“We should decide nothing until I see these miracle men,” Dondolan said. “Although I must say that the description of them in your letter gave me an unpleasant feeling in the pit of my stomach.”
“Why?” asked Bannity with some alarm. “Do you think they mean harm? I worried mainly that so many pilgrims would jeopardize the safety of our little town, drawing thieves and confidence tricksters and such. But surely God has sent those two to us — they have done so much good!”
“Perhaps. That is why I will restrain my conjectures until I have seen them.”
They made their way through the woods, between groups of revelers singing and praying, gathered around so many campfires it seemed more like the eve of a great battle than twilight in the woods outside a quiet village too unassuming even to have its own name. As they grew close to the great pale tent and the crowd of people waiting there — some patiently, others loudly demanding that they be allowed to be next to see the wonder-workers because their need was so great — Bannity found it increasingly difficult to make headway through the throng. It was a mark of how many of these people were strangers to the area that the village’s well-respected priest almost got into two fights, and only Dondolan’s discreet use of a quelling-charm got them past those at the front of the line without real violence.
They slipped through the tent’s flap-door. Dondolan across the big tent at the miraculous pair sitting like minor potentates on high-backed chairs the villagers had built them, the small man Feliks and the big man with the misshapen skull. Feliks was scratching himself and laughing at something. Eli was staring down at one of the kneeling postulants before him, his expression as emptily self-absorbed as a bullfrog waiting for a fly of sufficient size to happen past. Dondolan swallowed, then stepped back out of the tent again, and Bannity followed him. Even by torchlight, the priest could see the wizard had gone quite pale.
“It is indeed as I feared, Bannity. That is no poor traveler, innocently touched by God — or at least that is not how he began. The large man is the dark wizard Elizar the Devourer, scourge of the southern lands, and greatest enemy of the archmage Kettil of Thundering Crag.”
“Elizar?” Bannity suddenly found swallowing difficult. Even a village priest knew the Devourer, who had burned whole towns because he liked the gloomy skies their smoking ruins provided, who had performed vile rites to turn men into beasts and beasts into men, and whose campaign of violent conquest had only been stopped by Kettil himself, the greatest wizard of the age, who had come down from his great ice caverns atop Thundering Crag and helped the young King defeat Elizar’s vast army of slavering beast-men at the field of Herredsburn. Kettil himself had dueled Elizar before the gathered forces of both armies — the skies above Herredsburn, everyone remembered, had lit up as if with half a dozen simultaneous thunderstorms, and although neither had managed definitively to best the other, it had been Elizar who had fled the field, his plans in ruins, and who had retreated into a dark obscurity that had covered him for years — an absence that had lasted until this very moment. “That Elizar?” murmured Father Bannity. “Here?”
“I would stake my life on it,” said Dondolan, “and may be doing so. Even if his mindlessness is real, just seeing someone like me that he has known might shock him back to his prior self.”
“But we cannot simply…leave it. We cannot leave things this way.”
“No, but I dare not go near him. His miracles, you tell me, are real, so he still wields mighty powers. Even if he stays witless, I cannot afford the chance he might decide to give me my heart’s desire.” Dondolan shook his head, his white beard wagging. “The heart of a wizard, even a relatively decent one like myself, is full of dark crevices. It is the world we inhabit, the wisdoms we study, the powers we have learned to harness, if not always to understand.” He smiled, but there was not much pleasure in it. “I truthfully do not know my heart’s desire, and have no urge to discover it this way.”
“I’m…I’m not certain what you mean.”
“What if my heart’s desire is to be the greatest wizard of my age? I felt that way once, when I was young and first entering the Academy. What if that desire has not gone, only hidden?” He shook his head again. “I dare not risk it.”
“But what if an ordinary mortal — someone not a wizard — has the same thing as his heart’s desire? Or something worse, asking for the end of the world or something.”
Dondolan gave the priest a shrewd, sober look. “So far, that has not happened. In fact, the power Elizar wields seems not to have harmed much of anybody, except, by your account, a pair of nasty old folk who deliberately stood in the way of their children’s happiness. And even there, we cannot prove that coincidence did not carry them away. Perhaps there is something to Elizar’s magic that is self-limiting — something that prevents him from granting any but mostly benign wishes. I do not know.” He looked up. “I do know that we must discover more before we can make up our minds. We cannot, as you said, simply leave things be, not with Elizar the Devourer here, surrounded by eager supplicants, busily creating miracles, however kind-hearted those miracles may seem.” Dondolan ran his fingers through his long beard. “Not to mention the evil chance that this is all some cruel trick of Elizar’s — that he only shams at having lost his mind, and plots to seize the Middle Lands again.” He frowned, thinking. “When do they stop for the night?”
“Soon. When my sexton rings the church bell for evening prayer.”
“Wait until that bell rings, Father, then bring me the man Feliks.”
The small man seemed almost relieved to have been found out. “Yes, it is true. He was once Elizar, the greatest wizard of all.”
“After Kettil the archmage, you mean,” said Dondolan.
Feliks waved his hand. “My master poured his soul into five thousand beast-men at Herredsburn, animating them throughout the battle. Even so, he duelled Kettil Hawkface to a standstill.”
“This is neither here nor there,” said Father Bannity impatiently. “Why is he the way we see him? Is this some new plot of his, some evil device?”
“Tell the truth, minion, and do not think to trick me,” Dondolan said harshly. “Even now, Kettil himself must be hearing news of this. He will not take longer than I did to deduce that your Eli is in fact his old arch- enemy.”
Feliks sighed. “Then we must be moving on again. Sad, that is. I was enjoying it here.”
“Damn it, man, one of the most dangerous men in the world sleeps twenty paces away! Talk to us!”
“Dangerous to you, perhaps.” Feliks shook his head. “No, not even to you — not now. There is no trick, wizard. What you see is the truth. The old Elizar is gone, and dumb Eli is what remains.
“It was after Herredsburn, you see, when the king and your Wizard’s Council turned us away. With all his beast-men dead or changed back to their former selves, my master left the field and retreated to his secret lair in the Darkslide Mountains.”
“We suspected he had a bolthole there,” murmured Dondolan, “but we could never find it.”
“He was determined to have his revenge on Kettil and the others,” continued Feliks. “I have never seen him thus. He was furious, but also weary, weary and distraught.” The small man peered at the priest and the wizard for a moment. “Once, in middle-night when I was awakened from sleep by a strange noise, I found him weeping.”
“I cannot believe that,” said Dondolan. “Elizar? The Devourer?”
“Believe what you will. There was always more to him than you folk on the Council understood. Whatever the case, he became fixed on the idea of securing the Amulet of Desire, which can grant its possessor whatever gift he most wants. He spent many months — a year, almost — pursuing its legend down many forgotten roads, in old books and older scrolls. He spoke to creatures so fearsome I could not even be under the same roof while they were conversing.” The memory still seemed to make Feliks fearful, and yet proud of his bold master. “At last the time came. Deep in our cavern home in the Darkslide Mountains, he prepared the spells. I helped him as best I could, but I am just a servant, not a necromancer. I stoked the fires, polished the alembics, brought the articles he needed from our reliquary. At last the hour came when the spheres were in alignment, and he began the Summoning of the Empty Gods.
“He had been nights on end without sleep, in the grip of a fever that I had never seen in him before, even on the night before Herredsburn, when dominion over all the world was still at his fingertips. Pale, wide-eyed, talking to himself as though I was not even present, he was like a prisoner desperate for release, whether that release came from the opening of the prison door or from the hangman’s rope.”
Feliks sighed and briefly wiped his eyes while Dondolan tapped impatient fingers.
“The spell went on for hours,” the small man continued, “names shouted into the darkness that hurt my ears. At one point I fled, terrified by the shadows that filled the room and danced all around me. When I came back, it
