Wings of Power

by Carl, Lillian Stewart

  Gard closed his eyes and summoned a deep, slow breath. He tasted bread, mint, and an elusive odor of asphodel. The dragonet inflated. A wrench, a spasm of thought, a stretching sensation. Fur, black and gold fur—a shield stirring with imagery upon a rug, and a skin splayed upon a riverbank. . . Gard lay in soft folds upon the floor.

  Senmut, shaking his head in either admiration or disbelief, picked the tiger-skin cloak from the pile of clothes at his feet and deftly switched it with the one Persis was wearing. She continued staring into some other dimension. “I shall meet you at the temple with your clothing,” Senmut hissed into a fold of fur, neither Gard nor cloak having ears.

  Gard’s mind, the dragonet, the pentacle, were all one attenuated flame that illuminated image after image. Persis. The garden with its trail of green footsteps. A chariot, the driver squinting at the half-covered face of his passenger and then looking away with a shrug. The alley skimming by on either side and a cold draft ruffling cloak and senses. A sky tearing into streamers of gray and blue, glints of sunlight bleeding through and then clotting into glare.

  The maidan. Ranks of soldiers were the walls containing a giant granary, each kernel an Apsuri, a Muktari, or an enslaved Ferangi. The grain-faces swirled. Spears saluted and fell.

  Menelik’s massive brow was as brittle as his polished armor, so gnawed from within it was only a shell encompassing nothingness. Shikar was resplendent in not only polished but gilded armor. His black-currant eyes were buffed by some private satisfaction that sat upon his features as uncharacteristically as a sari on Hurmazi’s broad shoulders.

  Srivastava’s face was closed, locked and shuttered, revealing less than a stone idol’s. Whatever aura, whatever powers she had once had were gone, drained like her father’s blood. Yasmine’s face was garish with paint, emphasizing rather than concealing the premature decay of an overblown rose; a faint reek of wine hung about her.

  The last act, someone gurgled—the dragonet, perhaps. All the players together for the last act. Not quite, Gard responded, not quite.

  The huge temple of Hurmazi blocked the sky with pile after pile of taupe brick and gaudy friezes, showing the god himself watching indulgently as his wives spun flax, carded wool, boiled kettles of meal. The stone folds of Kyphasia’s gown rippled in the wind, revealing a glint of gold.

  Broad steps climbed upward, opening a vista of countryside lit by fleeting rays of sunlight. Rows of priests in fringed robes and flat, broad-brimmed hats stood below a temporary platform of brick and wood on the side of the holy mound. The wind teased Gard and tiger and dragonet and they seemed to hang between earth and sky without support, but not without motive . . .

  There was Tarek. Gard’s thought concretized. Flint eyes, chiseled cheekbones, not one hair out of place in his beard, not one fold out of place in his garments. His scimitar was angled along his leg just so, and even his dark, spark-spangled aura was draped precisely about his corporeal form. Yes, there was something of him in Deva, or of her in him.

  The wizard, intent on his own purposes, strode across the platform. At his right hand was an opening into darkness, a doorway into Raman’s crypt. At his left was an altar, stone horns protruding from each corner. Horns, bulls had horns, Gard had once known something about bulls and horned altars, something he had forgotten.

  Deva headed the line of priestesses. Her sari ballooned away from her face, her jewelry chimed on her glowing skin, and the watchers gasped appreciatively. Tarek’s wolfish smile illuminated even his eyes. He extended his hand. With a slight frown she let him guide her toward a bronze basin.

  Gard wriggled. The cloak fell from Persis’s shoulders and slithered into a crevice between the rim of the platform and a buttress beneath. Gard’s breath shot from his lungs and for a moment he gasped, cheek against cold gritty brick, hands splayed on sawdust and soot, mind undulating out of control. The dragonet swung upon the pentacle, back and forth in a compelling rhythm—up, get up, summon your power, get up . . .

  Gard got up. He realized he was stark naked. Not that he could not function in that state, if necessary, but it was cold up here, all the winds of heaven poking and prying at his body.

  Trumpets sounded. Menelik climbed the steps ponderously, each greaved leg like a tree trunk. Yasmine and Srivastava caromed away from each other, mutually repelled. Shikar planted his feet, glanced at Tarek and snickered in his beard. And just what had that hazelnut-tainted voice been telling him?

  Persis ran her hand down the pleats of her sari. Outlined by the material was Gard’s sword. The pentacle swung between fate and design like a scythe—destiny or free will, it did not matter . . .

  A stir among the priests. Their ranks were invaded by a robed figure with a straw stack for hair and beard; eyes peered out like those of a ferret. A similar figure joined the far row of priests. Gard narrowed his perceptions. The one on this side—yes, he struggled up the steps, limping, carrying a cloth bundle. The other one stared at Tarek, oblivious to the faces ranged opposite.

  An elusive scent of evil flavored the wind—Tarek? No, it was Bhai. Tarek’s aura was haloed by the frail shadow of conscience—damn him anyway.

  Senmut casually tossed his burden into the crevice. Hastily Gard shrugged on his trousers, bowing more to decency than to warmth. The dragonet began posturing, shakhmi, shakhmi, imkhash, and Gard’s pale skin flushed.

  Tarek was speaking in low, sonorous phrases that rolled out over the maidan and fell like a sweet narcotic dew over the scores of uplifted faces. What the gods want, what the gods intend—was the man more arrogant to claim the will of the gods or to pretend belief in them? The faces nodded enrapt by the timbre of that voice. Leader of Souls, Gard told himself in mute litany. Storm Lord. Lord of Delusion. Raman’s servant or Raman’s master.

  Deva’s aura licked quickly around her. She drew back, but Tarek’s hand tightened on hers. He bowed, elegantly, lethally courteous. Her eyes widened, flashed violet, crossed. Her jewelry jingled as she shuddered and stood still. Trumpets flared and died.

  The voice continued. The words were carried upon wings of sorcery, not quite rational, not quite mad, but somehow both; the chilling logic of lunacy. And yet, was the desire for temporal power any more or less insane than the acknowledgment of magical power? Gard scowled. The dragonet rotated in his chest, dancing dizzily, unsteadily, about the glow of the pentacle. In some other world, Tarek, we might have been friends.

  “. . . sacrifice Saavedra to Hurmazi in thanksgiving for victory,” said Tarek. Well, that was as reasonable as any other sacrifice. “Zoe of blessed memory was given in petition—now we must give thanks for a petition granted.” A priest stepped forward and placed a garland of camellia around Deva’s neck.

  Persis stiffened. Her eyes focused upon Tarek holding Deva’s wrist. But it had not been Tarek who had sacrificed Zoe; it was Tarek who would sacrifice—Deva? The dragonet hiccupped. No, not Deva! Menelik sacrificed his own daughter for power but Tarek, Tarek was much more subtle . . . Gard struggled in the undertow of sorcery that swept around him, threatening to wash him in waves of sulfur and hazelnut from the side of the platform down the steps of the temple to the ground. Must stand up. Must fight.

  “This is the daughter of the witch Amathe,” crooned Tarek. “The other child of the prophecy. Honored Jofar brought glory to Apsurakand but this girl brings danger to our beloved Padishah . . .” Deva watched him, transfixed. Her lips parted in a witless smile. Her aura guttered and streamed away. The clouds coupled and parted overhead.

  Deva! Pentacle. Wings. Senses. Will. Gard seized the golden aura of the amulet and wrapped it about him. The dragonet staggered in his gut, fell, leaped up again. Persis’s hand crawled down the folds of her sari toward the hilt of the sword.

  Deva! Damn it, separately we are not strong enough to prevail, together—we must be together . . . Deva twitched. The amethyst veil of her aura drifted tentatively around her. Senmut, his bushy brows arching upward into the haymow of his hair, his eyes protruding in
alarm, was making surreptitious gestures at Gard, which might be occult or might be simple impatience. Bhai and Shikar drifted complacently in the current of Tarek’s speech. “. . . war ended . . . fate of Padishah to rule all of Mohan . . .”

  Menelik stepped forward and dipped his hands into the basin. A symbolic cleansing of blood? Hah! The Great Sea itself would be stained red by the blood Menelik and his henchmen had shed, blood that pooled upon the earth of Ferangipur and flooded the river upstream all the way to Apsurakand. Gard’s spine rippled. The dragonet lunged. Together they stood upright. “Deva!” he shouted aloud. “Wake up!”

  Deva jerked as if slapped. She woke. The petals of the camellia seared into dust. She pulled her wrist from Tarek’s grasp, reached inside her bodice and threw her fortune-telling bones in his face. Each morsel of mortality puffed into a shape, translucent in the shadowed sunlight; the fragile hands of ghosts clawed at the sorcerer and he dodged.

  Menelik started; the water running through his fingertips was pink. Persis screamed, the cry of a raptor falling upon its prey. The sun glanced out and the short imperial sword skewed reflected light across the altar.

  Deva stared at Tarek. Even she, Gard realized as he scrambled onto the platform, had not known the bones she carried were human, the pitiful remnants of the murdered innocents, collected by Amathe in remorse for her part in the massacre. Tarek brushed the specters like clinging cobwebs from his face and body, shuddering perceptibly. So—he was discomfited—excellent!

  Menelik cried out, not so much in surprise as in recognition. Persis stood before him, sword clutched awkwardly in both hands. A downward thrust, turning the neck of the breastplate, and the sword sank to the quick in his chest. Shikar smiled, erased his smile, fumbled for his own weapon. Yasmine shrieked and fell to her knees. Srivastava stood frozen. The double row of priests and priestesses rattled with surprise and expostulation like leaves in a gale. From the maidan came shouts and screams and the clank of weapons as officers leaped up the side of the temple and paused, uncertain.

  Eye to eye Persis and Menelik stood, joined in one long moment of fatal contemplation. Then Menelik raised a trembling hand toward Persis’ face. She spat at him. Blood fountained over them both. His eyes rolled upward in their sockets and he fell, carrying sword and woman down with him.

  Deva spun across the platform and crashed against Gard. They gripped each other, teetering upon the brink of the opening into the crypt. Pity the marriage so soured by rank and power . . . No time to mourn. No reason.

  Senmut gulped. His eye leaped from face to face and settled upon the glowing orb of the sun that winnowed the clouds in the eastern sky. He shaded his eyes with his hand and looked calculatingly at it.

  Shikar stepped forward. Almost casually he drew his sword and struck. Persis, caught beneath Menelik’s body, jerked and gasped. Her blood-dappled hands released the hilt of Gard’s sword, fluttered like the broken wings of birds to the stone beneath, and lay still.

  Bhai crept a few paces forward, licking his lips. His smug expression was blasted from his face when he saw Senmut standing on the opposite side of the steps. Senmut lowered his gaze and looked at his brother with a humorless smile. Bhai snarled.

  Shikar stood upon the edge of the platform, and, raising his sword and rust-stained hands, began some carefully rehearsed speech. “Evil Saavedra used priestesses to fulfill prophecy . . .beloved Menelik foully ambushed and murdered—we, Satrap of Muktardagh, are now Padishah . . .” The soldiers fell back in stunned silence, not ovation. Shikar’s voice rose into a whine.

  Tarek’s head was cocked to the side, one brow arched, one eye narrowed. That expression, Gard noted, should have made his face look unbalanced, but it did not. Tarek seemed to have found his own balance long ago. Not really fair, that one man could have so much style over such depths of substance. It would be easier if I hated him . . .

  Deva leaned against Gard, her fists clenched on his chest, her lips moving in prayer or incantation or curse. The dragonet squirmed between them, the tips of its gauzy wings tickling their throats. The sunlight seemed to grow tenuous, like the watery light of midwinter, and yet still the shadows stretched at one moment long and black down the side of the temple, and in the next moment evaporated.

  Shikar persisted—something about leading the Alliance on to greater glories—the grandiloquent words made no sense to Gard. He watched Tarek beyond Shikar’s wooden gestures and monotonous voice. Tarek raised his hands. With a quick glint of teeth in his beard he clasped his hands and twisted.

  Shikar’s voice stopped with a sudden strangling noise. His face flushed dusky purple. He clutched at his heart—or rather, at his breastplate, a gilded carapace over his chest. His knees buckled. Mouth open, eyes staring, he toppled over the edge of the platform and bounced like a sack of meal down the steps to the ground below. The crowd eddied screaming around the blot that was his body upon the pavement.

  Yasmine fainted. Two priestesses caught her as she collapsed. Srivastava buried her face in her hands. Again soldiers and a priest or two surged forward. Tarek confronted them with hands raised, with a grin both mad and maddening. Suitably cowed, they fell back.

  Gard and Deva were rocked back, aghast, by the force of Tarek’s blow. To kill a man with nothing but will—no wonder Tarek wanted this ceremony to be public, to impress the populace with his power as he made his move at last. What a relief it was, that he was finally making his move at last.

  The sorcerer surveyed the scene, faces peppered with glazed brown eyes, priests’ robes and priestesses’ saris whipping in a chill wind, clouds churning about the disk of the sun . . . Something was wrong with the disk of the sun. A rim of darkness extended along its lower quarter.

  How the hell, Gard asked himself, blinking away the dazzlement in his eyes, did he manage that? “Tarek,” he called. Deva stood quivering in the crook of his arm, eyeing her father less with serenity than sadness.

  Tarek pulled his gaze from the puzzle of the sun and turned his head, not his body, toward Gard. His eyes glinted, but not with surprise. “So. You prove to be a worthy adversary after all.”

  “I suppose you plan to rule the Mohan yourself,” said Gard.

  “Well, yes, I rather thought I would.”

  “Think again!”

  Tarek’s body turned to follow his eyes. “Oh, I have thought, at great length. Of how I hate to have to dispose of you. Both of you.” His eye caressed Deva and his smile faltered. “You have interested me, Kundaraja, since you first challenged me in Dhan Bagrat. I thought you might be useful and you were. All I had to do was precede you, and follow you, and arrange the shards of circumstance you strewed about yourself—Deva, Vijay . . .”

  “Do not patronize me!” Gard snarled.

  Tarek’s expression would have been a sneer had it not been so patrician. “Dance for us, Kundaraja. Lead your own soul—and yours, my dear, I am so sorry—out of my way.”

  Gard shuddered. Tarek would sacrifice his own daughter. Yet Gard’s father would have sacrificed his son without even that feeble an apology. Deva’s fingertips bored into his arm. The dragonet spun, leaped, jerked in his chest. The winged pentacle beat against his heart. Maybe he did hate the man, hated him for his cool assurance, his sublime arrogance, his unashamed selfishness.

  Deva released Gard and raised her hands in a liturgical gesture. Agony blazed and died in his chest—focus! The dragonet swelled. Chest and throat and limbs filled with its prickly power, and he danced. Step, turn, step, leap—sparks shimmered at his fingertips. A blast of light drove back a blast of darkness. Tarek stood unscathed, hands flexed, brows arched.

  Deva was the axis about which he and the dragonet spun. Her eyes were liquid flame. His blood was quicksilver. He was making love to himself, to her—fire plunged into water, water poured over fire—wisps of phosphorescent cloud scudded across the platform . . .

  A hush muffled the sizzle of his thought. The world went dark. Deva looked up with an indignant, interrogative
cry, concentration shattered.

  The surrounding countryside contracted into smears of dull green and bronze. Vultures coasted in eerie silence overhead. It was dark, and yet the storm clouds were not that thick . . .

  The sun was shrinking. It was a thick incandescent crescent, then a thin paring of gold, its light draining away.

  The crowd wailed in a frenzy of terror. Priests and priestesses broke ranks and fled, carrying Yasmine and Srivastava with them. Bhai hitched up his robes and scuttled over the edge of the platform into the crypt. Senmut stood alone in the gathering darkness, hair standing on end, eyes gray transparent globes, nodding sagely.

  Gard stared upward. The sun was a lunette—no, it was the moon that had crescent horns, the headdress of the goddess . . .

  The sun vanished, blotted by a disk of black opacity like an obsidian shield. Streamers of gold and silver light flared out into an indigo sky. Tarek glared as if his aura had been sucked from him and strewn across the heavens. “By the seven hells, how did you manage that?” he demanded of Gard.

  Gard and Deva stood petrified in mid-gesture. The dragonet hissed like a disgruntled asp. “Me?” Gard croaked.

  Senmut chuckled. “You thought Gard was a worthy adversary, eh, Tarek?”

  Tarek leaned toward the old monk. His voice poured like a snake crawling among stones. “You were able to teach him to be stronger than you yourself?”

  “Demonstrably. I suggest you surrender, before he loses patience and pulverizes you on the spot.”

  “Senmut,” Gard whispered urgently, “do not . . .” Deva stood in his arms, her eyes glinting onyx and emerald, as if listening to some other voice.

  From the crypt Bhai cried, “Raman has swallowed Hurmazi. Hurmazi is dead, consumed by Raman.”

  “Try not to be stupid,” spat Tarek. “It is—er—simple magic!”

  Senmut’s toothily wicked smile glistened in his beard. His thought cavorted through Gard’s mind. It is merely the moon blocking the light of the sun. I knew it would happen—for generations the monks of Dhan Bagrat have observed and recorded the cycles of the heavens. The darkness will pass quickly—take advantage of it, boy!