Chapter 10

"Praise Jannath the Golden Goddess! It works! It works!"

Carried away, Candlemas whirled and grabbed the first person at hand, a wispy lesser mage named Jacinta. Two other mages laughed to see the chubby mage dance with the young woman, then laughed harder when he grabbed their hands and swung all three in a circle. Farm hands, gathered to witness the miracle, clapped their hands and hooted and stamped their feet.

The scene was a remote valley amidst steep hills covered with ash and elm trees, bottomed by a trio of jewel-like lakes. At the head of the valley was a small square keep of black stone and a few peasant cottages. The floor of the valley, split by a glistening stream, was not farmed in typically ancient meandering lots, but quartered with geometric precision and planted with every type of grain crop: wheat, barley, rye, spelt, oats, bran, timothy… It was near a small bridge over the stream, at the sharp edge of the wheat field, that magicians capered like children.

"Whew!" Candlemas huffed to a halt. Two hundred and fifteen years old, he was still in his prime, but long hours and good food had slowed him down. Dressed in a plain brown smock and rope sandals, pudgy and bald with a bushy black beard, an observer would never know Candlemas was a leading mentalist of his time. In fact, hardly anyone in the Netherese Empire, archwizard or lowest peasant, knew where Candlemas was, or what he'd been attempting. And after three long years "I've done it! We've done it, for you've all helped, my friends! And you shall reap the rewards, and the ages shall sing praises to your names! But come, let us watch!"

With brown, work-worn hands, Candlemas parted wheat stalks and ran amidst them. Lifting his head high, he could see how, ahead in a wandering line, wheat was stained a bright red like rust. But when he brushed the stalks with his hands, the red dust was knocked free to shimmer down like fiery snow and disappear amidst the yellow stalks. Candlemas laughed at the sight.

"Oh, they will sing praises to my name, just as Sunbright prophesied!"

"Milord?" asked Jacinta, who was thin and colorless as wheat. "What prophecy is that?"

"Eh? Oh, it was-it's a long story," he said. "Never mind. Look ahead! The spell has jumped the line! It's working on the barley!" He let out another fierce howl that almost cracked his throat, then stopped running, and stood puffing and grinning.

"You see," Candlemas told the three gathered mages, "I knew, I mean, a shaman friend of mine… This rust, this crop blight, began-what was it-four years back? From the start I knew it was trouble. Lady Polaris brought it to my attention in Castle Delia, and ordered me to fix it-as if that were simple. The rust ate the heart of the wheat, hollowed the kernels into empty shells, then it spread to other grains, even jumped to apple trees and peaches, which made no sense. A disease stays with its host, usually. It doesn't attack everything living. I thought we'd never figure it out, but a friend of mine, a barbarian shaman if you can believe it, prophesied I would find a cure, and we have!"

The mage's voice trailed off as he remembered his enforced adventuring to the future. How frustrated he'd been as steward to the estates of Lady Polaris, when suddenly he was ripped up and transported to the future, where he witnessed the destruction of the empire.

And he remembered how, returned to his own time, he'd found a new goal in life, and succeeded. This morning, as the sun rose, he'd brought out a potion, one of thousands he'd experimented with. It contained brimstone and antimony, quicksilver and iron filings, fennel and cuckoo's pintel, and lungwort and foxglove. He'd chanted to Mystryl, Mother of Magic; and Jannath, Grain Goddess, She Who Shapes All. He'd invoked spells by the dozen: Prug's plant control, Anglin's wall, Fahren's glitterdust, Shan's web. Then, kneeling, almost weeping with exhaustion, he'd dumped the potion at the roots of the rust-ridden wheat that gleamed like blood in the dawn light.

And performed a miracle. For the earth bubbled and seethed where the potion spilled, and a soft green glow enwrapped the leaning stalks of wheat. Like a green fire, the spell whisked through the field. And where it touched, rust fell away like dust, leaving the young kernels green and healthy and growing, fit food for man and beast. Nor did the spell quit, but took strength from the land itself, and spread out in rippling waves, cleansing all the crops of the blight and moving on to purify more growth.

For the first time in decades, Candlemas looked out over his work and felt pride. The last successful spell he'd completed had been-when? When he'd jerked himself and Sunbright and Knucklebones back from the future. Yet that glow of pride, his second-greatest accomplishment after today's, still haunted him, for in that moment he'd lost the only woman he ever loved. She'd chosen to remain with her beloved city, and had died with it. Since then, Candlemas had been alone.

"I wish," he murmured aloud, "I wish Aquesita could see my triumph. That would make it perfect…"

"Perfection isn't for mortals," scratched a voice behind him. "It's for gods, and the dead. Such as am I."

Startled, Candlemas and his attendant mages whirled to confront-a monster.

The creature loomed over them like some scarecrow burned to cinders. Its mineral-glistening body was naked, without ears or eyelids, like nothing they'd ever seen. Yet, as Candlemas stared into the monster's bulging blue eyes, he found something familiar.

"You!" Candlemas shrieked. "Jergal get thee gone! I know you… by all the gods!"

"Yes!" From the slash of a mouth came a dry chuckle, "You know me. You helped give me this hideous form!"

Despite himself, Candlemas backed from the monster, but tripped in a tangle of wheat and fell on his fat rump. The lesser mages scattered through the grain. The farm folk were long gone.

Enjoying Candlemas's terror and surprise, the black monster casually raised claws to either side. With a whispered incantation, "Worm food!", twin bolts of dull brown lightning exploded from its palms.

Candlemas watched in horror as the bolts overtook his assistants, enfolded all three in brown carapaces like insects. Then the brown hulls split in a hundred places like old parchment. For an eyeblink, the mage saw all three standing frozen, as if unharmed. Then they fell apart.

First to drop off where their fingers, ears, noses. Their flesh split into thousands of long, wriggling tubes, like maggots or earthworms. The skin of their faces followed, leaving their skulls bare. Their brains boiled into writhing pink nests of worms, as did their organs. Within a minute, the humans were reduced to heaps of insect-like obscenities wriggling and boring through fresh white bones.

Candlemas was too stunned to look away, to fall down, to be sick. He just stared, until the monster rasped again, "Like that spell? I learned it in the deeps, dear Candlemas. I learned much in my own personal hell. Amusing, isn't it, when you think I created the place? That I couldn't know it?"

"What?" The pudgy mage craned up to the monster's staring blue eyes. "Your own… oh, by the Pitiless One."

"No pity," cooed the monster. "Only pain. I'd fashioned a pocket of hell to punish my enemies. You, among others, for you betrayed me. But Polaris, she who'll die most exquisitely, turned the tables on me. She stripped me of skin, remember that? Peeled me like a chicken so I'd feel the punishments with every nerve end. Then she hurled me into my own private hell for a year, that I might suffer for my disobedience. And how long ago was that, dear 'Mas?"

"Wh-What?" the mage stuttered. He couldn't look away, hypnotized like a bird before a serpent. "Uh, it was a-a year-"