The mage's blundering feet left soil, squished in mud, and with tearful gratitude he splashed into the stream that cut the valley. Bathing his aching face and bleary eyeballs, he tried desperately to think of a spell-any spell-to drive Sysquemalyn away, or else cover his escape. A levitation spell might float him out of range, or a shadow door let him wriggle away. Even Undine's door, with no idea of his destination, would be enough. Perhaps he had a chance. He didn't hear her insane laughter.
Heat belched all around him. Brimstone bubbled just under his nose. He was afire. His smock ignited, as did the skin on his elbows and knees. He screamed at the sudden pain, and forced his eyes open to see this new attack, to get away.
The water was gone. Instead, the creek bed roiled with black, sticky tar. Huge gas pockets burped sulfur. Things charred and long dead floated on the surface. The tar was near boiling, and Candlemas was elbow- and hock-deep in it. It stuck to his face and neck, and burned where it touched. He wailed with fright and agony as he plucked himself free and grabbed for the shore.
The monster Sysquemalyn was there to meet him. He grabbed gummy grass near her craggy, twisted feet. "Hot, dear 'Mas?" the monster cooed. "Let me cool you."
A hand like a knot of thorns closed on his arm. He tried to yank free, but could not. The flint hand was powerful as a chain yoked to oxen, and it dragged him on tarry elbows and knees across burnt grass and ashes. At first Candlemas felt nothing, though the hand smoked on his upper arm. Then he saw it was not smoke, but ice mist. Frost dusted his bicep, then ice. The chill spread down his arm until it was numb. Steam rose where ice met hot tar, with Candlemas's flesh trapped between. He struggled to get his feet under him, to rise, but the monster dragged him like an anchor. When she let go, he collapsed onto the dirt path between smoldering crops. The whole sky was black now, or so it seemed to his seared eyeballs under tar-heavy brows.
"Sys, please…"
"No pleases, please," mocked the monster. She loomed against the sky like a lightning-killed pine. "Nothing can save you. You know you'll die, don't you? But not soon, not fast. A little at a time." She lifted her splayed foot and stamped down hard.
Candlemas couldn't move his numbed arm, and the foot crashed down like a boulder off a mountain. He heard fingers break and twist, felt the stamping vibration through the ground more than through his shoulder, which burned as if afire. Writhing, kicking gluey feet to roll away, he glanced at his arm and shuddered, almost sick. The flesh was not just chilled, it was frozen solid, dead forever. Broken in a dozen places, held together by skin.
"I bit your arm off once, remember?" From the scratchy throat issued-almost-the soft cooing wheedle the beautiful Sysquemalyn had employed years before, "Had it torn off by a yellow fiend, actually. That jolt will seem the gentlest caress after a day or two."
"Please," Candlemas wept with pain, "please, Sys. What do you want?"
"Want?" A mad shriek again. The claws flew high over the bald shining head. "Death, in all its forms, to all my foes!"
With a wildcat wail she stabbed down, fingertips sparkling. Candlemas was hoicked into the air, pulled in five directions as if by wild horses, and spun wildly. The world became a blur with dozens of flint monsters craning over him keening a death chant. He felt blood surge in his head, saw his vision cloud, saw blood squirt from his sundered arm. When Sysquemalyn suddenly shrieked a halt, the mage stopped so quickly his legs broke. Waves of pain and nausea rolled over, and suffocated him.
More frightening, Sysquemalyn vacillated between sane and insane, shrieking one minute, cooing the next as if playing her own games. She might torture him for days, heal him as needed, then continue. For years, even, her thirst for revenge unquenched.
A coo, "That's three limbs. What do to with the fourth? Smite the skin with exploding boils, perhaps?"
Hanging in mid-air, three limbs distorted, Candlemas knew he couldn't escape. He could only live and take it. To fight was useless.
At least in this form.
Biting his tongue, Candlemas reached for the only escape he could imagine outside death. Yet it was a form of death, for what he planned would leave him as something else. If he survived.
But pain tore at his mind, and soon he'd lose his reason. Become a babbling horror like Sysquemalyn, hung between the world and sanity.
Reaching deep inside, Candlemas conjured words to a spell he'd never attempted, wasn't even sure he remembered. It was long ago he'd read of it, but now it came back, like opening a cobwebbed drawer to find a diamond sparkling within. Or a scalpel.
Grinding his teeth against pain, he grunted the weird, twisted sounds of Quantoul's selfmorph.
The change was instant. An observer wouldn't have known if Candlemas truly changed, or merely swapped himself with some other-worldly horror. For the thing that suddenly hung in air was a purple granite cone taller than Sysquemalyn. Its bottom was hollow and ringed with savage teeth. Tentacles dangled and flapped. Two blind eyes like milky pearls started from its side.
And hating everything on this plane, the windghost attacked.
The flint monster never recoiled, or even ducked the hideous apparition. Its hate burned just as hot. Flint claws met granite cone, and for a few moments the air was filled with screams, scratching, and scrabbling. Then, quick as thought, the monster Sysquemalyn drove two hands like spears through the windghost's hide. Stone-hard organs and a many-chambered heart were rent like rocks in a crusher. Torn from its body, the tiny brain died.
Candlemas didn't die with it, for the mage's consciousness was gone, obliterated by the polymorph spell. For everything, including that keen brain, had changed with the spell.
Sysquemalyn was left with a stinking heap of purple rubble in a scorched field marred with tar and sulfur and blood. Yet even death could not satisfy her rage, and the gore-spattered monster slashed and stamped and tore at the ruined carcass, screaming, "I want to kill him again! I want him dead again! Again, again!"
All that remained to mark Candlemas's life and work was the blight-curing spell, quietly percolating at the edges of the valley, quietly dispelling the poisonous rust, then passing over the hill and jumping to other fields. And on and on, to the horizon and beyond.
"We halt this fight!" Thornwing crowed. Beside her, Blinddrum nodded. "And all others! There is no more need for battle!"
"What?"
"Are you mad?"
"Who made you chief?"
"Get out of the ring!"
Voices rose all around, a cacophony.
"Sunbright challenged every fighter! He-"
"He did, and he fought, and he defeated us!" the swordswoman shouted them down. "And by beating us, he has defeated the whole tribe!" More noise, objections, calls for quiet and dignity, questions of custom, but Thornwing plowed on. "Blinddrum and I are the best fighters in the tribe. None would dispute that. Yet Sunbright Steelshanks, son of Sevenhaunt and Monkberry of the Raven Clan, defeated us both. And by that act, he defeated all of us! So he need fight no more."
Grumbling, growling, cursing, yet many agreed with the logic while others pondered it, weighed it against tradition. Even old Iceborn admitted he'd never thought of a challenge in that light, but it made sense. To beat the best was to beat them all.
Magichunger kept one wary eye on Knucklebones as he bawled, "What of his sentence of death? Pronounced by Owldark?"
"Owldark is dead," rumbled Blinddrum, "and with him his sentence. I don't remember the reason for the sentence anyway."