Istu awakened

CHAPTER SEVEN

On that day appointed for battle by forces none living could comprehend, it seemed as if Nature herself rejoiced at the prospect for slaughter. When dawn poured itself over the horizon like soured milk, the Sky City floated some ten miles west of Kara-Est, where it was spotted by pickets posted in gondolas held aloft by ludintip, huge airborne jellyfish-like creatures. As they reported, the City showed no sign of warlike intent. No war birds circled its tall towers or winged in arrowhead formation to meet the aerial guardians of the seaport. To the immense disgust of Parel Tonsho, and Hausan and Suema, Senior General and Sky Marshal of Kara-Est respectively, a number of Deputies immediately expressed relief and demanded that their city's military alert be called off. The alert remained in force.

At ten in the morning, aerial reconnaissance reported ground troops massing on the plain west of the Hills of Cholon. Smiling grimly – largely for the benefit of the court sculptor come to immortalize what the general was sure would be an epic victory with a heroic bust in marble – General Hausan ordered two thousand cavalry and three thousand foot soldiers, including almost a thousand archers, to come forth from the Landgate to meet the foe. Sweating, itching and weak-kneed within her ornamental armor, Tonsho watched the couriers ride out from the Hall of Deputies with considerable misgiving. At her side her covey of youths strutted and made muscles, bragging about how they would deal with the enemy.

Tonsho knew victory would not be so easy. Battle never was, especially battle against the fearsome Sky City. She silenced her chirping boys with an impatient wave of her hand. On this of all days she didn't want their arrogant prattle distracting her from the serious business of worrying, something no one else in Kara-Est appeared capable of doing.

Standing on the skywall beside the huge mandibular jut of the City's forward dock, Rann and Synalon watched the tidal race of armies in collision. Synalon held a heavy white robe closely about her against the wind. Her hair blew like black stormwrack around her pale face. Rann wore the black and purple of the City with the gold brassard on his left arm identifying him as one of the elite Guard. He needed no badge of rank; the blazing crimson crest on the head of the black war eagle was device enough.

'We shall be victorious, cousin,' said Synalon smugly.'I feel it. I know it!'

Rann glanced sidelong at his queen. 'Is this assured by the Dark Ones?' he asked in a monotone.

'The Dark Ones?' answered Synalon, wildly, almost insanely. 'I assure this day's victory, cousin dear. I am the one with the power. I will crush those crawling insects, those larvae, those pathetic creatures daring to oppose my will!'

Rann said nothing of his own preparations, of the army, the eagle riders and the part they would play, the magics performed by scores of mages in the City. For all he knew, Synalon might be correct. This day might belong to her and her alone. Shaking his head at the prospect, he turned attention back to the slow jigsaw merging of armies below.

Ghostly with distance, the sounds drifted to their ears: barking, shouting, trumpets ringing, the beat of drums. The white and azure banners of Kara-Est snapped above orderly rectilinear arrays, heavy spearmen massed in the center with archers on the wings and squadrons of cavalry on the outermost flank. Against them the Sky City ground troops, twenty-two hundred dog riders from the City and her subjugated 'ally' Bilsinx. The attacking force travelled in a shapeless, fluid formation that the regimented commanders of the Estil army thought disorganized.

In advance swarmed the Bilsinxt light cavalry hurling darts and arrows to disorder the close-packed ranks of the Estil. The heavier City riders couched lances and charged through, the skirmishers parting easily to either side like a bow wave from a war galley's prow. The lines met, purple and black against blue and silver. Several seconds later the observers in the City heard the dull hammerblow followed by a many-throated shout as the hours and weeks of waiting were consummated in steel and blood and death.

Rann smiled grimly. His nostrils flared and he imagined the coppery smell of blood. Beside him Synalon stood as pale and stiff as a marble statue, her thoughts alien.

Inexorably, the City floated east. The striving mass of men and beasts passed beneath. Though outnumbered and less massively armored than their foe, the Sky City forces held their army in savage deadlock. The Bilsinxt streamed past the enemy's flanks like quicksilver, driving arrows into the unprotected flanks and rumps of the Estil knights' war dogs. Between the skirmishers surged an inchoate, writhing mass pushing now this way, now that.

Rann nodded. Turning to an aide who stood by, he said, 'Order the artillery to commence firing. It'll give our crews good practice for what's to come.' The aide nodded and rushed away. 'Besides,' Rann said, leaning forward to grip the windworn stone of the wall, 'the Estil must be encouraged to reinforce.'

Less than a minute later, a rain of rocks and ballista darts spattered among the Estil. Dogs screamed and men choked, dying as the two-yard-long shafts pinned men to mounts and mounts to sod. A few riders and footmen fleeing for the rear became a trickle, a stream – and threatened to turn into a torrential rout.

Ludintip-borne observers signalled news of impending disaster. Hausan barked orders and scattered demotions like seedcorn. Reinforcements began to flood in from the hills.

'Cease bombardment,' Rann ordered. Several of his aides remarked among themselves he had not smiled so since he had come up from a diverting evening torturing the virgin daughter of Mayor Irb, late of Bilsinx.

The prince walked to where the apprentice mage Maguerr sat in a bishop's chair peering into a new geode.

'Get me Dess.' The visage of the City's ground commander peered forth one-eyed from the geode communicator. Rann spoke briefly; the other nodded. He had been a colonel of the Guard until an arrow robbed him of one eye and the binocular vision essential to bird-back warfare. Rann trusted Dess to carry out his orders, no matter how distasteful.

Reinforcements joined the Estil battles, roaring lustily with eagerness to be at the foe. No sooner were fresh troops engaged than the black and purple lines began to waver. In a matter of heartbeats, the City forces had turned their dogs' tails toward their enemy in headlong flight.

Back in the Hall of Deputies Hausan crowed with delight at the news and restored the ranks he had been pruning mere moments before.

'But, sir, the ludintip report that many of our reserve forces are marching forth to join the pursuit.'

'Are they now? Spirited lads! I shall see a medal struck to commemorate this day.' He turned to Tonsho and the Marshal with an expansive wave of his hand. 'Did I not tell you the fight would be decided on the ground? Let them fly their pet gerfalcons against us now. The day is won!'

Tonsho and the round-cheeked Suema exchanged thoughtful looks. Without a word, the plump little Sky Marshal left to issue commands of his own. Ludintip rose from the city, titanic animated gasbags, some as large as a hundred feet across. The oblate spheroids of their hydrogen sacs glared orange-red in the sun. Shield-sized nuclei moved freely across the surface of the sacs avoiding only the tightly held sphincters the ludintip used to steer. The vast fernlike feeding fans were folded beneath the creatures. Tentacles as thick as a man's thigh clung to special brackets set in the gondolas; much slimmer tentacles studded with sting cells carrying an agonizing nerve poison waved in agitation. The gondolas swinging below the creatures bristled with spearpoints and engines of war.

Smiling oddly for a man who has just seen his army routed, Rann went to his war bird and accepted the reins from a cadet, who danced back with obvious relief. The eagle scowled at him.

'Easy, Terror,' Rann soothed. The bird spread its wings once with ineffable emotion as the diminutive prince swung into the saddle. Rann gripped the shaft of the implement that rode in the lance stirrup by his left leg. He hoisted it in salute to his queen. Synalon returned his salute with a small, haughty upward motion of her chin. It was all Rann could expect in way of acknowledgement now that the Power was on her. He kicked vigorously and Terror exploded into the air with a boom of wings. Seeing the red-crested war bird soar, the bird riders of the City took flight as one.

A score of gold brassarded riders formed on Terror. Each carried a shield in one hand and a lancelike object similar to Rann's in the other. The implements were wood shafts ten feet long, each tipped with an eighteen-inch cylinder of red fired clay, capped and sealed with a curious glyph. A wire ran back from the cap to a ring set on a lever at the point where each rider's hand gripped. Through vents in the bottom of each cylinder came a dazzle of flame.

Bolts arched gracefully from the cloud of ludintip. Prematurely loosed, they dropped harmlessly into the Hills of Cholon beyond the lordly palaces and great houses. Rann's grin widened, but he did not fail to note that more of the Estil artillerists had prudently held fire than loosed in panic.

A shaft went by to the left, its whine lost in the thunder of Terror's wings. Rann let his 'lance' drop level, pressing the butt to his ribs with his elbow.

From the clay vessel came an agitated chittering. Guiding the eagle with his knees, Rann swerved in full flight until the tip of the cylinder pointed at a gasbag so immense that a full two score men and two catapults rode the gondola beneath. The chittering increased to a frenzy of liquid syllables just the far side of coherent speech. Taking measured breaths, Rann waited until the sound reached a crescendo. His forefinger tugged the ring.

The cap snapped open. A blue nimbus of flame sprouted from the end as the sealing glyph was broken. An instant later the fire cloud became an arrow-straight line of fire between lancetip and ludintip.

The ludintip exploded in a brilliant blue flash as the fire elemental buried itself lustily in the hydrogen inflating the gasbag. Screaming, the Estil aviators began their last journey home.

Lines surged on either side of Rann, one red, one green, to converge on a second ludintip. Terror fought the thunderclap buffeting from the first explosion with powerful wings as another blossomed, and another.

With the wind at his back, Rann distinctly heard the tunk! tunk! tunk! of the City's own artillery, even above the screams and blasts and the tremendous noise of Terror's passage. A black bundle soared by, trailing smoke, to fall among the pitched rooftops at the western fringe of the City.

Rann glanced back. His cheeks grew taut. Only ten bird riders still followed him, spread in a loose echelon. The aerial artillerists of Kara-Est were proving formidable foes indeed.

Explosions splashed all over the sky as bird riders launched fire salamanders against the ludintip. The Palace mages of the Sky City had spent weeks conjuring small fire sprites into specially enchanted containers that would trap the creatures and their killing heat inside until the lids were opened and the magic seals broken. No more efficient weapon for eliminating the animated airships of the Estil existed.

Rann let the staff with its special jar drop in a lazy spiral to the cobbled streets below. Other bird riders would circle back to munitions carriers for more staffs. He had other concerns. With the unconscious skill of great practice, he performed the acrobatic feat of reaching for the recurved Sky City bow slung across his back while taking in the situation around him.

The tight formations of eagles had scattered themselves ail over the sky on their firing pass through the tudintip. Smoke trails grew like vines into the sky on all sides. A score and more of the gasbags had been set aflame by the salamanders. Rann's own forces were too spread out among the remaining enemy forces for him to appraise casualties. In planning, it was assumed they would be high. All he could do was hope they were not too high.

Two hundred feet ahead and to his left a dark brown eagle suddenly flashed into flame. The prince heard the mingled screams of bird and rider as they tumbled toward the earth. They burned like paper in the embrace of the salamander.

Rann cursed. Special vents were tapped in the rear of each fire sprite's jar so that its eager chittering would tell the bird rider when it was fixed on target. The fire elementals sensed the presence of inflammable substances and sped directly for the most volatile when released. Some fool of a eagle rider had pulled the trigger without being certain what his elemental was tracking. It had struck a comrade instead of a foe.

There was nothing Rann could do about that. Nocking an arrow, he put Terror into a circling dive toward a fat orange sphere rising from Kara-Est.

The black iron frame bucked like a wild beast as the bow of the ballista slammed to. Engineer First Class Juun held her breath as she watched the missile's flight with eyes scarcely less keen than a bird rider's. The eight-foot spear reached the top of its arc, tipped down and punched between the ribs of a war eagle as the creature's wings rose to gather wind. The bird convulsed in midair. Cheers rang from the tiles of the roof as the creature plummeted, its rider falling at its side in a helpless flailing of limbs.

Two burly assistant engineers, bare backs gleaming with sweat in the hot sun, spun the double windlass to recock the ballista. Making herself relax, Juun scanned the skies for another target. She had two kills that morning. The bounty would mean luxury for years.

She gestured with a gloved hand. The platform on which the engine was mounted began to revolve, turned by more assistants. As it turned she caught the eye of her friend Falla manning a ballista mounted on a turret at the other end of the building. Two more engines were mounted on the other corners but these lay out of sight behind the pitched roof. Falla grinned and touched the tip of her nose; she had seen Juun's kill. Juun laughed and waved back, then turned to peer through her sights.

She shut her ears to the shrieks as a ludintip fell like a meteor in the next block. The damned Sky Citizens had hellish magic on their side, but even that wouldn't bring them victory over the freedom fighters of Kara-Est. The elite rooftop artillery would exact a far heavier toll of the invaders than their limited population could afford.

She heard a thump, glanced reflexively to her left. A round lump the size of a bushel basket had dropped on the catwalk connecting the two emplacements. Near Falla's end thick greenish black smoke roiled from the ball. Juun turned her attention back to the skies as the rattle of bootheels on stone told her the fire-control crews were rushing to douse the smouldering projectile.

A buff-colored bird entered her field of vision, swooping in on a rising ludintip, its rider launching a stream of arrows at the gasbag's nucleus with breathtaking speed. Shouting broke out to her left, the sounds of struggle. She ignored it, gesturing to her crew to position the weapon. Juun had only a heartbeat before the bird was lost behind its quarry. She drew breath, pulled… the missile arced and fell past the bird's fanned tail. She groaned as the eagle went out of sight, its wings almost brushing the taut bladder of the ludintip.

She didn't hear the creaking of the windlass working against the mighty pull of the bow. 'Snap to it!' she shouted. A gurgling scream answered her.

Juun spun in the saddle, snatching at her dagger. The man on her left was sitting down staring at the shaft of a ballista dart that jutted from his belly. Figures writhed together on the catwalk, some obviously fighting to the death, others naked or partly so, striving belly to belly. In the eyeblink she had to absorb the strange scene, Juun saw others dancing drunkenly around Falla's engine, laughing, singing. A ballista server tottered an instant on the stone railing before plunging to the street eight stories below in a flawless swan dive.

A swirl of smoke curled around her face. It was aromatic; without meaning to, she inhaled deeply.

Her surroundings began glowing with a light of their own. She perceived a world behind the world she had known before, and this was a world she could almost enter. But not quite. Frustration brought hot tears coursing down her cheeks.

When Falla came to her with knife in hand and laughing, she welcomed her friend as she would a lover.

Above the battle for a moment, Rann gulped in great lungfuls of air. Though the sun was well past the zenith, the air up at a thousand feet was stinging cold and cut down his throat like a knife. His whole body tingled with manic energy. His every sense thrummed to the surging strength and pungent smell of the bird beneath him, the stinks and sounds and sights of the battle raging around him and below, the wind in his face. Even the burning line across his back, where an Estil archer had almost punched through his light mail, filled him with fierce exhilaration. Torture and intrigue, battle and flight, these were his loves, his fulfillments, the only ones available to the eunuch prince. He experienced the latter pair to the utmost now.

Pressure from one knee made Terror drop his left wingtip and go into a steep bank. He surveyed the grim situation below. But it differed little from what he had expected.

Things had gone well for the City in the Sky. The staged 'rout' of their ground forces had feinted a good portion of the defenders out of Kara-Est. The burning bundles of Golden Barbarian vision-weed had been shot from the City's walls with commendable accuracy. Hits and near misses had incapacitated a quarter of Kara-Est's rooftop artillery. Rann had learned about the drug when he had been a field marshal of a combined City-Quincunx army that had defeated an incursion of the Golden Barbarians into the Sjedd almost six years before. Whoever breathed its vapors forsook the real world to travel in a realm of visions and delusions – or perhaps in an alternate realm, depending on which school of philosophy one heeded on the subject. What mattered to Rann was that the victims' minds went elsewhere while their bodies provided conveniently helpless targets. High as he was, high enough to drift over the skywall into the City itself, he caught the resinous tang of the vision vapors.

'I hope everyone remembered to take the antidote,' he muttered to himself, the words inaudible even to Terror due to the rush of wind past his lips. The antidote to the drug was more costly by weight than gold. Synalon had grumbled over the expense, but Rann had persevered and knew himself now to be correct.

The assault had gone according to plan. Even so, three quarters of the rooftop engines still spat death. The water battery of warships anchored in the harbor were virtually untouched and the Estil forces, as diminished as they were, still outnumbered his own three to one.

He raised his eyes from the conflict below and peered at his City. A black and silver clad figure stood alone on the prow of the vast stone raft, gesturing with slender arms. Synalon.

He wheeled, keeping her in view. He again wondered if she had as much of the Dark Ones' favor as she believed. He knew his royal cousin, knew that she was the most powerful magician in the Realm and most likely in the entire world, knew also that she was capable of overestimating her power.

He watched the mystic gyration of the sorceress's arms. Briefly he felt the age-old pang, an impotence predating his emasculation. For magical power, like political power, passed along the female line of the Etuul clan. He had no innate magical ability, nor the aptitude to learn spellcraft, though he excelled in every other thing he attempted.

'I should be able to fee! the power flow, to know if Synalon's magic works or not,' Rann mumbled. But that was as inaccessible to him as knowledge of his own destiny. He was utterly at the mercy of his demented cousin, the monarch he loved and hated and, always, served.

He reached for another arrow and set Terror into a long, steep dive. Battle still raged.

Sun-heated stone stung the soles of her feet. Cold wind caressed her bare limbs. Synalon Etuul, Queen of the City in the Sky, shut her eyes against the sun's intrusion and strove to put her soul in touch with darkness. Her guards stood about her fingering their weapons and nervously watching their ruler poise herself on the tip of the skydock with nothing but sky an inch in front of her toes. She ignored them as she ignored the arhythmicthunk of catapults arrayed about the walls, and the tumult of noise that beat like surf against the floating City.

Black hair snapped in the wind like a million tiny whips. Synalon wore a harness of black leather,-a web woven about her otherwise nude body, leaving bare her breasts and the dark, furry tuft of her loins. What seemed to distant Rann some silver garb was only her own skin, as pale as moonbeams.

A black dot appeared in the center of her being. It grew quickly, and with it grew pleasure. Soon it was a sun, a black sun, consuming her in ecstasy and darkness. Her Guards cried out in alarm seeing black flames begin to stream from their mistress's body. She threw back her head and shrieked like a soul in torment. With an oath, a Palace Guard leaped onto the dock and raced to her.

Naked bones clattered on stone as the black flame scoured flesh from his skeleton.

The queen did not notice. Unholy pleasure possessed her. Yet through the midnight fires of orgasm burned the cold hard light of Will.

Come to me, the Will commanded. You are mine. Take form before me that my enemies shall be destroyed. By my Power, by the City in the Sky, by the Dark Ones who have chosen me (or Their own, I bid thee – come!

Out over the bay a swirling stirred the air.