Both sides fought with fanatical intensity. More than a few of the bird riders passed under the rafts after firing their arrows, only to have the hissing Vridzish fling themselves onto them so both fell, struggling viciously until the hard earth mingled their substance and rendered all issues moot.
Darl's great blade reaped lives like grain. A wareagle knocked his shield-bearer to the deck and disembowelled him with his talons. Darl decapitated the bird with a single cut and spun to split the rider's skull to the teeth as the man closed with a spear.
The deck teemed with battling men and near-men. A green-clad giant loomed over a knot of wiry little bird riders, flailing at them with his bow. So great was his strength that he batted three of the black and purple clad troopers over the edge before the others brought him down.
Darl leaped upon the giant's slayers. They turned as quick as serpents, but their speed and skill meant nothing against the Count-Duke. They died.
Behind him Darl heard a boom of wings, a scrape of talon on stone.
'Very well done, my good Sieur r'Harmis,' came a cultured voice. 'We seem to find ourselves alone. Shall we?' Darl turned and slowly smiled at Prince Rann Etuul.
In eerie suspended silence, Moriana's raft soared over the rimwall of the City in the Sky. She fancied she floated on the wings of a dream until a ballista thrummed and a barbed iron head punched through the wooden shielding to kill a Nevrymin. She came out of her reverie and shot an artillerist as he bent to the windlass of his engine.
Eagles screamed and circled. Arrows hammered the walls and roof. Moriana cast aside an emptied quiver and stooped to pick up another as a sweating forester drew his dagger across the throat of the howling man with the ballista-bolt in his guts. She said nothing. She understood battlefield mercy all too well.
Quiet and outwardly untroubled by the carnage around him, the Zr'gsz steersman guided the raft between the airy spaces of the City, making for the Circle of the Skywell in the center of town. Moriana peeked through the slit to check on the craft following hers.
She saw only three. Something had happened to the other; its pilot slain perhaps or it might have been knocked down by the catapults. As she watched, the next raft behind hers careened abruptly to the right. She caught a glimpse of its steersman slumping from behind his globe, arrows sprouting from his back.
The raft brushed a thin tower and brought it crashing into the street. The impact caused the raft to straighten.
'Please, survive,' the princess called quietly. She had little hope they would.
It ran headlong into the forward wall of the Lyceum and disintegrated, flinging Nevrymin about like dolls. And then there were only two rafts remaining.
She felt the deck tip beneath her. Her heart missed a beat but a quick glance aft showed her steersman intact and in control. She looked out again.
The Circle wheeled lazily below. The Skywell opened onto a pastoral landscape a thousand feet below. The pilot banked to follow the Skullway to the very portals of the Palace. To the left she saw armed men and women racing for the Palace. Ahead a squad of Monitors fled toward the same destination, heedless that their feet were defiling the skulls of the City's past rulers.
Some sense made her turn and look back toward the battle she'd left behind. With terrible certainty she knew what she'd see.
A thousand yards ahead of the City's prow two figures fought back and forth across the deck of a raft crewed by corpses. Moriana knew the splendid black bird who stood to one side watching the humans; she knew the tall figure in shining armor who swung his broadsword with skill apparent even across the distance; and all too well she knew the smaller black and purple figure darting in and out while his scimitar parlayed with the huge straight blade.
As the princess watched, Rann tripped and fell back toward the bulwark of the raft. Darl rushed. Rann ducked under the blow and swung with his scimitar. Darl's plate was sturdy but Rann's strength belied his size. The curved blade sank into Darl's side.
The Count-Duke spun, snapping the sword from Rann's grip. Rann danced away. Darl's heels came against the bulwark. He raised his broadsword to salute his foe. Then he turned, looked at Moriana and saluted again. And fell.
'He knew,' came Ziore's anguished words. Moriana returned his salute with her own broadsword. Her eyes stung but she wouldn't cry. Tears would cloud her vision. And then they were down.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Lungs burning, Fost pounded across the pavement towards the Palace. Fifty rebels raced at his side, while a score hung back among the buildings on the perimeter of the grounds to cover the attack with bow and arrow. As he ran Fost kept staring at the spectacle before him. One after another, three large slabs of gray stone flew over the Skywell and turned up the Skullway to approach the Palace.
The leading raft bumped to a halt. The walls fell away as foresters hacked at lashings with sword and axe. Green and brown clad men tumbled out – and one in achingly familiar russet and orange. Even in helmet and hauberk, Fost knew Moriana.
Shouting incoherently, he angled to meet her as she led the foresters up the Skullway. Her last trip along that avenue had been as a captive, jeered by multitudes as a traitoress, regicide, matricide. Now spectators had even better reason to name her traitor – but the only watchers on hand were the rebels swarming across the paved Palace grounds, and a platoon of Palace Guardsmen on the steps.
'Moriana!' shouted Fost. She cried his name in return and they flung themselves violently into each other's arms. Rebels and Nevrymin clasped forearms and pounded backs, instant comrades. The exuberance of the rebels was partly due to the humanness of their new allies. They'd expected green scaly skins.
Fost and Moriana wasted precious seconds in a kiss. They reluctantly broke apart, laughing, weeping, dabbing at the blood streaming from their nostrils. The Destiny Stone swung free outside Moriana's armor. It shone benevolent white. Fost pointed at it.
'Moriana, that's not…'
'Eureka!' screeched Erimenes. 'May this day be blessed forever! I've found a woman of my own kind!'
'Don't "my kind" me, you perverted mountebank!' Ziore screamed back.
Dead silence. Moriana goggled at the satchel by her side. The foresters gaped, too, having come to recognize the princess's familiar as sweet and shy.
The sweet, shy presence proceeded to deride Erimenes with the profane bravura of an Estil fishwife.
When Ziore paused to think up even more insults, Moriana spun quickly to face the Palace Guards, who stood clumped at the portal to the Palace wondering what was going on.
'Surrender at once!' she ordered. 'I, Moriana Etuul, your rightful queen, command it!'
For long seconds nothing happened. Then a Guard pivoted on his heel and split the chest of the man next to him with a stroke of his halberd. The Guardsmen quickly paired off and slew one another. Fost grinned. A little subversion was a wonderful thing.
Moriana raced for the portal. Fost followed, shouting for her to listen, that she didn't have the Amulet, that she carried another talisman instead, that her life depended on getting rid of the Destiny Stone. But Monitors poured into the far side of the Circle and men shouted and moaned and butchered each other on the steps of the Palace, and the mysterious shade Moriana carried still berated Erimenes the Ethical at the top of her nonexistent lungs.
A fleet-footed rebel darted past Moriana as she mounted the steps and heartily kicked open the centermost pair of doors. A flight of arrows buzzed out like angry hornets. Most of them struck the impetuous youth, lifted him from his feet and tossed him lifeless down the narrow steps.
The foresters' bows sang in reply. Screams echoed in the Palace's vestibule. Moriana plunged in, sword in hand. Fost followed. He prudently sidestepped as he passed through the door to prevent being silhouetted. When his eyes adjusted to the relative gloom, he saw a groined chamber radiating out in three directions. From the one ahead came the sound of running boots. Moriana.
As he followed, from the hallway to the righ
t poured a stream of Palace Guards. One lashed at him with a halberd. Fost took the blow on his shield, grunting as the blade split hide and metal and bit into his arm. He swung the arm violently, letting go of the shield's handgrip. The halberd flew wide as the shield's mass carried it along. Fost lunged and slashed the Guard across the face.
Rebels and foresters were crowding through the doors. Two Guards attacked Fost from opposite directions. Prudyn shot one, then cast his bow aside as another Guard rushed him. Prudyn stayed alive by seizing the haft of the Guard's weapon and battling him up against a wall.
The other Guard intent on Fost lunged, the spiked head of the polearm spearing for Fost's midriff. Fost whipped Erimenes's satchel off his left shoulder and swung it. Erimenes screamed.
The heavy satchel knocked the halberd aside. Fost thrust. The Guardsman sank. Fost ripped his blade from the foeman's chest and ran for the corridor Moriana had taken.
Above the fighting, Synalon waged a battle of her own from the throne room. Even as Moriana's flotilla surged ahead of the other rafts, the air began to dance as the immense air elemental took form.
A tornado howled toward the armada sucking boulders and uprooted trees high into the air. Khirshagk brandished the Heart of the People. A beam of blackness exploded from the center of the jewel and struck to the core of the approaching whirlwind.
A frightened, gusty wail split the sky. The elemental diminished, drawn down the black tube into the diamond. In a heartbeat it vanished. A rain of rocks and trees spattered the countryside below.
Shocked, Synalon stared in wonder and dread. She spoke new words of Summoning. She pointed to the earth. It heaved, a hill appearing where none had been before. She pointed to the sky. The hill shot upward toward the raft carrying the Instrumentality.
Black rays from the Heart stabbed into the soaring hillock. It exploded in all directions sending out a cascade of dirt and stone lasting for long minutes. Synalon screamed. She waved her arms. Sinkholes appeared among the hills below as boulders buried underground winked out of existence… to rematerialize above the vast fleet of skystone rafts.
Now Synalon's magic took full effect. A dozen rafts were stricken and fell, dooming a hundred of the People and scores of humans. A huge boulder dropped straight down for Khirshagk's raft.
The Heart radiated black energy. The boulder slowed, then stopped in midair, defying gravity above Khirshagk's head. He gestured with the Heart. The boulder soared away toward the City to plow a furrow of ruin from the prow halfway to the Palace.
Synalon tore her robes to free her arms for uninhibited gesturing. The fleet drove inexorably onward. She shrieked and the heavens rained fire. Men died screaming in the embrace of flames, some of them her own bird riders; the queen was beyond caring who died as long as she blasted the monsters who dared assail her City. But the Heart emitted a funnel of total blackness into which the flamedrops were drawn. The smoking diamond absorbed the rain of fire and glowed with even greater energy.
As the queen hurled spell after frantic spell against the Instrumentality, the earthly battle raged with undiminished fury. Khirshagk's raft was the nexus of a cloud of eagles, diving and slashing as their riders swept the decks with arrows. Shield-bearers kept their leaders from harm, though they died with the regularity of the Heart's black pulsation.
Still holding the Heart, Khirshagk tossed down his shield and caught up his mace. A bird dropped at him, claws extended. He swung the heavy mace and crushed the eagle's breastbone with a single stroke. His inhuman laughter rang across the battle-torn skies.
Synalon sent black clouds to confuse the invaders. Beams blacker still stabbed through them. With a hurricane wail the clouds were drawn inward. Fire and steel and plague she sent against the Fallen Ones, and a horde of winged demons from a lesser tenement of Hell. The Heart smote them all. The more power Synalon expended against it, the greater its own force waxed.
Unnoticed by Synalon, Moriana's rafts crossed the boundary of the City itself. Their route had been chosen with cunning. Once in the City, they had roofs to hide them. When they made their run-in along the Skullway the Palace itself hid them from sight. Singlemindedly, Synalon hurled destruction at the Zr'gsz only to see her every enchantment turned back upon itself. Many of the Hissers fell before her might. But the Heart kept Khirshagk inviolate and safe.
Rann stood on the lip of the raft, watching Darl's body turn end over end as it fell. Only when Darl struck ground did the prince swing back onto Terror's back.
Khirshagk saw the prince's mount take flight frpm the deck of his sister ship. He dropped his mace and seized a javelin. Straightening, still holding the Heart in his right claw, the Instrumentality cocked his arm and flung the dart with all his might.
Impact jarred Rann's body. Terror coughed. The scars crisscrossing the prince's face tightened like a net as he stared at the spearshaft jutting from his war bird's chest a handspan away from his right knee. The rhythm of its wingbeats lost, the mighty bird began to sink.
Synalon watched in horror as her cousin's mount spiralled earthward. Channeling her grief and rage and hatred, she called up a storm. Thunderheads gathered, rolled down on the Zr'gsz fleet with avalanche speed. Violet lightnings speared skyrafts from the air.
Energy raved from the Heart and the demon storm was torn apart, wisps of cloud spinning away to disperse in midair.
Synalon clenched her fists until the veins stood out on her forearms. She endured the agony of summoning a salamander of awesome proportions, a fire elemental so powerful that the hangings on the wall burst into flame, then the carpet and the wooden furnishings. The surface of the walls and the Beryl Throne itself began to turn soft and glow from the heat emanating from the sorceress-queen's body before the conjuring was done. Then her Will drove the elemental deep into the earth through crust and mantle in search of live magma. A new Throat of the Dark Ones would speak with an authority the Heart of the People could not refute.
The smouldering door to the throne room opened. 'Greetings, sister,' said Moriana. She stepped inside, frowned. Synalon felt the salamander she had summoned at such cost wink out of being.
'You've fought long and hard to come here,' she snarled at her golden-haired sister. The charred fragments of her robe fell in a black rain at her feet. 'I'll see you enjoy a death commensurate with your achievement.'
Synalon spoke rapid words. Moriana felt a detonation in her brain and reeled against the wall. It seared her shoulder.
Rage gripped her. She knew the spell – Synalon had used it to subdue her when she had tried to kill Synalon with her bare hands on the eve of her sacrifice to Istu. It would not bring her down again.
She willed the pressure in her mind to go, and it was gone.
'You have learned things during your sabbatical,' said Synalon in a voice like milk and honey. 'I should have expected no less. Even you can learn, if given enough time.' She raised a slender hand. 'My demons shall…'
The words died in her throat. She tried to force them out. She failed. It was as if a hand closed on her neck and bottled the words inside her.
'You shall not call your demons, sister dear,' said Moriana. 'Your Guardsmen are surrendering below or being slaughtered like sheep. 1 will not suffer you to call for supernatural aid. There's no one to help you. You must fight me, Synalon, with what power you have within you. If you've any of your own, that is.' Synalon's eyes blazed.
'Don't… count yourself the victor yet,' she gasped out. The real battle for the City in the Sky began.
Fost was breathing hard when he reached the tenth floor of the Palace, and motes of blackness spun in his brain. 'This is the proper level,' Erimenes told him.
'I know,' panted Fost. 'Been here before, remember? When Moriana and I… rescued you,' 'Rescued?' Erimenes said, outraged. 'I wouldn't use that term.'
'Neither should I. As I recall, you were busy collaborating with the enemy.'
'That's the true barbarian spirit,' a familiar voice said. 'Holding a colloquy
with a ghost while the fate of worlds is decided around you.'
Warily, Fost watched High Councillor Uriath enter the room. The tall, portly man had a massive volume tucked under his arm. He radiated a fey humor Fost hadn't detected in him before. 'I'm not a barbarian,' said Fost.
Uriath laughed. It was the first genuine laugh the courier had ever heard him utter.
'Ah, but you are. A pathetic groundling barbarian. Also a fool.' He giggled. 'And in another moment – dead,'
'Kill him, Fost!' Erimenes bawled. Fost brought up his sword and lunged.
Uriath had flipped open the book. His lips moved quickly. A unlit oil lamp set in a niche along-one wall burst into incandescence. Fost yelped and fell back as the flaming oil drew a line between him and the demonically grinning High Councillor. A shape cavorted in the center of the inferno, sinuous and vaguely reptilian. Uriath pointed at Fost.
'Kill him,' he commanded.
The salamander sprang. Fost flung himself to one side. Stone exploded, spraying him with glowing hot fragments. The fire sprite backed away, hissing, slavering sparks.
Fost crouched, keeping his sword between his body and the fiery thing, even though this was puny defense against the elemental. 'Erimenes? What do I do?' 'You pray to Ust,' the genie said. 'And I'll try Gormanka.'
The elemental darted forward. Fost danced aside. He screamed as the being grazed his side leaving his chainmail glowing in a yellow-white swath along his body. He could barely breathe from the pain. The monster's next rush would end him. The salamander hovered between him and the gloating Uriath. A wild rush at the High Councillor would buy him nothing except a death quicker by milliseconds. 'Father!' Was it his imagination? 'Father, what are you doing?'
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