Phoenix in Shadow

by Ryk E. Spoor

  But at the same time the water began to retreat, draining away to fill the space vacated by the impossibility that was rising from the lakebed. Water streamed in thundering cascades from glistening ebony and red scales the size of houses, and two blazing green eyes opened, glaring down at the cowering motes before it as bottom-mud and stone fell away, inconsequential as dust from a man’s boot. Farther back, halfway to the horizon, vast pinions surged from the roiling water, stretching out, out, casting shadows across land and water as though great banks of cloud had suddenly materialized, and with a mighty heave something the size of a mountain lunged skyward, and hung above them, floating unbelievably in the sky, casting the entire city and all about into black shadow as though night had replaced day.

  Sanamaveridion, the Elderwyrm, was free.

  CHAPTER 51

  Kyri stared in utter horror, unable to move. Too big. Too powerful. By the Balance, I’d heard stories, but they were just that, stories. The Dragons couldn’t be that immense, it was impossible.

  Nevertheless, it stretched above and before her, miles long, darkening the sky as though something had rent the bright blueness asunder and torn a strip half its width down the center of the heavens.

  “Now! We must act now, Kyri!”

  The voice brought her mind back to herself, unparalyzed her shaking limbs even as she heard the screams and panic behind her, and she looked down. “Act? Miri . . . Miri, what can we do?”

  “You are the Phoenix Justiciar of a GOD,” she said, and her eyes—no less terrified than Kyri felt—were at the same time filled with a frightening determination. “If you and I and Tobimar cannot do something, nothing can. He is stretching, taking this moment in pure pleasure of release, but that will end very soon and turn to rage.”

  Kyri drew Flamewing, felt a ludicrous comfort in its heft and strength, even though it was less than a thorn before the monster above them. “What do you . . .”

  “I will . . . distract him, at least for a while.” Her smile was wan. “I was after all one of those who imprisoned him, built this entire country around him, sure in the knowledge he would never be released.” Her tone said it’s all my fault as loudly as if she’d spoken the words. “He will be more than willing to give me his undivided attention. You must stop that wave, break it. I know you cannot get both sides of the lake, but at least one . . .”

  She almost protested again; even as they were receding at unfathomable speed those waves were nearly as huge as the Elderwyrm that had given them birth. But she knew she couldn’t afford the time. A minute, maybe two, and they’ll strike the shore on both sides. Nearby areas were already hit, no chance there.

  She nodded; then, as Miri started to turn, her back stiff, her eyes a bit too-bright, Kyri recognized the truth.

  She doesn’t intend to survive. She’s going to do the best she can against that . . . monster, and she knows she’s going to die.

  Kyri stepped forward, not even sure what she should do—what she could do—to stop the girl who had been a Demonlord . . . and then she did know, after all.

  She grabbed Miri and planted a kiss of her own on the smaller woman’s perfect lips. As Miri’s eyes widened comically, Kyri gripped her by the shoulders. “You come back, you understand me? Because for all of what you’ve been . . . it’s Light Miri that I know, and it would hurt me—hurt us—to lose you.”

  Miri’s hand had come up to touch her lips as though she couldn’t believe what just happened; she looked around and saw Tobimar, Hiriista, and Poplock nodding agreement. And then her face lit up with a brilliant determination that buoyed up Kyri’s own spirits. “Then . . . somehow . . . we have to win!”

  Kyri smiled as Miri turned again and ran—not heavily, not as one going to a foredoomed end, but as Light Miri of Kaizatenzei, the irrepressible, ever-cheerful defender—towards her mountainous opponent. Then the Phoenix Justiciar closed her eyes and concentrated.

  Myrionar, what a test you have set before us now. But I believe in you. I feel the barrier between us is weakened now, in this moment, and I must ask you for all you can give. Somehow, let me be Justice and Mercy, let me shield those who sheltered us along our path, and then . . . and then I must help duel a Dragon.

  She could feel the golden-singing power in her, and she was right, that heaviness that had impeded her was weaker—but so was Myrionar; she knew the god was dying, it had told her so.

  So many in danger, Myrionar. I know I ask much, I ask so much, of you who are already so weakened—

  You ask nothing I would not wish for myself, answered the Voice she would never forget, so calm and cool, at once so familiar she felt she had heard it all her life, and yet so different she knew it was no one she had ever met. I give you all that I can . . . and I will show you the way.

  Her body screamed at the influx of power, but Kyri had been prepared; she remembered, all too well, the ecstasy and agony of the ultimate strike she had leveled against the Summoning Gateway in Thornfalcon’s mansion, and knew that this would be—was—far worse.

  And then she saw the wave coming at her—coming at her a dozen times over. For a moment she could not comprehend, could not tolerate, the concept, the inundation of images of simultaneity, couldn’t imagine where she was, who she was.

  But the Voice spoke to her, weakly but clearly, one last time. You can tolerate it, you can grasp it, because you must. You are more than you were, Kyri Victoria Vantage, and you must endure and accept what you are, for only the power of the Phoenix—multiplied—will suffice for this moment.

  Kyri grasped that reassurance and command as though it were an actual lifeline. Myrionar has never asked me to do anything I couldn’t do. So I can do this.

  She opened her eyes and looked.

  Before her the wall of water towered higher, ever higher, two hundred, three hundred, five hundred feet, beginning to curl and collapse in what would become an unstoppable surge of roiling mud and shattered debris. Behind and at either side of the wall the shore looked different . . . yet, really, the same, for it was all Kaizatenzei—all the places she had seen and passed in her travels, and as each of her looked, to one side they could see, in the distance, another golden blaze of light, barely visible yet to her inhuman sight so clear: a woman outlined within the heart of the Balanced Sword.

  She/they raised their/her arms and called forth the power of Myrionar, and about them all appeared their namesake, a red-auric flaming firebird that screamed forward, god-fire against implacable water. The energies of a god detonated in a shockwave across the monstrous breaker’s entire front, sending the vanguard of the wave skyward in a plume of white and gold a mile high and pushing, shoving, refusing passage to the unstoppable, and Kyri felt the weight descend upon her, the piling-up of uncountable tons of water threatening to drive her back, to crush her beneath its impersonal, pitiless bulk, to shatter even the power of a god by the sheer, vast indifference of nature.

  But Kyri Vantage would not yield, not even to the entirety of an inland sea. She felt her selves reaching out to each other, separate and together and now interlinking as though hands stretched across the miles between them, and braced themselves against the bedrock of Kaizatenzei. No farther! This far, but no farther!

  The pressure crested, and she felt even Myrionar’s power wavering before that absolute force, and still she refused to yield. The faces of all she had met along the way now swam before her mind’s eye—Hulda and Zelliri, Tirleren and Demmi and Hamule, Kittia in Kalatenzei with her wild hair and hidden depths, Reflect Iesa accepting a difficult prisoner with trepidation and relief, and for a moment she almost . . . felt them, some already looking up to see both horror and hope before them with the towering wave faced by the golden defenders, others blissfully unaware of anything wrong, and she somehow found the strength to brace herself again, refuse to give a single inch . . .

  . . . and the water stopped, the pressure began to fade. It was receding, flowing away without even the force to rebound.

  With
a sensation like a thousand bowstrings vibrating after they are released, Kyri found herself back to her singular and original self; she wobbled and collapsed to one knee.

  I did it, she realized, and the thought filled her with awe and wonder. But at the same time she realized how fleeting that victory might be. All that monster has to do . . . is fall, and another wave—worse than that one—will be born.

  And I really don’t think I can do that again.

  CHAPTER 52

  Tobimar watched Kyri dissolve in a blaze of golden light that streamed off to the south and west with a mixture of awe and worry. What . . . is she doing? She’s going to stop that wave? Can she? Will she . . . survive?

  It was somehow so obviously typical that Kyri made a point of telling Miri that she had to come back alive, while not promising to do so herself.

  Unwillingly, he found his eyes drawn to the floating monstrosity above. Sanamaveridion was stretching, lazily flapping one gargantuan wing, then the other, barely moving, hovering as though he were nothing but a red-black cloud. A low rumble, as of the purring of a cat the size of a city, reached Tobimar’s ears.

  “Well, he’s happy for now,” Poplock observed dryly. “But once he decides to celebrate with a little dancing . . .”

  “Terian’s mercy,” Tobimar heard himself whisper. “What can any of us do against . . . that?” he asked, chilled to the core of his soul by a glimpse of the cold, hungry eye of the Elderwyrm. He saw Miri running towards it, to the broken point of the peninsula, but could not even imagine what the ex-demon thought she could accomplish.

  Auric-ruby light erupted all along the southern shore, causing the mountain-sized head above to slew around in startlement; just as suddenly it snapped around to the north, where Tobimar thought he saw, not a flash, but a darkening, as though for a moment a living bolt of night had crossed from horizon to horizon. Tobimar could not see what happened there, but to the south, the great wave shuddered, then collapsed, flowing back into Enneisolaten, the great lake called Sounding of Shadows, to join the rest of the water as it tried in white-foaming torrents to fill a void nearly as deep as its creator was high in the sky.

  “So, you avert disaster once, twice, little creatures, servants of tiny gods. Well done.” The voice of the Dragon was thunder and earthquake, sound and force in one, and the chuckle that followed was the threat of storm and avalanche. “I can spare a few more efforts for you to counter. How many will it take, I wonder?”

  Kyri reappeared in blue-touched gold, the color of Myrionar, and went to her knees. “I . . . stopped it. But all he has to do is fall and—”

  “Do not worry, Phoenix,” Hiriista said. “There shall be no more such waves.” He grasped a necklace from which hung a drop of amber like distilled sunshine. “By the Pact of the Call, by your Essence bound, I call you forth, Shargamor’s Shadow!”

  From the depths of the amber shone a light the color of a tropical ocean at noon, a blue-green as pure as dawn and mountain streams. Abruptly that light became a flare, the sun rising through the depth of the sea, streaking out and detonating within the lake.

  The water shone, and then rose up, a curling wave a thousand feet high, and within that wave a shape, streamlined, deadly, black of eye and white of tooth, with a fin projecting from the water that cast shadow like the Castle of the Dragon.

  With a rumbled, startled curse, the Elderwyrm leapt higher into the air, circling and staring. Then it chuckled again. “Ahhhh, a Great Summons, but still, a mere echo of the Lord of Water’s power. You prevent wave and ruin for perhaps . . . ten minutes? Fifteen, at the most. If, that is, I remain above the water. Perhaps I will not.”

  “Or perhaps you will, if you want to face me, Sanamaveridion!”

  The venom-green eyes widened and a growl shook leaves from the trees. “ERMIRINOVAS . . . you should have run while I was lost in the sensation of release. I see you now, and I will REND you, reduce body and soul to nothingness!”

  “Is she insane? He’s right, she should have run.” Tobimar hated the quaver in his voice, but he couldn’t help it; despite the godspower that still lingered within him, this was something utterly beyond his imagination.

  “She is not as helpless as you think. And neither are you. Do you not remember what Terian said ere he left?”

  Tobimar blinked at Hiriista, and then suddenly goggled in disbelief.

  For Miri, diminutive Light Miri, was growing, rising, towering now, great shining wings of her own stretching from her back, shimmering with sapphire and silver, as was her entire body as it continued to grow. “You may try, Sanamaveridion,” Miri answered, and her voice, too, was greater—yet still touched with the innocent determination of her ordinary form. “But I will not let you destroy what I—what we—have built here.”

  The laugh was almost enough to knock Tobimar from his feet; it vibrated in the ground and blew small clouds aside. “You will not let me destroy? You are strong, yes—but of the second order, not the first, and you know as well as I that even the first children of Kerlamionahlmbana himself would fear to face me or any of my brethren! And for what will you die? Mortals who were once your playthings? Ha! A fine jest indeed, you who were once the destroyer, using my own power to obliterate the Lords of the Sky, now stand hopeless before me—”

  “Not hopeless!” Miri cut him off, and drew herself up—smaller far than her opponent, but still tall enough that she could reach down and with an effort lift the fallen Tower, lever it up, and lift it back to its place; with a blaze of light the severed pieces were rejoined. “I have more hope than you imagine, for I have found purpose where I had none, and friends where I had enemies. Perhaps it is a fool’s hope—but hope it is.”

  Tobimar had been racking his memory to recall what Hiriista had asked him, and finally shook his head. “No, Hiriista; it’s . . . foggy. I barely remember that time; Terian was speaking and I was . . . elsewhere.”

  “Then understand that you are no less than Miri or Kyri,” Hiriista said, even as Kyri herself rose from the ground and the red-gold Phoenix fire reignited about her. “For Terian the Infinite said: ‘ . . . there is nothing in that oath or any other that prevents me from awakening the power that slumbers within Tobimar Silverun, Seventh of Seven; that sleeps within his blood.’” Hiriista paused, and a chill went down Tobimar’s spine as the magewright finished: “‘Within my blood.’”

  Suddenly everything made sense. Why is my family, alone of all in Skysand, not blessed by the appearance of Terian’s card, but called, required to act? Why have we always been hunted by demons wherever we go? Why was my blood the key for forcing open an artifact forged by Terian himself?

  Because we are . . . I am . . . of his blood. When Terian came from beyond and gave us the Seven Stars and Single Sun . . . he must have begun our line, too.

  Hiriista nodded, even as a shudder went through the ground, Miri blocking a blow from one of the titanic wings—and holding strong against it. “Now you see, Prince Tobimar Silverun. The power you borrowed may be fading . . . but that power dwells, also, within you, and Terian Himself said He had awakened it. If you can only find a way within yourself to tap it.”

  Kyri leveled a blast of godsfire that forced the Elderwyrm to back off, and for a moment she hovered in the air, the wings of fire he had seen once before now holding her aloft next to the hill-sized head of Miri. Then Tobimar closed his eyes.

  Once more he drew on the discipline and focus that Khoros had taught him, the awareness, sought the connections between action and reaction, past and future, choice and consequence, and almost instantly, still borne up and made greater by Terian’s power, he SAW it, a webwork of peril and possibility interwoven from the sky to the earth and all in between. He could see the immensity of their opponent and the vector of his assault, the poise and preparation of the girl who had once been a demon, the flow of godspower from many points into the Phoenix Justiciar, and more: the Unity Guard, evacuating people from trembling buildings, tending the injured, shoring u
p weak points, preparing—in case the unthinkable happened—for a desperate last stand. And more: deep below, the pattern of life, slowed yet active, in rank upon rank of sealed capsules, whose existence resonated with the Guardsmen above. And hovering in the air within that silent vault . . .

  The experiment was interrupted. Some of Terian’s power remains!

  The sense of that power sang to him, echoed the power still dancing about him, throbbing in his veins, pulsing in his soul, and without even thinking about it Tobimar called, reached out—

  And the rainbow-shimmering energy, the last power of the Sun of the Infinite, streamed up and out, passing through stone and air and wind, and poured into him. He felt his blood resonating with that response, and something more, something greater, rising from within to meet it—

  Rainbow mist and polychromatic dust abruptly ignited in blue-white fire, and Tobimar suddenly knew what it felt like to be a god. The world was as clear and simple as a child’s toy, and even the towering monstrosity above was just another monster, nothing to fear.

  Even as Tobimar felt a part of him quail at this terrifying shift in perceptions, he knew he had to act; the Elderwyrm was preparing to strike Kyri and Miri with a lunge of the sky-spanning head.

  He channeled argent-sapphire power into his body as he had always done with his own discipline, and the world slowed to a snail’s crawl, to the imperceptible slowness of ice melting in the sun. The light was around him, beneath him, and he was running, sprinting through the air as though it were solid ground. Even Sanamaveridion’s charge was sluggish, a glacial movement scarcely worth adjusting Tobimar’s motion for, and the cold emerald eyes were widening as Tobimar streaked towards him, a running bolt of lightning, and channeled his full power in a double-cut with the Swords of the Spiritsmith.