I slashed down with the blade alongside his hips, slicing through the ties that all bird riders use to keep them in their seats. The man gasped, realizing too late what I planned as I twisted hard with my other arm and threw him off the side of his own mount. The sky took him. I didn’t hear him scream.
I thrust myself down into the bird’s saddle, dragged Bryce up and unhooked his belt from mine to loop it tight over the pommel horn. I reached for the cut ties to knot them around me, but the shadows of two vullwings raced past and when I glanced up I saw they were circling, coming back toward me with emerald sunlight lancing from their javelins and bows.
Forgetting about tying myself in, I grabbed the hespern’s reins and worked the ones to take us to the right and down. In that direction lay Hurnan Jystral’s galleon. I could see it, and the smoke that rose over its cannon-shattered upper structure.
Glancing back for pursuit, I saw that the two vullwings had paused, for reasons obscure to me. Silhouetted in the light behind them hung the great pyramid of Vohanna. And, even as I watched, that huge black dreadnought lost its last ounce of toir’in-or power and plummeted like the stone it was toward the earth.
A grim smile curved my lips before I turned my attention back to the hespern. The wing-stick had been lost on the arm of the previous rider, but the beast responded to its reins beautifully as I began to guide it swiftly down through the flotsam of war. All around us were riderless birds and birds with dead men in their saddles, birds with blood rusting on their grey or black or brown plumage. It seemed to me that those among the enemy who were still living were starting to pull back, to withdraw—as if the loss of the pyramid had suddenly chilled their ardor for battle.
A shadow warned me too late that my own battle was not over. I was struck savagely in the shoulder, knocked forward over the neck of the hespern with my right arm numbed halfway down my side. A kryll sliced past within inches of us. Its talons had struck me a glancing blow but failed to grip. On its back rode Vohanna in her gargoyle-Amazon form.
Where Vohanna had gotten a saddle bird from I did not know. Perhaps she’d taken it the way I’d taken mine. Perhaps she had conjured it. Either way she had the advantage in the air. The kryll is a raptor, green-eyed, bold yellow in coloring, with spurred claws for holding prey and a curved beak for tearing it. The hespern is no match for it in either speed or viciousness.
I jerked the down-rein taut, then loosed it to give my bird its head. Immediately, the hespern went into a dive. Vohanna was just below us and I tried to ram her smaller bird with my bigger one. But the kryll was too quick and slipped to one side, then turned almost upon its own length to come after us with a snap of wings. I heard a doubled cry, Vohanna’s and the kryll’s, as they launched their pursuit.
Though agony shot through my right arm, I forced movement from that limb as I grasped the hespern’s reins. I didn’t know if the shoulder was fractured or merely badly bruised, but I had to use it anyway as I sensed the kryll nearly upon us and tried to haul my bird to one side and out of the way. I almost made it. The kryll missed me with its talons but hooked the hespern along one broad flank, ripping out feathers and bits of flesh.
The big transport bird shrieked in pain and went into a steeper dive. I hung on, Bryce bouncing unconscious across the saddle in front of me. Off to one side and below us, I could see Jystral’s flagship and fought to turn the hespern’s head toward it.
Again, Vohanna dove her bird upon us. Though Bryce’s sword had been melted into slag back in the pyramid, I still carried my own blade thrust through my belt. I drew it now, tried to slash up and over my head at the reaching talons of the kryll. I hit something.
The raptor veered away with an angry squawk, then came back hard under the goading of Vohanna. I swung at it again, had the sword jerked from my hand as a three-inch claw raked across my wrist. For the second time, then, the kryll struck at my mount, tearing away gobbets of meat.
The hespern faltered. Just beneath us but still off to the left loomed the wounded battleship of Hurnan Jystral. It was close, but maybe still too far. I sawed on the reins, trying to force the bird’s head up. It fought me, then seemed to give in. With a low moan that could almost have been human, it quickened the beat of its wings. We rose, drifted over the ship.
With a scream of rage, Vohanna drove her bird directly into mine. The kryll’s talons stabbed down, shearing through the hespern’s wing; its beak struck, tearing a chunk from my bird’s neck that left arterial blood spurting.
The hespern folded, plunged downward toward the ship’s deck fifty feet below. I hauled back on the reins, screaming at the bird to respond one more time. Above me I heard Vohanna shriek in triumph, or perhaps it was my imagination giving voice to the wind that rushed past us.
The deck loomed, polished oak blackened by fire, coils of rope twining between fallen masts and bloodied flags. I saw lost helmets and splinters of white wood torn from the hearts of the masts. My throat was raw in the wind from shouting; I stood in the stirrups, hauling back so hard on the saddle bird’s reins that one of them snapped in my fist.
Men on the ship were gaping up at us, gore-branded and soot-charred, with their grim hands clutching grimmer weapons. There seemed so few of them. I saw their eyes widen; many turned to run. They thought we were going to hit the deck at the speed of free fall. I thought so too.
But just as I was about to release the reins and drop down into the saddle to cover Bryce, the hespern found courage from somewhere and brought its beak up. Its wings grabbed at the air as the legs shot down in an attempt to find a perch.
The torn wing threw the hespern off balance. Its right leg snapped as we landed badly and I was hurled from the saddle. The bird squealed in pain and fear; I hit the deck hard on my back, losing my breath as the holystoned planks slammed me in the shoulders and spine. It would have been much worse if the hespern had not made its attempt to land.
Gasping for air, I tried to roll over amid the litter of spent weapons and the wreckage of a once proud ship. My muscles felt bruised all the way to the bone. My vision wavered, full of spicules of dark and light.
Bryce! my thoughts screamed. Did he live? I couldn’t see him, hidden as he was behind the bulk of the crippled and dying bird.
Boots thudded on the deck, men running toward me. I heard a babble of voices. My vision started to clear of floaters; my lungs began to suck in oxygen again. I pushed onto my hands and knees, lifted my head to find myself ringed round with spears. I knew no faces among the gathered crowd.
“I’m a friend,” I said quickly. “I’m Ruenn Maclang.”
Startled recognition flared in many eyes. Some of the men lowered their weapons and stepped back. Others did not.
Then there came a savage shriek filled with pure, poison fury. Everyone’s head turned. Vohanna’s kryll had landed at the prow. The gargoyle-witch dropped from its back with the black axe in her hands, its edge cutting at the light. I could not tell which of the two, bird or being, had vented their anger in a screech. Perhaps it had been both.
Three of the men who stood over me, hard-bitten warriors carrying stained steel, raced forward to defend their ship. The kryll struck at one and took a lance-cast through the eye that put it down. But no weapon’s edge came close to Vohanna. She thrust a palm toward her attackers and a blast of dark fire smashed them to the deck.
“Ruenn Maclang!” she shouted, ignoring the fallen men who writhed at her feet in agony. “I want Ruenn Maclang.”
As the rest of those around me drew back slightly, I started to call out, to tell the witch where I was. But a third figure stepped between the two of us. This one I knew. He was of that race known as the Vlih, with skin dark as oiled jet and equally dark hair hanging in a coarse mane down his back. His fists were empty of swords for the moment. No blades were strapped to the two muscled tentacles beneath his arms. But Rhandh, bodyguard of Rannon Jystral, was never unarmed.<
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“Don’t!” I shouted. “Rhandh! It’s Vohanna.”
But my warning came too late as the Vlih weaponmaster dropped his hands to the daggers at his belt and lashed them up and at Vohanna in one lightning move. By now the whole fleet must have known of the “goddess” Vohanna and her power. Valyan would have told them as he led them here. And Rhandh had seen what happened to those who hurled their bodies at the witch. Perhaps he thought steel alone would be faster, and it was. Just not fast enough.
One of Vohanna’s hands flashed white and the thrown knives spattered into molten metal that rained sizzling to the deck. With her other hand, the witch almost casually tossed a ball of flame at Rhandh. The Vlih tried to dodge, nearly succeeded, but the whirling corona of the ball brushed his shoulder and the whole thing exploded, hurling him to one side like a discarded bit of rag.
Others started forward then. Half a dozen. Then a few more. I thought it must have been nearly all that was left of the ship’s crew, but I knew the character of the Nyshphalians and knew they would not quit until Vohanna was stopped...or they were dead.
The latter seemed the stronger possibility at the moment.
“Wait!” I shouted as I pushed to my knees.
Vohanna’s gaze fell upon me and the men halted their advance in confusion.
I looked at the witch. “Here I am,” I said.
She smiled with a terrible curve of her lips, showing yellow teeth that had been filed into miniature skulls tipped with tiny dagger points. Her hand lifted and a finger pointed toward me that dripped rainbow embers.
“Time, Ruenn,” she said. Her voice was almost soft.
I smirked, started to get up. If she were going to kill me, it wouldn’t be on my knees. But a new voice, strong and vibrant, melodic, cut through the tableau, stilling us both.
“Ruenn Maclang is mine,” Rannon Jystral said. “You can’t have him.”
I could not help but look toward the one who spoke, though Vohanna held my death in her hand. And what I saw snagged the breath in my throat. Rannon stood near the rail of the ship in a chainmail shirt and leather breeks. Her greaves and helm were of silver alloy, her buckler of bronze. She held a crossbow and a rapier whose blade was soiled with blood. There were others near her but she was the only one I noted. She was...exquisite.
Vohanna did not seem impressed. She chuckled as her glance explored Rannon’s weapons and dismissed them.
“I’ll leave you his husk after I eat his soul,” she said.
I drew one knee up, placed my foot flat to the plank floor in order to stand and be ready if Vohanna threatened Rannon. For the first time I noticed a coil of rope nearby, maybe thirty, thirty-five feet long. One end had been cut but the other snaked through the debris to loop firmly around the stump of a shattered mast. On impulse, I reached for the sheared end where it curled near my boot.
“No,” Rannon was saying in answer to Vohanna’s comment. “I’ll have Ruenn safe and sound. As my husband.” She sounded absolutely sure of herself, and her words were like a cool kiss on my fevered heart. Rannon loved me still. As I loved her.
“But you,” Rannon added to the witch, her voice growing harsher, “will get...off...my...ship!”
Pride swelled in me. But my hands were working as I knotted the free end of the rope around my ankle. Vohanna’s attention was locked on Rannon, whose words had enraged her.
“I’ll crush your ship like a rotten grape,” she raved. “And all its crew will serve me as—”
I exploded from my crouch and hurled myself at Vohanna. She heard me coming, jerked her head around to face me, her palms lifting, fire smoking from her fingers. I felt the electric heat of that charge as it coalesced, but she had no time to release it.
I hit her in the stomach with my shoulder, wrapped both arms around her steel-muscled thighs as I drove her backward. The ship’s rail was right there and we splintered through in a shriek of tearing wood.
Vohanna’s sharp-nailed hands clawed at my shoulders, at my hair. Her mouth was open, shouting curses. The wind tore past us. Pieces of shattered wood rained down alongside us. The rope dragged around my ankle as it uncoiled like a whip across the ship’s broken railing.
Ten feet we fell. Fifteen.
I let go of the witch with my arms, tried to shove her away from me. Her rage mutated into fear, into terror. Her curses choked in her throat as her eyes went wild. She clutched tightly at my shirt.
At twenty feet we hit the end of the rope and I screamed as it snapped taut, nearly wrenching my leg from its socket. The woven cord held. For a moment, so did Vohanna. Then my shirt tore and the witch dropped suddenly away from me, flailing at the air like a poor swimmer as she tried to reach across that expanding distance to find me again.
Directly beneath us was a second Nyshphalian galleon, rising toward us to come to our aid. It was still a hundred yards down when Vohanna hit on her back directly upon the spear-shaped head of the vessel’s flagpole. That bolt of metal ripped through her spine and erupted a foot out of her chest in a spray of blood and tissue.
She hung there. Impaled. Her body jerked. Blood welled like dark lava out of her mouth and spilled down her chin. Her hands that had grasped at empire grasped now at air and found it just as impossible to hold.
A last spasm wracked her; her arms dropped to spread out wide from her sides. Vohanna was dead. And over the curve of the rescue ship I saw the massive cloud of dust that had spiraled slowly up from the jungle below where her pyramid had met its own end.
The war was over.
Then a fresh scream was wrung from my lips as the rope was jerked from above and I was hauled upward like a bait on a fishhook. The world spun crazily beneath my head before a dozen sets of strong hands grasped my legs, my hips, my shoulders, and dragged me backward over the rail of the ship.
I saw faces that I recognized—Valyan, Rannon’s father, and her brother. There was only one face I wanted to see. And then I did see it as Rannon Jystral dropped to her knees beside me and rained kisses on my face that scalded hot with tears.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
AFTERWAR
It was hushed in the hallway where Rannon and I walked. Outside these palace walls, the heart of Timmuzz beat with the sounds of manufacturing and trade, the sounds of a country once more at peace. But here, where our feet spurned soft rugs of golden weave, a late afternoon stillness held sway. And things were not quite at peace.
After the fall of Vohanna and her black pyramid, the witch’s saddle bird army had melted away rather than face the hammering of the Nyshphalian war-fleet. Then, troops had landed to clean out the caverns beneath the jungle. The remaining gunpowder and the notes on the making of the powder and the steam engines had been confiscated. Even now, Nyshphalian scientists toiled to build a new generation of weapons and airships. The technological genie was out of its bottle on Talera, and I regretted it. Who knew what changes would be wrought on this world that I loved in the next ten or twenty years.
But, in truth, I was thinking little of possible futures at the moment. Rannon Jystral walked beside me. The cedar and rose scent of her hair and skin was a living thing in my nostrils. Her breathing was as clear and sweet as a carillon’s ring.
She stopped at hall’s end, her fingers resting on the brass handles of a set of thorn-wood doors. I halted with her, dressed at least partly in bandages and limping a little on my right leg, which had been dislocated only a few days before in that final fight with Vohanna. My gaze sought Rannon’s and lingered. She smiled, a bit wanly I thought.
“Don’t tell me,” I said jokingly, waving a hand toward the closed doors. “You’ve planned a surprise party for me.”
I wanted to hear her laugh, but she didn’t. She shook her head, then said: “There’s been no time for us to speak since Vohanna’s death. Too many duties. Too many worries over whether Bryce and Rhandh would live.”
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She was right. After our flurry of shared kisses on the deck of her father’s ship, we’d been forced in different directions by the needs of those we cared about. Soon, days had passed with little more than kind smiles, stolen hugs, and a few words of concern that only scratched the surface of what we needed to say to each other.
“That talk can’t be put off any longer,” Rannon continued. “But first there’s something I want you to see.”
She pushed open the doors and stepped inside. I followed, stopping just beyond the threshold. Rannon walked to the center of the room and turned to face me. She wore a long-sleeved gown of white velvet, belted with silver. Her eyes were as blue as I’d ever seen them, richer still than the richest blue of the clearest sky my old Earth had ever known. Her face was pale around ripe lips, with silken hair cascading like a dark waterfall past her cheeks and over her shoulders.
“While you were away from me,” she said. “On Earth. I had these rooms built. I never got a chance to show them to you...before....” She trailed off, then just stood there watching me.
I glanced about. The room where we stood was broad and open and airy. Afternoon light slanted through crystal windows where the shutters were thrown back, and in winter I knew the sun would warm this space through the glass.
Though the palace was built of dark granite, planks of yellow pine had been laid over the stone here. And over the planks were tossed thick rugs rich in sunset colors. To either side of the main entrance loomed a massive fireplace, cold now in the glory of spring, and the scattered pieces of furniture were carpentered from sturdy oak and bansul and teak, with only the inlays of rare samphur wood to indicate their costliness. The effect was neither feminine nor masculine, but warm...comforting. I liked it.
To left and right were other doorways leading to other rooms. The left side was a sleeping area; I could see the bed standing huge on legs of winter-dark wood, piled high on top with furs and quilts. The door to the right was nearly closed and I walked over to push it wide. I knew immediately what the room beyond was meant to be, in months or years to come. The ceiling and walls were frescoed with scenes of brightly colored kites and balls, and of animals dressed like people. Children were to be raised and loved in this place.
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