War of Powers

by Robert E Vardeman;Victor Milan

  The birds went mad. The blaze of flame was like a blinding light flashed into a human's eyes in the dead of night. The creatures never had encountered fire before, particularly not the supernatural heat of the elemental. In their astonishment some of the huge killers flung themselves into the conflagration. Their cries rose in a horrid crescendo as the sprite devoured their flesh.

  Weakened by the effort of conjuration, Moriana staggered away. With no fire to draw the salamander, the only heat available was that of Moriana's own body; the possibility had existed that the salamander would remain within her as it attained fiery life and consume her own flesh before breaking free. She had rid herself of the being in time but she had no idea how much harm it might have done her. She could barely manage the power to put one foot in front of the other, but that didn't matter now. The burning grove totally obscured her own bodily heat. The blind predators had no way to follow her.

  A hundred yards away she stopped and performed the dismissal. The salamander resisted but was finally forced back to where it had come from. Its final shriek of rage stretched across the night like a banner. Though weariness tried to cement her limbs to the bench of stone where she paused, she drove herself to her feet and onward through the darkness.

  When she had left the valley of the sightless birds by climbing another nearly dry waterfall, which Erimenes assured her rose too steeply for the hunters to scale, she dropped to the grass and slept the deathlike sleep of total exhaustion. No dreams animated her repose. The chill mists that arose in the hours before dawn failed to disturb her. Only when the sun finally pushed its way above the peaks that loomed all around did she awaken.

  'If the blizzard of a week ago hadn't been followed by unseasonable warmth, you would have frozen to death last night,' Erimenes chided her as she sat up. 'I'll thank you to be more cautious in the future. It wouldn't do for me to be stranded among these tedious valleys.'

  'Why the concern over my welfare?' Moriana asked. Erimenes gave the same answer as when she had questioned him before about his new solicitousness: silence. Maybe he's afraid of being stuck here for generations, with nothing to entertain him but the ponderous circling of the seasons. But that explanation failed to satisfy her.

  'I congratulate you on the resourcefulness with which you handled those abominable birds,' Erimenes said. 'It would have been too degrading to contemplate had one of them swallowed my jar. Imagine spending the rest of the monster's natural life - and in past years they were renowned for their longevity- rolling about inside its gizzard with a lot of common pebbles and the occasional bone. Brrr.'

  Her every joint feeling like an unoiled hinge, Moriana rose and went to the stream. Kneeling, she splashed water on her face, gasping as the stinging cold revived her. She shook her head, sending droplets glittering off in the early sun. She finally realized Erimenes was speaking to her.

  'Pardon?' 'I said, I've decided I'm not at all dismayed at the present turn of events. You're much more stimulating than that slugabed Fost. For one thing your nicely rounded posterior as you bend over the creek . . .'

  'Fost!' Moriana's startled cry interrupted the spirit. 'I must find out what happened to him.' She settled on her knees and began the scrying spell, her hand poised above the stream.

  'Are you sure you want to?' Erimenes's words sounded strangely gentle. 'Remember the odds he faced.' He didn't say, Remember what awaited him if he was captured by Rann, and Moriana marveled at his restraint. She continued the chant.

  The water went murky, roiled and became a window. Sun rays slanted across a high rock face honeycombed with black holes. Huge shaggy shapes lumbered across the steppe in front of a high cliff.

  'Look!' Moriana cried. She seized the satchel, dragged it to her and pulled out Erimenes's jug, uncapping it in the throes of her excitement. 'Look, Erimenes. He lives!'

  Blue mist arose from the jar. It gyrated briefly, coalesced into the familiar gaunt figure. Erimenes bent forward to peer myopically into the water.

  'He does indeed,' the spirit said, as violence suddenly swept the tableau. 'But for how long?'

  Moriana could only shake her head, her features a mask of impotent worry.

  Fost watched the copper band of sunlight expand across the steppes as the sun rose over the distant Gulf of Veluz. He breathed deeply of the clear, brisk air and felt his body tremble, both from the weakness caused by his wounds and anticipation of what was to come.

  'The Sun Bear rolls the Great Globe into the sky,' the shaman intoned. 'The time has come.'

  Silently the People of Ust rose from their campfires and went to the hulking, reeking shapes of their mounts tethered by the domelike tents. Following them, Fost nursed doubts as to the truth of what the shaman said. From what he had heard, he didn't think the time would ever come to challenge a sorcerer such as Kleta-atelk of the Hurinzyn.

  A shirt of mail weighted down his shoulders, its hem slapping his thighs just above the knees as he walked. A round shield of bearhide rode on his left arm. The unfamiliar hardness of a helmet enclosed his head. For what it was worth, he was well armored. In his experience mere armor seldom had any use against enchantment. His thoughts did not run along optimistic lines.

  They turned more morose still when his mount was presented to him. 'This is Grutz,' Jennas said, slapping the blunt red nuzzle companionably. 'His rider, Suss, fell last night with an arrow in her eye. Here, Grutz, behold your new master. Fost is a doughty fighter, if a trifle dim. You'll like him.'

  Fost failed to appreciate the introduction but felt the time wrong to protest, particularly since the beast looked malevolently at him and growled deep in its throat.

  'There,' Jennas said in satisfaction. 'See? He likes you.' 'As appetizer or entree?' asked Fost. Jennas guffawed. 'You've spirit for a northlander,' she said, dealing him a buffet on the shoulder that loosened his teeth. 'Irtans and the others are foolish babblers when they say we should have fed you to the bears or let the birdmen finish you.'

  'I am, of course, grateful for your timely arrival last night’ Fost said, 'but you seem to assume I'll aid you in your battle against this sorcerer.'

  'And why not?' jennas asked. 'It is only fitting. We save your thick hide from the birdmen and you aid us. Are we not all children of Ust? Do we not worship the same god? Do we not share the same code of justice given us by the Red Bear of the East?'

  'Justice?' Fost croaked weakly, glancing from Jennas to Grutz and back.

  'A life for a life. We save you, you must offer your life to the Bear Clan in return. One way or the other.'

  Fost looked around. Others of the Bear People gathered, fingering knife hilts and smiling more like wolves than bears. Their lumbering mounts rocked restlessly, talons grating against rock. They could as easily slash through his tender flesh.

  'You're saying I must aid you in exterminating this sorcerer?' 'Of course you must!' boomed Jennas. 'It is your duty. You owe it to us. After this duty to the clan, the obligation is erased.'

  'I've had dealings with sorcerers in the past, bad dealings. I want nothing more to do with them.'

  'Grutz.' Fost retreated and stopped short when he felt a knife blade pricking into his back. The huge bear Jennas had called moved forward with ponderous steps. Its mouth opened to reveal fangs that Fost fancied to be the length of his own fingers.

  'Mount and ride, Fost Longstrider.'She didn't have to add, 'Or else Grutz sups early.' Fost smiled, hoping Jennas would read the tautness in the expression as bravado. He could think of nothing to say, so he put his foot in the stirrup and tried to hoist himself into the saddle on Grutz's high, sloping back. Fost had difficulty until Jennas put a hand under his rump and boosted him up.

  Grutz grunted, shifting under the weight. Fost swayed dangerously, blushing with furious embarrassment. The other bear-riders appeared not to notice how their hetwoman had assisted him. They adjusted the hang of their weapons, fiddled with medicine bags and fetishes or simply stared somberly across the brightening steppes. A group o
f dispirited helots went about striking the tents and stowing them for the trail. The nomad raiders took their homes with them and left nothing to mark their campsites.

  Jennas had mounted her beast, immense and brown with claws like black scythes. She plucked a lance from a rest, waved it above her head and spurred the bear into an eastward waddle. The bear-riders followed, forming up in a long column behind. Fost took his station at the end of the line. Grutz's muscles flowed smoothly under his fur, but his gait was ragged, lurching Fost about until the courier felt as though he were riding an earthquake.

  Misery rapidly overtook him. Rationally he should have been far more upset by the desperate eagle ride from the City in the Sky and the twisting, confused aerial battle that could have sent him plunging to inevitable death. But then he had been too busy fighting for his life to indulge in excess emotion. Now, with hours stretching empty before him, he had ample time to spend convincing himself he was about to fall off and break his neck.

  In a way that might have been preferable. Last night, stumbling away from the scene of the battle, Fost had heard how the Ust-alayakits, the People of Ust, had chanced to come to his rescue. They warred with a neighboring folk, the Hurinzyn, who dwelled in caves east of the bear-rider's range. The Hurinzyn - badger clan -were ruled by the sorcerer Kleta-atelk, who delighted in producing magical monsters. In days past the hunter-herdsmen of the Bear totem had often warred with the more agriculturally oriented Badgers. Since the advent of Kleta-atelk the conflict had taken on a far more bitter character.

  'Whether to feed his pets or for some purpose more hideous,' Jennas had told Fost, 'his men and his monsters have been raiding our flocks. Of late they have taken children too.' Her voice dropped beneath its usual deep contralto. 'A week ago my daughter Duri was taken and my freemate Timrik, her father, was slain defending her. Half a score other children of Ust were reaved away as well. So now we ride against the cursed Hurinzyn, to triumph or to die.'

  Leaving oldsters, children and non-combatant parents to stay behind with the flocks, the fighting strength of the People of Ust, some hundred warriors of both sexes, had set out for Hurinzyn territory the day before. As they camped, their scouts reported a body of bird-riders swooping in a landing at the foot of the mountains. Intent on Fost and Moriana, the Sky City troops hadn't noticed the bear-riders stealing up silently to pin them against the sheer rock walls as thoroughly as they had pent up their own quarry. Just as Jennas had been about to attack, the Guardsmen had rushed Fost's camp. Though in the habit of slaying all strangers, the bear-riders had been impressed by the courage of Fost's solitary stand against such numbers. Still, they had been prepared to let the Guardsmen do the work of finishing off this valiant warrior - until he had called on Ust for aid. The sign had been clear: Ust had provided this outlander to aid his folk against Kleta-atelk. They had unhesitatingly gone forward to his rescue.

  Fost had been bandaged, fed and housed in a hide tent stretched over the bones of some colossal creature. In the morning he had been given the best of the spare equipment. Under the circumstances he could scarcely refuse to join the bear-folk on their raid. Yet he fretted as he rode across the flat, featureless land in the lee of the Ramparts. Time fled. Would Moriana wait for him or was she at this very instant nearing Athalau, intent on using the Amulet of Living Flame to help depose her sister?

  His fatalistic fury of the night before had gone. Now he looked back on his reckless berserker rage with something akin to shame. He wished he knew more of his antecedents that he might learn whether his family had a history of madness. Life now seemed very precious to him; joining in a desperate expedition against a wizard of surpassing might and wickedness struck him as a poor way to hang onto it.

  For all their ungainly bulk the bears rolled along at a pace much quicker than a man could walk. Feeling his breakfast of dried meat and sour bear's milk churning in his stomach, Fost groaned. In action he would have a hard enough time just staying aboard his mount. If Ust had indeed contrived to have him join the attack, the doctrine of divine infallibility was in for a drubbing.

  They had ridden two hours when a shout roused Fost from the dour reverie into which he had fallen. Looking up, he saw two figures rise from the grass and flee with a peculiar hunching lope: badgers, slightly smaller than the Ust-alayakits' bears, with black on their masks and limbs. Their riders wore peaked fur caps and long, dirty robes. They showed no signs of armor and carried javelins with bone shafts.

  The bear-riders jeered at the retreat of their enemies. Even Jennas shouted after them, her stern, handsome features flushed as though she'd just won a battle.

  Did they seriously expect a pair to fight a hundred? Fost wondered. He began to understand his new comrades better. The growing enlightenment failed to cheer him.

  The village of the Hurinzyn came into view. The mountains here rose abruptly from the steppe in a grey, shiny wall. Artists or nature had pocked the stone face with a myriad caves in which the badger-folk made their homes. Ledges scaled the cliff in terraces, chiseled out of living rock to provide lateral access between the caves. Vertical movement was accomplished by means of ladders. Warned by their pickets, the badger-folk had drawn up the lowest of these. By any means Fost could see, the homes of the Hurinzyn were unreachable to the People of Ust. The courier wondered if Jennas had some scheme he'd been unable to guess at.

  One hole at the highest level was larger than the rest and fronted with a wide balcony of stone, a single broad slab that jutted from the cliff. From the hole emerged a lone figure. He was a tall man, or so Fost surmised, for his back was badly hunched. Wild black hair shot with grey fell around his shoulders and a beard of the same combination reached knobby knees left bare by the smock he wore. His garment was a faded black, crudely embroidered with white and lemon pictographs. He supported himself on a staff carved of yellowing bone topped with a gap-eyed and fanged badger's skull. His own eyes were round ebony glints.

  'Kleta-atelk,' Jennas said, reining her bear at Fost's side. The bridle applied pressure to the beast's neck to guide it while leaving the jaws free to bite.

  1 surmised as much,' Fost said. The badger-shaman raised an arm and began to sing in a high, trembling voice. 'What's he up to?'

  'He chants up his creatures,' said Jennas. She cinched her helmet strap tight beneath her jaw.

  'Are they otherworldly?' She shook her head. 'He must keep his song to control them. His pets are mortal beasts, 'tis said, transformed to monsters by his sorcery. The change maddens them. Should his chant falter, they'd fall on the Hurinzyn in an instant-and him as well.'

  More figures sprang from the waist-high grass. A line of Hurinzyn on foot confronted the bear-riders. The unarmored footmen cast javelins. Slings whined and loosed buzzing projectiles. A rock glanced off Fost's shield, momentarily numbing his arm. A grey bear to his left was struck by a spear just in front of its rider's leg. The creature gave no sign of noticing. Less vigorously driven than the spears and arrows of the Sky Guardsmen had been, the Hurinzyn javelins failed to pierce the coarse fur and fat that sheathed the bears' vitals.

  Jennas whipped her greatsword loose from its sling across her back. 'Forward!' she shouted. Growling, the column of bears spread into a line and charged. The Hurinzyn skirmishers loosed a desultory hail of missiles and took to their heels.

  Fost's worries about controlling his beast proved well founded. No matter how he tried to rein in, Grutz put his massive head down and charged along with his fellows, rumbling deep in his throat like a distant thunderstorm.

  'Hold on!' Fost bellowed, clinging to the horn of his pitching saddle. 'Stop! Can't you see we're being led into a trap!'

  A warrior-woman grinned fiercely at him in passing, whether in contempt at his caution or thinking he gave his battle cry, he couldn't tell. Jennas's big brown ran far in advance of the charge, rolling with all the irresistibility of an avalanche toward the departing badger-folk.

  Just as the animal's jaws gaped to seize a Hurinzyn, the
disaster Fost feared came crashing down on the People of Ust.

  From burrows dug into the clay erupted monsters. Horrid parodies of natural creatures swarmed over the bear-riders. A thing like a badger but covered with slimy skin grabbed a rider from his saddle. The man screamed as the acid seeping from its pores consumed him. An eight-legged dog ran in front of Fost's mount, slavering in mad rage. Something that seemed all eyes and mucus lashed at him with a jointed sting. He warded off the blow with his shield and swept his blade in a bloody line over the gaping orbs. Grutz carried him headlong.

  Suddenly the red bear put his rump to the ground and stopped so precipitously that Fost had to brace his hands against the pommel to keep from being emasculated. Falling back into his saddle, he looked ahead to see what had made the animal halt. Then he turned his head and vomited.

  At the foot of the cliffs a thing waited. Twice as high as a bear, wide as several, a mass of obscenely white and obese flesh, it sat and raised its voice in a lament. Great dugs drooped like sacks across its bulging belly and arms lay in boneless loops tipped with clumps of yard-long tentacles. Its eyes were wide and blue, long-lashed and weeping constant tears down cheeks and shapeless nose. The mouth had been elongated into a trunk, ending in incongruously red lips.