War of Powers

by Robert E Vardeman;Victor Milan

  The icy air was like razor-sharp knives in his lungs, emotion a dagger in his guts. Was his concern for Moriana alone or for his prospect of recovering the ancient, treacherous shade who alone knew the location of the Amulet of Living Flame? He couldn't answer the question.

  The look in his eyes answered Jennas. She set her face into the wind and rode on, leaving the courier to wonder if it was the icy blast that made her eyes water.

  Then they were descending to the valley on the far side of the pass. The snow began to thin. Jennas nodded silently as Fost shouted and pointed to a thin spire of smoke corkscrewing into the sky.

  They reached the valley floor. Fost booted Grutz to a run, galloping past Jennas's mount and shouting Moriana's name. A slender figure leaped from an overhanging bank and came around the campfire with sword in hand to confront the bear-riders.

  'Fost!' Moriana sheathed her sword, and she was running forward too, arms wide. Fost dropped from Grutz's broad back and lunged to meet her. Laughing and shouting with wordless joy, they clung to each other. Moriana babbled the story of her escape from the Valley, running on until Fost stopped her with an embrace.

  After an appropriately long kiss, he broke away and turned to Jennas. To his surprise the hetwoman smiled.

  'Any woman who can pass through the Valley of Crushed Bones alive is worthy even of a Champion of Ust,' she said. 'I leave you now. The tents of the Ust-alayakits are open to you always.' So saying, she turned her bear and loped back toward the trail through the mountains.

  Grutz shuffled forward, rumbling deep in his throat. Moriana raised her sword. The great, shaggy head shoved against Fost's chest and nuzzled him. He ruffled the coarse fur of the bear's neck. Then Grutz wheeled and followed the hetwoman of the People of Ust.

  Only a few flakes dropped from the leaden sky. Moriana and Fost stood with joined hands, watching as Jennas mounted the trail and ascended with remarkable speed. As she reached the place where the trail disappeared around the mountain, she paused to wave. Fost and Moriana waved back, and the warrior-woman was gone, Grutz lumbering after her.

  Fost turned again to Moriana. He saw the peculiar light in her green eyes and thought with sinking heart of her scrying spell. 'Moriana . . .' he began.

  She shook her head, placing a finger to his lips. 'Don't worry,' she said. She glanced at the trail. 'I wish she'd said her name. She's quite a woman, isn't she?'

  'Her name is Jennas,' the courier said. 'And yes, she is quite a woman indeed.'

  And so are you, he thought. They trudged on during morning and afternoon. At first they walked strongly. Moriana, pausing to wait for Fost, had enjoyed several days of relative inactivity in which to recuperate from the endless trek south. Fost had gone through a more strenuous time but at least, as he told himself, he hadn't had to walk during most of it.

  In a matter of only minutes, though, they were exhausted. The very clothes on their bodies weighted them down like the threat of impending death. Their feet were as hard to lift as if they had taken root. Step after dreary, dragging step all too slowly melted away the miles.

  The day passed in leaden silence. After exhaustion stilled the happy conversation that had followed Moriana and Fost's reunion, even Erimenes soon lapsed into silence. He could not endure the empty, lonely way his voice rattled up and down the valleys walled with grey stone and mortared with ice.

  The autumn polar day was short, and the sun no sooner gained the pinnacle of the sky than it tumbled to a bloody death on the jagged peaks. The onslaught of darkness brought with it redoubled chill. Fost and Moriana moved almost energetically as they erected Moriana's tent for the night. It was a counterfeit energy, born from their efforts to fight the weariness that urged them to lie on the bare, cold earth and sleep for all eternity.

  Fingers half frozen, they found it hard even to wield spoons to spill a few mouthfuls of gruel down their throats. Bland as it was, the magical grey mess stung throats gone raw from breathing saw-edged antarctic air. At last they put away the ebony bowl and unrolled their bedrolls for sleep.

  Fost wondered if it could have taken any more effort to climb the loftiest mountain in the Ramparts than it did to work his way down into the cocoon of his bed. Yet once he lay inside it, almost warm for the first time that day, he found sleep eluded him as nimbly as a handful of wind.

  He lay a long time, becoming gradually more aware of the aches that assailed his body and of the breathing of the woman beside him. His mind was numb with fatigue, but he could not slip off the mantle of awareness. He realized Moriana's breathing did not come in the steady rhythm of sleep. He wondered what made her wakeful. She had to be as tired as he.

  'Fost.' He rolled onto his back. He inhaled deliberately, thinking that his body would have stunk had not the cold leached odor from the air, or perhaps it was the sense of smell from his nostrils?

  'Yes?''What happens once we get there?' He breathed out. Vapor ghosted white above him. 'Let's leave it,' he said. His voice sounded ancient, a once-smooth baritone fractured by senescence. 'We don't even know if we will get there.'

  'It's time we spoke of it,' she insisted. He shifted to his side. Her face was a pale blur in the darkness of the tent. His imagination filled in details: satin skin dried like leather by wind and sun, stretched taut over the frame of aristocratic cheekbones; full lips pressed tight, almost pinched, by the endless hours of forcing her body to go on, always on; her naturally bright eyes gone hard and sharp as emeralds; her golden hair turned to straw. Still, she was beautiful, as beautiful as only one can be whose spirit is strong, enduring and indomitable.

  Fost freed his arm and reached out to stroke Moriana's cheek with the backs of his fingers. She turned her face away.

  'You're evading the question,' she accused. 'I won't have it.' 'What do you mean you won't have it?' he snapped, irritated by the tone of her voice.

  She looked at him. He thought he could see the Crystalline hardness in her eyes.

  'There is a question that must be answered soon,' Moriana said, the words sounding as if they'd been punched out with a cold chisel. 'Who is to have the Amulet of Living Flame? We both desire it. Who gets it?'

  Resentment geysered up inside Fost. He choked it back. Yet he knew it was this question, not the ache in his limbs, that kept sleep at a distance.

  'I'm too sleepy to think straight,' he said. 'For Ust's sake, can't we talk about it tomorrow?' He shook his head. 'Why can't we just share the damned amulet?'

  'That's no answer,' the princess hissed. Her hand shot from her roll and seized his wrist. Its grip reminded him of the grip of a Sky City eagle. 'I want it to free my City. You want it for. . . carousal, so that you can drink and wench your way through the ages like some little boy who's just slipped over the edge into adolescence.'

  'To learn,' Fost muttered. 'I want to learn.' 'There might only be limited power stored in the amulet. So it is written in the ancient scrolls Rann's men unearthed in Kolinth. So Erimenes affirms. If either of us uses it even once, it may turn into a useless trinket. So who is to have it?'

  Fost twisted his hand from hers and rolled onto his back with a noisy exhalation.

  Moriana reared up like an angry serpent. 'You can't just turn away. Talk to me, dammit. I command it!'

  'You command it?' Fost shot upright. 'By what right do you command it?' His voice shook with outrage.

  'By right of birth! I am Princess of the City in the Sky. I am queen. That's by what right, groundling.'

  'Queen? Queen? Of what? Of all the rocks and rodents in the Rampart Mountains?' He glared at her, nose hovering inches from hers.

  For a long moment they stared at each other. Then Moriana said, 'It looks that way, doesn't it?'

  Fost blinked. Moriana snickered. She flopped onto her back and gave a hoot of laughter. His eyebrows rose. He tried to speak, but a laugh bubbled up from inside him and burst out past his words.

  'I thought you were fighting.' Erimenes's words cut astringently across their mirth. He sounde
d accusing.

  'No, Erimenes,' Fost gasped, trying to gulp in a lungful of air. 'We're making love.'

  'If that's what you think you were doing, it explains why your companionship has been so markedly uninteresting of late. You could give lessons to a pair of mating felines.'

  Fost whooped and seized Moriana around the waist. Her fists pummeled his back, but not with the full strength she could put into them.

  The courier's mind was clear with a kind of feverish lucidity as they grappled and groped their way toward an activity sure to alleviate the spirit's boredom. They had dissolved into laughter over nothing. Their mirth had been a release from the pressure building between them. In his curious acuteness of mind Fost recognized that for all her apparent determination on settling the question of the Amulet of Living Flame, Moriana had been no less eager than he to delay finding an answer.

  Perhaps because there was no answer. His hand slid into her bedroll, touched the yielding smoothness of bare skin. Her fingers kneaded the great muscle of his thigh. He groaned as his body responded despite the protests of overworked muscles.

  Their bodies pressed against each other as if trying to blend into one. Yet the naked dagger of the unanswered question lay between them.

  Fost felt a twinge in his back, so sharp he cried out. Moriana's mouth muffled the sound. The cramp faded and then she was on top of him.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Prince Rann watched the snow fall.

  The cold wind beat upon the sides of the makeshift pavilion. Tents had been hurriedly stitched together to form the shelter, lances and javelins comprising the uprights and the stark gray rock of the cliff forming the rear wall. It kept the survivors of his party reasonably dry. It seemed to hamper the cold not at all.

  The prince shivered as icy tendrils of wind crept up his thigh. His right shoulder, bound tightly with linen, burned as hot as the brazier that provided the pavilion's sole heat. His side still ached from the love pat of Istu's Vicar, and his ribs seemed an ever-tightening band of iron around his chest. He tasted defeat and apprehension.

  'Haven't you finished that spell yet?' he snapped at the scrawny youth who squatted near the brazier. The youth looked up, nervously running his fingers through his scraggly yellow beard.

  'These things take time, lord,' he whined. 'Just now there is some disturbance in the ether. We aren't far from Athalau, centre of magic inimical to ours.'

  'Don't lecture me, goat-whelp,' the prince snapped. 'Just finish your casting and be quick about it.'

  With a sniff the journeyman sorcerer turned back to the wide half geode propped on a bronze stand to present its polished face to him. Rann suppressed a snarl. Like political power, sorcerous ability passed mostly along the feminine side of the Etuul clan. Rann had some spells, but numbered neither scrying nor the use of the seeing-stone among them. So he must abide with the sorcerer's impudence if he wished to communicate with the Sky City. He viewed the prospect with a feeling as near dread as he was capable of, but call he must.

  He thought of how satisfying it would be to flay the impudent sorcerer. The very notion twisted his nerves and gave him stirrings in useless loins. But he couldn't punish the journeyman mage-he was needed. He must not punish those fools who had let the bear-riders take his elite Sky Guardsmen in the rear and rob him of his vengeance upon Fost Longstrider. If he wished, he could return to the Great Crater Lake and torment a few Ethereals, but they met their sufferings with bland indifference. He might as well be inflicting torment on a brass statue for all the satisfaction it would give him. Tension built unbearably in him, tension of the sort he had ever been wont to ease through the suffering of others. Now it found no outlet.

  As they had been erecting this rough shelter against the buffeting winds, a creature had darted from its burrow beneath their boots. Quick as a serpent he had snatched up the small furry thing and snapped its neck with a convulsion of his hands. The killing had given him momentary satisfaction, but only momentary. The death had been too quick, too painless. It offered nothing of catharsis.

  Now he sat twining his fingers together with a force that threatened to snap their joints. He prepared himself for abasement before his cousin, for he had failure to report and assistance to beg. It was almost enough to make him start to scream and never stop.

  'Lord Prince,' the youthful mage said obsequiously through his snout. 'Our Most Gracious Majesty, Queen Synalon, awaits your pleasure.'

  Squinting at the youth in disgust, Rann entertained the thought of seizing him by the scruff of the neck and thrusting his face into the coals. Perhaps he could sear off a few of the pimples scattered like pustulant rubies across his visage. He shook himself and moved to stand in front of the geode.

  Its surface glowed with the likeness of Synalon. She lolled on her jeweled throne, fingers idly stroking the feathers of a large raven. Her scarlet gown opened to the navel, baring slices of creamy breast. Rann's tongue danced across his lips. She smiled, knowing the consternation it caused him to see her thus.

  'Well, cousin,' she purred, 'we trust you've only triumph to report?'

  The very silkiness of her tone indicated that she trusted no such thing. Rann swallowed hard.

  'I regret, O Mistress of the Clouds, that my expedition has met with a temporary setback.'

  Synalon nodded, her eyes half closed. The prince cleared his throat. 'I would not trouble Your Majesty, save that I must request you release to me more troops.'

  'More troops?' She arched a brow. 'What exigencies might you encounter that a half-company of our finest Guardsmen are insufficient to deal with?'

  Rann swallowed gall. 'None, Sky-born,' he said, 'yet I no longer possess half a company. Only twelve men remai n, twelve out of fifty.'

  'How is this?' Tersely Rann told her of their losses to storm, thulyakhashawin and finally to the bear-riding nomads. 'It distresses us that a handful of barbarians could slaughter our elite with such ease.' She plucked a morsel from a bowl at her elbow and offered it to the raven. The bird gobbled it down, regarding Rann with an unwinking crimson bead of an eye.

  Rann fought down a grimace. Her affectation of the royal 'we' irritated him, and he despised her poison-taloned pets.

  'They came upon us from behind, Majesty.' 'Indeed.' Her hand ruffled the feathers behind the raven's head. 'The foremost of our chieftains permits himself to be taken in the rear by a passel of savages. Is this the man we trust to bring us victory?'

  'My life is yours,' the prince said. He bowed his head. 'You'll not get off that easily,' Synalon sneered. Rann looked up in alarm. 'It is your fate to serve the Throne of the City. Though we need them for our own preparations, we will release to you another fifty Sky Guardsmen.' She stroked the bird's beak. It croaked delight at the attention. 'See that you do not disappoint us again. Bring us the amulet - and my sister!'

  'Your Majesty,'he almost gasped.'I assure you .. .'With a wave of her hand, Synalon broke the connection as the words left her cousin's mouth. He sat back, boiling with rage as sweat streamed down his face.

  The journeyman magician sat by with folded hands and an unctuous expression. 'Does my lord require anything else?'

  'Yes,' Rann snapped. 'The stink of the latrine trench begins to affront my nostrils. Do something about it, Maguerr, or I'll bury you to the neck in it so that you may fully appreciate the savor of the sewage.'

  He smiled at the boy's expression of horror. It made him feel somewhat better.

  The travelers had tramped so long through a fog compounded of

  tedium, exhaustion and bone-stabbing cold that it took them some minutes to realize they had come to the other side of the mountains.

  The storm had gone its way. The swollen sun squeezed into the eastern sky, turning the far mountains to copper. At the faint caress of winter sunlight on her cheeks, Moriana raised her head.

  'Ooooh!' A long syllable of wonder rolled from her lips. She clutched at her companion's arm. 'Fost, look. Look!'

  He lifted his h
ead and blinked. Weak as the morning sun was, it dazzled him after the long night. Tinged with pink, the icefields stretched away forever southward: the Southern Waste. And that meant to the east lay .. .

  He swiveled his head towards the sunrise. Moriana turned with him, and her gasp rose with his. High mountains formed a bowl beyond which stretched the Gulf of Veluz like a sheet of beaten bronze. In their amazement they took no note of the distant water. A nearer spectacle claimed their eyes.

  The glacier filled the bowl between the mountains. It was no blank whiteness like the icelands beyond but was an enormous swirl of bands of color, dark on light. Brown, white, black, yellow, dull red and green cast back flecks of sunlight here and there so that the whole sparkled and danced in the sun. It reminded Fost of candles he'd seen with different hues of wax poured together in colorful whorls.