by Victor Milán
Sorceress and swordswoman as she was, Zaranda had' found little time in life to study unarmed combat. Still, in her travels, she had gleaned a trick or two from the hand-fighting arts of distant Kozakura.
The dagger tip touched her stomach beneath her breastplate's lower edge. Shaveli smiled a ghastly smile and pushed harder.
In grappling the Sword-Master, Zaranda had moved several feet away from the lava. Now she shifted her left-hand grip from the man's wrist to Crackletongue's hilt and cast herself onto her back. Her not-inconsiderable weight drew the Sword-Master along. As he fell onto her, she put a boot in his stomach. Then she pulled with her arms and pushed with her long, strong leg.
Shaveli flew over her head. She twisted Crackle-tongue from his grasp as he passed. With a despairing wail, he pitched headfirst into the lava.
Zaranda rolled over and sat up. "At last," she said, "you've found yourself a willing embrace."
Something moaned past her ear and went into the lava three feet in front of her. She gasped as molten-stone droplets seared her cheek. The bowmen on the steps above were drawing bead on her.
One screamed and pitched forward off the stair. He landed with a whump on the stone beside the lava and lay still. An arrow jutted from his back.
His comrades turned to stare upward. Zaranda's gaze followed. "Stillhawk!"
The ranger stood at the top of the stair, legs braced, a short bow in hand. He plucked an arrow from his breast, nocked, drew in one smooth motion, and shot a second guardsman through the forehead.
The blue-and-bronzes cried out in consternation. Some shot back, others forsook bows for blades and ran up the stairs. None had any attention to spare for Zaranda and Chen; shooting with almost elven speed and accuracy, Stillhawk could drop them all unless they found a way to deal with him.
The women ran toward the doorway, piled through it, and came up short.
It was a great round bubble of a cave, ill lit by a smattering of torches in sconces hammered into the rough walls. By the far wall rose a glittering mound of treasure: gems, jewels, golden idols with gemstone eyes, a seeming infinitude of coins-silver, platinum, gold. Lying in the midst of the wealth, as in a nest, was a mass of glistening gray flesh almost thirty feet around.
From the mass protruded things-beings. Duergar, drow, orcs, humans-they seemed to grow from the substance of the thing. Some showed as no more than bumps on the surface; others were all but fully formed. Three tentacles, each as thick around as Shield's torso, reared from the obscene bulk, bearing great-toothed jaws. Three eyes mounted on impossibly delicate stalks weaved above the mass.
"What is it?" Chenowyn asked.
"A deepspawn," Zaranda said. "I should have suspected."
Near the mound crouched Tatrina, her eyes red from weeping. Her cheeks bled where her nails had gouged them. She appeared quite bereft of reason.
"Where's Faneuil?" Zaranda asked.
Something erupted from the horror's flank. Zaranda jumped back, raising her weapons defensively-for all the good they'd do against a creature that huge.
Slime sloughed away from the writhing thing. It was the upper half of Faneuil I, king of Tethyr. The head still bore its modest crown.
The man spat filth and craned to look at the newcomers. "Zaranda!" he croaked. "Help me!"
He stiffened. Tension seemed to flow from him. A blissful smile crossed his face.
"Welcome," he said-and his voice was the Voice from Zaranda's dreams, dry as desert wind stirring sand. "I've waited a long time for you, Zaranda Star."
"What in hell are you?" Zaranda asked.
"Not in hell, but in your world. I am lord-to-be of Faerun. I am L'yafv-Afvonn."
Chen wrung her hands convulsively before her breast. "What is that thing? What's going on?"
"It's a monster called a deepspawn," Zaranda said. "It loves to feed on intelligent prey. And anything it eats, it can duplicate from its own flesh. A perfect copy of the original in every way-except that it exists only to serve its creator's will."
She shook her head. "I should have seen it before. Here's where the darklings came from. And the All-Friends-those poor children were all replaced by spawn. Except Tatrina."
"She won't remain the exception long," the false Hardisty said. "She'll be very helpful in persuading her self-righteous old fool of a father to accept your authority when you return to the surface. Except, of course, it won't be you at all, but another of my children." The head laughed uproariously.
"What about the king?" Zaranda asked..
"Useless fool. I shan't even bother to duplicate him."
Head and body went rigid again. Then Hardisty said in his own voice, "Kill… me."
Zaranda stepped forward. Crackletongue flared and sparked and it lashed out. The king's head sprang from his shoulders and bounced to a stop at her feet.
The mouths hissed. Fool! the Voice exploded in her mind.
Two sucker-studded tentacles-as big around as the ones that bore the mouths, but vastly longer-shot from the pile in a spray of treasure to seize Chen and Zaranda. Zaranda felt another magical compulsion try to claim her, but bent all her will to fighting it and felt it pass.
Resist as you will, the Voice said in her mind. It only adds spice.
A third tentacle erupted forth. As Zaranda tried to hack at the tentacle that held her, the tip of the other grabbed her wrist and bent it cruelly back. Her fingers went numb; the sword slipped free.
Now I will exact the price of your meddling, the Voice said. Rejoice that I must assimilate your flesh to replicate you, else your suffering would be protracted indeed.
From outside the door came a drumming as of giant wings. Then screams, none in Stillhawk's voice.
A guardsman appeared in the doorway. He took three steps forward on wavering legs. In the torchlight, Zaranda saw that his eyes stared between bloody parallel slashes that ran down the front of him from crown to crotch. He fell upon his face.
A woman walked in. Black hair cascaded past slender shoulders and down the back of a midnight-blue gown. Her austerely beautiful face bore no expression.
Nyadnar, the Voice hissed. You have picked a curious mode of suicide. The free tentacle quested for her.
She raised a hand. "Don't even try. Look into my eyes, L'yafv-Afvonn, gaze upon my true soul. You can never hope to best me."
Never is a long time, mage.
"We'll see."
"Who is this?" asked Chenowyn, squirming fruitlessly to free herself of the tentacle wrapped about her slim waist. "Are we saved?"
"No," Zaranda said in a leaden voice. "This is Nyadnar. She'll do exactly nothing."
"It is not my way to act directly on the world," the sorceress said. She gestured at the dead guardsman at her feet. "Unless, of course, I'm compelled to defend myself." She walked to the wall opposite where Tatrina crouched, and stood as if carved.
Now, said the Voice, where were we? A mouth-arm darted forward and seized Zaranda's feet in its jaws.
"No!" Chenowyn screamed as the horror began to feed her friend into its maw. Zaranda thrashed violently, but was swallowed up, inch by inch.
The girl turned a tear-drenched face to Nyadnar. "You've got to help her!" she pleaded. "Please!"
"That is not my way."
"Let me go!" Chen drummed impotent fists on the tentacle that held her. Then to the sorceress: "I've heard her talk about you. You were her friend."
"I have no friends. I can afford none. My responsibilities are too great."
"You used her! How can you just let her die?"
"I employed her services from time to time. She was rewarded suitably, even generously. Where she is now, she came to by her own choice."
Slobbering, the toothed jaws had worked their way to Zaranda's hips. "She'll die! You have to do something!"
"I cannot." A pause. "But you can."
"Me? I'm just a girl! What can I do?"
"You are not just a girl, Chenowyn," the sorceress said. "As to what you can do… what
ever you choose."
The jaws were about her friend's waist. Zaranda uttered a hawk scream of rage and frustration.
"Damn you!" the girl flared. "Damn you, damn you, damn you! And damn you, too, you great big wad of filth!"
Her body went rigid with rage. Her hair rose, and her eyes began to glow. Her lips peeled back from her teeth in a grimace of fury…
And her jaws extended forward, telescoping.
Chenowyn's scream penetrated Zaranda's despair and brought her head around.
Her apprentice was transforming before her eyes. Her skin was darkening toward a brilliant, shiny, red; at the same time it grew visibly thicker, scaly, with an oddly crystalline quality. Face and limbs grew longer, became toothy jaws, forelimbs and legs wickedly clawed. Her skull flattened and broadened, and two long back-curving horns sprouted from its rear. Nubs formed on her back and grew into great ribbed wings.
The deepspawn found itself holding a small but very angry gem dragon. A mouth-arm darted for it, jaws spread wide. The dragon uttered a furious, piercing scream. A spray of brilliant red dust, like rubies ground to sand, gushed from its mouth.
Tough hide and muscle were scoured from the deepspawn's mouth-arm. Skeletonized jaws fell to the floor. The monster drew back a stump gouting green blood.
The dragon-Chen clawed at the tentacle about her waist. What an adolescent girl's fists could not achieve, an adolescent dragon's talons made light of. Ruby talons shredded the tentacle. It let Chen go and jerked away.
Chen's wings exploded from her sides, beat tentatively. She fell on her rump. Rising up on her hind legs, she thrust her head forward and breathed her spray of ruby dust against the neck of the mouth that had worked its way to Zaranda's armpits.
The abrasive spray cut through the arm. The head fell to the floor, jaws working spasmodically. Zaranda began to struggle free.
A tentacle lashed at Chen. Her jaws snapped it through. Then she flung herself at the monster, buffeting it with her wings, lashing it with her tail.
The remaining tentacle snaked out, looped back, wrapped itself around the young dragon's neck. She uttered strangling sounds and beat at it with her wings. It held her up in the air while the surviving mouth-arm trumpeted a cry of triumph.
Zaranda had extricated herself from the still-spasming jaws. Crackletongue lay on the floor nearby. Her right hand would not respond; she snatched the sword up with her left, screamed, "A star!" and slashed at the tentacle that was throttling Chenowyn.
With a flash and a crack, a stink of ozone and burned fetid meat, the magic blade cut through the tentacle. The severed end dropped from Chen's neck to writhe on the floor like a snake with a broken back. The stump, spewing foulness, flailed wildly, knocking Zaranda against the wall.
Chenowyn braced her legs, gathered herself, and breathed.
Corundum spray enveloped the monster. The spawn-heads growing from it opened wide their eyes. They began to scream in a horrid cacophony of voices.
The bulk heaved and flopped, trying to escape the awful torrent of ruby dust. Its skin abraded away, and then its flesh, and that which served it as bones, and its pulsating inner organs. The sprouting bodies withered to skeletons and went quiet.
A psychic scream burst like a sun exploding inside Zaranda's skull. Consciousness left her.
When she opened her eyes, Nyadnar was standing over her, gazing down with neither curiosity nor compassion.
"Oh," Zaranda groaned. She sat up. She felt like Death on a bender. But she was alive, and nothing seemed broken. "Chenowyn?"
"She is well," the sorceress said, nodding toward the middle of the floor. A very normal-looking human girl lay curled about herself. "Just resting."
"And L'yafv-Afvonn?"
"Destroyed. Or at least, fled to another dimension to avoid dissolution. One from which he cannot return, should he even desire to, for a time longer than the span of your lives, and a dozen generations of your descendants."
The girl moaned, jackknifed. Zaranda was up at once, running to her side, gathering her into her arms.
"What happened?" the girl moaned. "What did I do?"
"I don't know, honey," Zaranda said, "but it sure worked."
"You have saved the balance of the world, which was in danger of being thrown hopelessly awry," Nyadnar said, "You have done well, my daughter."
The others gaped at her. "Yes," the sorceress said, in a tone of voice like none Zaranda had ever heard from her. "You are my child, Chenowyn."
"She's a dragon?" Zaranda demanded. "How could that be? She didn't so much as shimmer in Armenides's dead-magic room; she couldn't have held a polymorph spell. And she's no half-dragon. She's as human as I."
"She is. She is also a dragon-as much as I."
Chenowyn jumped to her feet. "No! It's not true! I'm not a dragon! And stop talking about me like some… some thing that's not even here!"
Zaranda seized her hand. "Chen, I love you, no matter who you are-and you will never be a thing to me. But you were a dragon. I saw."
She straightened and faced the sorceress, one arm around the sobbing girl's shoulders. "How can somebody be both fully human and fully dragon? And what kind of dragon? She's not like any I've ever heard of."
"She is a new thing in the world," Nyadnar said, "A thousand years ago I noted an alarming fact: while you humans are small, short-lived, and weak, and we dragons are great, long-lived, and powerful, your numbers were increasing rapidly, year by year, whereas ours diminished slowly, but steadily.
"One solution-bandied about by the council of wyrms more frequently than it would reassure you to know-has been to eradicate your mayfly kind. I opposed this course of action. For one thing, by the time it came up for debate, I was morally certain it was too late-that were we to attempt any such thing, we should succeed only in hastening our own extinction. For another, I perceived your kind as having a function in the great system of the world, even as dragonkind has.
"Yet I could see the two coming inevitably into conflict. I wished to preserve both races if possible. So I sought to see if I could somehow reconcile them. Many years have I spent in study, in contemplation, and in experimentation. The end result you see before you: a person who is both human and dragon. A super-being, if you will: a ruby dragon."
Zaranda frowned. "I've heard that certain evil wizards of the Dalelands created an artificial woman by magic a few years ago. She didn't turn out as expected, if the story's to be believed."
"You speak of the woman who calls herself Alias of Westgate. I have interviewed her. She was indeed a less-than-pleasant surprise to her creators." The sorceress shook her head. "But the cases are nothing similar. There is nothing artificial about Chenowyn. By means beyond your comprehension I quickened her in my womb, carried her for nine months as a human woman, bore her in pain as a human mother."
"And then you just… turned her out," Zaranda said.
"When it was clear she was strong and would survive, I left her at the Sunite orphanage in Zazesspur." Nyadnar turned to the girl. "I hope you will understand, my daughter. I had to let you make your own way, to prove that this new order of being was viable. I had to let you show you could survive, though it tore at my heart to do so."
"You mean I'm just an experiment?" Chenowyn wailed.
"No, not at all. You are, as I said, an entirely new order of being. Possibly superior to anything that has existed on this plane before. And you are my daughter."
"Don't call me 'daughter'! " The girl turned and bolted from the chamber.
Zaranda ran after her. She got out the door in time to see Chen transform herself into a scarlet-hued dragon and fly upward.
Zaranda looked sidelong at Nyadnar, who stood staring up into the cavern darkness. Her inhumanly beautiful-literally inhuman, Zaranda realized-features remained expressionless, but her alabaster hands were knotted into fists.
"Nyadnar," she said gently, "you may've spent a thousand years studying how to give birth to her, but you have a lot to learn abo
ut being a mother."
Epilogue
A Star
Night had returned to Zazesspur when Zaranda returned to the surface.
A vast crowd thronged the civic plaza. Through the doors of the Palace of Governance, Zaranda emerged supporting a gravely wounded Stillhawk. Tatrina followed, looking right and left, tentative as a wild animal.
From far back in the crowd, a voice yelled, "All hail Zaranda Star!" The crowd took up the cry in a mighty cheer: "Hail Zaranda!"
"I hope that wasn't one of our people," Zaranda said to herself.
Duke Hembreon set a halting foot on the bottommost step of the broad concrete stairs. Tatrina's cornflower-blue eyes went wide.
"Daddy?" she said. Then: "Daddy!" and she went flying down the steps into her father's plate-armored arms.
"All part of the service, folks," Zaranda said. Suddenly she had to sit down on the top step. She managed to ease Stillhawk down to lie beside her. "Can somebody fetch a stretcher? My friend here needs care."
An astonishingly beautiful woman in a low-cut crimson robe came bustling up the steps. She had long white-blonde hair done up in an elaborate gleaming coiffure, and a huge gaudy gold Sune pendant adangle between her not-particularly well-concealed breasts. A pair of strapping young men in red tunics followed her.
"We shall personally tend this hero's hurts at the Temple of Sune Firehair," she said, clasping her hands before her bosom. "Ooh, he's so handsome!"
Stillhawk, now altogether unconscious, was gathered up and borne away by the ingenue acolytes, trailed by the hand-wringing priestess. Well, Zaranda thought, I guess it's no more than he deserves. He's had a rough day. On the long hike up from the Underdark, the ranger had told her of dying and being resurrected by Shield of Innocence.
Having turned his daughter over to a covey of nurses and seen her carried off in a palanquin, Duke Hembreon approached up the steps again. Zaranda reached to her belt.
"Here," she said, flipping the late King Faneuil I's crown to him. "You might be needing that."
