Feynard (32 page)

Snake, who was trying to hide under the same table as
Kevin, kicked him in the head to make more room. Kevin fumbled the flask of toad oil. Jiminy cricket, he felt sick!

“Now
, enough foolishness and petty bickering! I declare your petty council ended!”

So saying, the Dark Apprentice raised his burning staff and unleashed a titanic fireball at the huge central pavilion
which had been erected to house the Council of War. If he had intended to impress, his entrance and dramatic speech would have been sufficient. But the Dark Apprentice was not content. His wizard’s fire scorched through the still afternoon with a hiss of insatiable hunger, and as the pavilion exploded into flame, it tore wholly loose from its supports and flopped over on its side, trapping a group of Unicorns beneath the burning canvas. Next, he turned his attention to the small stage that seated the musicians, spewing a stream of flames from his staff that engulfed the creatures there and set them ablaze.

Zephyr, Amadorn, and several others belatedly counterattacked, but they had been caught unprepared and their combined magic fizzled against the wizard’s fire. The Dark Apprentice guffawed as he swatted their attacks away, as if they were no more than a swarm of buzzing grimflies. Amadorn was the quickest to recover, invoking by the touch of a secret sigil on the shaft of his staff a bolt from the blue heavens that rent a twenty-foot crater beneath
the dark wizard’s pointed slippers. But when the cloud of dirt had rained back to earth again, he stood unmarked and unharmed upon the edge of that steaming ruin. A sharp tang of ozone filled the air.

“Your puny attacks can never defeat the invincible Dark Apprentice!” he roared, and the amplified, magically enhanced power of his voice set the tables a-tumble, wrecked the bar area, and knocked many of the weaker creatures right off their feet. “Now taste the true measure of my might!”

As he strode forward, the Dark Apprentice’s highly polished black boots set the turf ablaze where he trod. He brandished his staff like a flame-thrower, setting two Bears alight and sweeping his fire towards Alliathiune and Zephyr, but the Dryad gave a cry and plunged her hands into the earth. The ground groaned and cracked and bucked before them, rising as a ridge to shield them momentarily from his immense power. The creatures behind scattered with cries of terror and dismay, seeking to hide themselves, to pull the ground over their heads, to take flight–anything to escape the reach of the Dark Wizard’s assault. Only Mylliandawn chose to press the attack. She hurdled the barricade Alliathiune had raised to unleash the full power of her horn upon Ozark’s disciple.

There was a crackle of fire and an angry growl from the other side of the ridge, followed by the sound of metal striking flesh and an awful hush.

“Quick, good Zephyr,” Alliathiune called, “let us raise a shield together. Noble Amadorn, will you add your Druidic powers?”

“At once!” said he,
touching his staff dextrously.

A silvery magic initiated by the Unicorn began to glimmer in the air between them, settling over the venerable Two Hoots, Swiftwing of Dawn, and the Wyvern. The Witch and the Jasper Cat too added their own peculiar brands of magic to the shield, which was swiftly bolstered by a group of junior Unicorns and even more swiftly joined by the cowardly Chief Rodent, whose instinct for self-preservation drew a snicker of disapproval from the tall, thin Witch. Like a lodestone, the shield drew other creatures nearby to its assumed safe haven.

Beneath the table, Kevin unstoppered the gourd and took a swig, but he spilled most of it down his shirt front. He groaned and dropped his head to the grass, watching proceedings from beside the bench as the toad oil burned briefly within him.

“Who is this apprentice?” cawed Swiftwing, smoothing his ruffled feathers with a flick of his great pinions. He was an Eagle of the faraway Tramalian Eyrie, and stood as tall as a man.

“Such power he wields!” spat the Jasper Cat, his emerald tail lashing back and forth in anger and fright. “Is he one of your colleagues, good Zephyr?”

“Not one of my acquaintance!”

There came a roar of flame from beyond the ridge. With a great groaning and creaking, one of the Elliarana began to topple–slowly, majestically–and the Dryads shuddered and wailed. The tree’s demise seemed endless, crashing in slow motion upon the meadow and shaking every creature there with the force of its fall.

“
The Sacred Grove burns!” Alliathiune shrieked, as if the smouldering of the ancient Elliarana was a brand pressing into her own flesh.

“Do not hasten to your death!” growled Amadorn, seeking with a crooked limb to restrain her.

The Dryad lashed out at him, blindly, her whole being taken up with the smouldering trees down there in the Grove. But Zephyr quickly stepped between them, heading off the Dryad, and righted the crippled Druid with his telekinesis.

“Peace, good Dryad!”

The Druid gave a sad little smile, and shook his shaggy mane. The fall had hurt him, that much was plain to see, but he braced himself upright upon his staff with a conciliating smile.

The booming voice shocked them all. “Peace? What peace shall I leave you?”

“The Dark Wizard!” The Chief Rodent gave a despairing wail and tried to squeeze beneath a table, which was too low to accommodate his quivering bulk. His posterior wriggled helplessly in the air.

The black figure had levitated up upon the ridge that Alliathiune had raised, employing it as a platform in order to showcase his superiority.

“Hold fast!” Zephyr said grimly, touching horns with one of the young Unicorns. “Strength to you, noble Scillianstar!”

“I shall not yield,” he returned bravely.

The Dark Apprentice sneered at him. “You shall not yield? You
will
bow before me ere the turn-glass yields its sand! Behold your erstwhile ruler, the ignoble Mylliandawn!”

He tossed down before them the head of Mylliandawn, which tumbled down the slope and came to rest very near
Scillianstar’s hooves. Entombed in some clear, plastic substance, with an expression of unspeakable horror making her eyes bulge grotesquely from her skull, was the head and horn of Mylliandawn, sheared off at the neck as by a gigantic razor. Scillianstar gagged and bolted, passing beyond the ambit of their protective shield.

“No!” cried Zephyr.

“Yes!” laughed the Dark Apprentice, raising his staff to snare the fleeing Unicorn with an invisible tendril of magic. “Ah, young Scillianstar. Come here!”

It was appalling to see how easily he overmastered the young Unicorn. Fighting, bucking and whinnying in terror, the Unicorn was drawn step by protesting step back towards the Dark Apprentice, who meantime having fended off a sneak attack by Alliathiune, leered at her and declared he would feed her to his Trolls.

“Fie, evil one!” she shot back. “Your end is nigh!”

“Oh, and how is that? Down!” he commanded, forcing Scillianstar to his knees. He nullified the effects of the Unicorn’s horn with another wave of his staff, and turned his attention back to the Dryad. He threw his arms wide. “Come, attack me–I dare you! Command the ground to rise up and swallow me! Call lightning from the heavens like your twisted friend here, who resembles nothing more on the Hills than a toad with a wart on his back! Freeze the air around me with your breath. I know, perhaps I will shrink you and use you as a paperweight? I said down!” Scillianstar’s breath
rasped in his throat as the noose was drawn tighter, and the Dark Apprentice forced him over onto his side.

“You will never succeed!” cried Alliathiune, punching her fists at the sky.

But the wizard’s staff sucked up her magic, rendering it useless, and there was a backlash that even through the shield struck her spinning like a top. Again, Zephyr’s telekinesis came to the fore and he broke her tumble somewhat–but despite his efforts, the Dryad was too stunned to rise from where she had fallen, her head lolling loosely upon her neck as consciousness receded.

Once more the Druid Amadorn sought to strike the Dark Apprentice with his skill and cunning, but he too was rebuffed with majestic ease, and crumpled over an invisible blow that blasted him clear of the protecting shield. He fell, senseless and limp, in a heap over
a table.

With a tornado of wind
, the Dark Wizard drove the remaining creatures back, step by begrudging step, until they stood at last near that selfsame table where the Chief Rodent’s quivering haunches blocked the breeze, with his forequarters wholly hidden beneath the polished wooden worktop. There Snake had also hid himself, pretending to be dead and probably wishing the same, and Kevin, too drunk to lift his head.

“Fiend!” roared a new voice, newcomer to the fray. It was the Lurk, and he came charging up from the river, behind and to the left of where the Dark Apprentice stood. He had chosen his moment well. As the hapless Fauns on the Bridge of Storms had learned to their detriment,
Lurks are incredibly fast over short distances, and Snatcher roared his challenge only at the last second. Four tons of armoured Lurk slammed into the wizard like a crazed rhinoceros in full flight.

He had time only to half-raise his staff, before there was an explosion that rivalled the D
ruid’s mighty bolt of lightning, launching the Dark Apprentice backward. The Lurk groaned and hauled himself upright, clearly intent on pursuing the Apprentice, but his left arm hung at an ill angle

“A brave strike, noble Lurk!” cried Alliathiune.

But the wizard, having rolled with the collision to absorb it, and further protected by the brief shield he had been able to raise in the instant before impact, had survived the brunt of the blow–though he stood weakly now, and clutched his ribs in sharp pain, he was able to raise his flaming staff.

Gone was the mighty voice; gone too
, the posturing and arrogance. “You will pay for that!” he shrieked, summoning a stream of hissing fire to immolate the Lurk where he stood. “Burn, you spawn of blackest Shäyol! How dare you challenge Ozark’s disciple?”

But there was one further Lurkish secret he did not know, one to which
Kevin and Zephyr were party following their discussion of anatomy with Snatcher. Lurks, for all their size and bulk, have a musculature comparable to that of a flea–pound for pound, an order of magnitude stronger and more resilient than that of Humans. From a standing start, Snatcher launched himself at his quarry out of that inferno, with flames sheeting and trailing off him like a comet.

Again the Dark Apprentice was taken by surprise. The staff guttered as he gaped in shock at this fiery apparition–but his reactions were credibly swift. He slammed up a shield and ducked aside, spinning and falling to his knees as the Lurk’s hip and thigh struck him a blow that sent him tumbling. Almost instantaneously, Zephyr and Alliathiune seized the opportunity to strike too, and
the Dark Wizard wilted beneath their combined efforts. But again, he was somehow able to absorb and misdirect their attack, and with a jerk of his staff froze Snatcher in place.

“Right,” he panted, fighting to restore the m
antle of his former dignity. “I’ve had enough of your impudence!” Sweeping his black cloak about him, he rose to his feet. “I have given fair warning, late rulers of Driadorn. Your time is at an end! Soon the Blight will sicken your precious Forest and with it, your magic will die–just like this young Unicorn here.”

The Dark Apprentice
clumped his smoking black boot down on Scillianstar’s neck, striking the pose of a mighty hunter. With a smile of pure evil he raised the staff and conjured into existence a tall guillotine, which he positioned over the hapless Unicorn’s neck. Mylliandawn must have been murdered in this manner.

The young Unicorn, seeing the weighty blade prepared to sever his life forever, fell into such a frenzy of struggling that the noose bit severely into his neck and caused blood to foam out of
his nostrils. But the power of the Dark Wizard’s magic was too much for him. Never had the one-horns been treated thus; their magic was unique and innate, and never before mastered by a creature of another race. The Dark Apprentice did not even appear to raise a sweat over controlling Scillianstar.

“Hold, you foul abomination!” cried Zephyr. Snatcher was beginning to overpower the paralysing spell cast upon him, but he may as well have been swimming through treacle for all the good it did. He would not recover in time to rescue Scillianstar.

“I cannot abide this any longer!” So saying, Swiftwing of Dawn made to launch himself at the wizard–but was restrained by Two Hoots. The Jasper Cat too prowled the limits of the shield, with his fur all a-bristle like an angry porcupine, but he was too smart to go out there on his own.

“Where are you from, Dark Apprentice?” called Two Hoots. “Why do you seek to despoil our fair realm?”

A cackle of laughter issued from within that frowning obsidian mask. “No more questions shall I entertain, for my patience is ended, ancient one. It is enough that I am, and that the star of the dawn shall be your nemesis!”

“Let us reason together, mighty–”

“Silence!” thundered the wizard, finding his volume once more. “Shut up, you mangy crow!”

With a kick,
he shook the guillotine. Scillianstar screamed in terror, seeking again and again to trigger the secret magic of Unicorns that allows them as a final resort to take refuge within their horns, but the noose somehow prevented him–and in that screaming was an unbearable, elegiac foretaste of his demise. Kevin had never heard a sound like it, and wished he would never again. It flayed him raw and bloody inside.