Istu Awakened

by Robert E Vardeman;Victor Milan

  As the sun passed the zenith and started back down the sky, the crowds began assembling in the Circle of the Skywell. There were plain Sky Citizens, looking timidly about them as if at some alien vista. There were the prisoners, bird riders and Sky Guards and Monitors and Guards from the Palace, watched by vigilant men and women who wore strips of blue and scarlet around their arms to show allegiance to Moriana.

  Resistance had long since ceased. When Rann fell from the sky, the heart went out of the bird riders. In a matter of minutes, some quick-thinking rebels had raised Moriana's claw and flower banner from the Palace flagstaff. While the sorcerous battle for the City had continued to rage, the physical battle for the Sky City had ended with this simple action.

  Moriana stepped out into the sunlight. In a few seconds, the entire City had taken up the cry.

  She gestured. Fost joined her. His hair was black and his gaze a heroic blue, and only those nearest could see the way his eyes shifted nervously. Having just lived through horrible ordeal, Fost Longstrider found himself suffering from stage fright.

  Moriana took his hand and led him down the steps to the Skull way.

  'Relax, Fost,' she said in a low voice. 'It's over. There's no need to be nervous now.'

  'I'm not used to this,' he said, looking out over the crowd assembled to cheer and venerate Moriana - and him.

  'They're friends, all of them,' she assured him. And it seemed to be so. He saw Prudyn and Chasko, carrying weatherworn satchels containing Erimenes and Ziore. The muffled sounds of acrimonious dispute rose from within, each making vile and impossible claims about the other's actions. And beyond them Fost sighted Syriana and the red-haired young lady who was sudden death on rooftop snipers, and tanned foresters and bearded Northern men and even a few diffident men in the breastplates of Palace Guards.

  As they neared the Circle of the Skywell, however, Fost's unease returned.

  'Moriana, where are the Fallen Ones? I don't see a single one of your Zr'gsz anywhere.'

  'They're hardly my Zr'gsz/ she answered. 'They're in the catacombs inventorying their religious relics. I suppose they'll want to load them on their skyrafts and be gone as soon as possible. After all, it's been millennia since the Zr'gsz had much commerce with humans. All this must upset them greatly.'

  'It upsets me,' said Fost, with feeling. But the nagging unease returned. What exactly was it that upset him? Perhaps it was nothing more than the presence of the Vicar of Istu in the Skywell. He peered suspiciously at the basalt statue. It remained immobile.

  Then Fost's attentions were diverted to the ceremony. The crowd melted away to give Moriana room. A pimply adolescent knelt with her burden at Moriana's feet. Moriana bade her rise.

  'As the youngest of the warriors who took part in the capture of the Palace of Winds,' Moriana declared, 'Ufrt Tonamil has earned the privilege to crown the new ruler of the City in the Sky.' The crowd roared agreement. Moriana knelt as the child fumbled with the wrappings on the package. She soon revealed the winged silver crown of the City's rulers.

  Ufri Tonamil hoisted the crown high, held it a moment, then stepped forward to place it on Moriana's head.

  'All hail Moriana!' she cried. 'Queen of the City in the Sky, Scion of the Skyborn, Mistress of the Clouds!'

  Moriana rose. The crowd went to its knees as one. Fost watched, then decided he should kneel, also. Immediately Moriana seized his arm and yanked him to his feet.

  'No one need kneel before me,' she proclaimed. 'Rise, my people.'

  They did. They swept forward and raised their new queen to their shoulders. Fost laughed at her expression, then cried out as he felt hands raising him, too.

  Moriana caught his eye. His lips formed the words, 'We won!'

  And they had. They'd won not just the Sky City, they'd thwarted the Dark Ones themselves. The Second War of Powers Jennas had direly predicted would never happen. That was their true victory.

  The boiling crowd turned Fost around. For a brief instant the Vicar of Istu flashed in his sight. His heart missed a beat. Then the crowd was bearing them toward the Palace of Winds, and its jubilation caught him up like the surge of a sea-wave.

  And in the depths of the City, a Demon stirred.

  BOOK TWO

  In the Shadow of Omizantrim

  For Joseph Wm. Reichert

  A prince of a fellow.

  For mi querida. Hoy, manana, siempre.

  CHAPTER ONE

  For a woman plummeting a thousand feet to her death, Synalon Etuul was uncommonly relaxed. The rushing air caressed her naked body like a thousand subtle hands. Her black hair, charred and frizzled from her contest of magics with her sister Moriana, fluttered inches above her seared scalp.

  Overhead floated the City in the Sky, a vast soundless raft of gray skystone. Around the mandiblelike double docks at the prow of the City swarmed hundreds of rafts of the same substance, from eight-foot flyers to hundred-foot barges, swarming with warriors both human and inhuman. A few of the eagles of the City's war force circled dispiritedly, herded by small two man flyers. For the first time in their long history, the warbirds of the Sky City knew defeat in the element over which they ruled as haughtily as kings: the sky.

  The dethroned queen paid attention to neither the birds nor the rounded hills cloaked in green that spun around and around beneath her feet. All her concentration was devoted to a single mental summons. Her eyes closed and the thought formed, surged outward, questing, commanding. In a moment, she heard a distant piercing cry and knew that her call was heard.

  Without warning, the arrow shape of a huge war eagle shot by her, wings folded to its glossy black sides, head thrust forward so that its yellow beak sliced the air like the prow of a ship. Synalon smiled and sent the bird encouraging thoughts.

  Once beneath her, it unfolded its full thirty-foot wingspan with a thunderous crack. Synalon fell by it again. Still, no concern touched the sorceress's aristocratic features.

  The wings furled like sails. The black warbird fell until it flanked Synalon, then spread its wings carefully so that they dropped side by side.

  'I'm ready, Nightwind,' she called, no longer requiring the tiring mental communication. The bird let itself drift down until it was directly beneath her. She spread her legs and floated down until she sat astride the bird's back, her legs thrown over its churning shoulders. She let her head slip back and uttered a small cat cry at the pleasure of the bristly feathers brushing between her slender legs. Defeated, exiled, and without so much as a cloak to her name, Synaion still took pleasurable sensation where she found it, and savored it well. The better, perhaps for the novelty of the circumstances.

  Slowly, the eagle increased its wingspan and the tempo of its wings' beating, until the full weight of the tall, lean woman was borne upon it. As it pulled into level flight, it curved and began winging along the City's track. Its mistress had prepared well for this eventuality, though her power in the City had been absolute, and her favor in the eyes of the Dark Ones had seemed to render her invulnerable. Its blood had seethed with the need to be out of the confines of the special aerie in the depths of the City, but Nightwind had waited patiently as instructed, for its mistress's mental call. Having rescued her according to plan, it strained powerful muscles to put as much distance as possible between the former queen and her former domain.

  A cry of pleasure broke from Synalon's throat and was whipped away by the wind of Nightwind's passage. Stolidly, the bird flew on. Only once did it have to correct its flight as the woman suddenly shifted her weight back and forth. It knew its mistress's foibles well.

  Flushed and breathless, Synalon cast a glance upward. The City was several miles distant. Her sister was undoubtedly on her way to having herself crowned Queen of the City in the Sky. Synalon reached forward and stroked the straining bird's neck, feeling the taut muscles beneath her fingers.

  'The silly slut,' she said, 'is probably wiping away a tear for her evil twin,' she said to her eagle. Synalon grinned savagel
y. 'Ah, yes, the evil but great-souled twin who took her own life rather than face the disgrace of being exiled among the groundlings or lifetime captivity.' She laughed, long and loud.

  Synalon had feared only one thing as she stepped to the windowsill in her throne room. The heat from the living firestorm of the salamanders summoned by the traitorous Uriath to slay both her and Moriana had abated slightly. But under no circumstance did she fear the fire elementals - or even the Destiny Stone Uriath had stolen and which had destroyed him. The major obstacle to overcome had been Moriana's lover Fost. He might suspect trickery and check to see if she had actually fallen to her death. He may have been a lowborn groundling but he was as cunning as if he had spent his life untangling the threads of intrigue in the Imperial court at High Medurim.

  In other circumstances Moriana might have suspected some ploy on her sister's part. But she had been exhausted physically and spiritually by the last duel with Synalon for possession of the Sky City they both coveted. Besides, she had wanted to believe her sister capable of making such a noble choice as suicide over imprisonment or exile.

  Wary of pursuit, Nightwind swiveled his head back and forth constantly studying the horizon and the sky to both sides. Looking back the way they'd come, he gave a sudden sharp cry.

  Synalon came immediately alert. Her vision wasn't that of an eagle but it was far sharper than an ordinary human's. On a distant knoll almost swallowed by the shadow cast by the City in the noonday sun sat a small figure. Before the figure a great black cruciform object lay on the ground. Synalon's eyebrows arched in surprise. Her thin lips drew back in a smile. With pressure of her knee, she set Nightwind into a long banking curve and headed back.

  The procession turned into the alley and stopped. Quiet lay like a blanket on the streets. From the center of the City came wild cries of celebration. Most of the population had massed in the great Circle of the Skywell to acclaim the new queen. Of the rest, some waged a final hopeless fight against the invaders in back streets and warehouses, or huddled behind shuttered windows fearful of the forces that stalked the City in the Sky that day. The backs of deserted buildings looked down blankly upon the knot of the faithful.

  It was an unremarkable wall constructed of seamless gray stone shot through with veins of dull green, worn to a glossy smoothness by the passage of wind and countless ages. Like the older structures in the City, like the bulk of the City itself, it was a gigantic crystal grown in the ages before the coming of man to the Southern Continent. Rooms, passageways and doors had been hollowed out of it by the patient labor of clawed hands.

  A hand like those of the original builders, dark green, finely scaled, possessed of thumb and three clawed fingers, held aloft a black diamond that smoked as though plucked from a furnace. The huge gem's facets glittered dully, not in the light of a sun masked by a high cloud layer but with an inner luminescence of its own. The worshippers fell silent. The hand pressed the stone against the wall. The jewel smoked furiously and a section of wall vanished soundlessly, leaving no trace.

  The jewel bearer stepped through the oblong opening into a passage that had lain hidden for a hundred centuries and more. Heads bowed, twinned hearts pounding with religious rapture, the faithful followed him into the dark - into the Dark. No light penetrated the downward-winding tunnel. The noonday light outside seemed incapable of crossing the threshold of the secret passage. But the giant diamond carried by the leader provided enough dark illumination of its own to guide its bearer and his twelve followers.

  Downward, ever downward they trudged. Darkness deepened, became tangible. No fear touched their hearts. The Dark was their element. They drew comfort and strength from it. The expectation of a great gift grew among the faithful.

  They came to a door. It was twice as tall as a man, made of oak and bound with brass that showed no tarnish, no sign of the ages that had washed over this door like a flowing stream. All was illusion: the door was not wood and brass. It was wrought of a substance no mortal could work or even alter. The physical aspect given to a binding force of incredible power, it defied any other power in the world.

  Any other but one. And the source of that power was only lately rediscovered.

  The twelve threw themselves to their knees. The thirteenth raised the smoking jewel above his head and began a reptilian hissing, a triumphant chant.

  In the bosom of the Dark a Demon slept, as it had for ten millennia. Hatred and despair washed over one another in an endless ebon swirl. But lately the Demon's dreams were shot through with bright threads of hope. Presences long unfelt had drawn near, uttering soft words, seductive words, promising that which the sleeping Demon desired above all things: freedom.

  Or had that been another fragment of dream, the mind of the sleeper taunting itself with a hope it knew must remain unconsum-mated?

  The nebulous awareness of the being existed without volition, could not summon events into focus or bring back recollections. It had no tests of truth or falsity. Still, the memories of newborn promise carried a sharpness, an appealing immediacy, that set them apart from the vagueness of dreaming. Like the memories of soft white flesh, and pain, and pleasure . . .

  Something tickled the Sleeper's mind. It stirred within its womb, within the stone that imprisoned its limbs as the old enchantment fettered its mind. For a long moment the Sleeper believed it was just another taunti ng shard of dream. Or did it hear once more the voices of those who had worshipped it in the days of glory, lost so long ago?

  It sensed presences. As the words of the Song of Awakening came to it, a pulsation of power ran through the Sleeper's body and mind. The Demon's consciousness began to swim upward through the clouds that had lain so long on it. Many times in eons past it had attempted this crazy hegira. But now it felt the singing certainty that this time would be different.

  'Well met, cousin,' Synalon called cheerfully as she circled Nightwind in to a landing on the rounded hilltop. Prince Rann looked up from contemplating his warbird's corpse. The fallen eagle was a twin to Synalon's save that it bore a blazing scarlet crest. It lay spread out on the hillside before him, the butt of a Zr'gsz javelin protruding from beneath one wing.

  'Rather absurd of you to say so, isn't it?' he asked, rubbing at the gingery stubble on his chin. He noticed her nakedness then, and looked away, blushing.

  She laughed and jumped down from Nightwind's back. The eagle spread its wings above the corpse of its nest brother and uttered a single desolate cry.

  'A pity about the bird,' the princess said. 'He was such a noble creature.'

  Still looking away from her, Rann nodded. 'I suppose it's reassuring,' he finally said. 'How do you mean?'

  'To know that I can feel remorse over the death of a friend.'

  Laughing easily, Synalon sat beside him. The warmth of her body washed over him. He began to fidget. He was a small, intense man who seemed put together of wire and spring steel. His eyes and swept-back hair were tawny, his face displaying the same haughty, almost ascetically classic sculpting as Synalon's. The perfection of his features was marred by a tiny network of white knife scars stretched over the skin like a mask. The nearness and nudity of his cousin was for him as exquisite a torture as any he might devise for victims of his sadism.

  'You're turning soft,' she taunted him. Then, as mercurial as always, she switched from banter to flashing anger. 'Perhaps that's why you lost my City for me. The security of my realm lay in your hands. You let it slip!'

  He jumped to his feet, glad of the chance to get away from the smell of her, the feel of her provocatively bare thigh pressing against his purple-clad leg.

  'You're a fine one to talk,' he said quietly. He paced away. His scabbard flapped empty at his hip. His scimitar had plummeted to earth sheathed in the body of Darl Rhadaman, Moriana's champion. 'You fought the real battle. What happened in the air was secondary. I grant you, I failed to stop Moriana's entry into the City. But ultimately, cousin dear, it was up to you to prove your superiority in a test of
wills and magic, face to face, alone.' He turned back to regard her sardonically. 'And evidently it was a battle you lost. Or else you wouldn't be in such . . . dishabille.'

  She leaped to her feet.

  'Don't lecture me, half man! How can a eunuch such as you understand what I have lost this day?'

  'What you have thrown away this day!' His face was taut and pale under the lattice of scars. 'With the favor of the Dark Ones, you thought, no price lay beyond your grasp. And now look what you've won. Exile to a lonely hilltop without so much as a cloak to cover your nakedness. A prize fit for a queen - or nothing!'

  She smiled at him, savage and evil, raised her arms and stretched so that her heavy breasts rode lazily up her ribcage. His tongue flicked lizardlike over his lips. He turned away again.

  'What will you do now, cousin?' Synalon asked silkily. 'Will you leave me on this hilltop fate has set me to rule?'

  His head drew down between his shoulders.

  'You know I cannot do that.' For the first time in Synalon's long memory, the prince's voice was hoarse and choked with emotion. She laughed musically in delight.

  'No, of course you can't abandon me. Because, while you hate me, you love me far more. And vastly more even than that, you desire me, O cousin Prince!'

  Abruptly, Synalon flung forth her arm. Blue lightning coruscated from outstretched fingertips and struck Rann full in the back. He uttered a croaking cry and fell forward onto his knees, arms hugging his chest, bobbing and gasping in a paroxysm of agony.

  'And because you fear me, my good and loyal Prince,' said Synalon, sneering. 'Because you fear me well.'

  Painfully Rann struggled to his feet.

  'It would . . . seem that you're the one - oh! - who grows soft,' he said, enunciating each word as if a dagger twisted in his bowels at every syllable. 'Still you fail ... to exact the final price of my failure.'

  'I'd prefer having you available to redeem yourself,' she said in a matter-of-fact tone. 'You are adroit, for all that your recent efforts have not exactly been crowned with success. And you're a tough bastard, Rann. A normal man would at this moment be lying before me unconscious or dead from the bolt I gave you.'