“Collapsed?” said Bannity. “How? I thought you were in some mountain cavern.”
“We were,” Feliks agreed. “I still am not certain how it happened — it was like being chewed in a giant’s mouth, chewed and chewed and then spit out. When I woke up, we both lay on the slope beneath the entrance to the lair, which was choked with fallen rock. Elizar was as you see him now, crushed and silent, his head all bloody, poor fellow. The Amulet was gone. Everything was gone. I helped him up and we stumbled and crawled down the hill to a cotsman’s deserted shack — the owner had fled when the mountain began to shake. I shaved my master’s head and doctored his wounds. We ate what supplies the cotsman had laid in, but when we ran out, we had no choice but to become wandering beggars.” The small, wrinkled man spread his hands. “I can do no magic, you see.”
“Was the boy in the village, the one Elizar sent to Eader’s Church, the first to be…touched?”
Feliks shook his head. “My master took a few people’s hands, mostly folk who gave generously to our begging bowl, and sometimes things happened. None were harmed, all profited,” he added, a little defensively.
“And you,” Dondolan demanded. “You must have touched his hands many times since this occurred. What of you?”
“What could happen? I already have my heart’s desire. All I have ever wanted was to serve him. From the first moment I saw him outside the Academy, I knew that he was my destiny, for good or bad.”
Dondolan sighed. “For bad, certainly, at least until now. You are not a true villain, Feliks, but you have served an evil man.”
“All great men are thought evil by some.”
“Not all great men graft the heads of wild boars onto the shoulders of peasant farmers,” Dondolan pointed out. “Not all great men wear the skins of other wizards for a cloak.”
“He killed only those who turned against him,” said Feliks stubbornly. “Only those who would have killed him.”
Dondolan stared at him for a moment. “It matters little now,” he said at last. “As I said, Kettil will have heard by now, and guessed who is here. The archmage will come, and things will change.”
“Then we must go,” said Feliks, rising to his feet with a weary grunt. “We will move on. There are still places we can live in quiet peace, if I only help my poor master to keep his hands to himself.”
“I dare not try to stop you,” Dondolan said. “I fear to wake your master if he really sleeps inside that battered skull — I admit I was never his match. But even if you flee, you will not outrun Kettil’s power.”
It does not matter. What will be, will be, Bannity thought to himself, but a little of his newfound peace had gone with Eli’s unmasking. Whether Elizar is a man transformed or a villain disguised, surely what happens next will be as God wills, too. For who can doubt His hand when He has shown us so many miracles here?
But Eli would not leave the wood, despite Feliks’ urging. The mute man was as resistant as a boulder set deep in mud: none of his servant’s pleas or arguments touched him — in fact, he showed no sign of even hearing them.
Dondolan and Bannity, armed with the knowledge of the miracle worker’s true identity convinced the suddenly terrified village elders that for a while at least, the crowds should be kept away. With a contingent of solders from the nearest shirepost, hired with a fraction of the profits from the long miracle-season, they cleared the forest of all the supplicants, forcing them out into the town and surrounding fields, where local sellers of charms and potions gleefully provided them with substitute satisfaction, or at least the promise of it.
Even as the last of the camps were emptied, some of the latest arrivals from beyond the village brought news that Kettil Hawkface himself was on the way. Some had seen nothing more than a great storm swirling around Thunder Crag while the sky elsewhere was blue and bright, but others claimed to have seen the arch-mage himself speeding down the mountain on a huge white horse, shining as he came like a bolt of lightning. In any case, those who had been turned away from Squire’s Wood now had something else to anticipate, and the great road that passed by the nameless village was soon lined with those waiting to see the most famous, most celebrated wizard of all.
Father Bannity could not help wondering whether Elizar sensed anything of his great rival’s coming, and so he walked into Squire’s Wood and across the trampled site of the camp, empty now but for a couple of hired soldiers standing guard.
Inside the tent wrinkled little Feliks looked up from eating a bowl of stew and waved to Bannity as if they were old friends, but Elizar was as empty-faced as ever, and seemed not to notice that the crowds of pilgrims were gone, that he and Feliks were alone. He sat staring at the ground, his big hands opening and closing so slowly that Father Bannity could have counted a score of his own suddenly intrusive heartbeats between fist and spread fingers. The man’s naked face and shaved scalp made the head atop the black robe seem almost like an egg, out of which anything might hatch.
Why did I come here? he asked himself. To taunt the blackest magician of the age? But he felt he had to ask.
“Are you truly gone from in there, Elizar?” The priest’s voice trembled, and he prayed to God for strength. He now realized, in a way he had not before, that here sat a man who of suchn power that he had destroyed whole cities the way an ordinary man might kick down an ant-hill. But Bannity had to ask. “Are you truly and completely empty, or is there a spark of you left in that husk, listening?” He had a sudden thought. “Did you bring this on yourself, with your magical amulet? When the time came for your heart’s desire to be granted, did God hear a small, hidden part of you that was weary of death and torment and dark hatreds, that wanted to perform the Lord’s work for your fellow men instead of bringing them blood and fire and terror?”
Eli did not look up or change expression, and at last Father Bannity went out. Feliks watched him go with a puzzled expression, then returned to his meal.
He came down the main road with crowds cheering behind him as though he were a conquering hero — which, after all, he was. Bannity watched the people shouting and calling Kettil’s name as the wizard rode toward the village on his huge white horse, the same people who only days before had been crouched in the dirt outside Eli’s tent, begging to be let in, and the priest wondered at God’s mysterious ways.
Kettil Hawkface was younger than Bannity would have guessed, or else had spelled himself to appear so. He seemed a man in the middle of life, his golden hair only touched with gray, his bony, handsome face still firm in every line. His eyes were the most impressive thing about him: even from a distance, they glittered an icy blue, and up close it was difficult to look at him directly, such was the chilly power of his gaze.
Bannity and Dondolan met the archmage at the edge of the wood. Kettil nodded at his fellow wizard, but hardly seemed to see the priest at all, even after Dondolan introduced him.
“He is in there…” Dondolan began, but Kettil raised his hand and the lesser mage fell silent.
“I know where he is.” He had a voice to match his eyes, frosty and authoritative. “And I know what he is. I have battled his evil for half my long life. I do not need to be told where to find him — I smell him as a hound smells his quarry.”
Strange, then, that you did not find him before, thought Bannity, then regretted his own small-minded carping. “But he is not the monster you knew, Archmage…”
Kettil looked at him then, but only a moment, then turned away. “Such creatures do not change,” he said to Dondolan.
Bannity tried again. “He has done much good…!”
Kettil smirked. “Has he revived all those he killed? Rebuilt the cities he burned? Do not speak to me of things you do not understand, priest.” He slid down off his massive white horse. “I will go, and we will see what devilry awaits.”