Indigo - Inferno Part 15

The other side will be waiting. Her stomach clenched and contracted fearfully. There could be no doubt now; these beings, whatever they were, were coming for her. She started to s.h.i.+ver, and an urge to scramble to her feet and run flashed through her mind-then died. Run? Where? Back to the iron gates, to hammer on them with her fists and demand that they be opened? No. She must face and meet what was stalking out of h.e.l.l to claim her. There was nowhere else to turn.

A new surge of light heaved up from the maelstrom below, and a ma.s.sive, distorted beam played across the valley slopes, haloing the approaching forms in a filthy rainbow of color, so that for the firsttime Indigo could see them clearly.

The sentries on the ridge might once have been human: these walking nightmares had not. Though their semblances were a parody of the human form, the planes and angles of their bodies were hideously out of kilter, as though they owed their existence to some obscene otherworld from which they had been manifested warped and incomplete. These were no earthly servants of Charchad. These were the demonic shades behind the mortal evil, first get of the monster she had been pledged to destroy-the true children of Aszareel.

Five more steps, six, seven... Indigo counted them like a child silently repeating a lesson, until, only a single pace from her, the beings halted. White, lidless eyes stared into her own, and when they reached out to take the chain that dangled from her shackled wrists, she didn't protest, but rose slowly to her feet, s.h.i.+fting her gaze from their distorted faces to look calmly at the insane landscape beyond. She had accepted the inevitable, and acceptance had its own narcotic power.

The demons didn't speak. Perhaps, Indigo thought with a distant fragment of her mind, they were voiceless. Metal jingled; she felt a slight tug on the chain, and with the dreamlike serenity of a sleepwalker she stepped between her captors and onto the long, steep path down into Charchad.

*CHAPTER*XV*.

"Grimya! Grimya, open your eyes!" Jasker's voice rose above the growing thunder from the fumarole, and he shook the she-wolf's huddled, immobile form. "Comeback!"

Grimya whined like a frightened cub but made no other response. Jasker doubted if she could even hear him, for her mind was lost in the consuming horror of what she was witnessing in Indigo's mind.

He had to break her trance-she was the link, the only link.

"Grimya!" Goaded by an upsurge of frustration and fear, the sorcerer raised his voice to a bellow that echoed raucously through the shaft. "In Ranaya's name I command you, look at me!"

A great convulsion shuddered through Grimya, and her golden eyes snapped open. For an instant her stare locked with Jasker's, and a mad, distorted picture tumbled through his brain. Blinding green radiance, terrible shapes that had no place on the earth, a treacherous slope that pitched down into h.e.l.l-for a split second before the image vanished Jasker knew that he was seeing the valley of Charchad through Indigo's eyes.

The frustration redoubled, making him want to scream. Grimya's despair had intensified her telepathic power to such a pitch that for one moment she had broken through the blocks in his own mind, allowing his vision to merge with hers. But it had been fleeting, incomplete. He had to recapture it.

Wildly, Jasker looked over his shoulder at the fumarole and saw that the light had deepened to blood crimson, pulsing now with the rhythm of a ma.s.sive, slow heartbeat. Old Maia was alive: she was awakening from sleep, slowly, steadily, relentlessly; and she was waiting. But her patience was running out.

He clutched at the she-wolf's fur, his sweat-soaked face distorted with frantic energy. "Grimya, listen to me! You must hold open the gateway in your mind! Link me with Indigo-let me through to her again!"

An awful cry came from the she-wolf's throat, neither a howl nor a whimper but with ugly echoes of both. "I-c... c... an't!"

"You must! Try!" He hugged her, but in her confusion and distress she struggled to pull away from him, and he was thrown back. It was no use: he couldn't reason with her-but neither could he stem the power now; the evocation had been performed and nothing could revoke it. With or without Grimya, he must reforge the link!

Jasker turned, scrambling back over the ledge to crouch at the brink of the shaft, and burning air sawed in his lungs as frenziedly he shouted to the giddying vault.

"Mother of Fire, aid me and lend me Your strength!" Desperation made his voice crack; echoes shrieked back at him and the salamanders screamed.And far down in the earth, Old Maia exhaled a t.i.tanic breath.

A shattering concussion hit them like a wall as a blast of wind roared out of the fumarole. Jasker was s.n.a.t.c.hed off his feet like a dry leaf, felt himself pitching backward, saw Grimya flung, yelping, against the rubble at the tunnel entrance. Then the blast was gone, leaving him sprawled facedown on the ledge with his lungs emptied and the concussion's aftermath thundering in his ears.

Ranaya had heard him, and She had answered! Scorched skin puckered and cracked as Jasker dragged himself to his knees, but the pain meant nothing. The G.o.ddess had spoken. Slowly he raised his head, then realized that the spectrum through which he viewed the world had s.h.i.+fted from its natural place. Red-orange-yellow-Grimya, only now staggering to her feet and shaking her head in confusion, was a crimson shadow with eyes like coals; the ledge had taken on the sullen, fiery hues of molten lava.

And he... he turned his hands palms upward, shaking, staring at their darkly glowing outlines, through them to the golden veins that moved and pulsed within the flesh, pumping fire through the network of his body- The power was inside him. He could feel it burgeoning, invading his being and he wanted to scream and laugh and weep with the glorious terror of it. This was what he had desired yet feared to grasp, and it was fear that had led him to fail so many times in the past. But now the concept of failure was beyond him. The power was his and he knew how he must use it.

He rose, and his eyes were hot and proud and vengeful as he turned to focus on the crouching she-wolf.

"Grimya." Jasker's voice shook as his body struggled to contain the forces unleashed within it.

"Will you help me in what I must do?"

Grimya gazed back at him. Her heart was pounding still from the shock of Old Maia's huge and emphatic utterance, but the thrall that had frozen her mind was broken.

The man was a man no longer. Jasker's form was etched by a glittering gold corona, and though within its frame his body and his face were unchanged, the she-wolf sensed the chaotic movements of something vast and beyond mortality, an energy that blazed and sang through the sorcerer's very essence. Demon! her mind shrieked. But Grimya knew the ways of demons, and she cast the warning aside even as it sprang into her brain. Not a demon. Not kin to Nemesis, not a thing of evil. She could give it no name, and her simple instinct wasn't enough to enable her to understand, but she knew what Jasker had become. And, knowing, she felt reverence and pity well within her like the surge of a calming tide.

"Jas-ker..." She spoke his name huskily, though she couldn't help but wonder if it meant anything to him now. Ignoring the rock's burning heat that singed the soft fur of her underbelly, she crawled toward him. Her ears were back, showing her uncertainty, but her tail twitched with a convulsive and involuntary expression of hope. "S... save her. Save Indigo. I can... hhh-elp you. I can. I will!"

"Little sister." He smiled down at her, and Grimya's body began to quiver uncontrollably.

"Ranaya will bless you for what you do tonight." And, bending, he touched one hand to the top of the wolfs head.

Old Maia, first of Ranaya's daughters, sighed. And as the great, gentle breath set the vaulted skeins of ore humming and singing like an eldritch choir, Jasker turned toward the fumarole, his arms upraised and s.h.i.+ning in their halo of unearthly brilliance. Though Grimya couldn't see his face, his expression was rapt, triumphant, the harsh lines of bitterness and hatred and deprivation falling away as, through eyes that were suddenly blurred with tears, he gazed up into the shaft toward the invisible night sky.

Ranaya, Mother of Fire, moved within the marrow of Jasker's bones as he began to speak.

The peripheral torches were being extinguished. Dawn was less than two hours away, and as the huge sirens boomed across the night to herald the end of the s.h.i.+ft, the outermost beacons were hauled down from their gantries to gutter into darkness. In the mine shafts, men set down their tools and turned their faces from the mineral veins in silent thanksgiving; those who were tardy, or who had to tramp through the deeper galleries and tunnels to reach the outside world, would have to negotiate the uneven slopes tothe ash roads and the gathering point in darkness, and chance that a turned ankle wouldn't lay them up and reduce their earnings to nothing for the next few days.

Quinas was to return to Vesinum on the morning wagon. Not a dignified means of travel for an overseer of his standing, but to summon a private carrier would take time, and his colleagues were anxious that he should be put into the care of a skilled physician as quickly as possible. They had urged him to try to sleep, but he had refused to heed them, savagely insisting that he intended to await Piaro's report. Piaro had finally returned and had confirmed that all had gone according to plan. Now, Quinas was as comfortable as they had been able to make him in the tallyman's hut, and need not be woken until the wagon was at the mine gates.

Simein, who was a staunch devotee of Charchad and one of Quinas's most trusted coterie, had taken it upon himself to see that nothing should disturb his friend and mentor during the few hours before the wagon's departure. He stood a few paces from the hut door, watching the extinguis.h.i.+ng of the first torches and fingering the haft of the whip that hung coiled at his belt. At his breast his Charchad amulet on its slim chain shone like a small, disembodied eye, brighter now that the lights of the mines were diminis.h.i.+ng; the unnatural glow from the sacred stone cast odd, angular shadows across the planes of Simein's face, emphasizing the pocked and flaking skin that was the first outward stigma of his enlightenment.

The mines were abnormally quiet. In the distance the smelting furnaces roared, but the more immediate racket of the diggers and hammers and trundling ore carts seemed muted, as though the night had wrapped them in a vast, m.u.f.fling shawl. The moon had set; the only shadows were those cast by the remaining torches on their towering poles. And although he couldn't put a finger on the cause, Simein felt ill at ease.

He looked up, past the cl.u.s.ter of rough buildings, over the heaps of waste dug from the mountains and left to rot in the blistering sun, to where the highest of the mountains brooded in silent silhouette over the scene. Just for a moment he thought that he'd glimpsed a peculiar, sourceless s.h.i.+mmer above that menacing peak, but after a few seconds of watching, his eyes registered nothing and he turned away again. An afterimage from the torches; no more. He had better things to do than indulge in idle fancy.

In the mountains, where men had burrowed through endless tons of rock to hew out a high-ceilinged gallery, something spoke with an inhuman voice that set the tunnels echoing-The last group of miners who had answered the siren and were heading for the open night and a day or two of freedom paused in their tracks, feeling the tremor that shook the old pa.s.sages. Glances were exchanged, but no one spoke. Such s.h.i.+ftings in the deep rock were a natural hazard. There was nothing untoward in this new manifestation; it was simply the familiar shuddering of a sleeping giant, and the miners set the incident aside to concentrate on thoughts of home as they continued on their way.

Outside, there were sparks on the foul air in the predawn gloom. No one heeded them; and no one paid any attention to the new rumbling that added an arrhythmic undertone to the thundering pulse of the mines as the next s.h.i.+ft trudged silently, dourly, to their labors.

Again and again she had tried to claw back some sense of reality, but in the howling maelstrom of the Charchad Vale, reality had no meaning. Dragged by her demonic captors, blinded by the vast radiation buffeted by yelling, unnatural winds, Indigo fought to hold on to her sanity as the nightmare descent went on and on. Reason had collapsed under the onslaught of the twisted forces that battered the valley; form and perspective were warped beyond recognition, so that one moment she seemed to be forging through a heaving sea of liquid gla.s.s, the next drifting helplessly above a void so vast that her struggling senses couldn't a.s.similate its dimensions. Terrible shapes moved all about her: winged things that flickered in the searing beams of light; bloated, misshapen horrors lurching like wraiths through the pulsating brilliance; something enormous and translucent, undulating , .. The crackling din from the depths of the vale beat constantly against her skull, and blending with it were human screams of torment, and other voices, not human, shrieking in fury or delight or sheer, unfettered madness.Indigo knew that her senses couldn't withstand the bombardment for much longer before she, too, became as mad as the denizens of the monstrous vale. She battled to keep a hold on her mind, but the hold was slipping, threatening to spin out of control and pitch her into a state of gibbering insanity from which there would be no return. Her body had become a blazing star of pain, as if the nacreous radiation were eating into her flesh and slowly consuming her; ice and fire burned together in her veins and every breath she took was rasping, choking agony. The courage that she had sworn to cling to was in tatters now: hope was failing, resolve was failing- The chain attached to her shackled wrists jerked suddenly taut. Indigo lurched off balance and fell to her knees as, like hound masters dragging a cur to heel, her demon guards hauled her to a stop.

Glaring, livid light, more brilliant and more deadly even than the pulsing beams filling the valley, blasted her eyes, and she cried out in shock and terror as she realized that she was sprawling on the brink of a pit whose vertical walls plunged down into invisible, coruscating depths. Vertigo hit her in a violent wave; she felt inhuman hands grip her arms, thrusting her forward, felt the ground beneath her giving way to nothingness- As though the sun had fallen to Earth-the heart of Charchad, the final fortress, the domain of Aszareel-Indigo screamed an inchoate protest as the world tilted wildly and her flailing body pitched into the pit.

She hit solid ground with an impact that cut off the scream and drove the air from her lungs in a rattling gasp. A lost, random shard of logic startled her into the realization that she had fallen only a short distance, not enough to break a bone or even to stun her. And yet- The rock on which she sprawled-if it was still rock, and had not been warped into something unimaginable-was breathing, moving under her, alive and hideously alien. And beneath the heaving stone surface, something yammered a dreadful parody of laughter.

The rock split. Through the blasting glare she saw the pit floor crack across inches from where she lay, and flung herself back as belching, roiling darkness erupted from the chasm and coalesced into a dense column that towered above her. Black radiance poured from the column, staining her skin, and Indigo stared up at it, appalled by the realization that this was no simple manifestation but something sentient and aware.

Suddenly the column s.h.i.+vered, and a rent appeared in its pulsating heart. Indigo felt a violent tug on her consciousness, as though whatever monstrous intelligence lurked within the column was reaching out to her, taking hold of her mind and crus.h.i.+ng her willpower to shards. Her gaze was compelled toward the widening rent; she tried to fight the compulsion and jerk her head aside, but it was too strong- An eye, lidless, white-irised, and shot with veins the color of rotting meat, opened in the split and stared back at her. And a voice that had no tone and no timbre, but nonetheless was redolent with the corruption of pure evil, spoke emphatically in her head.

INDIGO.

Her stomach recoiled and contracted; she clapped a hand to her mouth as a vomiting spasm threatened to overcome her.

I HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR YOU.

As the voice spoke she felt as though worms were writhing in her head; images of filth and decay clamored within her, and fear surged in their wake. This was the ultimate monstrosity of Charchad, into whose hands Nemesis and her own blindness had led her. And this horror contained the corrupted, mutated soul of what had once been a human being.

Her mind was starting to give way. She could feel it, as she felt the slithering of the worms conjured by the voice: not a violent cracking and splitting and plunge into madness, but a slow ebbing of her sense of reality. Weaponless, defenseless, she stood alone before a living devourer. No power in the world could help her now; she was condemned. And in the face of that knowledge, her terror suddenly had no meaning.

Slowly, aware of the floor s.h.i.+fting, breathing under her feet, Indigo rose. Her hands clenched, as though unconsciously she grasped and tightened an invisible cord between them, and she met the stare of the pulsing, diseased eye before her."Aszareel." Loathing, contempt, accusation: they were like a new drug in her veins, pus.h.i.+ng her closer toward the brink of insanity. She welcomed the sensation, for it gave her delusions of strength.

The obscene voice rustled in her mind. YES. I AM ASZAREEL, AND YET MORE THAN ASZAREEL. YOU SOUGHT ME, AND YOU HAVE FOUND ME. WHAT WILL YOU DO.

NOW, INDIGO?.

She smiled, her eyes gla.s.sy and wild. "I came to kill you."

SO YOU DID. A sound like laughter rumbled somewhere beneath her. THEN KILL ME, IF YOU CAN. YOUR EFFORTS WILL BE INTERESTING TO OBSERVE. AND WHEN THEY.

ARE EXHAUSTED, I SHALL TAKE MY TURN.

You cannot die, the Earth Mother's emissary had told her. But a demon could inflict far worse than death.... Indigo looked down at her hands. In the black glow they seemed like the hands of a corpse, shadows without substance.

Shadows without substance. She looked up again.

"No. I came to destroy Aszareel, not a false shade." Recklessly, goaded by the crazed fatalism that was rapidly replacing all semblance of reason, she took a step toward the black column. "Save your disguises for your groveling minions, demon, and show me your true form!"

It was madness, a challenge that she couldn't hope to follow through to its inevitable conclusion, but Indigo was beyond caring. The demon couldn't destroy her; but she was all too well aware that the horrors it was capable of inflicting upon her mind and body would be far worse than death. She had nothing left to lose. If she was doomed to fail, let her failure be bitterly, savagely complete.

The eye flashed with colors that she couldn't identify, and Aszareel laughed again. Beneath Indigo, the ground moved with a convulsion that almost threw her off balance.

AH: SO YOU WOULD SEE ME AS I AM? NONE HAVE HAD THAT PRIVILEGE FOR.

A LONG TIME. BUT FOR YOU, INDIGO, I WILL MAKE AN EXCEPTION. The black column pulsed, as though some enormous force were trying to burst from within it, and its fabric seemed to bulge outward. The eye distorted, swelling until it was twice the size of Indigo's head, and a foul stench filled her nostrils.

SEE ME. The air began to thicken. SEE WHAT YOU IN YOUR ARROGANCE HAVE SET YOURSELF AGAINST. The dark radiance was intensifying, deepening, and the ghastly voice was no longer solely in her head but reverberating all around her, echoing between the pit's sheer walls.

The column began to disintegrate. It was like watching the melting of some foul tar under blistering heat: the towering pillar lost its shape, shuddering, then slowly collapsed in on itself, boiling, bubbling, falling back from the disembodied eye that continued to glare through the miasma. But now Indigo could see that there was something else beyond the eye, a shape materializing in the murky darkness, generating a sickly light of its own. The outline was recognizably human: yet something about its dimensions was hideously wrong....

The form solidified and took on perspective. A small, wizened man sat cross-legged in a pool of black sc.u.m. He was hairless, and where his spare flesh should have been clothed in skin, white scales with the phosph.o.r.escent aura of a putrid fish s.h.i.+mmered and s.h.i.+fted over his body. His stomach was obscenely bloated, black veins crawling over its surface and throbbing, engorged with something mat wasn't blood. One eye, set above a ragged cavity where his nose had rotted away, stared at Indigo, and in its gelatinous depths moved an awesome, alien intelligence.

And Indigo could see beyond the decaying, mutated remains of what had once been a human being, into a dimension where huge, perverted tides s.h.i.+fted in gangrenous seas, where disease and necrosis and putrefaction crawled from primeval depths to twist and devour anything that had life. She felt the decayed, distorted fingers of unfettered evil touch her mind, felt her muscles and tendons locking into freezing paralysis- Aszareel smiled. Red-flecked saliva dribbled from the comers of his mouth, and a toad's tongue, black, corrupt, unfurled between the yellowed stumps that were exposed as his lips drew back. The smile widened, further, further, gaping impossibly; the warped head began to split in half, and with a hiss of foul gases released from a long-dead corpse, the hinges of the demon's jaw cracked, and blindinggreen nacre poured from its throat.

INDIGO. Earthly dimensions couldn't contain the voice; it dinned in her ears, shattering her hold on the desperate defiance that had sustained her and beating against her mind and body like a ma.s.sive wave. SEE THE FACE OF CHARCHAD, INDIGO WHO WOULD SLAY DEMONS! LOOK ON THAT WHICH ASZAREEL HAS BECOME, AND KNOW THAT YOU WILL SHARE HIS.

FATE!.

The wizened figure raised one hand. And its arm grew, stretching to an impossible length, defying nature and reason to reach out through the churning murk toward Indigo. She tried to throw herself back, but couldn't move: her feet wouldn't obey her, her body was held fast-The demon was reaching for her; its hand had swelled to nightmare proportions and she saw the fingers spreading, clawing, curling inward to grasp and enfold her. And its form was changing. The warped semblance of humanity was breaking down, and through the sh.e.l.l of what had been Aszareel erupted a vastness and a darkness that breached dimensions to burst into the world and surge toward her. She had no voice; she was strangling, her mind screaming but unable to break the paralysis as finally, irrevocably, her sanity began to shatter and the last barriers were smashed down- In the heart of Old Maia, Grimya's self-control was suddenly drowned by a wave of terror. As Indigo's defenses collapsed, the link between them had been violently reestablished, and the she-wolf felt the flood of Aszareel's triumph, felt her friend's horror and despair. She flung her head back, howling above the fury of the ancient volcano, and her howl metamorphosed into a frantic cry.

"Jas-ker! Jas-ker!"

The psychic shock wave of her fear struck Jasker like a physical blow and triggered a surge of energy that fountained from the depths of his being as the last psychic dam within him gave way. For one ecstatic moment he became omniscient-he was Grimya, he was Indigo, he was the boiling, raging heart of Old Maia-and he shrieked with the glorious madness of attainment as he felt the power rising, racing, blasting through his veins as the first t.i.tanic upsurge came roaring out of the fumarole in a crescendo of light and noise.

"Now!" His crazed voice dinned in the she-wolf's ears. "The power, Grimya! NOW!"

A wall of energy smashed against Grimya's mind like the onslaught of a gigantic cataract. She howled again, every hair on her body standing erect, and felt the power enter her, fill her, blast through her as she became a living channel for the white-hot fury of the volcano. Her cry and Jasker's scream rose on the back of Old Maia's thundering voice- And a new voice joined with theirs, shrieking through their linked minds as, in the pit that was the heart of the Charchad vale, Indigo caught fire.

*CHAPTER*XVI*.

INDIGO!.

The voices of Jasker and Grimya, and the roar of the volcano, exploded into her mind out of nowhere, and she yelled as the first stunning wave of power hit her. Brilliant red light erupted about her, tongues of astral flame leaping in a blinding corona about her frame, and through their savage flare she saw the monstrous hand of Aszareel flinch back and heard the demon's shocked cry.

Power! Raw, untamable, it surged through her brain in a single, glorious instant of revelation. She tried to scream Jasker's name, a paean of hope, of vindication, of furious joy, but the primeval energy was beyond control, and the cry ripped from her throat in a wordless banshee shriek that wrenched all the hatred and rage and burgeoning madness from her mind in one instant of pure ecstasy.

Aszareel howled. He flung his arms skyward, clawing at the air as though he would pull the churning green maelstrom of the vale down upon them, and Indigo saw tongues of fire catch among the fingers that had reached out to crush her. The demon's head jerked backward; a black, fetid gale stormed from his mouth toward her and she laughed wildly as the torrent of filth met the flames that blazed around her and flashed into nothing. The power was increasing, burning through the pit's miasma;she drew a great breath, calling the enormous energies into her blood and her bones, reveling in them- Indigo! The voice was both Jasker's and Grimya's, borne on the inferno that filled Indigo's mind and her body. Through eyes that streamed with heat and pain and joy she saw the thing that was Aszareel coiling, changing; saw it grow to five times her own height, rearing above her while the sick orb of the demon's eye turned first to yellow and then to green as deadly radiance began to emanate from it in ma.s.sive, pulsating waves.

Take the power, Indigo! This time it was Grimya alone who howled in her mind, and her cry was all but eclipsed by a sound that broke through from the astral dimensions and into the physical world, a deafening bellow that shook the valley walls. Take it, NOW!

The fire that wreathed Indigo flared from crimson into blinding white. She felt the bolt coming, felt it erupting from the molten heart of Old Maia, the hammer blow as it smashed through Jasker, through Grimya, into her own body. She couldn't contain it: the energies were too great to withstand and she knew she was about to be torn apart- DON'T TRY TO HOLD IT, INDIGO! USE IT-USE IT!.

Lightning tore through the Charchad Vale, splitting the foul radiance with a t.i.tanic crack. It struck the eye of Aszareel, and the demon screeched as its body burst into flames. It writhed, the putrescent skin blackening, crackling as physical fire leaped from its face to its arms to its obscene torso; and its screeching rose to an earsplitting shriek as astral flames took hold of the cancer beyond its earthly form.

Other screams melded with the demon's death cries; inhuman voices howling in fear and protest and disbelief as, linked inextricably with their master, Aszareel's h.e.l.l-born minions caught the backwash of fire and burned in their tracks, flapping things and crawling horrors and mockeries of men shriveling in the onslaught of the flames that spanned dimensions to devour them. Indigo heard their grisly chorus and fell to her knees, convulsions racking her as the echoes of the power flooded the Charchad Vale. She flung her head back, hurling the energies from her in a final spasm, and heard Aszareel screaming, felt him shriveling, melting, dying, as his perverted soul collapsed into the last throes of disintegration-Then a new voice boomed out of the night. In the mines, where men sweated in the claustrophobic warren of shafts and tunnels, the ancient rocks shook and rumbled with echoes that had not been heard in the region for millennia. Thirty miners had but a few seconds' warning before the roof of the gallery where they toiled caved in to bury them under ten thousand tons of stone. By the tally hut, where Quinas still slept away the time before the arrival of the morning wagon, the ground shuddered to a gigantic subterranean vibration that toppled one of the torch gantries, bringing its blazing beacon cras.h.i.+ng down in an explosion of sparks. In the distance a scream cut through the pulsing air-then the southern sky lit up with orange fire, and seconds later the first roar of the awakening volcano drowned the racket of the mines with its primordial thunder.

Old Maia heaved, a giantess rousing after centuries of sleep. In her cone, magma rose in a blazing turmoil of unleashed energies as the eruption blasted a thousand-foot column of fire and ash and molten rock into the sky. And on the far side of the valley, the forges and lakes and slag heaps of the smelting furnaces were lit by an answering explosion of fire, and a third, as the huge peaks that formed the triumvirate of Ranaya's Daughters answered their sister in awesome harmony.

In the Charchad Vale, the deadly radiance that had been the demon's greatest weapon exploded in an instant of howling, blinding mayhem, and the sky turned black as the last shreds of Aszareel's burning essence were consumed. Indigo felt the power leaving her in an agonizing jolt, and as the white corona Hashed out of existence she sprawled on the floor of the pit, limbs flailing, body thras.h.i.+ng, lungs heaving as she fought to breathe, to live, to stop herself from following Aszareel and his h.e.l.l horde into the mad vortex of destruction that had sucked them from the world like leaves in a gale. She felt the ground hump beneath her, heard the thunder of Old Maia and her sisters as fire ripped through the darkness. And in her battered, tormented mind, she heard the last word that Jasker, her friend, her savior, servant of Ranaya, was ever to utter in the mortal world.

RUN!.

Grimya sensed it coming, but her only physical fore-warnings were the sudden explosion of crimson lightin the fumarole, and a sound mat was, to her horrified mind, like the herald of the end of the world. The ledge on which they stood shook under the onslaught of the rising tide, and a hurricane wind howled through the shaft, hurling her off her feet. Struggling to regain her balance, the she-wolf felt a wave of heat hit her full on, and as her fur singed and her eyes streamed she saw Jasker, wreathed in fire, standing on the brink of the shaft. His arms were outspread as though he welcomed a long-lost lover; his hair was smoldering, his hands catching light as the fire cord he held blazed into new brilliance, and beyond his mad, sparking silhouette the salamanders sang an eldritch song above the voice of Old Maia.

"RUN!" The sorcerer's voice beat against Grimya's ears as the volcano thundered its final warning. "RUN!"

His eyes were burning in their sockets as he stared down into the fumarole, beyond the earth's crust, into her molten heart. And as the wall of magma rose toward him, he saw a vision of the mult.i.tude of underground veins, the chasms and the tunnels that linked Old Maia to her sisters. And he heard the vast voice of Ranaya, Mother of these three avengers, nurturer and slayer and inspirer, roaring out of the earth's core to speak his name and call him home.

Grimya, her instincts goaded into life by the sorcerer's last wild cry, leaped for the tunnel mouth, scrabbling up the rubble slope to the narrow gap. At the top she paused-and as she looked back, the first blinding coruscation hurled Jasker's form into silhouette, and a pillar of solid fire blasted up through the fumarole. In the fire's heart was a gigantic face, harsh-planed and angular yet with a terrible, serene beauty. Burning hair streamed about it like flares from the sun, and the eyes were twin infernos. The blazing lips moved, and a voice seemed to reverberate through the ancient mountain, ringing in Grimya's mind with a power that made her whimper in terror and awe.

YOU ARE THE DEAREST OF MY SONS.

Jasker fell to his knees, arms outflung. His hair caught fire, blazing in a wild halo that almost rivaled the brilliance of the G.o.ddess. And for one stunning instant Grimya saw his form change into that of a golden dragon, body s.h.i.+mmering, great wings clas.h.i.+ng like living flames, before a column of white-hot fire flashed from nowhere in the place where he stood, and he was engulfed.