Firebrand

She stepped carefully among the splattered remains of the dark ones the avatar had left in her wake. Suppurating flesh and gelatinous entrails lay in thick puddles of black blood that boiled and hissed, and produced a caustic steam that burned her nostrils and made her eyes water. She hastened her step.

Near the entrance to the chamber, she detected an indistinct blur of motion, an otherworldly presence that worried back and forth. Salvistar, she thought, well pleased. There were the barely perceived hoofbeats, the ripple upon the air like a horse tossing its head in agitation, the angry squeal of a stallion. Her spell had succeeded in holding him in check.

As she approached, her perception of motion at the chamber’s mouth ceased. Did the stallion watch her?

“I know you are there,” she told him. “What is wrong? Is your avatar in trouble?”

A distant whinny of rage.

She clucked her tongue at him. “You do not frighten me, Salvistar. You cannot hurt me, for I honor the one true God. You are just an aberration.”

She continued past him and entered the chamber as erratic air currents—not those of the passage, but those coming from the heavens—buffeted her, though they could do her no harm. The chamber was strewn with more destroyed demons. More than half the slaves, she observed, were dead, the others wounded and moaning. She caught those details in swift glimpses, for her attention was only for the figure kneeling in the center of the chamber beside the seal. Unlike the stallion, her spells had rendered the avatar visible, or mostly visible. She faded in and out, was translucent on the edges.

Grandmother was elated. Her great work draped and entangled the avatar like a net. It writhed across the armor, the knots seeking to burrow into it, and sparks flew where the knots fell across symbols of protection. The avatar struggled to throw the net off her, but the strands only shrank and tightened.

Grandmother stood before the avatar, almost giddy with anticipation. “I have you,” she said. “You may be favored by one of your gods, but you are only human.”

The avatar stopped struggling and seemed to gaze up at her through slits in the visor of the winged helm. More sparks erupted as the knots rubbed against the protections. The symbols appeared to be wounded, slowing their glide across steel. Some of the knots were successfully seeping into the armor, and the avatar shuddered.

“Yes,” Grandmother continued, “I know who you are. When I am through with you, you will loose an army of the dead upon the lands at my command, and it won’t be only the realm of Sacoridia that falls to the empire, but all of them.”

Another knot sank into the armor and the avatar spasmed.

Grandmother was delighted. “And, with you, there is something else that has come into my possession.”

She bent and pried yarn away from the avatar’s helm. The yarn had turned pliant, sticky. She jerked her hand back when a knot sparked. She was not sure if she should touch the armor, but her spell should have neutralized its power enough to prevent her harm. In the end, she was too curious not to. She lifted the visor. But for some burning of her fingers, the steel did not injure her, and she stepped back to get a better view.

“Well, Karigan G’ladheon,” she murmured, “we meet again.”

A soft glow shone from around the avatar’s face. Starlight, moonlight, Grandmother did not know, for the avatar moved partly in the realm of the living, and partly in the heavens, or so the chronicles of her people claimed, and she felt the truth of it in her bones. A patch of fine star steel mesh covered the mirror eye. The avatar’s normal eye wasn’t quite . . . normal. It was a dark, dusky blue, and fixed Grandmother with a raptor’s cutting gaze, Westrion watching through the avatar’s eye.

So this was her dark angel, trapped in strands of yarn, and now hers to control. There were more sparks, more knots burrowing into the armor, the avatar’s face showing strain.

“Now, let us see your other eye.”

Was it her imagination, or did the avatar’s lips tighten with the hint of a smile? Undeterred, Grandmother tore the patch off and beheld the mirror eye. It was not just the iris or pupil that had turned silver, but the whole of the eye that gleamed and reflected, exactly as Immerez had described. Grandmother stared at the reflection of her own face with its wrinkled skin, the drooping eyelids, and sunken cheeks.

“The Mirari truly exist,” she murmured, “and you are one. I have never seen the like.”

She wanted the eye for herself, and her fingers twitched by her belt knife. But if she cut it out, would it still allow her to look across time? To envision the weaving of the world?

Even now, an image formed in the eye, and Grandmother bent closer. She gazed into a tumult of flurries, flurries cascading down in dizzying patterns. Snow, and nothing more. She stepped back, disappointed as the eye returned to its cold, silver gleam.

“Is that all? Snow? If I want to see snow, I just have to step outside.”

The avatar smiled her tight smile.

In the chamber, it began to snow.

“What is this?” she demanded.

The wind pushed her back and back until she hit the wall. Through the blizzard she discerned a figure striding toward her. It was blocky, humanlike, but not fully formed. It was made of ice and had only vague features.

“Aureas slee,” she murmured in realization. The elemental she had summoned to her service so long ago.

“You are the one,” it said. It pointed an icicle finger at her. “You are the one that forced me out into the world, subjected me to pain, humiliation, and defeat. You.”