Nervously, he fingered his sword. He almost wished someone would challenge him. Then he could quench his anxieties in the hot rush of action.
Their steps carried them along the cleared circle around the well itself. In ancient days, Luranni informed him, the People had used the vast opening to focus Demon Istu’s powers against opponents below. Now the Skywell was mostly used for the purpose of “exiling” undesirables.
Fost’s eyes kept returning to the palace, several hundred yards distant along a wide, white avenue. The structure bulked huge, yet its construction was so airy, spun of arches and flying buttresses, that it gave the impression of weightlessness. Fost wasn’t deceived. He knew enough of fortification to see that, for all its baroque appearance, it’d be a formidable citadel to assault.
Something in the way the light struck the avenue running from the palace brought him to a halt. The paving seemed to be large, round rocks set in some black substance. The curious cobbling ended before the avenue joined the circle and was cordoned by almost invisible threads strung between brass posts.
“Magic barrier?” Fost asked. Luranni nodded. “Why?”
“None but the feet of royalty may walk upon the skulls of past queens,” the girl replied.
“Skulls?”
“Yes. When a ruler of the city dies, her skull becomes another paving stone, set in pitch among the skulls of her mothers.” Luranni spoke with the atonal solemnity she always used when discussing the history and traditions of the city. Fost wondered if she were reciting litanies taught her by her father.
He couldn’t help shuddering as he looked at the Skullway. The Hissing Folk might have been defeated long ago, but they had left their legacy. Thirty thousand years of grim evil had steeped the very stones of the city.
They walked on, skulls and palace burning in Fost’s mind. “Don’t take offense,” he said, “but your father strikes me as the ambitious type. Why doesn’t he forget about saving Moriana and try to seize power himself?”
Luranni laughed. “None but a woman may hold sovereignty in the city. So it is written. The people wouldn’t accept a male ruler, fearing it would rob the city of the magic that makes it float.”
Fost’s stomach turned over. He’d managed to forget that he’d spent almost a day on a platform of stone that hung a thousand feet off the ground with no visible means of support. The firmness beneath his feet suddenly seemed to pitch and roll like a ship on storm-tossed waters. The gusting breeze threatened to overturn the vast sky-raft and dash him to destruction. He had meant to ask Luranni why her father didn’t try to put her on the throne, but for a few minutes it was all he could do to keep from hurling himself face-down and clutching the street with desperate fingers. When the fear passed, the question had gone with it.
“Tell me about the Rite of Dark Assumption,” he said when he’d mastered himself, looking studiously away from the gold eyes that glinted with amusement. “What does it involve?”
“With much ceremony and incantation, the prin—, the victim is violated by the Vicar of Istu. When that is done, the demon takes her soul.”
They had gone past where the Skullway met the Circle and around a quarter of the promenade surrounding the Well. Luranni gestured at a point directly across from the mouth of the Way of Skulls.
“There is the altar where the royal victims are bound.”
Fost saw the low, flat slab next to an immense black statue. He pulled on his chin, trying to beat down fear and clear his mind for scheming. “We’ll need a diversion,” he said, keeping his tone light. “You can’t have a rescue without a diversion.”
He thought some more. “How is it that your father can keep warehouses full of fire elementals without burning out a whole quarter of the city? To say nothing of how he’s managed to avoid Rann’s spies.”
“I can answer both questions at once. The elementals are small ones, enchanted to obey commands from those unskilled in magic. They’re bought for smelters, heating, the kitchens of estates. While they prefer easily burned substances for food, they can burn almost anything at need, and consume it all, with no ash. This makes them in demand among those who can pay our prices.” He caught a note of pride in her voice. She served as negotiator with Quincunx city factors on behalf of Uriath’s concern. “So they’re kept in magicked clay vessels. That holds both them and their heat. It also blinds them to what goes on outside the jars. Those vessels are quite handy. They were invented centuries ago, in Athalau. Spirit jugs, I believe they’re called. What’s the matter?”
Fost had gulped audibly at the mention of Athalau and spirit jugs. It became doubly important that no member of Uriath’s underground ever get so much as a glimpse of Erimenes and his pot. He didn’t know how widely the existence of Erimenes and the amulet might be spread. But Kest-i-Mond, Moriana, and Synalon knew, at the very least. It seemed a fair guess that Uriath might, too. If he connected the parcel Fost was so desperate to recover with an Athalar spirit jug…
“What?” he said, feigning distraction. “Oh, nothing. I simply felt a moment’s trepidation at the thought of the odds we’ll be facing tomorrow.” He finished with the most wolfish grin he could muster to let Luranni know he felt no trepidation at all. In fact he did, a great deal, but saw no reason she should know.
She smiled back and squeezed his arm. The contact sent a thrill through his body. He hoped he could formulate a rescue plan soon enough to have a few hours alone with Luranni before meeting again with the underground. Already the rudiments of a scheme came to him.
“I think I see how it’ll go,” he said, grave as a field marshal planning his campaign. “Our larcenous princess is brought forth and bound to the altar. Then this Vicar of Istu has his way with her, right?” The girl nodded. “So the Vicar—the name conjures up a skinny old codger with yesterday’s gruel in his beard, and spectacles perched on his nose like a Tolviroth accounting clerk—so he gives Moriana a dose of his withered old prod. That’ll be the best time to make our move, when all eyes are on the, ah, main event. I’ll make for the altar with a team of picked men, if we can find any among your comrades who’re more of a menace to others than to themselves. At the same time, you’ll release a passel of tame salamanders into the crowd, under orders to make things warm for the onlookers. Then…”
His words dwindled to uneasy silence. He became aware of large golden eyes fixing him with a peculiar look. “You don’t think that’ll work?” he asked plaintively. Luranni shook her head. “Why not?”
She pointed once more. They were forty yards from the altar and the statue looming over it, near enough to make out detail. Short columns held the marble slab of the altar, which formed the shape of a Y. Fost scarcely noticed. The statue was of such uncommon ugliness that it commanded all his attention.
It squatted, clawed hands resting on basalt knees, leering down on humans less than half its height. Its form was manlike, but disproportionately thick of trunk and limb. Teeth filled its awful grin, blunt and bone-crushing save for two curving tusks. Nose and cheeks were wide and flat, eyes slanted beneath great juts of heavy brow. The whole expression was chillingly malevolent. Stubby horns curled outward and upward from either side of its head, an unnatural touch in a land where horn-bearing creatures wore them on nose and forehead. Between its thighs hung an immense, misshapen member of the same dark stone.
“What,” Fost said, knowing that Luranni’s objections to his plan were bound up in this monstrosity, “is that?”
“The Vicar of Istu,” she replied.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Shadows of high clouds fell on Moriana like a weight as her feet paced the uneven yards of the Way of Skulls. A bitter wind whipped her green sacrificial cloak about her legs, causing her to stumble repeatedly.
To either side, the Skullway was lined with jeering multitudes kept at bay by the magic cordon. Synalon’s done her propagandizing well, the princess thought. Any citizen should have known Moriana was innocent of her mother’s murder, the mother whom she
admired and Synalon despised. But Moriana’s arrival in the city on the heels of Derora’s death, and the lies spread by Synalon’s agents, had turned the people of the city from sympathy for the blonde princess to rabid hate. Even the repression by Guardsmen and Monitors was laid to Moriana; but for her act of treachery, the rumor mongers said, such stern measures wouldn’t have been required.
A gob of spittle hit her cheek. She bit back the soul-frying curse that rose to her lips and kept her eyes from moving to her tormentor in the crowd. She might not die a queen, but she would die like one.
Escorted by halberd-bearing Monitors, Moriana reached the Circle and began the slow procession to the altar. From above, the beat of wings rolled down like thunder. Rann, astride red-crested Terror, led the regiments of the Guard in a sardonic escort of honor.
The raw passion surging from the mob pushed her gaze aside into the gape of the Well itself. Below, land slipped by at a mile an hour. A few puffs of cloud drifted between earth and city. The green hills beneath, already changing to autumn yellow, beckoned the princess.
A brief dash, a leap, a blissful float to Hell Call, she thought. How much better than the degradation and damnation that awaits me.
But the hope was no more substantial than the clouds below. Against such an attempt to cheat Istu—and Synalon—the Monitors had been armed with weighted nets.
I’ll walk to my fate, and not be carried like some miserable groundling, she vowed to herself.
For all her determination to hold her head erect, she couldn’t make her eyes rise to behold the leering Vicar. The phalanx of Monitors snapped to a halt. Moriana raised her gaze.
Her sister stood on the far side of the altar. Her hair was caught up in an intricate coiffure, her body wrapped in a pearl-white robe. The blue eyes glinted with triumph. Moriana felt her knees go weak. It was obvious that Synalon intended to carry through with the unholy ceremony.
Until this instant, some corner of the princess’ being had cherished the hope that Synalon’s threats to invoke Istu had been no more than that. Surely, not even she would dare disturb the demon. She would torture her sister and cast her over the side to clean oblivion.
But Synalon wore the ceremonial vestments of the Rite, which hadn’t been donned in five thousand years.
When she saw the realization in her sister’s eyes, Synalon turned and lifted her arms to the crowd. The eager susurration died.
“Hear me, O denizens of the clouds,” the sorceress cried. Her words cut across the wind to the city beyond.
“The honor of our domain has been besmirched by an act of treason so vile that my lips hesitate to speak of it.” She swept her hand toward her captive. “Behold Moriana, who basely contrived the death of her mother, our queen, to seize the throne for herself!”
A moan of animal rage rolled from the crowd. Moriana’s soul shrank from its intensity.
“It is judgment, O citizens.” The raven-tressed woman clenched her fists. “That one of us, my own sister, should perpetrate such a deed, shows how far our city has fallen into decay.
“No mortal suffering would be sufficient to punish the murderess of Derora the Wise. Thus do I consign the traitor Moriana to a fate commensurate with her offense, and at the same time turn our noble city’s path from decadence to domination.
“Thus do I give Moriana to Istu, the soul of the city, to be his wedded bride throughout eternity!”
A wail rose from ten thousand throats, compounded of-eagerness and dismay, of terror and pure, surging lust. Rough hands gripped Moriana, stripping the green robe of shame from her. In her nakedness, she still stood proud, despite the bite of the wind, the voices that cried out to see her ravaged by the demon, the towering nearness of the Vicar. The Monitors, faceless in their bronze masks, drew her out on the altar, clamped her legs wide on the branches of the Y-shaped slab, and tied her wrists above her head.
She saw rather than heard Synalon recite the summoning. She felt the power rising, as if from the very stones. She smelled incense and a sudden stink of decay. At last some magnetism drew her eyes to the basalt ikon that was the Vicar.
Its eyes opened.
* * *
In darkness, its bower roofed in tons of stone, a demon slept.
It had slept thus for millennia. Once, though, it had known freedom. In the youth of the universe it had been created, and in time sent by the Dark Ones, its creators, to their votaries the Zr’gsz, to aid them and keep them strong in the cause of evil. Those had been the high days, the days of glory, when the black demon rode his raft of stone across the sky and visited shrieking death upon the foes of the Hissers.
Change.
The Pale Folk, the Ones Below who crawled like maggots across the face of the planet, began to resist. Their efforts were paltry at first, and with orgiastic glee Istu destroyed them. But they learned.
One rose among the Pale Ones, one whose name rang now and again through the sleeping demon’s brain in a discord of agony: Felarod.
He had the blessing of the Three and Twenty of Agift, sworn foes throughout eternity of the Lords of the Elder Dark. And more than that, the World-Spirit, very soul of the planet itself, had rebelled against the chaos sown by Istu. War raged that wracked the cosmos.
Istu fell.
Not even Felarod commanded power to unmake Istu, however. He had bound the demon with chains of spells in the depths of the Sky City and drawn a curtain of eternal sleep across its brain. The most furious efforts of the Dark Ones could not free their spawn. Perhaps in another turning of the galaxy the time would be right for Istu to gain freedom again, as perhaps it would be right for the demon’s final destruction. The Dark Ones settled back to bide their time and nurse implacable hatred.
Istu knew none of this. Istu knew only dreams. Dreams of bitterness, of longing for revenge. But occasionally his slumber had been enlivened with strange stirrings and fresh sensations, the sense of venturing once again into the world, of slaking his thirst on pale, soft-skinned victims. Those times were good. Yet in time those ceased as well. No more did the demon’s sleeping self hear the chanted summons from far above.
Not for five thousand years.
And then a voice began to tickle the underbelly of the sleeper’s mind, drawing part of it out of itself and upward, ever upward. Istu resisted for a moment. Then memories of dark delight poured into his eternal dream. With a growing sense of anticipation, the sleeper responded to the call….
Slits of yellow hellfire blazed beneath shelflike brows of stone. A tremor ran through its black form. It lifted a hand, stared at it, and then raised both arms above its head to cast a wordless shout of triumph and defiance toward the clouds above. No. sound emerged from the being’s mouth, but the roar reverberated in Moriana’s mind and drove her close to madness.
The Vicar’s yellow eyes swept down and fell upon the recumbent form of its sacrificial bride. The statue’s lips spread. A forked tongue nickered over fist-sized teeth. The member between its legs rose like a charmed serpent.
Stone groaned and broke as it lifted one leg free of its pedestal. The other leg followed. A ponderous step sent vibrations through the marble pressed against Moriana’s naked flesh. Four-fingered hands reached for her as the Vicar approached. She saw the blunted ram of its maleness lift toward her and felt the unyielding pressure, the tearing awful pain of entrance into her body. A voice that was hers and yet not hers screamed. Red agony exploded into blackness.
“Wine,” the vendor shouted, his lungs carrying his cry over the rumble of the mob. “Refresh your palates, honored ones, while you watch the traitor meet her fate. Twenty sipans the half-pint, wine!”
A stout, balding merchant with a teenaged, pockmarked mistress simpering at his elbow bought a pair of purple glass bottles. Fost accepted a handful of small silver oblongs, bobbed his head as if in gratitude, and limped away through the crowd. Slowly he edged toward the altar.
He played the role of a lamed bodyguard earning his keep by hawking his master
’s wine at the great event. His sword was strapped like a splint to his left leg, and both armed him and augmented his disguise. At the bottom of his leather pouch of bottles rested a round Athalar spirit jug and its volatile cargo.
“Wine!” The disguise worked well, at any rate. No one spared him a second glance. He felt the tingle of lust in the air as the crowd awaited Moriana’s denudation.
Despite the day’s chill, he sweated vigorously. This has to be the most crack-brained scheme I’ve ever heard of, he thought, not for the first time that day. The fact that he was the author of it from beginning to end didn’t comfort him at all.
“Ahhhh!” A sigh rippled through the mob as a Monitor stripped away Moriana’s cloak. Fost’s heart jumped within his chest. Again he felt the urge to rip loose his sword and lunge to the rescue, as he had wanted to do when he’d entered the Circle and first saw her marching the slow march of the condemned. A glance at the massed ranks of soldiers on the ground between him and the princess, and the squadrons of eagles wheeling overhead, stifled the urge at once. Lovely wench, he allowed himself to think. What a waste if this doesn’t succeed.
A tug at his sleeve brought him ’round to produce two bottles for a lean aristocrat with a jewel in one nostril. The pomaded dandies and the looks they exchanged reminded Fost of High Medurim.
His eyes scanned the crowd. Mingling with the onlookers would be Uriath’s men, carrying jugs like the one in his pouch. That part of the original plan remained, to use the fire elementals to draw attention from the altar. At first it had seemed a cold-blooded scheme even to Fost, but the eagerness with which the mob anticipated Moriana’s doom robbed him of any compassion for them.
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