Seven Sorcerers(87)

Damn these Men and Giants! Let them grovel and crawl like ants before us, as their predecessors did when the world was young and burning.

“Look to me in the hour of Zyung’s challenge,” Ianthe said again. “Wait for my signal. Until then, serve your God-King faithfully. Forget this dream and this pact. You will remember it when the time is right, as you remember your own natures.”

Ianthe raised her pale arm and the Red Dream faded. Like a splinter it would remain buried deep in the heart-mind of every conspirator, to blossom like a stoked flame in the hour when Zyung must fall.

Yet Sungui would remember it all. Ianthe’s spell was not meant to affect him as it had the rest of the coven. Sungui’s thoughts needed no protection from Zyung. Yet Ianthe had no idea that Zyung already saw the betrayal in Sungui’s heart. What would the Panther do if she knew? Destroy Sungui, or wipe the knowledge of the plot from his mind? Or perhaps she would allow Sungui to continue in uncertain allegiance as Zyung did.

She would never allow me a choice the way Zyung does.

Had Ianthe enchanted the five hundred to join her scheme, or won them over with memory and promises? Nearly half of the existing High Seraphim were hers now. Did it truly matter if she’d ensorcelled them or persuaded them? Sungui must be careful to take charge of the rebels at some point, before Ianthe bound them to herself as Zyung had done ages ago. Such treachery was not beyond the Panther, despite what she claimed as her true goal.

Sungui awoke inside his own cabin. Ianthe lay beside him in the dark. The dawn was only a few hours away. Outside the porthole the distant lights of the Lesser Seraphim flared in the valley, while the campfires of a hundred thousand Manslayers lined the riverbanks and ridges beyond the ruins. In the morning there would be no trace of decaying flesh left upon the battleground. Only a range of bleached bones.

Ianthe sensed Sungui’s waking and pulled him close to her. In the delights of her embrace he found no answers to his lingering doubts, but he lost the compulsion to consider them further.

Afterwards, the bliss of a dreamless sleep.

At mid-morning Lavanyia’s legions gathered in formation along the hillsides and ridges. Zyung stood in the middle of the ruined city, surrounded by a dozen new white hills: the heaped bones and skulls of Men, Trills, and Giants that had died in yesterday’s battle. The dead of Uurz, Udurum, and the Living Empire were treated as one, the raw materials of Zyung’s design.

The Lesser Seraphim had spent the night burning the flesh from these bones. There would have been even more than this, but the Celestial Lights of the Seraphim had turned every part of their victims to dust. Yet these mingled bones would be enough. They lay atop the weather-worn stones of the dead city. Stone and bone would be the bricks of Zyung’s new temple-palace. Sorcery was the mortar that would hold them together.

Sungui and ninety-nine other High Seraphim–most of them belonging to Ianthe’s secret coven–hovered in a steady ring about the Almighty, prepared to give his vision form and structure. Sungui retained his male aspect today. It seemed to please Ianthe best, and his female aspect had grown tired of Gammir’s torrid mating.

From the slopes, hills, and the decks of anchored ships, the eyes of the Holy Armada were upon the Almighty and his chosen builders. Zyung’s will reached out to them like a guiding hand, and a current of light gleamed between each of the floating Seraphim. Zyung was the spoke of their wheel, directing their power as an archer directs his arrows.

It began with the scattered stones of the dead city. The ones that were wholly or partially buried beneath the red earth began to rise. The sections of city wall that still stood now crumbled into fragments and floated to join the rest of the levitating rock.

Zyung’s soundless symphony played on in their minds, shifting from key to key. The hills of piled bones began to leap and dance. The rattling remains ascended and spun about the wheel of power like a swarm of white flies. The stones began to melt without heat, flowing like water, and the bones added their pale presence to the liquid substance. Stones and bones blended, becoming a single essence that reminded Sungui of the pearly clouds hanging above the bay.

The raw granite that had been the bones of a city combined with the whiteness that had been the bones of living creatures. Together they formed a new kind of stone, pale as marble yet without a single vein or blotch. The symphony of thought rose into a new pattern, and the power of the High Seraphim cast the new stone upward, a rising mountain bright as cloud yet solid as crystal. The white mountain took shape about Zyung’s figure, obscuring him from sight as it encased his body and towered above it. The wheel of Seraphim spun in unison about the bubbling paleness as it grew harder and denser. They sculpted the outlines of curved walls and soaring towers, arching bridges and impeccable domes.