was falling, hurtling like a meteor through a sparkling void, the howling winds of infinity assaulting his fleshless ears. He held onto the sword of his great-grandfather as if it were his only link to sanity. Suddenly he found himself in a dark hall standing before a black throne.
On the throne sat Sangzara, wrapped in the purple robes of conjury, a crown of black crystal rising from his bald head. His face was incredibly ancient, a mass of wrinkles with red eyes blazing like a devil from Hell. The nails of his fingers were longer than claws, tipped with poison spikes, and his teeth were black. A massive crystal ball sat before him on a pedestal of jade carved into twining dragon-shapes. A thousand naked skulls lined the walls of his sanctum, and a thousand black candles burned to support his dark arts. The statues of multi-armed devil gods stood behind him, their faces matching exactly the masks worn by his disciples.
“This outlander steals your soul, Shango!” Sangzara said. Shango stood before the wizard now in the center of an unholy sigil carved into the chamber floor. “But you are mine not his, as the souls of all who die in Haun-zuo belong to me. Spectre born of mine enemy you may be, but the power of my sorcery demands that you serve me. Kill the one who comes now to kill me! Kill him…”
A flash of light and Shango found himself beside Magtone again, atop the flying carpet. The moonlight flashed along his blade as they rocketed toward a broad window in the highest tower of the citadel. Shango’s arm moved of its own accord while the voice of Sangzara boomed in his head. “Kill him!”
Shango thrust the naked blade through Magtone’s belly and out his back. Magtone looked at him with a disappointed expression, yet there was no blood spewing from the terrible wound. Shango pulled his sword free and a mass of colored lights erupted from the hole in Magtone’s body. At that moment the carpet glided through the open window of Sangzara’s tower, crashing into the chamber of skulls with the obsidian throne.
Magtone and Shango tumbled across the marble floor, knocking over braziers and candles, spilling flame among the obscene tapestries and skull-lined shelves. Shango felt his human weight again, but still he was far lighter than he had been. When he leaped toward the black throne, he made it there in a single bound. He was a leaping ghost who somehow wielded a blade of solid metal in his phantom fist. Sangzara no longer sat on the throne, or Shango would have taken his head. The wizard was nowhere to be seen across the gloomy sanctum. Magtone lay on the furled carpet, convulsing and spewing rainbows from his gut-wound. He chanted in a language that confused the ear, and his convulsions grew less and less. Soon he staggered to his feet and closed the open wound with his hand and a final incantation.
“Why did you stab me?” Magtone asked.
Shango stuttered. “He forced my hand…”
“Of course,” Magtone said. “Sangzara commands the spirits of the dead.”
“Not only their spirits,” Shango said. “Their very bones will obey…”
The oaken doors of the chamber burst open, and the stench of the graveyard rushed into the room. A company of rotted mummies and demon-masked skeletons invaded the chamber of skulls. They brandished ancient swords blighted by rust, or battle-axes strung with cobwebs. It seemed the entire population of the citadels’ crypts had been called from their resting places and sent to destroy the intruders.
Magtone waved his hand and sang. A wall of fractured colors like a broken mirror separated himself and Shango from the shambling dead. They beat upon his magical barrier with ancient weapons but could not break it. Their stench was terrible.
“How can we kill those who are already dead?” Shango asked.
“I’m working on it,” Magtone said.
A loping shadow like a great hound dove through the barrier, shattering it with a roar and the gnashing of yellow fangs. The wizard had taken the form of a great black wolf. Shango recognized the cruel eyes of Sangzara in the creature’s face. The beast leapt not at him but at Magtone, who went down beneath its fangs. Shango watched the beast tear at Magtone’s body, which leaked light and sorcery as a man leaks blood. Then both of them were gone. They had landed on the flying carpet, and with dazzling speed it swept them both out the window.
The wizards’ duel was completely lost to Shango’s sight now.
The barrier separating Shango from the dead legion faded like a fog, and the mummies came against him with their flanged maces. He dodged and whirled with his newfound ghostly speed, still wondering if he were alive or dead. Then he realized that if he were no longer among the living, he had nothing to fear from an army of the dead.
So he waded into the stinking, fleshless warriors that sought to cut him down, hacking skeletons apart, taking off the shriveled heads of mummies, slicing dead limb from dead limb. Tomb dust and bone fragments filled the high chamber, and thunder shook the sky outside, where Magtone fought Sangzara somewhere above the world.
Shango sliced and thrust and leaped and cut. Never once did a dead thing’s blade or bludgeon impact his ghostly form. Perhaps he was immune to wounds now, being trapped between the states of life and death. He fought until the last mummy lay in curling shreds at his feet, until the last clacking skull shattered beneath his sandal. Only then did the citadel’s living guardians in their demon masks flood into the room to challenge him. There must have been a hundred of them or more, each one eager to avenge the death of his master.
Shango danced among them like a windblown flame. His flickering blade opened skin, vein, and flesh wherever it touched. Men howled and died and lost their limbs to the ghost-warrior’s skill. These were the same men who had slaughtered Shango’s people while he was not there to protect them. Disciples of Sangzara, Swordsmen of Zo, fanatics and madmen with a taste for blood. They would rather die than surrender, so they died in droves, rushing again and again at Shango. He cut them down without mercy, until the chamber of skulls was a chamber of steaming blood and twitching corpses. They lay in scattered pieces among the desiccated remnants of the undead. Shango stood atop the pile of dead without a single spot of red on his spectral robes, yet the blade of his great-grandfather dripped crimson from tip to pommel.
At last he sat upon the black throne and rested. He was not bone-weary or exhausted. He no longer had bones. He no longer felt the fatigue of bodily strain. But his spirit was tired now. Tired of killing. He wondered if his decision to follow Magtone had made him a coward. He should have died and joined his family in the afterlife. Instead he had taken Magtone’s hand and become something less than alive yet far more than dead. What would happen if he sat here in this seat of sorcery long enough? Would he fade away to nothing? Or would he be caught here to haunt this citadel for the rest of time?
Before he could contemplate an answer to such dreadful questions, Magtone came flying through the window on his carpet. His tunic was ripped to shreds, but his flesh was whole. Sangzara’s severed head, which had taken a man’s likeness once again, hung by its pale hair from Magtone’s fist. The withered face stared dumbly into infinity, the devil-fires in its eyes extinguished, lower jaw slack and dripping with gore.
“Sangzara is dead?” Shango rose from the black throne.
Magtone tossed the head into a firepit, where it steamed and crackled and melted into a black husk.
“I took his head off with a shaft of killing light,” Magtone said. “But his body escaped.”
“What do you mean it escaped?” Shango said.
“Exactly that,” Magtone said. “It sprouted a pair of black wings and flew into the deep forest. I could not catch it.”
“Headless…it
