Willow (26 page)

Then the Nockmaars sallied down the ramp and the fight swirled close. His horse shied and pranced away. Airk galloped up and lowered Willow to the ground. Then the two friends rode together, roaring in laughter, their swords whirling, cutting down a charge of five Nockmaar troopers.

“Willow! Raziel! There’s another way to the tower. Here!” Sorsha hurried them through a doorway and into a dark and narrow corridor.

Behind, Airk waved his bowmen forward. He pointed up the ramp where Kael had marshaled a phalanx of troops. “Let’s squash ’em!” he yelled, and he and Madmartigan led the charge.

For Franjean and Rool, cowering in the very bottom of Airk Thaughbaer’s saddlebag, all was confusion—a mayhem of blows, and lunges, and the terrible sounds of dying. They knew only that men and horses were perishing around them, and that this was a fight without pity or quarter. Airk’s great horse took a Nockmaar bolt in the thigh, and another in the neck, launched from crossbows on the parapet, and at the same moment a pikeman danced close and laid open its stomach, spilling its intestines into the mud. The beast fell, shrieking. Franjean and Rool were thrown out of the saddlebag and into the thick of the fighting. They found themselves surrounded by plunging hooves and singing arrows. They scampered for safety under a flight of stone steps and ventured out only once for the rest of that battle—to hamstring a huge trooper who had cornered Madmartigan. The man dropped to his knees and Madmartigan ran him through. “Thank you!” he shouted, waving under the steps. “Maybe you’re not so bad!” Then he was challenged again and drawn back into the battle.

Roaring like a bull, Airk Thaughbaer had meanwhile fought his way out of the mud, up the steps, and along the parapet to a cauldron of boiling oil. Directly below, a squad of Nockmaar troops had linked their shields together and were now advancing, a formidable human machine, threatening the flank of Airk’s brigade. Straining mightily, Airk reversed the apparatus of the cauldron and tipped it, spilling boiling oil down on this armored unit. Men died hideously beneath those shields, flayed alive, broiled in their breastplates. Their awful wail rose above the clamor and drew Kael’s attention from across the courtyard. His gaze locked with Airk’s; their war cries clashed. Kael gripped his sword. He hefted his mighty axe. Airk strode down to meet him.

Their combat went unseen in the melee by everyone but Franjean and Rool. For decades afterward, as their beards grew long and white, they would describe that fight to circles of wide-eyed brownies in the Woods of Cherlindrea: how Kael fought like a demon possessed, raining blows so thick and fast on Airk Thaughbaer that his arms blurred and his axe struck fire off the stones of Nockmaar; how Airk fought bravely under that savage attack, ducking, weaving, striking back, until at last Kael maneuvered him to the top of the ramp and forced him down; how Airk Thaughbaer lost both balance and life in that muddy place, hacked by Kael’s axe, pierced by Kael’s sword; how Kael kicked him without honor over the edge and into the mud below; and how Madmartigan, seeing this last act, hurled his sword spearlike into the antagonist he was facing and ran to his old friend . . .

“Airk!”

“If you . . . ever stand . . . on my grave, Madmartigan . . . I’ll haunt . . .”

Madmartigan wiped the blood and mud from his friend’s face. He held Airk while life faded from his eyes. He freed the hilt of Airk’s great weapon from his locked fingers. “Give me your sword, old friend, and I’ll win this war for you.”

Kael was not the first to feel the bite of that sword that day, but he was the last. Madmartigan fought his way through to him, and when at last they came face-to-face on the parapet, they were directly beneath the queen’s tower, in the first rays of the rising sun. Their duel was even more spectacular than Airk’s, but this time it was Madmartigan who rained the blows on his opponent, swinging Airk’s broadsword as if it were a mere rapier, battering that grim death’s-head helmet, knocking the axe spinning from Kael’s left hand, slicing into Kael’s side above the hip bone. The general fought with all the desperate strength left to him, but he was, finally, merely human. He was tired in body, tired in soul, tired of life—tired, perhaps, even of killing.

Perhaps (Franjean and Rool would suggest when they told this tale to admiring fairies) enough of his heart remained for him to know the wickedness of his cause, to know he should make an end. Perhaps that was why, at last, he did not strike when Madmartigan gave him an opening by lifting Airk’s sword high with both hands. Next instant, it plunged down through Kael’s breastplate and ripped open his heart. Kael’s last sound, as he fell backward over the parapet and into the moat, was laughter.

Swiftly after that the battle in the courtyard ended. Nockmaar troops threw down their weapons. Officers fled. A few witless trolls continued to shriek and gibber from niches in the battlements, hurling poisoned darts until they were picked off by archers. A few Death Dogs, loosed in the depths of Nockmaar by their trainers, hurtled into the last of the fray and onto the weapons of Galladoorn lancers. But soon the fighting ceased. Except for the moans of the wounded, the courtyard fell silent.

The rising sun went dark.

The real battle, the one in the conjuring room, was about to begin.

Grimly, Sorsha had led Willow and Raziel through corridors and up staircases that she knew well. Once she beheaded a troll who leaped snarling from an alcove, and once a Death Dog that came pelting in silence, eyes fixed on her throat. Soon they were climbing the corkscrew stairs that wound up to Bavmorda’s tower. Below, horses roared and men bellowed. Steel struck steel. Steel struck stone.

Willow’s heart had faltered as he peered down through the arrow-slits into the courtyard and saw Kael, saw the strength of the Nockmaar force. Yet he climbed doggedly, following Sorsha, followed by Raziel.

At the top, harsh light throbbed under the oaken door of the conjuring room and spilled down the wet stairs. From behind the door came Elora’s small wail, and overriding it, killing it, the shriek of Bavmorda.

Willow faltered utterly at that sound. His heart urged him on but his body failed him. He sank trembling to his knees. “No. I can’t go on.”

“It’s all right,” Raziel said, laying a hand on his shoulder as she went past. “You don’t have to, Willow.”

She murmured a chant to the barred door and it slammed open, sucking such a draft of air up the stairway that it flattened Willow where he knelt and snuffed the flames on the sacred tapers.

Bavmorda stood lost in the distant intricacies of the Ritual, her arms lifted to the dawn. The wind swept around her, whipping at her sleeves and the hem of her gown. “Raziel!” she said, turning slowly.

She had begun to change in the earlier stages of the Ritual, and now, toward its end, she had become unrecognizably grotesque. Her eyes had sunk into dark pools; her mouth twisted in a snarl of frightful depravity. Bereft of grace, bereft of dignity, her body had grown taut, her movements tense and quick, like those of spiny creatures in the froth of the sea. Crouching, she turned. “Raziel . . .” Her laughter was like the grating of pebbles. “Good! Now you will witness my greatest triumph!”

Sorsha stepped forward and halted abruptly, frozen by the icy wall of Bavmorda’s hatred. “Mother . . .”

“You! Get back! How dare you speak to me! You’re pathetic!”

“She has discovered kindness,” Raziel said from the doorway. “She has discovered love.”

“So!” Bavmorda hissed. She crept closer, arms stretching, fingers spread like talons. “Then you have seen your father.”

“I have seen what you did to him. But he’s alive in spite of you!”

“Traitor child! I shall destroy you now as if you had never been! You will become less, now. Ever less! Less than a child, less than a seed, less than a single germ!” Bavmorda signaled the three priests from the shadows and they slid forward like one body, beginning in unison the Chant of Infinite Diminishment.

Sorsha cut them down. She did it cleanly—three strokes of her sword across their necks. She stepped across their bodies toward the altar where Elora Danan lay, whimpering pathetically. “You will not kill this child!”

“Away!
Avaggu strokt
!”

The rising sun vanished. Lightning struck through the roof, paralyzing Sorsha. Bavmorda’s curse lifted her off her feet and hurtled her backward toward a wall of spikes where traitors were pinned, where truculent trolls and laggard servants were skewered, where all those were hung who gravely displeased Bavmorda in the circle of her conjuring room. But, before Sorsha could be impaled, a second spell slid between her and the spikes, and against its blessed cushion she slipped to the floor, unconscious.

So, she did not see the last battle. Only Willow saw; Willow, quaking in mortal terror but summoning enough courage to creep to the top step and peer over.

“You have gained strength since we last met!”

“I have Cherlindrea’s wand. See.” Raziel raised her hand, and an axe which Bavmorda had conjured and sent hurtling toward her halted in midair, and hung. “You cannot defeat our combined powers, Bavmorda!” She turned the axe and sent it flying back. “Elora Danan will be empress! The prophecy will be fulfilled!”

Bavmorda exploded the axe with a gesture of her fist. She scuttled behind her stone crucible. She swayed, muttering, claws beckoning. Stone gargoyles on the wall behind Raziel grew flesh, writhed free, slid from their perches, reaching for her.

“Bellanockt!”
Raziel spun and blasted them. They burst, splattering like jellyfish.

The queen laughed. “You believe you are my match? Never! My Ritual has undone the prophecy! The child’s energy will be obliterated!
Strockt
!”

Charms, chants, countercharms—all flew thick and fast, and with them such berserk violence that Willow cringed whimpering against the steps. He watched.

“Avaggdu suporium avaggdu!”

He saw Raziel enveloped in fire which could not consume her. He saw fireballs and lightning bolts carom wildly off the walls, narrowly missing Elora.

“Furrochk! Furrochk lithrak!”

He saw the room plunged into a deep freeze, howling with arctic winds, and Bavmorda clenched in a block of ice so cold that smoke rose from it. He heard her laughter echoing, saw the ice shatter, felt the searing blow of her curse as she hurled Raziel to the floor, toppled a pillar on her, and scuttled forward, whipping cords of fire across Raziel’s face. He saw Raziel struggle to clasp her fallen wand, lift it, and hurl Bavmorda against the ceiling, against pillars and the wall of spikes, against buttresses and gargoyles’ claws until Willow was sure that the queen must be cut to ribbons.

“Hither walha! Tuatha la!”

Up Bavmorda rose, blasting the wand out of Raziel’s hand and sending it spinning on the slimy floor. Ghastly creatures sprang out of whatever it touched. A chair turned into a five-headed coil of snakes, each with an agonized human face, a thing so appalled at life that it swarmed to a window and hurled itself out. A table became a gelatinous mass with myriad teeth that slid gnashing at Willow. He pounded out its life with a bronze candlestick.

“Elora . . .” Willow murmured. Without thinking he crept into the room and crawled along the wall toward the altar where the child lay.

Torn and bloody, whirling in the chaos they had created, the two sorceresses at last came to grips with one another. In that final encounter it was Bavmorda who drew quicker on untapped reserves of strength. It was Bavmorda who triumphed. Her nails raked Raziel’s face. While Raziel groped blindly, her eyes full of blood, Bavmorda’s hand closed like iron claws on her throat and wrung out the last of her consciousness.

Raziel sank to the flagstones.

Bavmorda uttered a hoarse cry, part laugh, part curse, part howl of triumph.

The door of the chamber slammed shut. The winds ceased.

Stiff, hunched, arms spread and bent, Bavmorda turned in the silence and faced Willow with Elora in his arms. “Bring back that child! And who are you?”

He held the child tight, her small head against his heart. She gave him strength, enough to say clearly. “I am Willow Ufgood. I am a sorcerer greater than you, Bavmorda.”

“Ha!” Bavmorda stared at the destruction and the horrors the fight had spawned. “Put her on the altar!” She gestured at the twelve candles and they sprang into flame. She pointed to the gong, and a ghostly reverberation echoed—the thirteenth. She pointed to the thirteenth candle.
“Avaggdu tuatha . . .
”

“Wait!” Willow groped for the last of the magic acorns given to him by the High Aldwin, found it, and threw it.

Bavmorda caught it.

She watched her hand turn to stone, watched her arm begin to petrify. Her eyes rolled back, white orbs in black sockets. She groaned. Her teeth ground together. She reached down a final time, down into the depths of sorcery for the means to confront this threat. She uttered a charm like the cry of a waking reptile.

Willow watched her wrist bend as flesh and sinew returned. He saw her fingers clench, pulverizing the acorn. He saw her hand open and brown powder drift across Fin Raziel’s body.

“Is
that
the extent of your power, fool? Now you will see
my
power. Now you will see the Ritual completed. Place the child on the altar!”

“No! You hag! You murderess! With my magic I’ll send Elora into . . . into a realm where Evil cannot touch her!”

“There is no such place.”

“Helgafel swath! Ben helgafel!”
Willow chanted.
“Bairn off danu famoww . . .”

Bavmorda grunted contemptuously.

“You’re no sorcerer! You’re a charlatan! A clown! You will go with the child!” She turned and beckoned. Cherlindrea’s wand flew from Raziel’s limp hand and into hers.

In that instant, Willow whipped his cloak and Elora vanished.

“What
! Impossible!” Bavmorda scuttled forward. “Lightning!” As she lifted the wand, her gown brushed against the lip of the last bowl laid ready on the platform of the great crucible, and thick fluid spilled over and around her feet. She had only an instant to realize what had happened; an instant to understand that her conjuring, driven by weird fate, had twisted back upon her. An instant to know that she herself—all that she had been or would have been—was the victim of her Ritual of Obliteration.