Fortune's Fool - Mercedes Lackey [126]
It was a mocking, painfully scathing song.
“What a failure you are!” Sasha sang. “Look at you! A couple of half-magic creatures, a mortal and a girl are beating you! You couldn’t manage to live with your own kind, and you can’t manage to live on your own. You couldn’t conquer anything in your own land and you can’t conquer anything in this one, where you are a stranger. Can you feel it? Even the tiny power you had is trickling away! Failure, fool, you have the respect of no one, and no one fears you.”
Blindly, Katya reached for Sasha’s hand and found it. The sense of his hand in hers made her feel stronger; she didn’t have to look at him to know he felt the same. He had no instrument, no balalaika to carry the magic; he was the instrument, and even as she controlled her own magic, she marveled at his.
Each word was a barbed dart. It was a poisonous song. It was aimed straight at the heart of the Jinn, a probe to find the things that the Jinn himself feared.
And it was working! He escaped briefly from the waterspout. The dragons came in for a second pass, and scored him with fire and talon again and the waterspout recaptured him. Katya dared to hope they could take him without needing the power of Earth….
But then, searching for a foe he could reach, the Jinn turned in midair. She felt his hot, desperate gaze on her.
And that was when he saw the bottle in her hand, realized what she had, and his anger exploded.
“Never again!” he screamed in a voice filled with such rage that she shrank back, her determination withering. “Vile, mortal worms! Never again will you hold me! Now DIE!”
Sheer terror engulfed her, as the sky exploded with flame.
Dimly, she heard the dragons bellow a challenge; she clung to Sasha’s hand as his song faltered, then began again. She reached for her power, sent the waterspout into his face—
Gouts of fire lashed the earth around her; she screamed as tongues of flame licked at her before she could call more water to deflect them. She felt Sasha’s arms go around her, as he shielded her with his own body, still singing, defiant, mocking, throwing all that they had in the Jinn’s face. “You will always be alone,” the song mocked. “We have friendship, love, the strength of companions. You cannot conquer that. You can never conquer that. Your sterility will blanket the earth and you will still never conquer that, nor ever have it for yourself.”
She lashed at the Jinn with her waters, throwing them at him as spray, sleet, even sheets of fog, anything to confuse his sight. The Jinn screamed his anger and returned with gouts of fire that struck all around them. The dragons roared from somewhere up above and the occasional shrieks of pain from the Jinn marked the times when they scored a hit on him.
It was stalemate, she realized. He couldn’t take them, but neither could they take him. With a tingling of despair, she wondered if the best they could hope for would be to be locked in a never-ending fight with the Jinn, until they all dropped dead of exhaustion—
“Die mortal worms!” the Jinn bellowed, as a gout of flame scored a direct hit on Adamant, and sent the dragon into a tumbling fall from which he only just recovered before striking the ground. Gina dove down to protect her mate as he struggled to fly, to gain the comparative safety of height. Icy fear clenched Katya’s heart as the Jinn turned his attention to her—and to Sasha—
“And now I see the weakest link in your chain,” the Jinn sneered.
With horror, she realized he was looking, not at her, but at Sasha.
“The song dies with the singer—” the Jinn snarled in triumph, and flames began to build around him.
“No!” Katya screamed, calling her waters to her—knowing that this time they would not be enough.
“Indeed, no. Enough.”
The Jinn froze; Katya didn’t blame him.
Literally rising from the earth, came the Queen of the Copper Mountain.
She was sheathed from head to toe in a—sculpture, was all that Katya could call it—of malachite. It began with an elaborately carved crown, which somehow flowed over her head and down her neck, into something