“Lan,go!” she screamed. She lifted Falcon’s Claw, thumb ring flashing as she opened her stance. In the lowlight, with her hair in two buns and her mother’s sword in her hand, the ghost of Yeshin Noro Ulara might have showed her face again tonight within the blood and bone of her daughter. “Don’t make it so that my mother gave her life for nothing!”
“Dilaya, don’t,” Lan shouted. “He’s too strong!”
But nothing could have stopped Dilaya. The girl let out a roar, sounding all the pent-up fury and grief of her loss.
And she charged.
All Lan saw was a flash of metal, and Dilaya went crashing backward into Tai. Falcon’s Claw spun from her hand, clattering to the ground.
Lan had seen Elantian metal magic before, yet it never failed to amaze her how powerful their spells were. When she’d watched Zen or the masters of the school fight, they’d needed to take time, draw qì, to weave them into functional Seals. This she understood, for there was a science and process to Hin practitioning.
Elantian magic might as well have been a gift from the gods. Fromtheirgods.
Lan stepped forward, positioning herself between Erascius and her friends.
“Run,” she told them over her shoulder.
Then she drew her ocarina.
“Lan, no.No,”Tai shouted. “If he takes you, it’s over.” But Lan saw blood darkening Dilaya’s armor as Tai supported her.
“Touching,” the magician said. He watched them with a strange expression: more curiosity than hostility. “More proof that your kind bear the intricacies of emotions, and that my colleagues assume wrongly. Pity that your civilization will never advance further than its current state.” He held out a hand. “Come. Resistance is futile, little singer. Your mother might have evaded my search for the power she possessed with a clever little trick, but it will not happen again.”
She understood, then, that this man had hunted her for twelve cycles not solely for the Demon Gods—but also as a personal vendetta. Sòng Méi’s quick thinking had stopped the Elantians from capturing the Silver Dragon, and Erascius hadviewed that as a personal failure. As being bested by a people he saw as no more than vermin.
He would not relent until he corrected his failure. Until he proved that Sòng Méi’s outsmarting him had been just a fluke.
There was no winning, so long as both of them lived.
“No?” Erascius lowered his hand. “Did you really think you and your band of practitioners could best the great Elantian military with some little game of hide-and-seek?”
The fear that had been a steady undercurrent thrumming in Lan’s body suddenly sharpened to a knife point.
“Yes, I almost believed it when I walked in, too,” Erascius said slowly, “when I entered the emptied school. I thought you’d truly fled your nest and taken everything of value within. But from the moment the magic walls hiding the presence of your school collapsed, I sensed it.” His lips curled, teeth shining white in the night. “It seems we have found not one, buttwoof your proverbial Demon Gods tonight.”
Lan thought of the masters protecting the Chamber of Forgotten Practices, of the Demon God that lay Sealed within. Had Erascius discovered that the Azure Tiger, too, was here on this mountain?
“What a beautiful display of power you and that boy put on against our army, with the Black Tortoise and the Silver Dragon,” Erascius continued, and Lan realized he did not know about the Azure Tiger. This brought her little comfort as the magician licked his lips, eyes flitting to her left wrist. “It seems your mother was even cleverer than I anticipated, hiding her Demon God within her surviving daughter. But her little games end tonight.”
Lan lifted her ocarina to her lips—but before she could play, magic curled around her body, dragging her, like a puppet on a string, into Erascius’s arms. She could smell the rust ofhis armor, feel the callouses on his hands as his fingers closed around her throat. They stood at the edge of the summit, ground giving way to plunging cliffs.
“You and I, we’ll learn everything there is about this Demon God inside you,” Erascius crooned. His eyes flashed as he glanced at Dilaya and Tai, huddled at the top of the summit. “But before that…it seems we have a few more guests than necessary tonight. Farewell.” He raised his other hand.
Lan had the sudden image of Tai and Dilaya lying on the steps, their bleeding hearts clasped in the magician’s hands like some prized trophies. Twelve cycles later, history was about to repeat itself.
No.
Lan locked her arms around the magician’s throat. Erascius grunted, whatever spell he had been about to cast dissipating with his surprise.
And then, beneath their feet, the mountain began to rumble. Fissures split like veins in the ground. A pulse of qì erupted from somewhere inside the mountain, filled with the yin that Lan had come to associate with demonic energies.
Inside her, the core of her Silver Dragon stirred. She sensed a head curiously lifted in the direction of the tsunami of qì, pale eyes the size of stars, of worlds, blinking in anticipation.
A gale of energies whipped up from a gaping chasm in the mountain, blue as the heart of a flame, pouring upward into the sky. Its glow lit up the night, and from within the layers of storm clouds, Lan saw a great shape moving.
The masters had unleashed the third Demon God. This could only mean one thing: that the Elantians had broken through their defenses, that the masters had fallen back on their last resort of releasing the Demon God rather than letting it fall into Elantian hands.
Lightning flashed; the entire sky seemed to bemoving.For a brief moment, Lan could make out a silhouette pacing through the clouds, teeth bared and maw unhinged in a roar of triumph. Then, it leaped and vanished.
