Now, said the Voice, where were we? A mouth-arm darted forward and seized Zaranda's feet in its jaws.
"No!" Chenowyn screamed as the horror began to feed her friend into its maw. Zaranda thrashed violently, but was swallowed up, inch by inch.
The girl turned a tear-drenched face to Nyadnar. "You've got to help her!" she pleaded. "Please!"
"That is not my way."
"Let me go!" Chen drummed impotent fists on the tentacle that held her. Then to the sorceress: "I've heard her talk about you. You were her friend."
"I have no friends. I can afford none. My responsibilities are too great."
"You used her! How can you just let her die?"
"I employed her services from time to time. She was rewarded suitably, even generously. Where she is now, she came to by her own choice."
Slobbering, the toothed jaws had worked their way to Zaranda's hips. "She'll die! You have to do something!"
"I cannot." A pause. "But you can."
"Me? I'm just a girl! What can I do?"
"You are not just a girl, Chenowyn," the sorceress said. "As to what you can do… whatever you choose."
The jaws were about her friend's waist. Zaranda uttered a hawk scream of rage and frustration.
"Damn you!" the girl flared. "Damn you, damn you, damn you! And damn you, too, you great big wad of filth!"
Her body went rigid with rage. Her hair rose, and her eyes began to glow. Her lips peeled back from her teeth in a grimace of fury…
And her jaws extended forward, telescoping.
Chenowyn's scream penetrated Zaranda's despair and brought her head around.
Her apprentice was transforming before her eyes. Her skin was darkening toward a brilliant, shiny, red; at the same time it grew visibly thicker, scaly, with an oddly crystalline quality. Face and limbs grew longer, became toothy jaws, forelimbs and legs wickedly clawed. Her skull flattened and broadened, and two long back-curving horns sprouted from its rear. Nubs formed on her back and grew into great ribbed wings.
The deepspawn found itself holding a small but very angry gem dragon. A mouth-arm darted for it, jaws spread wide. The dragon uttered a furious, piercing scream. A spray of brilliant red dust, like rubies ground to sand, gushed from its mouth.
Tough hide and muscle were scoured from the deepspawn's mouth-arm. Skeletonized jaws fell to the floor. The monster drew back a stump gouting green blood.
The dragon-Chen clawed at the tentacle about her waist. What an adolescent girl's fists could not achieve, an adolescent dragon's talons made light of. Ruby talons shredded the tentacle. It let Chen go and jerked away.
Chen's wings exploded from her sides, beat tentatively. She fell on her rump. Rising up on her hind legs, she thrust her head forward and breathed her spray of ruby dust against the neck of the mouth that had worked its way to Zaranda's armpits.
The abrasive spray cut through the arm. The head fell to the floor, jaws working spasmodically. Zaranda began to struggle free.
A tentacle lashed at Chen. Her jaws snapped it through. Then she flung herself at the monster, buffeting it with her wings, lashing it with her tail.
The remaining tentacle snaked out, looped back, wrapped itself around the young dragon's neck. She uttered strangling sounds and beat at it with her wings. It held her up in the air while the surviving mouth-arm trumpeted a cry of triumph.
Zaranda had extricated herself from the still-spasming jaws. Crackletongue lay on the floor nearby. Her right hand would not respond; she snatched the sword up with her left, screamed, "A star!" and slashed at the tentacle that was throttling Chenowyn.
With a flash and a crack, a stink of ozone and burned fetid meat, the magic blade cut through the tentacle. The severed end dropped from Chen's neck to writhe on the floor like a snake with a broken back. The stump, spewing foulness, flailed wildly, knocking Zaranda against the wall.
Chenowyn braced her legs, gathered herself, and breathed.
Corundum spray enveloped the monster. The spawn-heads growing from it opened wide their eyes. They began to scream in a horrid cacophony of voices.
The bulk heaved and flopped, trying to escape the awful torrent of ruby dust. Its skin abraded away, and then its flesh, and that which served it as bones, and its pulsating inner organs. The sprouting bodies withered to skeletons and went quiet.
A psychic scream burst like a sun exploding inside Zaranda's skull. Consciousness left her.
When she opened her eyes, Nyadnar was standing over her, gazing down with neither curiosity nor compassion.
"Oh," Zaranda groaned. She sat up. She felt like Death on a bender. But she was alive, and nothing seemed broken. "Chenowyn?"
"She is well," the sorceress said, nodding toward the middle of the floor. A very normal-looking human girl lay curled about herself. "Just resting."
"And L'yafv-Afvonn?"
"Destroyed. Or at least, fled to another dimension to avoid dissolution. One from which he cannot return, should he even desire to, for a time longer than the span of your lives, and a dozen generations of your descendants."
The girl moaned, jackknifed. Zaranda was up at once, running to her side, gathering her into her arms.
"What happened?" the girl moaned. "What did I do?"
"I don't know, honey," Zaranda said, "but it sure worked."
"You have saved the balance of the world, which was in danger of being thrown hopelessly awry," Nyadnar said, "You have done well, my daughter."
The others gaped at her. "Yes," the sorceress said, in a tone of voice like none Zaranda had ever heard from her. "You are my child, Chenowyn."
"She's a dragon?" Zaranda demanded. "How could that be? She didn't so much as shimmer in Armenides's dead-magic room; she couldn't have held a polymorph spell. And she's no half-dragon. She's as human as I."
"She is. She is also a dragon-as much as I."
Chenowyn jumped to her feet. "No! It's not true! I'm not a dragon! And stop talking about me like some… some thing that's not even here!"
Zaranda seized her hand. "Chen, I love you, no matter who you are-and you will never be a thing to me. But you were a dragon. I saw."
She straightened and faced the sorceress, one arm around the sobbing girl's shoulders. "How can somebody be both fully human and fully dragon? And what kind of dragon? She's not like any I've ever heard of."
"She is a new thing in the world," Nyadnar said, "A thousand years ago I noted an alarming fact: while you humans are small, short-lived, and weak, and we dragons are great, long-lived, and powerful, your numbers were increasing rapidly, year by year, whereas ours diminished slowly, but steadily.
"One solution-bandied about by the council of wyrms more frequently than it would reassure you to know-has been to eradicate your mayfly kind. I opposed this course of action. For one thing, by the time it came up for debate, I was morally certain it was too late-that were we to attempt any such thing, we should succeed only in hastening our own extinction. For another, I perceived your kind as having a function in the great system of the world, even as dragonkind has.
"Yet I could see the two coming inevitably into conflict. I wished to preserve both races if possible. So I sought to see if I could somehow reconcile them. Many years have I spent in study, in contemplation, and in experimentation. The end result you see before you: a person who is both human and dragon. A super-being, if you wilclass="underline" a ruby dragon."