The Very Best of Tad Williams by Tad Williams

so fearsome I could not even be under the same roof while they were conversing.” The memory still seemed to make Feliks fearful, 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 reliquary. 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, talking to himself as though I was not even present, he was like a prisoner desperate 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, crying 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 mountain 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 and 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 mountain 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 happened. 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