Seven Sorcerers(56)

Khama spun and raged and erupted like a dying celestial body, no longer heedful of the screaming, the flames, the death that filled the bowl of the earth. He was the annihilation of planets, the yawning chaos at the heart of existence, an irresistible spark torn from the cosmic furnace in which all things must find obliteration.

Until…

A great dark hand fell about him, clutching and quenching the flame of his existence. Inside the fist of shadows he saw the glimmering of galaxies, the starfields of alien worlds glinting like diamonds in the palm of a black gauntlet. The mighty hand squeezed, crushing the life from him, extinguishing the inextinguishable, snuffing out his glorious blaze.

The titanic fingers opened, and Khama fell.

A smoking ember of charred flesh, dropping from the light of sun and sky into the cold embrace of salty waters. He sank like a speck of molten rock, cooling and coalescing, as the deep accepted his defeat in a way that he could not.

No! I will not suffer this!

A single word, or the blast of a mighty horn, sounded in his awareness.

Both the hand and the word belonged to Zyung the Almighty.

The sea became a void, full of dead stars and shriveled worlds.

Khama sank deeper, toward a bottom that may or may not exist.

Then darkness.

No.

I will not be vanquished in this way.

I am the Feathered Serpent.

I am of the Old Breed.

Zyung is not my master.

I have no master but my own will.

I choose to endure.

In a deep trench the light of Khama’s intellect rekindled, a shimmering mote in the briny dark. Sand and coral and drifting strands of plant life mingled and merged with a passing school of fish. Pallid coils manifested across the seabed, sprouting feathers and scales.

His new eyes opened wide, shedding amber light across the ocean floor.

A shadow of his former self, weak and spent of all but his unbreakable intent, Khama glided among the shoals and underwater reefs. His head rose upward, guiding the rest of his body toward the higher waters.

First, the aquamarine glow of sunlight seen from below the surface. Then the crimson and orange glow of flames, and the white streaks of burning sorcery tainting the waters. Broken ships sank into the depths, still burning with unquenchable fires. The broken, drowned, and ragged bodies of sailors and soldiers drifted downward or lay among tangled beds of kelp.

By the hundreds, by the thousands they perished and sank to watery graves. Khama glided among them like a massive eel, skirting the hungry flames, searching by the light of his instinct for the Bird of War.

Zyung’s attention was no longer focused on Khama, or the God-King would crush him once again. He must find Undutu before that happened. Find him and fly him from this great slaughter before it consumed them both.

The great arc of sea vessels was broken and scattered. The black reavers of Khyrei were wrecked and blazing; the Jade Isle traders were nothing more than floating splinters; the lean galleys of Yaskatha drifted in flaming pieces toward the sea-bottom; the alabaster swanships of Mumbaza burned brightest of all, refusing to go down even as the flames consumed them. Warriors leaped blazing and wailing into the waters, where floating fires scorched them as they drowned.

Nearly all of the thousands ships assembled by Undutu and D’zan were burning and broken. The rest would soon follow.

Khama saw the Bird of War floating in two pieces, each one upturned to bob upon the surface, pale flames eating at the bisected hull and boiling the waters beneath.

I am too late.

He surfaced into the last moments of the firestorm. No more flames rose into the sky, but still the burning alchemy rained upon the wreckage and flotsam. A deluge of cleansing fire meant to sweep all resistance from the path of Zyung. It had succeeded.

Khama lifted only his head above the surface, directly between the two halves of the Bird of War. The moans of doomed men wrapped in blazing sails tore at his heart like the claws of vultures. His eyes scanned the wreckage…

He lives!

Undutu clung to the scorched keel of the swanship. His crown and sword were lost to him, as was his mighty fleet and all its proud warriors. A score of burns marked his lean body, yet he shouted defiance at the dreadnoughts hovering less than a bow-shot above the waves. The airships had come in low to finish any survivors. As if in response to Undutu’s raving cries, a gout of flame arced toward him from on high.

Khama grabbed the King’s leg between his jaws, gentle enough to avoid harm, and yanked him from the ruined shard of hull. He pulled Undutu beneath the water as the surface ignited and the flotsam charred to cinders. There was panic in the King’s face as the sea swallowed him, until he met the glowing eyes of Khama, who pulled him deeper still.

A globe of air bubbled from Khama’s throat to engulf Undutu. The bleeding monarch, able to breathe again, pulled himself along Khama’s skull to straddle the Feathered Serpent’s neck.