Wings Over Talera

by Charles Allen Gramlich

  “The house of Vohanna has been profaned!” it shrieked to the crowd, and the words struck like daggers stabbing ice. “Destroy them! Destroy all who would befoul your goddess!”

  The being whirled higher, wings thrumming, and the remaining fiends closed around it defensively, locking tails and bat-like hands. The whole mass of them swept toward the roof, surged through the skylight and away into the darkness. Behind us came the bull roar of the mob.

  I turned, looking wildly for Graye and Valyan, found them staggering toward the altar with Kreeg lolling between them. The ex-gladiator’s face was pasty, with a purple tinge beneath and blood all over him. But Valyan had listened to me about the tunnel. They were almost there.

  “Get inside,” I shouted at them.

  Someone among the villagers threw a torch at me. I caught it and threw it back, sending the first line of the mob scattering for a moment. Then they surged forward...and hesitated. Voices were raised, bitter and afraid, young and old, male and female. Their indecisiveness would not last.

  I shifted the rapier to my right hand, dipped down to grasp the unconscious form of the yellow-clad swordsman in my left. I dragged him up under my arm. His body was dead weight but fear gave me the strength. The crowd saw, and growled. They surged forward again.

  “Stay back!” I shouted at them. “This is Vohanna!”

  The lie held them. For an instant. And I turned and ran, lugging the swordsman with me. The crowd roared, and came like a river breaking its dam. I saw Valyan standing above the tunnel, saw him release Kreeg’s arms to Diken Graye beneath. Then the Nakscherii warrior was turning, nocking an arrow he’d somehow found time to recover from the laith’s corpse. He sent that wicked barb zipping past my shoulder, followed it with two more as fast as I could blink.

  I heard the crowd falter behind me and screamed at Diken Graye to catch as I slung the limp swordsman into the mouth of the tunnel. My glance met Valyan’s and I followed the rider’s body, dropping feet first into the darkness just as the green Llurn fired his last arrow and hurled his useless bow into the mob.

  I landed hard on soft loam, twisting my ankle and sprawling. Valyan hit next, fell against me. I rolled, trying to get to my feet as a grating noise tore at my ears. Diken Graye had found the lever that worked the tunnel opening and the altar was closing over it. An arm came through, scrabbled at smooth stone, tried to jerk back as the altar pressed in. A horrified shriek sounded, then was lost behind a ton of stone as the door closed and a hand and wrist dropped squirming to the ground.

  Valyan gagged, and even Diken Graye, the hardened mercenary, turned away. I rushed to Kreeg where he lay sprawled on the dusty floor. The sides of the tunnel were lined with torches every ten feet or so. By their light my friend looked dead. I dropped to my knees beside him, placed an ear to his chest. At first I could find no heartbeat, but then I felt movement. Kreeg was breathing. My friend was breathing!

  I rose. Above me came the distant thud of hammering as the enraged villagers worked at the altar that closed us off from them. I glanced at Valyan and Graye.

  “They may know where this tunnel comes out,” I said. “When they have a moment to think. Certainly those demon things know it. We better hurry.”

  “What of him?” Valyan asked, jerking his chin at the still unconscious swordsman.

  “Bring him,” I said. “But bind his hands. I’ll have some questions when he wakes.” I sheathed the man’s beautifully wrought rapier in my own scabbard.

  Valyan nodded at my words, bent to scoop the man up and toss him over a shoulder. I did the same with Kreeg, though far less easily. With a sore ankle and on trembling legs, I followed Graye and Valyan as they forged quickly ahead, the sounds of the howling mob growing faint behind us.

  No pursuit had found us by the time we reached tunnel’s end and discovered that it exited through the mouth of a natural cave in the side of a small hill. We went out cautiously but no foes awaited. Though still dark, the mist had cleared and three of the moons gleamed like lush fruit in the sky. With their light as a guide, we covered our tracks and it did not take long after that to reach the marshy place where our sabruns were tied.

  I was grateful to lay Kreeg’s heavy frame on the ground and to kneel beside him, gasping for breath. Valyan merely dumped the swordsman, who was now beginning to stir. Then he dragged the fellow to a sitting position against a rough-barked chelaquin tree and reached for the cloth covering the man’s features.

  “Let’s just have a look under here,” he said, grasping the yellow hood and stripping it away.

  I was watching and wished I hadn’t been. The shock of it was like knowing that a snake has struck you and might be venomous. The face I saw was different, but the same. It was my cousin from Earth. It was Eric Ryall’s face that gleamed at me from beneath the disguise.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  A TALE SPUN BY NIGHT

  I rushed to Eric, hands going out to grasp my cousin’s shoulders, shaking him, shaking him. He groaned and his eyelids fluttered. I winced to see his hazel irises overlain with crimson. And his normally ruddy face was pallid and wet looking—except where black and blue tattoos gleamed sullenly and intricately.

  I shook him again. And again his eyes fluttered, then opened fully. He gazed at me without recognition, with an inarticulate madness etched in his pupils. I slapped him.

  “Eric. It’s Ruenn. Eric!”

  He murmured, then jolted as my slap seemed to register. Or perhaps it was just my voice. I remembered how it had affected him during our fight, how each time I’d spoken he had paused. But it wasn’t enough merely to “affect” him. I needed to find a way to break through to him, to connect to the mind of the man he’d once been.

  “Where’s Bryce?” I demanded, trying to reach him that way. “Eric!” I shook him a third time. “Where...is...Bryce?”

  Again my voice did more than any slap or shaking; his mouth twisted and he thrashed his head from side to side. Still, there was no true awareness in him. Something held him in thrall and I knew no way to free him.

  I glanced helplessly at Valyan and Graye. Valyan’s eyes burned with sympathy but all he could do was shrug and turn away to see to Kreeg. Graye, however, walked over to squat next to me.

  “He’s not as bad as your bro—” Graye started, then paused to glance quickly at me. “As bad as...he could be,” he finished.

  I looked at the mercenary. I don’t know if there was a question in my stare, but he went on as if there had been.

  “I mean the hair and eyes,” he said, motioning to the white that only streaked Eric’s rust colored hair, and to the eyes through which the true color still peeked. I recalled how Graye had described Bryce’s hair and eyes—dead white, blood red.

  “So?” I asked, my voice bleak and rough.

  Graye did not reply but leaned forward to study the tattoos on Eric’s face and neck. I had already noted the resemblance of those inked lines to the tattooed map of Talera on the chest of that Nokarran assassin I had killed back in Trazull. Yet, Eric’s markings were more elaborate and detailed, and were scrawled over with runes that shone like surreal glyphs.

  A frown creased Graye’s face and he glanced to me. But I’d already seen what he’d seen. On Eric’s forehead there coiled a winged pattern of colored patches—blue, red, green, gold—rotating around a central mandala of entwined thorns. And at the mandala’s center, at the point of reintegration, there glistened a small oval of whitish matter, like glass or marble. At first I thought it a speck of dust and reached to wipe it away, but it clung like a leech to Eric’s skin and felt warm and oily to my finger. Then I knew what it was.

  “A milkstone,” Graye said needlessly.

  I shivered. “Aye,” I said. “And embedded in his flesh.”

  I wondered, then, if that Nokarran assassin in Trazull had worn such a stone amid his tattoos. I had not noticed one but h
ad not been looking for it either.

  Graye interrupted my thoughts. “That...thing may be how he’s being controlled.”

  “Perhaps,” I agreed.

  And what of Bryce, my mind added. Was he, too, being controlled?

  Graye reached to his hip and unsheathed his knife. I caught his wrist above the wolf’s-head hilt.

  “What do you?” I asked.

  He stared hard at me, his eyes asking—I thought—for trust.

  “I’m going to remove the milkstone,” he said after a long pause. “It might free him.”

  “Or kill him,” I murmured.

  He nodded. “There is that possibility. But….” He cocked his chin toward Eric’s slowly writhing form, as if willing me to note the lost gaze and the drool-flecked lips. “…would you rather he stay like this?”

  My hand tightened on the mercenary’s wrist. I growled an oath, then released him abruptly.

  “Take it,” I said.

  “Hold him down,” Graye replied.

  He drew a silver flask from his boot and poured a mouthful of the contents along the edge of his dagger. I smelled whisky and cinnamon, then leaned forward to grasp Eric’s shoulders and neck. I held him tight, pressing his back to the tree against which Valyan had leaned him.

  Even through his emptiness, Eric felt the knife. He jerked and shrieked as the cold blade touched him, and I fought him to stillness as Graye made a quick circular incision around the milkstone and yanked away the small flap of tissue in which the stone was embedded. He threw the whole of it off into the bushes as blood welled and clotted instantly in the tiny crater.

  Eric stiffened, his heels drumming. Then he began to gag wildly. I rolled him onto his side just as a green bile jetted from his mouth and nostrils. There were specks of crimson in the bile but the release seemed to clean Eric of something foul. He slumped deeper into unconsciousness. Yet, I thought this new state closer to true sleep than to the emptiness he’d shown before. I pulled him away from the spreading pool of vomit and used one of our blanket rolls to pillow his head. He moaned, but his writhing had stopped.

  Graye rose from his squat after wiping his dagger on a clump of marsh grass. He sighed. It seemed in relief.

  “Well, he survived,” he said.

  I nodded, not trusting my voice, then rose as well, leaving Eric in his stillness while I strode over to Valyan where he bent over the injured Kreeg. Graye moved to check on the sabruns, to make sure they were ready if we needed them quickly.

  “Tell me,” I said softly to Valyan.

  The Green Llurn glanced up at me. He’d bound Kreeg’s chest tightly with cloth he’d found in one of the saddlebags. He’d splinted an arm. And there were other things.

  “He lives but I don’t know if he’ll stay that way. He’s got broken ribs, a broken arm and wrist. Head injuries. He may be bleeding inside. I pray Ivrail that he isn’t. He needs a trained healer.”

  “Vriun is in Nyshphal. In Timmuzz,” I said. “I know of no other we could trust.”

  [*Vriun the Healer first appears as a slave of the Klar in Swords of Talera. He is of the race called Kaldi, and was freed by Ruenn. Later, he became court physician to Rannon and her family.—CAG]

  “Vriun is an old friend,” Valyan agreed. “But Timmuzz is far and none of us dare show our faces there since....” He did not need to finish.

  I sighed, biting at my lower lip. “I think—” I started to say, and a hoarse whisper interrupted me.

  “Ruenn.”

  I spun about to see Eric’s eyes open. And he had pulled himself to a sitting position against the chelaquin tree. I raced to him, dropped to my knees beside him.

  “Eric?”

  His eyes were still shot through with blood but they seemed brighter to me, more their natural color. In amazement, I noted that the small wound in his forehead had completely closed, as if his body had rejected the mark of the toir’in-or. The puckered scar that remained was a good sign, I told myself.

  “I need.... Need...water,” Eric struggled to whisper.

  Diken Graye heard, and as I turned toward the sabruns where our water gourds hung he tossed me one that sloshed deliciously. I lifted Eric forward from behind the shoulders, uncorked the gourd and let him sip, stopping him when he would have gulped.

  He drank slowly, for a long time, then leaned his head back to gasp for breath. His eyes seemed brighter still, though I feared some of it was fever.

  “Where...where are we?” he asked. A thread of water spilled down his chin.

  “On the Rosjavik Peninsula,” I answered. “Near the village of Kellet’s Bay.” Even though he nodded, I could see the names meant nothing to him.

  “What do you remember, Eric?” I asked gently.

  He glanced at me, and away. It seemed he was frightened. He took another sip of water, swallowing as if desperate to avoid thoughts of what had happened to him. He looked down then, and mumbled something I couldn’t catch.

  “Eric,” I prodded. “Tell me what you remember.”

  “Vohanna,” he said after a moment, his gaze cast to the dirt, his voice lost and ill.

  Valyan heard the name he hated and walked over to stand above me. Graye listened from among the sabruns. The night held frogs that drummed the marsh with their songs; there came the plash of movement in the waters around us. But between the four of us a silence ached.

  I finally broke that silence with two questions. “What is Vohanna? Where is Vohanna?”

  “Vohanna is god,” Eric answered, as if it were something he’d memorized. “She dwells in the ancient earth.” Then: “Ruenn,” he said. His voice seemed bruised.

  “What, Eric?”

  “You must save Bryce. Must....”

  The muscles twisted beneath my skin. My heart banged. I leaned forward. “Where is he?”

  Still, he did not look up from the ground.

  “Eric!”

  He winced. But his words came in a tumble. “He is with Vohanna. In the city below the city. With the ruins above.”

  “Vohan,” Graye interjected. Then he glanced at me, rushed on. “Our attack. The day I was captured. When we...shot down your airship. I had flown in from the east but was joined by others. They came from the north. From the direction of Vohan.”

  I nodded. Graye was only speaking my own thoughts of that ancient and fallen citadel on Nyshphal, rumored to have once been the center of Vohanna’s empire. I wondered. Was it still?

  My thoughts flew to Bryce then, lingered, and circled back to Eric. The cousin I remembered had been wild and joyful, willful but brave—with his mind always focused outward on life. My eyes grew damp to see him now, shivering, terrified, sick all the way to his bones.

  “What happened to you, Eric?” I asked softly. “How did this come to pass?”

  He tried to straighten but fell back against the tree weakly. I gave him more water and it steadied him. He wiped his mouth with a hand that trembled only slightly.

  “That night,” he began. “On Earth.”

  I knew what night Eric meant. His last night on Earth. Mine too. After a storm at sea, we had dropped anchor at an island where Eric and others of my then crew decided to camp on shore. They had disappeared in a blaze of sorcerous fire and it had been in searching for them that Bryce and I stumbled upon the gate to Talera and were drawn through (see Swords of Talera).

  “That night, we were taken. By beasts that thought like men. We were taken as fodder for Vohanna’s armies, as she gathers her power to restore her rule in this world.”

  My teeth clenched. “And the others of my crew?” I ground out.

  “They serve her now. Or they’re already dead.” He seemed to shrink in on himself. “I don’t...remember much of it,” he added. I knew he lied but did not have the heart to force that story from him. But....

  “And what o
f Bryce?” I asked. “He was not stolen with the crew. How did he end up with Vohanna?”

  “I don’t know,” Eric said. “He was brought in later. She…Vohanna...took....” He stopped for a moment, panting slightly, as if it were growing difficult for him to breathe. “She took a...liking to him.”

  A cold belt of fear tightened around my chest at those words, but his next ones were worse.

  “He didn’t...didn’t fight her. Not much at least.”

  “And the others fought?” I asked, the pitch of my voice rising in my own ears. I lifted a hand to my mouth, began to gnaw at my thumb.

  “Some did. I did.” He half sobbed. “Not that it mattered. No one fights her for long. She wins. Always wins.”

  I forced my hand down to grasp his shoulder. I forced my voice into a semblance of control.

  “It’ll be all right now, Eric,” I said. “We’ve taken out the stone she was using to rule you.”

  He laughed bitterly. “Only one of them, Ruenn. Only the most obvious. There are others.”

  “Where?” I asked, squeezing his shoulder harder. “Tell me and we’ll take those too.”

  His next words let me know how foolish I was.

  “Inside, Ruenn. Inside my body. In my guts.” His voice sagged. “In my soul.”

  I wanted desperately to weep.

  “How long?” I asked, and he did not question my meaning.

  He shrugged, hopelessly. “Hours. Minutes! As soon as she recognizes that she’s lost the connection she’ll move to regain control.”

  He grabbed my hand where it rested on his shoulder. His grip was strong but it was a desperate strength—a false one.

  “Kill me, Ruenn,” he begged. “Kill me.”

  I jerked my hand away from him as if burned, my mind and body both recoiling.