Jess Lebow: The Colors of Magic Anthology

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.

"On another occasion, I might enjoy prolonging our duel, but alas, I find myself impatient to get on with murdering the city. Do you think it possible that in three nights I could slaughter everyone? Imagine the oh-so-ambitious Ilmieras emerging from their refuge to discover there's no one left to rule. What a rich jest that would be."

The creature's wings beat with a thunderous boom, propelling it forward, and it cut at her chest. She spun out of the way and slashed at its throat, but it parried.