The Very Best of Tad Williams by Tad Williams Page B

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 village 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 devilry 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, Devourer!” 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, pushing the priest flat against the ground and rolling