WoP - 02 - Istu Awakened

by Robert E. Vardeman

  'Well done, Your Grace,' Erimenes told him sarcastically.

  'Moriana Etuul,' the herald roared, pointedly ignoring the extra voice chirping in from time to time, 'Princess and Pretender to the Beryl Throne, Mistress of the Clouds, beloved cousin of our Emperor Teom the Magnificent, arise and approach the Presence.'

  Moriana did as she was bid, but before she could step forward, a loud rumble like an avalanche in progress rolled from left to right across the Plaza.

  'Thunder?' asked Fost.

  'We should be so lucky,' shot back Erimenes. 'Look to your left.'

  His heart nearly jumped free of his chest.

  'Death!' shouted the mob as it crashed like surf against a line of blue-plated Watchmen, who stood their ground with halberds levelled. 'Death to the foreign sorceress!'

  A sergeant rapped an order. The gleaming blue line of the Watchmen took a step back and prepared for the crowd.

  Across the cordon of armored Watchmen a figure arthritically mounted the steps of the Ministry of Sanitation. A tall figure, thin almost to the point of emaciation, clad in torn and faded tunic and trousers that had once been as red as freshly shed blood threw up his frail matchstick arms and emitted a wordless screech of pure hatred. The crowd surged, rallying to him.

  'Seize the witch, the traitress!' shrieked Sir Tharvus of Black March, flinging out an accusing arm and pointing straight at Moriana. 'Slay her, slay the betrayers of humankind who shelter her in their bosoms! They are traitors and deserve to die with her!'

  Roaring like a rabid animal, the crowd surged forward.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The halberds flailed, blades rising to flash white-hot in the sunlight, rising again to the company of screams to gleam the dull red of blood. The mob faltered. It momentarily lacked a leader, someone to urge them forward into the face of death. The faint-hearted in the crowd began to edge away from the soldiers. But the crowd didn't disperse. In the back rallied tight knots of angry citizens. Parties of stout men in dusty aprons finally pushed forward, hauling great chunks of pale-veined white stone. The others in the mob heartened and began to chant cadence as their newfound heroes cast the hundredweight blocks. Unwieldy in their carapaces, a half-dozen Watchmen went down beneath the crushing chunks of marble.

  It was enough. The crowd rushed forward again while Sir Tharvus's voice whipped it, crying out for blood. The remaining Watchmen fought, then vanished from sight as if they were sailors drowning in the vast Joreal Ocean. Teom stared, his eyes wide with terror at what befell his troops. Fost gripped the hilt of ceremonial sword and swore. Moriana had her own straight blade, but Fost's broadsword had been judged too unorthordox for the investiture. That left him armed with a weapon hardly fit for swatting flies.

  The soldiers assembled down the avenue held ranks, though whether by design or confusion of their officers there was no knowing. Across the hundred yards of cleared space in the Plaza raced the crowd, waving sticks and bats and other makeshift weapons. Above their shrill cries came the shriller chants of Sir Tharvus. Madness had seized him and lent his frail frame power beyond reckoning. And that power transmitted to the crowd and fed their pent-up hostilities. There was carnage.

  'You hoped things would get better,' Fost told Erimenes, pulling the satchel flap back from over the jug inside. If he and Moriana were about to be murdered by the mob, Erimenes might as well get an unobstructed view.

  'Stop!' The voice rolled like a great bell, drowning even the strident cries of Sir Tharvus.

  Quiet descended over the crowd scattered across the marble flagstones of the Plaza. Down from the bleachers strode Foedan, tall and unafraid, holding his arms wide as if smoothing the jagged emotions of the crowd. The crowd faltered, lost impetus. He walked toward the bloodstained leaders. Fost and Moriana clearly heard the padding of his soft suede boots on the marble.

  'Cease this display,' he said. The mob stared at him, weapons hanging limp in a hundred hands. 'This woman has saved you from destruction. You should fall on your knees with gratitude, not attack her like so many jackals.'

  'But. . . but she's a witch!' a voice faltered from the middle ranks of the crowd.

  'She is a sorceress. Were she not, the Fallen Ones would have arrived in these streets by now, bringing with them flame and thirsty blades. You and all your families would be dead, the death meted out by the damned reptiles!'

  'Don't listen to him!' Tharvus shrieked. 'Slay her! She sold out humanity to regain her throne. Slay her!'

  Stil! the mob remained poised on the knife edge of indecision.

  'No,' Foedan said, not loudly but distinctly.

  'He'll never hold them,' said Ziore. 'Moriana, do something.'

  Fost's stomach twisted to a sudden premonition.

  'No!' he shouted. But it was too late.

  Moriana raised a hand, swept fingers in an intricate gesture. A globe of pure white light appeared over Foedan's head, competing with the sun in intensity. A moan of fear and awe swept through the crowd. The knight gazed at the mob, not seeming to notice the luminous display above his head.

  'See? He's sold out, too!' Tharvus cried. His eyes blazed with a mad light as bright as the mystic sphere hanging over Foedan. 'Behold, the witch has set her mark upon him!'

  The crowd gave throat to an animal cry of rage. They fell upon the lone, unarmed knight with club and cleaver and bare fists. He stood unmoving until the seething bodies hid him from view.

  Teom yelped like a scalded cat and raced to the steps of the Temple crying, 'Sanctuary! Give me sanctuary!'

  The platoon of Life Guards that had attended him on the bleachers went clattering by the kiosk and up the wide steps after their master. They ran as much to protect him as to save their own hides. No amount of training prepared their officers to face sure suicide by standing and fighting off this mob.

  'What ho!' Erimenes sang out. 'A battle!'

  'I'm glad the prospect pleases you.' Fost drew his blade and held it in front of him without conviction.

  One of the members of the masons guild who had helped strike down the Watchmen raced at Moriana, swinging a long pry-bar he had used to lever up chunks of the paving marble. She snapped out of her fog of horror at what her attempt at help had won Sir Foedan and backed with a ringing clang of steel on iron. She fought to retain her grip on the sword as the stonemason attacked again and again. A laborer swung a hammer at Fost, and he had no time to worry about Moriana.

  Fost's blade crossed the haft of the hammer with an odd sound. The workman reeled back, mewling like a lost soul.

  'Shrewdly struck,' congratulated Erimenes.

  Fost stared. The man's right hand hung from a rag of skin, yet Fost's parry hadn't come anywhere near it. Then Fost saw that his sword had bent itself into an L shape around the hardwood shaft nearly severing his assailant's hand at the wrist.

  'Come on!' he shouted to Moriana. She thrust into the twisted face of an attacker and spun, following him back to the bleachers with the mob hot after them. The flimsy wooden structure thundered and vibrated beneath frantic feet as the assembled notables fled the wrath of the populace. The mob was pouring into the Plaza from both directions now. As hazardous as the bleachers were, they offered the only ground on which to make a stand. As Fost and Moriana went booming up the stands, a hairy-armed man made a grab at Erimenes's wavering form.

  'Unhand me, you rogue!' shrilled the genie.

  'Oh, my darling, are you hurt?' cried Ziore. Fost moaned. The man snatched again and seized one of the straps flapping wildly on Fost's kilt. His sword useless, Fost swung Erimenes's satchel and caught the man squarely on the side of the head. The man fell backward and went cartwheeling down the tiers of benches. One of the benches at the bottom gave way under the added weight with a loud snapping noise. The man's back was obviously broken.

  They made the top of the bleachers and turned, momentarily ahead of the pursuit. Here the angry crowd could only come at them with difficulty, and some of the most vocal members of the mob sheered o
ff short of the steps, wary of the bleachers' penchant for falling. The would-be killers came in ones and twos. Moriana was able to send them reeling down again, gashed and bloody, while Fost propped his sword tip against the bench and tried to kick it straight again.

  He slipped, slashing his right calf, cursed, looked accidentally over the edge. The hard marble of the Plaza was a good forty feet below. There was no escape that way.

  'Where the hell are the soldiers?' he shouted, swinging his almost-straight sword against a long-haired man hacking at him with a billhook. The blade struck edge-on and didn't bend. Fost put a sandaled foot in the man's belly and sent him staggering into the sweat-streaming faces of a dozen fellows.

  'Don't expect help from them,' Moriana panted through a lull in the attacks. She pointed her chin up the street.

  'It appears your elevation is resented more than anyone anticipated,' Erimenes said dryly. 'Or perhaps the Twenty-third is paying off some long-standing grudges against the City Watch.'

  The lightly armed but more numerous infantrymen had thrown themselves against the massively armored Watch, preventing them from coming to the aid of the Imperial party. In the other direction, Imperial troops fought each other, too. Fost shook his head and spat blood. A blow had caught him in the mouth, and he hadn't noticed it until now.

  'Their commanders won't even stand trial for this,' he said bitterly. 'Look. Teom's out of it.'

  Moriana glanced across the sea of bobbing heads that flooded the Plaza. Teom and the innumerable clerics had disappeared. The great gilt valves of the Temple were shut and guarded by a line of Life Guards with raised shields and lowered spears. A fresh wave of attackers flowed against Fost and Moriana leaving no time for talk.

  An apprentice stonemason dressed in a leather jerkin thrust at Fost with a shortsword taken from a dead Watchman. Fost disengaged and ran the man through. Screaming, the apprentice toppled off the verge of the bleachers, but not before the courier had wrenched the sword from his grasp.

  Fost turned back and found a big man almost on top of him, swinging a makeshift club at his head. He caught the thick wrist in his free hand and aimed a disembowelling stroke at the giant belly squashed against his hips.

  'Ellu!' he gasped into a face he knew well from the streets of his childhood. He faltered.

  He recalled in a flash the foundling kitten they'd found and nursed together with scraps of food purloined to ease the complaining of their own bellies. No such memories stayed Ellu's now-fat hand.

  'Traitor!' he snarled through spit and a cloud of reeking breath. He twisted his burly arm free of Fost's grip and cracked him across the face with his cudgel. Fost saw blackness and dancing sparks, fought to keep his balance with heels dangling over emptiness.

  Ellu raised the club to finish him off. His arm stopped in midstroke, as if caught and held by an invisible hand. A look of consternation gripped the man's florid features. Then Moriana seized his shoulder, spun him from her lover and struck him down, crying her thanks to Ziore for staying the man's hand with her emotion-confusing powers.

  Dizzy and nauseated, Fost dropped to his knees.

  'It's lost,' he croaked. 'We can't stand them all off. The War of Powers is lost here and now.' A blackness beyond physical oblivion clutched at him.

  He felt Moriana's hand on his shoulder, looked up through red mists of agony. He heard barks, snarls, screams, saw the crowd streaming away to the right, eastward toward The Teeming in which he'd been born. No one had reckoned with Captain Mayft and the outland cavalry. Now they came with lances couched and war dogs snapping left and right and made reckoning of their own with the mob.

  Slow and lazy the stained wooden deck rocked beneath Fost's bare feet. He smoothed wet hair from his face, drank in the salt air rich with the tar and cordage smells of the big ship and felt more relaxed than he had in days.

  He stood near an opening in the rail. A rope ladder had been let down from the gap to hang just above the dancing green surface of the sea. As he watched, a slim hand reached out of the waves, catching the bottom rung. In a few seconds, Moriana was lithely scaling the side of the ship, shimmering with wetness.

  Like him, she wore a minimum of clothing. To a simple loincloth like the one knotted around his waist she had added a brief halter bound about her chest.

  'I must say the princess makes an impressive sea sprite,' remarked Erimenes. His jug had been lashed to the railing so that he could watch Fost and Moriana swim without fear of being tossed into the sea by the sway of the ship.

  'A good thing this is a Tolvirot craft with a mixed crew,' said Fost. 'If Moriana appeared dressed like that on deck of an Imperial vessel with an all male crew . . .' He shook his head.

  For all that, he found himself appreciating the suppleness of her body and her great beauty. He approved, heartily.

  'Have fun with the sharks?' he asked as Moriana stepped on deck.

  She nodded, doing a brief dance as her feet accustomed themselves to the heated deck. Fost glanced over the side to where lean, silver shapes knifed through the water. A wedge of fin broke water hard beside the ship. A blunt snout thrust above the surface and a dead-gray eye regarded the deck with inhuman detachment. Fost shivered, but Moriana called out to the creature and waved. It slipped soundlessly into green water and vanished, all thirty feet of it.

  'You shouldn't have left the water when they arrived, Fost,' chided Moriana, wringing out her long hair. 'They're very friendly. It's fantastic to ride on one. They're so fast, they move so cleanly, with such strength - it's like being on the back of an eagle, almost.' Her voice dropped and her eyes were troubled. He slipped an arm around her shoulders and hugged her reassuringly, savoring the feel and smell of her tanned flesh.

  'Friendly?' He shook his head, grinning. 'I could swim down the throat of that monster without getting scraped on his teeth along the way. And I'm not even sure he would consider me as more than an appetizer served before the main course. I prefer not to take my chances with a beast like that.'

  'Perhaps we need such powerful friends.' Her tone was not wholly joking.

  'I wonder if it's true what Oracle said,' asked Ziore, hovering at Erimenes's side with her fingers vaporously mingled in his. 'That in the old days the world belonged to the Zr'gsz and the giant lizards and the great furred beasts, the hornbulls and mammoths, that humanity came here from somewhere else and brought certain animals with them, dogs and pigs and sharks and those darling little animals Teom showed us just before we left, the new ones imported from the Far Archipelago. What did he call them? Horses?'

  Erimenes sneered.

  'That's right,' answered Fost, ignoring him. Teom had taken them into the menagerie he kept outside the north wall of the Palace, on the very bluff overlooking the harbor. The Emperor had chattered volubly as if a second attempt on his life and throne had not been crushed in a bloody street battle only two days before. The new acquisitions to his enormous zoo filled him with delight, for they were rare beasts with intriguing legends surrounding them. Indeed, Fost thought they were rather cute. Tiny elfin things, the largest male no more than eighteen inches high at the shoulder. They were built like hornless deer, but their small hooves were continuous, not cloven. They had long silky brush tails and similar manes of hair growing down their necks. Their dished faces held eyes liquid brown and large.

  In their last interview with Oracle a little later, Fost had mentioned the beasts. Oracle's eyes lit up.

  'I have heard of such,' he said eagerly. 'Do you know the most intriguing legend of all concerning them?' The four had shaken their heads, Erimenes with a crabbed look. He hated being lectured to by someone more knowledgeable.

  'It is written in old, old documents that once these creatures called horses grew larger than the biggest war dog, as large as Nevrym unicorn stags, and that they were tamed as dogs are now, to be ridden in travel, the hunt, war.'

  'But they're so tiny,' objected Ziore.

  'The ones surviving today are. They were a spec
ial breed, nurtured by the scholar-priests of the Far Archipelago as objects of amusement and wonder. What happened to the others?' He shrugged imaginary white shoulders. 'What happened to the cattle of olden days, short-coated like riding dogs, with horns set on either side of their heads? The only beast in the world today who wears his horns like that is Istu himself - oh! Your pardon, Princess,' he said to Moriana, who had suddenly colored and dropped her eyes. The mention of the Demon had triggered a train of memories in her that were anything but pleasant.

  'I suppose you think all this supports your ridiculous theory that humanity came to the world from another plane of existence,' said Erimenes, elevating his nose to a contemptuous angle.

  'I do, in fact. The legends aren't conclusive, but they point strongly to the possibility that we - or you, I suppose - originated elsewhere.'

  'It also points strongly to the certainty that our kind is given to flights of imagination,' Fost pointed out, loath to rank himself with Erimenes in debate with Oracle. 'The Archipelagan Reduction states as a matter of principle that the simplest theory to account for a phenomenon is the most likely to be true.'

  Erimenes turned his sneer on him.

  'I'm ashamed to learn you've been taken in by the naive and simpleminded doctrine of Reductionism. We sages of Athalau had more wisdom than that.'

  'Did the Athalar sages ever disprove the Reductionist axiom?' Oracle asked with interest.

  'Ah, no, not exactly. But there are contentions too patently absurd to require that wise men waste their precious time deigning to disprove them.'

  The discussion had gotten tangled in sticky strands of epistemology. Only Moriana remained aloof, lacking the others' interest in abstract knowledge for its own sake. The question of humanity's origin on this world or elsewhere was never solved, unsurprisingly.