Clearly something terrible was happening. Tanis and Brandella climbed the ramparts, clambering their way toward Kishpa, who stood in plain view atop the barricade. When they reached the top, they saw what was driving the elves into a state of abject fear.

"By the gods!" Tanis exclaimed.

The human army had swelled to immense proportions, gaining reinforcements that easily numbered more than five thousand and perhaps as many as ten thousand.

"Where did they all come from?" Brandella wondered, squinting against the sun.

The enemy troops were virtually uncountable, charging toward Ankatavaka like an endless sea of humanity. Their numbers stretched in every direction, entering the open meadows on all three sides of the village. And they kept streaming out of the woods.

The elves didn't have enough arrows to kill this many humans, even if they hit their mark with every one let loose. The odds, they all realized, had become impossible. They were about to be overrun by an army that outnumbered them at least thirty to one.

Yet Tanis was surprised to find Kishpa, a figure in red robes boldly silhouetted against the eastern sky, calmly surveying the oncoming human horde. Tanis looked around for Scowarr and Mertwig, surprised that they were nowhere in sight.

Kishpa, having given Tanis a suspicious stare when the half-elf showed up with Brandella, finally answered his lover's question. 'They came," he said matter-of-factly, "from a spell, and that's how they shall perish."

"Are we imagining them?" asked Tanis.

Kishpa straightened his red robes, fluttering in the morning breezes. "No, it's a duplication spell," he explained. "Most of them are phantom reflections of a much smaller number of real soldiers."

"See there," Kishpa said, and indicated a young, blond human carrying a distinctive quiver tooled in blue and yellow. "Now look there, wading across the stream. And there." Tanis and Brandella followed his pointing finger. A blond warrior carried the same quiver across a creek; not 30 yards from that soldier, a duplicate warrior hurried past a tree.

Kishpa looked pleased with himself, his relaxed smile contrasting. "They might have fooled me," he admitted, "but they overdid it, duplicating far too many soldiers. It made me suspicious, and so I looked more closely. That's when I noticed that too many of them are dressed exactly the same, are holding their bows in the same way, and are running in perfect step with each other. That's when I knew.

'The spell, by the way, is rudimentary," he added, "but I've never seen it done on such a grand scale. There must be at least a half-dozen magic-users in the human camp. If this spell is any indication of their power, none of them are terribly advanced, but, combined, they can come up with very powerful magic."

"Are you strong enough to stop them?" Brandella asked worriedly, putting her arm around the mage. Her brown eyes gazed warmly into his blue ones; Tanis looked away.

"I don't know," the mage replied candidly. "I need to husband my magic, so I must counterattack with a spell that is relatively simple."

"I hope you have something in mind," Tanis said irritably, "because, reflections or not, they're getting awfully close."

"If either Scowarr or Mertwig does his job, then we just might-ah, just in time!" the mage exclaimed, pointing down to just inside the village gate. Little Shoulders skidded to a halt below, holding a small metal box in his hands.

"Open the gate!" Kishpa ordered.

"No!" cried a chorus of elven defenders. The ones who didn't reply looked fearfully at the dissenters but did not move.

"Do as I say!" the mage commanded angrily.

No one moved. Tanis, Kishpa, and Brandella looked into a sea of re- 133 calcitrant, almond-eyed faces. With an oath, Tanis jumped down off the barricade and raced across the cobblestones to the gate. He reached for the pulley rope and was about to yank down on it when, just above him on the battlement, a fearful elf with a knife tried to cut the rope. Instead, Brandella sent an arrow flying through the elf's sleeve, pinning it to the battlement wall.

Tanis hauled on the pulley rope; then, as the gate swung open, the half-elf bowed to the weaver up above. She inclined her head and winked.

Once the gate was open, the mage shouted to Scowarr, "Open your box and empty it onto the ground just outside. Then get back in. And you, Tanis, close the gate!"

Scowarr and Tanis did as they were told.

The human horde was fast closing in, covering the open field between the woods and the village. The sound of their charge was deafening, but Kishpa concentrated on his spell, repeating the same strange words over and over again.

Nothing seemed to be happening-until a terrified cry howled from the front lines of the human army.

19

There were моrе screams from the humans as Tanis scrambled back to the top of the barricade. The half-elf recoiled from the scene below. A giant spider, with scabrous, long legs and an eager mandible, was turning the humans in its path into masses of slashed and bleeding flesh. The human reflections of those who were killed or injured took on the same bloody countenance as the originals, so scores seemed to fall in agony. The creature killed silently, but the din of the victims was deafening. Brandella turned from the sight with a horrified cry; many of the elves reacted in the same way. It wasn't long before the very sight of the hideous creature sent the real soldiers into a headlong retreat, their duplicates instantly following. Those humans who were farther away, however, nocked their arrows and sent them flying in the direction of the gigantic spider.

A rain of wildly aimed arrows filled the air, and, perhaps fearing that they might kill the creature, Kishpa continued jabbering away in a long-forgotten tongue, murmuring sounds that Tanis suspected only Raistlin would have known and understood.

Kishpa, with what Tanis realized was a fine sense of justice, used the same duplication'spell as had his human counterparts. As the mage's words became more intense, the screams from below grew to a soul-shattering extreme as the humans suddenly found themselves facing a growing army of giant spiders.

Spiders will avoid a fight unless they feel threatened and sense that they have no choice. With the barricades behind them, they had only one direction in which they could easily go. And from that direction came painful arrows and thousands of swarming humans.

With the spiders constantly churning their scaly legs in a field of men, it became virtually impossible to tell which of the spiders was the original and which were the magic duplicates. Slaying the right spider might have ended the humans' ordeal, but they had to fight all of them at the same time. Arrows from the elven barricades made the trial that more hellish for the soldiers.

The human army, both real and unreal, fled as one. They turned like ships on a stormy sea, twisting in one wave and then tacking as if with the wind. Feasting on human blood, the real spider followed after them, hungry for more. And the rest of the duplicate monsters followed in a macabre dance of dozens of thin, long, sharp-edged legs that skittered across the open meadow like so many nightmares. The humans were routed.

The elves on the barricades cried with joy at their deliverance. The chant of "Kishpa!" went up among them, echoing into the morning sky.

For his own part, the mage stood slumped against Brandella's shoulder, exhausted. Supporting her lover, the weaver sent Tanis a look that seemed to say, "See? I told you he would need me," and Tanis nodded shortly. A handful of grateful villagers rushed up to their mage and carried him down on their shoulders, Brandella following. The rest of the elves danced on the barricades, showing little of their notorious elven reserve.