The Very Best of Tad Williams by Tad Williams Page A

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 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 master 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’ 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 solders from the nearest shirepost, hired with a fraction of the profits from the long miracle-season, they cleared the forest of all the supplicants, forcing 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 anything 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 here sat a man of such power that he had destroyed whole cities the way an ordinary man might kick down an ant-hill. 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