WoP - 01 - War of Powers

by Robert E. Vardeman

  Eventually Jennas reached for a small brass bell and rang it twice. The hide flap of the tent opened promptly to admit an aged helot woman. 'The little one has had a long day,' Jennas told the servant. 'See her bedded down, Unphaia.' The hetwoman bent to kiss her daughter on the forehead. Then, clucking, the old woman herded the girl out of the tent and off to bed.

  Fost sat staring obliviously into his cup, concentrating on keeping his mind white and empty. A touch on his shoulder made him start.

  Jennas stood over him. Even in his numbed state, he was aware how splendid and barbaric she looked, the gold circlets around her brawny arms, heavy gold loops dangling from her ears and her shapeless garb of fur and hide not managing to hide the ripeness of her figure. The lamplight turned her skin to bronze.

  'If you turn inward, you won't come out, my friend,' she said. Her fingers stroked down his arm.

  He raised his hand to hers, meaning to pluck it away, sickened by the very touch. He paused, fingers hovering over the back of her strong hand. Don't blame her, a mental voice told him. She wasn't responsible for the blandishments of Kleta-atelk's guardian - nor the way you responded to them.

  His hand closed on hers in a desperate grip. She knelt. Her breath was warm on his cheek, honeyed by the wine. She kissed his ear. He snatched his head away as though her lips burned him.

  She put a hand to his jaw and forced him to face her. The lamp's glow turned her pillow-soft, but she was immensely strong, perhaps as strong as he. Though he tried to resist, he shortly found himself looking into her eyes.

  'When our young are taught to ride, sometimes they are thrown and hurt by accident and become afraid,' she said gently. 'We make them mount again promptly and ride, lest their initial fear stay with them always.' She kissed him on the lips. He did not respond, but neither did he draw away. He clung fiercely to her hand, the only anchor he could find in a chaotic world.

  'I know what befell you today. The thralls told me.' She took his hand and laid it on her breast.

  The flesh was warm and vibrant with life. Her heart beat powerfully and fast beneath his fingers. Slowly she drew his hand down until his fingers slid into her jerkin and touched her nipple. Her other hand slipped from his face and began unlacing his tunic. She kissed him again, and he returned it. Her tongue was strong and carried the taste of wine.

  His tunic opened. Jennas turned her attention to her own belt. Then her fingers groped for Fost's crotch. He moaned and tried to draw away. Leaving his hand clutching her breast as fervently as it had earlier clutched her hand, she grabbed the back of his neck and crushed his face to hers. Her other hand worked vigorously up and down.

  In spite of himself Fost was becoming aroused. He kneaded the handful of her breast, marveling at its firmness. He squeezed her thumb-thick nipples. She moaned and undulated against him.

  Her mouth parted from his. Her head dropped, her short red hair tickling down his stomach. He gasped and arched his back as her lips enfolded the head of his trembling manhood.

  Unbidden, the Face appeared behind his eyes, lips parted, teeth agleam. With a strangled shout, he tore himself from Jennas's embrace and rolled off the pile of furs.

  Jennas leaped to her feet. The short leather skirt she had donned after the battle fell from her hips, leaving her naked from the waist down. The fur of her sex was a vertical red-orange bar, pointing down between smooth, muscular thighs. One brown-tipped breast protruded from the front of her jerkin, jiggling to the angry rhythm of her breathing. Her eyes blazed.

  'Be that way then!' she raged at Fost. 'Be like a timid virgin boy, afraid of your own appetites! Go and become a Josselit, for all I care!'

  'Jennas, I . . . ' 'Enough of words! You fought like a man today - claim your reward like one now.' Contempt edged her voice. 'Or did Ust send us a eunuch for a champion?'

  His head fogged with wine and unwilling passion, Fost got unsteadily to his feet. 'You can't talk to me like that.'

  She slapped him. His head rocked and lights flickered inside his skull. He reeled back, blinking and rubbing his cheek.

  When his vision cleared, his jaw slumped in amazement. The hetwoman had thrown herself down on all fours on the furs, presenting her naked hindquarters to him. Her buttocks were sculpted hillocks of muscle. The pink lips of her vulva lay open, inner secretions reflecting the light like a jewel. The thick, urgent odor of her excitement filled his nose and set his heart beating even faster.

  'Well?' she asked. The word was a challenge. She confronted him with a choice: Take her or become a monk.

  She was right, you know, the courier thought. A bestial growl rose from his throat as his brief anger dissolved into passion. He dropped to his knees, laid hands on her buttocks. The flesh was like soft, warm marble. He throbbed with unbearable tension. Shaking with lust, he thrust forward.

  Jennas uttered a guttural exclamation of exultation as his manhood filled her.

  "I simply cannot see why you waste time mooning about this dreary valley.' Erimenes fluttered spectral hands in exasperation. 'Why trouble yourself over Fost? Forget him. The key to everlasting life lies within your grasp. Take it. You can seize the City in the Sky, and with your beauty and power enjoy an unending succession of far more skilled lovers.'

  'I wish you wouldn't go on so,' Moriana said, glancing in irritation at the spirit. 'You're just bored.' She began pacing to and fro by the campfire.

  'Indeed I am, as any sensible soul would be in such tediously bucolic surroundings.' He crossed an arm over his chest and laid elbow in palm. He tapped fingers against his chin, an action Moriana found disconcerting, since both fingers and chin lacked substance. Then he brightened. 'The time needn't be a total waste though. You could amuse yourself - and me - by engaging in self-stimulation. There's ample wood about. You could carve yourself a dildo of heroic proportions and . . .'

  'Enough!' snapped Moriana. She laid elbow in palm and tapped her own chin in unconscious imitation of the sage. 'I wonder how Fost fares.'

  'You know the great oaf lives, at any rate. Why, he positively seems to have covered himself in glory.' A sly look stole across the wispy blue features. 'Forget him, I say. It's for your own good. You saw the way that she-bear of a hetwoman cast covetous eyes on him, and her with mammaries the size of crystal balls! He's reveling this minute my lady, with never a thought for you.'

  Moriana rounded on him, hair flying. 'That's not true!''Prove me wrong.' Erimenes smirked. 'Employ your scrying spell.' Moriana chewed her lip for a moment, staring at Erimenes, who assumed a look of such lugubrious and obviously false concern for her welfare that she almost refused. But curiosity nagged at her. What was her lover doing? He wasn't the most continent man she'd ever known, and that red-haired hetwoman was definitely handsome in a coarse, emphatic way. Nor was Erimenes - damn his vaporous eyes! - in error about the way she looked at Fost. Moriana paced a minute more, then went to the nearby strem and dropped to her knees.

  'I don't doubt they'll adopt him into their clan,' said Erimenes, his voice drifting over her shoulder. 'He'll marry the chieftainess and raise up a brood of squalling, hirsute brats. Each spring he and she will ride off to the raid together, with matching bear skulls adorning their heads. Ahh,' he sighed loudly, 'a charming picture.'

  Moriana's ears burned furiously as she hurried through the words of the spell. The water stirred and grew luminous.

  'I'll show you, Erimenes,' she flung back at the spirit. 'Fost will not betray my trust. He'll spurn that husky slut. . .'Her words trailed off as an image coalesced. 'Your definition of "spurn" and mine differ, lady,' Erimenes said judiciously, leaning forward to peer into the water.

  It required a moment for the princess's eyes to adjust to the gloom of the picture. It took more time for her mind to make sense of what she saw. A woman on elbow and knees, a man kneeling behind her on his knees . . .

  She realized what she was looking at and breath hissed inward.'She seems to find his spurning most salubrious,' Erimenes said. In stony silence
Moriana plunged her hand into the water, dispelling the image. She stood and looked at the spirit's wavering form. Her eyes were like green metal.

  'We leave in the morning,' she said.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Stretching, Moriana emerged from the tent. It was of light, oiled skins stitched together and could be rolled small enough to fit in Fost's knapsack. Shivering in the chill dawn, Moriana thanked fortune she had it.

  A light fall of snow had dusted the valley, draining color and contrast from the landscape. Large flakes fluttered down. She hugged herself, blew fog from her lips and shook out her hair. At least the snow hid the ominous scattering of bones at the head of the long valley.

  'Are we ready to move on yet?' Erimenes inquired from within the tent. 'This dismal valley was dull enough to begin with. Now it's cold and damp as well. Let's move.'

  Teeth chattering, Moriana glanced at the tent. 'Why should the cold and damp bother you? You're snug in that nice, warm jug. Brrr.'

  'Snug? I'd call this intolerably cramped.' The scholar's complaints had an unusually bitter tone this morning. 'You cannot conceive how dreary it is within this wretched pot. Would that I had a body again!'

  Moriana stooped and reentered the tent to wrap her heavy cloak around her shoulders. 'Do you mean that? You're immortal, Erimenes. Would you truly trade that for corporeal existence - the discomfort, the transience?'

  'What good is immortality if one cannot truly live? To feel, to love, to experience!'

  'I thought you got all those through others.' She sat on her bedroll and brought out the magic gruel bowl and began to eat the bland porridge.

  'You think so?' Erimenes asked scornfully. 'What would you rather do, make love to a lusty, well-endowed young buck - or watch another do it?'

  Moriana laughed uneasily, her mind darting to what the scrying spell had shown her the night before. Her last spoonful of gruel seemed to curdle in her mouth. She forced it down and made herself think of other things.

  The Valley of Crushed Bones was foremost in her mind. The day before, she'd spent fretting about Fost, summoning up scryings in the water and watching until she grew too upset to look any more, pacing like a beast in a pen and then dropping to her knees by the water to make the spell again. She hadn't ventured far up the narrow valley.

  Her lack of exploration, she admitted to herself, grew as much from trepidation as concern for Fost - which, she now assured herself, had been misplaced. Those bones, those bleached, broken bones . . . what did they signify?

  For all that he had spoken ominously of the Valley before, it seemed Erimenes knew little of it but the name. Perhaps a glacier had come this way and uprooted some ancient burial ground in passing, then retreated, leaving bones strewn about the Valley. Moriana doubted that explanation. She knew how glaciers had advanced across the once-temperate lands that men now called the Southern Waste to swallow ages-old Athalau. She'd never heard of glaciers retreating in the region though. Where the ice once took hold, it clung.

  If nothing else, the bonefield was the last serious obstacle between Moriana and Athalau, except for the glacier itself in which the city lay entrapped. The Ramparts didn't soar as high here as they did around the Gate of the Mountains. The walls of the Valley of Crushed Bones rose abruptly to become sheer faces of rock, the flanks of two mighty peaks. At the top of the Valley the walls closed to within twenty yards of each other in a narrow pass. And beyond, the land lay downward, down to the City in the Glacier.

  She ate her fill, for she wished to be well nourished in case the solution to the enigma of the Valley proved a continuing danger. Finishing, she stowed the bowl and took down the tent, packing it away as well. Erimenes grumbled all the while, but his comments didn't seem directed at her. She paid him no mind.

  At last she was ready to proceed. She stood with the knapsack slung over her shoulder, gazing up the Valley. The snow had stopped. The day lay still and white beneath a low, grey sky. She sighed and started walking.

  Guilt nibbled at the edges of her mind. I'm abandoning Fost again, she thought, but immediately He abandoned me! flashed through her mind. The way he rutted with that redheaded slut!

  She shook her head. Better to contemplate the nearness of her goal. Reaching the city without Fost would be a boon, for it meant there would exist no question as to who should possess the amulet. Moriana felt something very much like love for the courier - or at least I did, she mentally amended - but it couldn't compare to her love for the City that was her home.

  Synalon. The name burned like an ember in her mind. Moriana recalled the scenes of brutality and repression she had witnessed in her beloved City, both in person and by means of her spells. Nor would her sister rest content with imposing an iron yoke on the people of the City. She meant to restore the Sky City's dominion over the Sundered Realm.

  Could she accomplish it? Moriana didn't doubt she could. Synalon's sorcerous powers were great, even though the aid of Istu was denied her, for that part of the Sleeper's mind she could tap into would react with venomous hatred to the being that had summoned it up only to cause it consummate agony. And the military might of the City, though not large in terms of manpower, was formidable. Without venturing far from their randomly-floating fortress, the Sky Citizens could control the Great Quincunx that covered the very heartland of the Realm. From Lake Wir to the Southern Steppe, from the Gulf of Veluz to the Thails, the City could dominate the vital trade arteries of the continent.

  What her sister would do with all the Realm under her command was something Moriana shrank from considering. Synalon had already shown herself willing to dabble in the dark and grisly rites of the ancients. With all the wealth and populace of a continent, who knew what she could do? Send ten thousand highborn virgins to shrieking impalement upon the stony member of the Vicar of Istu to win the demon's aid and forgiveness? Assuredly Synalon was capable of it. Release black Istu from his millennia-long durance and subject the world once again to the foulness of the Demon of the Dark Ones? Moriana shuddered. Her sister wouldn't balk at such a thing.'And with the resources of the Realm at her disposal, perhaps she could succeed even in undoing the work of Felarod the Great.

  Moriana raised her head to face the icy blast that blew down the Valley. She could go on alone now with no regrets. She had reminded herself of the gravity of her quest; to succeed, no sacrifice was too great.

  The Valley rose at a gradually increasing angle. Before long, Moriana found the going difficult. Snow had made the dead grass slippery. Head down, she scrambled upwards, buffeted by the wind until her feet flew from beneath her and she went face first into the snow.

  Grabbing wildly for support, her fingers closed around something smooth and hard. Turning over and sitting up, she brought the object up to examine.

  'Gods!' 'There you have why this is known as the Valley of Crushed Bones,' Erimenes said.

  The thing in Moriana's hand was a sunbleached human bone, probably a femur. One end had been splintered by some awful force. Normally anything but squeamish, Moriana was horrified by her prize and flung it far away from her. It rebounded off the looming wall of the canyon with a loud clatter.

  Picking herself up, Moriana surveyed the ground ahead. The cliffs were vertical here, save for the huge protrusions of what looked like pink granite humped against the base of either face.

  'At least you won't have to wade through the snow for a while,' Erimenes observed. Moriana sucked in her cheeks, staring pensively ahead.

  The spirit was correct. For a hundred yards the ground was bare. Not bare merely of snow but of vegetation, large rocks and the bone fragments strewn all around where the princess stood. It was as if the stretch of ground were regularly graded and cleared.