“Ack!” said Senta, blowing water out of her nose.
Szim rose to the surface of the little pool that was the lizzie bathtub and circled around her like an alligator.
“No fair! How am I supposed to keep up without a tail?”
Senta was not a strong swimmer even by human standards, having had little opportunity to swim, growing up first in a large city with few clean waterways, and then in a primordial land in which every body of water held frightful predators.
The lizzie submerged briefly and then shot out of the water so quickly that she was able to land feet first on the stone edging. She reached down a clawed hand, and pulled the human female from the water.
“Frogs swim very well, and they have no tail.”
“Do I look like a frog to you?”
The lizzie tilted her head, looking at the human with one eye.
“Oh very funny.”
“Come, I will paint you,” said Szim.
A table in the corner of the room served as a sort of vanity for reptilians, and was stocked with pigments that the lizzies used to decorate their bodies. Two days earlier, Szim had convinced Senta to let her paint her body, and since then she had spent her time naked but for a bit of red, black, and yellow body paint. After all, she reasoned, there were no other humans within a hundred miles, and the lizzies could hardly tell the difference. There was no one to be scandalized and no one to accuse her of going native. Though Szim had tried several designs, she had at last settled on outlining or emphasizing the sigils already imprinted on the sorceress’s body. Senta had fourteen sigils, sort of magical tattoos, adorning her body. Up and down her front were twelve two-inch stars, while on her back were two images of Bessemer, one with open wings that covered both shoulder blades, and one of the young dragon curled up and sleeping in the small of her back. They were the result of creation and summoning magic.
“Okay, my turn,” said Senta, when Szim was done.
She used the same cups of paint to draw designs on the lizzie—red stars surrounded by yellow up and down her back and a large yellow happy face on her belly.
“It is too much,” said Szim. “I’m not important enough to have so much paint.”
“Nonsense. You’re the close personal friend of the most powerful sorceress in the world.” She stopped and looked around.
“What?” wondered the lizzie.
“Just checking to see if someone was going to pop up to contradict me. Oh well. Come on. Let’s go down and eat.”
Szarine had finished setting the table and the food looked delicious. At Senta’s direction, the cuisine had improved greatly over the past week or so. Now boiled eggs and poached fish sat beside fruit salad and a mashed tuber that was almost a potato. The lizzie cook joined them at the table and the three of them began passing the dishes and filling their plates.
“What do you want to do today?” asked Szim. “I don’t think there is anything to show you in the entire complex that you haven’t already seen. Maybe we could climb the mountain.”
“Hmm. Or maybe we could hunt down Khastla and torture him until he calls that stupid dragon home.”
Both the lizzies rolled their eyes in shock.
“You mustn’t say such things!” said Szim. “The god cannot be summoned!”
“Don’t I know it, or he would be here already.”
“Khastla says the god is asleep in Tsahloose,” said Szarine.
“I’ve been waiting here an entire fortnight.”
“Hissussisthiss used to sleep for months,” said Szim.
“Bessemer’s not as big or old as Hissussisthiss was,” said Senta. “It hasn’t been that long since I used to dress him up in my doll’s clothes.”
“You still have your little goddess,” Szim pointed out.
“Yes, I do.” Senta frowned. “You know, I think it’s been four days since I saw her. She’s never been away from me for more than two before. I should scry her and see what trouble she’s into.”
“After that, we can go mountain climbing,” said Szim.
When she had finished eating, Senta left the two lizzies, and climbed the stairs to the bedchamber. Along the way, she stopped and picked up a washbowl from the bathroom and filled it with water. Once upstairs, she placed the bowl and the floor and sat down cross-legged in front of it. The magical art of scrying, observing something or someone from across time and space, wasn’t something that Senta specialized in, but it was simple enough, as divination magic went.
“Uuthanum,” she said, but nothing happened.
“Uuthanum,” she said again.
The water remained transparent and completely unremarkable.
“Uuthanum eetarri.” She touched her finger to the water, and still nothing.
“Kafira’s tits!” Senta growled. It had been a long time since anything had foiled her magic.
Getting her handbag, she reached into it and pulled out a piece of chalk. On the solid stone floor, she drew a large circle and inside of that, a pentagram. Then she drew arcane symbols all around its circumference. Placing the bowl of water in the center of the circle, she sat down next to it once again.
“Sembor uuthanum edios nit eetarri!” This time the water turned white like milk. Suddenly red bubbled up from the center. Some powerful magic was preventing her from magically seeing anything at all. She grabbed the edge of the bowl and flipped it out of the circle, spilling contents that were once again just plain ordinary water, across the floor.
Reaching into her bag again, she pulled out a large jar. I was filled with liquid the color of urine, and suspended within this liquid was a small leathery body, looking something like a cross between a dragon and a human baby. It had a small pointed face with a pinched nose, tiny curled horns, and wings upon its back. She pulled out a second and a third jar. They both contained similar grotesque little creatures. She opened the lids, one after the other, and the little creatures crawled out. They coughed the sickly yellow liquid from their lungs and then stretched out their little leathery wings.
“Hello, my little ones.”
The three tiny creatures peered up at her, revealing little black eyes. These were quasits—creatures created by magic to serve her.
“Someone has the bullocks to use magic against me. Against me!”
The three little monsters flinched.
“I want to know who they are and I want to know where they are. You get out there and find them!”
The three little abominations flitted their wings, spattering the floor with liquid, and flew into the air. Then they shot out the open window.
Walking down the stairs to the bathroom, Senta sat on the edge of the square pool, dangling her feet into the water. Scooping up some of the cool liquid, she washed the lizzie paint off of herself. She heard a hissing from the doorway and looked up to see Szim talking to her. The spell that allowed her to understand the lizzie had worn off.
“Sembor uuthanum. What did you say?”
“Is something the matter?”
“At least that spell works,” said Senta. Then she answered the lizzie. “I tried to scry out where Zoey was and what she was doing, but there was something blocking my magic.”
“Is it because she is a god? I have heard it said that magic doesn’t effect them.”
“That may be true for some, but not for me,” said Senta. “Don’t forget, I killed Hissussisthiss with magic.”
“Then what could stop you?” wondered the lizzie. “I know you are powerful. I saw you and your magic at Tsahloose. You were stronger than even the high priest.”
“Who else is in the area that might have powerful magic?”
“No one… unless…”
“What?” demanded Senta, climbing to her feet.
“The lizzies from Xiatooq.”
“Xiatooq?”
“Yes. You remember, those who were in the house carved into the root of the mountain. I don’t know what magic they might have, but their ways are strange.”
Senta remembered the unusual lizzies she had seen—large, with bumpier and darker skin, wearing not just paint and feathers, but brightly colored skirts and capes and large amounts of jewelry.
“Take me there.”
Senta followed the lizzie out of the house and through the fortress grounds. The sun was up, but it was still cool. There were few lizzies out and about. The cool air on her naked skin was bracing.
“They’re not there anymore,” said Szim, as they hurried along. “They left three days ago.”
“Of course they did,” Senta murmured.
They reached the spot at which they had seen the lizzies of Xiatooq. The façade of the building reaching out into the garden and the open-air patio just above the first floor were still in the shadows of the mountain. It wasn’t the visible light that Senta saw however. The entire structure, the side of the mountain to the left and right, as well as above, and much of the stone ground around it, were covered in the yellow residue of magic, invisible to most, but oh-so obvious to her.
“Those bloody bastards!” she growled. “They’ve got Zoey. I don’t know how, but they have her.”
Turning on her heel, she marched as quickly as she could back to her apartment. She stopped at the door and turned to Szim, who was following along behind her.
“You need to leave me. I don’t want you anywhere near me for a while. Things are going to get very nasty.”
The lizzie stared at her for a moment, and then with a quick nod, turned and left. Senta went inside. Szarine had gone for the morning. Back in the bedroom, the sorceress pulled her clothing from her handbag—the black pants and corset that she had worn when she had first arrived at Dragon Fortress. She was just slipping on her high black boots when the three quasits flew back in the window and landed near her feet.
“You didn’t see anything, did you, you little demons?”
One of the three turned its back on her and another looked down at its feet while it kicked at an invisible pebble. But the third quasit raised its arms and jumped up and down. She picked it up by its head and looked into its face.
“So, little Bikindi, what did you see?”
She squeezed the little creature’s head with the fingers of her right hand until its little black eyes popped out into her left palm, looking like a pair of tiny black ball bearings. Popping them into her mouth, she bit down. They were slippery, but at last she crushed them, her mouth filling with the taste of vile jelly, as images filled her mind.
It wasn’t the here and now that she saw. The quasits could see beyond the veil of the present reality. It was some time ago—three days, she imagined. She could see the troop of strange lizzies hurrying out of the dragon fortress. Four of them carried a large box, something like a steamer trunk. It was plenty large enough to hold Zoantheria, if she were somehow unconscious.
But how could these lizzies have disabled Zoey? Dragons were, by their very nature, magical. They were, as Szim had indicated, notoriously unaffected by magical spells. But that was not always the case, Senta reminded herself. She had killed a dragon with a spell: one much larger and more powerful that the little coral dragon. But it had been the most powerful spell in her repertoire, and as far as Senta knew, she was the most powerful magic user in the world.
“You’ve earned a rest,” she told the little monster, as she dropped it into its jar of urine-colored liquid. She turned to the others. “You, Dante and Ulixes, you two get out and find which way those lizzies from Xiatooq went.”
Tossing the jars and all her remaining possessions into her handbag, she descended to the large room on the bottom floor. She recited, “Tijiia uuthanum uluchaiia,” as she reached out her hands and molded the air as though it was clay. Between her palms, shadows collected together in a large, familiar shape. She stood back and looked at it. Though it was nothing more than a cloudy shadow, to a human or a lizzie, it would appear as a rugged reptilian warrior. Senta could see it both ways.
“Well, General, are you ready for your command?”
The shadowy lizzie threw its right arm across its chest in a salute.
“Come with me.”
She walked out the door and through the now familiar pathways to the gate between the two statues of Bessemer. With a wave of her hand, the gate flew open and she stepped out into the sunshine, followed by the shadow form that she had created. When they were several hundred feet away from the gate, she stopped.
“Tijiia uuthanum uluchaiia,” she recited again, molding another lizzie shape out of the shadow.
“Here is your army then,” she said. “Uastium premba uuthanum tachthna paj tortestos—sieor!”
The second shadowy lizzie shook for a second and then split down the middle. Suddenly there were two of them. Then they split again, and then split again, and again. And again. The chain reaction continued until the vast slope of the land leading up to the fortress was filled with thousands of shadowy lizzie warriors.
“Now, General,” barked the sorceress. “Unleash hell!”