Istu Awakened

by Robert E Vardeman;Victor Milan

  'I am not meant to go,' she said. 'This journey is yours alone, Fost.'

  Wings thundered overhead and the voices of men floated down through the fog. Fost's bird screamed. It twisted about under him, its wings beginning to flutter nervously. The bird longed for the air. Fost cursed and jabbed its neck, expecting the Sky Guards to start dropping through the misty ceiling. None came.

  'That's ridiculous. Get aboard.'

  'I couldn't,' she said, her brown eyes gleaming wetly, 'even were it intended that I do so. Yon beast can't bear both our weights.'

  'She's right, Fost. That dead girl's a foot shorter than you, and no doubt weighs half what you do.'

  'Shut up, Erimenes.' A catch in his voice almost choked him. He tried to lie to himself that it was due to eagerness to see Moriana again. He knew better.

  'Nor can I abandon our faithful bears in the streets of this strange city,' she went on remorselessly. 'You can manage on your own. Nor are you truly on your own, O Chosen of Ust.'

  'Jennas . . .'

  She turned and mounted Chubchuk, her soft, 'Goodbye,' coming back to haunt Fost.

  'My sainted self, Fost, quit dithering!' Erimenes shouted.

  Face a mask of anguish, Fost nudged the eagle's flanks with both knees hoping this was the proper signal. The bird understood. It stretched its wings, hopped, thumped the air vigorously in an effort to raise the unaccustomed weight. The courier's heart almost stopped as the bird dropped from beneath him, but the next instant the wings caught air and smoothly bore him upward into the mist.

  'Good luck, Jennas I ... I hope we'll meet again!'

  'We shall,' she called after him. 'But not in happy reunion. Fare thee well, Longstrider. I. . .'The words became garbled by distance. Fost thought she added 'I love you' but couldn't be sure.

  A moment of flight both timeless and weightless through the veiling clouds and then Fost was blinking in hot sunlight. The roofs of the buildings were completely covered by the fog. Off to his right the salamander still died in agony within a thrashing spiral of steam. Hoping the bird had sense enough not to veer in that direction, he pressed himself against its neck and clung.

  Off to his left where the blunt cliffs of the hills shouldered out of the cloud, he saw the distinctive shapes of the Sky City cargo balloons dropping down with bird riders circling protectively above. Just ahead, a great number of the sausage balloons dropped toward the Central Plaza. The gondolas beneath bulged with armed men in the livery of Bilsinx. Though he didn't know what was happening, he knew enough of both tactics and of Rann to make a fair guess. With the fog to cover the maneuver, the prince had launched a feint attack on the Ducal Palace; when the Estil commanders sent troops to relieve the Palace, the main attack fell against the reduced forces in the Hall of Deputies, the nerve center of the defense.

  The sky was nearly clear of eagles, though more balloons hung near the City bearing loads of arrows and javelins for the riders to replenish their ammunition. Most of the birds Fost saw were spiralling down among the assault balloons. That confirmed his guess that he was witnessing the killing stroke.

  But what of the score of balloons rising upward toward the City in the Sky?

  'Easy, easy,' he told the eagle, mainly to quiet his own nerves. To his surprise, he was not reduced to jelly by the knowledge he was alone on the back of a potentially hostile bird half a thousand feet in the air. Since first encountering Erimenes and Moriana, he had been through any number of appalling adventures, including several of the aerial variety to rival this hellride to the City through the combat all around him. That and the emotional numbness remaining after his escape from the wrath of a captive elemental a hundred stories tall accounted for his seeming calm.

  He couldn't bring himself to even think of Jennas left behind in the now defeated city so far under his feet.

  'Erimenes,' he whispered, knowing it was lunatic since none could hear him. 'Erimenes, why are so many Sky City balloons climbing back to the City? The battle's at its climax.'

  'Guardian was right. Your eyesight is weak, indeed.'

  'What?' Why was that confounded genie prattling about the sentient glacier guarding Athalau?

  'Don't you see those "balloons" are orange and round? They aren't balloons, they're ludintip.'

  'Oh,' said Fost, 'and we're flying right up into the midst of them.'

  'There's always the opposite direction.'

  Fost swallowed hard.

  Single-mindedly, the bird beat its way upward. None of the ludintip's passengers seemed to be looking their way, Fost noted with relief. Their attention was fixed upward. A few eagles flying combat patrol around the City's perimeter swooped down, only to be clawed from the air by whirring flights of arrows. Then the living gasbags were above the rimwail, pouring lethal arrows on the startled faces of the attackers turned defenders.

  Fost's eagle climbed up into the midst of the beings in time to see a flight of small black birds billow upward like smoke.

  The five hundred men and women riding beneath the ludintip had not the slightest expectation of living to feel solid earth beneath their bootsoles again. Their only aim was to sow as much death and devastation as possible in the City itself before they fell. Synalon and Rann might triumph, but nevermore could it be said that the City in the Sky was immune to reprisal from the ground.

  Dropping with her squadron of bird riders and Sky Guards, Colonel Dashta Enn was astonished to see the ludintip sprouting from the mist like red-crowned mushrooms and go rushing upward so fast that she and her flyers only had time to loose a futile scattering of arrows.

  The audacity of the attack took away her breath.

  Trained by Rann, she did not hesitate. The colonel was committed to the attack on the Hall of Deputies. The assault might succeed. Then all that remained would be the mopping-up of scattered, disorganized and leaderless forces, if it failed, all Rann's genius and the sorceries of Synalon could not alter the fact that the Estil armies still outnumbered their foes hugely and would crush them like a giant swatting a fly if they regrouped.

  The City had to fend for itself. She swooped down to battle. Her eagle's talons raked cotton, then fell on unsuspecting prey.

  Synalon sat on the stone pier, head hanging listlessly with her chin on her breastbone. It took all her powers of concentration to keep the sylph and the dying, screeching fire sprite under control. She didn't know if they were still needed. She dominated them now simply to prove her power.

  Something brushed her cheek. It whined like an insect. She slapped at her face when she felt the sting.

  'Your Majesty, beware!' screamed one of her bodyguards from the skydock behind her. Additional words were lost in a bubbling, gurgling moan.

  Her fingers touched wetness. She pulled her fingers away in dismay. It took a few seconds for her inwardly directed eyes to register smeared blood. Her own. Someone had dared to attack her, Queen of the Sky City! And within her own territory!

  She flashed to her feet. Her concentration broke. The waterspout leaped upward, dissipating in air with a great shout of joy at the destruction it had accomplished, leaving nothing behind but a rain of muddy water and debris. The salamander hissed relief as oblivion swallowed its agony.

  The sky was filled with gaseous ludintip.

  'Maggots!' Synalon screamed. 'You dare attack my City!' The rage burned her brain as the salamander had seared her flesh.

  All that saved her life was the amazement gripping the Estil archers after their first volley when they realized that the wild, scorched, nude figure was Synalon herself. Now came clouds of arrows.

  Screeching in fury, she waved her hands before her, covering herself with a shield of fire in which the arrows flared and disappeared without reaching her body. The survivors of her bodyguard shot back, but they were vastly outnumbered. Even as the raging queen blasted a second volley of arrows, a ludintip gondola bumped down on the gray stone. Howling like fiends, armed men and women poured forth. For the first time since the human
capture of the City in the Sky, its ramparts felt the tread of an invader's feet.

  Even with the allies she had and the death spells she commanded, Synalon could never hope to withstand such a fanatical attack singlehandedly. So savagely drained of energy that she could barely stand, Synalon teetered on the brink of the skywall. Hidden reserves of power were fed by her anger.

  'Up, my children, up!' she screamed, her voice wild and fierce and mad. She threw her scorched arms up over her head, then pointed to her intended victims. 'Rend and slay the invaders, the groundling maggots! Slay them!'

  Obedient to their mistress's command, the ravens of the Sky City burst forth from their rookeries. A boiling black cloud of death, they swept over the invaders like a firestorm from the guts of Omizantrim. Beaks pecked at the vulnerable membranes of the ludintip, plucked eyes from warriors battling impotently with bows and spears. Their talons slashed at the Estil commandos and each contact of claw with skin meant inevitable death. As Synalon stood and laughed while balancing precariously on her spit of stone, daring gravity to claim her in the moment of her triumph, her ravens slew the intruders to the last man and woman. Though the Estil soldiers killed the black attackers by the hundred, each raven that fell was replaced by a dozen more.

  At last the screaming died. Only the sound of the wind could be heard over the ripping of flesh by a thousand black beaks.

  Somewhere in the City a war eagle left alone by the ravens who mistook it for part of the City's forces touched down bearing a rider whose senses reeled with horror at the sight he had just witnessed.

  The battle was quickly finished. Convinced of his triumph to the end, General Hausan was shot by Colonel Enn while posing for ten artists dashing off sketches to mark the epochal event of Estil history. Pudgy Sky Marshal Suema led a gallant delaying action against the bird riders while Tonsho, her nerve broken by the nearness of physical danger, fled downstairs to her private apartments in the south wing of the Hall. Suema and his men fell quickly. Scimitar in hand, Enn led the pursuit of the real ruler of Kara-Est.

  They found her cowering among cushions and fine tapestries pulled from the walls. Her pretty-boys fought bravely but futilely; after a brief exchange of swordcuts Enn called for archers. The Chief Deputy's lover-bodyguards were feathered to fall among the silks. The scent of blood mingled with a dozen rare perfumes.

  Tonsho cowered in the midst of luxury.

  'No, no, don't hurt me,' she moaned, her eyes screwed tightly shut. 'For the love of all gods, don't let Rann have me'.' 'Do you yield the city of Kara-Est?' Enn demanded sternly. 'Y-yes,' sobbed Tonsho. And the thing was done.

  CHAPTER NINE

  With the unfamiliar, harsh syllables of the Zr'gsz tongue hissing in her ears. Moriana lay on her belly and watched. The jagged black stone beneath her stung with heat even though her sturdy tunic. Whether the heat came from the sun hanging low in the western sky or the fires burning far below she couldn't tell.

  She stiffened as she sensed a presence nearby.

  'Anything?' asked Darl Rhadaman r'Harmis, lowering himself beside her on the crest of the undulating line of cooled lava.

  Moriana pointed with her chin. The maincampof the Watchers lay below. It was a somber place, reflecting its purpose. Walls of dressed lava rock holed like cheese supported flat basalt roofs. The windows had been hewn from the same green-black stone as the roofing. Moriana knew why. Wood, sod or thatch, anything combustible, couldn't safely be used as building material here on the northeastern slope of Omizantrim where hot sparks or ash might descend from the Throat at any time. A fresh Justing of gray ash overlay the compound, a remnant of Omizantrim's eruption weeks before.

  The princess set her mouth. The Watchers' architecture might be practical but it did nothing to alleviate the grimness of the task they performed throughout long generations.

  She saw them going about their everyday tasks. Men and women ground wheat together turning the man high millstone in a granite bowl with the strength of their own backs. Some knelt to whet the edges of spears and shortswords. A sweating, straining, curiously silent crew manhandled casks of fresh water gathered at springs below from the bed of a wagon built to survive the brutal broken terrain of the badlands. Over by the long oblong mouth of one of the underground bunkers in which the Watchers weathered Omizantrim's outbursts, a sturdy woman with sunbleached hair drawn back in a bun slit the throat of a squealing deer and began to give a group of children a lesson in butchering and dressing meat.

  'It's like a combination military camp and monastery,' remarked Darl in a low-pitched voice that carried only a few feet. Moriana glanced at him, nodded slowly.

  Since their arrival in Thendrun, Darl had emerged from thecocoon of self-doubt and despair that had wrapped him since Chanobit. On their second night in the emerald keep they had once again become lovers. Whether Darl knew or not what had occurred between her and Khirshagk, he said nothing of it. Moriana felt tempted to ask Ziore if he suspected. She didn't. That would be an invasion of Darl's innermost privacy.

  Still, there was something about him that disturbed Moriana. Was it fatalism, discouragement or simply feeling the onset of middle years, the slowing that comes inevitably to even those as robust as the legendary Count-Duke of Harmis? He had held up well on the rapid march from the keep of the Fallen Ones, though. When they had to leave their wardogs behind to advance silently through the badlands, he walked with a firmness and sureness of step that put Moriana, a decade and a half his junior, to shame. 'Where's the creature?' he asked.

  'It generally stays in the vicinity of the camp. Sometimes it moves in the dead of night. No one ever sees it. In the morning, it's simply gone, only to turn up elsewhere.'

  'Foraging?'

  'Apparently not. The Ullapag doesn't eat. It seems to derive its sustenance from the mountain itself.'

  'The same animal has survived for ten thousand years?' Darl shook his head in wonder. 'We deal with potent magic'

  Moriana said nothing.

  Something scraped behind her. She turned her head slowly to see Khirshagk approaching gingerly over the sharp lava. The height of a tall man, the Zr'gsz leader moved with surprising grace. However, he and all his kin were less skillful at silent movement than the humans in the party.

  After a council of war with the followers who had remained faithful into the depths of Thendrun, Moriana had decided to send one knight back across the Marchant into Samazant to muster men for a new attempt on the City. Darl had been afraid they'd used up their stock of sympathy among the men of the City States. But last night Moriana's crying spells had revealed the Sky City occupation of Kara-Est. News of the seaport's fall would have reached the Empire by the time Sir Thursz reached his home country. Those tidings would make men reconsider the princess's pleas for aid.

  A Nevrym forester had gone north down the trail from Thendrun to his home woods to consult Crimpeace, the head of the woods runners. The foresters lacked the instinctive fear of the Hisser that most of the Realm harbored, but they were known also as redoubtable foes of the Dark. This reassured Moriana that her appraisal of the Zr'gsz was accurate. It also let her hope the Nevrymin might aid her, especially since she had promised a substantial gift of gold in return. Like their neighbors the Dwarves of North Keep, the foresters had a healthy regard for specie.

  'Have you located the hellbeast yet?' asked Khirshagk, lowering himself beside the humans. His limbs sprawled in away the princess found disconcerting. His dark hide blended with the black rock and evergreens around them as if he had been bred in such surroundings.

  'Not yet,' said Darl.

  A file of men and women appeared abruptly below and to the left. They wore drab clothes like the folk in camp, with the addition of mottled green and black cloaks. The Zr'gsz were not the only ones practicing camouflage. Not even the four keen-eyed foresters accompanying them had known of that patrol's nearness.

  'This country works both for and against us. You can hide an army in these folds. Not even the
Watchers have a way of overcoming that.' Dari rubbed the dark stubble on his jaw. 'We may be able to bring this off, after all.'

  'I hope you are right,' said Khirshagk.

  Moriana reappraised her companion. After his bullheadedness and refusal to take her advice had helped lose the battle at the creek, she had fallen into the error of dismissing his military judgment. Now she was reminded that he knew more of infantry-lore than she; her greatest experience lay in aerial warfare. When the Watcher patrol appeared she had experienced near panic. Her imagination had peopled the tortured black landscape with hordes of Watchers closing unseen on them, Darl had restored perspective. If the intruders moved warily, the Watchers would only discover them through a stroke of luck.

  'Maybe their vigilance has flagged,' she said, thinking out loud.

  'No,' said Khirshagk simply.

  'But . . .'

  'Khirshagk, get back! It's looking this way!' At the urgent whisper from Ziore's jug, the lizard man slithered back down the slope. Moriana flattened herself on the rock and looked around wildly.

  'What is? I don't see anything.'

  'The Ullapag' said Ziore. 'It sensed Khirshagk.'

  'Can it read thoughts?'

  'Poorly. Enough to feel the alertness come into its mind. I deflected its attention, set it at ease. I think.'

  'I wonder if it can communicate with the Watchers?' asked Moriana.

  'Probably,' answered Darl. 'But I don't think it has.' The routine below dragged along calmly.

  The two slipped away to join Khirshagk in a fold of the lava. A caprice of wind carried acrid smoke from a fumarole uphill to them. Moriana and Darl coughed and blinked back tears.

  Khirshagk rocked on his haunches. His eyes had a faraway gaze.

  'The Heart. I taste its nearness.' Unconsciously, his tongue flicked from his thin-lipped mouth. It was forked. Moriana felt a disquieting tingle in her loins.

  Moriana opened the lid of Ziore's jar. Pink mist spilled from the satchel, became a whirlwind of dancing bright motes and finally shaped itself into a woman, tall, serious and quite lovely despite advanced age.