Magician's End Read online

  RAYMOND E. FEIST

  MAGICIAN’S END

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Maps

  Chapter One: Shattered

  Chapter Two: Confrontation

  Chapter Three: Journey I

  Chapter Four: Homeward

  Chapter Five: E’bar

  Chapter Six: Assassins

  Chapter Seven: Journey II

  Chapter Eight: Storm

  Chapter Nine: Journey III

  Chapter Ten: Skirmish

  Chapter Eleven: Trapped

  Chapter Twelve: Journey IV

  Chapter Thirteen: Elvandar

  Chapter Fourteen: Clash

  Chapter Fifteen: Silden

  Chapter Sixteen: Journey V

  Chapter Seventeen: Northlands

  Chapter Eighteen: Travel

  Chapter Nineteen: Magic

  Chapter Twenty: Plans

  Chapter Twenty-One: Unveiling

  Chapter Twenty-Two: Revelation

  Chapter Twenty-Three: Encounters

  Chapter Twenty-Four: Battles

  Chapter Twenty-Five: Conflict

  Chapter Twenty-Six: Attack

  Chapter Twenty-Seven: War

  Chapter Twenty-Eight: Destruction

  Chapter Twenty-Nine: Obliteration

  Chapter Thirty: Aftermath

  Chapter Thirty-One: Renaissance

  Epilogue: Crydee

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  By the same Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  This final book in the Riftwar Cycle, after thirty successful years of writing, is dedicated to you, the reader. Without your support and enthusiasm, I never would have achieved this milestone.

  • CHAPTER ONE •

  Shattered

  CHAOS ERUPTED.

  A light so brilliant it was painful bathed Pug as he instinctively threw all his magic into the protective shell Magnus had erected around them just a moment before. Only Magnus’s anticipation of the trap had prevented them all from being instantly vaporized. Energy so intense it could hardly be comprehended now destroyed everything at hand, reducing even the most iron-hard granite to its fundamental particles, dispersing them into the fiery vortex forming around them.

  The light pierced Pug’s tightly shut eyelids, rendering his vision an angry red-orange, with afterimages of green-blue. His instinct was to shield his face, but he knew the gesture would be useless. He willed himself to keep his hands moving in the pattern necessary to support Magnus’s efforts. Only magic protected them from conditions no mortal could withstand for even the barest tick of time. The very stuff of the universe was being distorted on all sides.

  They were in what appeared to be the heart of a sun. In his studies, Pug knew this to be the fifth state of matter, beyond earth, air, water, and fire, called different names by various magicians: among them, flux, plasma, and excited fire. Energy so powerful that it tore the very essentials of all matter down to their very atoms and recombined them, repeating the process until at some point the plasma fell below a threshold of destruction and creation and was able finally to cease its fury.

  Years of perfecting his art had gifted him with myriad skills, some talents deployed reflexively without conscious effort. The magic tools he used to assess and evaluate were overloaded with sensations he had never experienced in his very long lifetime. Obviously, whoever had constructed this trap had hoped it would be beyond his ability to withstand. He suspected it was the work of several artisans of magic.

  In his mind, Pug heard Miranda asking, Is everyone safe?

  Nakor’s voice spoke aloud: ‘There’s air. We can talk. Magnus, Pug, don’t look. It will blind you. Miranda, we can look.’

  ‘Describe what you see,’ Magnus said to the two demons in human form.

  Miranda said, ‘It’s an inferno hotter than anything witnessed in the demon realm. It has destroyed a hundred feet of rock and soil below us and we are afloat in a bubble of energy. Farther out from where we stand, it’s turning sand to glass. A wall of super-heated air is expanding outward at incredible speed, and whatever it touches is incinerated in moments. As far as my eye can discern, all is flame, smoke, and ash.’

  Less than a minute ago, the four of them had been examining a matrix of magic, which was obviously a lock, but had turned out to be a trap.

  Ancient beings of energy, the Sven-ga’ri, had been protected in a quiet glade atop a massive building built by a peaceful tribe of the Pantathians, a race of serpent-men created by the ancient Dragon Lord, Alma-Lodaka. Unlike their more violent brethren, these beings had been gentle, scholarly, and very much like humans.

  Now that peaceful race had been obliterated. It didn’t matter to Pug that they had been created by the mad vanity of a long-dead Dragon Lord as pets and servants: they had evolved into something much finer and he knew he would mourn their loss.

  ‘It’s fading,’ said Nakor. ‘Don’t look.’

  Pug kept his eyes closed, focusing on his son’s protective shell. ‘You anticipated—’

  Magnus finished his sentence for him: ‘—the trap. It was just one of those moments, Father. The hair on my neck and arms started to tingle, and before I knew it the protective spell was cast. I had created a word-trigger, a power word. I just had no idea the trap would be so massive. Without your help and Moth— Miranda’s …’ He let the thought go unfinished.

  Pug and Miranda both chose to ignore his slip. She wasn’t his mother. She was a demon named Child who was in possession of all his mother’s memories, but Child seemed completely contained within Miranda. It was easy to forget she wasn’t Miranda; the experience was unnerving for all of them.

  Only Belog the demon, now to outward appearances Nakor, seemed untroubled by his situation, and that was wholly in keeping with who Nakor had been in life: a man of unlimited curiosity and a delight in all mysteries. His voice held a note of awe. ‘This was an unspeakably brilliant trap, Pug.’

  Keeping his eyes tightly shut, Pug said, ‘I tend to agree. What’s your thinking?’

  ‘Whoever fashioned this understood it could be investigated only by a very limited number of people,’ said Nakor. ‘First they would have to get past the Pantathians, either by winning their confidence or by brute force. If they reached the matrix, few magic-using demons or lesser magicians, or even very well schooled priests, could have begun to understand the complexities of this lock, or trap, or however you think of it.’

  Miranda said, ‘Only Pug.’

  Pug was silent for a moment, then said, ‘No. It was Magnus. I sensed the lock, but only assumed there was a trap involved. By the time I returned from the Academy, he had already easily won past barriers that would have proved a challenge to me.’

  Magnus began, ‘I’m not certain—’

  Miranda cut him off. ‘That was no hollow praise. I have all your mother’s memories and skills, Magnus, but you … you are the best of both of us, I mean both your mother and father.’

  Nakor chuckled. ‘You’ve long denied it, boy, but in the end, you are beyond us. All you need is a little more experience and age.’

  ‘I find it incongruous to be laughing in the midst of all this chaos,’ said Magnus.

  Suddenly there was an explosion of sound, as if they were being slammed by a hurricane of wind. ‘Don’t look,’ reminded Nakor.

  ‘What was that?’ asked Pug.

  ‘I think that was air returning.’ After a moment, Nakor added, ‘The explosion … I don’t know if I can describe what I’m seeing, Pug. Miranda?’

  After a pause she said, ‘It was more than just light and heat. I felt … shifts, changes … displacement. I’ve never encounte
red its like. I’m not certain if it’s even what we would call magic.’

  Nakor said, ‘It’s not a trick, or at least not one I can imagine. Everything changed.’

  ‘How?’ Pug asked.

  ‘You can open your eyes now, but slowly.’

  Pug did so and at first his eyes watered and everything was blurred. A strange vibration, high-pitched and fast, almost a buzzing, could be felt through the soles of his sandals. He blinked away tears and found himself semi-crouched within the energy bubble his son had erected an instant before the explosion.

  Beyond the shell everything was white to the point of there being no horizon, no sky above or ground below, nor sea beyond a shore. As his eyes adapted to the brilliance he could see faint hints of variation, and after another moment faint shifts in the whiteness, as if colours were present beyond the boundary of the bubble.

  They floated above the bottom of a crater thirty or forty feet below them. The only remnants of earth and rock were beneath their feet, encased in Magnus’s sphere.

  ‘Are you holding us up, son?’

  ‘The spell is, and we’d better be ready for a rude landing when it releases. I can’t keep this sphere intact and move it.’

  ‘Maybe I can help,’ said Miranda. She closed her eyes and the sphere slowly settled to the bottom of the crater.

  Everything was still confounding to the senses as energies continued to cascade around them, every visible spectrum shifting madly outside the bubble. Pug pushed Magnus’s protective sphere gently and it expanded enough that they could all stand easily. After a few more minutes passed, details in the crater wall became recognizable. Slowly, the blinding light faded and varying hues of ivory, palest gold, a hint of blue emerged. At last the brilliance disappeared.

  They blinked as their eyes adjusted to natural daylight, which was dark in comparison to what they had just endured.

  Pug looked around. They were perhaps fifty feet below the surface, surrounded by what appeared to be glass.

  ‘What happened?’ asked Miranda.

  ‘Someone tried to kill us,’ answered Nakor, without his usually cheerful tone. ‘We need to get out of this hole and look around.’

  ‘Is it safe by now?’ asked Magnus.

  ‘Be ready to protect yourself and we’ll find out,’ said Nakor. ‘I think it’s going to be very hot for you two.’

  Magnus studied the little man for a moment, nodded once, and glanced at his father. Pug tilted his head slightly, indicating that he understood the warning and both men encased themselves in protective spells without a word exchanged.

  Magnus closed his eyes for a brief moment and the sphere around them vanished. Pug knelt and touched the glass beneath his feet. ‘Odd …’

  ‘What?’ asked Miranda.

  ‘The energy … I expected it to be more … I’m not sure.’ He looked from his son to Miranda. ‘Both of you are more adept at sensing the nature of a given spell. Does this feel like just an explosion to you?’

  Miranda knelt next to Pug. ‘Feel like an explosion? We lived through it; it was massive and loud.’ She touched the glass beneath them. ‘Oh, yes, I see what you mean.’

  Magnus did likewise. ‘This … the explosion was the by-product.’

  Nakor looked at the three kneeling magicians and said, ‘Please?’

  ‘The energy released was the result of a spell that wasn’t just some spell of massive destruction,’ said Magnus, standing. ‘We need to go.’

  Pug waved his hands without comment. All four rose upward and floated towards the edge of the crater.

  Magnus said to Nakor, ‘As best I can tell, that spell did two things. Besides obliterating everything within a fairly large radius, it also moved us to … I’m not sure where we are, but it’s not where we were when the spell was triggered.’

  They reached the lip of the crater and Pug said, ‘You are right, Magnus. We are not where we were minutes ago.’

  ‘Where’s the sea?’ asked Miranda.

  They looked to the south and where waves had lapped the shore just minutes before, only a long, sloping plain remained. To their rear there was a rising bluff and hills beyond that roughly resembled what they would have seen on the Isle of the Snake Men, but these hills were denuded of any plant life – no trees, no brush, not even a blade of grass could be seen.

  The devastation was complete: nothing moved save by force of the wind. There was sand everywhere: years past this land had turned to desert. They were at the edge of a vast, deep crater, and like the crater, the land around had been fused by the blast, its surface nothing but glass of coruscating colours, as smoke, ash, and dust swirled upward, admitting narrow shafts of sunlight. The wind was blowing the smoke northward, clearing it away quickly. On this world nothing burned, for there was nothing to burn, and the rocks and sand that had been turned molten were rapidly cooling.

  ‘I think we’re still in the same place,’ said Nakor. ‘I mean, an analogous place, as when we travelled to Kosidri.’ Pug, Magnus, and Nakor had discovered that on the other planes of reality the worlds were identical, or at least as much as the variant conditions of that reality permitted. So wherever they were was a world similar in geography to Midkemia. ‘But I think the energy state here is going to prove troublesome soon.’

  Pug nodded.

  Miranda said, ‘I feel a little odd.’

  Magnus said, ‘I remember how we adapted when we travelled to the Dasati realm, father.’

  ‘But this time it feels … different, obverse?’ said Pug.

  ‘A higher state than either the demon realm or Midkemia,’ agreed Miranda. ‘As if there’s too much air?’

  Nakor grimaced. ‘We could be overwhelmed by it if we do not tread cautiously.’

  Each fashioned a protective spell that returned a tiny bubble of protective energy around themselves, reducing the more intense energies in this world to a level their own bodies could accommodate.

  ‘If it’s a higher energy state,’ said Magnus, ‘we did not go into a lower realm. But a higher one. Which means—’

  ‘We’re in the first realm of heaven?’ suggested Miranda.

  Contemplating the desolate landscape, Nakor quipped, ‘It’s obviously overrated. There’s more to offer in the demon realm.’

  They were silent for a moment as they contemplated the barren world around them.

  Pug looked at his son and said quietly, ‘I neglected to say thank you. Had you not returned …’

  Magnus embraced him. ‘You’re my father. No matter how much I may disagree with … what we talked about … I will never leave you when you need me.’

  Father and son held each other for a moment, then separated, returning their attention to the moment. Glancing at Miranda, they saw she had tears on her cheeks. She reached up and wiped them away and in an angry tone they both knew well, said, ‘Damn these memories. I know they are not mine! I know it!’ She crossed her arms across her chest. A bitter chuckle was followed by her observing, ‘Part of me remembers a time I’d have happily torn your heads from your shoulders and devoured your still-beating hearts.’ Then she glanced up and in softer tones said, ‘And part of me feels that I’ve never loved anyone more than I’ve loved you two. Only Caleb was your equal.’ This last came out a hoarse whisper.

  Magnus understood his father well enough to know Pug was fighting an impulse to reach out and embrace the form of his former wife, to comfort a person who wasn’t really there. Softly he said, ‘I can’t call you Mother.’ He looked her in the eye. ‘But I never understood until now just how difficult this must be for you.’ In what was an impulsive act for the usually stoic magician, he took a step, slipped his arms around the demon in human form and held her closely for a brief moment.

  When he stepped away, he saw more tears streaming down the face of the first person in life he had beheld. Powerful emotions tore through him, and he fought back the urge to say more. No matter how much he wished his mother back, alive and before him, it was nothing compared t
o what his father must feel. He put his hand on Pug’s shoulder and said, ‘We must make the best of a terribly confusing and awkward situation, and if we focus on what is before us, perhaps what is behind us will distance itself enough that we may develop new ways of seeing each other.’

  Nakor grinned. ‘That’s very nice, but have you noticed someone is coming towards us?’

  All looked in the direction Nakor indicated and saw the landscape was starting to resolve itself. Approaching them was a familiar figure clad in a black robe, wearing sandals bound upon his legs with whipcord, and using a staff as a walking stick. His hair was black, his posture youthful and his stride vigorous, as he had been in his prime.

  All four were momentarily stunned and finally Pug put voice to their incredulity. ‘Macros!’

  The figure held up his hand. ‘No, though I resemble him, no doubt.’

  Miranda and Nakor exchanged glances and the short gambler asked, ‘You have Macros’s memories?’

  ‘No,’ said the figure.

  ‘Who are you?’ asked Magnus.

  ‘I have no name. You may think of me as a guide.’

  ‘Why do you look like my father?’ asked Miranda.

  The guide shrugged slightly, in a perfect mimicry of Macros. ‘That is a mystery, for I am by nature formless in the mortal realm. I can only speculate, but my conclusion is that I appear to be who you expected me to be. I am sent by One whose Will is Action, but I needed to be in a form with which you could converse.’

  The four exchanged quick glances, then Nakor laughed. ‘It is true that for most of the last hundred or more years I’ve expected to see that rascal’s hand behind every turn and twist of our existence.’

  The others nodded slowly. Pug said, ‘Well, then, guide. What should we call you?’

  ‘Guide serves well enough,’ he answered.

  ‘Where exactly are we?’ asked Magnus.

  ‘The world of Kolgen.’ Guide pointed to the south. ‘Once a majestic ocean lapped these shores, now there is only blight and desolation.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Pug.

  ‘Walk, for we have a long journey if you are ever to return home,’ said the likeness of Macros.