Blue Adept by Piers Anthony Page B

large and strong, and there were many of them. I saw a woman torn apart by two trolls who were fighting over possession; they laughed with great grotesque guffaws as her left arm ripped out of its socket, and the troll holding that arm was angry because he had the smaller share, and clubbed the other troll with it while blood splattered everywhere. But then a screaming child ran by, a little girl, and the troll caught that child and brought her to its face and opened its awful mouth and—and bit off her screaming head.
    Then the image faded, mercifully, for I was screaming myself. Never had I seen such horror! The darkness covered all. After a pause, the dawn came. The trolls were hidden in the houses, gorged; they would not go abroad by light of day, and suffered no fires, for that they were the opposite of goblins in this respect and the light was painful to them. They had buried themselves under piled blankets, shutting out all signs of the day. They were safe; no villager remained alive.
    No—one remained. A child, a boy—he emerged from the trunk of a hollow tree. It seemed he had been playing in it when the trolls descended, or doing something he wasn’t supposed to, like practicing spells, then had hidden frozen in fright until dawn made it safe to emerge. Now he stood, surveying the ruin—and it was the blue lad.   “Thou!” I exclaimed. “Thou didst witness it all! Thy village, thy family, most brutally destroyed!”
    “Have no sympathy for me,” he replied grimly. “I was transformed that hideous night from youth to enchanter. I realized that no force but magic could restore the balance, and so—“ He spread his hands. “Look what I did.” I looked—and saw the figure in the image raise his hands, and I heard him faintly singing, though I could not make out the words. Then, suddenly, a ring of fire appeared, encircling the village, blazing ferociously. Magic fire, I knew, but still fierce and hot. It burned inward, not outward, while the blue lad watched. He must have spent his sleepless hours in hiding devising that terrible spell, perfecting it. It ignited the outer thatch cottages. Now the trolls woke, and ran about in the fire, burning, terrified—but they could escape only inward toward the center of the village. And there the fire pursued them, itself a ravening demon.
    Now it was the trolls who gibbered in horror, and were granted no reprieve, as they huddled in the center of the village, heads covered, backs to the fire. Inevitably it closed on them, torturing them before it consumed them, and then fain would I have felt sorry for the trolls, but that I remembered the woman torn apart and the decapitated child. No mercy for the merciless! The trolls fought each other, trying to keep place in the closing circle, showing not the faintest compassion for their fellows, only selfish-ness.
    At last the dread fire burned itself out, its magic consuming flesh as readily as wood. Only mounds and ashes remained. All of the trolls had been destroyed. Except—except there was a stirring in a mound, and from it came a little troll, that must have been deeply buried by its mother, so that it alone survived. Now it looked about and wailed, afraid of the coming day.
    The blue lad spied it, and knew that this one could not have killed any people, and he cast a spell of darkness that clothed it, and let the little troll go. “Thou’rt like me,” the blue lad quoth. Then he turned his back on what had been his home, and walked away.
    The music stopped and the vision dissipated. I looked across at the blue lad. He had shown me his second major component: his power. Yet I did not realize, or perhaps refused to let myself know, the significance of this deadly ability.
    “Thou—thou wast as thou art now!” I exclaimed. “Thou hast not changed, not grown. But the destruction of thy village occurred ten years ago! How could—“ “I was seventeen,” he replied.
    “And now thou’rt—twenty-seven?” I