body, impaled another on his right claw, pulled the giant to his mouth, and bit him half. The blood and flesh fired his rage and he roared anew.
The giants shouted and bounded forward. Blades rained down on Furlinastis’s scales. Giants shadowstepped atop his back, tried to drive their blades down into his spine. He lurched, throwing them off of him, crushed another under his body, and tore the arm off another with his fangs.
But some of the giants’ blows penetrated his scales. Furlinastis leaked shadows and blood. He was slowing, weakening.
Cale and Riven stepped through the darkness and materialized two strides behind Kesson Rel, in time to watch Rivalen’s body burst in a shower of blood as veins and arteries exploded outward from his flesh. The Shadovar prince fell to the ground in a twitching heap of glistening gore. Shadows still streamed from his ruined body.
“High,” Cale said.
“Low,” Riven answered, and both lunged forward, blades bare.
Cale took a two-handed slash across Kesson’s throat; Riven stabbed his sabres in the middle of Kesson’s back.
Their blades passed through him as if he were air.
“Illusion,” Cale said, as the image disappeared. Riven cursed.
Kesson’s voice, intoning a spell, carried on the wind from somewhere to their right. They whirled, sought him, saw nothing.
Holding his mask, Cale spoke a brief prayer and a circle of force radiated outward from him in all directions to about twenty paces, countering invisibility in its path.
Kesson appeared, hovering low over the plains, energy gathering in both his hands.
“I have Rivalen,” Cale said, and winced as a wave of Magadon’s mental energy caused a spike of pain in his head. “Go.”
Riven nodded, and charged Kesson.
I am power, Magadon said in Cale’s head, his voice an echo of Mephistopheles’s. And I am hate.
Riven threw one of his enchanted sabres at Kesson as he charged. The curved blade, poorly balanced for throwing, cut an irregular arc through the air and struck Kesson in the shoulder. If the blade cut flesh, Riven couldn’t tell. He could tell that it had no effect on Kesson’s casting.
Kesson’s dark eyes fixed on Riven. He flapped his wings, pointed both hands.
Cale shadowstepped to Rivalen’s side and gagged at the stench. The Shadovar’s body had been opened, as if his skin had been unbuttoned and the vitals pulled forth. One of his arms was little more than a withered stick.
Blood vessels, tendons, intestines all lay in a twisted heap on the ruins of his flesh. His eyes fixed on Cale, still aglow, filled with rage and pain. He opened his mouth to speak but nothing more emerged than a wet gurgle. Cale saw that Rivalen’s hand still held his holy symbol, slicked with his blood. Perhaps the Shadovar’s regenerative flesh would heal him in time. Perhaps not.
Intoning a rapid prayer, Cale cast his most powerful healing spell and fought back bile as the magic caused Rivalen’s innards to squirm back into place and closed the flesh over them.
Rivalen, still slick and sticky with his own blood, inhaled in a gasp.
“Get up,” Cale said, and pulled him to his feet.
Magadon’s voice rang in his head.
I am power.
Magadon! Cale projected through the mental connection. This is not you! Get control! Get out of the Source, Mags. Get out.
I have control, Magadon answered, and began to laugh. And I will never get out.
Cale looked back the way they had come and saw through the darkness, through the raging battle of wraiths and shadows, a huge form moving through the storm, a floating city.
Sakkors.
And Magadon.
Riven dodged to his right as energy flew from both of Kesson’s fists. A glowing orange ball of power streaked toward Riven from Kesson’s left hand, while a line of green energy from his right hand coalesced in the air and formed itself around Riven into the shape of a large, barred cage. Riven slammed into its unyielding bars. He was trapped inside with the orange ball, which began to spin and hum.
Riven cut at the bars, but he might as well have been chopping at adamantine.
The ball spun ever more rapidly, emitting a high pitched whine. Riven backed away from it as far as the cage allowed. He looked over and saw Cale pull Rivalen, mostly whole, to his feet.
“Cale!”
The ball exploded, filling the cage with billowing black smoke shot through with burning streams of red-hot embers. Riven had nowhere to hide, no cover, and smoke and embers saturated him. He screamed as his flesh blistered, blackened, as his clothes caught fire.