Thieves World 5 – The Face of Chaos by Asprin, Robert

I do summon thee!’

Lalo was tumbled by a riptide of power and for a moment knew a desperate hope

that the sorcerer’s instinctive house-cleaning would send him home. But where

was home, now?

Then the power ebbed, and Lalo sat up, still in the triangle. The demon in the

sigil beside him spat and reached for him with flaming claws.

‘Oh thou spirit who hast come to my summoning, I conjure thee to tell me thy

name.’ Enas Yorl seemed unmoved by his first failure, and Lalo began to

understand the patience and plain nerve required for wizardry.

He got to his feet and approached the edge of the triangle as closely as he

dared. ‘It’s me, Lalo the Limner. Enas Yorl, don’t you recognize me?’

And as he waited for the sorcerer to reply, Lalo realized that he himself

recognized Enas Yorl, and that was very strange, for the essence of the curse

that tormented the sorcerer was that his form should never remain for long the

same. With a kind of horrified fascination, Lalo looked into the true face of

Enas Yorl.

He read there passions and evils at the limit of his comprehension, barely

confined by lines of vision and tormented love. In that face all that was great

and terrible were joined in an eternal conflict that only the slow erosion of

hopeless years might ever hope to reconcile. And those years had already become

so long. It was a face whose planes had been chiselled out by the relentless

blade of power, ground down again by a kind of patient, painful despair. At last

he understood why Enas Yorl had refused to let Lalo paint his portrait. He