I could see how much slower he was flying. “You’re bleeding!” Another arrow thunked right into his eye. He bellowed in agony. I twisted enough that I caught sight of the wyvern rider. My ghost hand burned cold as I raked at it again and again. The wyvern busted open as white ghost claws tore into it.
It went spiraling down. Its rider leapt off. He extended his arms out and webbing emerged from his armpits. He was like a gliding lizard from Gongol. He spiraled down and was lost in the red clouds.
One Eye fired off more shots, scattering what remained of the wyvern squadrons.
“They run away.” One Eye’s voice was loud and stone like.
“Yes, but we have an entirely different problem now!” Gaumoon shook wretchedly. I had to pull my chain tighter on his fin to keep myself from being flung off. We were barreling down at a steep angle, nearly in a freefall. “Just hold on, Gaumoon. Push a little more!” I pulled on his chain to make him curve his fall, but it was of no use. Malfeon’s sky seemed far more vast than my own world’s yet there had to be an end to this fall, and as we fell in a near freefall, my bones were about to find out.
12
“Gaumoooon…” he wheezed out, the flaps of his gaping maw fluttering as he gasped.
“One Eye! Look out for any sky island, no matter the size! Find one or we die!””
We plunged into clouds, red mists swirling all around us.
I glanced back and saw One Eye’s mechanical eye adjusting like a sailor’s periscope amid the turmoil. He was unflinching in the chaos, his mouth set in a slit of utter concentration. “To our right. Eighty five degrees.”
I kept looking that way, but the mists were too strong. “Damn it!” I just had to trust in my companion. “Gaumoon, push! Push one last time!” My arm tugged at the chain, pointing Gaumoon in that general direction. I felt the enormous muscles of his back pull as best they could. We began veering in that direction, but we were still at a near fall.
“Come on… come on…” I didn’t blink though the red mist whipped at my eyes. “Come…”
We broke through the cloud barrier. “There!” I saw the sky island One Eye had spotted. It was below us, but far ahead, shaped like a gigantic stone kidney. We would not be able to land there the way we were falling. “Come on, Gaumoon! Look, it’s right there! Go to that island!”
“Gaumooon…” he croaked. His wings strained.
“It’s not enough…” I unlatched my chain claw from him. It was the only way, but would it work? Tiloshar said the chain grew by its arcane power, not by any physical property, but were there limits to it? The furthest I had extended the chain was some fifty feet, and the island we were quickly losing hope in reaching was at least 1000 feet away. At the angle we were falling, the absolute nearest point would be perhaps 500.
I stood as I rode the falling sky manta.
My heart drummed.
I began stepping, building momentum, coiling my arm like I was about to hurl a spear as far as I could to save my life.
“Fenris... guide my hand!!!”
Hisssssss! My chain whipped out as foot after foot of steel links stretched out from me. It seemed like forever as the clawed end of the gauntlet sailed out, trailing a snake of black chain behind it. “Fenris!!!” It was on track. I had thrown it right, then… it missed. It fell short. It went plummeting to the ground then began recoiling back to me, as if by its own will. “No! It can’t be!”
We had fallen from the nearest point, where we were on even height with the sky island. Every throw I tried with the chain would be from an even farther distance.
“Gragh!!!!” I hurled the chain, putting even more strength into it, aiming more upward this time to make up for how much we had dropped. The chain went flying out from me. Once again it fell short. “Gods!” I saw the chain retract back to me, flailing like an injured viper. Why was I failing? It drew its power from magic… was my mind not strong enough? Was there a limit to the chain? I hurled the chain claw out again. It fell short. Every time, it only extended out some 300 feet. Perhaps that was it. Perhaps that was its limit.
I glanced back at One Eye. “One Eye…” I said, searching frantically for another island, but now I could clearly see an end to the fall. Far, far below us, perhaps a hundred miles still, was a burning black land cracked worse than any desert I had ever seen, burning lava seeping through the crevices. Here and there obsidian structures of some kind rose from the earth like cruel knives and seemed to bleed fire. “Find another sky island!” I searched frantically. I felt for Gaumoon, but he was no better. How could he be?
“There are none.” Even One Eye’s stone voice sounded grave.
I looked up to the island we had missed. Our lost hope. “I can’t let it end like this… I won’t!” My gauntleted fist was a blur as I punched so hard into the air that I felt I would have shattered a stone wall had it stood before me. The chain claw shot out from my hand. I watched it fly, watched it soar. This had to work!
Nothing.
The chain reached its limit once more, then fell in a limp curve, and retracted.
I fell to my hands and knees. “What have I done? This… this can’t be.”
Something shot through the sky, a black blur. Gaumoon shuddered violently. He bellowed in shock. His death throes. Had it been another harpoon? I searched the sky for a wyvern rider.
Gaumoon went on shaking, then I realized it was not him, it was something moving him, something rattling him. “What is doing this to you?” Keeping my chain coiled around his large fin, I let myself lie gut down on his back and peered down to his underside. “By Fenris!” It was the bird woman!
She had her hands stretched out over her head and she was pushing up into Gaumoon’s long flat whale belly. Her eyes were shut, her face shone with sweat as she strained herself to her limit. Her wings beat like a drowning bird.
For a long moment I was frozen to silence. I could only watch the strange sight. “Take us up, to the sky island!” My sense finally returned to me.
I doubted she needed my counsel to know that was our only hope. Gaumoon slowly began rising just barely above a straight line ahead. “Good! Gaumoon, we’re not dead! We can still make it, but I need you to give one last push!”
“Gaumooon!” He croaked out, a shred of strength I hoped would not be his last.
I pulled to his right and had him soar some moments, then to his left so that we began making a huge circle around the island above us. “Push, bird maiden! Push, Gaumoon!” We circled again, then twice more. “We’re getting closer!” We circled again, each time rising closer and closer to the sky island. We circled and this time I was ready. My shoulder was a catapult as I launched my chain claw. I felt the reverberating sensation of the chain claw bury itself on the stony underside of the sky island—the glory of a thousand victories, a thousand fulfilled desires, a thousand spared deaths all leapt in my heart. “Rrrrrgh!” I grunted as I gripped Gaumoon’s fin as hard as I could with one hand, and retracted the chain with the other. However powerful, the chain claw had its limits, and tugging the giant manta strained it. I closed my eyes and felt every fiber of muscle in me pull taut as bowstrings. Endure this. You have to. I vibrated with effort, my jaws clenched so tight they could have broken.
Between my pulling with the chain, the bird maiden’s pushing us upward, and the gathering momentum of us spinning toward the island like a tether, we finally got close enough that I knew we would reach it. I unlatched my chain claw from the sky island, and latched it again at a better spot. We slowly kept rising until we rose above the surface of the giant sky island. Now that we had flown to it up close, I saw that it was much larger than I had first thought. It was about a mile wide and twice as long, though it was also tall, like a kidney bean with another bean growing from its underside. And it was riddled with holes that looked near the kind that moles burrow.
We were headed straight for the surface of the sky island. “We’re going too fast!” The stony ground was rushing toward us. “
I’m not letting you die, Gaumoon!” I shot my chain it and it latched on a tall stone formation. I held onto it and retracted the chain slowly to try and slow our fall. Gaumoon shuddered as his belly scraped the ground. We were jolted up. I turned and saw that the bird maiden had shoved herself onto Gaumoon’s maw. Her wings were flared out and her back curved as she was pushed straight into him, the opposite direction he was flying. Once again, she was saving us. “Just a little more!” I pulled on the chain to slow us down more.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw something headed straight for us. It was a jagged boulder that rose right into our flight path. “Behind you!” It was too late.
“Ah!” the bird maiden’s high-pitched scream stabbed at my heart as I saw her left wing crash into the boulder and snap back in a gruesome way.
“No!”
As Gaumoon was trailing right behind her, he also drove right into the boulder. But, as he was a thousand times more massive than the bird maiden, he burst it apart.
He began skidding on the stony surface of the sky island.
Finally, with a cloud of dust around us, we came to a stop.
“By the gods…” I blinked the dust out of my eyes, and leapt off my dying mount.
13
As the dust settled I saw Gaumoon’s rough spotted hide rising and falling with his shallow breaths. He was still alive, and that was more than I had expected. I went to the harpoon stuck in him, the one in his eye. It was a relief, if there was such a thing in this situation, to see it had struck just below the eye, but in the chaos I had thought it had punctured through. But all his wounds together would soon be fatal, and I had no healing I could tend to him.
One Eye stepped beside me. “Not good.”
I ran in the direction we had come from. “Bird maiden!” My legs scuttled through rocky ground. Finally, I located her. She was staggering to her feet. “Bird maiden, you live!”
“Please…” A trickle of dark blood was seeping from her mouth, and her left wing was bent at a strange angle. “I repaid the life debt. Please let me go.” She was clearly in pain.
“Life debt? It is you who have saved us. Come, there must be something I can do.”
“No, let me go!” She turned and leapt into the sky. Even with a broken wing she still managed to flutter jaggedly, nearly a butterfly. But she hardly had any control as she twisted this way and that in the air.
“Stop! You must stay!” I chased after her. “You’ll die out there!”
“I’ll die here!” She truly was panicked. I had no choice. The rushed clinking of my chain rang in the air as I flung my claw at her. It wrapped around one of her shins—I made sure not to command it to actually claw into her. The grip was tight on her. “Forgive me, but I cannot let you fly to your death!” The chain came slinking back to me, and it brought the struggling maiden to me as well. She came crashing into my arms. I softened my catch as best I could. My arms wrapped around her, folding her arms to her sides so she could not struggle. Her iridescent lips and hair moved about as she struggled in my grasp. Her good wing was still free, and she flapped it about. Its curved end was hard as bone and so nearly stabbed my eye out as it flailed.
“Stop! I won’t harm you!”
“You serve Sombrala!”
“I don’t even know such a name!”
She stopped flailing a moment, her breathing still heavy.
My hands eased their clench on her slender arms. “You have to believe me. I’m not from this world. My garb and my features must seem alien to this land? Do they not?”
“They do.” Tension began leaving her frame. “Do you truly not serve Sombrala?”
“Aye!”
“We can’t stay out here… more of them will come.”
“The riders.” Her wine-colored hair brushed my collarbone as she nodded. “Over there. Those tunnels.” I looked to the holes I had spotted, but saw now that they must have been made by something the size of a dragon rather than a mole. She was shivering with fright, but I felt her hair against me once more as she nodded. “Come.” I took hold of her, carrying her into my arms. She was light as a feather, and I supposed it could only be so for a bird maiden, or bat maiden as might be. Her wings felt like satiny leather, and hardly took up space as she folded them tight against her body. Her tail brushed against me leg as it dangled below her and she seemed to feel this and pulled it away by instinct.
I carried her to the tunnel’s dark entrance. The smallest shreds of light seeped into the tunnel from cracks in the sky island, but as it went further, the tunnel turned pitch black. Setting her down gently, I commanded, “Wait here, don’t try to fly away again. You’ll only fly to your death.”
I ran back out to Gaumoon. I heard his bellowing wails. “Gods, what is happening to him now?” The poor beast was swaying as One Eye stood beside him, some kind of fire between them. As I neared I saw it was One Eye summoning the red energy from his mechanical eye and burning Gaumoon with it. “One Eye, are you insane?!”
“No,” came the reply as his gray face shone with the red light reflecting on it.
“Stop!” I grabbed him by the arm and his red beam ceased. “What the hells are you doing?”
“Sealing his wounds.”
“What is this substance on him?” There was something like tar on the spots that One Eye was burning.
“Blood.” He raised his palm to me and I saw a barely closed wound, the same tar like substance forming a fresh clot, a thick black line across his grey palm.
“Gods, this is strange.” I looked over the giant manta. “But at least he lives. Come, we must get him to the tunnel.”
One Eye and I both slid under the juncture of each of Gaumoon’s wings and his giant torso. “Heave!” I grunted, feeling the veins pulse in my neck. My head felt like it would pop like a grape in a fist. I stood with Gaumoon on my back, as did One Eye. Which one of us carried the heavier load I did not know, but for once I was glad my old friend was a zombie and not a mortal man. We staggered, dragging Gaumoon toward the tunnel. Now and then he helped us by pushing himself with this tail, lightening the burden on us for a passing moment. I was glad that we only had to carry enough of his weight to drag him, rather than hoist him off the ground completely.
We reached the edge of the tunnel, and here the job became easier as we were descending and simply had to ease Gaumoon’s slide down into the darkness. Once the tunnel leveled out to almost even ground, we let our mount down, and he was still.
Gaumoon’s hide glistened in what rays of light managed to seep into the tunnel. “One Eye, light.”
His red torch of an eye lit up. The rocky, moss covered surface gleamed red, as did One Eye’s face. The bird maiden’s winged silhouette was further down the tunnel. I examined Gaumoon. Still breathing. “Perhaps some of this moss will do him good.”
“He is too weak for food.” The bird maiden had slowly made her way limping to us.
“We have to find a way to help him. He is a beast, but he has saved our lives many times over…” I looked at the bird maiden’s turquoise colored eyes. “As have you. Tell us, what is further in those tunnels?”
She glanced down. “I’m not sure. They used to be homes, all this used to be… a small city.”
“A city… for those people we saw, the ones that had been butchered by the wyvern riders?”
She nodded. “Yes.”
“But they were all killed as well, weren’t they?” Her silence was answer enough. “If this was a city once, there might very well be something that could help Gaumoon.” I glanced at her broken wing. “And you. Your wing.”
“No, I don’t need healing.” Her voice was still full of fear, although of what exactly I did not know.
“Of course you do. One Eye, come, we will search these tunnels.” I motioned to head out with One Eye.
“Wait!” the bird maiden glanced up at me but could hardly hold my gaze. “They could come any moment. They know how to catch scents. There are many more of them.”
/>
“The riders.”
She nodded back.
I looked to One Eye’s glowing red eye then back to her. “You hurt yourself for our sake. I’ll stay here and watch over you and Gaumoon. One Eye, you have the torch for an eye. You will be better suited to search the tunnels. See what you can find. Old potions, herbs, salves, anything.”
One Eye trodded further down the tunnels and left us to the near darkness.
“Rest, bird maiden, you’ve strained yourself.” I let myself slide along the stone wall until I sat on the tunnel’s ground. “It’s too dark.” I looked about for anything that could be a source of light. Then I realized something. Staring down at my Ghost Hand gauntlet, I willed its arcane power to make the gauntlet glow. It was faint, but to my Fenrir eyes it was a world of difference. “Have you seen now, that you have nothing to fear from me?”
“I’m not sure…”
I was surprised. “At least let yourself sit. If I mean you harm it will make no difference whether you stand or sit, especially with a bad wing, will it?”
She slid along the tunnel wall. She sat so that her knees came up to her chest. She wrapped her arms around them and looked side-eyed at me.
“Bird maiden, I do not even know your name.”
“I don’t know yours either.”
“My name is Rothan.”
“Rothan.” She said it as if it were a name in an alien tongue, which I supposed it was. I did not push for her name. “Tell me, why do the riders kill these winged people?”
“They take some as slaves. Some, they kill.”
“And take their wings. As trophies?”
She shook her head. “They use them. The riders’ master uses them for magic. She forges them into wings for her servants.”
“This master of theirs, the one you mentioned earlier, this master must be… some kind of demon.”
Wolf Blade: Chains of the Vampire Page 11
