Pool of Twilight - James M. Ward [21]
Sirana feigned an impressed look. "I have misjudged you, great abishai," she simpered. She fell to her knees before the fiend's clawed feet, bowing her head submissively. "Truly I am not worthy of being called mistress by one so mighty as yourself."
Slayer let out a deep, rumbling laugh. "Well, this is more appropriate, erinyes-spawn."
Abruptly Sirana stood up, a vicious smile on her beautiful face. Slayer stared at her, too late noticing the rune she had drawn upon the floor while she knelt.
The rune spewed forth a white-hot funnel of sparks.
"What is this?" the abishai hissed as the sparks covered its body. The fiend tried to bat them away, but the sparks seared its scaly flesh with pain wherever they touched. Black flames flared to protect Slayer, but the sparks sent by Sirana spun faster and faster. The abishai's aura of protection shattered.
"No!" Slayer screamed. "This cannot be!"
Sirana watched as the sparks adhered to Slayer's skin. They covered the fiend, consumed it.
"But I am a prince of fiends!"
The abishai writhed like a skewered lizard, its entire form burning with magic, its body lost in the maelstrom of sparks. The tornadolike magic whirled faster and faster. Then Slayer began to shrink, melting into the rune on the floor. One last wail of fury echoed around the chamber, then the tornado was sucked down into the rune that had spawned it.
The magical symbol shimmered with power. Sirana did not hesitate. She knelt down, pressing her forehead against the rune.
Searing heat shot through her skull, but before she could scream it faded to a dull, almost pleasant tingling. Sirana stood, new power surging through her veins. The rune on the floor had vanished, but a mirror image of the symbol glowed momentarily on her pale forehead. Then it, too, faded. All the power that had been Slayer's was now hers to command.
She stretched luxuriously, then sank onto a velvet covered chaise, reveling in her victory over the abishai. A month ago such a conquest would have been beyond her abilities. But not now. Every day she grew stronger. Her destiny beckoned.
True, The Oracle of Strife had been destroyed, but the riddle of the hammer's hiding place had apparently been solved, or the clerics of Tyr would never have allowed the book to go up in flames. Sirana would find other ways of obtaining her prize. It would be simple enough to find the hammer by following those sent to fetch it, and Sirana's otherworldly spies had already informed her that the son of two of her father's killers would be among them.
She tossed her head back and laughed, a high, trilling sound that echoed off the cold stone walls. She was a highly creative fiend, after all. She was certain she would think of something.
Raising her hand, she gently stroked a braided ring fashioned from the coarse hair of some monster. "Hoag, I summon you. Come to me."
Instantly, a creature materialized high above her. The hamatula, a baatezu of the Nine Hells, was a tall, long-limbed fiend covered from head to claw with cruelly barbed spikes. The hamatula were cousins of the abishai and erinyes, but after her experience with Slayer, Sirana found that she preferred the cruel and crafty hamatula to the brutish and arrogant abishai. Hoag had served her well in the past. She should have thought to summon this particular fiend earlier.
"Sirana," the fiend growled with pleasure. "How wonderful it is to be summoned by a wizard of your eminence once again."
It bowed low, its long, spindly limbs strangely graceful. Its exquisitely sharp talons brushed the stone floor, tracing fine lines in the hard stone. "What task may I perform for you, mistress?"
"I need you to help me with a little plot I've concocted, Hoag," Sirana said