What reviewers are saying about Wings of Power
“. . . an interesting re-telling of an old legend. The ending is full of twists, unpredictable, with a delightful discussion of death and glory.”—Timothy Lane, Fosfax
“. . . an intense tale . . . a complex and fascinating plot . . . resonances between adolescent lust and mature love, between interior and exterior beauty, and between faith and skepticism underlie the story with a steely webwork of reality . . . an elegant thread of eroticism woven with delicacy and wit through the story . . . the prose is crafted with a jeweler's precision and the use of imagery is masterful. Carl may well be the finest stylist working in fantasy today.”—Ardath Mayhar, Thrust
Wings of Power
Sabazel, Book Four
Lillian Stewart Carl
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2011 by Lillian Stewart Carl
This book is available in print at most online retailers
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
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Chapter One
He ran, gasping and sliding, but the beast followed him. Not that he could see it—he could never see it—but he knew it was there. Its hooves drummed the rock, deafening him. Its breath, foul with sulfur and decayed flesh, lashed the back of his neck. The beat of its mighty wings threatened to sweep his feet from under him.
He ran. The dark caverns through which he struggled twisted like entrails spread across an altar, an altar draped with blood-red amaranth. The winged bull was almost upon him, and he was lost . . .
“Gard!”
A voice—a soft, warm, clear voice. He stumbled toward it. Light, a lavender and silver dawn unfurling outside the window. It was morning. He had survived another night. But where was he?
Oh yes! How pleasant it was to wake in a woman’s arms! It was when he did not sleep in a woman’s arms that he feared he would never wake at all. The vision stalking him struck without warning.
“You were moaning,” Raisa said. “A nightmare?”
With an effort he quelled the thunder of his heart, caught his breath, managed a diffident shrug. “Maybe I ate too many savories at the banquet last night.”
“Maybe you drank too much wine.” She smiled and nestled close beside him, arranging the coverlet over them both. Was that how it had finally happened? Gard’s brows tightened for a moment, trying to remember clearly. The banquet. The Emperor presiding with his usual easy grace. One rhyton of red Sardian wine, or two or three; no, it had been Raisa’s sparkling black eyes that had intoxicated him. For years they had intoxicated him, and for years he had nobly confined himself to teasing her with stolen kisses, eagerly returned.
Well, she was sixteen now, and now knew what a woman meant to a man.
Her body was warm, her skin smooth against his, dissipating the lingering chill of his nightmare. Her fingertips flirted delicately across his belly. “I cannot imagine,” she murmured into his throat, “why my old nurse told me it would hurt. You did not hurt me, Gard. You would never hurt me, would you?”
“Of course not,” he returned, blowing the long strands of her sable hair from his face. His own hair was chestnut, and had not darkened with age as everyone had once predicted. Crimson and black, he thought. Like some heraldic emblem.
The day lightened. A lark caroled across the sky. The city beneath the palace window awoke. Muffled hoofbeats and cheerful shouts and the tantalizing odors of cooking bread floated upon the breeze that raised goose flesh on Gard’s perspiring back.
Ah, Raisa! He rocked as peacefully upon her body as a ship upon the halcyon swells of the sea, raining kisses and endearments like prismatic water drops across her upturned face. Even though the affectionate phrases were well-practiced, they were not lies. He had never lied to gain a woman’s favors. He had never needed to.
Gard basked; surely he had found bliss at last. The sun was warm, and the sea glassy-still, and Raisa’s silk and saffron skin encompassed him. Pigeons cooed on the windowsill. He could sift the fragile morning shadows through his fingers, shaping them to his will. And he willed that this moment would go on forever, that he would never have to decide how best not to hurt her.
The steady tread of a sentry echoed in the corridor outside the room. Was it not daring. Gard thought drowsily, to take Raisa here in the palace, in her own bed, under the very eye of the soldier detailed to protect her, and two doors from her parents’ indulgent gaze?
On the distant horizon of his senses the black clouds of a squall line gathered. A gust of conscience rippled his sails. Ignoring them, he closed his eyes and turned his face into Raisa’s hair. She murmured contentedly to the coppery stubble on his cheek and he answered. Such harmonies were all the more sublime after the dissonance of nightmare.
The door slammed. Gard had time to think but not vocalize a wailing No! before a hand as harsh as a talon grasped his hair and flung him sprawling onto the cold marble floor.
The pigeons fled, wings beating. Raisa gasped and muffled her shriek of dismay in her pillow. A princess does not blame, does not plead for, does not dally with a beggar who does not know his place.
“How dare you!” shouted her father, Tembujin.
Gard looked warily up at the supple figure clad only in breeches, face contorted, fists clenched. Interesting, how in moments of outrage the civilized man dropped away and left Tembujin the barbarian he had once been, his black eyes smoldering like a pillaged city.
Gard grappled with his wits. If I stand, he will knock me down. If I stay here, he will think me a supplicant. He stood, and fixed Tembujin with a placating gaze. His clear, burnished gray eyes were like lanterns suddenly opened.
Tembujin’s fists kneaded his hips. He snarled, “She might as well be your sister!”
“She is not, is she?” Gard might try an innocent smile at this point, but that would be lying.
“Filthy bastard!”
“True, my parents were not wed when I was born.” Intriguing; Tembujin’s invective was usually more imaginative. Shock, probably. At least he had not interrupted them earlier. This was embarrassing enough.
“How dare you!” Tembujin shouted.
He really wants to know, Gard realized. His thought spattered from one slightly blurred image to the next: Raisa sitting up, clutching the bedclothes to her breasts—lovely breasts, nice handfuls—her face glazed, not with regret but sorrow; her mother, who had been a mother to him, hovering protectively over her daughter and casting glances at Gard that were more bewildered than baleful; Raisa’s maidservant, her eyes huge, her hands knotted before her. Aha! It had been she, no doubt, who had peeked in to wake her mistress and who had dutifully, if uncharitably, raised the alarm.
One of Raisa’s brothers forced his way past the servants and guards gawking in the doorway. There was that barbarian face again, responding with rage instead of hurt.
Gard said with a bitter laugh, “Rather a challenge, you see.” And he added to himself, the only power I have is over women.
Gods, did Raisa’s face crumple at that? No, she could not believe she was only a challenge to him! His gaze faltered and fell, but could not, somehow, reach out to her. Had it been only moments ago that he had promised her he would never hurt her?
Tembujin, with an incoherent growl, hit him.
Gard saw the blow coming, felt the fist like a bronze mac
e strike his mouth, heard the flat, ugly sound. The floor jerked up beneath him and struck him again. A wave of pain dashed against his skull and his teeth rattled. He tasted blood. His for Raisa’s, that was fair enough.
Thank the gods that Tembujin had not been holding a dagger. “Really,” Gard said thickly, struggling to regain his footing, “It is much too early in the morning for such unpleasantness. Can we discuss this after breakfast?”
Tembujin coiled as if around a mortal wound. Raisa’s face was a mask; her mother’s was hidden by her hands. The faces in the doorway, angry, shocked, amused, parted like the sea before the prow of a ship. The Emperor stood in the doorway, his sheathed sword in his hand. It was the dark depths of his eyes that sparked like a drawn blade.
He needed no explanation. His superhuman perception rarely did. With a gesture he dispersed the watchers. With a word he soothed Tembujin. And he looked at Gard in an agonized despair more harrowing than any anger, any physical injury, could be.
Gard turned away, wrapping his arms about his own cold, raw flesh. Why is it, he demanded of himself, that every time I touch gold it turns to lead?
He had been shaded from birth by the outspread wings of power. The slow beat of those pennons mocked his every waking moment and haunted even his hours of rest.
That was not much of an answer, but it was the only one he had.
* * * * *
Gard stood in the center of the throne room like an island in the midst of a marble sea. He glanced from side to side, half expecting to see sharks’ fins furrowing the smooth expanse of stone. But he was alone, without even predators for company.
The Emperor, Andrion Bellasteros, seated himself on his throne. He leaned back, sighed wearily, fixed his nephew with the steady gaze and perilous silence that reduced scribes and governors, legionaries and generals, to stammering idiocy. The naked blade of his sword rested across his knees, muttering to itself in quick rippling licks of light, driving back the shadow.
Gard tightened his hands clasped behind his back. He dropped his gaze to the floor and eyed his toes flexing and loosing beneath their binding strips of leather. He tongued his swollen lip. Say something, he mutely ordered the Emperor. Shout at me. Beat me.
But his uncle had never beaten him for his misdeeds, even as an orphan rescued from the storm his parents had created. Andrion had always been supernaturally patient with the son of his half-sister Chrysais and the demon Eldrafel, as if by his patience he could atone for their evils.
Not all of us have supernatural powers, Gard thought with an uneasy mingling of relief and resentment. The room was so quiet he could hear the faint shimmer of light in the blade of the sword and the furtive steps of eavesdroppers lurking in the corridor outside the doorway. Palace gossip, as usual, buzzed about him as bees about honeysuckle. But it was autumn, and the honeysuckle was long gone.
Tembujin, Khan of the province of Khazyaristan, Gard’s adoptive father, stood in his habitually casual pose at Andrion’s right hand.
No, he only appeared casual. His body was as taut as the string of the bow he wore over his shoulder, his mouth was as thin as an arrowhead, and his black eyes were hooded, choosing to reveal nothing instead of revealing too much. His fingers tapped upon the arm of the throne like the fusillade of hoof beats of messengers bearing bad news.
“Say something!” Gard ordered Tembujin, raising his own eyes.
The Khan scowled at that limpid gray gaze. “I have. When I found you with my daughter this morning. What else do you want to hear?”
Go ahead, tell me that I betrayed you, and Andrion, and your care of me these thirteen years. Somewhere in the back of Gard’s mouth a sense between taste and smell recalled Raisa and her scent like fresh lemon-grass. It could not have been wrong to have seduced her. Wrong to have been caught, yes, but not wrong to expressed his affection for her.
It hardly mattered. He could not undo what he had done any more than he could change his ancestry. His skill with women was an innate faculty, nothing he had deliberately cultivated—that certain half-smile, a quirk of the brow, a careless, as if accidental, caress. He wondered suddenly, irrelevantly, if magic were like that—visualization into reality as casual as a kiss. Or as searing.
Andrion stared at him, no doubt interpreting his reverie as stubborn cockiness. The Emperor wore that unnerving all-knowing gravity he usually reserved for council meetings and audiences. Gard had never been able to decide how much of that expression was an act, and how much real perception. Now, with himself as its focus, he did not want to know.
He tried inspecting the tapestries behind the throne, stitched stories of his ancestors’ heroism; he found no help there, just more accusing glances. What did you expect, he asked the thread-painted features of his grandfather Marcos Bellasteros, the god-king, what could you possibly expect of me when my other grandfather was a demon, and destroyed my island, my home, my inheritance in one convulsion of infernal spite?
A breeze tickled the tapestry, and the cloth rippled with a distant sound of wings. The strong feathered wings of the falcon god Harus of Sardis, Bellasteros’ father. The fetid leather wings of dead Tenebrio, the shadow lord of Minras. The stern but hardly humorless face of the conqueror seemed to smile; Bellasteros had had his moments of caprice, Gard told himself. Always, of course, redeemed by honor.
“Gard,” said Andrion, and for a moment the miscreant thought it was the image that had spoken. “Gard,” Andrion said. “King of Minras.”
“Do not taunt me, Uncle.”
“When have I ever taunted you with your title?”
“An empty title.”
“Your kingship burns in your heart.”
“My kingship was extinguished when Minras was destroyed, in the battle of the dark gods my father raised and drove mad.”
“Is that your fault?” Andrion demanded. “Is it mine?”
“Blame it on the gods,” answered Gard. “They take pleasure in tormenting the men who crawl like lice in their robes.”
Oddly, Andrion smiled. “Yes, let us blame the gods for the mingled dark and light in our own souls, and then we shall not have to choose which to follow.”
Gard looked again at his feet, trying not to squirm. Get the lecture finished. Get onto the punishment. Outside, asters and heart’s-ease bloomed beneath a brilliant sky, a vast canopy of sapphire over the city. Outside, the sunlight was as thickly golden as the gilded wings of angels in miniature paintings of the Mohan. Outside, the air was green wine, cool and tart and brisk, like Raisa’s kisses.
No doubt they were already dosing her with herbs; a pregnancy would never do, would it? A bastard child of a bastard child of a demon. Inside, clouds gathered like the ash that had billowed above dying Minras, or chittering flocks of bats pouring from the dank labyrinthine cavern-temples through which Gard, it seemed, was doomed to eternally wander.
“Why,” asked Tembujin caustically, “when no one rests your parents’ crimes upon your head, do you try so hard to commit crimes of your own?”
“Crimes?” Gard muttered to his feet. “Pranks, yes, but I have never murdered anyone.”
Andrion winced, and his eye dimmed for a moment. Yes, Gard’s mother Chrysais had paid for her crimes, killed by the same hands that had used her. Eldrafel, Gard told himself. My father.
The breeze eddied again about the room. The wind, the breath of the goddess Ashtar, Andrion’s other divine ancestor. Even though I have none of her blood, thought Gard, even though I worship at her shine, she teases me with the beauty of women, like sounding a trumpet call before a war horse.
The Khan cleared his throat. “I would ask Andrion to marry you to Raisa, but she has long been promised to my chief nuryan. And he will take her still, he says, for he would affirm his allegiance to me.”
“He is an old man!” Gard protested.
“Twice your age,” said Andrion dryly, “but hardly old.”
Marriage was for men with names. “How generous,” Gard said. “It could not
be, by any chance, that he has five children by his late first wife? And his concubines grow restless without a wife to rule them? And you would not marry a Khazyari princess to a beggar whose only legacy is darkness?”
Tembujin spun away from the throne, hands gripping the horn and wood of his bow rather than, perhaps, gripping Gard’s throat. Andrion’s brows arched almost to the short fringe of dark auburn hair framing his face. He turned his most relentless glance upon his nephew. “When I was your age, Gard . . .” he began.
“You had been Emperor for two years,” the young man replied, obscurely pleased that Andrion’s patience was at last wearing thin.
The Emperor exhaled and slapped the sword across his lap. Its light rippled through the room, making the chamber seem for a moment like a submarine grotto. He said in the voice that brought legions to a halt between one tread and the next, “When I only a little younger than you, I, too, pitied myself, and scorned the game that I thought the gods played with me. But in the end we choose for ourselves. Gard, which gods to follow, and which games to play.”
He was right. Of course he was right. He was always right. Gard sealed his lips over his teeth. Did the man never grow tired of being right?
Apparently not. “When you were eighteen,” Andrion went on remorselessly, “I set you to study with my secretaries, hoping to make of you a scribe and then a governor, but you already knew how to read and write and recite the catechisms of Harus and Ashtar, and preferred spending your allowance on racing horses and courtesans.
“When you were nineteen I sent you to the temple of Harus in Sardis, where you performed the duties of an acolyteonly, it seemed, to explore beneath the veils of the women who came to the temple to worship. Until the governor asked me to bring you back here to Iksandarun before the men of Sardis trussed you and threw you into the river as they used to sacrifice bulls in my father’s youth.”
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