“Gene!”
Gene turned at Linda’s yell. She was pointing behind him. Gene whirled and saw the soldier getting up and retrieving his sword and shield.
“What?”
Snowclaw growled. The servants were also rising from the dead, zombies now, whey-faced and gaunt-eyed.
Melydia made another hand movement.
Gene swiveled his gaze back and forth. He couldn’t believe it. Now there were eight servants and three soldiers.
The next phase of the fight was complex, and grew increasingly strange. Gene held his own against three opponents, but at some point he looked around and saw that there were other people in the room. Not exactly other people — duplicates of himself. And duplicates of Snowclaw, fighting other doppelgangers of the soldier and Melydia’s servants. There were even duplicates of Osmirik.
He fought on. Presently he grew aware that the room had become increasingly bright. The light seemed to be coming from the jewel, but he couldn’t afford to look up.
He stumbled over a body and fell, then rolled and jumped to his feet again. He looked down. It was himself, one of his magical twins, with a bloodied shirt front and an oozing slash across the forehead. Other fallen duplicates of himself lay about. But that wasn’t the worst of it. New combatants had appeared, and these weren’t human. A yellow-skinned, green-eyed, scaly being attacked him with mace and chain. Gene blocked, slashed, blocked, and thrust, making short work of it, but another variant of the same creature, this one green of scale and yellow of eye, took up the fight. He dispatched it, then whirled to find two horned goatlike creatures advancing on him, one with an ax, the other with a halberd.
Linda continued her slow advance toward Melydia. It was like walking through a swamp, like mud sucking at her feet. The melee went on around her. She had matched every duplicate that Melydia had conjured, every magical creature, and now that part of the contest was over. This duel was really between Melydia and her.
Brilliant amber light from the jewel flooded the chamber. The floor vibrated, and then began to heave.
Linda felt her powers grow. No longer were they limited to materialization tricks. She felt energy flowing from the jewel, and at the same time sensed a waning of the restraining force exerted by the rock. Power coursed through her, but it was all she could do to keep moving forward. Intense waves of force emanated from Melydia. Linda knew that the witch’s power, too, was growing.
A wind — not moving air but currents of force — rose up and tore at her. Above, the jewel glowed and pulsed, pumping more energy into the whirlpool. A swirling vortex of energy formed as the fighting continued. Linda held her ground. She was about five yards away from Melydia, who still faced the rock, performing ritual movements and speeches. The closer Linda got, the more resistance she felt. She tensed her muscles, leaned forward as if bracing against gale-force winds. She inched forward, fighting a battle for every step. If only the floor would stop shaking, she thought. But it shook all the more. She knew what she would do if she reached Melydia. She would strangle the horrible woman with her own hands. The thought didn’t upset her in the least. She could feel the woman’s evil. It was the most loathsome sensation she had ever experienced. Somehow Melydia’s mind was in contact with hers — not directly, but they were tapping the same source of power. It was as if they shared an electrical outlet. Even that limited proximity produced in Linda a profound revulsion. The woman’s mind was a cesspool of hate, jealousy, contempt, fear — every negative emotion inflated to astonishing proportions, and the sum of it amounted to nothing less than hatred of life itself.
She struggled forward. About three yards now. The face of the boy at Melydia’s feet was dead white.
Melydia began the last incantation. It was the most subtle and difficult of all. One missed syllable, one slip, one flub, and she would have to go back to the Lesser Invocation and begin again. She knew she wouldn’t have time for that. She could handle the distractions going on around her for only so long. But she still had a little time, just enough. She began.
At the end of the second statement, the Anticlastic Argument, a hand movement was called for. She executed it, and went on. The third statement, the Synclastic, demanded a rigid body posture, measured breathing, and as little eye movement as possible. She enunciated it perfectly and went on to the next set of Arguments, which she completed flawlessly.
She took a deep breath, assessed the increasingly violent situation in the chamber — then began the group of statements leading up to the Concluding Argument, the last word of which was the Dodecagrammaton, the word that would trip the spell and liberate a force the world had not seen in three thousand years.
She began. Her lips moved, the words barely audible. Then … after years of planning and scheming, one word remained.
She felt a warm hand on her neck.
She declaimed the Dodecagrammaton, rapidly, confidently, forcefully, every syllable rolling perfectly off her tongue, every phoneme sharp and crisp, twelve sounds like hammer blows driving the last nail into the coffin of a world she despised, hated with every fiber of her being.
Hands snaked around her neck. She whirled and looked the girl in the eye.
“You are talented, my dear,” she said. “And very brave. But you are too late.”
An eddy of force carried the girl away from Melydia and into the whirlwind.
Gene thought: Things are getting out of hand.
He was floating high in the chamber, caught up in a terrific cyclone of multicolored streamers of fire. Snowy floated by — or maybe it was one of his doubles. But then, how were you supposed to tell the real one? He wondered if he himself were the real Gene or just a conjure-twin.
Another of those horrible things wafted by, and he took a swipe at it with his sword, which he had stubbornly hung onto. The creature snarled at him, then vanished in a puff of flame.
There was no sense of physical place now, no Hall of the Brain, no castle, only a swirling maelstrom of energy whose focal point seemed to be a bright starlike object somewhere off in the distance. Gene floated, then fell. There was no air, and he couldn’t breath. Yet he could speak.
“I love you, Linda,” he said.
Then there was nothing.
Through the smoke and the vapor and the nebulae of circulating fires there came a gap, a way, a protected lane. It clove the chaos in twain, and a figure walked it, purposefully, gracefully, without fear or hesitation, advancing toward the island of calm in the middle of the storm.
Melydia watched the figure grow into a man she knew.
“You have come,” she said.
“Melydia,” he said. “How good of you to visit me.”
“It is my pleasure. You are too late, Incarnadine. Why have you held back?”
“Is that how it looks? My dear, I fought you with every means at my disposal. You are more powerful than I could ever hope to be.”
“Yes, I am. Why did you not tap the deepest source of magic?”
“I would have had to do what you have done, Melydia. I did not want to make a pact with Evil itself.”
“I did what I had to do.”
“Do you hate me that much?”
Her scornful laughter held overtones of the cries of a tortured animal. “Is that why you think I did this? Because of you? You … you weakling! You dilettante! You were born to supreme power, and you did nothing but toy with it! Irrevocable power, ultimate might! You have spent not one lifetime, but several, throwing it away! Expending it on useless trivialities! You have withdrawn from the world. Castle Perilous should be the seat of world power, yet here it sits, an empty hulk, a legend without substance, a curiosity. But it will sit no more! Your house of uselessness is gone, or soon will be, and you can do nothing to stop its going. But I will build another to replace it. It will be fashioned from a transmogrified body — not that of a demon, but of a king. You will be my new castle, Lord of the Western Pale, and when men speak of Castle Incarnadine, it will be in hushed and fearful tones.”