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!”
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 toward 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. They kicked up dirt as they 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 caldron 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 color 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 color 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, toward 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 been blackened and shriveled by 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 mumbled, “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, calling something forth from within himself.
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 toward 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 toward 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 toward 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 favor. 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. Abbey thought it a coldhearted 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.”
“And not a very flattering one,” Zedd grumbled as he stepped up behind them.
“But … how?” Abby pressed her fingers to her temples. “I don’t understand.”
Zedd gestured. Abby saw, for the first time, the body lying just beyond the door out the back. It was Mariska.
“When you showed me the room when we first came here,” Zedd told her, “I laid a few traps for those intent on harm. That woman was killed by those traps because she came here intent on taking my daughter from where she slept.”
“You mean it was all an illusion?” Abby was dumbfounded. “Why would you do such a cruel thing? How could you?”
“I am the object of vengeance,” the wizard explained. “I didn’t want my daughter to pay the price her mother has already paid. Since my spell killed the woman as she tried to harm my daughter, I was able to use a vision of her to accomplish the deception. The enemy knew the woman, and that she acted for Anargo. I used what they expected to see to convince them and to frighten them into running and leaving the prisoners.
“I cast the death spell so that everyone would think they saw my daughter being killed. This way, the enemy thinks my daughter dead, and will have no reason to hunt her or ever again try to harm her. I did it to protect her from the unforeseen.”
The sorceress scowled at him. “If it were any but you, Zeddicus, and for any reason but the reason you had, I’d see you brought up on charges for casting such a web as a death spell.” She broke into a grin. “Well done, First Wizard.”
Outside, the officers all wanted to know what was happening.
“No battle today,” Zedd told them. “I’ve just ended the war.”
They cheered with genuine joy. Had Zedd not been the First Wizard, Abby suspected they would have hoisted him on their shoulders. It seemed that there was no one more glad for peace than those whose job it was to fight for it.
Wizard Thomas, looking more humble than Abby had ever seen him, cleared his throat. “Zorander, I … I … I simply can’t believe what my own eyes have seen.” His face finally took on its familiar scowl. “But we have people already in near revolt over magic. When news of this spreads, it is only going to make it worse. The demands for relief from magic grow every day and you have fed the fury. With this, we’re liable to have revolt on our hands.”
“I still want to know why it isn’t moving,” Delora growled from behind. “I want to know why it’s just sitting
there, all green and still.”
Zedd ignored her and directed his attention to the old wizard. “Thomas, I have a job for you.”
He motioned several officers and officials from Aydindril forward, and passed a finger before all their faces, his own turning grim and determined. “I have a job for all of you. The people have reason to fear magic. Today we have seen magic deadly and dangerous. I can understand those fears.
“In appreciation of these fears, I shall grant their wish.”
“What!” Thomas scoffed. “You can’t end magic, Zorander! Not even you can accomplish such a paradox.”
“Not end it,” Zedd said. “But give them a place without it. I want you to organize an official delegation large enough to travel all the Midlands with the offer. All those who would quit a world with magic are to move to the lands to the west. There they shall set up new lives free of any magic. I shall insure that magic cannot intrude on their peace.”
Thomas threw up his hands. “How can you make such a promise!”
Zedd’s arm lifted to point off behind him, to the wall of green fire growing toward the sky. “I shall call up a second wall of death, through which none can pass. On the other side of it shall be a place free of magic. There, people will be able to live their lives without magic.
“I want you all to see that the word is passed through the land. People have until spring to emigrate to the lands west. Thomas, you will warrant that none with magic make the journey. We have books we can use to insure that we purge a place of any with a trace of magic. We can assure that there will be no magic there.
“In the spring, when all who wish have gone to their new homeland, I will seal them off from magic. In one fell swoop, I will satisfy the large majority of the petitions come to us; they will have lives without magic. May the good spirits watch over them, and may they not come to regret their wish granted.”
Thomas pointed heatedly at the thing Zedd had brought into the world. “But what about that? What if people go wandering into it in the dark? They will be walking into death.”