The Stanger’s Hands
                            TAD WILLIAMS

Tad Williams became an international bestseller with his very first
novel, Tailchaser’s Song, and the high quality of his output and the
devotion of his readers has kept him on the top of the charts ever since.
His other novels include the Memory, Sorrow and Thorn series (The
Dragonbone Chair, Stone of Farewell, To Green Angel Tower), the
Otherland series (City of Golden Shadow, River of Blue Fire, Mountain of
Black Glass, Sea of Silver Light), Caliban’s Hour, Child of an Ancient City
(with Nina Kiriki Hoffman), and The War of The Flowers. He is currently
finishing the Shadowmarch series (Shadowmarch, Shadowplay, and
Shadowrise). In addi-tion to his novels, Williams writes comic books for
DC Comics (Aquaman, The Next, Factory) as well as film and television
scripts. He lives with his family in the San Francisco Bay Area.

        In the ingenious story that follows, he suggests that the problem
with using magic to get your Heart’s Desire is that you might actually get
it. . .

                                    ****



     P
EOPLE in the village had been whispering for days about the two
vagabonds in Squire’s Wood, but the boy Tobias was the first to speak to
them.

     Tobias was a somewhat wayward lad, and the fact that he should
have been grazing his father’s sheep on the hill above the forest at that hour
more or less assured the sheep in question would be wandering along the
shady edges of the wood instead, with Tobias wandering right behind them.

      It was not until he saw a drift of smoke twining like a gray scarf
through the trees that the boy remembered that strangers had been seen in
the wood. He felt a moment of fear: why would anyone live out of doors in
the cold nights and flurries of autumn rain if they were God-fearing folk?
Only robbers and dangerous madmen dwelt under the un-sheltered sky.
Everyone knew that.
        If he had been a fraction less headstrong, Tobias would have turned
around then and hurried back to the hillside, perhaps even remembering to
take his father’s sheep with him, but there was a part of him, a strong part,
that hated not knowing things worse than anything. It was the part that had
once caused him to pull the leg off a frog, just to find out what it would do.
(It did very little, and died soon after with what Tobias felt guiltily certain was
an accusatory look in its bulging eyes.) It was also the reason he had
dented his father’s best scythe when he had used it to try to cut down a
tree, and why he had dumped the contents of his mother’s precious sewing
basket all over the ground—a search for knowledge that ended with Tobias
spending all afternoon in the fading light on his hands and knees, locating
every last needle and pin he had spilled. Once this rebel voice had even
led him several miles out of the village, on a quest for the town of Eader’s
Church, which he had heard was so big that the streets actually had names.
His father and two other men had caught up to him an hour after sunset as
he sat exhausted and hungry by the side of the road. He had got a whipping
for it, of course, but for young Tobias whippings were part of the cost of
doing business.

       So now, instead of turning and leaving the woods and its perilous
inhabitants behind (for the sake of his father’s livestock if nothing else), he
followed the trail of smoke back to its source, a small cookfire in a clear-ing.
A small man with a ratlike face was tending the flames, his wrinkles made
so deep and dark by grime he looked like an apple-doll. His large
companion, who sat on a stone beside the fire and did not look up even
when Tobias stepped on a twig and made the little man jump, was so odd
to look at that the boy could not help shivering. The large man’s head was
shaved, albeit poorly in some places, and the skull beneath the skin bulged
in places that it should not. His bony jaw hung slack, the tongue visible in
the space between top and bottom teeth, and although he did not seem
blind, the eyes in the deep sockets were dull as dirty stones.

     If the big man was paying no attention, the little man was. He stared at
Tobias like a dog trying to decide whether to bark or run.

      “Your wood’s too wet,” the boy told him.

      “What?”

    “You’ll get mostly smoke and little fire from that. Do you want
smoke?”

       The small man frowned, but in dismay, not anger. “I want to cook this
fish.” He had the sound of a southerner, the words stretched and
mis-shapen. Tobias wondered why they couldn’t learn to speak properly.
He squinted at the man’s supper with the eye of an experienced angler. “It’s
small.”

      “It’s better than starving,” the man pointed out.

      “Well, then, I’ll show you.” Tobias quickly found enough dry wood to
rebuild the fire and within a short time the little man was cooking the fish
over it on a long stick. His large companion still had not moved or spoken,
had not even seemed to notice the newcomer in their camp.

     “Thanks for your kindness,” the small man said. “I am Feliks. “We are
new to this.”

      “My name’s Tobias,” the boy said, basking in the glow of his own
helpfulness. “What does that mean, ‘new’?”

      “We have been living somewhere there was food.” Feliks shrugged.
“The food ran out.”

     Tobias stared at the other man, who still gazed at nothing, only the
slow movement of his chest behind his dark, travel-worn robe showing that
he was something other than a statue. “What’s his name?”

       Feliks hesitated for a moment. “Eli.” He said it in the southern way, the
last syllable rising like a shorebird’s cry—Eh-lee. “He was my master, but
he ... something happened to him. He lost his wits.”

      Tobias now examined the big man with unhidden interest—if he had
no wits, it couldn’t be rude to stare, could it? “What happened?”

       “The roof fell on him.” Feliks took the fish from the stick, burning his
fingers so that he almost dropped it—Tobias was amused by how many
things the man didn’t know how to do—and then cut it into two pieces with a
knife, handing the larger piece to the silent giant. Eli moved for the first
time; he took the fish without looking at it, put it in his mouth, and chewed
with bovine patience. Feliks began to eat the other piece, then turned
shamefacedly to Tobias. “I should offer some to you, for your kind-ness.”

       Tobias was old enough to understand this would not be a small
sacri-fice for Feliks. “No, I’ll eat at home. And I’d better go now or Father
will have the strap out.” He looked through the trees to the angle of the sun,
which was definitely lower than he would have liked. “He’ll have the strap
out, anyway.” The boy stood. “I’ll come back tomorrow, though. I can help
you catch better fish than that one.” He hesitated. “Have you been to other
places? Other villages, even towns?”

     Feliks nodded slowly. “Many places. Many cities all over the Middle
Lands.”

      “Cities!” Tobias swayed a little, faint-headed at the thought. “Real
cities? I’ll be back!”

       The tall man named Eli suddenly put out his hand, a gesture so
star-tling after his hour of near immobility that Tobias recoiled as though
from a snake.

      “He ... I think he wants to thank you,” Feliks said. “Go ahead, boy—
take his hand. He was a great man once.”

       Tobias slowly extended his own small hand, wondering if this might
be the beginning of some cruel or even murderous trick—if he had been
too trusting after all. Eli’s hand was big, knob-knuckled, and smudged with
dirt, and it closed on the boy’s slim fingers like a church door swinging
closed.

      Then Tobias vanished.

                                     ****

WHEN two days had passed with no sign of the boy, suspicion of course
fell on the two strangers living in Squire’s Wood. When the man named
Fe-liks admitted that they had seen the child and spoken to him, the
shireward and several local fellows dragged them out of the forest and
chained them in wooden stocks beside the well in the center of the village,
where every-one could see them and marvel at their infamy. Feliks tearfully
continued to insist that they had done nothing to harm the boy, that they did
not know where he had gone—both things true, as it turned out—but even if
the two men had not been strangers and thus naturally suspect, the
villagers could see that the big one was plainly touched, perhaps even
demon-possessed, and almost no one felt anything for them but horror and
disgust.

      The lone exception was Father Bannity, the village priest, who felt that
it was a troubling thing to imprison people simply because they were
strangers, although he dared not say so aloud. He himself had been a
stranger to the village when he had first arrived twenty years earlier (in fact,
older villagers still referred to him as “the new priest”), and so he had a
certain empathy for those who might find themselves judged harshly
sim-ply because their grandfathers and great-grandfathers were not buried
in the local churchyard. Also, since in his middle life he had experienced a
cri-sis of faith, leading him to doubt many of the most famous and popular
tenets of his own religion, he was doubly unwilling to assume the guilt of
someone else simply because they were not part of the familiar herd. So
Fa-ther Bannity took it on himself to make sure the two prisoners had
enough food and water to survive. It would be a long wait for the King’s
Prosecu-tor General to arrive—his circuit covered at least a dozen villages
and lasted a full cycle of the moon—and even if the two were guilty of killing
the poor child and hiding his body, Father Bannity did not want them to die
before this could be discovered for certain.

      As the small man, Feliks, grew to trust him, he at last told Bannity what
he swore was the true story of what had happened that day, that the boy
had touched big Eli’s hand and then disappeared like a soap bubble
popping. Father Bannity was not quite certain what to think, whether this was
a true mystery or only the precursor to a confession, a man easing
gradually into a guilty admission as into a scalding bath, but he stuck by his
resolution to treat them as innocent until they told him otherwise, or events
proved the worst to have happened.

      One day, as he was holding a ladle of water to Eli’s dry lips, the big
man suddenly looked at him almost as if seeing him for the first time, a
flash of life in the dull, bestial eyes that Bannity had not seen before.
Star-tled, the priest dropped the ladle. The big man lifted his hand as far as
he could with his wrist restrained by the stocks and spread his long fingers
like some strange flower blooming.

      “Don’t,” whispered Feliks. “That’s what the boy did.”

     Father Bannity hesitated for only a moment. Something in the big
man’s strange gaze, something solemn and distant but not unkind,
convinced him. He reached out and allowed Eli’s hand to fold around his.

      For a startling moment Bannity thought he had become a fish, jerked
thrashing out of the river and up into the daylight, blinded by the sun and its
prismatic colors, dazzled by the burning air. Then, a half instant later, he
realized it was as though he had been out of the water for years, and now
had suddenly been plunged back into it: everything that had withered in him
suddenly sprang back to life, all the small losses of the passing days and
months—color, feeling, ecstasy. The feeling was so strong, so
over-whelming, that he could not even answer Feliks’s worried questions as
he staggered away.
      Bannity knew again. He had forgotten what it felt like, but now he
remembered, and the thunderous force of belief returning betrayed how
much he had lost. God had sent him a miracle in the person of the silent
gi-ant, and with that single touch, a world that had slowly turned gray around
him over the years had been kindled back into flaming life.

       God was in everything again, just as He had been when Bannity was a
child, when he had been able to imagine nothing better than to serve Him.

      God was alive inside him. He had experienced a miracle.

        It was only when the first surge of ecstatic happiness had become a
lit-tle more ordinary, if no less pleasurable, that Father Bannity realized
noth-ing tangible had actually changed. It wasn’t so much that God had
shown him a miracle, a sign, it was more as if touching the giant’s hand had
reawakened him to the love of God he had once had, but which had slipped
away from him.

       It was Eli, he realized, although undoubtedly acting as God’s
messen-ger, who had given him back his love of the Lord, his belief in a
living Cre-ation, and most of all, his certainty that what was was meant to
be.

     The silent, damaged man had given Bannity his heart’s desire, even
though the priest himself had not known what it was.

       Grateful, renewed, the priest resolved to speak on behalf of the two
prisoners when the Prosecutor General returned to the village, to tell the
truth even if it meant admitting that he had, for a time, lost his own faith.
Father Bannity would undoubtedly have been their only defender, except
that on the day before the traveling lawspeaker rode into town, the boy
named Tobias came back.

      He had been, the boy told the villagers (and very gleefully too) in the
town of Eader’s Church, and it was just as big and wonderful as he had
imagined. “They have lots of dogs!” he said, his eyes still bright with the
specta-cle he had seen. “And houses that go up and up! And people!” He
seemed to feel that the whipping his father had just given him—on general
principles, since the actual mechanics of the boy’s disappearance were still
a mystery— was a small price to pay for all he’d seen.

       Tobias knew nothing about how he had got from the village to the
far-off town—it had happened in an instant, he said, from clasping Eli’s
hand to finding himself in the middle of the Eader’s Church
marketplace—but unfortunately there had been no equally magical way of
returning. It had taken him all the days since he’d been gone to walk home.

       When the Prosecutor General arrived the next day, there was no
longer a case for murder to be tried, although several of the villagers were
talking darkly of witchcraft. The Prosecutor General, a small, round,
self-important fellow with a beard on his chin as small and sharp as an
arrowhead, insisted on being taken to see the two former prisoners, who
had been released to their campsite in Squire’s Wood, if not to their
previous state of anonymity.

      Holding out his rod of office, the lawspeaker approached Eli and said,
“In the name of the State and its gracious Sovereign, His Majesty the King,
you must tell me how you sent the boy to Eader’s Church.”

     The big man only looked at him, unbothered. Then he extended his
hand. The Prosecutor General, after a moment’s hesitation, extended his
own small plump hand and allowed it to be grasped.

       When Father Bannity and the other men watching had finished
blinking their eyes, they saw that instead of his prosecutor’s tunic, the
Prosecutor General was now unquestionably wearing a judge’s robes, cowl,
and wreath, and that a judge’s huge, round, golden emblem of office now
hung on a chain around his neck. (Some also suggested that he had a
stronger chin as well, and more penetrating eyes than he had heretofore
possessed.) The ex-Prosecutor General, now a full-fledged Adjudicator,
blinked, ran his fingers over the leafy wreath on his head, then fell down on
his knees and uttered a happy prayer.

     “Twelve years I’ve waited!” he said, over and over. “Thank you, Lord!
Passed over and passed over—but no more!”

      He then rose, and, with fitting jurisprudential gravity, proclaimed,
“These men have not practiced any unlicensed witchcraft. I rule that they
are true messengers of God and should be treated with respect.”

       Finding that his pockets were now richer by several gold coins—the
difference between his old salary and new—the new-minted Adjudicator
promptly sold his cart and donkey to Pender the village blacksmith and left
town in a covered carriage, with a newly hired driver and two new horses.
Later rumors said that he arrived home to find he had been awarded the
King’s Fourteenth Judicial Circuit.
       In the wake of the Prosecutor General’s astonishing transformation,
Squire’s Wood began to fill with people from the village and even some of
the surrounding villages—for news travels fast in these rural areas— turning
the two men’s camp into a site of pilgrimage. The size of the gath-ering
grew so quickly that Father Bannity and some of the wood’s nearer and
soberer neighbors worried that the entire forest soon would be tram-pled
flat, but the squireward could not turn the newcomers away any more than
he could have held back the tide at Lands End.

      Although none of this swarm of postulants was turned away, not all
received their heart’s desire, either—Eli’s hand opened only to one in
perhaps three or four, and it was impossible to force the issue. One man, a
jar maker named Keely, tried to pry the big man’s fingers apart and shove
his own hand in, and although he succeeded, nothing magical happened to
him except that he developed a painful boil in the middle of his forehead
the fol-lowing day.

       Some of the pilgrims’ wishes turned out to be surprisingly small and
domestic: a man whose sick cow suddenly recovered, a woman whose
youngest son abruptly discovered he could hear as well as he had before
the fever. Others were more predictable, like the man who after clasping
Eli’s hand discovered a pot of old coins buried under an ancient wall he was
re-building.

      To the astonishment of many, two blighted young folk who lived on
neighboring farms, a young man with a shattered leg and a girl with a huge
strawberry blotch on her face, both went to Eli, and both were gifted with a
handclasp, but came out again looking just the same as they had be-fore.
But within the next few days the young man’s drunkard father died of a fit,
leaving him the farm, and the girl’s cruel, miserly uncle who treated her like
a servant fell under the wheels of a cart and died also, leav-ing her free to
marry if anyone would have her. The two young people did indeed marry
each other, and seemed quite happy, although they both still bore the
disfigurements that had made them so pitiable to the rest of the village.

       The only apparent failure of Eli’s magical touch was Pender, the
blacksmith, who went to the campsite a massive, strapping man with a
beard that reached halfway down his chest, and went away again with the
shape and voice and apparently all the working parts of a slender young
woman. He left town the same night, trading the Prosecutor General’s old
cart for a pair of pretty dresses before setting off on the donkey toward the
nearest city to start his life over (at least so he told his neighbors), so no
one was ever able to find out exactly how such a strange thing had
happened when others had been served so well.
       Soon the lame youth and other grateful folk came and built a great
tent in Squire’s Wood for Eli and Feliks to shelter in, and began bringing
them daily offerings of food and drink. People were coming to see the two
strangers from all around, and even the villagers who had not obtained a
supernatural gift from the silent giant came to realize how valuable his
presence was: the village was full of pilgrims, including some quite
well-to-do folk who were willing to pay exorbitant prices to be fed and
housed near the miracle worker.

       Father Bannity, still basking in the joyful light of his newly recovered
faith, did not doubt that Eli and Feliks were gifts from God, but he had not
lost all caution or good sense, either, and he was worried by what was
hap-pening to his quiet village. He sent a messenger describing recent
events to Dondolan, the nearest accredited wizard, who had an eyrie near
the top of Reaching Peak. The wizard had not passed through the village
for years, but he and the priest had met several times. Bannity liked the
mage and trusted his good sense, certainly beyond that of the village
elders, who were growing as greedy of pilgrimage gold as children tumbled
into a treacle vat, happily eating themselves to death.

                                    ****

DONDOLAN the Clear-Eyed, as he had been named back in his Academy
days, took one look at the priest’s letter, then leaped out of his chair and
be-gan packing (a task that takes a wizard a much shorter time than the
aver-age traveler). The messenger asked if there would be any reply, and
Dondolan told him, “I will be there before you.” Then, suiting deed to word,
he promptly vanished.

       He appeared again in the village at the base of the mountain and took
his horse from the livery stable there—even an accomplished wizard will not
travel by magic for twenty leagues, not knowing what he will find at the other
end, for it is a fierce drain on the resources—and set out. Other than an
ill-considered attempt by some local bandits to waylay him just outside
Drunken Princes’ Pass, an interaction that increased the frog population of
the highlands but did not notably slow Dondolan’s progress, it was a swift
journey, and he reached the nameless village within two days. Spurning
more ordinary couriers, he had sent a raven ahead, and as a result Father
Bannity waited at the crossroads outside of town to meet him.

     When they had greeted each other—fondly, for the respect was
mutual, despite their differences on the theological practicalities—Bannity
led Dondolan through the fields around the outskirts of the village, so as not
to cause more ruckus and rumor than was necessary; already the village
practically breathed the stuff, and the pilgrims arriving daily from all over
only made things more frantic.

       “Do you wish to speak to the two of them?” Bannity asked. “It will be
difficult, but I might persuade the village elders to let us close off the camp,
although it will not be easy to remove all the addled folk who are living there
now—they have practically made a new town in the middle of the forest.”

      “We should decide nothing until I see these miracle men,” Dondolan
said. “Although I must say that the description of them in your letter gave
me an unpleasant feeling in the pit of my stomach.”

       “Why?” asked Bannity with some alarm. “Do you think they mean
harm? I worried mainly that so many pilgrims would jeopardize the safety of
our little town, drawing thieves and confidence tricksters and such. But
surely God has sent those two to us—they have done so much good!”

     “Perhaps. That is why I will restrain my conjectures until I have seen
them.”

       They made their way through the woods, between groups of revelers
singing and praying, gathered around so many campfires it seemed more
like the eve of a great battle than twilight in the woods outside a quiet
vil-lage too unassuming even to have its own name. As they grew close to
the great pale tent and the crowd of people waiting there—some patiently,
oth-ers loudly demanding that they be allowed to be next to see the
wonder-workers because their need was so great—Bannity found it
increasingly difficult to make headway through the throng. It was a mark of
how many of the people were strangers to the area that the village’s
well-respected priest almost got into two fights, and only Dondolan’s
discreet use of a quelling-charm got them past those at the front of the line
without real violence.

      They slipped through the tent’s flap-door. Dondolan stared across the
big tent at the miraculous pair sitting like minor potentates on high-backed
chairs the villagers had built them, the small man Feliks and the big man
with the misshapen skull. Feliks was scratching himself and laughing at
something. Eli was staring down at one of the kneeling postulants before
him, his expression as emptily self-absorbed as a bullfrog waiting for a fly
of sufficient size to happen past. Dondolan swallowed, then stepped back
out of the tent again, and Bannity followed him. Even by torchlight, the priest
could see the wizard had gone quite pale.
      “It is indeed as I feared, Bannity. That is no poor traveler, innocently
touched by God—or at least that is not how he began. The large man is the
dark wizard Elizar the Devourer, scourge of the southern lands, and
great-est enemy of the archmage Kettil of Thundering Crag.”

      “Elizar?” Bannity suddenly found swallowing difficult. Even a village
priest knew the Devourer, who had burned whole towns because he liked
the gloomy skies their smoking ruins provided, who had performed vile rites
to turn men into beasts and beasts into men, and whose campaign of
violent conquest had only been stopped by Kettil himself, the greatest
wiz-ard of the age, who had come down from his great ice caverns atop
Thun-dering Crag and helped the young King defeat Elizar’s vast army of
slavering beast-men at the field of Herredsburn. Kettil himself had dueled
Elizar before the gathered forces of both armies—the skies above
Herreds-burn, everyone remembered, had lit up as if with half a dozen
simultaneous thunderstorms, and although neither had managed definitively
to best the other, it had been Elizar who had fled the field, his plans in ruins,
and re-treated into a dark obscurity that had covered him for years—an
absence that had lasted until this very moment. “That Elizar?” murmured
Father Bannity. “Here?”

     “I would stake my life on it,” said Dondolan, “and may be doing so.
Even if his mindlessness is real, just seeing someone like me that he has
known might shock him back to his prior self.”

      “But we cannot simply . . . leave it. We cannot leave things this way.”

       “No, but I dare not go near him. His miracles, you tell me, are real, so
he still wields mighty powers. Even if he stays witless, I cannot afford the
chance he might decide to give me my heart’s desire.” Dondolan shook his
head, his white beard wagging. “The heart of a wizard, even a relatively
decent one like myself, is full of dark crevices. It is the world we inhabit, the
wisdoms we study, the powers we have learned to harness, if not al-ways to
understand.” He smiled, but there was not much pleasure in it. “I truthfully
do not know my heart’s desire, and have no urge to discover it this way.”

      “I’m . . . I’m not certain what you mean.”

       “What if my heart’s desire is to be the greatest wizard of my age? I
felt that way once, when I was young and first entering the Academy. What
if that desire has not gone, only hidden?” He shook his head again. “I dare
not risk it.”

      “But what if an ordinary mortal—someone not a wizard—has the same
thing as his heart’s desire? Or something worse, asking for the end of the
world or something.”

       Dondolan gave the priest a shrewd, sober look. “So far, that has not
happened. In fact, the power Elizar wields seems not to have harmed much
of anybody, except, by your account, a pair of nasty old folk who
deliberately stood in the way of their children’s happiness. And even there,
we cannot prove that coincidence did not carry them away. Perhaps there is
something to Elizar’s magic that is self-limiting—something that prevents
him from grant-ing any but mostly benign wishes. I do not know.” He looked
up. “I do know that we must discover more before we can make up our
minds. We cannot, as you said, simply leave things be, not with Elizar the
Devourer here, sur-rounded by eager supplicants, busily creating miracles,
however kindhearted those miracles may seem.” Dondolan ran his fingers
through his long beard. “Not to mention the evil chance that this is all some
cruel trick of Elizar’s— that he only shams at having lost his mind, and plots
to seize the Middle Lands again.” He frowned, thinking. “When do they stop
for the night?”

      “Soon. When my sexton rings the church bell for evening prayer.”

      “Wait until that bell rings, Father, then bring me the man Feliks.”

                                     ****

THE small man seemed almost relieved to have been found out. “Yes, it is
true. He was once Elizar, the greatest wizard of all.”

      “After Kettil the archmage, you mean,” said Dondolan.

     Feliks waved his hand. “My master poured his soul into five thousand
beast-men at Herredsburn, animating them throughout the battle. Even so,
he dueled Kettil Hawkface to a standstill.”

      “This is neither here nor there,” said Father Bannity impatiently. “Why
is he the way we see him? Is this some new plot of his, some evil device?”

      “Tell the truth, minion, and do not think to trick me,” Dondolan said
harshly. “Even now, Kettil himself must be hearing news of this. He will not
take longer than I did to deduce that your Eli is in fact his old arch-enemy.”

      Feliks sighed. “Then we must be moving on again. Sad, that is. I was
enjoying it here.”
     “Damn it, man, one of the most dangerous men in the world sleeps
twenty paces away! Talk to us!”

      “Dangerous to you, perhaps.” Feliks shook his head. “No, not even to
you—not now. There is no trick, wizard. What you see is the truth. The old
Elizar is gone, and dumb Eli is what remains.

       “It was after Herredsburn, you see, when the King and your Wizard’s
Council turned us away. With all his beast-men dead or changed back to
their former selves, my master left the field and retreated to his secret lair in
the Darkslide Mountains.”

     “We suspected he had a bolt-hole there,” murmured Dondolan, “but
we could never find it.”

      “He was determined to have his revenge on Kettil and the others,”
continued Feliks. “I have never seen him thus. He was furious, but also
weary, weary and distraught.” The small man peered at the priest and the
wizard for a moment. “Once, in middle-night when I was awakened from
sleep by a strange noise, I found him weeping.”

      “I cannot believe that,” said Dondolan. “Elizar? The Devourer?”

       “Believe what you will. There was always more to him than you folk on
the Council understood. Whatever the case, he became fixed on the idea
of securing the Amulet of Desire, which can grant its possessor whatever
gift he most wants. He spent many months—a year, almost—pursuing its
legend down many forgotten roads, in old books and older scrolls. He
spoke to creatures so fearsome I could not even be under the same roof
while they were conversing.” The memory still seemed to make Feliks
fear-ful, and yet proud of his bold master. “At last the time came. Deep in
our cavern home in the Darkslide Mountains, he prepared the spells. I
helped him as best I could, but I am just a servant, not a necromancer. I
stoked the fires, polished the alembics, brought the articles he needed
from our reli-quary. At last the hour came when the spheres were in
alignment, and he began the Summoning of the Empty Gods.

       “He had been nights on end without sleep, in the grip of a fever that I
had never seen in him before, even on the night before Herredsburn, when
dominion over all the world was still at his fingertips. Pale, wide-eyed,
talk-ing to himself as though I was not even present, he was like a prisoner
des-perate for release, whether that release came from the opening of the
prison door or from the hangman’s rope.”
      Feliks sighed and briefly wiped his eyes while Dondolan tapped
impatient fingers.

      “The spell went on for hours,” the small man continued, “names
shouted into the darkness that hurt my ears. At one point I fled, terrified by
the shadows that filled the room and danced all around me. When I came
back, it was because I heard my master’s hoarse cry of triumph.

      “He stood in the center of his mystical diagram, holding up something
I could barely see, something that gleamed red and black ...”

     “Something cannot gleam black,” Dondolan said—a trifle querulously,
Bannity thought. “It makes no sense.”

      “Little of what had happened that night made sense, but I will not
change my tale. It gleamed red and black. Elizar held it over his head,
cry-ing out with a ragged voice, ‘My greatest wish made real . . . !’—and
then the roof collapsed.”

    “Collapsed?” said Bannity. “How? I thought you were in some
moun-tain cavern.”

       “We were,” Feliks agreed. “I still am not certain how it happened—it
was like being chewed in a giant’s mouth, chewed and chewed, then spit
out. When I woke up, we both lay on the slope beneath the entrance to the
lair, which was choked with fallen rock. Elizar was as you see him now,
crushed and silent, his head all bloody, poor fellow. The Amulet was gone.
Everything was gone. I helped him up, and we stumbled and crawled down
the hill to a cotsman’s deserted shack—the owner had fled when the
moun-tain began to shake. I shaved my master’s head and doctored his
wounds. We ate what supplies the cotsman had laid in, but when we ran
out, we had no choice but to become wandering beggars.” The small,
wrinkled man spread his hands. “I can do no magic, you see.”

        “Was the boy in the village, the one Elizar sent to Eader’s Church, the
first to be ... touched?”

      Feliks shook his head. “My master took a few people’s hands, mostly
folk who gave generously to our begging bowl, and sometimes things
hap-pened. None were harmed, all profited,” he added, a little defensively.

    “And you,” Dondolan demanded. “You must have touched his hands
many times since this occurred. What of you?”
     “What could happen? I already have my heart’s desire. All I have ever
wanted was to serve him. From the first moment I saw him outside the
Academy, I knew that he was my destiny, for good or bad.”

      Dondolan sighed. “For bad, certainly, at least until now. You are not a
true villain, Feliks, but you have served an evil man.”

      “All great men are thought evil by some.”

      “Not all great men graft the heads of wild boars onto the shoulders of
peasant farmers,” Dondolan pointed out. “Not all great men wear the skins
of other wizards for a cloak.”

      “He killed only those who turned against him,” said Feliks stubbornly.
“Only those who would have killed him.”

       Dondolan stared at him for a moment. “It matters little now,” he said at
last. “As I said, Kettil will have heard by now and guessed who is here. The
archmage will come, and things will change.”

      “Then we must go,” said Feliks, rising to his feet with a weary grunt.
“We will move on. There are still places we can live in quiet peace, if I can
only help my poor master to keep his hands to himself.”

     “I dare not try to stop you,” Dondolan said. “I fear to wake your
mas-ter if he really sleeps inside that battered skull—I admit I was never his
match. But even if you flee, you will not outrun Kettil’s power.”

      It does not matter. What will be, will be, Bannity thought to himself,
but a little of his newfound peace had gone with Eli’s unmasking. Whether
Elizar is a man transformed or a villain disguised, surely what happens
next will be as God wills too. For who can doubt His hand when He has
shown us so many miracles here?

                                     ****

BUT Eli would not leave the wood, despite Feliks’s urging. The mute man
was as resistant as a boulder set deep in mud: none of his servant’s pleas
or arguments touched him—in fact, he showed no sign of even hearing
them.

     Dondolan and Bannity, armed with the knowledge of the miracle
worker’s true identity, convinced the suddenly terrified village elders that for
a while at least, the crowds should be kept away. With a contingent of
soldiers from the nearest shirepost, hired with a fraction of the profits from
the long miracle-season, they cleared the forest of all the supplicants,
forc-ing them out into the town and surrounding fields, where local sellers of
charms and potions gleefully provided them with substitute satisfaction, or
at least the promise of it.

      Even as the last of the camps were emptied, some of the latest
arrivals from beyond the village brought news that Kettil Hawkface himself
was on the way. Some had seen nothing more than a great storm swirling
around Thundering Crag while the sky elsewhere was blue and bright, but
others claimed to have seen the archmage himself speeding down the
mountain on a huge white horse, shining as he came like a bolt of lightning.
In any case, those who had been turned away from Squire’s Wood now had
something else to anticipate, and the great road that passed by the
nameless village was soon lined with those waiting to see the most famous,
most celebrated wizard of all.

      Father Bannity could not help wondering whether Elizar sensed
any-thing of his great rival’s coming, and so he walked into Squire’s Wood
and across the trampled site of the camp, empty now but for a couple of
hired soldiers standing guard.

      Inside the tent wrinkled little Feliks looked up from eating a bowl of
stew and waved to Bannity as if they were old friends; but Elizar was as
empty-faced as ever, and seemed not to notice that the crowds of pilgrims
were gone, that he and Feliks were alone. He sat staring at the ground, his
big hands opening and closing so slowly that Father Bannity could have
counted a score of his own suddenly intrusive heartbeats between fist and
spread fingers. The man’s naked face and shaved scalp made the head
atop the black robe seem almost like an egg, out of which anything might
hatch.

     Why did I come here? he asked himself. To taunt the blackest
magician of the age? But he felt he had to ask.

      “Are you truly gone from in there, Elizar?” The priest’s voice trembled,
and he prayed to God for strength. He now realized, in a way he had not
before, that before him sat a man who was of such power that he had
destroyed whole cities the way an ordinary man might kick down an anthill.
But Bannity had to ask. “Are you truly and completely empty, or is there a
spark of you left in that husk, listening?” He had a sudden thought. “Did you
bring this on yourself, with your magical amulet? When the time came for
your heart’s desire to be granted, did God hear a small, hidden part of you
that was weary of death and torment and dark hatreds, that wanted to
perform the Lord’s work for your fellow men instead of bringing them blood
and fire and terror?”

     Eli did not look up or change expression, and at last Father Bannity
went out. Feliks watched him go with a puzzled expression, then returned to
his meal.

                                     ****

HE came down the main road with crowds cheering behind him as though
he were a conquering hero—which, after all, he was. Bannity watched the
people shouting and calling Kettil’s name as the wizard rode toward the
vil-lage on his huge white horse, the same people who only days before
had been crouched in the dirt outside Eli’s tent, begging to be let in, and the
priest wondered at God’s mysterious ways.

        Kettil Hawkface was younger than Bannity would have guessed, or
else had spelled himself to appear so. He seemed a man in the middle of
life, his golden hair only touched with gray, his bony, handsome face still
firm in every line. His eyes were the most impressive thing about him: even
from a distance they glittered an icy blue, and up close it was difficult to
look at him directly, such was the chilly power of his gaze.

       Bannity and Dondolan met the archmage at the edge of the wood.
Kettil nodded at his fellow wizard but hardly seemed to see the priest at all,
even after Dondolan introduced him.

      “He is in there ...” Dondolan began, but Kettil raised his hand, and the
lesser mage fell silent.

        “I know where he is.” He had a voice to match his eyes, frosty and
authoritative. “And I know what he is. I have battled his evil for half my long
life. I do not need to be told where to find him—I smell him as a hound
smells his quarry.”

      Strange, then, that you did not find him before, thought Bannity, then
regretted his own small-minded carping. “But he is not the monster you
knew, Archmage ...”

      Kettil looked at him then, but only a moment, then turned away. “Such
creatures do not change,” he said to Dondolan.

      Bannity tried again. “He has done much good . . . !”
       Kettil smirked. “Has he revived all those he killed? Rebuilt the cities
he burned? Do not speak to me of things you do not understand, priest.”
He slid down off his massive white horse. “I will go, and we will see what
de-vilry awaits.”

      Bannity had to admit the archmage was as impressive as legend had
promised. He strode into the forest with no weapon but his staff of gnarled
birch, his long hair blowing, his sky-blue robes billowing as though he still
stood on the heights of Thundering Crag. Bannity looked at Dondolan,
whose face bore a carefully composed expression that betrayed nothing of
what he was thinking, then they both followed the archmage Kettil into
Squire’s Wood.

       To Bannity’s astonishment, Eli himself stood in the doorway of the
tent, looking out across the great clearing.

       “Ho, Devoured” Kettil’s voice echoed, loud as a hunting horn, but Eli
only looked at him incuriously, his large hands dangling from his sleeves
like roosting bats. “I have found you again at last!”

       The hairless man blinked, turned, and went back into the tent. Kettil
strode after him, crossing the clearing in a few long paces. Bannity started
to follow, but Dondolan grabbed his arm and held him back.

      “This is beyond me and beyond you, too.”

       “Nothing is beyond God!” Bannity cried, but Dondolan the Clear-Eyed
looked doubtful. A few moments later little Feliks came stumbling out of the
tent, flapping his hands as if surrounded by angry bees.

       “They stand face-to-face!” he squawked, then tripped and fell, rolling
until he stopped at Bannity’s feet. The priest helped him up, but did not take
his eyes off the tent. “They do not speak, but stare at each other. The air is
so thick!”

       “It seems ...” Dondolan began, but never finished, for at that instant
the entire clearing—in fact, all the woods and the sky above—seemed to
suck in a great breath. A sudden, agonizing pain in Bannity’s ears dropped
him to his knees, then everything suddenly seemed to flow sideways—light,
color, heat, air, everything rushing out across the face of the earth in all
directions, push-ing the priest flat against the ground and rolling him over
several times.
      When the monstrous wind died, Bannity lay for a long, stunned
in-stant, marveling at the infinite skills of God, who could create the entire
universe and now, just as clearly, was going to dismantle it again. Then a
great belch of flame and a roar of rushing air made him roll over onto his
knees and, against all good sense, struggle to sit up so he could see what
was happening.

      The tent was engulfed in flame, the trees all around singed a leafless
black. As Father Bannity stared, two figures staggered out of the inferno as
though solidifying out of smoke, one like a pillar of cold blue light, with
flame dancing in his pale hair and beard, the other a growing, rising shadow
of swirling black.

      “I knew you but pretended, demon!” shouted Kettil Hawkface, waving
his hands in the air, flashes of light crackling up from his fingertips.
“Devourer! I know your treachery of old!”

       The shadow, which had begun to fold down over the archmage like a
burning blanket, instead billowed up and away, hovering in the air just above
Kettil’s head. A face could be seen in its roiling, cloudy midst, and Bannity
could not help marveling even in his bewildered horror how it looked both
like and unlike the silent Eli.

      “I will make sure your dying lasts for centuries, Hawkface!” shrieked
the dark shape in a voice that seemed to echo all the way to the distant hills,
then it rose up into the air, flapping like an enormous bat made of smoke
and sparks, and flew away into the south.

      “Master!” screamed Feliks, and stumbled off through the woods,
following the fast-diminishing blot of fiery blackness until he, too,
disappeared from sight.

       Kettil Hawkface, his pale robes smeared with ash, his whiskers and
hair singed at the edges, strode away in the other direction, walking back
toward the village with the purposeful stride of someone who has
com-pleted a dangerous and thankless job and does not bother to wait for
the approbation he surely deserves.

      As he emerged at the forest’s edge, he stood before the hundreds of
onlookers gathered there and raised his hands. “Elizar the Devourer’s evil
has been discovered and ended, and he has flown in defeat back to the
benighted south,” the archmage cried. “You people of the Middle Lands
may rest safely again, knowing that the Devourer’s foul plan has been
thwarted.”
     The crowd cheered, but many were confused about what had
hap-pened, and the reception of his news was not as wholehearted as Kettil
had perhaps expected. He did not wait to speak again to his colleague
Dondolan but climbed onto his white horse and galloped away north toward
Thundering Crag, followed by a crowd of children crying out after him for
pennies and miracles.

     Bannity and Dondolan watched in silence as the ramrod-straight figure
grew smaller and then eventually disappeared. The crowds did not
immediately disperse, but many seemed to realize there would be little
reason to collect here anymore, and the cries of the food sellers, charm
hawkers, and roving apothecaries became muted and mournful.

      “So all is resolved for good,” Father Bannity said, half to himself.
“Elizar’s evil was discovered and thwarted.”

    “Perhaps,” said Dondolan. “But a part of me cannot help wondering
whose heart’s desire was granted here today.”

      “What do you mean? Do you think . . . they clasped hands?”

        Dondolan sighed. “Do not misunderstand me. It is entirely possible
that the world has been spared a great evil here today—Elizar was always
full of plots, many of them astoundingly subtle. But if they did touch hands, I
think it is safe to say that only one of them was granted his heart’s
desire.”

      “I don’t understand.”

      “Elizar may not have seemed entirely happy as Eli the dumb miracle
worker,” Dondolan said, “but he did seem peaceful. Now, though, he is the
Devourer again, and Kettil once more has an enemy worthy of his own great
pride and power.”

      Bannity was silent for a long time, watching the sky darken as the sun
settled behind Squire’s Wood. “But surely God would not let Elizar’s evil
back into the world simply because his enemy missed it—God must have a
better plan for mankind than that!”

       “Perhaps,” said Dondolan the Clear-Eyed. “Perhaps. We will think on
it together after we return to the church and you find the brandy you keep
hidden for such occasions.”
     Father Bannity nodded and took a few steps, then turned. “How did
you know about the brandy?”

      The priest thought Dondolan’s smile seemed a trifle sour. “I am a
wiz-ard, remember? We know almost everything.”

                                   ****