“Mother,” Leandra said, “what do we do next?”
With a draconic throat, Francesca could not make human speech. She could have written a spell, but Leandra could only deconstruct text. So, she only shook her draconic head.
“Is Dad still alive?” Leandra asked, her voice softer.
Francesca nodded.
“Good,” Leandra said and nodded at her mother. “As to what we should do next…” She let her voice trail away and then looked over at Lotannu and his hierophants. The three of them were about a hundred yards away. Francesca bared her teeth at the imperials. They watched impassively.
“Forget them,” Leandra said. “Something has been drawing me here for a long time. Something like destiny.”
Now Francesca bared her teeth. What was Leandra talking about? Had she gone completely mad?
Leandra looked up at her mother. “What did you see in the smoke?”
Francesca blinked. Yes, completely mad.
“Every one of my crew saw something different. In the smoke, I saw the faces of all those who have followed me and died. I saw Dad’s face too. It frightened me. But the sailors saw writhing snakes or insects or demons.”
Confused, Francesca could only put her head to one side.
Leandra sighed. “No, I don’t suppose you could tell me.” She looked up to the volcano’s peak. “So then … as soon as we figure out where he is, and before he gets started on destroying humanity, I suppose we should introduce ourselves to the first demon of the invasion. Who knows, we might even meet Los himself.”
“No one so grand,” said a rasping voice.
Francesca whirled around but saw only the island’s black expanse. Behind her Leandra made a thoughtful sound. Francesca whipped her head around and discovered an old man standing ahead of her daughter.
The stranger was thin and bent over by age. A few wiry hairs erupted from his blotchy scalp. His clothes were a confusion of rags and bright silks wrapped about him without regard for function or fashion. He had turned his sunken face to Leandra and was studying her with bright green eyes. “Sorry to disappoint, but the great Los you have already met.”
Francesca bared her teeth and started to defensively curl her tail and wings around her daughter. But Leandra held out her hand. “No, Mother.” She never took her eyes from the stranger. “We’ve already met Los? Are you the dread god then?”
The old man smiled, revealing snaggled teeth. “No one so grand. A mere slave, your slave, that is all I am.” He bowed far lower than Francesca would have thought possible for his arthritic frame.
“Are you a demon?” Leandra asked. “The lava demon of this island?”
Lotannu and his two hierophants had crept closer. Now they stood well within earshot. Leandra paid them no mind.
The old man straightened. “Not a demon, only a human who was made diamond-minded.” He turned his bright green eyes on Francesca. His mouth moved into a slack, geriatric smile. “I would tell you more about myself, but I might bore your mother. She and I met long ago, long before you sent me to find you.”
Francesca narrowed her eyes. She had never seen the man before.
Apparently her thoughts were clear on her draconic face, for Leandra said, “I don’t think she recognizes you.”
“Oh no?” the old man asked. His smile widening but then becoming melancholy. “She and I fought once when I had a different mind. We fought in the sanctuary in Avel, amid pillars and arches of the Hall of Ambassadors. We fought under the open sky and in a redwood forest. I only just escaped her.”
A horrible suspicion grew in Francesca’s heart. She wanted to leap away from the old man, to spread her wings and be away.
The old man took a wheezing breath, turned his green eyes on Francesca. “There have been days, many days, since then that I wish I had not escaped, that she had killed me in that beautiful room or that beautiful forest. Her husband, your father, could have killed me on the rolling green savanna, under the stars. Often I wonder why he didn’t … The thoughts that come when a mind is enslaved, they are hard to explain.”
Leandra laughed. “You will have to try harder. Nothing you say makes any sense. Who are you, really? And why have you brought me here?”
He turned the horrible green eyes away from Francesca and toward Leandra. “I brought you here at your command.”
Leandra blinked. “We’ve never met before.”
“Not in this life. I am your father’s old enemy, your distant cousin, your slave.” He bowed again. “I have had many names, but many years ago I was called the Savanna Walker.”
Francesca’s heart began to race. She never saw the Savanna Walker’s human body, only his opalescent draconic form.
The old man bowed again to Leandra, sank to his knees. “And you too have had many names. Far from here, you commanded me to cross the ocean again so that you might know who you truly are.”
Leandra’s eyes focused on something far beyond the old man. “And who am I, truly?”
“You are the engine of the world. You are the change come to destroy the world and remake it.” He looked up at her with his green eyes, so like Nicodemus’s, and said, “You are the reincarnation of Los.”
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
No one spoke.
Leandra became aware of the wind, lapping waves, birds crying far away. The sky had cleared, the sulfurous odor dissipated. Her heart filled with strange elation even as her thoughts snarled. She cleared her throat and said, “What you say, old man, is impossible.”
The ancient creature looked at her with his sunken face, smiled. Black smoke poured from his mouth, nose, eyes. The oily air wrapped around his head, coiled down his body. Faces danced across the smoke—Holokai’s, Thaddeus’s, her father’s. Then the smoke puffed into gossamers that twisted, evaporated. Again a thin pathetic man stood before her, his smile disturbing and sympathetic.
Francesca spread her claws, coiled her tail protectively around her daughter. Dhrun stepped away from the tail while surprised cries came from Lotannu’s pilots. Her mother snarled at Lotannu, but a wall of black smoke rose between them. “They will stay,” the old man said. “They must hear what I have to say. I will not permit you to harm them.”
Francesca turned her snarl on the old man, and for a moment Leandra feared her mother was going to scoop her up and fly away. But then Leandra leaned over and laid a hand on her mother’s tail; she seemed to relax.
Leandra looked back into the old man’s eyes. She kept her voice flat. “The smoke—cute trick—doesn’t change that your claim is impossible.”
His smile brightened. “Mortals look back as if the past could have been different. But reweaving the past is the only impossibility. You taught me so when you showed me how to perceive forward into time. The past is alive only within ourselves.”
“When did I teach you anything?”
“Thirty-four years ago.”
The specificity surprised Leandra. She looked up at her mother, whose draconic eyes studied the stranger with a quickness suggestive of fear. In the coming winter, Leandra would be thirty-four years old. “Thirty-four years?”
“Almost precisely.”
“Explain.”
The old man’s face grew smoother, his motions quicker. “Once I was a wild, wonderful thing on the savanna. You might have heard of me; I had the fecund mind. But Typhon enslaved me, made me a diamond-minded dragon. That is why I now talk … this way.” He made a sour face. “Typhon set me against your father and later your mother. She wanted to kill me for reasons that she might not be completely aware.” He looked up at Francesca.
The dragon growled at him.
The old man nodded as if greeting an old friend. “Typhon sacrificed himself so that I might fly to the Ancient Continent. Often I have wished your mother had killed me then. But I escaped and flew over the rolling savanna of Spires, over the arid plains and farmlands of Verdant, over the twisting sands of the Desert of Oso, past the Burning Rock. There I rested several days, fattening m
yself on katabeasts and the leonine children of Chimera who hunt them.”
As the old man spoke, smoke rose from the ground behind him and formed the shapes of his narration. A slender dragon flew over plains and dunes. He swooped down to sink claws into a massive katabeast. He defended the carcass from a tribe of spear-wielding creatures with human torsos growing from lion bodies.
“I fought the urge to fly north. I thought it would be my death. Who could have said how wide the ocean was? But Typhon had enslaved me, and when my belly grew fat, I took wing with the compulsion.” The smoke became a wide-winged dragon flying over undulating waves. “I flew over bright schools of fish and leviathans as large as swimming mountains. I flew through wind and fog and sunlight that seemed bright enough to shine through my soul. Then, on the fourth day, a wind storm struck and blew me west.”
The miniature smoke dragon frantically worked his wings as a storm tore wisps from his body and tail. The dragon faltered, fell toward the sea. But then it turned to fly with the wind, gliding unsteadily. Ahead the smoke formed a long coastline of sheer cliffs. Waves dashed themselves into wisps along the shore. “On the sixth day, I reached land.” The miniature dragon landed gracelessly atop one of the cliffs and collapsed, breathing heavily.
“But I did not know if the land was the Ancient Continent. Perhaps the storm had blown me into another world.” The perspective of the smokeplay expanded to reveal a rolling land covered with pine forests and sharp peaks. A deerlike creature ventured out of the wood to experimentally sniff the sleeping dragon. “But soon I regained my strength.” With blurring speed, the miniature dragon pinned the deerlike creature under foreclaws, tore out its throat. The dragon ate and then took wing.
“I explored the vast new land—one filled with the bones of ancient civilizations.” Land rolled underneath the dragon until it became a ruined city of strange architecture, all square buildings and crumbling arenas amid trees and shrubs. “But nowhere did I find humanity. Animals, wilderness, that was all. More surprising, nowhere did I find demons.”
Leandra blinked. “So it wasn’t the Ancient Continent?”
“So I thought, for if there was one thing we know of the Ancient Continent it is that it swarms with demons.” He looked from Leandra to Francesca to Lotannu. “How could it not? The human kingdoms built themselves believing that the demons will come for them. So I told myself that I had not found the Ancient Continent for I had not found the ancient demons. And yet as I continued to explore, I found more and more ruins. And such ruins! They fit perfectly the cities of ancient legends—the towers of Berulan, the domes of Ursha’al—that I could not escape the feeling that this was indeed the Ancient Continent.”
The smoke showed the landscape rising into mountains which held a ruined city of spires. Then the landscape fell to a wide jungle, punctuated by massive mountainlike pyramids. There followed sand dunes and a ruined city of domes built around an oasis.
The old man continued. “I did not realize then that the past is dead everywhere except within us, where it is vibrantly horrifyingly alive.” The smoke dragon pawed through the crumbling temples and collapsing tombs. Then the dragon took wing, and the land stretched into a snowfield below. The dragon flew until the plain grew into a steep volcano beside a wide river. Here there were ruins, but only the tops of the buildings and towers protruded from the mountain. The rest of the city seemed to have been covered by lava flow.
“At last, in the snowy north, I discovered Mount Calax.”
The smoke dragon landed amid the ruins and discovered a statue of immense proportions submerged to the waist in ancient lava flow. “I found your stone remains where the Last Emperor and his guardians sacrificed themselves to bind you in stone so humanity might escape across the ocean.” A shudder moved through the old man. The tiny dragon approached the statue and then fell into a seizure.
As abruptly as it had formed, the smoke evaporated. Again the old man shuddered. “A godspell placed in me by Typhon wormed its way from me and into your frozen statue. It used my imperial heritage to free you from your prison. Your eyes became smoke, your mouth a conflagration. Your body melted and covered mine. There was only pain. Such great pain.”
Leandra pressed her hand to her chest. Just as nightmares enfold the sleeper in horrible inevitability—the monster that cannot be escaped, the fall that cannot be avoided—Leandra felt destiny take hold of her.
The Savanna Walker stood straighter. “That was when I ceased to be Typhon’s slave and became yours.”
“I have no slaves.”
“You have two.”
“You’re straining my credulity.”
“Your present life, it is one of bondage to your human body, to the disease that is wracking it.”
“I have been cured of my disease.”
“Cured? By the loveless spell?”
Discomfited, she said nothing.
“The loveless spell did not cure you; it only masks your humanity, bringing your divine nature to the surface. That is why you have heightened senses and can deconstruct gods.”
Again the nightmarish inevitability filled Leandra. “Not cured?”
The Savanna Walker’s expression darkened. “That day nearly thirty-four years ago, I brought you news of Nicodemus Weal and Francesca DeVega and how Typhon had brought them together in hopes of starting a new version of the Disjunction in which the divine language and Language Prime intermingled. I told you how your mother had destroyed Typhon and eaten his remains. In return, you showed me how time truly is, how the future stretches out before us like a landscape, but the past is as confining as a prison cell. You showed me the truth of the past.”
“And what is the truth?”
“When our ancestors fled the Ancient Continent, the demons languished. Without human prayer to refresh their divine language, they weakened. Without Los to govern, they fell to fighting. Over the millennia they perished until there were only a few dozen patrolling the southern coast, longing to cross the ocean to seek revenge on humanity. Without sustaining prayer, and with the constant fighting, their minds degenerated into brutishness. Typhon was the only surviving demon who retained his intellect. Then, when he discovered the half-finished golem named Fellwroth on Mount Calax, he transformed the creature into his ark and together they crossed the ocean.”
Leandra shook her head. “But Fellwroth reported to my father that demons still stalked the Ancient Continent. Typhon was trying to create a dragon to fly over them to revive Los.”
“So they did when Typhon left, but he sailed from the Ancient Continent centuries ago. And his presence on the Ancient Continent stabilized the Pandemonium. Many of the demons had formed a loose alliance against him, agreeing to protect each other should Typhon attack any one of them. Once Typhon left, they destroyed each other.”
Suddenly Leandra understood. “That is why the Disjunction hasn’t come. Humanity has been wondering why the Pandemonium has not crossed the ocean for the past thirty years. It’s because there are no demons left?”
When the Savanna Walker nodded, excited murmuring sounded from Lotannu’s hierophants.
Leandra ignored them. “Leaving only you, old man? Are you the invasion?”
He shook his head. “The invasion began thirty years ago. That is why I want those men”—he gestured to Lotannu’s party—“to hear what I have to say. If they don’t, I will have to find someone similar. You gave specific orders about whom I had to inform to complete the demonic invasion.”
Leandra looked around. “You’ll forgive me if I’m skeptical about this demonic invasion. There is an acute lack of destroyed civilizations at hand.”
“Your goal was never to destroy human civilization, but replace it with something purer, something better. That is your fundamental passion.”
The words chilled Leandra. She would have traded empire and league for a less degenerate civilization in a heartbeat.
The Savanna Walker nodded at Leandra. “I see it in your eyes; you ar
e the same in this life. You strengthened me so that I could protect you while you were still young and mortal.”
She could only blink at him.
“After commanding me, you gave me your old and massive body. I used it to make this island. With it I can make the fire burn, the lava flow. You showed me how to enhance my talents. Before I could block perception, cause blindness or deafness or aphasia; you showed me how to drive any man or woman into madness. The smoke you believe you see, for example, is nothing. You see in it your projected fears. What happened on Feather Island will give you evidence for all that I say.”
Remembering her father’s reports of madness and lava flows, Leandra nodded. “But why attack Feather Island?”
“The imperial forces there were tracking you. They were also about to discover your father sailing into the bay from the Matrunda River. To ensure your safety, I destroyed them.”
“And the innocent villagers.”
The Savanna Walker produced a toothy grin. “I wasn’t trying to show off.”
“You disgust me.”
“With pleasure.”
Anger flared in Leandra.
The old man continued. “After empowering me on the Ancient Continent, you told me to return to the human kingdoms and await your reincarnation. You decided that you would be the child of Nicodemus and Francesca. Francesca had eaten the body of Typhon, so her union with Nicodemus became a conduit for your soul into this life as a creature of both divine language and Language Prime.”
Francesca flexed her claws.
The Savanna Walker looked up at her. “That was when I first began to wish that you, Francesca, had killed me in that redwood forest. I had been enslaved for nearly a decade already, but all during the quest for Los, I hoped that the dread god would reward my service with freedom. But as his spirit sped away south to be reborn, I knew that I would never be free again.”
The old man looked down at his slender frame, his knobby feet. “My true body might not impress. But with the stone and fire of your old incarnation wrapped around me, I became a great dragon. With wings as wide as a city, I flew back to the human lands. It wasn’t hard to find you. Your mother and father were then on Starfall Island, as the league was taking its shape. So I became a creature of the sea, floating across the waves just over the horizon. Human eyes could not perceive me, though a few encounters with sailors led to increased rumors about the fabled floating island. Deities straying closer were more troublesome. I had to hunt them down and eat them. Later that year, you were born. Though I was over the blue horizon, I recognized your reincarnation the way a blind man feels the sunshine.”
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