The four rotating wings were visible as a blurry white disk, edged with gold, and slung beneath them was a gondola-shaped basket in which could be seen the figure of the king. Dardash’s keen eyesight picked out weights suspended on ropes beneath the basket, giving the whole assemblage the same kind of stability as a pendulum, and it seemed to him that Marcurades had also added extra fitments at the top of the pipe which carried steam to the wing impellers.
A sigh of mingled wonder and adoration rose up from the watching throngs as the machine continued its miraculous ascent into the clear blue dome of the sky. At a dizzy height above the palace, almost at the limit of Dardash’s vision, the king reached upwards to operate a lever, the insubstantial disk of the wings tilted slightly, and the machine swooped out over the line of the cliffs, out over the waters of the bay.
Ecstatic cheering, great slow-pulsing billows of sound, surged back and forth like tidal currents as Marcurades—godlike in his new power—steered his machine into a series of wide sweeps far above the wave crests.
“Now,” Urtarra urged. “The time is now!”
“So be it,” Dardash said, fingering the scrap of parchment on which the spell for the kinetic sorcery was written. He uttered a single polysyllabic word and tore the parchment in two.
At that instant the sun-gleaming shape of the flying machine was checked in its course, as though it had encountered an invisible obstacle. It wavered, faltered, then began to fall.
The sound that went up from the watching multitude was a vast wordless moan of consternation and shocked disbelief. Dardash listened to it for a moment, his face impassive, and was turning away from the balcony when two things happened to petrify him in mid-stride.
Far out across the water Marcurades’ flying machine, which had been tilting over as it fell, abruptly righted itself and began to hover, neither losing nor gaining height. Simultaneously, a fierce pain lanced through Dardash’s left hand. He snatched the sensor ring off his finger and threw it to the floor, where it promptly became white hot. Outside was a pounding silence as every one of Marcurades’ subjects, not daring to breathe, prayed for his safety.
“The king flies,” Urtarra said in a hushed voice. “He built better than you knew.”
“I don’t think so,” Dardash said grimly. “Look! The machine’s wings are scarcely turning. It should be falling!”
He strode to a chest where he had stored some of his equipment and returned with a silver hoop which he held out at arm’s length. Viewed through the metal circle the hovering aircraft was a blinding, sun-like source of radiance. Dardash felt the beginnings of a terrible fear.
“What does it mean?” Urtarra said. “I don’t …”
“That light is mana—the raw power behind magic.” Dardash’s throat had gone dry, thickening and deadening his voice. “Fantastic amounts of it are being expended to keep Marcurades and his machine aloft. I’ve never seen such a concentration.”
“Does that mean there’s another magician at work?”
“I wish that were all it meant,” Dardash said. He lowered the silver loop and stared at the flickering mote which was the flying machine. It had begun to move again, slowly losing height and drifting in towards the shore, and Dardash knew with bleak certainty that aboard it was a new kind of man—one who could use mana instinctively, in tremendous quantities, to satisfy his own needs and achieve his ambitions. Marcurades could tap and squander mana resources without even being aware of what he was doing, and Dardash now fully understood why the future divined for the king had been so cataclysmic. Such power, without the discipline and self-knowledge of the traditional sorcerers, could only corrupt. The mana-assisted achievement of each ambition would inspire others, each grander and more vainglorious than the one before, and the inevitable outcome would be evil and madness.
Dardash, all too conscious of the dangerous nature of the energy behind his profession, suddenly foresaw the rise of a new kind of tyrant—the spawning of monsters so corrupted by success and ambition, believing themselves to be the fountainheads of power, that they would eventually seek to dominate the entire world, and even be prepared to see it go up in flames if their desires were thwarted.
“I forbid it,” he whispered, his fear giving way to resentment and a deep implacable hatred. “I, Dardash, say—NO!”
He ran back to the chest, driven by the knowledge that with each passing second Marcurades was a little closer to safety, and took from it a slim black rod. The wand had no power in itself, but it served to direct and concentrate magical energies. There was an unexpected noise in the next room and, glancing through the partially open door, Dardash saw Nirrineen coming towards him. Her expression was one of childish delight and her hands were at her throat, caressing a gold necklace.
“Look what the king has given me,” she said, “Isn’t it the most …”
“Stay out of here,” Dardash shouted, trying to control his panic as he realised there was almost no time left in which to accomplish his purpose. He wheeled to face the balcony and the bright scene beyond it, pointed the wand and uttered a spell he had hoped never to use, a personal sacrilege, a destructive formula which used mana to combat and neutralise mana.
The flying machine disintegrated.
Its four wings flailed and fluttered off in different directions, and from the centre of the destruction the body of the machine plunged downwards like a mass of lead. There was a sputtering explosion as it struck the water, then it was gone, and Marcurades was lost, and all that remained of the young king and all his ambitions were spreading ripples of water and the four slow-tumbling wings which had borne him to his death. A lone sea bird shrieked in the pervading silence.
Dardash had time for one pang of triumph, then his vision dimmed and blurred. He looked at his hands and saw that they had withered into the semblance of claws, blotched and feeble, and he understood at once that his brief battle with Marcurades had been even more destructive than he had anticipated. In that one instant of conflict every trace of mana in the entire region had been annihilated, and he—Dardash—no longer had access to the magical power which had preserved his body.
“Murderer!” Nirrineen’s voice seemed to reach him from another time, another existence. “You murdered the king!”
Dardash turned to face her. “You overestimate my powers, child,” he soothed, motioning for Urtarra to move around behind her and block the exit. “What makes you think that a humble dabbler in simple magic could ever…?”
He broke off as he saw Nirrineen’s revulsion at his appearance, evidence that more than a century of hard living had taken a dreadful toll of his face and body. Evidence of his guilt.
Nirrineen shook her head, and with near-magical abruptness she was gone. Her fleeing footsteps sounded briefly and were lost in the mournful wailing that had begun to pervade the room from outside as the people of Bhitsala absorbed the realisation that their king was dead.
“You should have stopped her,” Dardash said to Urtarra, too weak and tired to sound more than gently reproachful. “She has gone to fetch the palace guard, and now neither of us will ever …”
He stopped speaking as he saw that Urtarra had sunk down on a couch, hands pressed to his temples, eyes dilated with a strange horror, seeing but not seeing.
“So it has finally happened to you, soothsayer—now you can foresee your own death.” Dardash spoke with intuitive understanding of what was happening in Urtarra’s mind. “But do not waste what little time remains to you. Let me know that my sacrifice has not been in vain, that the whore wasn’t carrying Marcurades’ seed. Give me proof that no other mana-monsters will arise to usurp magicians and wreak their blind and ignorant havoc on the world.”