Tol’s booted foot lashed out. “Mandes! I have you!” Another kick. “You can’t escape me!” A third kick.
The fifth blow broke the iron latch, and the door swung open. Beyond was a turret room, the very highest of the old fortress’s many towers. A window opening gaped opposite the door. Mandes stood in the opening.
Wind whipped the magician’s golden robe around his legs and flung his hair wildly about his head. Beholding the bloodstained avenging fury in the doorway, Mandes fairly convulsed with terror.
“You can’t kill me!” he said shrilly. “I am the greatest sorcerer of this age!”
“You’re nothing but a murderer many times over. Your head will decorate the wall of the Inner City!”
Beyond the rogue sorcerer, Tol could see the wizard’s paired griffins circling, pulling their flying golden coach, trying to approach the tower. They were confounded by the mountain, which severely limited their room to maneuver, and by the howling wind, which alternately threatened to dash them against the fortress and lift them high above it.
Mandes rested his forehead against the stone. His shoulders shook. Tol thought he was weeping, but when the wizard lifted his head, Tol realized he was laughing.
Mandes declared, “With me dies your life as you know it, Tolandruth! Your emperor, your army, and all the things you love shall pass away!”
“Your threats are meaningless, betrayer!”
“No, it happens even now. A greater evil than anything I ever dreamt of will sit upon the throne of Ergoth!”
Tol hesitated. “Is it possible to undo what Nazramin has done?”
Mandes mastered himself again. “Only I could undo it, if I live.”
Tol weighed the possibilities. Spare the evil he’d finally cornered to fight worse evil elsewhere? Mandes was a conniving villain, and Tol’s credo had always been a simple one: destroy the enemy when you find him; don’t worry about one you may meet tomorrow.
Mandes saw the judgment in Tol’s countenance. He knew his fate was sealed.
Only two paces separated them. Tol lunged just as Mandes leaped away, arms outspread, trying to catch the side rails as the flying coach whisked past. Tol felt golden fabric whisper through his fingers, but it was too late.
Mandes laughed. He was gone!
For the space of two heartbeats, he believed it. Then the shifting winds lifted the passing coach, his hands closed only on air, and the terror of his mistake struck home. Mouth stretched wide, Mandes shrieked all the way down to the craggy rocks far, far below.
The griffins, freed of Mandes’s hold, broke their traces and flew off, trumpeting their freedom. Moments later, the flying coach shattered to glittering fragments in the crevasse below the fortress.
Tol sagged to the floor, his rage spent.
He didn’t know how long he sat, unmoving, his mind an exhausted blank, but it was the coldness of the wind that finally broke through his stupor.
With Mandes’s death, the mist wall and the unnatural warmth protecting the summit had dissolved. Sundown was coming, and the normal cold was swiftly reclaiming the citadel. Soon ice would engulf everything. Tol’s injured face and shoulder were stiffening. He needed to reclaim his furs and get down the mountain.
Before the daylight failed, he performed one last task. He scrounged enough rope from Mandes’s jumble of possessions to lower himself into the ravine below the fort. On the rocky slope not far from the ruined coach, he found the sorcerer’s mangled corpse. For once the letter of Ergothian law suited Tol’s purpose. He had spared the Dom-shu chief Makaralonga this fate years ago. He would not spare Mandes.
The rogue wizard’s head would return with Tol to adorn the palace at Daltigoth. His body would feed the vultures of Mount Axas.
Epilogue
Snow was falling the day Tol began his journey back to Daltigoth. The snow had started the night Mandes died and continued without pause. It was not a blizzard, but a steady, soft accumulation that shrouded the world in stillness.
Mandes’s hired mercenaries had vanished by the time Tol came down from the fortress. With winter settling quickly upon the heights, they’d wasted no time departing for warmer and more profitable climes.
Although Mandes’s spells had dispersed with his death, strange occurrences continued on Mount Axas. When Tol reclaimed his and Early’s horses, he found the winged Irda statues had vanished from their plinths. On the pedestals where they’d stood for countless centuries, all that remained were the imprints of two clawed feet. Likewise the crouching lion statues were gone. The snow around their bases was unmarked; there was no sign anyone had dragged the statues away, nor were there any paw prints.
Tol wrapped Early’s body in a broad length of fine Tarsan linen taken from Mandes’s hoard. Riding Tetchy and leading Longhound bearing the kender’s body, he made a slow descent of Mount Axas. Halting in a high valley filled with aspen and birch trees, he buried his brave companion. Even in the gray light of a winter’s morning, it was a beautiful spot; in spring, it would be spectacular.
Purged of his decade-long thirst for vengeance, Tol felt empty. He rode along the trail to Juramona, pondering the price of his revenge. The empire was free of an evil force, but many good people had given their lives to bring that about, and Tol had no idea what awaited him in Daltigoth. Had Mandes’s vision been true? Was Ackal IV lost, mad, and his vicious brother now seated on the throne?
It took him two days to reach the Eastern Hundred, and two more to wade through the snow to Juramona. When he arrived, Tol discovered that many more days than he’d reckoned had passed since he and Early had departed for Mandes’s mountain.
“I almost mourned you for lost!” Egrin declared, upon seeing Tol again. “It’s been twenty days since you left us!”
Tol shook his head doggedly, dislodging the snow that had collected on his head and shoulders. “Can’t be,” he muttered. “Two days to the mountains, a day in the fortress, two days out, two to cross the Hundred-seven days. I’ve been gone seven days.”
Egrin rested a hand on his shoulder. “You’ve been away twenty days.”
Indeed, it transpired, much had happened in that time. A courier had arrived from the capital with a sealed missive for the marshal. The seal was unfamiliar, but the letter proved to be from Prince Nazramin. Now titled “provisional regent for the ailing emperor, Ackal IV,” Nazramin wrote that the empire was in safe hands and the Marshal of the Eastern Hundred should stand ready for further orders.
“What will you do?” asked Tol, upset at this confirmation of Mandes’s awful vision.
“Wait for my orders,” Egrin replied. He could do nothing more-or less.
Tol tarried two days in the city of his childhood, soaking his tired body in casks of hot water and allowing Healer Ossant to attend his wounds. Although Egrin urged him to remain longer, Tol knew he needed to move on. He must learn the fates of those he’d left in the capital, and truth be told, he found Juramona too full of ghosts.
He left a substantial amount of gold in Egrin’s care, courtesy of Mandes’s treasury, with instructions to bestow it on the sorcerer’s victims. With Egrin’s stoic but heartfelt farewell in his ears, Tol rode off at midday.
The snow was gray mush in the streets. As Tetchy made his way through the town’s bustling lanes, Tol saw again the faces of his youth: Lord Odovar, whose life he’d saved to begin his adventures; wise Felryn, who even in death had helped him defeat Mandes; Narren, killed years ago in the battle against XimXim; Fellen the engineer, Frez, Darpo, Tarthan, and the rest of his handpicked band of foot soldiers who had perished in the long war with Tarsis.
Just before passing through Juramona’s wall, Tol’s route took him by a tavern. The door swung open, and the piping of a flute came to his ears. The sound reminded him of Crake, the clever flutist and quick-witted archer. He had once been Tol’s closest friend and later his bitterest foe. He, too, was dead.
