Wings Over Talera

by Charles Allen Gramlich

  My feet slipped, came free of the knob of worked stone upon which they had perched. I didn’t let go with my left hand; that grip was torn free as my legs swung out over naked, hungry sky. That sky seemed to grab at me. My right hand slid, clenched, slid. I flailed upward with my other hand, clawed at the railing there. My feet dangled, my boots dragging at me.

  Then my left hand caught an iron bar and locked in a death grip. My right hand followed. I pulled myself up and over the rail, collapsed to all fours on the ledge. Sweat iced my body. My lungs seemed torn as I gulped for air.

  A broad metal door stood before me, sculpted basilisks to either side and a porthole just above filled with beveled glass through which pulses of light strobed. It was toir’in-or light, milkstone light...Vohanna’s kind of light. There were no more openings above. This had to be the way to reach the witch.

  I forced myself up, staggered toward the closed door hoping I could get it open, and the pyramid shudder-jumped beneath me. Grabbing desperately at one of the stone dragon heads, I hung on as a hammer of sound slammed into me like a physical blow. It was the bull-roar of the cannons being turned loose.

  With a wild glance into the sky I saw the looming galleons of Nyshphal, their prows parting the massed ranks of Vohanna’s bird army like sharp rocks parting river rapids. All around them were melees of saddle birds and their riders, struggling in black knots against the emerald sun.

  But smoke was rising, from the mouths of cannon beneath me, and from the first battleship in the Nyshphalian line. Even as I watched, I saw that ship list and begin to slide sideways and down. Its masts crashed to the decks, the great canvas sails torn and blackened. I saw the flames lick up, ugly and orange as the hull caught fire. And there, at the heart of war, I saw men go spinning over the dying ship’s rails, screaming to their deaths.

  From behind, I was struck and knocked flat on the ledge with someone on top of me. It was Bryce, snarling.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  WRATH

  I’d not heard the door to the pyramid open behind me, but Bryce had come through, had knocked me down. And now he grabbed my head from above, smashed me chin first into the gritty stone of the ledge. My lips tore; a tooth chipped.

  “I’ll kill you,” he growled. “Kill you with my hands!”

  A hard knee pressed like a brick into the small of my back. My head was slammed forward again and I just managed to turn my face to save my nose, feeling instead a brilliant lance of pain that exploded in my cheek as it split over the bone. I tasted blood from my mangled lips.

  The pyramid’s cannons boomed a second time—in a wall of thunder. The ledge shook but I couldn’t see, didn’t know if another Nyshphalian galleon had been hit.

  Blind fury rolled over me. I shoved myself up by my hands, lifting Bryce off the ground as I thrust to my knees. His boots rang on stone as he caught his weight on his legs. He snapped an arm around my neck, noosed it tight. I locked hands together in front of me and smashed them like a mallet back into his face. Twice I hit him. Heavy blows. He only snarled, lowered his head, wrapped his other arm about my throat in a stranglehold.

  Choking for breath, I got my feet under me, stood. I was taller than he. He tried to hang on but I threw myself backward into the iron balustrade that curved the outside length of the ledge. The blow jarred us both. I felt Bryce’s arms loosen and reached up, grabbing his wrists. I tore him free as I jackknifed forward and flung him over my head. He crashed heavily down upon the ledge.

  Rushing forward, I tried to stomp him, but he spun on his back and lashed a kick into my thigh. His face was a rictus with blood, the lips drawn back in a feral snarl. His kick slowed me and he rolled away to come to his feet in a crouch.

  Again I rushed. He didn’t wait for it but launched himself into me, head low. I was ready and swayed aside, like a matador with a bull, then smashed downward with the heel of my hand to catch him on the jaw. He went down and I kicked at his side. He caught my boot at the ankle and shoved me away, then flipped backward to his hands and from there to his feet.

  He dropped to a fighting stance, the milkstones pulsing in his throat and his hellish eyes casting red shadows on his pale cheeks. But I charged into him again, too enraged to fence with fists and feet, wanting to get my hands on him. He was as full of wrath as I.

  We came together, swinging, fighting in primal silence except for grunts of effort. Bryce slashed a fist into my side, above a place where I’d been cut. The wound opened but I felt no pain, only the blood running. I swung at his chin but the blow bounced off his shoulder. He was ducking, weaving as he worked his fists against me. I tried to head-butt him and could find no opening. He hit me again in the same side. Again and again. Triphammer blows. Now it did hurt.

  I shoved him off me. He spun off his left heel and snapped a kick at my face. I blocked with an elbow, chopped down with my other hand into the muscle of his thigh. That muscle spasmed and when I pushed him away, he fell.

  I kicked him brutally in the ribs and heard him grunt, but his reaction time was phenomenal. He twisted like an eel onto his side, bringing his legs up and around to sweep my feet from under me. I hit hard on my back, gasping for a moment at breath, and he swarmed over me, punching, slamming blows at my head that rattled my brain like a pea in a tin cup. I shifted my weight under his, snapped up with my knees, and flipped him over my head. He came down on the metal railing hard enough to wring a long groan from his lips.

  We staggered up at the same time, both of us groggy and worn. My brother, too, was breathing hard now. And sweat was on him. Even the tattoos that had writhed across his chest were still, as if they were as exhausted as the rest of him.

  “Bryce,” I started. And he charged me.

  I grabbed his shoulder and arm, used his momentum against him, and threw him over my hip. He landed in a jarring tangle of limbs, but as I came after him he snapped a kick up over his head and caught me flush in the mouth with the toe of his boot. I staggered back, fresh blood at my lips and running down my chin, and with teeth loose in my gums.

  The cannons boomed from beneath us in the pyramid. Smoke wafted up, stinking of sulphur. Bryce climbed to his feet like an old man. My own movements were no better. On earth we’d been trained by the same teachers. Our physical differences in size, speed, strength were minimal; we were well matched. But now we were both tired and hurt. And angry.

  Yet, my rage was different from Bryce’s. His was false, grafted onto him like a limb that didn’t belong by the witchery of Vohanna. My anger was true, though not directed truly at my brother. I had reasons for my feelings, reasons that extended into my heart rather than lying on the surface of my mind. In the end, I thought my wrath would give me strength where his would not.

  I spat a mouthful of blood over the railing as the cannons roared again like a voice from Hade’s throat. The sound brought a thought to me, a possibility. The Nyshphalian fleet’s catapults had not yet responded to the cannon that tasked them. They were still too far away.

  I grinned, wolfishly I knew. Perhaps aboard the slave ships and in the lava mines of the Klar I had learned to bank my anger until it was time to stoke it. Perhaps I’d learned to temper fury with cunning.

  I began to circle Bryce, bringing up my hands, my weight held forward over the balls of my feet. Bryce turned with me, cocking his own fists, until his back was to the railing and I saw over his shoulder that two more of the Nyshphalian ships were aflame.

  Saddle birds swept by with flashing wings. I glimpsed the pale faces of their riders, both friend and foe, and the flights of crossbow quarrels that leaped between them like dark rain. Many birds carried dead men still strapped on their backs, and though there were those among the living who saw us, none had time from their own battles to interfere between Bryce and myself.

  Then I saw what I’d hoped to see. The fleet of Nyshphal had been battered but the catapults of the forward ships
were finally within range of the pyramid. Galleon decks shuddered as those catapults released; I saw the dark boulders whipped skyward. The ships of the fleet could never pound through the stone-sheathed walls of the pyramid fast enough to keep the cannon from tearing them up, but that wasn’t what I was hoping for now.

  I waited; Bryce took a step toward me. It was only seconds but it seemed longer. The missiles of the catapults arced up...came down...toward the top of the pyramid...where we stood. Bryce did not know they were coming.

  I tensed. And the boulders hit, raining down like giant hail cast from an ogre’s fist. A sixty pound stone slammed into the rail of our ledge with a mad shriek of tortured iron. Others hit below us, and above, and to either side. The world rang with loudness.

  Bryce’s pupils dilated wide in surprise. He half spun to face the noise behind him. I loosed my rage, let it flame up behind my eyes, and I hurled myself forward, at his feet, rolling into his knees as he heard me coming and tried to turn back.

  I swept his legs from under him. He twisted in mid-air, like a cat, but still hit jarringly hard on his side. From the ground I lashed a kick into his jaw, snapping his head back, then turned off of one elbow to drive the other down into his solar plexus. He lost his air explosively, eyes goggling as he jackknifed in reflex.

  I got up, wrapped my fists in Bryce’s dead-white hair and hauled him to his feet. He slapped at me weakly as he choked desperately for oxygen, and I chopped him across the throat with the blade of my hand. Then I ran him forward and threw him head first into one of the stone basilisks that guarded the doorway into the pyramid. He struck it with a thud and went down.

  Still I was seething, standing over him with my mind gone wild and my fists closed so tight the nails bit into my palms. Wrath is hard to collar again once it’s unleashed. It wants to prey. But my brother did not get up to provide a quarry.

  The cannons fired. More catapult boulders crashed around us. Part of our ledge broke off and went avalanching down the steep side of the pyramid. But Bryce was not getting up.

  In sudden anguished fear, I dropped to my knees beside him. Blood ran from his split-open scalp. “Bryce,” I muttered, calling to him. He was my brother! And if I had killed him....”

  My hand went out, grasped his shoulder, rolled him over. He did not stir, but in his throat fluttered a weak pulse. He lived! I breathed again.

  More boulders hit around us. Another piece of our ledge cracked away. I glanced up from Bryce, saw the sky alive with flame and smoke and the wheeling specter shapes of vullwings and half a dozen other species of saddle bird, from the big hespern transports to the predatory kryll. The great galleons of Nyshphal forged on, trying now to encircle the pyramid and hammer it down. But the cannons bit at them ravenously, smashing one after another into tangled, drifting wreckage.

  I got my feet beneath me and stood, dragged Bryce up and over my shoulder. I could not leave him here to be crushed by the Nyshphalian catapults. Between the carven basilisks, the gate into the pyramid stood open. The corridor beyond beckoned. Somewhere within this stone pile would be Vohanna, and there was little time to find her before the fleet was crushed.

  Just inside the mouth of the corridor lay the sword Bryce had discarded when he’d chosen to take me with his hands. I plucked it up, sheathed it in my belt beside my own, then hurried forward along the polished and narrow hall. Light globes of dark purple made the air look bruised. Those globes shook, from the pulse of cannon fire within, from the pound of catapults without.

  At corridor’s end was a second door, also ajar, and I burst through it onto another ledge within the heart of the pyramid. A railing bordered this ledge also, and only the iron weave of that balustrade kept me from falling, for the core of the pyramid was an open well that seemed to drop forever beneath me.

  My heart tripped, and slowly recovered its beat. Then a deep, low thrumming caught my attention. I looked up. The apex of the pyramid was scarcely forty feet above my head. But below that roof, suspended in the center of the well by a web of barbed cables, there hung a huge, black crystal sphere shot through with veins of pewter and bright brass. Shadows flickered like hunting bats around that sphere, and from within came flashes of intense violet-white light.

  “Vohanna,” I muttered.

  Glancing wildly around, I searched for some way to reach the witch’s crystalline lair. Then to one side I glimpsed a set of wide, bronzed steps that anchored that lair to the ledge upon which I stood. Bryce was getting heavy. I switched him from my right shoulder to my left, then raced around to the steps and up them. They ended at a silver door in the wall of the black sphere. I tried it. It was locked.

  In raised metal relief in the door’s center there loomed a tusked and horned skull of what is called among Talerans, a bane—which is supposedly the offspring of a demon and a human ghost. The mouth of the skull was open, the tongue extruded like a finger-less palm. On impulse, I pressed down on that tongue.

  There came a quiet snick and four holes irised open in the metal forehead. I leaped back, but nothing issued from those openings and I cursed myself for a fool to not have considered a trap. I’d been lucky. But perhaps few enemies penetrated this far into Vohanna’s sanctum.

  I tried the door again. It was still locked. The holes were of different sizes, set in a tantalizingly familiar arc above the bane’s eyes. I frowned. A thought occurred to me and was gone just as quickly. I couldn’t grasp it. A key of some kind was what I needed. Or four keys maybe.

  I sat Bryce down, leaning him back against the door. His breathing was steady but his head lolled. Already, he had been unconscious longer than I would have expected. It was almost as if his mind were in hiding, as if he were in some kind of coma. But there were other things I had to worry about at the moment.

  It seemed likely that my brother had possessed something to unlock the outer door where he’d ambushed me. Perhaps it was the same thing I needed here. I checked his belt and around his neck, felt in his pockets and took off his boots to shake them out. There was nothing remotely like a key anywhere. I straightened, my mind sliding toward despair.

  Bryce’s hands rested on the floor beside his thighs. The false one twitched, chinking like metal against the stone. I felt my eyes go wide. Four holes! The thought that had tickled my mind a moment ago returned now to hammer me. Bryce had only four digits on his mechanical hand—three fingers and a thumb.

  Grabbing my brother’s shoulder, I dragged him unconscious to his knees and held him there, then grasped the fingers of his right hand and thrust them at the holes in the door. They fit! A rapid series of clicks sounded within the sphere’s walls and I jerked Bryce’s hand back just as the portal folded inward.

  Through that opening I glimpsed multicolored lights that bloomed and flitted and burst. The very air throbbed in that place, and my heart and mind throbbed with it. Before me rose ten black steps that glittered with mica, with dark, metallic rails on both sides. I couldn’t see Vohanna but knew she was there beyond those steps. I smelled the acrid tang of her sorcery, heard the sickly sensuous murmur of what was still, recognizably, her voice. And in the shivering air I could feel how drunk she was on the power of the milkstones.

  The hair curled and leaped on my body.

  I had seen what intoxication with the toir’in-or could do to a being. In the underworld mines of the Klar slavers I had seen it—when the Thye Vessoth priest known as Nethcormundis had tried to slaughter Rannon and myself. Steel had stopped that sorcerer, but I didn’t think steel alone would be enough this time.

  There was one other weapon I could use. Possibly.

  I laid Bryce on the floor and drew from his boot the antler-hilted dagger that was sheathed there. What I contemplated now might kill my brother. But it seemed to me that death was even more assured, for both of us, if I did not act. Nestled against each of the carotid arteries of Bryce’s throat, just above where the bone of the c
lavicle ran, there lay embedded a milkstone. I touched one. It felt warm and oily.

  Milkstones are power. Though I do not understand the laws governing that power, I know that the crystalline structure of the stones can be used to amplify and direct thought just as a properly constructed amphitheater can channel and enhance sound. The results can be—in the hands of an adept—sorcery. And yet, to use the stones is a matter of carefully attuned rhythms and harmonies. Breaking those harmonies is...dangerous.

  Pinching one of Bryce’s milkstones between my thumb and fingers, I pressed the sharp tip of the dagger to the flesh just underneath it—and hesitated. I recalled what had happened at Kellet’s Bay when Diken Gray had cut a fleck of toir’in-or from Eric Ryall’s brow. The blood had clotted almost instantly and the wound had sealed over as if the human body were rejecting the alien taint of the stone. But would that happen here? And what if I sliced too deep and nicked an artery? Would Bryce bleed to death? If the wound did not clot would I be able to save him?

  From beyond the black steps came the high-pitched cackle of Vohanna’s inhuman laughter. And as sure as if I could see it, I knew that another Nyshphalian ship had been torn from the sky.

  My face burned with a sudden anger that was mixed with fear for both my brother and my adopted country; my teeth ground together from the need to act. With an oath and one quick cut, I passed the dagger through the skin beneath the toir’in-or and plucked the milky jewel from the left side of Bryce’s throat.

  I had cut shallowly but still the blood spurted. A scarlet jet of it pulsed across my leg and boot. My heart thudded and I almost screamed as I grabbed for the wound with my hand. But then the hole was closing, sucking itself shut as a burst of some residual heat from the milkstone cauterized it.

  Bryce jerked and heaved in apparent agony, but—like Eric Ryall before him—he did not awaken and seemed to slump deeper into unconsciousness as the toir’in-or was removed. Quickly, then, I cut the second stone free. Again, red fluid sprayed, and again the wound sealed.