Wings Over Talera

by Charles Allen Gramlich

  I nodded to Graye. “Greetings,” I replied.

  My recent confederate’s eyes alternately surged and ebbed with crimson, and a speck of toir’in-or stone had been inserted into his forehead so recently that the wound was bruised and angry around it. He was “controlled” more fully than any of Vohanna’s servants I’d seen before, and I knew he was here for only one reason, to taunt me with the fact that the “goddess” had taken from me my last companion.

  “I am sorry,” I said to him. “I should have realized the witch would try to seize you. I should have warned you.”

  Graye’s mouth opened and closed, as if he couldn’t get enough air. His body stood atremble. His face twisted then; the crimson of his eyes waned.

  “You...could not have known that....”

  The words died away, leaving the mouth to hang slackly open, and a chill wave of gooseflesh swept my body as Diken Graye’s features wavered and...changed. Eyes went dead black; lips seemed to swell, to ripen. Skin that had been ashen with pain turned as dusky as buffed and burnished gold. The mouth pursed around a tongue that dabbed at white teeth.

  I had seen such a display before, but still it shocked. I wasn’t going to admit it, though.

  “What could I not have known...Vohanna?” I asked calmly.

  And from inside Diken Graye’s occupied form, Vohanna chuckled with a voice as sweet and sick as rotted honey.

  “Why, you could not have known that anyone who has toyed with the discipline of the toir’in-or is susceptible to me. Well, particularly susceptible to me.”

  I considered, then remembered. Diken Graye had flown Rannon’s airship on the day we crashed into the river above Timmuzz. That proved he had some training as a pilot and some knowledge of milkstones.

  “Ah,” I said, smiling briefly at her then, as if it did not overly concern me.

  Vohanna/Graye turned her head to one side, like a hungry bird studying a cricket. I met her gaze, keeping my face neutral.

  She looked me up and down, then waved a languid hand as if in dismissal of what she’d seen.

  “But do tell me, darling Ruenn,” she said. “Before I have you killed. What possessed you so foolishly to invade my home? To destroy my lovely ships? To kill my servants?”

  “’Tis simple,” I said, bowing my head slightly. “I had to prove to you that you need better servants.”

  She frowned, and for the first time I saw her look confused.

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “You need better servants,” I repeated. “Someone like myself, for example. You see, I’ve come to swear fealty to you.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  OATH OF FEALTY

  “I’ve come to swear fealty to you,” I had said.

  Vohanna’s eyes, so inky black within Diken Graye’s face, did not blink. But I saw a flush of copper creep up from under the dusky-gold tinge that painted Graye’s skin.

  “You think me a fool?” she spat. “I should have you buried alive to rot among my trees. I should see you fat and bloated with krutt larvae as they feed on your insides. I should—”

  “But you won’t,” I interrupted sharply. “Because it makes perfect sense that I’d offer my allegiance to you. My woman betrayed me. My friends died or ran. Or they are yours.” I nodded toward the body she possessed.

  “My own brother serves you,” I continued. “And besides. I don’t like to lose. Those who go against you...lose. But.” I lifted my left hand, raised the index finger. “I’ll not wear a milkstone for you. Had your servants been less controlled I could never have penetrated this far or blown up your ships. That was a mistake on your part.”

  Deliberately, I’d made my tone harsh; I imagined Vohanna had seldom—or never—been spoken to in that way. I figured my chances were about eighty out of a 100 that I’d be slaughtered immediately for insolence, but there was a possibility she’d be intrigued enough to let me live a bit. My hand rested on the ornate hilt of my sword. If death was my sentence, at least I’d go out with a weapon in hand.

  Diken Graye’s body stiffened, and drew itself up in a way that the man I’d known never would have done. Sweat slicked my palm as the witch’s black eyes flashed at me. The moment was here; now I lived or died.

  Vohanna...left Diken Graye. I saw the man’s muscles sag as she abandoned him, saw the brightness of his eyes dull and the red return. In the room for a moment there hovered a presence. It had a sound, like telegraph wires humming. It had an image, like smoke and golden light swirling in a sunbeam.

  It had a voice.

  “Bring him to my throne,” it said.

  Then the presence passed from the room, and I was alone with Diken Graye and the Vhichang guards with their crossbows. Graye’s body twitched. He lifted his head, the face and eyes inflamed, as if he’d been running a fever. From a corner of his mouth there dribbled a thin stream of dark spittle where he’d bitten at his own mouth.

  With no words, but with agony in his red eyes, my one-time companion stepped aside and motioned me past him toward a stone hall leading deeper into the pyramid. Half the crossbowmen went ahead, half followed behind; and as we pressed on, other guards, of many races, stepped from dusty, silent stairwells and joined us. I was left my sword, though it would hardly be of use against such numbers.

  Gradually the hall widened around us, until we came out into a large area lit by glow lights of a soft butter-gold rather than the harsher blue-white that I’d become accustomed to. The room was built in the shape of a half moon, with—at the heart of the crescent—twelve steps of white marble leading up to doors of argent.

  The floor where I stood was tiled in cinnabar and ebon, with the tiles intertwined so as to draw the eye into interpretations, like seeing faces in clouds or in the leaves of a summer tree. I did not like what I saw there—temples built from burning bodies, rose-eyed skulls with black, pointed tongues—and I forced myself to look away, to look up toward the silver doors where four guards awaited.

  The guards were Klar, of that reptilian race who are pirates, slavers, and savage fighters. Their nearly naked bodies were scaled in dark grey, tattooed and gleaming, with the flat, opalescent sheen of milkstone shards flashing from their foreheads. Each held a warhammer of black iron that was as long and thick as a stallion’s leg. I walked toward them, Diken Graye beside me, and two of them turned and pushed back the twin doors for us to pass within.

  At the threshold, Graye drew to a halt. I glanced at him, and his disconcerting eyes met mine and held. For a moment I thought he would speak, but he did not—or was not allowed. He stepped back, his gaze dropping to the floor, and I bit at the inside of my lip to keep from screaming in anger at what had been done to him. Then I turned and entered the throne room of Vohanna.

  Despite an aura of veiled decay, it was instantly clear that this was a throne room made to stand above throne rooms, a place to impress enemies and allies alike. Undoubtedly it had been built when this ancient city was young, when Vohanna had been a “goddess” on Talera.

  The walls of the room lifted in vaulted black marble thirty feet into the air, and oriflammes of scarlet silk were unfurled from ceiling to floor, billowing softly in a zephyr breeze that blew from some unseen source. On that breeze there also carried incense, aromatic and overly sweet. And from above me there arose a light of palest sapphire, not from glow globes, but from living beings captured and held between tall, fluted columns by razor-thin silver wires.

  Those beings were Phylari. I had thought them mythological, for I’d seen them only in Taleran paintings where they were often used in the same way that angels are used by Earth’s artists. But these were real and beautiful, suspended as if in flight by the wires piercing their ankles and wings.

  The Phylaris’ wings were covered with elongated scales that resembled vein-less feathers. As in the paintings, they had no fore-limbs and their hind-limbs wer
e long and slender, delicately clawed for perching on the high rocky ledges where they are supposed to make their homes. The nearly translucent bodies radiated light in all the pale shades of blue, and even the large, tear-drop eyes were agleam.

  I wondered. Had some earthlings once seen a Phylari? Had they drawn it for their fellows and thus given rise to tales of angels? It seemed to me at that moment, very likely.

  Then a thousand tiny bells sounded, as if from the air itself, and my attention was drawn toward the front of the throne room. A raised walkway of braided copper wire, intricately looped, led from the door where I stood up through the center of the chamber to disappear within a curtain of fountaining water. But now, that shimmering spray began to still as, one after another, the fountains failed.

  I saw the final guards then, beyond the dying veil of water, standing or squatting, on black and red squares that resembled those of a Kyrellian game board. Those guards numbered about forty and they were not human—nor any other natural race of Talera—but twisted hybrids of beasts and beings combined. Those that had hands carried curved swords of ivory-white steel; the others were armed with tentacles or claws. Yet, all of them were alike in the soulless crimson that filled their pupil-less eyes.

  I started toward them, striding, and they opened the way for me. Above me in the air the Phylari were silent, and I knew that their silence was a sign of their profound suffering, for it is said of those angels that they sing constantly in melodies more fine than the finest kalina ever strung.

  And then I saw the throne. Amethyst and jade it was, onyx and gypsum and lapis lazuli, quartz and opal and olivine, topaz and tiger’s-eye. It sat on a dais of black marble veined with gold, with a fragrant dark wine purling down pale steps before it that were made of skulls. Above it circled more of the winged devils that I’d seen in the temple at Kellet’s Bay when Graye, Valyan, and Kreeg had stood with me against many. And beneath the winged ones, on the throne, there was Vohanna.

  Vohanna!

  Source of all my pain.

  Lodestone for my rage.

  She looked no more than eighteen in Earth years. Her skin had the hue of rose petals dusted with amber-gold and blushed from beneath with health. Her moonlit silver hair was feathered with curls of pure snowy white and foamed down over her slender shoulders, down over the simple ebon shift against which her body thrust. All the way to her ankles those tresses coiled, and in no wind that I could feel they moved and danced as if alive.

  There were no adornments anywhere upon Vohanna—no web of black pearls in her silken flag of hair, no bright jewels at her finely sculpted ears, no copper brassards clasping her upper arms. She wore no kohl to darken her sable lashes, no paint upon lips that were already riper than the rising sun.

  In her form, she looked guileless and fragile. In her face, she looked...innocent. But her gaze was ancient and black upon mine, with firefly runes twining and beating in the depths of her glance. I felt that glance like a bruise.

  Then her eyelids closed in a slow blink, sweeping from left and right like curtains over her pupils. And still I could see the blackness beneath the flax-thin membranes of those lids. She turned her head to the side, a mannerism I’d seen her employ before. And in a mocking tone she said:

  “So. Dear, dear, Ruenn. Go down on your knees and show me how much you wish to serve me. Swear to me this fealty that you promise so well.”

  I chuckled, and Vohanna’s lips curled with a feral flash of white teeth. It seemed she doubted my stated wish to serve her. Yet, something about me appeared to intrigue her. Was it the same something that intrigued her about Bryce? That we were from another world, perhaps? Surely she’d seen men from other worlds. She’d had them kidnapped after all. No, there had to be another reason why—when she finally held me firm within her grasp—she’d not had me immediately killed. I began to wonder what that reason might be.

  “Well?” Vohanna asked.

  Only seconds had passed since she’d first spoken, but already her glittering ivory nails were tapping on the incised stone arms of her throne. It seemed the goddess Vohanna had no more patience than a spoiled child. I wasn’t surprised.

  Smiling, I offered her an incline of the head. “Forgive me, Vohanna. It was only that your mention of ‘serving’ you made me think of Bryce. How...is my brother anyway?”

  The woman smirked.

  “Oh I assure you, Ruenn. He is employed at this very moment in carrying out critical duties for his...queen.”

  I felt my jaws grind but fought to maintain my smile. Then Vohanna leaned forward, her fingernails tinkling over the rubies and opals and diamonds embedded like pebbles in her chair.

  “But tell me. Ruenn! Where is the other who was with you?”

  I frowned. “The other?” I asked.

  “Yes. When I saw you at Kellet’s Bay you had the one called Diken Graye with you. And now he serves me. You had Eric Ryall and we all know that he is dead.”

  Again she smirked, but by now my smile was firmly etched.

  “You had a savage who was dying,” she continued. I knew she meant Kreeg. “And a warrior with green skin. A Llurn. Where is that one? That...Nakscherii?”

  She almost hissed the final noun, the name that Valyan’s people used for themselves. I remembered a similar reaction by Valyan when he’d first heard the name Vohanna in my presence. I remembered what he’d said: that the Asadhie goddess Ivrail had birthed his people, and that Ivrail’s foulest enemy had been Vohanna. During the time known as the “God-War,” Ivrail’s and Vohanna’s followers had burned hecatombs of the battle-dead in their names. It seemed old enmities still had potency for both Valyan and Vohanna.

  But there was something more important here. If Vohanna was asking where Valyan was, then it meant she didn’t know that I’d sent him to Nyshphal for help. It meant she wasn’t aware of the fleet that was almost certainly on its way to attack her. For a moment, then, doubt whispered to my ear. What if Valyan had not reached Nyshphal? What if Rannon and her father had refused to listen and no fleet was on its way?

  I shook my head and let Vohanna think it was only in response to her question. I whispered, “they’ll come,” to myself—for I had to believe I did not stand completely alone—but the words I let Vohanna hear were: “As I told you, my friends either died or fled. Valyan fled.”

  “Ah,” Vohanna said, nodding. “Adequate servants are so hard to find and maintain. And the Nakscherii were always...fickle.”

  I glanced toward the scarlet-eyed guards that surrounded us, and up toward the membranous-winged devils that circled above with horns glittering and long tails lashing.

  “Finding servants does not seem a problem for you,” I said, looking back at the woman. “But then, I guess it helps if you make your own.”

  She chuckled. “Are you jealous, Ruenn?”

  “I’m curious.” I nodded to the twisted, bizarre creatures around us. “If you can make such hybrids, then why send slavers to raid other worlds for men? I know now it was you who sent the sorcerer who abducted my old ship’s crew from Earth. Why? And why would you need Bryce, and Diken Graye, and so many others?”

  Vohanna was still leaning toward me in her seat, and now she let her elbows drop to her knees and steepled her hands before her, letting her sharp little chin rest atop her index fingers. Beneath a drift of niveous hair, her brow furrowed.

  “There are so many reasons, Ruenn. So many answers that I could give to your questions. I could tell you I draw slaves from other worlds because their families do not come hunting for them.” She smiled and something darkly humorous danced in her eyes as she gazed at me. “At least until now,” she added.

  Then she lifted her chin from her fingers and nodded toward the hybrid servants that stood all around in perfect stillness. Her voice became a bell, ringing.

  “Or I could tell you that such...synthetics, are costly to make. Natura
l slaves come cheap. And while the synthetics are deadly, they lack a certain level of initiative. Which is, I believe, something you pointed out as a weakness of my army.”

  She rose slowly to her feet then, and the silk of her shift grew taut across her slender frame, moving against her skin with a whisper of friction that suddenly thundered in my ears. She smiled, and spoke as softly as a caress, so softly that I could scarcely hear her over the beat of my blood.

  “I could tell you such things. Ruenn Maclang. And they would be facts. They would be accurate. But they would not be...true.”

  She took a step toward me on her dais. The breeze blowing from somewhere within the room shifted and freshened. Vohanna’s scent closed around me, enveloped me in cinnamon and laurel, in saffron-cloves and smoke, in wormwood.

  “The truth is,” she said. Her eyes were huge. “I take slaves because I can. Because I like it.” Her lips curved in a pout. “Does that make me bad...Ruenn?”

  Her scent was like silken mud clogging my nostrils. My muscles trembled. The back of my mouth, the inside of my throat, grew dry and thick. My mind roiled.

  Vohanna took another step toward me. And a third. Down the skull steps from her throne she came, and it seemed her sandals spurned the dusky wine that cascaded beneath her feet. Her eyes teemed with scarlet embers and with...other things.

  “Kneel to me, Ruenn,” she said.

  My legs ached. My shoulders rounded. I dropped slowly to one knee, fighting to keep my head up. Only the salt wetness in my mouth told me that I’d bitten my tongue bloody.

  “Bryce,” I rasped. “What of Bryce? How...did...you take him? Was it like...this?”

  Somehow, Vohanna was standing above me. Her hand reached and her fingers brushed a fallen lock of hair back from my forehead. Her knuckles were cool and dry, smooth as stream-worn pebbles.

  “Do not fight me, Ruenn.” Her voice held a gentleness that I wanted to believe in. “Your brother did not fight me. There is a world gate here. In this pyramid. You were right. It was I who sent the sorcerer to steal your Earth crew. Your crew, or any crew. I sent him from here. But Bryce shot him in the sphere gate on your side, and the resulting explosion dragged you both through to Talera. Only one could come back through this gate. It was Bryce, who went before you. And you were hurled far away across the planet.”