Spellbreaker (53 page)

Francesca wondered what could possibly be going through her daughter's mind. Though it was unlikely that the deity who had brought Leandra to this island would let her go, she could at least try. But Leandra continued to shake her head and then gestured to the island. With a four-armed god by her side, the sailors did not seem to have much chance for negotiation.

So the crew paddled the battered vessel onto the strange shore. Francesca dove and circled close. There was no eruption, no return of the black smoke. Above her, a swath of white cloth broke away from the
Empress
and formed a lofting kite that held three figures in its dangling harness. Two wore green robes, the other black: Lotannu and two hierophantic pilots for escorts.

Francesca watched as Lotannu's jumpchute landed the three imperials on the island. Leandra's sailors formed a protective knot around her, but Lotannu and his wind mages kept their distance.

With a few wingbeats, Francesca landed on the volcanic island. The shore felt disturbingly warm under her feet, and her claws slid across the glassy rock. Francesca stared down at the black substance and bared her draconic teeth at it.

“Mother.”

With a start, Francesca brought her head up and discovered Leandra standing in front of her. Dhrun and her crew stood beside her. The sailors looked up at Francesca with awe, but Leandra regarded her mother as coolly as she might over breakfast. It was hard for Francesca to tell, perspective being so different in draconic form, but it seemed as if her daughter had grown taller.

“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 myself 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.