Ruddygore spotted him. “Hello! Where’s Sugasto?”
“Haven’t seen him since last night,” Tiana called back.
“Ruddygore!” Marge screamed, practically flying into him and bowling him over. “Late, as usual!”
“Not at all,” the sorcerer replied. “Until either the bodies were destroyed or Boquillas died, or both, I was powerless to alter events. Even I couldn’t do them in, you see. But now, now that the Baron is ashes, it’s no longer your business to close this affair, but mine. Mine—and Sugasto’s.”
“He’s the new young gun, Pard,” she responded. “You think you can take him?”
Ruddygore always looked to her like Santa Claus, but the expression on his face now was anything but cheery or merry. It was the kind of look that froze brave men, and sent everyone running.
“There’s only one way to find out,” he said softly. “The Baron is dead. The Council will back only one of us now.”
He walked up the black slope and into the garden area. As he reached it, an idol like a great hooded cobra suddenly wriggled, as if corning to life, and hissed at him.
He hissed back at it, and it was engulfed in fire.
“Sugasto! ” he called in his booming voice, the call echoing throughout the complex. “Sugasto! Come! It is finally our time!”
“Over here, fat man!” came a response, and they all looked and saw the Master of the Dead in his full black robes, standing on the far side of the porch.
“What say we meet on the ice?” Ruddygore suggested calmly. “Less chance of debris and more open space. Besides, we might have to tend to a bit of other business over there before we square off.”
Sugasto nodded. “The ice it is. But I fear nothing coming from that pit. The horrors frozen there fought my sort of fight.”
Marge felt exhausted, but she wasn’t about to miss this. As the assembled soldiers and staff stepped back to watch, forming almost an audience, Tiana got down from his perch and walked up to Marge, now standing at the other end of the porch looking out at the ice.
“What are they going to do?” he asked the Kauri.
“Wizard’s battle,” she responded. “It’s required by the Rules, I think, anyway, to end this sort of stuff.”
“He will win, will he not? Ruddygore, I mean.”
She shook her head. “I dunno. I keep looking at that steam over there. You can’t see it—yet. But magical strings are forming shapes behind that mist, ugly shapes. And Ruddygore lacks the killer instinct. Remember Boquillas.”
Between the wall of steam and the palace island was the broad expanse of ice. Now the two figures, both looking rather small against its plain backdrop, faced each other at a distance of about thirty feet, like two gunfighters in some bleak frontier showdown.
“I didn’t teach you everything, Sugasto,” Ruddygore noted.
“All that time in the madness of the djinn where you sent me wasn’t wasted, either, old man,” the Master of the Dead responded. “As you have already seen.”
“Your zombies are of little use to you now,” the big man said. “And you’ll not find my soul so easy to pluck.”
Sugasto’s hand went up, and an enormous ball of the blackest magic flew toward Ruddygore. Ruddygore responded with a massive, almost blinding flash of light that banished it.
“I saw that!” Tiana exclaimed.
“They’re just warming up, feeling each other out,” Marge told him. “I’m more worried about something else. I just figured out why Sugasto was so pleased to have this fight where it is. Every time they hurl something, either one, more power builds behind the mist, more incredible magic rushes in and solidifies.”
Now both sorcerers let loose huge spells that met in the middle, and the entire area between them was awash in color, like a giant, jagged splotch of varicolored paints, the colors mixing and swirling and oozing around, forming shapes. Fierce, lion-like things, and things like some horrible nightmare of bears, against demonic shapes, ugly, serpentine, and gargoylelike, all roaring their fury and going at each other as the two men, like puppeteers, kept moving their hands and arms in fantastic, gyrating motions.
“I wonder what it seems like to them?” Tiana breathed.
Upon a vast plain of crackling, multicolored energy, the two protagonists stood not as people but as thoughts or expressions, each with his own distinctive colors. Thrust, parry, thrust again, done with the speed of thought, and with any of the weapons the imagination could supply; this was the plane of the wizard’s battle.
“The djinn prepares you well for this, old man,” Sugasto taunted. “Planes of madness, without rules, without form, until you give it thus.”
An enormous demonic monster materialized, pouncing with a horrible roar upon Ruddygore. The big man became a massive mouth, all teeth and gullet, swallowing the creature and not resisting a very large burp!
“True, my boy, but I’ve been there since last you were!” Ruddygore responded.
Massive energy, all blues and greens and bright orange for strength, flashed out from the big man and took form; a great squidlike horror whose tentacles reached out and threatened to grab the brilliant will-o’-the-wisp that was Sugasto.
The man in black became a giant, whirling blade, cutting the tentacles like salami, stacking them up in uneven piles.
“You’re every bit as good as the potential I saw in you when you were just a lad,” Ruddygore noted. “You still lack imagination, though.”
“Imagination! Fine talk from a man who plays the game so incessantly that he has forgotten why the game is played at all!”
“You never understood, Sugasto, and that was your tragedy,” the big man responded. “The lust for power, the god complex, has consumed you. You would be a god or the devil himself, yet those are the worst jobs in all Creation, for they are the loneliest. Let us stop this childish playing, Sugasto. Let me show you your victory! Let me give you your vision of the new world!”
There was blackness, blackness all around, and the man in black was falling, falling down an endless hole. There was no top, no bottom, no sides, only blackness, falling forever. There was no one to catch him, no one to save him, no one even to sympathize. He was utterly, completely alone, falling forever.
No! There were others around him! Almost in terror, he reached out for them, drew them to him with his mighty power. Yes! Lots of people! They whirled with him, falling in the darkness, and he could see them, millions of them; men, women, children, all with glazed eyes and vacant stares, all without minds, without souls…
Sugasto screamed.
From the porch, Marge pointed to the figure of the man in black. “He’s staggering! He’s down! Way to go, Ruddygore!”
But at the moment of victory, there came an ominous rumbling from the still steaming edge of the Devastation. Suddenly, the ice trembled, and huge fissures opened, coming outward in the direction of both sorcerers, the crack coming between them.
It was so unexpected that Ruddygore was knocked off his feet and off his concentration, allowing a weakened Sugasto some breathing room.
And then, suddenly, rising from the ice between the two wizards, emerged a monstrous head, with huge, glaring eyes, nostrils that snorted smoke and fire, and fangs dripping with the ichor of doom. Dragonlike, it was more than a dragon, it was the horrible face of all that was feared in dragons.
A second opening, then a second head, even more frightening and hideous than the first, appeared, snorted, and looked around. Now, yet a third appeared, and a small part of the body as well, showing the monster, fully thirty feet high, its three heads taking in the scene, looking as if it could devour them all. The castle crowd, once an audience, began running over the ice, away from the three-headed nightmare from the Devastation, but the sorcerers could not run.