I closed my right fist over the two stones. Crimson dripped from my hand. I picked up Bryce with both arms—he did not seem heavy—and straightened to stalk up the steps before me. At the top I halted, incarnadined with my brother’s blood, and stood looking down into a small, hollowed area within the heart of the witch’s sphere.
I saw Vohanna, and knew: death has wings and black eyes.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
VOHANNA
Vohanna’s sanctum was lined with niches in which bodies stood. There were dozens of the still forms, behind glass panels in rectangular recesses within the sphere’s ebon walls. Human and inhuman waited there, the mythical and the extinct standing next to the common. Some of the bodies seemed more machine than flesh; others mimicked the cephalopod or the arachnid.
As strange as was that parliament of bodies, however, it was Vohanna who held the stage. I had time to see her here, as I had not that night in the temple at Kellet’s Bay or in the arena below where I’d fought Bryce. She hovered above the floor, over a table of scintillant gold. Her four lower limbs were thin as sticks and seemingly useless. It was her wings that held her, and they were not feathered like those of birds, not membranous like those of bats, not brittle and diaphanous like insect wings. There were four of them—blue, red, black, yellow—and they were moist and translucent as they beat. Through the skin I could see a webbing of platinum bones and what resembled razor-thin wire.
Vohanna’s fragile, insectile legs dangled beneath an abdomen that looked like an elongated human torso. Her upper body was sexless and glinted dully, as if made of chitin or some glazed ceramic armor. But her hands were beautifully human, with four delicate fingers that danced a ballet over a matrix of a dozen milkstones loosely embedded in the surface of the golden table. From those stones her moving fingers wrung sprays of light and a whispering, haunted melody that I knew must provide power to this ship’s engines and guns. And to its mistress.
The table over which Vohanna labored was near the far wall, across the floor of the sphere from me, but though the witch faced in my direction she did not see me. Her gaze was held by the display that swirled and eddied in the air before her eyes. It was, I suddenly realized, a simulacrum—a replica—of the war outside.
Struck to stillness by such sorcery, I watched as the scene roiled with miniature war-birds from the armies of Vohanna and of Nyshphal, all of them wheeling and dipping in wild disarray. The galleons of the Nyshphalian fleet were there as well, like fist-sized clots within the tapestry of battle. Though concentrated fire from the big ships had torn gaping holes in the hordes of Vohanna’s bird riders, nearly half the Nyshphalian vessels were aflame. Cannons had pounded them, and some in Vohanna’s army still carried—and had used—the exploding crossbow quarrels. I had not, apparently, blown up all the quarrels when I destroyed Vohanna’s three other cannon-armed ships.
Vohanna seemed to have a few small manned flyers as well, and they had entered the fray to worry the wounded galleons like wolves at an elk. With their masts and catapults wrecked, the damaged Nyshphalian vessels were easy prey. I saw one such ship, tiny in replica though it would have been huge in reality, being cut to shreds by coordinated arbalest fire from a group of five enemy flyers.
Then, from out of the sun’s glare swept a dark-hulled warship with maroon sails straining at the bright sky. It came down upon the five flyers from above, veering close into the wind in a feat of sailing worthy of heroic sagas. A bronze ram that I knew to be the length of two men gleamed like a splinter at the warship’s prow. But it was magnificent. And the black clusters along the ship’s rails had to be soldiers massed and ready with weapons.
The enemy flyers saw the bigger ship coming. I watched their bows start to turn. But there was no time. The warship was on top of them, coming down at a hard angle. Its oaken hull rode straight across the upper-structures of two flyers, smashing masts aside, splintering wooden cabins, turning crowds of fleeing men into red smears against the decks.
Then the heavy ram took a third flyer straight through the heart and sheered its way out the other side. The flyer’s wooden hulls exploded with the impact. Knots of struggling figures were thrown free of the dying ship to pinwheel like dark dots toward the earth.
My heart surged; I almost cheered, for even in diminutive I could see the flag snapping at the mast of the rescuing warship. It was gray and maroon, bordered with gold and with the image of a trenkil, the Taleran eagle, charged in its center. I knew that flag; I knew that ship. It was the personal war-craft of Hurnan Jystral, emperor, father of Rannon—and Rannon was aboard it. The woman I loved could have been nowhere else.
Below me on the floor of the dark sphere, Vohanna laughed. My exaltation fled as my throat choked in sudden panic. My glance found the witch, saw her attention focused upon Jystral’s vessel, saw her lift one delicate finger and stroke it over a milkstone that vibrated rapidly in its small hollow of metal. That single stone flickered from opal to scarlet, and even as I screamed out, “No!” it was too late.
From deep within the pyramid came the shuddering thrust of the cannon firing. I saw the Nyshphalian flagship hit, saw flames erupt as the masts and proud banner fell. And then I saw only Vohanna as her gaze rose to mine and locked. Bodies burned in the depths of her eyes. Lovers entwined their silken limbs. Visions of horror and beauty followed one upon another, beating against my awareness.
Somewhere in my mind I knew that Hurnan Jystral’s ship was torn, though not how badly. Perhaps Rannon was hurt. Or dead. Yet, I could not rip myself away from Vohanna’s soul-less orbs. Her pupils were black rubies within black ovals—scorpion eyes in a face that was inhumanly lovely. She chuckled, though how that sound arose from such an alien throat I did not know.
The unconscious Bryce slid from my arms and thumped to the floor. Trapped by the witch’s mental compulsion, I could not care. Before, when I’d faced Vohanna in human guise, she had tried to conquer my mind with hers and almost succeeded. Only my use of Rannon’s name as a mantra had saved me. This time, in the winged body I’d begun to think of as her natural form, the Asadhie’s power was much greater, her hunger much worse. My spine curved; my knees trembled; I bit my tongue on a scream that could not escape my constricted lungs.
“Mine,” Vohanna said. “Bent to my will.”
I tried to shake my head in negation but found myself shackled by Vohanna’s eyes. There was nothing else in my universe.
Then there came one other thing. There came heat. Heat!
A searing lance of pain leaped up my right arm. My right fist burned! I lifted it, amazed that I could move it under my own volition when the rest of my limbs belonged to Vohanna. From within the clasp of my fist, light poured, shining through flesh and bone with the incandescence of a tiny sun. Or, two tiny suns. It was the milkstones that I had removed from Bryce which flamed.
In that instant, Vohanna lost control of me. She gasped, her coal-colored eyes flickering with a sudden lambent yellow. She drew back slightly from her table, wings snapping in the air. The battle simulacrum froze in mid-movement, and my lips twisted in a savage smirk as my self-mastery flooded back and I whispered into the sudden stillness.
“Greetings, Vohanna! Shall we chat again about killing me?”
The toir’in-or stones still kindled in my palm but the pain was bearable and I was not about to release them when they had just saved me from Vohanna’s mental chains. Instead, I used my left hand to pluck Bryce’s sword from my belt where I had thrust it in beside my own.
With the tip of the blade, I pointed at the small replica of Hurnan Jystral’s crippled warship where it sat stilled within the frozen weave of the simulacrum.
“If the woman I love is not dead aboard that ship, Vohanna,” I said, “then I might suffer you to live. But you will stop this attack immediately.”
Vohanna did not speak. All the taunting sensuousness of her manner was gone, and it seem
ed that what she had left was only the hard kernel of hate that filled her heart. I’d not even been alive when first that hate coalesced, but now I was the lightning rod to which it leaped.
The witch closed her eyes, and when she opened them again an instant later her sockets had emptied of flesh and filled with stone—with twin toir’in-or of perfect black. On the table before her, the other milkstones rattled in their matrix like dried acorns in their gilded metal cups.
Vohanna reached one hand toward me, to swat me like a fly. Her fingertips gathered light, pulled it in from the air like streamers of bright ribbon. The matrix table jiggled; the whole room went hot with a surge of static electricity that played over the walls like knots of St. Elmo’s fire. The black toir’in-or in the witch’s eye-sockets flushed with sick scarlet, darkened, then flushed again like the beating of a rotten heart.
To use milkstones is a matter of carefully attuned rhythms and harmonies. To break those harmonies is to beg disaster.
In the moment before Vohanna unleashed her power upon me, I tossed the milkstones from my right fist into the air, dropped my right hand to join my left upon the sword, and slashed the blade across with all my strength. The steel tip caught one stone; the edge caught the other. A backlash of molten energy slagged my blade to the quillions in an instant, but the two damaged gems whipped toward Vohanna at incredible speed.
The Witch tried to dodge—didn’t quite succeed. One stone smashed her in the chest; the other hit the wall of the sphere behind her head.The world went white.
The sword-hilt cooked in my palms, but before my reflexes could react to that pain the ruined weapon was torn from my grip as a shock wave rippled the air like water. The nexus of power that Vohanna had planned to release outward at me went off in all directions around her instead. A crescendo of sound and bright flame churned the matrix table into gravel, shattered most of the glass doors over the niches where the bodies stood, and exploded outward through the wall behind Vohanna. I was thrown down as that surging wave of power hammered me in the chest.
Where the witch had stood, there brewed a volcano of fire and light. Wolves of flickering red heat ate at the marble floor; the roof of the sphere vaporized and the top of the pyramid blew off as a radiant column of sparks sliced through it like a giant lance. The pyramid staggered as if its engines had stalled.
With my senses stunned, I scrabbled for Bryce and threw myself across his prone form as chunks of burning rock fell around us. No being made of flesh could have lived through that inferno, but in the next instant Vohanna came shrieking out of the chaos, her lucent wings on fire in patterns like moiré silk. She hurtled wildly at me, her voice keening, and whipped past close enough to singe my hair. Then madly around the room she whirled, smashing into walls and floor and ceiling.
Blinded, I thought. I hoped it was permanent.
But I wasn’t going to trust in Vohanna’s blindness. I staggered to my feet, teetering for a moment on legs that felt like spindles. The flames from the explosion of the milkstones were spattering away like the dying embers of fireworks. The cannons had fallen silent, or else my ears were deaf to them. But the pyramid itself was still moving, adrift on vagrant currents of wind. How long would its engines keep it aloft before the last erg of toir’in-or energy drained away?
The same burst of power that had ripped out the wall of the sphere behind Vohanna had also torn a gaping hole in the basaltic outer skin of the pyramid. That rent was big enough to drive a team of horses through, and on the other side of it winked the emerald sky of Talera. Lifting Bryce in my arms, I stumbled toward the open air, wanting it, hoping for something, hoping at least that the fresh, clean breeze would start to revive my brother, who only seemed to be slipping deeper into coma.
Behind me, I heard more glass shatter and glanced over my shoulder. Somehow, Vohanna had put out the flames eating at her and was now smashing the crystal panel that covered one of the wall niches. A body stood there, one of the few left undamaged after the destruction of the matrix. It was a hybrid—gargoyle and Amazon. Nearly eight feet tall it stood, with blazing red hair that flowed to its waist, with two arms and two legs that were hideously corded with muscle. Its skin was dusky gray. Its face was pocked with scars and knobbed with the bony protrusions of short horns. Yet, its lips were female and full, its breasts cupped in gold beneath the silver links of chainmail.
I had almost reached the opening in the wall, limping with Bryce cradled across my chest, but now I froze as a new horror blasted my already dazed mind. I saw Vohanna move against the gargoyle’s body, saw her wings beating at its ribs. Then the suddenly stilled form of the witch fluttered to the ground as the other body stiffened and stirred. Sable eyes opened. A fanged mouth bellowed rage as one massive hand grasped a battle-axe and used it to bash a way out of the coffin/box that now seemed far too small for its owner’s bulk.
I’d just discovered the secret of all Vohanna’s forms. Here in this place she kept the bodies that she inhabited at will, the bodies that lived only because her mind told them to live. The sight galvanized me as few others could have at that moment.
I whirled and rushed toward the opening in the outer wall. Better to fling Bryce out of the pyramid, to let him shatter on the earth below, than to give Vohanna a second chance to own him. From behind me came a series of bestial growls and one quick glance showed that the gargoyled Vohanna had leapt to the floor of the sphere and was coming fast, the axe like a sharp cross of black light in her fists.
Then there was nowhere else to run and the torn wall was before me, its edges ragged with broken masonry. Through it I saw groups of bird riders whipping by above and below, some of them nearly close enough to touch.
I pivoted to face the witch of Talera in her savage new form. She was almost upon me when the mass of the pyramid stuttered and I thought we were going down. But Vohanna went rigid in mid-stride and in the next moment the huge ship caught itself and plowed on. Was it luck, or some heroic mental effort of the sorceress? Either way, I didn’t think it mattered. Luck or sorcery, time was leaching away. How much longer could the pyramid stay aloft? And if I fought Vohanna here the battle would be long. I doubted we’d live to see who’d win.
Bryce and I had thrown away our sword scabbards before our fight below. But the scabbard-hooks were still on our belts. I snapped the empty hooks on Bryce’s belt through my own, binding us together before I stepped to the very edge of the wall and counted for a heartbeat. Then I threw us both out of the pyramid.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
WINGS OVER THE JUNGLE
Outward I leaped, from the pyramid into the sky, with Bryce held like a child in my arms. Downward we hurtled—five feet, ten feet—with the wind shrilling cold around us. But I had timed my jump, had tried to time it, to the movement of the saddle birds racing by in formations.
Beneath us swept a troop of hesperns, those massive birds which are primarily used as transports and which compare in size to a vullwing or a sabrun like a Clydesdale compares to a Shetland pony. From inside the pyramid I’d seen them coming, a dozen of them. We struck one.
The hespern’s rider had not heard or seen us, did not know what was about to happen as I drew my legs up and hit him in the shoulders with my knees. He was snapped forward brutally over the neck of the bird. Bryce smashed down across the man’s back as I grabbed desperately for a hold on something.
The impact of our falling bodies seemed to collapse the hespern for a moment. It dropped sickeningly beneath us. Bryce slid down the rider’s back, slammed into my chest and knocked me further along the bird’s broad, piebald flanks. My right foot slid out over the void; my hands scrabbled, clawed, caught one of the tough leather straps of the saddle. That strap stretched. But held.
Bryce’s unconscious body slipped past me, nearly jolting my hands loose from the saddle strap as he tumbled off the side of the bird and was jerked up hard by the scabbard-hooks linking our
belts. The bird had nearly recovered itself, but now its right side took a sudden dip. It gave a terrified squawk as its left wing beat wildly at the air to balance the weight differential. I was jerked further out to the right side of the bird’s body, the tendons straining like living wires in my arms. Bryce hung from my waist, dangling over emptiness.
The hespern’s rider groaned. I’d thought the impact of Bryce and I crashing down upon him must have snapped his spine, but it seemed we’d only stunned him. If he saw us now.... One quick slice of his knife through the strap that I held and all would be over but our fall.
I lurched forward, on my belly along the back of the bird. Other saddle birds swept past us, their riders gawking at what had appeared suddenly in their midst. I ignored them, got both my hands over the saddle’s extended rear cantle, pulled myself up to my knees by main strength. With quivering arms, I dragged Bryce up beside me.
The hespern had lost some altitude but had fought its way back to level flight and was starting to circle, venting a plaintive call as it sought to locate its formation. So far, everyone was leaving us alone, too startled to know how to react. That couldn’t last. In moments we’d be recognized for enemies and crossbows would be turned loose to raven us.
Then the hespern’s rider sat up, coming suddenly back to full awareness. As he started to turn, still not realizing exactly what had happened, I snapped one arm around his neck from behind. He jerked in shock and grabbed with both hands at my elbow. That left my other hand free to snake down and whip his belt dagger from its sheath.
The rider had his head half turned toward me within the lock of my choke hold. The whites of his eyes glistened. He saw me lift the dagger and flailed for my wrist with one hand to keep the blade from his throat. But it wasn’t his throat I wanted.
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