A cry of pleasure broke from Synalon's throat and was whipped away by the wind of Nightwind's passage. Stolidly, the bird flew on. Only once did it have to correct its flight as the woman suddenly shifted her weight back and forth. It knew its mistress's foibles well.
Flushed and breathless, Synalon cast a glance upward. The City was several miles distant. Her sister was undoubtedly on her way to having herself crowned Queen of the City in the Sky. Synalon reached forward and stroked the straining bird's neck, feeling the taut muscles beneath her fingers.
'The silly slut,' she said, 'is probably wiping away a tear for her evil twin,' she said to her eagle. Synalon grinned savagely. 'Ah, yes, the evil but great-souled twin who took her own life rather than face the disgrace of being exiled among the groundlings or lifetime captivity.' She laughed, long and loud.
Synalon had feared only one thing as she stepped to the windowsill in her throne room. The heat from the living firestorm of the salamanders summoned by the traitorous Uriath to slay both her and Moriana had abated slightly. But under no circumstance did she fear the fire elementals – or even the Destiny Stone Uriath had stolen and which had destroyed him. The major obstacle to overcome had been Moriana's lover Fost. He might suspect trickery and check to see if she had actually fallen to her death. He may have been a lowborn groundling but he was as cunning as if he had spent his life untangling the threads of intrigue in the Imperial court at High Medurim.
In other circumstances Moriana might have suspected some ploy on her sister's part. But she had been exhausted physically and spiritually by the last duel with Synalon for possession of the Sky City they both coveted. Besides, she had wanted to believe her sister capable of making such a noble choice as suicide over imprisonment or exile.
Wary of pursuit, Nightwind swiveled his head back and forth constantly studying the horizon and the sky to both sides. Looking back the way they'd come, he gave a sudden sharp cry.
Synalon came immediately alert. Her vision wasn't that of an eagle but it was far sharper than an ordinary human's. On a distant knoll almost swallowed by the shadow cast by the City in the noonday sun sat a small figure. Before the figure a great black cruciform object lay on the ground. Synalon's eyebrows arched in surprise. Her thin lips drew back in a smile. With pressure of her knee, she set Nightwind into a long banking curve and headed back.
The procession turned into the alley and stopped. Quiet lay like a blanket on the streets. From the center of the City came wild cries of celebration. Most of the population had massed in the great Circle of the Skywell to acclaim the new queen. Of the rest, some waged a final hopeless fight against the invaders in back streets and warehouses, or huddled behind shuttered windows fearful of the forces that stalked the City in the Sky that day. The backs of deserted buildings looked down blankly upon the knot of the faithful.
It was an unremarkable wall constructed of seamless gray stone shot through with veins of dull green, worn to a glossy smoothness by the passage of wind and countless ages. Like the older structures in the City, like the bulk of the City itself, it was a gigantic crystal grown in the ages before the coming of man to the Southern Continent. Rooms, passageways and doors had been hollowed out of it by the patient labor of clawed hands.
A hand like those of the original builders, dark green, finely scaled, possessed of thumb and three clawed fingers, held aloft a black diamond that smoked as though plucked from a furnace. The huge gem's facets glittered dully, not in the light of a sun masked by a high cloud layer but with an inner luminescence of its own. The worshippers fell silent. The hand pressed the stone against the wall. The jewel smoked furiously and a section of wall vanished soundlessly, leaving no trace.
The jewel bearer stepped through the oblong opening into a passage that had lain hidden for a hundred centuries and more. Heads bowed, twinned hearts pounding with religious rapture, the faithful followed him into the dark – into the Dark. No light penetrated the downward-winding tunnel. The noonday light outside seemed incapable of crossing the threshold of the secret passage. But the giant diamond carried by the leader provided enough dark illumination of its own to guide its bearer and his twelve followers.
Downward, ever downward they trudged. Darkness deepened, became tangible. No fear touched their hearts. The Dark was their element. They drew comfort and strength from it. The expectation of a great gift grew among the faithful.
They came to a door. It was twice as tall as a man, made of oak and bound with brass that showed no tarnish, no sign of the ages that had washed over this door like a flowing stream. All was illusion: the door was not wood and brass. It was wrought of a substance no mortal could work or even alter. The physical aspect given to a binding force of incredible power, it defied any other power in the world.
Any other but one. And the source of that power was only lately rediscovered.
The twelve threw themselves to their knees. The thirteenth raised the smoking jewel above his head and began a reptilian hissing, a triumphant chant.
In the bosom of the Dark a Demon slept, as it had for ten millennia. Hatred and despair washed over one another in an endless ebon swirl. But lately the Demon's dreams were shot through with bright threads of hope. Presences long unfelt had drawn near, uttering soft words, seductive words, promising that which the sleeping Demon desired above all things: freedom.
Or had that been another fragment of dream, the mind of the sleeper taunting itself with a hope it knew must remain unconsum-mated?
The nebulous awareness of the being existed without volition, could not summon events into focus or bring back recollections. It had no tests of truth or falsity. Still, the memories of newborn promise carried a sharpness, an appealing immediacy, that set them apart from the vagueness of dreaming. Like the memories of soft white flesh, and pain, and pleasure…
Something tickled the Sleeper's mind. It stirred within its womb, within the stone that imprisoned its limbs as the old enchantment fettered its mind. For a long moment the Sleeper believed it was just another taunti ng shard of dream. Or did it hear once more the voices of those who had worshipped it in the days of glory, lost so long ago?
It sensed presences. As the words of the Song of Awakening came to it, a pulsation of power ran through the Sleeper's body and mind. The Demon's consciousness began to swim upward through the clouds that had lain so long on it. Many times in eons past it had attempted this crazy hegira. But now it felt the singing certainty that this time would be different.
'Well met, cousin,' Synalon called cheerfully as she circled Nightwind in to a landing on the rounded hilltop. Prince Rann looked up from contemplating his warbird's corpse. The fallen eagle was a twin to Synalon's save that it bore a blazing scarlet crest. It lay spread out on the hillside before him, the butt of a Zr'gsz javelin protruding from beneath one wing.
'Rather absurd of you to say so, isn't it?' he asked, rubbing at the gingery stubble on his chin. He noticed her nakedness then, and looked away, blushing.
She laughed and jumped down from Nightwind's back. The eagle spread its wings above the corpse of its nest brother and uttered a single desolate cry.
'A pity about the bird,' the princess said. 'He was such a noble creature.' Still looking away from her, Rann nodded. 'I suppose it's reassuring,' he finally said. 'How do you mean?' 'To know that I can feel remorse over the death of a friend.'
Laughing easily, Synalon sat beside him. The warmth of her body washed over him. He began to fidget. He was a small, intense man who seemed put together of wire and spring steel. His eyes and swept-back hair were tawny, his face displaying the same haughty, almost ascetically classic sculpting as Synalon's. The perfection of his features was marred by a tiny network of white knife scars stretched over the skin like a mask. The nearness and nudity of his cousin was for him as exquisite a torture as any he might devise for victims of his sadism.
'You're turning soft,' she taunted him. Then, as mercurial as always, she switched from banter to flashing anger. 'P
erhaps that's why you lost my City for me. The security of my realm lay in your hands. You let it slip!'
He jumped to his feet, glad of the chance to get away from the smell of her, the feel of her provocatively bare thigh pressing against his purple-clad leg.
'You're a fine one to talk,' he said quietly. He paced away. His scabbard flapped empty at his hip. His scimitar had plummeted to earth sheathed in the body of Darl Rhadaman, Moriana's champion. 'You fought the real battle. What happened in the air was secondary. I grant you, I failed to stop Moriana's entry into the City. But ultimately, cousin dear, it was up to you to prove your superiority in a test of wills and magic, face to face, alone.' He turned back to regard her sardonically. 'And evidently it was a battle you lost. Or else you wouldn't be in such… dishabille.' She leaped to her feet.
'Don't lecture me, half man! How can a eunuch such as you understand what I have lost this day?'
'What you have thrown away this day!' His face was taut and pale under the lattice of scars. 'With the favor of the Dark Ones, you thought, no price lay beyond your grasp. And now look what you've won. Exile to a lonely hilltop without so much as a cloak to cover your nakedness. A prize fit for a queen – or nothing!'
She smiled at him, savage and evil, raised her arms and stretched so that her heavy breasts rode lazily up her ribcage. His tongue flicked lizardlike over his lips. He turned away again.
'What will you do now, cousin?' Synalon asked silkily. 'Will you leave me on this hilltop fate has set me to rule?' His head drew down between his shoulders. 'You know I cannot do that.' For the first time in Synalon's long memory, the prince's voice was hoarse and choked with emotion. She laughed musically in delight.
'No, of course you can't abandon me. Because, while you hate me, you love me far more. And vastly more even than that, you desire me, O cousin Prince!'
Abruptly, Synalon flung forth her arm. Blue lightning coruscated from outstretched fingertips and struck Rann full in the back. He uttered a croaking cry and fell forward onto his knees, arms hugging his chest, bobbing and gasping in a paroxysm of agony.
'And because you fear me, my good and loyal Prince,' said Synalon, sneering. 'Because you fear me well.' Painfully Rann struggled to his feet.
'It would… seem that you're the one – oh! – who grows soft,' he said, enunciating each word as if a dagger twisted in his bowels at every syllable. 'Still you fail… to exact the final price of my failure.'
'I'd prefer having you available to redeem yourself,' she said in a matter-of-fact tone. 'You are adroit, for all that your recent efforts have not exactly been crowned with success. And you're a tough bastard, Rann. A normal man would at this moment be lying before me unconscious or dead from the bolt I gave you.'
Turning, Rann gradually forced himself to uncurl and stand upright before his cousin. He felt like he was stretched on the rack. He forced his lips to smile.
'A normal man, perhaps, but not a half man, eh?' He shook himself as though throwing off the last of the pain the lightning had left. 'What now, cousin?'
Synalon paused, rubbed her palms together, as if rolling a pill between them.
'We travel to Bilsinx, or Kara-Est perhaps, and marshal our resources. The bitch Moriana found some way to increase her powers. So will I. And whose damned lizard allies of hers – their magics seemed all of a defensive sort. They were potent, but even more so is my hatred. I will find the way to defeat them in spite of that damned smoking jewel of theirs, and then pull Moriana down to a lingering death in the sight of all the City she thought to wrest from me!'
Rann might have pointed out that Moriana had indeed wrested the City away from Synalon. He didn't. He was too preoccupied staring past the pale angle of Synalon's shoulder, past the charred fall of her short hair. She frowned at him. The roundness of his eyes, the relevation of his brows and the slight parting of his lips were equivalent to a shout of horror and disbelief from another man. She followed the stare.
Small objects detached themselves from the rim of the floating City and fell. First a few, then hundreds spilled from all sides of the Sky City like beach sand from a child's palm. The objects rotated as they fell. Synalon's wondering eyes made out the flail of limbs desperately seeking purchase on the air. Screams came to her ears like the cries of distant gulls.
CHAPTER TWO
Fost Longstrider sat slumped in the bishop's stool someone had produced for him and wondered whether or not to get drunk.
All around a crowd cheered itself hoarse. Moriana stood proudly beneath the winged crown of the City in the Sky, her arms outflung as if to embrace her new subjects. For having just fought two desperate battles, one of arms and one of sorcery, and then having come close to flaming death from the stolen magics wielded by High Councillor Uriath, she looked remarkably fresh and radiantly beautiful.
Fost, on the other hand, was slipping from the frenzy of battle into the fog of after-action depression. He was charred all over from his own near incineration by one of Uriath's fire elementals, and was uncomfortably aware that the stench of burned flesh clinging to his sweat-lank black hair had come from Luranni. She had bought his life with hers. Where he wasn't black, he was bloody; where he wasn't scorched, he was scored by swordcuts. His helmet and shield were gone, his breeches blackened and torn beyond recognition and his hauberk reduced to a few rings of steel mail hung around his powerful torso. He still had his broadsword hanging at his hip in a well-smoked hornbull leather scabbard. He looked more like the vanquished than a conquering hero.
In battle he'd always felt a vivid, singing awareness, had felt alive in a way he didn't at other times. Lately he had started to go into a berserker's fury that grew madder as the battle grew more intense. Afterward, however, he felt depleted, soiled, and not at all proud of his prowess at wreaking destruction on his fellow man.
His only consolation was that the venerable ghost of Erimenes the Ethical wasn't crowing in his usual fashion over the glorious bloodletting he had witnessed that day.
Still, Fost thought, his lot wasn't so bad. The woman he loved stood by his side and received the adoration of her City. She had succeeded, as had he. Moriana had regained her precious Sky City; he had been reunited with his lover. An added bonus was that Synalon's madness would never unleash a second War of Powers on the world.
A fatuous smirk crossed his face when he realized he was a hero. Like in all the fairy tales of his youth, he was a hero and had won the privilege of living happily ever after.
He drained his goblet of wine and eyed the swell of Moriana's rump inside her tight breeches. Living happily ever after was a marvelous prospect, he decided. He just wished this state business would be finished soon so they could get down to doing the happy living in earnest.
With harsh shouts and proddings with spears, a mob of prisoners was herded into the circle to stand before their rightful queen. Some cowered on their knees pleading for forgiveness with clasped hands and desperate voices. Others stood aloof, disdaining to beg for their lives. Even they had a certain hunted look to their eyes. Fost guessed that their apparently prideful refusal to prostrate themselves and grovel for mercy sprang from a knowledge that it would do them no good. Moriana was an Etuul, from the same stock as Synalon and Rann.
Most of the troops guarding the prisoners wore the ragged garb and odd bits of armor of the Underground's street fighters, the brown and green of the Nevrym foresters or the bright colors and well-tended armor of Moriana's handful of allies from the City States. A few, though, wore the black and purple of the City's military, and here and there Fost caught a glimpse of the brassards of the elite Sky Guard worn alongside the blue and red ribbons of Moriana's sympathizers. The captives were an equally mixed lot: common bird riders and Sky Guardsmen still haughty and erect despite the numbing shock of their first defeat; Bilsinxt auxiliaries in drab earth tones; gaudy Palace Guards; even a few scattered Monitors bereft of their leather helmets and looking about wildly like beasts being led to the slaughter. So hated wer
e Synalon's Monitors that only those fortunate enough to find outlanders – Nevrym foresters, men from the Empire, even Hissers-to surrender to before the mob caught them had survived this long. Now they faced Moriana's justice. But unlike the other prisoners, to them it made little difference whether she chose to be harsh or lenient. The crowd had seen their faces. Their fates were immutable.
As the crowd backed away as if to set themselves apart from those who had dared oppose the return of the City's rightful queen, Fost wondered again where Moriana's reptilian allies were. He hadn't seen one yet. But he knew Moriana had won their cooperation by promising to give them certain religious relics they had been forced to leave behind when Riomar shai-Gallri and her sorceress adventurers wrested the City from them millennia before.
One of the religious artifacts was in view at this moment, and not as faraway as Fost would have liked. Across the Skywell from where he and Moriana stood, squatted the Vicar of Istu, leering at the proceedings with a grotesque basalt face. The statue's form was manlike and exaggeratedly male. Its head bore horns. This was the most disconcerting feature of the great icon, because all of the world's horned creatures wore them decently on snout or forehead and pointing forward. The Vicar of Istu's sprouted unnaturally from the sides of its round heads and curved upward.
A substantial pedestal had been carved from the foundation stone of the City, but the Vicar didn't occupy it. Fost felt cold all over remembering the sight of the statue coming alive and moving from that pedestal to threaten Moriana so long ago. He hoped that the Vridzish were nearly finished rounding up their precious religious treasures. The sooner they got that ghastly mannikin out of his sight the happier Fost Longstrider would be.
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