him anywhere, and now the truth had failed. For a brief instant, a new and strange thought flickered across his mind: perhaps, if he wished to have her by his side, he should be prepared to accept her as a friend. Instead of constant attempts at seduction, he should simply value her for her fine qualities and welcome her into his life as an equal, or even a superior, rather than as just another conquest. He truly did want her to stand beside him at the upcoming summit. He honestly admired her courage and her convictions. He glanced back across the lonely room. She was standing now, studying herself in a full-length mirror. She was beautiful, slender and virginal, and once more had that vulnerable lost look upon her face. He wanted to say something, but couldn't find the words. When he saw her again, he would work on winning her as a friend. Perhaps then she'd be easier to seduce.
As the door to the star-shaped chamber closed, Jandra looked back over her shoulder. She almost felt like chasing after Pet. He wasn't the best of company, but being alone in this room was painful.
For as long as she could remember, this tower had been her home. Once, its walls had been lined with thick, leather-bound tomes and countless parchment scrolls. The interior had been a forest of tables covered with vials and beakers and magnifying lenses of the finest quality.
'The world thinks of what we do as magic,' Vendeovorex had told her. 'Their ignorance is an important source of our power. We do not manipulate supernatural forces. We move matter and light according to inalterable rules, using tools that must remain invisible to others.'
In this room, she'd learned to understand the building blocks of the material world, and the countless ways these blocks could be pulled apart and placed back together. Using her 'magic' was an art, a kind of sculpting on the finest scale imaginable.
Of course, all of the tools of teaching were gone now. The king's wicked brother Blasphet had taken command of this tower after he'd been released from the dungeon. He'd turned the room into a torture chamber. Earth- dragons had since cleaned, mopped all the dried blood and gore, and returned Jandra's possessions to their former positions. Now her every step echoed in the vacant chamber. Moonlight seeped through the high windows, painting the marble floors with ghostly shapes. Not that Jandra believed in ghosts. Vendevorex had raised her as a strict materialist, and had always been dismissive of the spiritual world.
'There are indeed realities in this world that cannot be seen,' he had said. 'We move through a world of fields and forces. We control machines too small for the eyes to discern. We are masters of an unseen world-but the invisible is not the same as the supernatural.'
Jandra studied her face in the mirror. In her old life, when she'd looked into this same glass, she'd been staring at the face of a naive and innocent girl. She'd been through so much since then. She'd nearly died. She'd felt her life slipping between her fingers in warm gushes. What's more, she'd learned to kill. She'd heard the gurgling, wet gasping breaths of a dragon dying by her hands. She closed her eyes, and all the violence of the recent months washed through her mind. She'd learned to fight when she had no strength to fight. She'd learned to live for days in clothes caked and clotted with blood.
She opened her eyes-and found she was still looking into the face of a girl, but a girl who was no longer innocent. She lifted her chin and studied the thin pale line where her throat had been slit. She looked with sorrow at her shoulder-length hair-once it had hung the full length of her back. She'd been forced to cut it to disguise herself. She brushed away the fringe of hair across her scalp that concealed the metal band she had once worn as a tiara. This was a smaller version of Vendevorex's skull cap, a device that allowed her to communicate with the unseen machines that floated by the millions in the air around her. She'd changed her hair to hide it when she'd been a fugitive.
She removed the tiara and placed it on the table.
There was no longer any need to hide who she was.
Indeed, now it was time to proudly announce to the world her true heritage.
She lifted Vendevorex's skull cap and brought it to her brow. Her eyes were locked on their reflection. They were cool hazel circles, devoid of sorrow or joy or hope or fear. They were the same sorts of eyes through which Vendevorex had looked upon the world. She was the inheritor of Vendevorex's power. And, she hoped, she was the inheritor of his wisdom and strength.
She lowered the skull cap onto her head, willing the metal to drape like cloth over the contours of her scalp. She closed her eyes to concentrate on the way the metal felt as it formed a helmet that matched her head and hers alone. Then, with a thought, she willed the malleable metal once more into solid silver.
She opened her eyes, expecting to find herself transformed. Instead, her mouth fell open as she let out a gasp. Behind her in the mirror, his golden eyes gleaming in the dim light of the room, stood Vendevorex.
Blasphet, the Murder God, woke to the familiar blackness. Since the fiasco of the Free City, Blasphet had been locked in the lowest chamber of the dungeon, his wings, legs, neck, and tail shackled to the bedrock. A dragon with a less vital mind might have been driven mad in the timeless dark. Blasphet philosophically accepted his confinement as an opportunity to contemplate the error of his ways, free from normal distractions.
Unfortunately, Blasphet still had a few abnormal distractions. When Shandrazel had captured him, he'd known of Blasphet's reputation for concealing poisoned needles and small tools among his feather-scales. He'd unceremoniously plucked Blasphet like an oversized chicken. Now his scales were growing back, with an itch surely unprecedented in all history. To lie in tomblike stillness and be aware of each new feather-scale seeping from its follicle, like a billion tiny insects burrowing from his hide… Was it possible his hatred of Shandrazel was even greater than his hatred of Albekizan?
Albekizan had been the central focus of his hatred for half a century. As those years passed, Blasphet had enjoyed a thousand enticing visions of how his brother might suffer. Over the years, his schemes had grown in complexity. Once, he'd imagined sawing off his brother's limbs, then hooking his mouth to a tube and force feeding him for months until Albekizan was a bloated blob. Then he would starve his brother, melting off the fat, reducing him to little more than a skeletal torso draped in an enormous sheet of flesh. Finally, he would cut Albekizan open, breaking and rearranging his bones, wiring and pinning them into the shape of a throne. Blasphet would rein over the kingdom from the living throne of his brother, leisurely looking down upon the former king's plaintive eyes, reveling in the despair he would find in them!
He sighed at the memory, and reminded himself that he was here to learn the error of his ways. His biggest error, he knew, was his need to torment his enemies rather than simply kill them.
For Shandrazel, there were no visions of elaborate torture thrones. He would simply close his jaws around the bastard and rip his throat out! The thought filled him with a warmth that defeated the chill of the bedrock.
Above, Blasphet heard the creak of a door. Once a day, guards would come to feed him gruel and muck up the pool of filth that Blasphet had excreted since their last visit. Blasphet hadn't yet killed any of his guards, though he had thought of a dozen possible ways. Perhaps today he would indulge himself. A faint light seeped through the darkness. The acrid odor of an oil lamp reached his nostrils as the guards descended the stairs.
Something was different. Blasphet cocked his head to better to catch the guards' footsteps. The sound was wrong. Whatever approached wasn't as heavy as earth-dragons. Humans? Perhaps coming to take revenge? It seemed so unfair. Human genocide had been Albekizan's vision; Blasphet had taken up the challenge only out of intellectual curiosity. He bore no hatred of mankind, as a whole. Humans had been the only species ever to grant him proper respect. Humans once worshipped him as a god-the Murder God. It hadn't been hard to convince an army of assassins and spies of his divinity. Humans believed in gods with the same obvious certainty with which they believed in weather. It was simply in their nature. At the height of his power, before Albekizan had crushed the cult, Blasphet's worshippers had numbered in the thousands.
Keys rattled in the lock of the iron door. Tendrils of light glowed around the edges of the frame. Slowly the door groaned open, pushed by a half dozen earth-dragons, their legs straining. A single earth-dragon should have been more than strong enough to open the heavy door.
Blasphet tilted his head to watch as the earth-dragons marched into the cell. Four more followed, carrying a man-sized bundle of canvas bound tightly with coils of rope. Silently, the earth-dragons advanced, rings of keys jangling in their fists. The six who had opened the door went to the shackles that held him. Without a word of explanation they crouched, slipped the keys into the locks, and turned them. Iron clattered on the stone floor as they pried the shackles loose, grunting with the effort-in the damp dungeon air, the shackles were already beginning to rust.
Blasphet had been staked to the floor on his back. His limbs felt weak, nearly paralyzed, but through sheer will he rolled to his side. The earth-dragons helped him to his belly, then stood back as Blasphet rose on trembling, unsteady legs. He stretched his wings, shaking them, loosening the damp grime that coated them.
