Still sprawled among his texts and scrolls, eyeing her warily, he nodded.
"Because I'm no longer a creature of celestial magic," she said. "I can understand why you never anticipated such a thing. You humans remain human no matter what you do. But we spirits are fundamentally beings of mind and soul, for all that we wear the semblance of matter, and it turns out that our very essence can change if we do and feel the wrong things. You corrupted me, Sabul, made me your torturer and assassin, and in consequence, I'm not an angel anymore. I'm just some sort of… bird! Can you imagine how that grieves me, to have my very nature, my identity, my connection to the Divine Will, stripped away? At least I possess my liberty again, and that means I'm free to deal with you." She moved toward him.
He gazed up at her aghast but not, she sensed, because he feared for himself.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I never intended to harm you. I noticed that your appearance changed in small ways from one meeting to the next, but you never told me what it meant."
"Because I myself didn't comprehend until recently. But suppose I had told you. Would you have released me?"
"I-I wish I could say yes, but…" He composed his features and clambered to his feet. "Do what you will, Kotara, I won't resist. Mete out justice on your own behalf."
She had never hated him as much as at that moment. Had he either fought or pleaded for mercy, like all the men she'd slain at his behest, she could have gleefully torn him apart, but there was something about his calm contrition and acceptance of his fate that locked her rage up inside her.
Fortunately, it didn't matter.
Grinning, she said, "Actually, I don't have to soil my own hands with your blood. Like you, I choose to act through a surrogate."
He shook his head. "I don't understand."
"The Ilmieras have raised a knight banneret of the Abyss to kill you. It may be on its way here even now, and I'm content to commend you into its hands. My recent experiences notwithstanding, I'm sure that it's still a far more able torturer than I am."
"But- ' Clearly shocked, Sabul ran his fingers through his dirty, uncombed hair. "Kotara, I know something of the spirits of darkness, even if sorcerers of my order never summon them. I know about the champions of the Pit. Such a spirit wouldn't fight for the Ilmieras unless they paid it. What price did it demand?"
"License to hunt mortals throughout the city for the next three nights."
"No! Even the Ilmieras wouldn't agree to that."
"They're frightened of you, magician. They'd do almost anything to rid themselves of you and me. I warned you that if you continued to wage war, innocent people would come to grief."
He grimaced. "Yes, you did, and I refused to heed. Thus I have absolutely no right to expect you to listen to me now. But if the fiend slays me, it will afterward slaughter scores, perhaps hundreds, of others. Whereas if you stand with me now, there's at least a chance we can destroy it. Will you aid me?"
She laughed in his face.
He attempted to take her hands. "I beg you. I'm not asking for myself-"
Kotara stepped back out of his reach. "Were I still an angel," she said, "no one would have to exhort me to take up arms against a dark spirit or to pity the folk who might suffer at its hands. But thanks to you, Guildmage, I'm now a baser creature. I can put my own well-being first, and I see no reason to risk my life to aid a city that has given me so little cause to love it."
"Then there's only one solution," said Sabul somberly, picking up a ritual dagger with a silver crosspiece and pommel. "If the fiend must kill me to claim his reward, I'll simply have to deny it the opportunity."
Kotara chuckled. "I'm sorry, but even your suicide wouldn't answer. The creature merely promised the Ilmieras you'd be dead before morning. It didn't swear to take your life itself, and thus your self-destruction would fulfill the terms of the agreement. No, if you hope to save your fellow mortals, you'll have to fight the fiend. I wonder how long you'll last with your mind clouded by hunger and lack of sleep. When you haven't purified yourself since Axdan's burial. When your ceremonial robes are dirty and foul."
"Damn you!" Sabul cried. "How can you be so spiteful, considering what's at stake?"
"I am as you made me," she replied lightly. "Farewell,
Guildmage." She strode to the window and leaped into the night.
Within a minute, she was clear of the city. She had an urge to climb until she left the globe itself behind but was no longer certain she belonged among the stars. What if she encountered one of her sisters and that other spurned her for the altered and degraded creature she was? She didn't think she'd be able to bear it, so she simply flew out over the ocean. The black waves gleamed in the light of the two moons, and the wind carried the tang of saltwater.
She realized that she had no idea where to go. She told herself not to worry over that or anything else for the time being, to simply soar and enjoy her freedom. But she couldn't. There was a deadness inside her, and visions crept unbidden into her head.
She saw Sabul, famished, exhausted, and still wracked with grief, yet behaving like a mage devoted to goodness and justice at last, ready to sacrifice his own life to save his city. Of course, he was only seeking to undo a catastrophe that was ultimately of his own making, and that scarcely absolved him of his sins. Yet sorely as he'd injured her, she suddenly found it difficult to hate him utterly, knowing he'd transgressed for love of his brother.
She also saw the bloody, twisted faces of the young men she'd slain and imagined the captain of darkness committing similar atrocities on a far grander scale until the streets of the capital were awash in blood. She'd professed to hate the city with its greedy nobles fighting over the crumbs of wealth and power that slipped through the fingers of its decadent royalty. In point of fact, most of the inhabitants were commoners who took no part in the feuds of the upper classes.
Kotara no longer felt a profound and abiding love for all humanity, nor a reflexive, unquestioning desire to act in accordance with the Divine Will. Those gifts had perished with her angelic nature. Yet she could still distinguish between altruism and selfishness, magnanimity and malice, responsibility and abdication, and she recognized that it would simply be wrong to abandon Zhalfir to its doom. Moreover, this time she wouldn't be able to absolve herself with the thought that a mage had compelled her. This time the sin would be her own choice, and she suspected the guilt might ultimately prove as crippling a burden as Sabul's grief had been to him.
Shrieking like an enormous eagle, she wheeled and sped back toward the land.
She saw flares of white light and the bursts of inky blackness, alternately brightening and darkening the sky over the Nobles' Quarter while she was still above the harbor. Racing on, her shadow flowing across the rooftops of the city, she discerned that, as she'd expected, the emanations were blazing forth from the windows of Sabul's tower.
When she peered inside, she saw her erstwhile master chanting at the center of a ring of pale phosphorescence, a barrier against the minions of the night. A slender ritual sword shone in one upraised hand and an ivory staff in the other, while the marble diamond amulet burned like a star on his breast.
The fiend loomed over him, its enormous wings seeming to fill the chamber from wall to wall. A vest of blue-black mail armored its torso, and a helm with a jagged crest protected its head. Roaring with each stroke, it hewed at Sabul with a dark, two-handed sword. The weapon looked peculiarly insubstantial, as if it were forged of shadow, and it sizzled like meat on a griddle when it swept through the air. Every stroke penetrated a little farther into the zone of warding established by the magic circle.
The monster struck yet another blow. With a sharp crack, Sabul's amulet shattered, and suddenly no longer impeded by the ring of luminescence, the shadow sword streaked toward the young mage's head.
Sabul hopped frantically backward, and the cut missed him by a hair. But his foot came down on the leg of a broken chair, which turned and threw him off balance. He fell, and the knight of the Abyss pounced at him.
Fleetingly grateful that she was no longer too chivalrous to attack an opponent by surprise, Kotara scrambled into the room, snatched up another ritual sword from a blond-wood rack of such implements, and charged, intent on stabbing the dark monster in the back.
The fiend must have heard her coming, for it pivoted smoothly. Her weapon rang as the knight of darkness parried her thrust. The fiend riposted with a horizontal head cut, and when she attempted to counterparry, the shadow sword swept through her blade as if it weren't there. Evidently the infernal glaive was solid only when its master wanted it to be.
She ducked, but didn't quite manage to avoid the blow. The shadow sword missed her head but grazed the top of her left wing. She felt a sting of pain, and a bloody white feather drifted toward the floor.
From a crouch she thrust at her opponent's three-toed foot, and the monster stepped nimbly out of range. Her point grated on the hardwood floor. She straightened up, and they both came back on guard, then regarded one another, looking for openings.
After a moment, the fiend's burning jade eyes narrowed in perplexity. "I've never seen a creature like you before," it rumbled. "What are you?"
"Something the Divine Will created to oppose abominations like you," she replied, and by the firmament, that was still true, no matter what had happened to her since. She flung herself at her foe.
Kotara knew she was overmatched. Though she was quicker, the fiend was stronger and had a longer reach, and together with the shadow sword, which could parry but not be parried, those attributes gave her foe the advantage. But perhaps she could keep it busy long enough for Sabul to cast a spell potent enough to deal with it. The magician had already clambered to his feet and resumed his chanting. Veils of pearly light swirled around him as his conjuration took shape. The winged woman prayed that the destruction of the marble diamond hadn't so diminished his magic as to render his efforts futile. Now he would need to draw all his power from the wide world itself, specifically from those expanses of grassland to which he'd established a mystical link.
A whip-snap beat of her wings carried her high enough to thrust at the dark spirit's eyes. The harbinger of night struck her blade out of line, then slashed at her shoulder. Remembering that unlike her foe, she couldn't parry-she must remember that, every instant!-she swooped beneath the stroke and cut at the creature's ribs. Clashing, the fine links of its dark mail turned the blow.
The shadow sword swept down at her, and she barely managed to wrench herself out of the way, blundering against a small round table in the process. An hourglass toppled from it and crashed to the floor. As she struggled to recover her equilibrium, the fiend wheeled and rushed at Sabul.
Caught by surprise, Kotara couldn't pursue fast enough to keep the knight of darkness from reaching the mortal. She cried out as, hissing and crackling, the shadow sword leaped at its target.
Sabul shouted a word of power. The ring of phosphorescence flared, and his staff glowed. Though the monster's sword never touched anything but air, it rang and rebounded as if it had struck a shield. At the same instant the staff snapped in two, and Sabul stumbled backward, out of the glowing circle.
His adversary laughed and strode after him. Her wings fluttering, the wounded one throbbing with every beat, Kotara threw herself between them. Her sword flashed out in a stop cut to the fiend's upraised sword arm, and at last she succeeded in drawing a little blood-or rather a steaming, malodorous ooze.
The fiend snarled and struck back with a blow that would have shorn her wing off if she hadn't twitched it aside. She feinted to the left of the monster's blade to draw a parry, then disengaged and thrust on the other side, but the shadow sword shifted back in time to deflect the attack. Kotara instantly retreated to forestall a riposte, and the two spirits paused to study each other anew. Behind his protector, Sabul resumed his incantations.
"You fight well," the knight of the Pit told Kotara.