WoP - 01 - War of Powers

by Robert E. Vardeman

  Fost heartily thumped the jar with his fist. Erimenes gulped and quieted. Inside the jug, he was susceptible to motion sickness.

  Stuffing Erimenes' jar back into its satchel, Fost set off at a rapid pace into a tunnel the spirit had adjudged to be the way out. A mere twenty paces shut off the light of Athalau. Blackness as thick and heavy as velvet engulfed him. He tried a few experimental steps, bumped his nose into a wall, cursed, and stopped. Even with Erimenes guiding him through this maze of ice-worm tunnels, he might encounter one of the builders. Memory of hard black jaws stayed him.

  'Erimenes? If I let you out, will you promise not to squabble with the Guardian?'

  'Why should I promise you anything?' Fost sighed. A century of life and fourteen of death and Erimenes still acted like a spoiled child.

  'Because I can't see where I'm going.' 'Ahh,' said Erimenes cagily. 'You need my glow to illuminate your way. And Moriana has your torches. You need me. Not the other way around.'

  'Tell me,' said Fost, 'how many centuries would it take before an ice worm decided to see if a discarded clay pot was tasty?'

  'A pot like mine? Oh, very well. But I won't forget this, Fost. You're brutal. Brutal.'

  Fost opened the satchel and allowed Erimenes to waver into being beside him. Fost smiled broadly and got a scornful sniff in return. The light cast wasn't bright, but it did prevent him from colliding with tunnel walls.

  Fost walked rapidly, avoiding the cold walls until a slab of ice slammed sideways into the courier and knocked him off his feet.

  Erimenes shrieked in terror as his jug flew into the air. The satchel cushioned it enough to prevent it from shattering. Another tremor rocked the passageway. Erimenes swirled like a tornado, jittery blue lightning crackling through his being. He squealed like an orphaned shoat.

  'Guardian,' Fost bellowed. 'What's going on?' 'In-intruders, O man.' Agony etched the voice. 'They come from above like the ones who came after you professing to be your friends.' The words came as quickly as any human's. Something caused the Guardian incredible anguish.

  A lull in the quaking gave Fost opportunity to recover Erimenes' satchel and lash it securely to his hip. The philosopher still vibrated.

  'Negligence! Criminal negligence! You, a Realm courier, allow your valuable cargo to be endangered by carelessness. I shall complain to your employer, sir!'

  To think of his employer Gabric - fat, black-moustached and oily-made Fost grin. Gabric had enough grievances with his star courier already. Making off with the property of a sorcerer and failing to report back in were definite violations of the rules.

  'Pain,' moaned the glacier, shuddering. 'Such agony!' Fost felt tons of ice poised over his head. Guardian was shaking himself apart. The courier crawled along as fast as he could. 'What's hurting you, Guardian? Tell me!'

  'The bird folk. They brought with them some demon of northern witchery. Ohhh! It burns. It burns into my bowels!'

  'A fire elemental,' said Erimenes, voice jittering to the tempo of the quakes rocking the tunnel. 'The Sky City men are burning inward.'

  'Yes!' The glacier's voice was the sound of tortured yielding metal. 'Their leader, the lying manling, still lives. They rescue him with the fire fiend. O Felarod, O Athalau, I have failed you!'

  Ice shards erupted from ahead as the tunnel collapsed. Face cut and bleeding from the icy knives, Fost dropped to his knees and crawled. Over the roaring of new ice falling, he heard Erimenes shouting,' . . . other way . . . back up . . . yards . . . tunnel to north!'

  The din deafening him, Fost raced for the cross-tunnel, death nipping at his heels as he went.

  Steam geysered from the hole in the ice. The bird riders huddled around, filling their lungs with the astringent steam and feeling the war between the heat that bathed their fronts and the chill that lashed against their backs. The glacier shifted under them like a beast gone mad.

  Shapeless in his heavy cloak, Maguerr hunched over his geode. 'The elemental is almost through, noble prince,' he said. 'Do you see it yet?'

  Rann rolled onto his back. The city moved around and beneath him in constant randomness. The view above was obscured by debris, flecks and chunks of ice falling to shatter in the streets. All around him, soaring buildings had been hammered to rubble by plummeting blocks.

  'Yes!' he shouted. His hand clawed at the glass brick as though actually clutching the young mage's sleeve. 'A yellow glow - red now - I see it! Water's beginning to drip down this side.'

  Maguerr fought to keep the fire elemental in check. They were fickle, tricky beings, as were the nobles of the Sky City in their own way. A single wavering of purpose, of concentration, and they would all be screaming torches. The salamanders loved to dine on human flesh.

  The bird riders kept well away from the sorcerer. They knew the risks of distracting him at a crucial moment since ice was not a normal diet for fire sprites. Only the strongest spells of obedience known to the Sky City mages forced the fire elementals into contact with water.

  To bore a rescue tunnel down to the injured Prince Rann, the salamander needed fuel, vast amounts of it, to maintain its existence. And it needed to be bribed, as well.

  The bird riders around the steaming hole in the Guardian's back cast glances at their tethered birds, shrilling and thumping wings nervously at the nearness of such potent savagery. Not one of the men could make himself forget that there were now three more birds than riders. No extra mounts had been brought.

  Service to their City in the Sky could be costly. Under their boots, the salamander bored ever deeper into living ice.

  Fost barely noticed the cessation of the tremors. The impossible crashing, like all the world's forges in one, dinned on within his brain. His bruised, weary limbs still felt the glacier's shaking. Had the whole mass of the Guardian's bulk fallen on him he couldn't have ached more.

  He lurched along, sometimes erect, sometimes swaying, sometimes dragging himself on hands that had become senseless clubs of meat. He was conscious of Erimenes hovering at his side like a nervous guardian angel. The philosopher's lips moved ceaselessly, but Fost heard nothing.

  Blinding glare caused him to recoil. Fear clutched at him. Wondering if he had become turned around, he confronted the elemental impaling the helpless Guardian. He blinked, forcing his eyes to confront the hellishly intense light.

  It was the sun. The pale, distant, antarctic sun. He was out, safe, free. The journey through the bowels of a nightmare had ended. He'd lost precious hours in his pursuit of the woman he loved and was far away from the Gate of the Mountains, but the noise and pain battering his head had ceased. And the fear, too, the soul-rotting fear that filled the mouth with bile and the mind with white howling had subsided. He couldn't be trapped in a closed-in space now.

  He pulled himself along the stony, snowy ground. A slope fell away before him. He rolled down, listless, limbs flailing helplessly. At last he hit bottom. The sun dripped warmth into his chilled soul. His eyes closed. He slept and dreamed of. . . nothing . ..

  He awoke. The sun had fallen low and was about to douse its fires in the distant Gulf of Veluz. Dying light stained the world orange.

  Fost was conscious of separation. Shadow. He was somehow shaded and exempted from the dying umber sunset. He raised his head in pain.

  A great, misshapen figure loomed over him, blotting out the sun.

  CHAPTER THREE

  A round swell of petulance drifted up through the Sleeper's mind. Black in blackness, the creature stirred. Its mind and body were bound in eternal darkness. Yet the dreaming mind, the mind beneath, refused to be still.

  Tenuous dream memory fragments of color, feeling, smell, floated through a mind that had not known these alien intruders for ten thousand years. Yet it had known these sensations recently.

  Hadn't it? Colors, pale, pinkish blurs-faces. Thousands of faces, faces of the soft folk, the folk of the ancient foe, turned toward it in fear and awe and - expectation. One face in particular contorted in a fear so intens
e that the Sleeper's mind experienced a thrill like freedom, like the destruction of suns, like a'boiling in stone loins. The soft one was bound and helpless; its nude form awakened desires buried deep in the mind of the demon. Nostrils newly returned (how? why?) had drunk in the sweet smell of fear and excitement and the harsh musk of anticipation, not from the shape upon the altar but from the thronging multitudes. They awaited the captive's degradation like the blessing of a god. In its dream the Sleeper felt soft flesh yielding to it, enfolding it, causing hot pleasure to blast in pulses up its spine.

  And then pain. PAIN! The dream dissolved in a crimson wash of rage. Betrayed! The Sleeper had been betrayed again! Drawn forth from senselessness with the promise of pleasure, it met only the reality of pain.

  Betrayed! The word burst forth and shrieked through the stony corridors of its mind. It was ever this way. From the freedom of the gaps between suns it had been drawn to this insignificant ball of offal. It had been promised consummation of all desires left unsated in the void by those who granted it life. It had reveled for a time in the nearness of benchmarks, by which it measured the immensity of its power. But that had begun to pall. It had come to see it was being used, bound by the strength of its makers to serve beings inferior to itself.

  And then the great struggle with the ancient foes, the time of triumph and ultimate loss. Its lords assured it that it could not be defeated by the pale ones. They had lied. It was brought low, cast down, immurred in stone. The black soul that had known the freedom of galaxies now knew only the inescapable confines of a tiny womb of rock and magic. Worse than this, its intelligence had been forced inward and down into this endless slumber. Awareness came in fleeting fragments, yet it knew it had been more.

  It suffered. Betrayed! Always betrayed. It had served its makers well, and they had abandoned it to this prison. In blackness a black shape twisted in wrath and impotence. Black limbs thrashed at invisible binding wa I Is. The ancient stone remained impervious even to fists capable of smashing mountains. Black waves of hate flowed from the sleeping mind like flaming gas from the explosion of a star.

  In the City above, thousands of other sleepers stirred uneasily. Unlike the Sleeper below, they slumbered only from the labors of the day. Most slept on and soon forgot the formless dread that had for a brief instant invaded their dreams. Others, more sensitive, lay wakeful. Some rose and looked out at the gelid winter stars above with a new uneasy familiarity. Aftera time they, too, shuddered and returned to bed. Perhaps some sensed the nature of that which roused them, but if they did, they kept their minds carefully averted. Some things are too hideous to confront directly.

  Like a great stone cloud, the City in the Sky floated northeastward. Below, the jagged Thail Mountains began to ease and flow into foothills that would become the centra I plain. A thousand feet below, Thail tribesmen in reeking furs shook fetish sticks at the City.

  The City would continue on its path whether or not the Thai lint mystics danced and gibbered. No one, not even the powerful mages who inhabited it, could swerve the Sky City from its slow but unpredictable course around the Great Quincunx of cities. It had followed the Quincunx since the War of Powers had stripped its original owners, the lizardlike folk now called the Fallen Ones, of their dark sorceries and confined them to the City. Humans had seized the Sky City by treachery and cast out the Fallen Ones, who had then shut themselves in a castle in the heights of the Mystic Mountains. They had played no further role in the affairs of the Sundered Realm except as occasional villains in tales told to frighten small children into obedience. The City in the Sky now followed its own whim switching course at the cities forming the sides of the Quincunx - Wirix, Kara-Est, Brev, and Thailot, and Bilsinx at the center. Following no known or knowable scheme, it proceeded a mile every hour of every day.

  Vast wings reached into the sky. Eagles rose from the battlements bearing small, wiry men on their backs. A score, two score, then fifty of the warbirds took wing, orbited the City once and flew off to the south. Thailint watchers cowering in the rocks far below marked the grim manner of the troop. Not even the wild cry of an eagle floated down the wind as the Sky Guardsmen beat their way into the teeth of an icy wind.

  A hundred miles to the south, just beyond the lower reaches of the Thails, they encountered another smaller party flying out of the snow-sheathed Southern Steppes. Now the eagles throated strident cries to greet their kin. The men saluted one another with weapons but did not speak. The party coming from the south brought a slight, still form strapped amid heavy furs on an improvised pallet. The newcomers swung about and took up stations surrounding the three eagles that bore the burden. Though every man was ceaselessly alert, eyes roving the horizon for sign of danger, none expected trouble. The City ruled the skies over the Sundered Realm. But it was not for protection that the men had flown to meet the stretcher bearers.

  Gravely wounded, Prince Rann Etuul, commander of the elite Sky Guard, was being borne home to the City. His men had come unbidden as a guard of honor.

  The Sky Guardsmen did not love their prince. They feared him. But despite his personal taste for inflicting pain, his discipline was severe but fair; enemies of the Sky City and its capricious, lovely ruler provided partners enough for the only sort of lovemaking the eunuch prince was able to partake of. A slacker could expect no mercy at his hands, but those who did their duty well had nothing to fear. Prince Rann did not have his men's love but he had from them respect bordering on worship.

  High-piled clouds paced the City as it floated toward Wirix. With the wind at their backs, the returning bird riders made good time. They returned home just as dusk began to tint the sky scarlet. The unconscious Rann was removed from the stretcher and taken to his chambers in the royal palace. Nervous mages, their shaven skulls painted with cabalistic symbols, hovered like a cloud of gnats. Synalon had convinced them that Rann's life was more precious than their own.

  For three days Rann hovered in the gray no-man's-land between life and death. His injuries should have killed him outright. Yet Rann had retained consciousness until the rescue party had finished strapping him to the makeshift sling. He only vaguely remembered the eagles lifting from the street up through the steaming hole far above. After that, all was black.

  His own natural resilience joined forces with the sorcery of the City. By the third morning after his return, the crisis had passed. At midday his eyes opened, and he asked for refreshment. The mages on duty exchanged looks of almost unbearable relief and went flapping into the hall to spread the good news.

  He was sipping boiled poultry broth when his cousin swept in. Synalon Etuul was a woman in her early twenties, soft-voiced and self-assured to the point of arrogance. Her sorcery and skill in intrigue had accomplished the death of her mother and the seizure of the throne that was, by tradition and law, her sister's. She was the greatest enchantress of her age, and she was determined to restore the City in the Sky to its former glory.

  'Your Majesty,' said Rann, looking sardonically over the rim of his pewter mug. 'I'd abase myself, but my physicians forbid me to leave my sickbed.'

  Synalon bowed her head in reply. Her jet-black hair was unbound and fell in gleaming coils past the shoulders of a gown the same color. Her creamy skin glowed in vivid contrast.

  'It is we who should abase ourselves to you, Prince Rann,' she said, clasping her hands on her breast. 'You are the hero of the hour.'

  Rann raised a skeptical eyebrow. 'You have brought the traitor Moriana to justice. The hearts of our people are lifted to you in gratitude. Moreover, you have secured for us the Amulet of Living Flame, a guarantee that we will be able to spread the benefits of our reign over this noble City for all time to

  come.'

  'I haven't exactly secured the amulet for Your Majesty.' It took a conscious effort to keep from saying 'Your Majesties'. He found Synalon's affectations amusing - amusing and lethal. 'The amulet lies buried under tons of ice. I must, in all honesty, point out that the ice fall might h
ave smashed it to powder. Magical artifacts of such antiquity are notoriously fragile.'

  'No matter,' said Synalon, dismissing the possibility with a wave of her hand. 'My prime concern was that Moriana be denied the use of the amulet. I desired it for my own immortality, of course, but no matter. When the Sundered Realm lies conquered at my feet, then will be the time to experiment and increase my sorcerous lore. Perhaps I can make peace with Istu. With the resources of a continent at my disposal, I can find some way to break damned Felarod's restraints and free the Soul of the City. Then nothing would be beyond my power! Nay, cousin, this is but a setback. It is not to diminish the glory of your achievement.'