War of Powers

by Robert E Vardeman;Victor Milan

  “If you didn’t cast some kind of spell of invisibility over us, who did?” asked Fost, stretching a finger to trace the line of Moriana’s jaw.

  “I don’t know.”

  “If either of you had the sense the Three and Twenty Wise Ones gave a dung beetle, you might infer the identity of your savior.” The peevish voice emerged from the satchel propped against the bank. “Though why I should expect gratitude from the likes of you I’ll never know.”

  Fost drew himself up on one elbow, peering through the darkness at the spirit’s jug. “You? But how?”

  “Moriana didn’t. You certainly did not. Whom does that leave?”

  “I didn’t know you were a magician, spirit. What else have you concealed from us? Remember the Josselits, Erimenes.”

  “No magic was involved. A mere trifle of mind control. Why, even when alive I could have accomplished such a feat with ease. My thirteen hundred ninety-nine years of contemplation have only honed the edge of my abilities.”

  Moriana’s eyes met Fost’s in the darkness. “The savants of Athalau were noted for their mental abilities, apart from sorcery,” she said.

  “Which explains how,” the courier said, “but not why. Why, when you were on the verge of seeing our blood shed as you’ve so avidly desired before, did you rescue us?”

  “Even if I felt called upon to account for my actions to some lout of a courier…”

  “The Josselits, Erimenes. Remember them.”

  “…I strongly doubt you have the mental capacity to follow my reasoning,” the spirit said testily. “As for your incessant caviling about the Josselits, I can only observe that they would be as stimulating company as you’ve proven this night. Lying beside you is a lovely wench who owes her life and soul to you, and yet you lie there like a pious divinity student without doing a thing about it.”

  Erimenes’ comment made Fost aware of an urgent tickle below his belt. He gazed at Moriana for a minute. Her expression was unreadable in the starlight.

  “No,” he said at last. “I think not. After what you’ve been through today…”

  Moriana kissed him lightly on the lips. “Thank you, Fost.” With that she rolled over, snuggled herself against him, and went promptly to sleep.

  In a short time he too slept, but his dreams teemed with enemies and screaming faces.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Like damp, rumpled cloth gradually dried and drawn taut over a frame, the land flattened from undulating prairie to a virtually featureless steppe. High gray-green grass, bowing before the ceaseless wind, stretched as far as the eye could see in all directions. Winter and the nearness of the polar zone had dropped a blanket of dreariness on the land. Leaden gray-clouds rolled across the sky, building an impenetrable wall above the low, black bulk of the Rampart Mountains. Even the sunlight was robbed of its brilliance and cast a wan radiance. And every step took the fugitives deeper into bone-chilling cold.

  Fost and Moriana had spent three days winding through the labyrinth of ravines. Twice flights of war-birds had flown over, but overhanging banks had provided them cover from observation. By the time they emerged from the broken country, not an eagle could be seen through the whole vast dome of the sky.

  From there on, they had to traverse open country, which gave no shelter from the keen eyes of Rann's eagles. So they decided to travel mostly at night, halting at the first pallid tint of dawn to dig places to sleep away the daytime. The roots of the steppe grass reached deep. They knew they could cut up great chunks of sod and then pull them back into place over them to provide camouflage.

  For their own reasons, the two felt increasingly eager to reach the city in the glacier and the treasure it concealed. Yet their path did not lead directly toward the Gate of the Mountains, the pass that lay due north of Athalau. The swallowed city rested on a southeastward line running through Thailot to Brev. The travelers’ weary legs, however, carried them almost directly south.

  Moriana broached the subject the evening they emerged from the ravines. They had just finished the celebration denied them the night of their escape from the City in the Sky. Facing one another, naked, they pressed close with the aftermath of passion.

  “If we make straight for the Gate of the Mountains, Rann’s men will have us before we go thirty miles,” she said, the words slightly distorted as she lay with her cheek against the courier’s chest. “Their eagles have poor night vision, but on the steppe they don’t need to see well to make out moving figures.”

  “What can we do about it?” Fost asked as he absently stroked her golden hair.

  “I remember hearing of a way through the Ramparts near the Great Crater Lake directly south of here.” She rubbed her smooth cheek across his chest. “Synalon has some scheme in mind; I don’t think she’ll let Rann have many men to hunt us. He’ll concentrate on the straight path to the Gate. If we make for the Crater Lake we’ll have a better chance of eluding him.”

  “Hmmm,” Fost rumbled thoughtfully to himself. “I remember something about a western passage on that map I took from Kest-i-Mond. I don’t recall exactly, but I have the impression there was something ominous about the name.”

  “The Valley of Crushed Bones, it’s called.” Erimenes’ tones seemed even more sour than usual. “If that sounds at all ominous to you.”

  “It does. But no name, however awful it sounds, scares me as much as Rann and his bird riders.”

  “Nonsense. You’ve dealt with the Sky Guardsmen before.” Erimenes made a sound as though clicking a vaporous tongue. “Really, Fost, I cannot fathom your timorousness.”

  Fost made a rude noise.

  “What became of the map?” Moriana asked him.

  He grimaced. “Obviously Synalon knew its value. I had it in the satchel you stole from me.” He felt her tense at the words and patted her rump affectionately. “Never mind. That’s long gone by now. At any rate, I don’t have the map any longer.”

  “And Rann does,” Erimenes said. “He’ll know of the westward route. He’ll lay a trap for you, mark my words.”

  Moriana eased her head around to look at the satchel. “I have the feeling there’s something about the Crater Lake country that our distinguished colleague dislikes. Why don’t you want us going to the Great Crater, Erimenes?”

  Erimenes mumbled something about them regretting such ill-considered judgments and spoke no more.

  “Another mystery,” Moriana said to Fost. “First he renders us invisible to the Guardsmen despite their protection spells. Now he displays this curious reluctance about the Great Crater Lake. I wonder what it means?”

  “Nothing but good, if it shuts him up like that,” Fost replied. He reluctantly pulled away from Moriana’s grip and sat up, the cold wind from the steppes whipping around him. But the wind felt good, clean, fresh, and crisp after the blood and death they’d been through. “Let’s be on our way. The night soon will be dark enough to cloak our movement from Rann.”

  “I suppose you’re right,” sighed Moriana. She straightened and stared southward.

  Fost didn’t have to be a mindreader to know what she was thinking. On this score, their thoughts were as one. The City in the Glacier. The Amulet of Living Flame. Immortality.

  Immortality!

  They had endured much at the hands of Synalon and Rann. They had defeated them. Now only reward lay ahead for the courier and his princess in the southlands.

  “Come on, let’s move!” Fost cried, struggling into his clothing. “The sooner we’re off these steppes the better I’ll like it.”

  “Yes, Fost,” agreed Moriana, dressing as quickly as the courier. Neither could hide the soaring anticipation they felt.

  “Why you’re so eager to freeze, going in this direction, I’ll never know,” sniffed Erimenes. “There’s nothing this way you could possibly want, mark my words.”

  But Fost and Moriana ignored him. They strode off onto the night-shrouded steppe with a spring in their walk, hand in hand, knowing the worst lay behind
them.

  BOOK TWO

  The City in the Glacier

  CHAPTER ONE

  'If Rami's bird-riders don't kill us, this damned wind will. Doesn't it ever stop?' Fost Longstrider shouted over his shoulder. As if to mock his words, the wind died momentarily. A teasing lull, and then it blew full force again, hurling the eternal chill of the antarctic waste beyond the Rampart Mountains into their chapped, reddened faces.

  His companion hunched closer, both to hear his words and to share his body's warmth. Numbed hands plucked ceaselessly at her heavy velvet cloak, tightening it against the cold in a gesture long since turned into reflex. The woman's fingers were long and fine, unmarked by labor save for the small, distinctive calluses left by long hours spent wrapped about the hilt of a sword.

  'I thought you were used to living in the wind and weather,' Moriana shouted back, blinking as the blast whipped her golden hair painfully into her eyes, 'i thought you couriers spent all your time out on the road.'

  'I thought you princesses spent all your time lolling about in jewel-encrusted towers on satin pillows and thinking about how best to gratify your every whim.'

  Moriana managed a short laugh. 'I suppose we've still a lot to learn about each other.'

  'In the old days,' a third voice said, 'the weather was worse. The wind blew harder and colder, the snow lay deeper when it came, and for months out of the year the sun never rose at ail this far south.' The thin, plaintive voice issued forth from a bulky knapsack slung over the courier's back.

  'Come, Erimenes,' said Fost. 'You don't expect us to believe such wild stories.'

  'It's true,' the voice insisted. 'It was quite sometime ago, of course. Long before my birth, to say nothing of my death. During the War of Powers ten thousand years ago, it was, when Felarod and the Earth-Spirit challenged the might of the Dark Ones. The struggle tipped the world on its axis. It brought these once fair and temperate lands into the icy grasp of the south pole and sealed the fate of lovely Athalau. I would not lie to you.'

  'Oh?' said Fost, in mock surprise. 'Has the cold caused such a drastic change in your character?'

  'Scoff, lowborn,'sniffed Erimenes. 'I tell you nothing but the truth.' Fost nodded, inclined to believe the spirit this time, yet unwilling to allow Erimenes the opportunity to gloat. In the vast libraries of High Medurim, Fost had read of a cataclysmic struggle in the distant past. But being born in the worst slums and learning the treacherous ways of the capital of the once-great Empire had turned him into a bitter realist. He had dismissed the tales as fantasy, mere legends concocted by the romantically inclined to add spice to the otherwise dreary march of history. He had forgotten the tales until just a few days past, when the honey-haired daughter of High Councillor Uriath of the Sky City had entertained him with the history of that ancient community.

  Now he wondered how much truth was contained in those ancient tomes. Yet his hard-headed approach to reality refused to yield totally in spite of his recent confrontations with fire elementals, ape-monsters that ran through walls like wraiths but whose talons tore flesh like steel hooks, and idols that came to life imbued with the souls of sleeping demons. Abruptly he threw back his head and laughed into the teeth of the wind.

  'Are you taken insane?' asked Erimenes hopefully. 'Might I expect some new and diverting escapade from you?'

  'It's nothing, old spirit,' said Fost, wiping away a tear before it turned to ice on his cheek. 'It just occurred to me how absurd the universe really is. Here I am tramping across the Southern Steppe beside the sorceress-princess of a city that floats a thousand feet in the air, and riding in the satchel at my hip is the spirit of a philosopher who has died fourteen hundred years before . . .'

  'Thirteen hundred and ninety-nine,' corrected Erimenes haughtily. 'Get your facts straight.'

  'And,' Fost continued, as though the wraith hadn't interrupted, 'this bizarre trio is bound for a city lost in the bowels of a glacier, in search of a talisman that confers the blessing of eternal life.'

  'All you ever think about is that amulet’ complained Erimenes. 'One would think there is nothing else in the world.'

  'Isn't eternal life a worthy enough goal, Erimenes?' asked Moriana. 'Yes, laugh, ridicule my warning to snatch at all the experience you can now. Mark my words. This fool's errand to retrieve the amulet will only earn you death, not eternal life,' Erimenes said sourly. 'Right now the journey is easy. You'll find it otherwise when Rann catches you and starts winding your guts onto a spool before your eyes.'

  'You'd like that,' said Moriana with sudden savagery. 'It would be quite a thrill for you to watch, wouldn't it?! don't doubt you'd stand by and offer helpful suggestions as you did when I was captive and my eunuch cousin forced me to watch him torture to death the friends of my childhood.'

  Fost gripped her shoulder. Moriana's face had gone white. Her capture in the Sky City had left scars on her soul that even time might not obliterate. She had returned to the Sky City to find her beloved mother dead and her hated sister usurping the throne. Within hours she was a prisoner, trapped by her cousin Rann's secret police. And at Synalon's command, Prince Rann had refrained from tormenting the prisoner - physically. He had found other ways of torture, ways leaving her body unsullied for her sacrificial marriage to Istu, the Demon of the Dark Ones.

  Black Istu slept in the foundations of the Sky City, bound there at the end of the War of Powers by a victorious Felarod. For centuries the humans, who had supplanted the reptilian Fallen Ones responsible for building the City thirty millennia before, had sacrificed select members of the Blood Royal to Istu, in the form of his Vicar, an obscene stone statue that squatted at the City's core. Though Istu slept eternally, his subconscious remained active with a primitive, elemental life. This force could be drawn into the Vicar by the arcane chants of the Rite of Dark Assumption. For a time after the chant, the stone would pulse with unholy life - time enough for the demon to consummate his union with his latest victim.

  Five thousand years before, Julanna the Wise had overthrown the necromancer Malva Kryn and founded the Etuul line. Her first act had been to suppress the Rite and all worship of the Dark Ones.

  'Rann tortures only mind and body,' continued Moriana bitterly, 'but this is nothing compared with Synalon. My sister strives to serve the Dark Ones again after all these years.'

  'Don't let Erimenes goad you into argument,' cautioned Fost. 'He craves excitement. These dreary steppes are boring to him - and they are getting to me as well.' He glanced at the blonde woman and felt a lump forming in his throat.

  Fost had rescued Moriana from Synalon and Rann, but it had been no mere altruism that prompted him to take such insane risks. He had followed a beauteous thief who had robbed him in the night, made it memorable with her lovemaking when he caught her, and then stolen away before dawn with the jug containing Erimenes the Ethical. And Erimenes alone, who had dwelt in Athalau before the glacier engulfed it, knew the location of the Amulet of Living Flame.

  Fost's first discovery upon entering the City in the Sky was that his nocturnal thief was no less than Princess Moriana Etuul and rightful ruler of the City. His second was that she had been captured by her sister. Fost had already encountered Synalon's men searching for Erimenes and knew how deadly confronting them could be. With Erimenes secreted somewhere in the Pake of the Winds, Fost's only hope of finding him lay in asking Moriana. He had been forced by circumstance to rescue her.

  He looked at the woman who strode beside him with steps still long and sure despite the fatigue he knew weighted her limbs. She was tall, nearly as tall as he. Her slimness made her appear almost frail beside his brawny bulk, belying a tigerish strength and swiftness that had almost claimed Fost's life at sword point the night they first met. The exchange of sword thrusts had turned into an exchange of thrusts of a different nature, but Fost had never forgotten the coldness felt when he realized he faced an opponent his equal in skill.

  Her eyes, bloodshot now from the wind, were green, brighter and l
ivelier than his own of smoke-grey. She was fair and blonde and lithe; he was burly, tanned and weatherbeaten, with a face framed by an unmanageable growth of black hair. In appearance they were as disparate as their backgrounds.

  But even that first night, Fost had sensed something in her, some strand that matched one in the skein of his own existence. When he had trailed her across the steppe, fought his way up to the Sky City and found himself caught between Rann's ruthless efficiency and the equally deadly ineptitude of anti-Synalon rebels, he had told himself over and over that self-interest was his motive. She had robbed him of the key to life everlasting; he had meant to have it back. But he had never been able to hide from himself that his interest in rescuing Moriana ran far deeper.

  And after rescuing her and escaping on the back of her aged, faithful war bird, he had learned that she, too, felt a strong link between them.

  Moriana sensed his gaze, turned her eyes to his, smiled. He smiled back and looked away. In the green pools of her eyes he had seen the same knowledge that haunted him. Each ever-harder step to the South carried them nearer the decision that could sever forever the bond between them - or end one or the other's life.

  Only one could possess the Amulet of Living Flame and the immortality it gave.

  Night descended like a dome of black crystal, shutting out both wind and light. The steppe lay still under the cold blaze of constellations. Small soft sounds rustled in the dead grass around them, but none came near. The lesser predators of the steppe had learned that the smell of humans meant danger. The greater stayed clear, kept at bay by Moriana's magic.