Her fingers touched wetness. She pulled her fingers away in dismay. It took a few seconds for her inwardly directed eyes to register smeared blood. Her own. Someone had dared to attack her, Queen of the Sky City! And within her own territory!
She flashed to her feet. Her concentration broke. The waterspout leaped upward, dissipating in air with a great shout of joy at the destruction it had accomplished, leaving nothing behind but a rain of muddy water and debris. The salamander hissed relief as oblivion swallowed its agony. The sky was filled with gaseous ludintip.
'Maggots!' Synalon screamed. 'You dare attack my City!' The rage burned her brain as the salamander had seared her flesh.
All that saved her life was the amazement gripping the Estil archers after their first volley when they realized that the wild, scorched, nude figure was Synalon herself. Now came clouds of arrows.
Screeching in fury, she waved her hands before her, covering herself with a shield of fire in which the arrows flared and disappeared without reaching her body. The survivors of her bodyguard shot back, but they were vastly outnumbered. Even as the raging queen blasted a second volley of arrows, a ludintip gondola bumped down on the gray stone. Howling like fiends, armed men and women poured forth. For the first time since the human capture of the City in the Sky, its ramparts felt the tread of an invader's feet.
Even with the allies she had and the death spells she commanded, Synalon could never hope to withstand such a fanatical attack singlehandedly. So savagely drained of energy that she could barely stand, Synalon teetered on the brink of the skywall. Hidden reserves of power were fed by her anger.
'Up, my children, up!' she screamed, her voice wild and fierce and mad. She threw her scorched arms up over her head, then pointed to her intended victims. 'Rend and slay the invaders, the groundling maggots! Slay them!'
Obedient to their mistress's command, the ravens of the Sky City burst forth from their rookeries. A boiling black cloud of death, they swept over the invaders like a firestorm from the guts of Omizantrim. Beaks pecked at the vulnerable membranes of the ludintip, plucked eyes from warriors battling impotently with bows and spears. Their talons slashed at the Estil commandos and each contact of claw with skin meant inevitable death. As Synalon stood and laughed while balancing precariously on her spit of stone, daring gravity to claim her in the moment of her triumph, her ravens slew the intruders to the last man and woman. Though the Estil soldiers killed the black attackers by the hundred, each raven that fell was replaced by a dozen more.
At last the screaming died. Only the sound of the wind could be heard over the ripping of flesh by a thousand black beaks.
Somewhere in the City a war eagle left alone by the ravens who mistook it for part of the City's forces touched down bearing a rider whose senses reeled with horror at the sight he had just witnessed.
The battle was quickly finished. Convinced of his triumph to the end, General Hausan was shot by Colonel Enn while posing for ten artists dashing off sketches to mark the epochal event of Estil history. Pudgy Sky Marshal Suema led a gallant delaying action against the bird riders while Tonsho, her nerve broken by the nearness of physical danger, fled downstairs to her private apartments in the south wing of the Hall. Suema and his men fell quickly. Scimitar in hand, Enn led the pursuit of the real ruler of Kara-Est.
They found her cowering among cushions and fine tapestries pulled from the walls. Her pretty-boys fought bravely but futilely; after a brief exchange of swordcuts Enn called for archers. The Chief Deputy's lover-bodyguards were feathered to fall among the silks. The scent of blood mingled with a dozen rare perfumes. Tonsho cowered in the midst of luxury.
'No, no, don't hurt me,' she moaned, her eyes screwed tightly shut. 'For the love of all gods, don't let Rann have me'.' 'Do you yield the city of Kara-Est?' Enn demanded sternly. 'Y-yes,' sobbed Tonsho. And the thing was done.
CHAPTER NINE
With the unfamiliar, harsh syllables of the Zr'gsz tongue hissing in her ears. Moriana lay on her belly and watched. The jagged black stone beneath her stung with heat even though her sturdy tunic. Whether the heat came from the sun hanging low in the western sky or the fires burning far below she couldn't tell. She stiffened as she sensed a presence nearby.
'Anything?' asked Darl Rhadaman r'Harmis, lowering himself beside her on the crest of the undulating line of cooled lava.
Moriana pointed with her chin. The maincampof the Watchers lay below. It was a somber place, reflecting its purpose. Walls of dressed lava rock holed like cheese supported flat basalt roofs. The windows had been hewn from the same green-black stone as the roofing. Moriana knew why. Wood, sod or thatch, anything combustible, couldn't safely be used as building material here on the northeastern slope of Omizantrim where hot sparks or ash might descend from the Throat at any time. A fresh Justing of gray ash overlay the compound, a remnant of Omizantrim's eruption weeks before.
The princess set her mouth. The Watchers' architecture might be practical but it did nothing to alleviate the grimness of the task they performed throughout long generations.
She saw them going about their everyday tasks. Men and women ground wheat together turning the man high millstone in a granite bowl with the strength of their own backs. Some knelt to whet the edges of spears and shortswords. A sweating, straining, curiously silent crew manhandled casks of fresh water gathered at springs below from the bed of a wagon built to survive the brutal broken terrain of the badlands. Over by the long oblong mouth of one of the underground bunkers in which the Watchers weathered Omizantrim's outbursts, a sturdy woman with sunbleached hair drawn back in a bun slit the throat of a squealing deer and began to give a group of children a lesson in butchering and dressing meat.
'It's like a combination military camp and monastery,' remarked Darl in a low-pitched voice that carried only a few feet. Moriana glanced at him, nodded slowly.
Since their arrival in Thendrun, Darl had emerged from thecocoon of self-doubt and despair that had wrapped him since Chanobit. On their second night in the emerald keep they had once again become lovers. Whether Darl knew or not what had occurred between her and Khirshagk, he said nothing of it. Moriana felt tempted to ask Ziore if he suspected. She didn't. That would be an invasion of Darl's innermost privacy.
Still, there was something about him that disturbed Moriana. Was it fatalism, discouragement or simply feeling the onset of middle years, the slowing that comes inevitably to even those as robust as the legendary Count-Duke of Harmis? He had held up well on the rapid march from the keep of the Fallen Ones, though. When they had to leave their wardogs behind to advance silently through the badlands, he walked with a firmness and sureness of step that put Moriana, a decade and a half his junior, to shame. 'Where's the creature?' he asked.
'It generally stays in the vicinity of the camp. Sometimes it moves in the dead of night. No one ever sees it. In the morning, it's simply gone, only to turn up elsewhere.' 'Foraging?'
'Apparently not. The Ullapag doesn't eat. It seems to derive its sustenance from the mountain itself.'
'The same animal has survived for ten thousand years?' Darl shook his head in wonder. 'We deal with potent magic' Moriana said nothing.
Something scraped behind her. She turned her head slowly to see Khirshagk approaching gingerly over the sharp lava. The height of a tall man, the Zr'gsz leader moved with surprising grace. However, he and all his kin were less skillful at silent movement than the humans in the party.
After a council of war with the followers who had remained faithful into the depths of Thendrun, Moriana had decided to send one knight back across the Marchant into Samazant to muster men for a new attempt on the City. Darl had been afraid they'd used up their stock of sympathy among the men of the City States. But last night Moriana's crying spells had revealed the Sky City occupation of Kara-Est. News of the seaport's fall would have reached the Empire by the time Sir Thursz reached his home country. Those tidings would make men reconsider the princess's pleas for aid.