At first he thought it had suddenly turned to night. All he saw from beneath the bench was blackness. And then the blackness moved. The enormous black body hopped ponderously to one side, the huge head turned. Wiz went weak from sheer terror.
The thing looked at Wiz with burning red eyes and then turned away. It lumbered through the last dying vestiges of the blue fire and out the door. Wiz heard it make its way down the corridor.
It took a long time for Wiz to get his heart back under control. The monster had destroyed the wizard and it looked right at him, but it hadn’t touched him. The way the thing looked at him Wiz knew it had to have seen him. But it hadn’t made a move to harm him. Somehow Wiz did not think it was because the monster was a friend.
Wiz had never seen the huge black creature, but he recognized it from descriptions. It was Bale-Zur, the slaying demon which had brought Toth-Set-Ra to power in the Dark League and then destroyed him when Wiz attacked the City of Night.
There was something about that. Something he had learned. He cudgeled his brains, trying to recall that almost-remembered bit of knowledge. Something he saw? No, something someone told him. Before he used his new magic to travel to the City of Night and rescue Moira. Something someone told him about demons, or dragons, or . . .
Of course! True names. Humans weren’t the only creatures with true names. Fully mature dragons had them. And so did some kinds of demons because it was only by knowing their true names that they could be controlled. That was how Bale-Zur found his prey. Unlike other demons, the great slaying demon did not need to know a thing’s true name to destroy it. All it needed was for the being’s true name to have been spoken somewhere in the World at some time.
And of all mortals in the world, William Irving Zumwalt was the only one safe from Bale-Zur. No one had ever spoken his full name—his true name—anywhere in this World.
Licking his lips, he stepped over the gruesome remains of the wizard. As he did so he kicked something that rolled across the floor.
Wiz was almost afraid to look down for fear his foot had touched some body part. But it was only a silvery sphere about the size of a baseball that had been clutched in what was left of Seklos’ hand.
Seklos must have grabbed it when Bale-Zur attacked him, Wiz thought. Overcoming his revulsion, he bent down and picked up the sphere. He couldn’t be sure but it looked like the thing that the wizard had thrown at him, the one that spread fire on the stones.
He forced himself to look at what was left of Seklos and realized his left sleeve was lumpy. Swallowing his gorge, Wiz reached into the blood-sodden sleeve and fished out two more of the spheres. He could have done it faster except he kept his eyes closed through the whole process.
The three spheres gave him weapons, his first real weapons that might be effective against the wizards of the Dark League.
The wizards . . . ! Seklos had sent his companion for help. Wiz stuffed the balls into his pouch, grabbed his halberd and dashed down the stairs. There were three wizards not more than a hundred yards up the street when he emerged from the building. Without hesitating, Wiz ran around the corner, leaving the black robes to wonder at the sound of footsteps with no sign of the runner.
Several blocks away, Wiz sank back against the wall of an empty storeroom and listened for any sound of pursuit.
The situation got worse and worse. His cloak of invisibility’s spell had some loopholes. Wiz had no doubt at all that there were counter-spells that would render it useless.
Wiz forced himself to calm down and think. Through all the hunger and cold and terror, he had to think.
He had to summon help somehow and if he expected to live long enough for that he had to defeat or neutralize the Dark League. Two problems and both of them looked insoluble.