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STOPPER

The little company spent the remainder of that night on the western slope of the valley just north of the Heart. They settled themselves in a grove of fruit trees mixed with a scattering of crimson-leaved maples, the smell of berries and apples mingling with hardwood bark and new sap in the cool night air. Cicadas hummed, crickets chirped, night birds called from near and far, and the whole of the valley whispered in the softest cadence that all was well. Sleep was an old and valued friend on such a night. For all but one of the worn and harried members of the little company, it came easily.

Ben Holiday alone remained awake. Even Strabo slept, curled up some distance off within the shelter of a low ravine, but Ben stayed awake. Sleep would not come for him. He leaned back against Willow and waited for the dawn, troubled and anxious. Willow was a tree now. She had made the transformation moments after they had eased her down off the back of the dragon, barely conscious. She had tried to reassure Ben with a quick squeeze of one hand and a momentary smile, and then she was changing. Ben remained unconvinced. He stayed awake next to her, wishing that it was not just in his imagination that he could seem to hear the sound of her breathing grow steadily stronger, smoother, deeper in tone. He knew she believed the transformation was necessary, that whatever the nature of the illness that had ravaged her in his world, whatever the form of the poison that attacked her, the soil of her own world would heal her. Maybe yes, maybe no, Ben thought. He had seen it work before, but that was before. He continued to keep an uneasy watch.

Even so, he tried several times to snatch a bit of sleep, tried to close his eyes and let it embrace him, but his thoughts were dark and filled with the promise of terrifying dreams. He could not shake the memory of how close they had all come to not making it back. He could not forget the sense of helplessness he had experienced there in that empty courtroom when all his options had been stripped from him, a trial lawyer whose arguments and appeals had finally been exhausted. He could not forgive himself for so completely losing control.

Questions whispered to him from the night. How far away from himself had he come in giving up his old life for his new? How much had he sacrificed to regenerate his sense of purpose? Too much, perhaps—so much that he was in very real danger of losing his identity.

He drifted in and out of a sort of half sleep, through uneven bouts of self-recrimination and second-guessing, plagued by demons of his own making. He knew he should dismiss them, yet he could not find the means. He grappled with them helplessly, each encounter provoking new pain and doubt. He was too vulnerable, and he could not seem to protect himself. He simply drifted.

When dawn’s light did begin at last to creep into the dark recesses of his consciousness, the eastern sky lightening and the night fading west, he found he had slept somehow, if only briefly. He jolted awake from a fitful doze, his eyes searching quickly for Willow, finding her asleep beside him, her color strong again, her life miraculously restored. There were tears in his eyes, and he brushed at them, smiling. Then, finally, the demons began to slip away, and he could feel again some small measure of hope that he might yet make sense out of who and what he was and take back into his own hands the lines that measured out his life.

He confronted then, for the first time, something he had carefully avoided that entire night—the prospect of dealing with Nightshade and the Darkling. The specter of such an encounter had been lurking at the edge of his subconscious ever since Questor had told him after landing what had become of the bottle, kept just back of where he would be forced to think about it. But now he must think of it, he knew. He could put it off no longer. Everything that had gone before in his long search for the medallion and Abernathy would be rendered pointless if he did not find a way, once and for all, to dispose of that damnable bottle. That meant he must face Nightshade. And that could easily cost him his life.

He sat in the gradually brightening clearing, feeling the pulse of the morning begin to quicken and the sluggishness of its night sleep begin to fade. He let his hand drift down to Willow’s face and his fingers brush her skin softly. She stirred, but did not waken. How was he to do what must be done? he wondered. How was he to retrieve the bottle from Nightshade so that the demon could be put back inside? The doubts and fears had left him now, their needles withdrawn. He was able to think in clear, pragmatic terms. He must become the Paladin again, he realized, the knight-errant that was the alter ego of the Kings of Landover, that frightening iron juggernaut that seemed to claim a bit more of his soul each time he called upon its services. He shuddered involuntarily at the surge of ambivalent emotions that were stirred within him. He would need the Paladin’s strength to withstand Nightshade’s magic, not to mention the demon’s. Questor Thews would help, of course. Questor would lend his own magic to the cause. The real question was, would the two of them be enough? Even forgetting Nightshade for the moment, how could they overcome the Darkling? How could anyone overcome a creature whose power was apparently limitless?

Ben Holiday sat alone in the brightening dawn and pondered this puzzle. He was still pondering it when the others came awake, the solution he sought as elusive as summer frost.

He was pleasantly surprised, therefore, when halfway through a breakfast in which he was principally concerned with assuring himself that Willow was well again, the answer came to him.

He was surprised, too, when, following breakfast, Strabo offered to carry them all north to the Deep Fell. He needn’t have been. The dragon didn’t make the offer because he felt an obligation to do anything further to help, or because he felt Questor had any further hold over him either. He had no sense of responsibility or concern for the success of their endeavors. He made it because he was anxious to let Holiday and Nightshade have at each other and he wanted to be there to enjoy the show. Someone’s spilled blood was necessary to satisfy his irritation at having been dragged into this conflict in the first place, and he could only hope that witch and King would both bleed freely in the battle that was to follow.

“You owe me, Holiday!” the dragon announced with a venomous hiss on making the offer to convey Ben to his own funeral. “This makes twice now that I have saved your worthless skin and twice now that you have given me nothing in return! If Nightshade dispatches you, I will consider the debt paid—but not otherwise! Think of what I have suffered for you! I was attacked, Holiday—chased and hounded by metal flying things, hunted with lights, screamed at and threatened by others like yourself, my system fouled by poisons I can only guess at, and my equanimity thoughtlessly disrupted!” He took a long, careful breath. “Let me put it another way. I find you the most annoying, bothersome creature I have ever had the misfortune of encountering and I long for the day you are finally no more!”

Having said that, he knelt down so that the object of his derision might mount him. Ben glanced at Questor, who shrugged and said, “What else can you expect from a dragon?”

Willow and Abernathy gave him fits as well by insisting that they should accompany him. When he had the temerity to suggest that he didn’t think this was such a good idea, given the extent of the danger Questor and he would likely be facing from the witch and the bottle demon, both immediately suggested that perhaps he had better think again.

“I did not survive the acute discomforts of Graum Wythe’s dungeons and the vicissitudes of Michel Ard Rhi’s personality to be left behind now!” his scribe announced rather irritably. “I intend to see this matter through to its proper conclusion! Besides,” he huffed, “you need someone to keep an eye on the wizard!”

“Nor do I intend to be left behind, either,” Willow hastened to add. “I am well now, and you may have need of me. I have told you before, Ben Holiday—what happens to you happens to me.”

Ben was hardly convinced by either argument; neither appeared to him to have fully recovered from the hardships of the journey over and back and neither would be of much help in dealing with Nightshade and the Darkling. But he knew there wasn’t anything he could say that would change their minds and he decided it would be easier to take them than to try to force them to remain behind. He shook his head. Things never seemed to work out quite the way he wanted them to.

So they lifted skyward aboard the dragon, departing the grove of fruit and maple trees that had been their night’s camp, leaving behind the Heart with its rows of flags, stanchions, and polished oak benches and the distant, tiny island where rested castle Sterling Silver, and passing finally out of the hill country of the south into the plains and grasslands of the north. They flew until the Greensward was behind them and the wall of the Melchor rose ahead. Then Strabo dipped earthward, sailing lazily across the dark, misted bowl of the Deep Fell, presumably so that Nightshade couldn’t miss seeing them, settling at last on a small scrap of grassland a short distance from the hollows’ edge.

Ben and his companions eased themselves down from the dragon’s back, casting furtive glances toward the rim of the witch’s home. Mist swirled sluggishly in the windless midday air as if stirred by some invisible hand, and silence masked all signs of whatever life waited below. The air was sultry and fetid, and the clouds were gathered thick across this stretch of the mountains. East, sunlight brightened the land; here, gray haze cloaked everything.

Signs of the wilt that had marked the land at the time of Ben’s arrival in Landover were evident again. Leaves were withered and sick-looking; whole stands of trees and patches of scrub were black. The devastation spread outward from the Deep Fell for as far as the eye could see—almost as if some sickness had crawled out of the hollows and begun devouring what lay beyond in ever-widening circles.

“A fitting place for your demise, Holiday!” sneered the dragon, bending close. “Why don’t you get on with it?”

He spread his wings and soared off into the mountains, settling comfortably upon an outcropping of rock that overlooked the hollows and gave him a clear view of everything below.

“I find him quite intolerable these days,” Questor Thews said quietly.

“I find it hard to believe he was ever anything else,” Ben said.

He positioned Willow and Abernathy in a broken stand of Bonnie Blues some distance back, pleading with them to stay out of sight until matters with the witch and the demon were resolved. He had no real expectation that his entreaties would be heeded, but he at least had to make the effort.

He returned to Questor and spoke quietly with him then, explaining for the first time his plan for dealing with the Darkling. Questor was thoughtful for a moment, then announced, “High Lord, I think you may have found the answer.”

Ben’s smile was faint. “Finding the answer is one thing; applying it is another. You know what I mean, don’t you? This will be tricky, Questor. It has to be done just so. Much depends on you.”

Questor’s owlish face was solemn. “I understand, High Lord. I won’t let you down.”

Ben nodded. “Just don’t let yourself down. Are you ready?”

“Ready, High Lord.”

Ben turned to face the Deep Fell and called out sharply, “Nightshade!” The name echoed and slowly died away. Ben waited, then called again. “Nightshade!” Again, the name echoed into silence. Nightshade did not appear. Beside him, Questor shifted his booted feet uneasily.

Then a swirl of black mist lifted out of the hollows, churning and seething as it settled on the parched grasses at its rim, and Nightshade appeared at last. She stood there against the mist, robes and hair black, face and hands white, a stark and forbidding vision. One hand clutched the familiar bottle, its painted surface luminescent in the gray air.

“Play-King!” she whispered with a hiss. With her free hand, she pulled the stopper on the bottle. The Darkling crept forth, wizened spider’s body dark, sticklike, and covered with hair. Red eyes gleamed and fingers curled on the bottle’s edge. “See, precious one?” the witch asked softly and pointed. “See what comes to amuse us?”

Neither Ben nor Questor moved. They became statues, waiting to see what would happen next. The Darkling crept about the lip of its bottle like an anxious cat, searching here and there, whispering and hissing words that no one but the witch could hear. “Yes, yes,” she soothed, over and over, bent down now. “Yes, little demon, they are the ones!”

Finally, she looked up again. Her free hand slipped the stopper into her robes, and her fingers stroked the fawning demon. “Come play with us, High Lord and Court Wizard!” she called over. “Come play! We have games for you! Such games! Come closer!”

Ben and Questor held their ground. “Give us the bottle, Nightshade,” ordered Ben quietly. “It doesn’t belong to you.”

“Anything I wish belongs to me!” Nightshade screeched.

“Not the bottle.”

“Especially the bottle!”

“I will bring the Paladin, if I must,” Ben threatened, his voice still quiet.

“Bring whomever you like.” Nightshade’s smile was slow and wicked. Then she whispered, “Play-King, you are such a fool!”

The Darkling shrieked suddenly, leaped upward, and thrust its tiny crooked fingers toward them. Fire and shards of iron flew at them with the blink of an eye, slicing through the hazy afternoon air. But Questor’s magic was already in place, and the fire and shards of iron passed harmlessly by. Ben’s hand was about the medallion, his fingers closed upon its metal surface, the heat beginning to surge through him. Light flared less than a dozen yards off, and the Paladin appeared, white knight on white charger, a ghost come out of time. Fire burned in the medallion, then surged outward through mist and gray to where the ghost took form. Ben felt himself ride the light, borne on its stinging brightness as if a mote of dust, carried from his body as if weightless. Then he was inside the iron shell, and the transformation had begun. A second more and it was completed. Iron plates closed about, clasps, straps, and buckles tightened, and the harness latched in place. Ben Holiday’s memories faded and were replaced by those of the Paladin—memories of countless battles fought and won, of struggles unimaginable, of blood and iron, of screams and cries, and of the testing of courage and strength-of-arms on distant fields of combat. There was that strange mix of exhilaration and horror—the Paladin’s sharpened expectation of another fight, Ben Holiday’s repulsion at the thought of killing.

Then there was only the feel of iron and leather, muscle and bone, the horse beneath, and the weapons strapped close—the Paladin’s body and soul.

The King’s champion surged toward Nightshade and the Darkling.

The lance of white oak dropped into place.

But the witch and the demon were already fusing hatred and dark magic to produce something they believed not even the Paladin could withstand. It climbed out of the hollows behind them, born of green fire and steam, clawing free of the mists and the haze, a huge, lumbering thing as white as the Paladin himself.

It was a second Paladin—of sorts.

From behind the shield of his magic, Questor Thews blinked and stared. He had never seen anything quite like this monster. It was a perversion—a joining of what appeared to be a huge, squat, lizardlike creature and an armored rider twice the size of the knight-errant, all twisted and sprouting weapons of bone and iron. It was as if some impossibly warped mirror had produced a distorted image of the Paladin, as if that image had been reflected in the most loathsome way possible and given life.

The monstrous creature—a single being—wheeled from the hollows’ rim and lumbered to meet the charge of the Paladin.

They came together with a thunderclap of sound, white oak and bone shattering, iron scraping and clanging, beasts grunting and shrieking their pain and anger. They slid off each other and passed by, dust and debris flying. Back around came the Paladin, discarding the remains of his lance, reaching down for the battle axe. The creature of the witch and demon slowed, turned, and seemed to swell in size, growing as if fed by the force of the conflict, lifting until it towered over everything.

All eyes were fixed at that moment on the creature.

Questor Thews made a slight motion with his hands. He seemed to shimmer, disappear, then reappear looking vaguely translucent. No one noticed.

The Paladin attacked, battle axe swinging. Nightshade and the Darkling fed their combined magics into their creation, shrieking with delight as it swelled even further, then lifted on its hindlegs and waited. It was as big as a house now, a mass of sluglike flesh. The Paladin rushed it, and the creature surged forward, trying to crush its attacker. The earth shook with the force of its weight as it struck. The Paladin just managed to slip past, the battle axe ripping along the beast’s thick hide. But the wound closed over almost at once. Magic gave the creature life, and magic was not subject to the laws of man and nature.

Back came the Paladin, broadsword drawn now, the gleaming blade cutting and hacking with tremendous fury, carving lines of red along the length of the beast. But the wounds closed as quickly as they were made, and the creature kept lunging for the knight, waiting for its chance. Nightshade and the Darkling urged the monster on. The witch’s face was rapt with pleasure. The demon’s tiny body was stretched taut. Magic surged from both of them, feeding their creature, keeping it strong. They could see that the beast’s lunges were getting closer now to the attacking knight. It would not be long now, they knew.

From within the cover of the decimated Bonnie Blues, Abernathy and Willow watched silently. They, too, could see how this fight was going and could tell how it was going to end.

Then something strange happened.

The creature suddenly lurched upward and began to shrink.

It shuddered as if stricken with a poison. The Darkling saw it first. The demon shrieked with anger and disbelief, raced down Nightshade’s black robes, and thrust its spider arms out to feed its pet more magic. But the creature failed to respond. It continued to shrink, flinching back now from the blows of the broadsword struck by the Paladin, stumbling and tottering away as it felt its life drain from it.

Nightshade saw it now, too, screamed in fury, then made her own determination of the cause and wheeled suddenly on Questor Thews. Fire as dark as pitch flew from her outstretched hands and enveloped the wizard. Questor Thews erupted in a pillar of smoke and ash. Willow and Abernathy gasped in horror. The wizard had disappeared completely.

But the creature was still shrinking. And now something was happening to the Darkling as well. It was doubled over, writhing on the ground at Nightshade’s feet, twisting as if the same poison that had infected its creature had infected it as well. It was shrieking something at Nightshade, who bent quickly to listen.

“The bottle, mistress!” it was saying. “The bottle has been sealed! I cannot find the magic! I cannot live!”

Nightshade still had the bottle in one hand. She stared at it uncomprehendingly, finding it unchanged, undamaged, the stopper pulled, the neck open. What was the demon screaming about? She was mystified.

A short distance away, the creature of the witch and demon’s magic had breathed its last, crumbling completely into dust. The Paladin ground it beneath his charger’s hooves and wheeled about once more. Nightshade looked up from the bottle in confusion. The Paladin was coming now at her.

Only then did she think to reach down to test the bottle’s opening. Blue wizard fire sparked and bit at her, and she jerked her fingers back. “Questor Thews!” Willow heard her shriek in fury. The Darkling was barely moving, clinging to one sleeve. The witch snarled, clasped the bottle by its throat, and prepared to send her own magic surging into its blocked opening.

She was too late.

The Paladin was almost on top of her.

Then Questor Thews seemed to explode out of nowhere right in front of the witch, seizing the bottle before she could think to react, snatching it quickly away. Nightshade shrieked once and lunged for the wizard just as the Paladin reached her.

Fire seemed to erupt from everywhere at the point of impact.

No longer within the concealment of the Bonnie Blues, but running to reach Questor Thews and Ben, Willow and Abernathy drew up short, wincing from the sound and the heat. Fire flared, seemingly of all colors and shapes, exploding into the mist and gray like a geyser out of the earth.

Then the debris settled, and Nightshade and the Paladin were gone. Questor Thews was on his knees, both hands clutched tightly over the top of the bottle, watching stonefaced as the Darkling writhed on the scorched earth and turned to lifeless dust.

Ben Holiday returned to himself, lightheaded and dazed, with the medallion still warm against his chest. He started to sway and topple over, but then Willow was there, holding him upright, and Abernathy was beside her, and he managed to smile and say, “It’s okay now. It’s over.”

The four friends sat quietly at the site of battle and talked about what had happened.

Nightshade was gone. Whether she had been destroyed by the Paladin or escaped to trouble them another day, none of them knew. They could recall the moment of impact—a flare of light and a glimpse of the witch’s face. That was all. They were not willing to bet that they had seen the last of her.

Strabo was gone, too. He had lifted into the sky almost immediately at the battle’s conclusion, winging his way east without a backward glance. They could only imagine his thoughts. They were certain they had not seen the last of the dragon.

The Darkling, they hoped, was gone for good.

So, with any immediate danger dispelled, Ben was able—with occasional interjections from Questor—to explain to Willow and Abernathy how the puzzle of the Darkling had been solved.

“The secret was the bottle,” Ben said. “The Darkling lived in the bottle and never left it completely for long, even when freed from it, so there had to be some logical tie between them. Otherwise, the demon, who was always so anxious to be let out, would have simply abandoned its prison and gone its way. I thought, what if it can’t leave the bottle? What if that’s where it gets its power? What if the magic comes from the bottle, not the demon, and the demon stays with the bottle because it has to, if it wants to continue to use the magic? The more I thought about it, the more sense it made.”

“So the High Lord suggested to me,” Questor broke in eagerly, “that if the magic came from the bottle, then shutting off the bottle would cut off the Darkling’s power.”

“The trick was in doing that without letting Nightshade know what was happening—and then getting the bottle back before she could do anything about it.” Ben regained control of his explanation. “So while the Paladin was engaged in battle with the Darkling and Nightshade, Questor used the magic to shrink himself down and slip over to hide in the bottle’s neck. He became its stopper. He left an image of himself so that Nightshade wouldn’t know what he was up to. What Nightshade ended up destroying, when she guessed that Questor was behind the loss of magic, was just the image.”

“You might have alerted us to that much, at least!” Abernathy interrupted heatedly. “You scared us to death with that trick! We thought the old … Well, we thought he had been fried!”

“Questor sealed off the bottle,” Ben continued, ignoring his scribe’s outburst. “That shut off the source of the Darkling’s power and rendered Nightshade’s own magic, which was focused on the bottle’s, useless. It all worked exactly the way we had thought. By the time Nightshade figured out what had happened, it was too late. The creature was done, the demon was too weak to help, and the Paladin was bearing down. Questor surprised Nightshade by jumping out at her the way he did, full-size again, and snatching back the bottle. She couldn’t do anything.”

“What we hadn’t anticipated, of course, was the extent of the effect that sealing off the bottle would have on the Darkling,” Questor cut in again. “The demon drew not only its magic from the bottle, but its life as well. Once it was shut outside, it could not survive.”

The four glanced as one at the small pile of dust some dozen feet away. A fresh breeze had come up. Already, the flakes were beginning to scatter.