In Otoka's vast, cavernous sanctum, weighty chandeliers dangled so low that Azuri might have grazed the centerpiece, a winged, glass giant descending, its shimmering arms grasping a glasswork planet reflecting not only the dead, ashen face of Otoka, but the livid, tearful face of Eurilda, both
clasped in a light that embraced and splintered them into countless slivers, lighting the stained-glass windows that lined the sanctum walls in a prismatic diversity of violets, yellows, blues, and greens, all flooded by red flashes of gridlocked flame snarling in the sky.
For as Eurilda glared with baleful contempt, the elves hurtled in, shattering the stained glass.
Through the window shards, the Alfyrian Fire surged in meteor streaks that crisscrossed columns of fiery smoke, until the Abyss was banished behind a rose-red sky tinged with drifting dust glinting in eddies, and drizzling in sparking, ashen puffs. Rows of Kundan Cerund unfurled in along the torrential Abyss-spanning blaze of Alfyrian Fire, clashing their weapons and shields as they set foot on the Giant World.
Azuri was familiar with the concept of the Alfyrian Fire, having argued against it in the Palace of the Tzurarkhs, and he recalled those arguments now: that turning their legions into an apocalyptic weapon would lead to swelled heads, gigantic egoes, and overweening pride in their ranks, making the Kundan Cerund an unassailable caste even the High Tzhurarkh might fear; that it would be replicated by other worlds, until the Abyss was rife with Alfyrian Fire and its knockoffs, and the first spark of war burned worlds to kindling; that no one, not even the High Tzhurarkh, could be trusted with the keys to such a device, when a spiteful whim might end the Five Worlds; that it was a dishonorable way to deploy, not only scorning noncombatants, children, and the elderly, but destroying the souls of soldiers now expected to bear arms where children play. The Tzhurarkhs' vehement roars waged war even before he had finished, pitting partisan contempt against partisan praise, drowning much of his whirlwind summary, in which he had passionately argued that the first thing destroyed by Alfyrian Fire was not its target world, but the souls deployed, and the world that aimed them into the Abyss. When it was already hard to find points of union between five different peoples, the Alfyrian Fire would splinter them even further, then grind the Five worlds into dust, leaving only a true abyss.
Even as he recalled this calamitous prophecy, it was eclipsed by Eurilda, who overshadowed him now, her hands--and whatever disaster she intended--occulted by her cloak.
"Is he..." asked Cyhari.
"Shut its mouth!" bellowed Eurilda, fixing Azuri with a stern, murderous glare. "Look what you have done!"
"Not I." Were Azuri a younger man, and not so weary, he might have stammered, but age and exhaustion kept his voice monotone. If his steadiness was a lie, it infused him with a wooden bravery. "And if you think to blame my people, your people slew tens of thousands of mine only hours ago."
"You lie," she seethed, "it is your people who slay mine."
"Your warlords dropped an oasis on Julaba."
"How would you know this?" Mirth lit her red-rimmed eyes, and a smile quivered on her trembling lips.
"An elven wizard..."
"Say Frellyx. I know the taste of his magic, and smell the stink of his handiwork underneath that of my master." Her acid loathing glowered at the Cyhari-thing as if she sought to burn her to a smudge where she stood.
"Having freed me from my cell, Frellyx geased me, then dispatched me with those he had gathered to implement the plan he coauthored with the giants." At her wicked smile, Azuri averted his eyes. "I was told the target was Hravak."
"While it's amusing to imagine you as a dupe, an agent of your own peoples' demise, what care I for dead elves?" When she flexed the fingers of her visible hand, the cloaked one stirred in its folds. "Why not top the pile with a couple more--or at least one, as I don't know how to classify what they made of your daughter."
"They?" Azuri raised an eyebrow. "Your master did this."
"My master as well," murmured Cyhari. "And my maker."
When the doors burst open, a dozen giants jostled each other as they crowded through, then rushed to bar the door with a tall candelabra, rattling its candles to the floor, where the tips flattened, then went out with a smolder, darkening the entrance. These giants were clad neither in armor, nor the red-embroidered black of assassins, but in the vibrant scarlet that marked them as Otoka's apprentices.
While their fresh faces were etched neither with the scars of battle nor the rigors of war, fear had whitened them a shade past the ivory hue of giants to a snowier complexion.
"Get out!" Eurilda hollered, inspiring the youngest and freshest-faced to clap their backs to the door and kick their feet, as if to backpedal through the weighty barrier, or bear it on their backs in their backward scamper down the corridor.
It struck Azuri then just how young Eurilda was, for as the eldest apprentice set her jaw, glaring back at Eurilda with grim determination, he saw that his feared enemy, barely more than a child herself,
could be no more than two years younger. How had Eurilda acquired so much power and this much wickedness in so short a space? Twenty years ago, Eurilda did not exist, and Azuri and Cyhari--the real Cyhari, not this pitiful and ungainly reminder--were living on Nahure.
"We'll be slain." Having closed her eyes and swept her hand to the side as if to cut off any rejoinder, the apprentice's eyes flashed to her ashen master, and she stormed toward Eurilda. "What did you do?"
"Me?" Eurilda's voice rang shrill. "Watch your tongue, girl, or I'll knock it through the Abyss faster than the Alfyrian Fire."
When the doors buckled and clattered, the candelabra bent, its metal whitening where it was bit by the door handles.
While Azuri had been giant-sized all day, he was always preoccupied with the actual size of giants and their effects, such as the gigantic candelabra, no doubt a foot thick and solid bronze, or the tremendous door, no doubt two feet thick, and reinforced by bolted black iron--both of which creaked and twisted under the onslaught on the other side. How were his fellow Alfyrians bringing this much force to bear?
When the wood smoldered, the handles whitened, and the candelabra sagged, they backpedaled away just as it exploded into a cascade of soot, embers,, slagged iron, and melting bronze, puddling under two gigantified elves grasping a strange glass horn between them, which blew sparking, yellow vapors.
"Fire!" The scathing bellow echoed resonant with overtones of hatred, contempt, and fear. "Burn them all!" As the elves strode over the slag, a bright golden beam lanced forth, slicing half the apprentices in half, not only too swiftly to scream, but too swiftly to know they were slain. Not that the beam left a nice, neat trail; on the contrary, it tore its messy, bubbling way, melting flesh to gore.
"Down!" Azuri hissed, yanking Cyhari under a stone table. While it would not shield them from the unulenorn, which melted the hardest stone or metal to liquid, he hoped by concealment to subtract themselves from its available targets. As they crouched, his eyes flicked here and there: while some apprentices had melted into the gory scum that now spattered the walls and floors of the befouled sanctum, others had looked to Eurilda's rapid spellcraft, remembered their lessons, and helped conjure the billowing fog which now stalled the melter's ray. Strange, Azuri mused, that it passed through bodies and the hardest metal like butter, but was stymied by a filmy mist.
"The mist!" he whispered, but Cyhari was already darting for the shielding fog.
When it happened, his sight dimmed and his hearing numbed, but irony intensified its harsh awareness until he dwindled to a whisper. Having passed into the fringe of his affections and the heart of his worries, this drab doppelganger put her own trust in the ephemeral, and leaped from solid stone into diaphanous mist, only to be speared by the lance of the unulenorn.
While the apprentices had liquified into gore that clumped to the sanctum wall, what posed as Cyhari crumbled into utter nonexistence, a nothingness mirrored by his vaporizing feelings. He could not help thinking it an apt conclusion to her short life. How long could she have expected to live, being out of place from birth? If anomalies are short lived, abominations fight for existence with every breath. But he couldn't help thinking she had found a place, even if it was nowhere in the Five Worlds,
but in the remotest reaches of his heart.
As he crouched, this spark of pity kindled anger, then rage.
Its truest feelings had been unwitting, incessant deception; in copying Cyhari's motions and mannerisms, it had grown on him, leaving him with affection both heartfelt and loathsome, making of his every feeling an invasion, as if another mind had seeded in his own, strangling the roots of his own being, until he felt estranged from himself. The moment of her vanishing had also eroded his own heart or mind, unearthing this inextricable stranger she had seeded in him, a false flower even worse than the geas. Compassion and sorrow surged, but rage burned them away. While he knew it for a counterfeit fire, the fanned memories of his berserker rage when Cyhari had died in actuality, they now flared so real that he saw nothing but her death as he shouldered the table rage-blind, clasped it in his wide grip, then lunged up, the thrust of his legs amplifying the two-handed hurl to impart such a ripping momentum that where the table struck the giant gunners, blood, brains, and other gore splashed, as if they too had melted under Azuri's brute projectile.
Having stooped for a sword, Azuri followed through in a full lunge, sweeping the blade in a high arc that impaled a third giant elf. While the mist had spread throughout the sanctum, obscuring everyone and everything, Azuri had no more friends here, and felt free to cut and thrust as he liked, sparing neither giant nor elf.
"Kill him!" If before he only mirrored the angst of his daughter's death, this shrill, barking voice fanned it to a full blaze.
"Face me, Ialuna."
"Kill him now!" When she lowered her penant spear toward Azuri, the others circled so gingerly and timidly that her shout raised to a frantic scream: "kill him now!
When Azuri growled, they scooted back inches, but when he crouched, and lowered his sword,
they backpedaled yards, and as his feet hammered hard, jarring one into a stone table, the elf's screech cracked, then snapped in half, sputtering into inaudibility; and when, in this cruel, paused crash of bodies, the others flocked him, sharp swords raised, his sword slashed, wetting sword, armor, table, and floor with bright purple blood. As they came clashing in, they pierced the crushed elf, whom Azuri bandied back and forth as a shield, a moaning, leaking shield. Hearing his stiffening shield's death rattle, he chucked it, head first, clouting two along head and chest to fall under the bloody corpse in a tangle of limbs, which left just one standing, who tottered backward on knees weakened by fear, his shield held so high and stiffly forward that it looked more like a floating door than armor.
"Run, fool. I desire her death, not yours."
When the elf turned, and darted for the door, he gained no headway, as if running on a slick, yielding surface toward a door that receded from his floundering advance. When he began to lose ground, Azuri realized the elf was in the grip of an enchantment so gradual that his break for the door had become an infinitely regressing torture, shrinking ever out of reach, until the spell quickened its pace, and dissolved the elf to six inches high.
Eurilda stooped, scooped him up, grabbed his hair in her other hand, and with one rough twist,
peeled him from his scalp down to the small of his back. Not that she stopped there, but this was where his skin reached its tearing point, leaving a bloody skin rag in one hand, and a gibbering, skinned elf in the other. It may have only been seconds that she listened to his squealing cries, but they creeped long,
until, with a calm, saintly smile spoiled only by a cruel glint in her eyes, she pressed her fingers softly but firmly to the elf's head, which disgorged brains in a gory spurt.
While her soldiers were dead, Ialuna glared at Azuri and Eurilda with naked contempt, unafraid and angry, until Eurilda's eyes laid into her coolly, when the elven woman dwindled down to an elven scale.
"Now why would you want me dead, Ialuna?" Azuri's voice was cool and even. "Yesterday we were on the longbow world, bent to the same task by Otoka the Wise."
"You don't believe I wanted to destroy Julaba!" When her timid scowl became a jagged grin, Azuri hoped her teeth were ravaged when he had dropped a bookshelf on her, even as he found her new ugly look profoundly disappointing, for wounds and scars told of survival, of persistence in the face of her much deserved death, of the spiteful continuation of her unworthy existence. "I'm no traitor! Even geased, we never shared anything but hate for each other."
"On the contrary, we have a death in common, and my promise of murder, which you have never taken to heart."
Eurilda's sneer cut across her reply. "You waste time and words, Azuri. Who cares how or why she is here." Having flicked away Ialuna's sword, then seized her in the same loose grip, Eurilda bunched up Ialuna's long black tresses in her hand, and was about to tug, when Azuri stirred from his malevolent haze.
"Do this, Eurilda, and your vengeance will be at an end."
"Why am I not surprised that you speak caution? Old, timid elf in a hulking frame. You should have been born a kiuvathi." Eurilda's eyes raked Ialuna. "You should would want this more than me, as she has killed your daughter twice now." She sighed. "Tell me what you mean, but quickly."
"Only one day after leaving Otoka's service, she returns with royal assassins in her wake.."
She snickered "So the High Tzhurarkh conspired against his own world? Isn't his palace in Julaba? Why would he do this?"
"He has retreated to his Summer Palace. Historically, that's the traditional first move for a High Tzhurarkh planning a coup."
"A coup? Against himself?"
"Against the Tzhurarkhs. You forget, we have not one king, but a hundred and one. In many ways, our High Tzhurarkh is more slave than master to the hundred Tzhurarkhs who swear loyalty while advancing their own agendas."
"Is this true?" While the cracked, dirty blade of Eurilda's thumbnail was not quite as wide as Ialuna's neck, it left little doubt as it pressed to her throat that its brutal pinch might decapitate the wicked elf.
"I don't even have the High Tzhurarkh's ear, how am I supposed to know his mind?" When the nail pressed harder, drawing a rivulet of blood to fill the cracks of the grimy nail, Ialuna stammered, "but I can speculate. It makes sense. The Kundan Cerund who conveyed my orders said it was most urgent. To be honest, I didn't need much motivation, seeing that Otoka had destroyed my ancestral lands."
"As if that mattered." Azuri shrugged. "They were liened by the government for your violent acts."
Until then, Azuri had scarcely cared what happened to Julaba. When Ialuna mentioned her ancestral homes, spite welled up until he felt small enough to drown in it, until he realized the home once shared with his wife and daughter had lain in the awful trajectory of the weaponized oasis. It was like his life had been sealed behind a stone until Ialuna was a fingernail's width from death, when the stone lifted, and he could not only breathe, but feel the Abyss-light on his face.
While his cares were his again, as they went out to his home, he felt the finality of its erasure, of the utter destruction of past centuries, and of all thoughts of his future, which until that moment lay buried under the stone. In the absence of a reason to be, Azuri had allowed vengeance to draw him into the afterlife of his numb feelings, until he had become a protracted shadow, a spidery soul, which, even as it fed on the sight of Ialuna on the cusp of death, bit back at Azuri, draining him of all purpose, all determination. "Ialuna, did it work?"
"I wasn't there when it hit."
"You're evading. I know you were at the summer palace. But did it work?"
"I lost everything too--"
"I lost everything before that day. You can scorn my grief, but don't underestimate me. I'm not seeking closure, but strategy. We must know our enemies, Ialuna."
Eurilda snorted. "Don't think I'll spare this worthless witch, no matter what she knows."
"Eurilda, I don't like you, and I know the feeling is mutual." While Eurilda only glowered, he took this as a sign of assent.
"I only point this out so you can understand I have no motive for speaking anything but the truth. While I don't like you, would never flatter you, and until recently habored thoughts of revenge against you, I now desire nothing but avenging not only Cyhari, but her memory, which was briefly housed in Otoka's monstrous construct."
"Just say what you were going to say. I don't care about your justifications."
"Don't you want to take the fight to the High Tzhurarkh?"
Eurrilda's brows contracted as she turned toward Azuri. Until now, she had only deigned to talk to him, not sparing him a glance. "I'm not myself, having been disappointed in love and long imprisoned in an enchantment of my own design."
"So I heard. Even as the rumors filled me with elation, my heart shuddered to think of anyone trapped as I was, for so long a time."
"Whether it was an interminable moment, or the blink of an eon, I have become accustomed to living without foresight. While I remember the satisfaction planning and scheming can provide, I have settled instead for the gross gratifications of instinct." She looked at him shrewdly. "Having had it worse than me, how are you still thinking ahead?" Not waiting for a response, she snorted her displeasure and shook Ialuna, rattling her in her rough grip until the pinch of her nail dragged on her neck and chin, a deep scratch welling bright purple elf blood. "This Alfyrian Fire. Summon up a return trip."
Ialuna's eyes were wracked with terror, her mouth was drawn into a rictus of fear, and her hands shoved at the giant hand ineffectually, but only a squeal escaped from her purpling face: "n-n-no!" When the giantess wrinkled her nose into a sneer and grudgingly lifted her thumb, Ialuna's chest heaved, and a wheeze rasped out, "they...don't...trust...me."
Eurilda chortled. "Do you blame them, you vile, despicable thing? What king or god would trust you with the subtleties of their will? Look whose hands you're in now."
"P-please..."
"You've as good as said you're worthless, you worm--the only satisfaction I can get from you now is the sigh I'll squeal, squirting your cowardly jelly out of your shrinking skin."
"Even if I get you to Alfyria, you'll slay me anyway."
"What's it to you if you die a traitor or not?" As Eurilda's nostrils flared in an ugly scowl, the jets of hot air parted Ialuna's hair.
As Eurilda taunted Ialuna, Azuri's attention wandered. Despite having anticipated taking his revenge on Ialuna, her comeuppance was proving a deadening, enervating affair. As his wrath trailed away, he prayed Ialuna would peter off into oblivion, so he could forget his vengeance and begin, once again, to live as he wished.
His eyes stilled into a dreamy, backwards-looking glance, and his thoughts cooled their fires, no longer forging schemes but taking pride in past times. Then his eyes were caught by the slow sag of Otoka's chest.
The master wizard was not yet dead.
As Azuri's hindsight snagged on the present, his heart quickened, his breath rasped, his memories caved in, and his pride deflated, until his skin squirmed, and his hair felt thin and reeled tight. As he was strolling memory lane, his body had remembered the geas. As fear flooded memory, it obliterated its precious details, until he thought of nothing but rebelling against the dying grasp of the wizard.
The master wizard might not even be dying. His breath was shallow, but not ragged, as deep blue iced the giant's cheeks their natural color.
When Eurilda again took hold of Ialuna's tresses, Azuri's attention wavered. While it would be easy to say nothing, and a relief to watch his daughter's murderer be skinned alive, it nagged him to think Ialuna had proven a tool after all. He had never known his true enemy. "How long have you worked for your cousin, Ialuna?"
When she turned her pleading eyes, Azuri laid his hand on Eurilda's arm, but the giantess shrugged him away, jerked a ropy tress free from just over Ialuna's ear, and barked a spiteful and malevolent laugh as violet blood soaked her hair, her face, robes. While Ialuna was now a frazzled horrorshow, her remaining tresses not only a proliferation of split ends pulled near the breaking point too many times, but circling the gaping hole in her dark beauty, Azuri quelled his own dark mirth. Laughing at this bloody parody of his enemy would have been an unseemly memory to recall.
"You may as well answer him," Eurilda chuckled moodily. "It's nothing to me now, but I may have an interest in where his line of inquiry is heading."
"She's their captain. Of course you will." Truth to tell, Azuri had lost his taste for vengeance. It was one thing to savor a death, or to be tantalized by the thought of murder, but it was another to have it served up cold. "You heard her. Tell me what we want to know."
"Long enough." When Ialuna coughed, it became a coughing jag, as if Eurilda, in stretching her skin, had strung her breath twice as tight. Not only did her face seem pinched from the giantess's tugging on her scalp, but even her fingertips looked rough and raw, with blood peeking from under the cuticles.
"Get a hold of yourself." His tones were so pitiless and certain that Azuri did not recognize his own voice. "How long, Ialuna?"
"Don't prolong the inevitable, scum," snapped Eurilda. "I grow bored with this already."
"Years, decades, centuries. Who knows?" As realization dawned in Ialuna's eyes, they curled in cruel and feral glee. Even when Azuri answered this presumption with a scornful scowl, she couldn't stop the smile spreading to her mouth, despite that her lips were also cracked from being stretched in Eurilda's monstrous grip. "You've figured it out, Azuri."
"I don't know. You haven't admitted anything."
"I can help you, Azuri."
"But nothing for me?" Eurilda snorted. "Typical. I'm going to kill her now."
"Wait! Stop!" As Eurilda's inexorable grasp straddled Ialuna's neck and hoisted her into the air, Ialuna forced a breathless screech: "Stop! I have a way!"
"I told you," grunted Eurilda, although she had never made any claim to that effect, and he had never made one to the contrary. Having turned her palm up, and Ialuna upside down, so that her legs kicked at the air, Eurilda's other hand frisked Ialuna's cloak and armor, but produced nothing but a dagger, a brandy flask, a few pouches of food and coin, and Eurilda's angry, redoubled efforts, which pawed until Ialuna was bruised, contussed, and scraped by the giantess's ugly, cracked fingernails. "She lied!" Eurilda shouted, then hissed, "you lied! You'll live to regret that, but not more than a minute from now."
"What did you mean, Ialuna?" Not only did he refrain from laying his hand on Eurilda's arm, but Azuri chose his most diplomatic tone of voice, a gentle but insistent tone more at home in a snake charmer or a sheepherder.
"Like she'd tell you the truth."
"I can get you there, Azuri. Why would I lie?" Ialuna panted with fear. "Killing Cyhari wasn't personal, you know. I liked her."
Eurilda cackled. "Do you hear her? Next she'll say she did you a favor."
"You're stalling, Ialuna." Azuri had begun to feel his teeth on edge, with the increasingly nagging thought that the slain giants would soon be followed up by another unit,
"If I'm going to die, I wanted you to know. Not to give you closure, but myself. I didn't want to kill her. If she wasn't so smart, she'd still be alive."
Azuri had been leaning upon his sword like a cane, but now changed his grip, raising it to Ialuna's throat in a white-knuckled fist. "I don't care how your mind works. How do we cross the Abyss?"
"Several dozen keys were given to the officers."
"And you don't have one?" snarled Eurilda.
"I already told you the High Tzhurarkh doesn't trust me."
"But someone has one--here, on the grounds."
"Yes."
"What do these keys look like? How do they work? With no vehicle to speak of, what mechanism do they turn?"
"You're wasting time."
When Ialuna realized she was spared for the moment, by Azuri's need on the one hand
and Eurilda's whimsical curiosity on the other, she shook herself from the giantess's grasp,
landed roughly on her feet, and began the slow spiel of a spell which drew her split, frowsy hair into trim plaits and smoothed her rumpled clothes, but could not quite pull herself together, given her skin was snapped tight too many times, her arrogant bearing was strained to a simpering shudder, and her wild eyes were stirred to a rich foment.
"You disappoint me, witch," fumed Eurilda. "I hoped that spell was a weapon. Now crushing you will be anticlimactic."
"How could crushing little old me give a brute like you any satisfaction?"
"While following you gets me what exactly?"
"Do you not know? Can't you guess who held the strings while you were tied in your pouch?"
"Your High Tzhurarkh, no doubt." Eurilda's eyes seethed. "Why should I care. I didn't know it at the time." Her eyes curled in a feline grin. "Just as you can't know who's in my pouch, can you, Azuri?" All mystery of what lay under her cloak dissipated as she uncovered her left hand, which clutched the enchanted pouch Azuri knew so intimately, having been stowed, and stewed, inside it for the better part of two days. "Where are you off to in such a hurry?" she giggled, for Azuri had unconsciously drawn back a faltering step and fixed her with a fearful, cold stare.
While Azuri took a gingerly, sheepish step back, his breath bunched up until his huge chest burst against his shirt. When she held the pouch out stiffly from her body, he looked past this cruel baiting to her vicious face. "Our choices are easy, Eurilda. Either we choke Ialuna and share a spiteful laugh, or cross the Abyss, spare ourselves endless, unnecessary battle, and slay the one who dispatches these treacherous spies and killers."
"Don't think I care who's a traitor, spy or killer, Azuri. I fit the bill for any or all, depending on who defines me. It's only her face and name I wish to stamp out, I could care less as to any weak meaning or paltry significance she has for you."
While Azuri knew flattery would get him nowhere, having been humbled by the giantess in their last encounter, he could not help himself. "You are wiser than I would have thought credible."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"There lies the former master, but here stands the new master."
Eurilda pinked, but waved away his compliment. "Don't sweet-talk me, Azuri. I'm only too willing to tuck you into my pouch."
At her lascivious leer, Azuri's flinching eyes eyes fell on Otoka's shambles, which shuddered so noticeably that even the egotistically-absorbed Eurilda might notice now, were her eyes not blurred by tears of bereavement, bloodshot with anger, and now bent into this hideous, sarcastic fliratation. Had she really proposed an indecent suggestion, standing so near what she thought was the corpse of her beloved master? Forcing himself to soften the cold pinch of his scowl, he met her eyes with a wan smile. "Do you still take pleasure in making me shrink, giant woman?"
"How could I be satisfied, when your eventual diminshment is a certainty?" This time, when Eurilda sized him up, it was not a procurer's lewd appraisal, but a jeweler's critical eye. "After melting into a puddle of thaumaplasm, your abomination's spell should have ended." Though one eyebrow arched, her bored, lifeless eyes undermined her curious tone. "Not that I care what happens, Azuri, and I've always preferred divination to puzzles, but it should prove diverting."
Even Azuri knew this magical law: all enchantment had a cause; if the cause was dead, or even nodded off into sleep, so died the enchantment.
There was only one answer. As it clicked in Azuri, Eurilda saw it flicker in his eyes, and she smiled with a glimmer of respect. "You've worked it out."
"At best, you could call it an informed guess."
"Imagination fleshes out many a factless hunch, Azuri. Don't forget the body of your---what do I call her? Daughter? Monster? Not that's it's our only problem in nomenclature, for can we even call it a dead body when its life began in one? As she can't have two corpses, we must think of her as one body whose death doubled, and her brief echo of life only the encore before her true finale."
"You hope to cause me discomfort or anguish," sighed Azuri. "When I have already thought these thoughts. I know her death was prolonged as much as her life. Being better with magic, you discount my knowledge, education, and wisdom, but having the power to shrink me into your pouch does not make you my elder. I have lived thirty times longer."
"And occupied your days with what, precisely? The logistics of feasting your goblin hosts on Nahure? Or has the tedious study of languages prepared you for this moment?"
"It's arrogant to suggest I lived for this moment." His eyebrows and brow dipped into a scornful sneer. "As the moments I lived for have all passed, I suffer through these anticlimactic events. Like you, taking pride in randy innuendo as your master lies dying."
"Dying?" As Eurilda ran to her master, her haughty face fell to such a woeful and crestfallen low, that Azuri knew her suffering to be real, and her coquettry only a mask she wore to toy with Azuri.
Though the wracked elder sorcerer lay but a few yards away, Eurilda dashed, dropped to her knees, skidded the last inches, and scooped her master into her arms.
"Why did you say anything." Ialuna's hiss was barely audible.
"Why do you care?"
"We need her on Alfyria."
"We?" Azuri snorted, then slouched right, nabbing Ialuna in his giant hand before she had time to react. "You're coming with us?"
"You're taking me with you." Her diminuitive roar rang tinnily in his ears like a squirrel's chatter. "You have no choice."
"There is always a choice."
"You mean stay here, to be slaughtered by the Kundan Cerund?"
"Who knows how the giants fare. Why do I have to help? I'm tired. Even choosing to do nothing is a choice. We already stopped you here."
"Stopped us?" She writhed in his grip.
"Careful. Your true colors are showing."
"There are two hundred Kundan Cerund on these grounds. Otoka may still live, but not for long."
"Shut her up, Azuri!" Having given him a black glare, Eurilda crooked Otoka's withered body on her bent arm, as if he was no heavier than a dry branch.
"Then he lives?"
"Yes. But he can't be moved--not now, Azuri. It's like he's aged three hundred years."
"Then what do we do?"
"Don't pretend you're my ally." Her sunken eyes glimmered above a sour grin. "I know hate when I see it. But if your offer of help was genuine..."
Azuri let her trail off well past the accepted paramaters of an awkward pause before replying. "Why not? While I may not want to, I haven't wanted anything for months. Not only do I eat like one paying back a grudge, but sleeping is my grievance against living."
"You know I don't care."
"Neither do I." Azuri shrugged. "As I grow older, apathy becomes a profound source of motivation. Why is now why not?"
Eurilda barked a rude laugh. "One day, I may try your nihilistic optimism. At least I'll have a laugh."
"What would you have me do?"
"Why not? Go with Ialuna."
"Why not, indeed." However, he wasn't able to unclench his fingers. While clutching his daughter's killer was more unsettling than satisfying, his vengeance had an unshakable hold.
"Slay the High Tzhuarkh."
"Easier said than done. The palace guards are bristling with armor and weapons."
"Why should I care? You don't."
"No, I suppose I don't. I'll do it."
"You'll die trying. You won't be a giant when you arrive in Alfyria."
"If you're right, maybe I will."
Ialuna's terrified face scrunched into a bitter scowl. "What are you talking about? You're lucky the abomination's spell persisted this long."
"And you're at death's door, and don't know it," said Eurilda. "While you can't pass up this opportunity, Azuri, one of you will be dead before long."
"I know it."
"Go with him," Otoka gasped as he sat up and twisted free of Eurilda's cradling. "What of your offspring?"
"Master, you mustn't..."
"Mustn't what? Live?" Otoka's hacking laugh echoed in the sanctum. "If my breathing disappoints you, apprentice..."
"Never!"
"...I am still the master of these halls." When Otoka muttered, and gestured with wavering hands, the sanctum doors slammed and locked with a rattle. Then the screams started--screams so terrifying that they blistered the eardrums, and made the hair stand straight and tall. Winds screeched, billowing hot, acrid fumes under the doors.
Having cloaked his manor in death, Otoka settled into a breathless slumber as deep as death.
"He'll forgive me when he wakes," said Eurilda. "Or he never will, which is all the same, since it won't change his manner with me. I'm not going, Azuri."
"I see."
"He needs me here."
"I understand."
"What would you have me do?" she ranted. "I don't know where they are. When that cursed goblin snatched me up in my own pouch, I was tearing through Alfyria after Sarin Gelf, and since then no doubt he has sequestered himself like your cowardly king."
"Don't think I judge you," said Azuri. "In any event, you will do as you wish, and I will do as I wish, regardless of how each of us thinks about it."
"Free will is a slave's illusion. I could cow you into nursing Otoka the Wise, if I wanted." She laughed. "It's a good thing I don't. Go kill your king, Azuri." With a show of great reluctance, she handed him her enchanted pouch. "Take my guest with you. While you may want to dispose of the contents, they will be of use when you've done away with Ialuna."
Having long dreamed of a turnabout vengeance, he wondered if his burgeoning magical gifts
would activate this pouch, swallowing Eurilda into its folds as he had once been engulfed. As he tested it with his will, his grip on its velour became white-knuckled, and his fingers shook. "Do you expect me to return this?"
"There is a Doorway under the manor, Azuri. So long as you do not think to hide it, I can collect my property anytime I wish." When she averted her intense gaze from his eyes, Azuri's chest shuddered as they released their pent-up breath. "I know you hate and fear me, and with good reasion, but if you hear word of my children, remember I am a mother, and they are only children."
"Lyspera's web so entangles us, Eurilda, that I would not think to revenge myself through cowardly inaction or silence. As we will no doubt speak again, I hope to pay you back face to face." Azuri dragged Ialuna through the slag and gore left by the melter. Finding the door stuck in the jambs,
he crunched his shoulder against it, and the door popped out, spiderwebbed with cracks from which splinters jutted. While the screams of the dying still resonated in the hall,they were dying echoes of those already dead.
Azuri dragged Ialuna by the arm into the nausea-inducing fumes, rancid with burnt elves, and when she had wormed free, he snatched a hank of her black hair. Her formerly long and lustrous locks were now so hacked, snarled and frayed that they felt like half gray cobwebs clinging to his hand.
"Let go of me!" Having pummeled his fist with both balled hands so recklessly that she hit her own temple, then her chin, Ialuna went slack, until her scraping heels found their dull, screeching counterpoint in her own mewling shriek, as taut hairs drew tight on her reddening scalp, then snapped. Her tears were a twofold flowering of joy and shame; joy, because Azuri exulted in wringing screams from his daughter's slayer, and shame, in that her cries recalled Cyhari's grief, when she was disappointed in her career.
"Unhand me, you..."
"Having done so little to you, Ialuna, you might only call me a griever, and there is no crime or shame in that."
"You were there!" Ialuna shrieked. "If you loved her, you might have stayed my hand!"
As his eyes drew wide, his hand drew back, but when she shrank from the fall of his giant sized fist, he paused an inch from her face and exhaled his anger, only to feel its crackle along his limbs,
demanding her death. But having lived with rage for so long, he wore it now like a flaming cloak.
Let it set himself on fire, he raged; if he couldn't cast aside the rags of his pain, let them burn away the darkness within.
"Where is it?" As he dragged her down the dark, fuming halls, the smoke tingled in tiny tears beading under his giant eyes. While Ialuna hacked and hacked, it was not from struggling to answer, but from choking on the bitter vapors, which were a thicker haze nearer the blackened floor.
"Why complain? We all die." He barked a mirthless laugh as the fearful flutter of her eyelids metamorphosed into a defiant stare, and her puffed-up chest swelled even more with pent-up, painful fear. "Not that I intend on killing you, but who's to say when I'll give into my anger, or whether you'll slip from my fingers as we hurtle across the Abyss."
She sneered. "You know nothing. The Alfyrian Fire isn't like the Alfyrian Ladder. There's nothing to hang on to."
"So we become the threads, is that it? And no travelers were ever lost to that enchanted web in transit?"
"Occasionally. No one knows why."
"It's from using the gods' devices."
"Once I would have said there are no gods. But a goblin changed my way of thinking."
"You like goblins."
"With reservations."
"That's a point in your favor. A qualified point, due to your reservations. Elves lack many goblin virtues."
"Then perhaps they are not virtues." Ialuna laughed.
"More like there are no virtues at all," Azuri retorted, "save for the troubling existence of goblins. While a trifle greedy, they are as good as a selfish people can be. Your existence, on the other hand, points to an evil creator, who delights more in wickedness than virtue."
Fear again flickered over Ialuna's face. "You're not reconsidering killing me, are you? I can still be helpful to you."
"That our maker made you so useful to me is a particularly macabre joke. The goblin philosopher poet writes vaela soira capra gulic / vaol reri gulz cala cale, or the gods sow jewels in deep grime, / the good reap gold from the wicked's crime."
"They'll find us soon," said Ialuna. "They'll kill me on the spot for treason, but save you for torture, Azuri."
"So where is it?"
"Put me down."
"Not on your life. Tell me where it is."
"Kejuro was in charge," she muttered, as if to herself, "he must have it."
"You mean you didn't know?"
"Of course I knew! If only by process of elimination. Would the High Tzhurarkh send his most faithful without the possibility of a return trip?"
"You mean the Kundan Cerund. They do not serve the High Tzhurarkh."
"You can dance around the fictions of our society all you want. No Tzhurarkh ever has the High Tzhurarkh's interests at heart. Only Cerund knights have ever done his will in truth, without malice, and with good intent."
"I don't think the High Tzhurarkh recpicrocates their good will. Look around you. He sent them into death."
"There it is! It must be! Put me down!"
When Azuri tightened his grip, then wedged her under his arm, she squirmed, clawed and bellowed futilely, but could not break free of his colossal brawn. Stooping over the charred corpse she had clawed towards, he pawed with giant-sized fingers until clumps of char crumbled into ash, leaving fragmented scales, eroded armor-links, and a red-hot sword hilt still attached to a slagged drizzle of hot metal drips--that, and a peculiar half-moon clasped to the blackened, shattered bones of the skull.
Once it was in his grasp, Ialuna redoubled her efforts, pawed and scratching at his ribs in her striving to snatch the silver crescent. "Give it to me, Azuri. You don't know how to use it!"
"And you do? If the High Tzhurarkh kept it from you, I'm certain you haven't a clue how it operates."
"It's enchanted! I'm a sorcerer, and you're not, Azuri. Give it here, and I'll send us back to Alfyria."
"It's not so simple, Ialuna. As Eurilda pointed out. I'm still a giant's height. As Cyhari's double is now doubly dead, I clearly have some aptitude for magic I never entertained." Azuri brought the half-moon up to pore over the smooth, blemishless metal. "Moreover, you're not much of a sorcerer, are you? You don't even match the skill of she whom you called an abomination, or you might have cast a growth spell to oppose me, break free, and strand me on Nymerea."
When mailed boots clattered in the outside corridor, and elves shouted in shocked and stricken Alfyrian, Ialuna hissed, "Then use it! Take us back to Alfyria."
As he gazed on the half-moon, Azuri's scowl softened, his blood cooled, and he dropped Ialuna roughly to the floor. Seizing it in both hands, he turned it end over end, front to back, then back again, changing the angle from side to side, but still found nothing, aside from his own fingerprints where he had touched the shining metal. "It's a perfect puzzle," he mused. "All one piece, and without a way for my thoughts or fingers to touch its potential."
"Give it to me!" Ialuna seethed. "Having mastered not weapon spells, but enchantments, divinations, and metamagics that enchain and unravel enchantments themselves, I am more than a match for that toy."
"Having specialized in the magical and the unreal..." While Azuri could not bring himself to smile at Cyhari's murderer, he could not prevent the smirk from creeping into his voice. "...you now have nothing to deal with the elves coming for us now."
"Give it to me!"
"This refrain is a nuisance," sighed Azuri. When he clouted Ialuna with the half-moon, a single drop of blood spouted from her pummeled, torn lip, and its drip drew a line down the shining crescent.
As the tug shook Azuri to the core of his being, the foundations of Otoka's manor trembled; as the margins of his sight shivered, the stone walls winked in and out, and the dim lights flickered. As the tug seized him again, he crunched Ialuna's hauberk in a steel grip, and the world dissolved into a hurtling shadow lunging for infinity.