Seven Sorcerers: Book Three of the Books of the Shaper

by John R. Fultz

  The dreadnoughts were still too far out to attack or be attacked, and the spheres of light still enclosed them. But Khama could see now the glitter of spears and mail upon their decks–the rush of activity that preceded a strike on the forces below. The moment their protective shells fell, the airships would rain destruction upon Undutu and his allies. At that same moment the defenders would unleash forty thousand flaming arrows, seven hundred ballistae bolts, and two hundred balls of flaming pitch. As for what forces the dreadnoughts would deploy, Khama could only guess.

  The circle of three thousand sky-ships grew tighter. In three concentric rings Zyung’s Holy Armada now had surrounded the Jade Isles. Those in the innermost circle would be the first to attack–and only those on the east side of the circle would be in range of the aquatic fleets. Then Khama saw it: Along the eastern third of the circle all three ranks of dreadnoughts would be close enough to attack the allied fleets–assuming the dreadnoughts’ weapons shared a range similar to those of the water-borne ships. There the attack must come first.

  Along the sides of each dreadnought round apertures opened and tubes of black iron emerged, swiveling toward the lands and ships below. The sky-ships sank lower now, as they converged upon Ongthaia and its anxious defenders.

  Khama tensed his coils, remaining hidden on the rim of the volcano. The enemy must not see him until he attacked. And he must wait until the moment those radiant spheres blinked out of existence. The sea was calm as glass, the wind had escaped to some other world, and the ward drums of a thousand ships counted the moments until conflagration.

  Tighter grew the circles. The drums beat on, steady as eternity.

  Behind the black walls of the Jade City, fifty thousand people cowered and prayed to the Gods of Sea and Sky for succor. Zharua was not among the ships; he was no Warrior King. He must be pacing the tops of his palace ramparts, hearing the drums, watching the convergence of his sky-borne enemies, and perhaps wishing he had accepted Zyung’s offer of surrender. It was too late now. His fate lay in the hands of the Southern Kings and their valiant navies. As did the fate of all the Five Cities. In truth, all hope lay in the hands of Iardu the Shaper. If Khama believed in the Gods worshipped by Men, he would have prayed to them in that moment.

  The circles tightened and lowered. The drums thundered.

  The spheres of light faded and time ceased. The nature of the world itself seemed to shift, reality dilated, and the clouds inhaled the muttered prayers of men.

  Khama launched himself into the air, a streak of rainbow flames. He raced toward the nearest of the sky-ships as the iron tubes spurted streams of white fire. The same liquid flames exploded from the irons along all three rows of the eastern dreadnoughts. In that same moment the war drums ceased, and thousands of flaming arrows flew toward the golden hulls. Khama was a bolt of light gliding between the rising and falling firestorms.

  The sky ignited with a maelstrom of fires pale and orange and red as blood.

  Khama’s head struck the hull of a dreadnought as a wreath of lightning swirled along his Serpent body. The cries of dying men filled his ears beneath the splintering of wood and the booming of strange sorceries. He burst from the great ship’s midsection like an arrow shot through an overripe pear. Armored bodies flew in all directions, and the airship lurched behind him. He sped on, cracking two of the three masts with his forehead, grabbing the third between his fangs. He vomited bolts of lightning along its length to engulf the shattered vessel and every living thing on it.

  He snapped the mast off and spat it out as the sky-ship rocked and spilled toward the sea. A gargantuan tree fell in the midst of the plummeting wreckage and howling crew. The tree burned and withered even as the ship fell apart. A thousand armored warriors clutched at falling debris. A few escaped on leather-winged lizards, but not many.

  Khama rose high above the dreadnoughts now. The eyes of captains, bowmen, and sorcerers rose toward him as he wheeled in the hot air. He would get no more surprise attacks. One of three thousand ships had died instantly from his explosive power, but now the enemy had marked his presence with weapon and spell.

  Below the hovering armada great fires raged. Hulls were peppered with blazing arrows. Ballista bolts struck home, digging deep into the golden keels and trailing oiled ropes from the ships below. Men kindled those ropes and the flames shot upward to rush across the bottoms of the sky-ships. The Khyrein globes of pitch struck home as well, scorching hulls or burning tiny holes in the sides of dreadnoughts. The airships were far too large for the catapults to do much damage. The only true threat to the dreadnoughts’ superiority, besides Khama’s power, were the thousands of arrows spreading flame across their lower halves.

  Khama sped outside of the dreadnoughts’ circle to get a better look at the efficacy of their weapons. From each iron tube a bolt of brilliant flame raced like venom from a cobra’s mouth, setting fire to whatever sea vessels it fell upon. The dreadnoughts were equipped with mechanisms of sorcery that hurled gouts of alchemical flame. At least twenty of these iron tubes sprouted on either side of every sky-ship, raining forty streams of enchanted fire upon their foes. Already half of the aquatic ships were burning, compared to a mere fifty or so dreadnoughts that were set aflame by arrow, bolt, or catapult. And the battle was only thirty seconds engaged.

  Men leaped into the water to avoid burning to death, but the sorcerous fires burned atop the water. There was no escaping the devastation by abandoning ship. The dreadnoughts fired a second barrage of flames, and more warships ignited. Volleys of burning arrows rose from ships individually now. In the broadening devastation there would be no more simultaneous fleet-wide volleys launched upward. Scores of ships were now separated by flames, panic, smoke, and the chaos of battle.

  Khama had no time to seek out the Bird of War to check Undutu’s status. He hurtled toward another of the dreadnoughts. A blast of lightning flew from his tongue and set the airship’s sails alight. The ship quavered and a hundred arrows flew at Khama from its decks. They bounced off the scales beneath his feathers as he plummeted. The two nearest dreadnoughts sprayed him with flaming alchemy as he passed, so when he struck his target it was as a flaming meteor. Men and wood went flying. Khama found himself immersed in the bowels of the great ship this time, without enough force to burst through its bottom hull. He looked through a shattered bulkhead into a womb-like chamber filled by another mammoth tree.

  Among the topaz branches of the tree floated a woman in silver robes similar to those of Damodar. Another of Zyung’s Old Breed slaves. She shouted wrath at Khama and unseen forces hurled his body from the pierced ship. He left a hole torn halfway through its decks all the way to its heart.

  The trees are the source of power for these vessels.

  He knew it instantly, whirling above the dreadnoughts to quench the flames along his coils. Why else would sorcerers guard and protect these trees? The tree’s countless branches and roots, he had noted, flowed into the substance of the ship itself. The trees were the seeds from which grew the dreadnoughts, sculpted by the will of Old Breed magic. How could he use this knowledge to defeat the armada? An answer eluded him.

  There was no time to consider it further as six globes of light rose from six different dreadnoughts to surround Khama. At the center of each radiance floated a silver-robed sorcerer. They glared at him with eyes of murderous calm. He recognized one of them as the very same envoy he had cast out of Zharua’s palace.

  Damodar and his fellow wizards, come to rip the Feathered Serpent apart.

  Khama bellowed a gout of thunder at the silver-robes, scattering them like leaves. Yet more of them rose from the surrounding dreadnoughts. He could not count their numbers. He had never seen so many sorcerers gathered in one spot, not in all his eons of existence.

  Below him the allied fleets were burning, the cries of dying men rising like ash to fill the superheated air. The dreadnoughts continued pouring their flame upon the aquatic ships, as fewer and fewer arrows rose from the crumb
ling decks.

  How can it be over so soon?

  Khama swirled in the air, weaving a pattern of cosmic energies as the floating silver-robes converged upon him. They cast bolts of starlight from their mouths and fingers, yet their power cascaded across the sizzling corona of his sorcery. Faster and faster he spun, releasing the core of his power, glowing like a second sun in the crowded sky, absorbing the blasts hurled against him, swallowing the pain, letting his physical form give way to the raw currents of sorcery that fueled his eternal spirit.

  More of Zyung’s sorcerers flew toward him, yet he barely saw them through the haze of his own unleashed potency. Finally he released all of it, exploding from the epicenter of his being. His fury washed across the sorcerers and the ships behind them, a tidal wave of light and gravity and the all-consuming fires of stellar destruction.

  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.

  Khama sped away from the devastation, heading for the black roots of the nearest island. He stayed low to the seabed. Let them believe they have slain both Serpent and King this day.

  Undutu wept and moaned, his fists dug into Khama’s fresh plumage. The black waters rushed by as the thunders of battle faded behind them.

  The foot of an island loomed before them now, a blue-green mountain rising toward the air and sun. Khama followed the course of the underwater crag, planning to surface only when he had carried Undutu west of Ongthaia. Yet something drew his attention toward the southern end of the isle. Someone was calling his name. A familiar voice. He reversed direction, swimming fast as a shark toward the sound that was more than sound.

  The sea floor sloped upward, erupting in a beach of golden sand. Once again Khama raised his head above the waves. This time the head and shoulders of Undutu rose behind it.

  “Gods of Sea and Sky!” Undutu cried.

  A handful of figures lay panting and groaning where surf met sand. Less than a dozen men had reached the shore under the power of their own arms and legs. Only one of them stood to greet the Feathered Serpent; the rest vomited seawater or lay senseless and bleeding.

  “Khama!” shouted the caller. He grasped a blade of black iron etched with the Sun God’s sigil, which blazed in the sunlight.

  “D’zan!” called Undutu.

  Khama glided into the shallow water, where Undutu leaped from his back and embraced his fellow King. They stared across the waves, where less than a league from the shore the remnants of their routed fleets burned and sank. The sky was full of hovering dreadnoughts; throughout the battle they had held their concentric formation above Ongthaia.

  Yet now another sound filled the air. The flapping of a thousand pairs of leathery wings. Flying lizards with gilded beaks descended from the center ring of sky-ships, skimming low above the shattered fleets. The Trills plucked men from the sea with beak and claw. Their riders, Manslayers in silver plate mail, skewered swimming men on hooked lances. Soon the devil-birds would reach the islands, where they would sweep and feast on these few survivors, then move inland to raze the
towns. First they concentrated on finishing off the last of the naval survivors.

  “We are lost,” D’zan moaned. His eyes turned from Undutu to Khama, then to the burning wrecks and flocks of hungry monsters.

  “Yet you live, Majesties,” said Khama. He scanned the men who had reached the beach. One had already died, three were too injured to walk, and six others were wounded yet whole. D’zan had lost his crown as well, but somehow kept hold of his blade. He appeared unharmed but for a gash across his chest and a few burns on legs and cheek. Undutu’s burns were worse, yet he bore them like a true King, without complaint. How they must pain him now that he was free of the cold waters.

  Of the eleven survivors, all save D’zan were Mumbazans. Either Khama’s favored folk were more powerful swimmers than the Yaskathans, or they were simply luckier. Perhaps these men had only made it here because their swanship was stationed closest to this island. But that did not account for D’zan’s presence; he had sailed in the prow of the Kingspear.

  Eleven men living. A hundred thousand dead.

  Khama scented sorcery in D’zan’s exhausted breaths. The Yaskathan King held ancient power within his young flesh. Perhaps it accounted for his surviving when no others of his kind had done so. How could he swim all this way with the weight of that blade on his back? D’zan’s boots were caked with mud and seaweed, as if he had run across the seabed instead of swimming to shore. There was no time to explore the mystery now. It was a blessing that both Kings had survived this day.

  The blast of a great war horn sounded above the islands. Thunder followed in its wake.

  “Quickly,” Khama told the two Kings. “Gather these men onto my back. We will not let Zyung take us this day. We must fight again on the mainland.”