The wizard, his arms raised, called forth more light, more shadows, more magic. The river roiled around him. The hissing thing in the air grew as it slowly slumped closer to the water. Shafts of light shot from the hot, rotating, bloom of power.
The sun was rising over the hills behind the D’Harans. This part of the river wasn’t as wide as elsewhere, and Abby could see the activity in the trees beyond. Men moved about, but the fog hanging on the far bank kept them wary, kept them in the trees.
Also across the river, at the edge of the tree-covered hills, another wizard appeared. He threw down a rock and then leaped atop it. He pushed up the sleeves of his robes and flung his arms skyward, launching sparkling light up into the air. Abby thought that the strong morning sun might outshine the conjured illuminations, but it didn’t.
Abby could stand it no longer. ‘Zedd!’ she called out across the river. ‘Zedd! Please, you promised! I found your daughter! What about mine? Please don’t do this until she is safe!’
Zedd turned and looked at her as if from a great distance, as if from another world. Arms of dark forms caressed him. Fingers of dark smoke dragged along his jaw, urging his attention back to them, but he gazed instead at Abby.
‘I’m so sorry.’ Despite the distance, Abby could clearly hear his whispered words. ‘I gave you time to try to find them. I can spare no more, or countless other mothers will weep for their children – mothers still living, and mothers in the spirit world.’
Abby cried out in an anguished wail as he turned back to the ensorcellment. The two women tried to comfort her, but Abby was not to be comforted in her grief.
Thunder rolled through the hills. A clacking clamour from the spell around Zedd rose to echo up and down the valley. Shafts of intense light shot upward. It was a disorienting sight, light shining up into sunlight.
Across the river, the counter to Zedd’s magic seemed to spring forth. Arms of light twisted like smoke, lowering to tangle with the light radiating up around Zedd. The fog along the riverbank diffused suddenly.
In answer, Zedd spread his arms wide. The glowing, tumbling furnace of molten light thundered. The water sluicing over it roared as it boiled and steamed. The air wailed as if in protest.
Behind the wizard across the river, the D’Haran soldiers poured out of the trees, driving their prisoners before them. People cried out in terror. They quailed at the wizard’s magic, only to be driven onward by the spears and swords at their backs.
Abby saw several who refused to move fall to the blades. At the mortal cries, the rest rushed onward, like sheep before wolves.
If whatever Zedd was doing failed, the army of the Midlands would then charge into this valley to confront the enemy. The prisoners would be caught in the middle.
A figure worked its way up along the opposite bank, dragging a child behind. Abby’s flesh flashed icy cold with sudden frigid sweat. It was Mariska. Abby shot a quick glance back over her shoulder. It was impossible. She squinted across the river.
‘Nooo!’ Zedd called out.
It was Zedd’s little girl that Mariska had by the hair.
Somehow, Mariska had followed and found the child sleeping in Abby’s home. With no one there to watch over her as she slept, Mariska had stolen the child back.
Mariska held the child out before herself, for Zedd to see. ‘Cease and surrender, Zorander, or she dies!’
Abby tore away from the arms holding her and charged into the water. She struggled to run against the current, to reach the wizard. Part way there, he turned to stare into her eyes.
Abby froze. ‘I’m sorry.’ Her own voice sounded to her like a plea before death. ‘I thought she was safe.’
Zedd nodded in resignation. It was out of his hands. He turned back to the enemy. His arms lifted to his sides. His fingers spread, as if commanding all to stop – magic and men alike.
‘Let the prisoners go!’ Zedd called across the water to the enemy wizard. ‘Let them go, Anargo, and I’ll give you all your lives!’
Anargo’s laugh rang out over the water.
‘Surrender,’ Mariska hissed, ‘or she dies.’
The old woman pulled out the knife she kept in the wrap around her waist. She pressed the blade to the child’s throat. The girl was screaming in terror, her arms reaching to her father, her little fingers clawing the air.
Abby struggled ahead into the water. She called out, begging Mariska to let Zedd’s daughter go free. The woman paid no more heed to Abby than to Zedd.
‘Last chance!’ Mariska called.
‘You heard her,’ Anargo growled out across the water. ‘Surrender now or she will die.’
‘You know I can’t put myself above my people!’ Zedd called back. ‘This is between us, Anargo! Let them all go!’
Anargo’s laugh echoed up and down the river. ‘You are a fool, Zorander! You had your chance!’ His expression twisted to rage. ‘Kill her!’ he screamed to Mariska.
Fists at his side, Zedd shrieked. The sound seemed to split the morning with its fury.
Mariska lifted the squealing child by her hair. Abby gasped in disbelief as the woman sliced the little girl’s throat.
The child flailed. Blood spurted across Mariska’s gnarly fingers as she viciously sawed the blade back and forth. She gave a final, mighty yank of the knife. The blood-soaked body dropped in a limp heap. Abby felt vomit welling up in the back of her throat. The silty dirt of the riverbank turned a wet red.
Mariska held the severed head high with a howl of victory. Strings of flesh and blood swung beneath it. The mouth hung in a slack, silent cry.
Abby threw her arms around Zedd’s legs. ‘Dear spirits, I’m sorry! Oh, Zedd, forgive me!’
She wailed in anguish, unable to gather her senses at witnessing a sight so grisly.
‘And now, child,’ Zedd asked in a hoarse voice from above, ‘what would you have me do? Would you have me let them win, to save your daughter from what they have done to mine? Tell me, child, what should I do?’
Abby couldn’t beg for the life of her family at a cost of such people rampaging unchecked across the land. Her sickened heart wouldn’t allow it. How could she sacrifice the lives and peace of everyone else just so her loved ones would live?
She would be no better than Mariska, killing innocent children.
‘Kill them all!’ Abby screamed up at the wizard. She threw her arm out, pointing at Mariska and the hateful wizard Anargo. ‘Kill the bastards! Kill them all!’
As if in obedience to her command, Zedd’s arms flung upward. The morning cracked with a peal of thunder. As if he had loosed it, the molten mass before him plunged into the water. The ground shook with a jolt. A huge geyser of water exploded forth. The air itself quaked. All around the most dreadful rumbling whipped the water into froth.
Abby, squatted down with the water to her waist, felt numb not only from the cold, but also from the cold knowledge that she’d been forsaken by the good spirits she had always thought would watch over her. Zedd turned and snatched her arm, dragging her up on the rock with him.
It was another world.
The shapes around them called to her, too. They reached out, bridging the distance between life and death. Searing pain, frightful joy, profound peace, spread through her at their touch. Light moved up through her body, filling her like air filled her lungs, and exploded in showers of sparks in her mind’s eye. The thick howl of the magic was deafening.
Green light ripped through the water. Across the river, Anargo had been thrown to the ground. The rock atop which he had stood had shattered into needle-like shards. The soldiers called out in fright as the air all about danced with swirling smoke and sparks of light.
‘Run!’ Mariska screamed. ‘While you have the chance! Run for your lives!’ Already she was racing towards the hills. ‘Leave the prisoners to die! Save yourselves! Run!’
The mood across the river suddenly galvanized with a single determination. The D’Harans dropped their weapons. They cast aside the ropes
and chains holding the prisoners, turned, and ran. In a single instant, the whole of an army that had a moment before stood grimly facing them, were all, as if of a single fright, running for their lives.
From the corner of her eye, Abby saw the Mother Confessor and the sorceress struggling to run into the water. Although the water was hardly above their knees, it bogged them down in their rush nearly as much as would mud.
Abby watched it all as if in a dream. She floated in the light surrounding her. Pain and rapture were one within her. Light and dark, sound and silence, joy and sorrow, all were one, everything and nothing together in a cauldron of raging magic.
Across the river, the D’Haran army had vanished into the woods. Dust rose above the trees, marking their horses, wagons, and footfalls racing away, while at the riverbank, the Mother Confessor and the sorceress were shoving people into the water, screaming at them, though Abby didn’t hear the words, so absorbed was she by the strange harmonious trills twisting her thoughts into visions of dancing colour overlaying what her eyes were trying to tell her.
She thought briefly that surely she was dying. She thought briefly that it didn’t matter. And then her mind was swimming again in the cold colour and hot light, the drumming music of magic and worlds meshing. The wizard’s embrace made her feel as if she were being held in her mother’s arms again. Maybe she was.
Abby was aware of the people reaching the Midlands side of the river and running ahead of the Mother Confessor and sorceress. They vanished into the rushes and then Abby saw them far away, beyond the tall grass, running uphill, away from the sublime sorcery erupting from the river.
The world thundered around her. A subterranean thump brought sharp pain deep in her chest. A whine, like steel being shredded, tore through the morning air. All around the water danced and quaked.
Hot steam felt as if it would scald Abby’s legs. The air went white with it. The noise hurt her ears so much that she squeezed her eyes shut. She saw the same thing with her eyes closed as she saw with them open – shadowy shapes swirling through the green air. Everything was going crazy in her mind, making no sense. Green fury tore at her body and soul.
Abby felt pain, as if something inside her tore asunder. She gasped and opened her eyes. A horrific wall of green fire was receding away from them, towards the far side of the river. Founts of water lashed upward, like a thunderstorm in reverse. Lightning laced together above the surface of the river.
As the conflagration reached the far bank, the ground beneath it rent apart. Shafts of violet light shot up from the ripping wounds in the earth, like the blood of another realm.
Worse, though, than any of it, were the howls. Howls of the dead, Abby was sure. It felt as if her own soul moaned in sympathy with the agony of cries filling the air. From the receding green wall of glimmering fire, the shapes twisted and turned, calling, begging, trying to escape the world of the dead.
She understood now that that was what the wall of green fire was – death, come to life.
The wizard had breached the boundary between worlds.
Abby had no idea how much time passed; in the grip of the strange light in which she swam there seemed to be no time, any more than there was anything solid. There was nothing familiar about any of the sensations upon which to hang understanding.
It seemed to Abby that the wall of green fire had halted its advance in the trees on the far hillside. The trees over which it had passed, and those she could see embraced by the shimmering curtain, had blackened and shrivelled at the profound touch of death itself. Even the grass over which the grim presence had passed looked to have been baked black and crisp by a high summer sun.
As Abby watched the wall, it dulled. As she stared, it seemed to waver in and out of her vision, sometimes a glimmering green gloss, like molten glass, and sometimes no more than a pale hint, like a fog just now passed from the air.
To each side, it was spreading, a wall of death raging across the world of life.
Abby realized she heard the river again, the comfortable, common, sloshing, lapping, burbling sounds that she lived her life hearing but most of the time didn’t notice.
Zedd hopped down from the rock. He took her hand and helped her down. Abby gripped his hand tightly to brace against the dizzying sensations swimming through her head.
Zedd snapped his fingers, and the rock upon which they had just stood leaped into the air, causing her to gasp in fright. In an instant so brief that she doubted she had seen it, Zedd caught the rock. It had become a small stone, smaller than an egg. He winked at her as he slipped it into a pocket. She thought the wink the oddest thing she could imagine, odder even than the boulder, now a stone in his pocket.
On the bank, the Mother Confessor and the sorceress waited. They took her arms, helping her out of the water.
The sorceress looked grim. ‘Zedd, why isn’t it moving?’
It sounded to Abby more like an accusation than a question. Either way, Zedd ignored it.
‘Zedd,’ Abby said in a painful undertone, ‘I’m so sorry. It’s my fault. I shouldn’t have left her alone. I should have stayed. I’m so sorry.’
The wizard, hardly hearing her words, was looking off to the wall of death on the other side of the river. He brought his clawed fingers up past his chest, appearing to call forth some inward resolve. Teeth clenched, his face set in a grim look of focused concentration.
With a sudden thump to the air, fire erupted between his hands. He held it out as he would hold an offering. Abby threw an arm up in front of her face at the heat.
Zedd lifted the roiling ball of liquid fire. It grew between his hands, tumbling and turning, roaring and hissing with rage.
The three women backed away. Abby had heard of such fire. She had once heard her mother name it in a hushed tone: wizard’s fire. Even then, not seeing or knowing its like, those whispered words forming a picture in Abby’s mind as her mother recounted it, had sent a chill through Abby. Wizard’s fire was the bane of life, called forth to scourge an enemy. This could be nothing else.
‘For killing my love, my Erilyn, the mother of our daughter, and all the other innocent loved ones of innocent people,’ Zedd whispered,’ I send you, Panis Rahl, the gift of death.’
The wizard opened his arms outward. The liquid blue and yellow fire, bidden by its master, tumbled forward, gathering speed, roaring away towards D’Hara. As it crossed the river, it grew like angry lightning blooming forth, wailing with wrathful fury, reflecting in glimmering points from the water in thousands of bright sparkles.
The wizard’s fire shot across the growing wall of green, just catching the upper edge. At the contact, green flame flared forth, some of it tearing away, caught up behind the wizard’s fire, trailing after like smoke behind flame. The deadly mix howled towards the horizon. Everyone stood transfixed, watching, until all trace of it had vanished in the distance.
When Zedd, pale and drawn, turned back to them, Abby clutched his robes. ‘Zedd, I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t —’
He put his fingers to her lips to silence her. ‘There is someone waiting for you.’
He tilted his head. She turned. Back by the rushes, Philip stood holding Jana’s hand. Abby gasped with a jolt of giddy joy. Philip grinned his familiar grin. At his other side, her father smiled and nodded his approval to her.
Arms reaching, Abby ran to them. Jana’s face wrinkled. She backed against Philip. Abby fell to her knees before her.
‘It’s Mama,’ Philip said to Jana. ‘She just has herself some new clothes.’ Abby realized Jana was frightened by the red leather outfit she was wearing. Abby grinned through her tears.
‘Mama!’ Jana cried at seeing the smile.
Abby threw her arms around her daughter. She laughed and hugged Jana so hard the child squeaked in protest. Abby felt Philip’s hand on her shoulder in loving greeting. Abby stood and threw an arm around him, tears choking her voice. Her father put a comforting hand to her back while she squeezed Jana’s hand.
/> Zedd, Delora, and the Mother Confessor gathered them and herded them up the hill towards the people waiting at the top. Soldiers, mostly officers, some that Abby recognized, a few other people from Aydindril, and the wizard Thomas waited with the freed prisoners. Among the people liberated were those of Coney Crossing; people who held Abby, the daughter of a sorceress, in no favour. But they were her people, the people from her home, the people she had wanted saved.
Zedd rested a hand on Abby’s shoulder. Abby was shocked to see that his wavy brown hair was now partly snow-white. She knew without a looking-glass that hers had undergone the same transformation in the place beyond the world of life, where, for a time, they had been.
‘This is Abigail, born of Helsa,’ the wizard called out to the people gathered. ‘She is the one who went to Aydindril to seek my help. Though she does not have magic, it is because of her that you people are all free. She cared enough to beg for your lives.’
Abby, with Philip’s arm around her waist and Jana’s hand in hers, looked from the wizard to the sorceress, and then to the Mother Confessor. The Mother Confessor smiled. Abby thought it a cold-hearted thing to do in view of the fact that Zedd’s daughter had been murdered before their eyes not long before. She whispered as much.
The Mother Confessor’s smile widened. ‘Don’t you remember?’ she asked as she leaned close. ‘Don’t you remember what I told you we call him?’
Abby, confused by everything that had happened, couldn’t imagine what the Mother Confessor was talking about. When she admitted she didn’t, the Mother Confessor and the sorceress shepherded her onward, past the grave where Abby had reburied her mother’s skull upon her return, and into the house.
With a hand, the Mother Confessor eased back the door to Abby’s bedroom. There, on the bed where Abby had placed her, was Zedd’s daughter, still sleeping. Abby stared in disbelief.
‘The trickster,’ the Mother Confessor said. ‘I told you that was our name for him.’