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.
In the moments that followed, Kotara decided that her foe might well have been holding back hitherto, for now the infernal knight's sword was everywhere at once. Its cuts kept her so busy dodging that she rarely managed an attack of her own, and when she did, her foe invariably bashed it away with a forceful parry. One actually knocked her off balance and threatened to send her weapon spinning from her grasp. Clutching frantically at the hilt, she managed to hold on to it, but the shadow sword was streaking at her again. Her wings beat, but she knew they couldn't carry her out of the way in time.
The shadow sword halted inches shy of her head. For an instant she had no idea why. Then she felt the surge of magic in the air and realized that her last series of advances and retreats had landed her inside Sabul's ring of luminescence. Discerning her plight, the young wizard had commanded the enchantment to shield her.
Her foe attacked again. As she desperately evaded his blows, heart pounding, sword arm half numb from the pummeling it had endured, the dark blade plunged closer and closer to her body. She was tiring, slowing, and that meant that soon, perhaps in scant seconds, the shadow sword would cleave her flesh. A shrill voice inside her, one she'd never heard when she was an angel, yammered that she must save herself by fleeing. She ignored it as best she could.
At her back, magic glittered and seethed in the air as Sabul's conjuration built to a conclusion. But it wasn't accumulating rapidly enough. She was all but certain that the fiend would dispatch her and turn on the mage before he could finish.
She had to buy Sabul some time, and she could think of only one tactic that might serve. The knight of darkness cut at her, and instead of seeking to avoid the shadow sword, she simply threw herself forward in an all- out counterattack.
Her enemy's weapon ripped through her breastplate and into her shoulder. Though she didn't feel any pain just yet, she sensed that the blow had done hideous damage, nearly severing both her arm and her wing. But at the same instant, the point of her blade punched into the monster's throat and out the back of its neck. The fiend hadn't expected her to abandon all hope of defense, and her reckless ploy had caught it unaware.
Kotara collapsed to the floor. It required a titanic effort merely to turn her head sufficiently to see how the knight of darkness was faring.
The hulking creature had dropped to one knee. Making an ugly choking sound, its wings shaking spastically, it took hold of the weapon transfixing its neck and began to pull it free. It emerged in a series of little lurches, one agonizing inch at a time.
But at last it was out, and the twin bubbling wounds started to close. The fiend gave Kotara a leer that told her, as plainly as words, that her sacrifice had been for nothing. Then it picked up the fallen shadow sword, sprang to its feet, and pivoted toward Sabul-who calmly spoke the final word of his incantation.
Power sang through the air. The fiend staggered, the holy magic as damaging to it as the infernal energies released by its summoning had been to Kotara. Shaking off the effect, the foul creature sprang at Sabul. Perhaps it imagined it could dispose of him before the spell, whatever it was, took hold.
If so, the fiend was mistaken. Stone and timber crashed down as some irresistible force wiped the ceiling out of its way. A white, scaly, translucent claw as large as the creature's entire body plunged through the ragged opening, gripped the dark spirit, and lifted it out into the night and up to a set of colossal jaws. Stray bits of the fiend showered back into the chamber as its nemesis chewed it up and gobbled it down.
The dragon, assuming that its hind feet were planted on the ground, was taller than Sabul's tower. From its prodigious size and ghostly semitransparency, Kotara realized that it was no summoned creature like the fiend or herself but rather an artificial thing the Guildmage had fashioned from his wizardry. It swallowed a final time, then simply melted away.
Sabul flung himself down at Kotara's side. For the first time she observed the charred hole in his vestments and the blistered, seeping skin beneath. The marble diamond had burned him when it burst. He had a scraped, bloody mark on his brow as well. Probably a piece of the roof had clipped him as it fell. Gripping her numb, useless hand, he said, 'Kotara, I'm sorry! I'm a healer, but-
'I know,' she said, 'no one could mend this wound. The fiend cut too deep.'
'I'm sorry,' he repeated, 'for everything.' She could barely make out his face now. The chamber seemed to be growing darker, though she knew the gloom was actually in her eyes.
