Seven Sorcerers(121)
“You burned me to nothing once before, Ytara!” growled the Panther. “Yet I took refuge in your own belly. Have you learned nothing?”
Ianthe reared up on her hind claws and smashed Alua, who was also Ytara, to the deck. The white flame extinguished itself, except for the fires of Alua’s eyes, which burned brighter now. The Panther raked its black talons across her stomach with a splash of crimson. The fanged maw opened wide enough to snap off Alua’s head, but her swift hands grabbed the upper and lower jaw. The Panther’s fangs hovered a finger’s breadth from her face.
“I have learned many things,” said Alua. “Including the Bitch of Khyrei’s true name.”
In that instant the Panther abandoned its attempts to rend Alua’s flesh. It tore away from her and sprouted eagle’s wings from its back, leaping across the railing toward the night sky. Sungui could almost feel Ianthe’s fear from the top of the forecastle steps.
Alua grabbed the Panther’s whipping tail and slammed the winged beast against the deck. The dreadnought trembled a third time. Alua’s voice rose in a single word loud as a thunderbolt, as if she spoke with the voice of dead Zyung himself. Soldiers and slaves clasped their hands over their ears, so loud was that sound.
Where Ianthe had been scrambling upon the deck, there now stood a statue of opaque crystal in the form of a winged panther. Alua’s flame ran along its back, and the frozen wings shattered like panes of glass. Ianthe’s essence seethed inside the crystal prison. Alua examined her handiwork as the wounds on her body vanished beneath the power of her flame.
Vireon held the Black Wolf above his head now. The beast erupted with tendrils of darkness like questing black tongues. They wrapped about Vireon’s limbs, their thorny tips piercing his flesh where claws and fangs could not. With a great cry of pain and indignation, the Giant-King tore the Wolf’s body in half. Scarlet sprayed across the deck, and Gammir’s bones cracked like hammered boulders.
The Wolf howled as Vireon stood over its bisected form. The black tendrils faded to smoke and the lupine body parts flowed into the shape of a mangled and broken man. Gammir stared up at Vireon with yellow wolf-eyes that had not changed at all. His maimed arms and legs shuddered, his shattered spine convulsing. A gout of black gore burst from between his lips.
“Brother…” gasped Gammir. “Kill me now. You’ve earned the right.”
Vireon grabbed Gammir by the neck and lifted him to dangle like a ruined doll. “I too have learned many things, False Brother,” he said. The holes bored into his flesh by the cutting tendrils leaked blood across his stomach and legs. He seemed to feel no pain from these wounds. “I know that you cannot be killed as a Man is killed. You are no longer a Man, but a sorcerer. So are we both now, though spawned by different fathers.”
He tossed Gammir’s mangled body next to the crystallized Panther. Alua looked upon the wailing Wolf without pity. Vireon walked near and embraced her.
Gammir spat a fresh torrent of blood across the deck. “You will devour us then. Take our essence into yourselves.” He smiled through his pain. “There is no other way to end us. I welcome this, Brother. Let me become a part of you, as I was never truly a part of your family. Let me be the memory that will haunt you forever.”
“No, Kinslayer,” said Vireon. “You murdered my brother and my cousins. The Bitch of Khyrei murdered my father… and our daughter. Yet we will not devour you.”
“You must!” choked Gammir. “Or we will return, and the killing will begin again.”
“There are fates worse than death for immortals,” said Alua. “This you will discover, Wolf. You will be bound to your Panther forever.”
A fresh blast of the white flame coursed from Alua’s eyes. It drowned Gammir’s cries along with his shattered body. When the flames faded he, too, was a frozen lump of foggy crystal.
Alua sang an ancient song. Vireon held her left hand as her right dripped molten fires between its fingers. The crystallized pair smoked and steamed and began to merge. In a few swift moments, a single lump of amorphous quartz lay where the Wolf and Panther had been. It was large as a boulder and murky as the waters of a blood-glutted river.
Vireon lifted the boulder of crystal, which darkened now to the color of a purple bruise, or fresh-dried blood. He squeezed it between his mighty hands as if to splinter it, but it did not crack or shatter. It grew smaller instead, and smaller, and smaller still, until it was a single diamond lying in his palm, emitting a residue of sorcerous vapor.
The center of the bright diamond was a drop of crimson.