Read Tyrant's Stars: Parts Three and Four for Free Online Page B

astride a giant eagle soaring fifteen hundred feet above the earth. A song of unearthly beauty flowed through the air—even birds in the distance seemed to be listening. This eagle had wings that were over thirty feet long, and with the width of its body, its total wingspan reached sixty-five or seventy feet.
    Callas and Courbet had received their orders to dispatch D from Grand Duke Valcua in the forest near the fortress. Both she and Courbet had been brought back to life by their lord’s power. Valcua had commanded them both to do away with D. He put it this way: “You mustn’t let your guard down, but it’s not imperative that the two of you work together. Slay him together, and you shall have my praise. Accomplish it alone, and you shall also be rewarded. Ah, yes—perhaps I shall give you control of the moon!”
    Valcua had led the starry-eyed pair to the spot where D and the Dyalhis children had fallen into the subterranean waterway.
    “I leave the rest to you,” Valcua said to them before he faded away.
    Of course, the two assassins had no way of knowing where the water had carried their targets. Believing they would seek out civilization where they washed up, Callas headed for the village of Toja. Courbet elected to follow the course of the waterway. Its route had been input into his memory at the time of his resurrection—that must’ve been Valcua’s doing. But Valcua’s statement that they need not fight side by side was impeding any cooperation.
    When Callas reached the village, the weird insects that had sprung from Valcua’s footsteps were in the midst of their attack on the community. Callas had merely watched as people were horribly devoured or chopped up by oversized claws, for no human soul remained in the diva after Valcua revived her. And now she flew across the sky on a giant eagle, following D as he raced along the ground. As she watched his tiny form, now smaller than a grain of pollen, her eyes not only displayed the same rapture that had always been there, but they also held a hint of terrible obsession capable of shaking any who saw it. Most people would’ve called it hatred. Those with a keener understanding of the mind’s workings might’ve called it something else: love.
    “The sun is high, but I am higher still,” Callas murmured. Her words were a song.
    Her hair fluttering in the breeze, she filled her lungs with the crisp air before looking at the birds that surrounded her.
    “Would you care for a bit of exercise?” the diva sang, her voice still gentle.
    D wasn’t riding aimlessly. Since he’d left the village, he’d been listening to the sound of the water flowing beneath the earth’s crust. Before long, the water would be rushing back out to the surface. Where the waterway ended, he should find Sue—who’d been abducted by one of Valcua’s assassins—as well as Matthew.
    Was the assassin in question Callas or Courbet? D had witnessed Callas stabbing Courbet, and then the two of them being engulfed by napalm flames immediately thereafter. However, that hardly meant that Valcua’s subordinates were dead. Or was it another one? The last of the seven . . . the foe known as Seurat.
    Whoever it was, having Sue as a hostage would undoubtedly make him or her a fearsome opponent—or so ordinary reasoning suggested. D raced like the wind. Not a glimmer of fear or uncertainty showed in his horribly handsome features. From the very start, this young man had been utterly devoid of feeling regarding those he must slay.
    A shadow unexpectedly passed across the sun, as if a cloud that wasn’t there had suddenly appeared. D lifted his head a bit to look up at the heavens. The blackness that spread overhead was no cloud—it was expanding in all directions. Or rather, it was drawing closer.
    A second later, thousands—or even tens of thousands—of birds assailed D and his cyborg horse. There were little four-winged birds, birds of prey, winged dragons, and great ravens—and