THE FINAL HUNT

Of the three hunters, Rokál is the most accustomed to the awe and thunder of Zretaian chases—the windswept charges up stepped sky-bridges, the crashing thunderclaps, the vortexing clouds, everything alight with flashes of blue-white lightning. His ears are the first to catch the ringing of metallic paws racing up behind.

He turns. Beyond his unsuspecting comrades, the golden lynxes of Ulto are streaking to the attack, two glittering sparks against the blue of the night. Rokál leaps past his comrades, then heaves his crescent axe in a plunging strike, smashing his mystic blade into the neck of the foremost lynx and severing its enchantments. The second lynx pounces on him. He crashes down beneath its tremendous weight, rolls, and heaves it out over the abyss.

For a moment his face hangs beyond the edge, and he glimpses the fall of his enemy, a tumbling flash like a flipped coin, plummeting through the moonbeams to smash against one of the raised walkways in the jungle. Then Tzark pulls him to safety and helps him to stand.

Meanwhile Viványa, fixated on Ulto with unrelenting concentration, knows nothing of the lynxes; she speeds after her quarry across narrow bridges, along dizzying wall-walks, up the spines of sword-edged roofs, her hard bare feet hammering three strides for every two of her enemy's.

Ulto is slowing, bleeding, accustomed to a life of study and torture, not strenuous chases amid tearing winds. She is gradually losing her lead. Ahead, she sees the final bridge, a fifty-yard span of cable and wood crossing a chasm of whitewater that swirls in a ceaseless maelstrom far below, and on the other side, the Upper Tower awaits, windowless and impenetrable, a refuge, if only she can reach the obsidian doors! She casts a glance behind, and flinches to see the terrifying Vivict gaining on her with the velocity of a wolf in a nightmare.

Viványa flies onto the bridge as Ulto reaches the far end and turns at bay. Framed against the vastness of the upper tower, the sorceress begins sawing at one of the two cables, her accursed dagger shrieking through the steel.

Viványa is too far away to reach Ulto before the bridge falls, so she rifles her belts for a throwing weapon, and finds all of them spent. Only her dagger and her eating knife remain. She draws the dagger and hurls it in a flashing arc. The chaotic wind curves its path; it strikes the slack of her enemy's cloak. Adjusting her aim, she hurls her eating knife, and it pierces Ulto's throat.

Ulto coughs blood, but simultaneously she severs the first of the cables, and the left side of the bridge drops, planks that were solid horizontals suddenly dangling edgwise from the single remaining line. Viványa catches herself on the final cable, snarling with frustration, scrambling away from Ulto lest she be killed by the imminent fall of the bridge.

An arrow whizzes past in the wind.

Rokál still has his looted bow, and Ulto, as she hacks at the final cable, is a stationary mark. Firing a second shot, he seeks to drive her away from the bridge. But Ulto does not flee. Arrow after arrow pierces her, weakens her, but she knows that with her throat clogged in choking blood, she cannot outrun the hunters if the bridge remains. She cuts the final line, and sees the bridge begin to fall, and Vivict with it. Then she staggers for the Tower.

Viványa clings as the bridge plummets, its cables still attached at Rokál's end, the whole structure swinging downward to slam against the wet rock wall. The wooden slats that had been closest to Ulto's side fall farthest and crash with bone-breaking force, shattering against the stone, raining splinters that splash into the maelstrom, but near Rokál's end, Viványa merely twists and catches herself feet-first against the wall, and then scales the dangling line like the rigging of a ship.

She comes up cursing Ulto but still grinning from the chase. Without pausing to catch her breath at the top, she whirls her grappling hook and flings it across the gulf, catching the bridge-post on the far side. Then she knots the rope around one of the posts beside her to create a horizontal line across the abyss. With a parting smile of gratitude toward Rokál and his bow, she leaps out and swings hand-over-hand after their quarry.

Despite lost time, the chase is far from hopeless: Ulto is staggering, sometimes falling and crawling, fletched with a dozen arrows and struggling at the end of an abundant trail of blood.

Tzark, as he awaits his turn on the rope, sees a chasm in the clouds opening like a moonlit gateway overhead, and through it he witnesses a higher world, a distant stormscape of infinite heights where the apex of the Tower flies at the center of a whirlpool of radiant spells, howling explosions, and wheeling draconids, all wreathed in lightnings that flash in fearsome shapes and exotic colors, crackling magnificently among the pillars of the storm. Then an immense thunderhead sweeps down like a shutting door, and the vision is lost. Yet still, Tzark feels a tingling in his spine, the excitations of magic in the atmosphere.

Meanwhile Viványa flashes after her quarry like a hurled axe.

Ulto stumbles through the obsidian doorway and whirls to slam it closed, but sees the blood-haired warrior already near! In desperation she heaves on the doors, and they crash shut just as a scimitar pierces between them, lancing through Ulto's shoulder and jamming the doors open by a chink. With a hiss of fury, the sorceress flees.

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Viványa bursts through the door and finds herself in a vast chamber, a hatchery for firedrakes. Ulto's echoing voice calls an invocation in a language like icicles; and a dozen draconids the size of eagles dive from the heights in a flaming onslaught.

Viványa whirls among them, and finds them killable by scimitar blades, slower than Azaocratz, slower than herself.

Behind her, Rokál crashes through the door to sees his comrade embattled and Ulto already far above, scrambling up a wooden scaffolding toward an archway overhead. He cuts a firedrake down before Vivict's eyes and shouts, "After her! Leave the draconids to me!"

Viványa hounds the trail of her fleeing enemy's blood up the splintered scaffolding, through a high archway, and beyond, into halls of twisted architecture and convoluted opulence. But Ulto has already laid a false trail, and Viványa is tricked in her haste into a detour among volcanic workshops. By the time she returns, cursing herself, Tzark has caught up, and they continue shoulder to shoulder, racing upstairs.

Stairway after carpeted stairway blurs away beneath their feet; and they hear voices: a deep-throated chant, and over it, Ulto's blood-choked griping.

At the top of a grand staircase, they enter the high observatory of Voua Azrain. It is a darkened chamber, illuminated only by the colors that glow through the transparent walls. Outside, the hidden stormscape which Tzark had glimpsed flickers and gleams, the glittering vortex of wild magics spinning all around them, for they stand now at its core.

Tzark senses Vivict going slack, mesmerized. The rainbows unravelling in the torrential darkness have melted all her fury and entranced her eyes, which sparkle with the reflections of the lights.

As he peers through the shifting colors of the observatory, Tzark sees a towering silhouette, dark save for the gleam of its yellow eyes, which are slitted in concentration, gazing into depths that others cannot perceive.

Ulto has been pacing; a ring of blood shows where she has walked, circling around this dark pillar of a being. While her pursuers had been chasing up the stairs, she had sought to recall Voua Azrain from his labors. One incantation from him, and the Tower could be cleansed of its intruders; one word, and she could be transformed into a monstrous and powerful raven—but her pleas have been in vain.

Darting a nervous glance at the entrance, Ulto sees the silhouette of Vivict between her scimitars—and runs for her life. Her last resort is to reach the children of that insipid dockworker, and use them as hostages.

Tzark courses Ulto across the observatory, but she reaches a trapdoor and falls through it mere heartbeats ahead of him, then slams it shut and slides home the bolt.

The thief attacks the lock with skeleton keys as Viványa's attention drifts back from the view, and she realizes that she has just let Ulto slip. She hisses, feeling as abashed as a hunting hound would. While she waits for Tzark to spring the lock, she cannot sit still, but paces the darkened observatory in restless excitement.

Firedrakes and wyverns swoop by outside, their shadows stirring amid the chamber's gloom, and Viványa's eye catches on a spark of azure nearby, a shining gemstone the size and shape of an egg, resting on a plinth close beneath the eyes of the vast and motionless sorcerer. With a backward glance at Tzark's bent silhouette, she pads up the steps of the sorcerer's dais, and stands within his uneasy shadow.

The gemstone is stirring. She sees movement in its translucent depths. There is a living jewel within the larger gem, a tiny draconid curled into a ball, no larger than her thumb—only a fetus, but already flexing its wings, Azaocratz in miniature. A descendant? A sibling?A reincarnation?

Viványa looks up at the sorcerer's eyes—eyes that even the desperate entreaties of his mutilated apprentice could not distract. Without taking her wary gaze from his face, she sheathes one of her scimitars and lays a hand on the gem.

She feels its warmth, and even through the crystal surface, she can sense the life within—an aura—like a quivery foreshock of the dragon-glory of Azaocratz, but soft as a whispered prophecy. The yellow, gleaming eyes of the sorcerer… Viványa feels the power and danger behind them, something far beyond her mortal strength. Yet her adoration for Azaocratz is on the brink of overwhelming her, making her reckless. Her stomach drops as she feels the balance within her tilt, and all caution evaporates into love. She knows that this one act may destroy her, but she lifts the gem.

The yellow eyes of Voua Azrain do not widen. Only the merest flutter of his pupils hints that he has seen who dares to plunder his prize. In his overflowing mind, tigers and soldiers and four-armed slaves are of no consequence. Even Ulto, a lesser sorceress, is replaceable. Wyverns are not. The experimental masterpiece, Azaocratz, had shown immense promise. But this new wyvern, constructed with excruciating care from unique artefacts, and strengthened with decades of enchantments, was to bring that promise to its ultimate fulfillment. It is only with immense effort that Voua Azrain does not allow his concentration to be broken. There will be time enough later to chase down this insolent insect, vaporizing her through his own power if she remains in Zretaia, or, if she departs, coursing her down through his agents and slaves.

Viványa understands that next to this act of burglary, the hunt for Ulto matters nothing. Yet when Tzark springs the lock and Rokál jogs breathlessly into the chamber, she resumes the chase alongside her comrades with undiminished zeal.

Together they drop through the trapdoor and race along the trail of Ulto's dwindling blood, bounding through mazes of staircase-libraries, sliding down winch-ropes in slaughterhouses, sending four-armed slaves scattering before their sudden onslaught, until finally Viványa catches Ulto by the hair and hurls her to the floor, just inside the archway of a chamber of caged children.

Ulto lashes out with her accursed daggers. Against Viványa, her efforts are laughable. Spitefully, the sorceress tries to strike at the hand of the nearest child, but finds her wrist locked in Viványa's grip.

The children clamor and shake their cages, shouting for bloodshed, but Rokál, who arrives on the heels of Tzark, insists that Ulto be taken out of the children's sight before anything more is done.

As they drag her outside, he tells Ulto, "We will hear your last request, if it is reasonable."

But Ulto's brain is nearly bloodless, full of bursting lights and impotent loathing. When she does not make any request, Rokál gives her the flask of rum, nearly empty now, and she drinks it to the bitter lees. "It was never meant to be like this," she says.

Rokál answers, "In another life."

Then Viványa holds Ulto steady, and Rokál cuts off her head.