Lukin, though not the target of her mind-magic, was stupefied by the spectacle before him. His eyes
spoke
what bloodless, sputtering lips could not: it was not possible to work magic in the presence of God’s holy crystals… could this somehow be
real
?

The Sage ventured a glance upward. “W-who… who are you?”

Athaya studied him silently for a moment before replying, as if needing to translate his clumsy human speech into a more celestial form. “I am a servant of God. Not His greatest,” she added, darkly wry. “None among my kind would dare dub ourselves so.”

Athaya no longer had to consciously pour power into the spell; the crown took more than she could ever willingly give. Already it was feasting on her, using her magic—and her life—to sustain the fabric of her spell. And how could she prevent it? Resistance was as unthinkable as it was unattainable. She felt the forces of the tides move within her veins; felt the gusts of a stormswept ocean rage inside her lungs—powers too vast for her flesh to repel. All she could do was submit to their awesome beauty and let herself be borne away on a raging river that she could not even begin to comprehend or control and savor this tempting measure of true angelic might.

“Why have you come?” the Sage asked. He began to rise, but Athaya gestured sharply for him to remain on his knees. Her fingers were as long as tapers, candlelight gently streaming from each tip.

“I come to remind you of your place. You dare to take that which it was never meant for you to have. You are not worthy to be ruler of this or any land!” Athaya tossed her head in rebuke, masses of golden hair sluggishly tracing the motion as if slowed by water. “Your ambitions shame He who made you.”

The Sage recoiled as if he had been struck. “No, no… you do not understand! It was my destiny. Dameronne—”

“Foresaw an age of a great wizard king. Nothing more. He did not speak your name, though you act to all the world as if he had.” Athaya glared at him with pewter-colored eyes. “Are you so certain of your worthiness?”

“I—” The Sage shuddered violently; unlike her, he still waged constant war against the crown. But while he was able to block out much of the pain, his resistance was fast growing threadbare; tendrils of the crown’s painful influences seeped past his guards to poison his mind. His eyes went glassy as he tried even harder to oppose them, but the tighter he clung to his sanity the more deeply he was mired in her bindings.

Crede omnino.
Believe that all is as it seems…

“I seek only to establish His kingdom here,” he said, turning his palms upward in supplication.

“Your desires have ever been for your own selfish purposes—not His. Never has it been His will for any of His children to use their gifts to dominate others.”

The Sage balled his hands into tight fists. “No, that cannot be! You lie!”

“
LIE?
Impudence!” she shouted, beating her wings with magnificent force. “I cannot lie. It is not my nature.” She moved closer to him, shedding radiance with every step. “You dare to reveal His secrets by seeking out who amongst you are Lorngeld before their time; and you further plot to mold my Master’s will to your own purposes and scatter seeds where you choose instead of where He has planted them. Do you seek to be a godling? Do you presume yourself God’s
peer
? Your judgment will be harsh, indeed,” she warned with narrowed eyes, “unless you prove your worth.”

“Prove…? But I have already—” The Sage shook his head in wild denial. “No, no… I cannot be so wrong! Let me see Him. Let me—”

“
See
Him?” Athaya’s illusory body rippled with silent laughter. “No one sees Him until their life is done and they come before Him to be judged. Until that time you must be satisfied dealing with me.”

The Sage’s brows wrinkled inward; he was dissatisfied with her answer. “What do you want of me?”

Athaya struggled to hold back a tideswell of exhaustion; the spell was draining her badly. Her limbs felt taut as bowstrings stretched to impossible new lengths; her heart fluttered wildly; her knees began to quiver, threatening to buckle under her. But a few more minutes was all she required… a few minutes in which to entrap him utterly.

“I offer you one chance to prove that you are indeed as worthy as you claim.” She slowly extended a finger to point to the glowing crown in Lukin’s trembling hands. “These are truly God’s crystals, little Sage—in that alone, the archbishop is indeed correct. But my Master has not shared with you the full extent of their secrets, and only His most favored can discern it.”

“Then
I
shall be able to do so.” The Sage’s mouth formed a stubborn line of resolve. “What must I do?”

“Merge with them,” she said simply. “There is peace amid their pain. You think the gems an enemy, but they are also a hidden ally. They are a source of great power; far greater than any you have ever known—far greater than the paltry tricks the sealing spell has granted you.” As she expected, the Sage’s eyes flashed greedily at that. “If you can discover the key to that power, then I will relent; I will accede you the homage that you seek. You will become king of Caithe and the most powerful magician in all the world, and you will have my blessings on you always.”

“But… the corbals are deadly. They bring agony and madness—”

Athaya shrugged gracefully. “So did your
mekahn
,” she reminded him. “And yet that you survived. This is but another time of trial.” Her eyes took on a subtly mocking cast. “Will you brave it, then? Or will you forfeit the Challenge?”

Athaya waited while the Sage mulled his answer. In his frazzled state of mind, she sincerely doubted the Sage’s ability to scry the secret of the corbal’s heart. The crown pressed down upon him cruelly; it was only a matter of time before his shield collapsed beneath its weight and, like Father Aldus, he would be so tortured by the crown’s terrible pain that he would take his own life to escape it. It would save Athaya the grisly task of taking that life herself.

And if, by some chance, he won? If he learned to do as she had done? Then he would grasp at what was offered him like a greedy child snatching at a sweet, and send his adept powers spiraling through the corbals, working great magic in a glorious and unwitting suicide. Either way, he would be dead. Athaya only hoped that she would live long enough to see it and know her work was done.

“You wanted a crown so badly,” she told him, when he still did not answer, “and here is one before you. Take it. But take all of it, in all its many aspects. A crown is more than a mere emblem of power and wealth; it demands responsibility and risk… and death, if need be,” she added with a meaningful glance to Durek’s lifeless form. “If you cannot embrace it utterly, in all its many facets, then you are unworthy to hold it.”

But the Sage was no longer listening; no longer in such awe of her. His reverence had changed to dark suspicion, and he leapt to his feet and jabbed an accusing finger at her, defiant to the last. “No! I shall not meet your challenge. It is a trick, do you hear? A
trick
! You tell me there is power in that crown, but you only wish me to lower my defenses and walk blindly to my death! You are jealous of me!
Jealous!
I am destined to sit at God’s right hand and you come to me with lies, bidding me to turn back at the brink of my greatest success—God’s greatest victory upon this earth!”

Athaya drew back, mighty wings flinching inward in genuine astonishment.
Truly, your Grace, you bring new meaning to pride and vanity. If God Himself denies you, will you still mewl like a spoiled child, demanding to see
His
superior?

By now the crown was glowing like a harvest moon in the archbishop’s hands, and only then did Lukin’s muddled senses piece together what was happening—that his precious weapon, meant to kill, was somehow the cause of all this pageantry; the locus of Athaya’s power. As if it carried pestilence, he hastily dropped the crown into the strongbox and slammed the lid closed, locking it in impotent darkness.

The psychic shock ripped through Athaya like a severed limb. The delirious intoxication of power surging in her veins was gone in an instant, leaving an empty husk of flesh. The swift descent from one extreme to the other rendered her mute and paralyzed, as if the rhythmic pulses of love had suddenly been twisted into agonizing convulsions of death. Without the crown, her creation shattered like stained glass in an explosion of sharp and blinding color—a little death that returned her to human form. Her wings dropped away like autumn leaves; her flesh lost its lustrous glow; her gown turned once again to simple wool; her hair was once more night instead of day.

The spell was broken, but the Sage was beyond comprehension now, his mind irreversibly contaminated by both Athaya’s magic and the residue of the crown. “Are you afraid of me, then?” he shrieked, ignoring Athaya’s battered mortal presence and whirling around like a madman in the dark for signs of the now-vanished archangel. “Have you gone back to carry false tales of me to God?” He shook a fist at the sky, damning it and all that it contained. “You all conspire against me! I will speak to Him without your aid. I need no intercessors! He will see
me
!”

Clutching the strongbox by a leather strap, Lukin bolted toward the arena’s edge and freedom, but the Sage snatched his arm with unholy strength and held him back. “Give me the crown! I
will
see Him… and this crown shall be my gift to Him. And if the crystals do have secrets, then He will tell me what they are!”

Lukin’s face was waxen and his lips convulsed several times before any sound came out of them. “See Him? A gift? What are you—”

“Give it to me!”
The Sage clamped a fist over one of the leather straps and wrenched the strongbox from the archbishop’s arms.

“No! The crown is priceless! It’s Caithe’s only hope against—”

Heedless of Lukin’s protests, the Sage threw his head back and shouted at the heavens, a herald proudly announcing his own arrival.
“HINC LIBERA ME!”

But Lukin was unwilling to give up his prize so easily; he made one last leap at the strongbox—and his body touched the Sage’s own the instant the spell was cast. Their forms began to shimmer in unison, ebbing from the world like morning mist.
Translocation
, Athaya breathed in wonder. But this time the Sage intended not merely to pass through the between-place; what he had once called heaven. This time it was his destination—a destination from which his human form could never return.

The Sage was badly weakened by his battle against the crown and the spell was poorly cast. Time and again, he and Archbishop Lukin drifted in and out of the world like the moon slipping out from behind one cloud only to be quickly obscured by another. Lukin’s face was frozen in a mindless scream of terror, while beside him, the Sage’s eyes gleamed with reckless expectation, certain of the reward and vindication that would surely be his.

After several uncertain seconds, the Sage and his captive vanished completely, and from somewhere very close, Athaya heard Lukin’s wails of terror echo in her ears like a half-remembered nightmare. He gained no more respite from his pain than he had granted to any of the Tribunal’s prisoners; his wails transformed to tormented shrieks as his flesh was rent from him piece by piece, leaving nothing but the soul behind—if, Athaya mused, he had one. Would that soul be permitted to stay? she wondered. Or would it be cast down into a realm far less forgiving, reserved for those who had done great evil in the world?

Then she heard the Sage’s voice as well, more distant than Lukin’s but no less anguished. But the voice was swiftly gone, spiraling into nothingness beyond human pain, and silence once more settled over the arena. Whatever they endured was over now. And where there had been two heartbeats sustaining the blood-wards, there now remained only one.

With the Sage dead to this world, the blood-wards began to dissolve, melting like wax in summer heat and leaving pools of sticky whiteness on the ground. Through Athaya’s black-edged vision came a badly blurred image of hundreds of bodies lying prone upon the cobblestones, some still writhing in the last paroxysms of death. Couric’s form she recognized, now staring sightlessly up to God; and another—was it Nicolas?—stood near him, with someone just behind, watching in fearful expectation. And around them was a city in chaos, as fires and sickness and madness raged, the work of those struck down by the crown who had not yet been granted the mercy of death.

Athaya dropped to one knee, no more than a bruised and bloodied woman in a tattered dress, her heart straining to keep its rhythm—pitiable, she thought, compared to what she had been only moments before.

Though she knew the sun shone bright above her, twilight soon descended on her vision. Her body was ready to collapse from the strain it had suffered—the weariness of translocation multiplied a hundredfold—and ached for endless sleep. She felt no pain; only a mellow and hazy fading away, like death from cold, too far gone to be afraid of the shadows overtaking her. Tired… so tired. She felt plunged into a sea of lukewarm water fully garbed in wool, the fabric’s sodden weight slowly dragging her down into the cold and murky depths.

I have done my duty, as I once pledged to do. Please
, she implored, to whatever Power held sway over the fates of men.
Please, let it be enough.

Just one thing more remained to be said; one thing more, before she could rest. And with the arena now dissolved, those still able paused to hear the words of the victor.