The Witch's Daughter (21 page)

Brielle struck again even before her enemy’s fires had completed their work. She pointed a single finger at the ground under Thalasi’s feet and spoke a word of doom. The hard ground became mud, and the Black Warlock dropped in and disappeared from sight.

Brielle replaced her finger with a clenched fist, and the ground returned to its previous solid state. Then the witch waited cautiously. She may have humiliated the Black Warlock, but she did not believe for a minute that her simple trick had destroyed him.

A rumble under her feet confirmed her belief.

The ground exploded into man-sized divots, and Thalasi, a dragon once again, roared up into the air. His fiery breath came on, its fury tenfold. But again Brielle met it with a thick and unrelenting spray of water.

And so it went, back and forth for many minutes, each
magic-user assuming various forms or manipulating the environment to strike out, and the other inevitably countering with appropriate and cunning defensive actions.

And then they were both in their human forms again, facing each other and gasping too hard for breath even to shout out further insults. Thalasi slammed his bony hands together, and the lightning crackled and built.

Brielle put up her mirror in time, and Thalasi created his before the bolt came thundering back. But this time neither would let the charge dissipate. It was time, they both understood, to finally determine who was stronger. Brielle added a second bolt to the dizzying volley, Thalasi a third. Back and forth the lightning crackled, every circuit exacting a toll upon each of the defensive shields.

Brielle stood resolute, drawing on Avalon for further power. Thalasi, though, so far from Talas-dun, his bastion of strength, eventually began to weaken. The witch recognized the waver in his defensive field, and she added yet another blast on the very next rebound.

The darkness of the night was stolen away in the instant of the explosion; the ground rumbled as far away as the talon and human encampments across the Four Bridges, and up in the Crystal Mountains, where the elves were preparing their march. And when the smoke cleared, the Black Warlock sat on his butt, many feet back from where he had begun the encounter, his clothes burned and smoldering.

“You have not seen the last of me!” he cried in defiance. He slammed his fists on the ground, sending two cracks in the earth rushing out toward the Emerald Witch. Brielle easily halted the charge of the gorge, but when she looked back after casting her countering spell, the Black Warlock was gone. She spotted him high in the distance, in dragon form again, flying far away off to the north.

Brielle turned her attention back to her forest, and to the
blackened, savaged oak tree that had absorbed the brunt of the Black Warlock’s initial assault on the wood. The witch stroked the charred bark tenderly, hearing the painful mourn of the great tree’s death throes. For centuries it had stood, one of the cornerstones of Avalon, one of the very first trees nurtured by the magics of Brielle. It had performed its task to perfection, pulling in the wrath of the Black Warlock, accepting the assault of flames with its wide branches so that other, younger trees might escape the devastation.

And the oak had paid with its life.

Brielle remained with the tree until it cracked apart, sending a renewed shower of sparks flying into the air, and toppled with a heavy crash onto the open field beyond the forest’s thick borders.

The witch had won her confrontation with Thalasi, but the effort had cost her dearly, in strength and in the scars that would linger for many years on this edge of the forest. And the battle had unsettled Brielle as well, for she knew, and no doubt Thalasi knew, too, that if they had met in combat anywhere other than Avalon, the very heart of Brielle’s powers, the outcome would surely have been different.

The only weakness the witch had detected in the Black Warlock was the subtle discord between the two spirits inhabiting the single being. But this gave Brielle no cause for hope; what remained of the individual spirits of Martin Reinheiser and Morgan Thalasi seemed diminutive and was likely fading away quickly. The bond between the spirits would only strengthen, Brielle supposed, and when the joining of the two was truly completed, the resulting being would be even more formidable.

She must take care not to turn her back on that one for even an instant.

Especially over the next few hours. For Thalasi had gone north, not back to his talons in the south. Brielle could guess
his destination easily enough. Beyond the northern ridge of Avalon, in a box canyon, loomed the foulness of Blackamara, a tangled, evil swamp. Thalasi would find solace in that pit of perversion as surely as Brielle gathered her strength in Avalon. And within the dark gloom of Blackamara, the Black Warlock would be virtually untouchable while he recuperated.

Brielle slumped heavily against an unharmed elm, asking the earth to give her still more power this dark night. She needed to rest, but she knew that she could not. Thalasi lurked but a few short miles away, and her forest had to be defended by magical wards in case the Black Warlock decided to pay another visit on his way back to the southland.

With a last look to the dead oak, Brielle gritted her teeth and started off along Avalon’s borders, determined that Morgan Thalasi would not catch her or her forest unawares ever again.

S
TILL ENCASED IN
the body of a dragon, the Black Warlock slammed through the thick canopy of Blackamara, tearing vines and splintering limbs, and swooped down to the swamp’s muddy ground in a furious rush.

“Never again!” he roared, and the sound of his dragon voice echoed off the high cliff walls surrounding the swamp, shook the trees in Avalon to the south, and sent an alert running through the encampment of the elves who had gathered on the field of Mountaingate.

Then Thalasi walked as a man again, startled by his own outburst. He did not know how much strength Brielle had left to her, but he didn’t think it prudent to so blatantly announce his whereabouts. He stalked through the dark, twisting boughs, taking no heed of the snakes and poisonous spiders and darker things that roamed the gloom of the Blackamara night.

New trees did not grow in this swamp, and the fetid water rarely shifted. Little had changed in the twenty years since the Black Warlock had walked through here, and after a few minutes he began to recognize some of the paths. He followed their winding course up to the base of the high
eastern wall, and then south a short distance. Bones of hundreds of victims, man and horse, who had fallen over the cliff during the infamous Battle of Mountaingate, littered the region, but the Black Warlock knew exactly where to look, and soon he had found the open grave of an old companion.

“Ah, Captain Mitchell,” he whispered, bending low to consider the skull and jumble of bones, relieved to find them fairly intact. Thalasi wanted to go after the spirit right then, to relieve his embarrassment over the defeat he had suffered by bringing forth the commander who would lead his army to victory. But little remained of the Black Warlock’s power; Brielle had taken everything he had to throw at her. He could not hope to cast such a powerful enchantment in his present state, and he realized that if he truly wished to regain his strength, the sun would rise and ride across to the western sky before he again opened his eyes.

“A curse upon that witch,” he spat, wondering how his talon army would fare throughout the next day without his guidance and protection. Would Brielle recover faster than he? And what of Istaahl; would the White Mage sense his absence and use the advantage to strike out against the wizardless army?

He shook the thoughts from his head. Even if the talons were scattered by the forces—magical and otherwise—of his enemies, the cost would be worth the gain. Thalasi knew now that he could not possibly hope to break through to the eastern fields without a trusted general guiding the movements of the army. “And you,” Thalasi growled, holding the skull up before his dark eyes, “shall be that general.”

And then he was off, back toward the very heart of Blackamara, which was manifested in the form of a gigantic black willow tree. He knew the place well, for this embodiment of perversion Morgan Thalasi himself had planted centuries before.

He arrived shortly after dawn, seeing the monstrosity in all its evil splendor. The willow loomed a hundred feet in height, its trunk three times the girth of a fat man, and was supported by a root system so vast that its underground tendrils reached out to the perimeters of the swamp. Naught but evil could fester above those black roots, transforming, perverting, the pureness and health of the earth into a foul and wicked thing. All around beyond the boundaries of Blackamara the land was a tribute to the majesty and beauty of nature—the northern fringes of Avalon were only a mile or so to the south—but within the borders of the swamp, on the ground tainted by the roots of Thalasi’s black tree, the power of the earth had become something sinister indeed.

Brielle and Ardaz had joined forces and attacked the place once, many centuries before. They had sent their magic crashing down upon the swamp, splintering hundreds of trees and tearing the spoiled ground asunder. But the black willow had survived, too entrenched to be displaced even by so powerful an attack, and the swamp had only grown up again, thicker and more evil than before.

Thalasi viewed the tree now and was comforted. He found a nook in the massive trunk and curled up to sleep, using the skull of Hollis Mitchell as his pillow.

All through the day, the black willow sent its power flowing into the weary body of its creator, and when Thalasi awoke, the sun low in the western sky, he felt stronger than he had the previous day, even before he had tangled with the Emerald Witch.

He stroked the tree gently, his child, then climbed onto the lowest branches. “Awake, heart of Blackamara,” he called softly. “The master is come; the master needs your help.”

The tree rustled quietly though no breeze blew through its widespread branches. Thalasi’s evil smile widened. He spoke again to the willow, louder, using the arcane tongue of the
wizards. Enchantish, it was called, and when employed by the other wizards of Ynis Aielle, its many multisyllabic words and tight phrases normally rolled out in a melodic chant speaking to the harmony of the universe. But from the mouth of the Black Warlock, enchantish sounded an evil and harsh language indeed, the croak of demons and ghouls, the discord that offended the purity of the natural world.

But no less powerful came the twanging chanting of Morgan Thalasi. He was a master of the third school of magic, a school that did not ask but rather demanded cooperation from the powers of the universe. Each cracking syllable sent a thrilled shudder through the trunk of the black tree.

He chanted for over an hour, running through a ritual he had devised many years before but had never needed to attempt. Certainly any encounter with the realm of the dead would not be without risk.

The willow answered the Black Warlock’s call with the fall of a broken branch, about five feet long and three or four inches in diameter. Thalasi scooped the gift up in his hands, sensing the power the tree had put into it.

“Serpent!” the Black Warlock commanded, and the dark wood became a venomous viper writhing across Thalasi’s skinny wrists and forearms. The serpent head wriggled to within an inch of the Black Warlock’s face, and he blew into it gently, soothing the enchanted beast.

He knew what he must do now, though any conscious thought of the act surely sent a shiver running through his spine. Yet this being that he had become was much more than mortal man, he knew, so he tilted his head to the side, offering his bared neck to the serpentine gift of the black willow.

The snake coiled and struck, sinking its venom-dripping fangs deep into Thalasi’s neck. But the snake had not bitten in any attempt to inject its killing poison—and the poison
would have had little effect on the likes of the Black Warlock anyway. Instead the snake’s vampiric fangs drew out the lifeblood of Thalasi, sent the potent fluids of the Black Warlock into the thing that would become his magical staff. As Thalasi felt his strength draining away, his knees buckled under him, but still he held the serpent close, giving it every ounce of power he could spare.

He would regain his strength in time, but that which he gave to the staff would be eternal.

And when it was over, sometime later, the snake became a broken branch again, though now its surface shone with ebony smoothness and its length verily vibrated with evil power. Holding, cradling, the wicked thing, Thalasi recovered his strength quickly. They were joined, blood in blood, he and his staff, his extension of perversion.

The Staff of Death.

“Greetings, my lost friend,” Thalasi said to Mitchell’s skull. He tapped the object with his staff, and a red light appeared in each of the empty sockets.

“Good,” murmured the Black Warlock. “You have heard my call. How do you find the realm of the dead, Hollis Mitchell?”