Istu Awakened

by Robert E Vardeman;Victor Milan

  'Come along,' she said, grabbing Fost's arm. 'Let's get back to the inn before dark. I'm tired of watching the proletarian regime in action.'

  The gradually opening door brought Fost awake with all senses wire-taut. A greenish dawnlight spilled across the floor from the partially shuttered window. Outside, a handcart creaked and thumped over the potholes in the street.

  A hesitant footfall sounded; another. Fost lay still, forcing himself to breathe with the metronomic regularity of a sleeper, while he mentally estimated distances. In a leap he came to his feet, broadsword snatched from the scabbard hung at the bed's head post.

  'Eek!' The innkeeper cringed back against the doorpost, eyes popping, trying to pull his head into the collar of his jerkin. He looked like a frightened turtle. 'P-please, gentles. I meant no harm!'

  Fost became acutely aware that he stood naked in the middle of the floor menacing a three-foot dwarf with a sword nearly as long as the dwarf. Moriana stirred on the bed, wondering drowsily why her nude body was so precipitately uncovered.

  'Fost, what's - oh!'

  His initial fear dissolved into embarrassment. He resorted to the old masculine position: blustering rage.

  'What do you mean by this, sneaking into our rooms? Come to murder us in our beds,no doubt!'

  If the dwarf shook any harder, pieces of his body would come rattling to the floor.

  'No, no!' he moaned.

  'Aha! You voyeuristic scoundrel! Come to peep at the Princess Moriana in her nakedness, then, are you?'

  'But the princess is so skinny and malproportioned, gentle sir. Why would I do that?'

  Moriana cleared her throat. The conversation was clearly out of control.

  'Just what is it you want, innkeeper?' she asked, sitting and making no effort to cover herself.

  The dwarf glanced at Fost, who was still standing with sword menacingly pointed, then made the effort to calm himself.

  'It's the militia. They're searching all over town. You must flee at once.'

  'But why? What do they want from us?'

  'Because of the news,' the dwarf choked out. 'The Sky City has stopped!'

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The ship sang. The lyre sang harmony.

  Soprano sang the rigging, squeaking on the blocks, sighing in the warm west wind. Bass sang the hull, moaning and cracking as seams opened and closed to the play of the sea. High sang the lyre, as silver and fleeting and lonely as the cries of seabirds. And low sang the lyre in bell-shaped tones. Standing by the starboard rail with Moriana at his side, Fost thought he'd never heard a sweeter sound or one sadder.

  The song dwindled and became one with the past. Fost and Moriana looked up at the ship's captain, who had folded his unlikely body between two crenellations of the stout forecastle looming over the deck. He smiled and inclined his head.

  'It was Jirre herself who taught me to play,' he said.

  Moriana turned questioningly to Fost. He answered with a silent shrug. That the captain of the ship Wyvern was mad was indisputable. But knowing him as he did, Fost couldn't be wholly convinced he wasn't telling the truth.

  Five days ago Fost's brain had reeled in incredulity at the innkeeper's tidings: the Sky City had stopped. Impossible! was his first reaction. The City had not simply kept immutably to following the Great Quincunx for all Fost's relatively short life, it had done so since before even humans had seized the City from its rightful owners eight thousand years ago. It had done so for two thousand years of the Hissers' tenure, since the end of the War of Powers when Felarod had confined the once free-floating City to its pattern above the center of the continent . . .

  Since the War of Powers not even the Hissers had been able to alter the City's course. Since the binding of Istu.

  But Istu was no longer bound.

  The word had come first to the Outer Town courtesy of a Wirixer factor who lived in a sprawling marble pile built during the occupation by the Northern Barbarians. The Wirixers had a sorcerous communications network, as did the Sky Citizens, though the Sky City had had no direct representative in North Keep for several years. The news that the City had come to a halt in the air after passing over Wirix soon spread to the Keep itself. The reaction was immediate.

  The grapevine hummed with news that Chairman Samilchut was drafting an offer of alliance to be transmitted to the Zr'gsz, though how it was to be sent was still uncertain. The Wirixer wasn't going to do it, not while his home city was besieged by an army of the Fallen Ones. While it was true, as Fost said, that even with Istu on their side the Hissers would take years to reduce North Keep, Samilchut deemed it wise to try to get on the good side of a power that could stop the ten-thousand-year progress of the City in the Sky. The fact that she would be a long time losing didn't encourage the dictator to seek war.

  It took no great deductive powers to realize that the former ruler of the Sky City, onetime ally of the Fallen Ones, might make a nice gift for North Keep's chairman to send the People as a token of her friendship. Fost and Moriana had found themselves shivering in the wet dawn wind on the swaybacked docks of the Outer Town, wondering how they were going to reach the ships anchored out in the harbor.

  Teeth chattering, Fost eyed the ships. Apparently no one left small boats moored at the dock overnight and whatever boatmen plied the harbor were still in bed on this bleak morning. He wondered if they could swim out with their dogs to one of the vessels. He and jennas had escaped Tolviroth Acerte in similar fashion a few months ago plowing right into the bay on the backs of their bears. This time, they couldn't be sure of the reception awaiting them once they clambered over a strange ship's gunwales and asked for asylum.

  His gaze kept coming back to one ship in particular. It was the largest, anchored next to the Tolvirot warcraft. Fost knew little of ships but could tell there was something peculiar about this one. Its proportions were wrong, as if its designers had set out to make it one thing and midway decided to change it into another. And it had a familiar aura to it as well, a combination of sloppiness and a shipshapeness that reminded him of a man he knew to be dead.

  'Down there,' Moriana said, tugging at his sleeve. 'There's a boat.' Bumping its nose against the seawall like an amorous dolphin bobbed a square-prowed dinghy. They walked the hundred yards to the boat. Three men stood on the deck near it. One leaning against a pile of cordage was obviously the crewman who had rowed the boat to shore. Another, a tall storklike man in a flapping black cloak whose sleeves fluttered in the wind as he gestured gave the impression he was trying to become airborne. He had to be a local merchant.

  And the third . . .

  Fost stared hard. He was well above average height for a dwarf, but there was no mistaking the shortness of limb and the sturdiness of body. His kinky hair was a golden cloud floating around his head - no pure-blooded dwarf had any but straight hair. As the disbelieving courier grew closer, the aristocratic fineness of the man's profile became apparent, another blatantly un-dwarven characteristic.

  'What a strange man,' Moriana whispered. 'I've never seen the likes of him before.'

  Fost said nothing. His eyes remained on the man. He was certain there couldn't be two such men in the world - and the one Fost knew was dead.

  The golden dwarf turned in irritation at the intrusion. Immediately, his face transformed into a mask of sheer joy. Ortil Onsulomulo smiled and bobbed his outsized head. Luck had finally smiled on Fost and had continued during the past five days aboard the Wyvern.

  'Yes, a goddess taught me the arts of the lyre. Do you doubt it?' He struck a chord and the listeners felt their eyes fill with tears.He strummed another chord and mirth bubbled up inside. A third and Fost and Moriana felt that some ultimate truth hovered just beyond their fingertips waiting for the tiniest exertion before they could grasp it.

  'No, Captain Onsulomulo,' Moriana said, shaking her head. 'I don't doubt it.'

  'I'm sure the captain speaks metaphorically,' put in Erimenes.

  Onsulomulo shook his head stu
bbornly. His jaw set and the expression on his cheerful face hardened.

  'I speak unvarnished truth, blue ghost who thinks too much about screwing.' He bounced to his feet and tucked the instrument under one arm. 'The Wise Ones love me. Because Fate has cursed me, the goddesses and gods pity me.'

  'I can almost believe it,' muttered Fost. He had last seen Onsulomulo peering over the rail of the dwarf's ship Miscreate, which was being drawn up in a waterspout formed by an air elemental Synalon had called to devastate Kara-Est harbor. It was impossible that Ortil Onsulomulo lived. Yet it obviously took more than a howling elemental to stop him.

  The courier still had the eerie feeling that the Three and Twenty kept their eye on him, too, just as Jennas maintained. Not only was the half-dwarf captain overjoyed to see him, he insisted on providing Fost, Moriana and the ghosts and dogs immediate transport to High Medurim - free. And more than mere transportation, Onsulomulo also offered the pair the protection of his escort, the TMG dromon Tiger.

  'You, my friend,' Onsulomulo had said, hugging Fost to his barrel chest, 'you are the source of all my good fortune!'

  It was hard to deny. Instead of smashing him and his ship to splinters, the air sprite had deposited Onsulomulo and the Miscreate in the Central Plaza of Kara-Est with loving care. It had presented the city's conquerors with a knotty problem. No matter what their eventual plans of conquest, the City in the Sky couldn't afford to alienate either the dwarves or the Joreans. The fact that since siring his bizarre bastard Ortil's father Jama Onsulomulo had become Minister of Education for the western Jorean province of Sundown made it difficult to adopt the expedient solution of bashing in Ortil's head and claiming the elemental had killed him in combat. Ortil Onsulomulo was just not the kind of neutral one could kill with impunity, in the heat of battle or otherwise.

  At the advice of Pavel Tonsho, former Chief Deputy of Kara-Est now the governor of the conquered city, the Sky Citizens had given Onsulomulo a ship, crew and a fat indemnity and sent him on his way.

  The Wyvern seemed designed especially for Ortil Onsulomulo. Like him it was a freak, a crossbreed. Laid down in the Estil shipyards as a gigantic round-sterned cargo ship, its construction had been halted midway when the backing company had gone bankrupt. The receivers couldn't afford to complete a vessel of this size, but neither did they wish a half-constructed ship to go to waste. So the hull was cut down. The Wyvern was transformed into a cog. And it was ugly.

  It had just slid - or waddled - down the ways into Kara-Est harbor when the Sky City appeared overhead. No one knew or cared if it was seaworthy; the crew sent aboard after the battle got horribly seasick on a bay as smooth as a mirror, which wasn't a good sign. But no one said the Sky City had to offer Onsulomulo guarantees, just a ship.

  He took it.

  Perhaps no other mariner could have sailed the Wyvern. Probably none other skilled enough would have stayed aboard longer than three minutes. Onsulomulo fell in love with the ship at once.

  He did more than sail her. He took her up the Karhon Channel to Tolviroth Acerte, a journey which made the refugee Estil seamen wonder if they wouldn't have been better off taking their chances with Prince Rann. At the City of Bankers, he took on a cargo so valuable that he hired a Shark class dromon from TMG to squire him to High Medurim, the port of delivery.

  As the Wyvern's boats had warped her around the end of the breakwater, the fugitives had speculated among themselves as to the nature of the cargo. Moriana thought Wyvern carried strategic materials vital to Imperial security; Ziore, priceless art objects; Erimenes staunchly held out for aphrodisiacs. Knowing High Medurim and its Emperor Teom the Decadent, Fost tended to agree with Erimenes.

  As it happened, he'd been as wrong as the others. He felt the deck quiver under his feet.

  'Good morrow, Magister Banshau!' called Onsulomulo, launching himself into space off a battered crossbeam. Fost shut his eyes as the dwarf dropped ten feet from where he had been inspecting the mast and landed jarringly on the deck. None the worse for the experience, the captain strolled past Fost to greet the newcomer who had emerged blinking and puffing into the daylight. 'I trust the morning finds you well?'

  'I am not!' roared the corpulent man blocking the hatch. 'I couldn't possibly be well, forced to ride in this wallowing monstrosity. How you could think for one instant that I might be, completely eludes me.'

  'I thought you Wirixers were used to boat as such,' said Eri-

  menes. 'You live in the middle of a lake, after all.

  The man glared at Erimenes with beady black eyes almost lost in a face like a full moon. He reached chubby, ring-encrusted hands to straighten the square green felt hat, then smoothed the golden silk cord fastening his purple robe about his vast equator. He shuffled bright orange toe slippers into a wider stance, as if bracing to attack the spirit, and blew out through his moustache like an angry walrus.

  'Of all the nerve, you ghastly blue violation of the laws of nature!' he bellowed. 'You insult my vast intelligence! Wir is a lake, and this, as even the ghost of a discredited philosopher ought to be able to see, is an ocean.'

  'A discredited philosopher, am I?' bristled Erimenes. 'You bilious cretin!'

  'Justly are Wirixer sorcerers renowned for their wisdom,' Ziore declared in fervor.

  In unison, Fost and Moriana sighed. This was the cargo Onsulomulo carried to High Medurim, the cargo that rated escort by the Tiger. A Magister of the Academy of the Arcane Arts in Wirix was a rare commodity, but not rare enough to justify the enormous expense of TMG protection. There had to be more to Zloscher Banshau than met the eye.

  A three-way screaming match ensued among the two Athalar genies and Banshau. Captain Onsulomulo stood to one side smiling slyly. The mage's elephantine rage had been deflected from him. Truly, he was beloved of the gods.

  With common accord, Moriana and Fost unslung their satchel straps. They looped them over a belaying pin and went below. The music had gone out of the day.

  Moriana yelped as a wave clawed at her feet before falling back to lose itself in the chaos of the sea. A few more quick heaves on the line by grinning Tolvirot sailers and she was swaying above the decks of the Tiger, dripping legs dangling from the boatswain's chain.

  She was too high up for Fost to reach her. Tiger's first officer stepped up beside him, reached, plucked the tall blonde woman from the chair and handed her down as if she were a child. Tim Devistri was the tallest human Fost had ever seen. He had the mahogany skin of a Jorean tanned the black of Nevrym anhak by the sun. It was all but unheard of to find a Jorean serving as a mercenary of any kind, not that the TMG sailors thought of themselves as mercenaries.

  'Why so skittish?' asked Fost. 'I thought you were used to being up in the air.'

  'Over land,' the princess told him. 'That doesn't come right up and grab you.'

  Ignoring a lewd comment from a female Tolvirot sailor, Fost said, 'You know, you've turned the most amazing gray-green. Almost as if you had Vridzish blood.'

  She turned deathly pale. He let go, stepped back and watched killing rage in her eyes change into shocked hurt.

  'Forgive me, I didn't know. That is, I was thoughtless . . .'

  'No,' she said, shaking her head sadly, 'I'm the one who is sorry. I don't know why I reacted like that.' She gave him a wan smile and squeezed his arm.

  He watched her turn, wondering what had happened to her in Thendrun. It couldn't have been pleasant, he decided.

  Captain Nariv Shend took them for a tour of her ship. She was a stocky woman of middle height and years. Incredibly broad shoulders and back showed she still took her turn pulling an oar, as did many TMG captains. There were no slave rowers on a TMG ship, only skilled and highly paid professionals.

  At the moment, those professionals lounged about the narrow deck, the men barechested, the women in scant black halters. Others slept in the crowded hammocks slung between the benches below while the Tiger beat southwest under sail.

  Bareheaded so that her short-cropp
ed black hair was ruffled by the breeze, the captain herself led them on a tour of the ship.

  'A Tolvirot dromon's the epitome of the naval architect's art,' she informed them in a voice gone husky from bawling orders over the years. 'Tiger's the latest design. She lives up to her name, too. You'll not find a tiger shark sleeker or deadlier. We're only fifteen feet shorter than the tub Wyvern -' She gestured with contempt at the larger ship, which even in the mild sea wallowed worse than the slender warcraft. '- but we're less than half as broad beamed and don't displace a fifth of what she does. And look at this.' She bent over the starboard rail and pointed down at the hull. When the ship surged up as it came off the crests, they saw shiny yellow streaked with green. 'Copper sheath. Cuts through water like a knife. And our spur up at the prow can punch through an enemy's hull like a spear.' If Erimenes were here, Fost reflected, he'd make some comment about the captain's propensity for metaphor. Which was only one of the reasons the genie wasn't here.

  She straightened and looked at them. Her eyes were pale blue and almost hidden in wrinkles etched by squinting against the harsh sunlight blazing down and glancing off the broken surface of the sea.

  'That's with rowers, of course. Peaceful times, when there's any kind of wind, we sail and let the rowers off.'

  Fost thumped a boot heel on the stout anhak deck that covered the ship from rail to rail.

  'I thought most rowed vessels were open.'

  'Tiger's fully armored. The deck gives us a good fighting platform in a boarding action. And you see our gunwales are pretty high, and we've these stout mantlets for added protection from archers.'

  She led them around her ship while they looked on and tried to ask informed questions. The Tolvirot sailors watched with amusement but no contempt.

  'And up here in the forecastle, we've got the pump for our flame projector.' She nodded to her first officer, who stood by the forward mast directing a sail drill in a voice like a thunderstorm. He acknowledged and went back to the drill. Like this captain and everyone else aboard, he wore a short blue kilt with a dagger at his belt. But he didn't wear a short-sleeved blue tunic like Shend. His titanic chest was bare. Fost eyed him, hoping that no turn of events pitted them against one another. And in the same thought, he hoped Moriana wasn't eyeing the enormous sailor too closely, either.