Sunday Read: An Excerpt from Raymond E Feist’s Magician’s End in Anticipation of Open Book

American fantasy author Raymond E Feist will be at this year’s Open Book Festival in Cape Town where he will speak to Sarah Lotz on Wednesday, 17 September 2014 about Magician’s End and all that came before.

Magician’s End is the final book in the Riftwar Cycle. Feist’s epic saga has now come full circle, with the black magician Pug/Milamber facing a final and brutal test.

We first met Pug in 1977 as the orphan keep-boy in Magician who became an apprentice to the magician Kulgan. When his home was invaded by the Tsurani warriors of a different dimension, Pug was kidnapped and sold into slavery. Thus began an adventure that would span over 30 years and be captured in 30 books.

Feist is a New York Times and Times of London bestselling author.

The following excerpt is from the first chapter of Magician’s End, where Pug and his son, Magnus, witness the destruction of an ancient race:

* * * * * * * * * * *

SHATTERED

Chaos erupted.

A light so brilliant it was painful bathed Pug as he instinctively threw all his magic into the protective shell Magnus had erected around them just a moment before. Only Magnus’s anticipation of the trap had prevented them all from being instantly vaporized. Energy so intense it could hardly be comprehended now destroyed everything at hand, reducing even the most iron-hard granite to its fundamental particles, dispersing them into the fiery vortex forming around them.

The light pierced Pug’s tightly shut eyelids, rendering his vision an angry red-orange, with afterimages of green-blue. His instinct was to shield his face, but he knew the gesture would be useless. He willed himself to keep his hands moving in the pattern necessary to support Magnus’s efforts. Only magic protected them from conditions no mortal could withstand for even the barest tick of time. The very stuff of the universe was being distorted on all sides.

They were in what appeared to be the heart of a sun. In his studies, Pug knew this to be the fifth state of matter, beyond earth, air, water, and fire, called different names by various magicians: among them, flux, plasma, and excited fire. Energy so powerful that it tore the very essentials of all matter down to their very atoms and recombined them, repeating the process until at some point the plasma fell below a threshold of destruction and creation and was able finally to cease its fury.

Years of perfecting his art had gifted him with myriad skills, some talents deployed reflexively without conscious effort. The magic tools he used to assess and evaluate were overloaded with sensations he had never experienced in his very long lifetime. Obviously, whoever had constructed this trap had hoped it would be beyond his ability to withstand. He suspected it was the work of several artisans of magic.

In his mind, Pug heard Miranda asking, Is everyone safe?

Nakor’s voice spoke aloud. “There’s air. We can talk. Magnus, Pug, don’t look. It will blind you. Miranda, we can look.”

“Describe what you see,” Magnus said to the two demons in human form.

Miranda said, “It’s an inferno hotter than anything witnessed in the demon realm. It has destroyed a hundred feet of rock and soil below us and we are afloat in a bubble of energy. Farther out from where we stand, it’s turning sand to glass. A wall of superheated air is expanding outward at incredible speed, and whatever it touches is incinerated in moments. As far as my eye can discern, all is flame, smoke, and ash.”

Less than a minute before, the four of them had been examining a matrix of magic, which was obviously a lock, but had turned out to be a trap.

Ancient beings of energy, the Sven-ga’ri, had been protected in a quiet glade atop a massive building built by a peaceful tribe of the Pantathians, a race of serpent men created by the ancient Dragon Lord, Alma-Lodaka. Unlike their more violent brethren, these beings had been gentle, scholarly, and very much like humans.

Now that peaceful race had been obliterated. It didn’t matter to Pug that they had been created by the mad vanity of a long-dead Dragon Lord as pets and servants: they had evolved into something much finer and he knew he would mourn their loss.