'All hail Moriana!' she cried. 'Queen of the City in the Sky, Scion of the Skyborn, Mistress of the Clouds!'
Moriana rose. The crowd went to its knees as one. Fost watched, then decided he should kneel, also. Immediately Moriana seized his arm and yanked him to his feet.
'No one need kneel before me,' she proclaimed. 'Rise, my people.'
They did. They swept forward and raised their new queen to their shoulders. Fost laughed at her expression, then cried out as he felt hands raising him, too. Moriana caught his eye. His lips formed the words, 'We won!'
And they had. They'd won not just the Sky City, they'd thwarted the Dark Ones themselves. The Second War of Powers Jennas had direly predicted would never happen. That was their true victory.
The boiling crowd turned Fost around. For a brief instant the Vicar of Istu flashed in his sight. His heart missed a beat. Then the crowd was bearing them toward the Palace of Winds, and its jubilation caught him up like the surge of a sea-wave.
And in the depths of the City, a Demon stirred.
BOOK TWO
In the Shadow of Omizantrim
For Joseph Wm. Reichert
A prince of a fellow.
For mi querida. Hoy, manana, siempre.
CHAPTER ONE
For a woman plummeting a thousand feet to her death, Synalon Etuul was uncommonly relaxed. The rushing air caressed her naked body like a thousand subtle hands. Her black hair, charred and frizzled from her contest of magics with her sister Moriana, fluttered inches above her seared scalp.
Overhead floated the City in the Sky, a vast soundless raft of gray skystone. Around the mandiblelike double docks at the prow of the City swarmed hundreds of rafts of the same substance, from eight-foot flyers to hundred-foot barges, swarming with warriors both human and inhuman. A few of the eagles of the City's war force circled dispiritedly, herded by small two man flyers. For the first time in their long history, the warbirds of the Sky City knew defeat in the element over which they ruled as haughtily as kings: the sky.
The dethroned queen paid attention to neither the birds nor the rounded hills cloaked in green that spun around and around beneath her feet. All her concentration was devoted to a single mental summons. Her eyes closed and the thought formed, surged outward, questing, commanding. In a moment, she heard a distant piercing cry and knew that her call was heard.
Without warning, the arrow shape of a huge war eagle shot by her, wings folded to its glossy black sides, head thrust forward so that its yellow beak sliced the air like the prow of a ship. Synalon smiled and sent the bird encouraging thoughts.
Once beneath her, it unfolded its full thirty-foot wingspan with a thunderous crack. Synalon fell by it again. Still, no concern touched the sorceress's aristocratic features.
The wings furled like sails. The black warbird fell until it flanked Synalon, then spread its wings carefully so that they dropped side by side.
'I'm ready, Nightwind,' she called, no longer requiring the tiring mental communication. The bird let itself drift down until it was directly beneath her. She spread her legs and floated down until she sat astride the bird's back, her legs thrown over its churning shoulders. She let her head slip back and uttered a small cat cry at the pleasure of the bristly feathers brushing between her slender legs. Defeated, exiled, and without so much as a cloak to her name, Synaion still took pleasurable sensation where she found it, and savored it well. The better, perhaps for the novelty of the circumstances.
Slowly, the eagle increased its wingspan and the tempo of its wings' beating, until the full weight of the tall, lean woman was borne upon it. As it pulled into level flight, it curved and began winging along the City's track. Its mistress had prepared well for this eventuality, though her power in the City had been absolute, and her favor in the eyes of the Dark Ones had seemed to render her invulnerable. Its blood had seethed with the need to be out of the confines of the special aerie in the depths of the City, but Nightwind had waited patiently as instructed, for its mistress's mental call. Having rescued her according to plan, it strained powerful muscles to put as much distance as possible between the former queen and her former domain.
A cry of pleasure broke from Synalon's throat and was whipped away by the wind of Nightwind's passage. Stolidly, the bird flew on. Only once did it have to correct its flight as the woman suddenly shifted her weight back and forth. It knew its mistress's foibles well.
Flushed and breathless, Synalon cast a glance upward. The City was several miles distant. Her sister was undoubtedly on her way to having herself crowned Queen of the City in the Sky. Synalon reached forward and stroked the straining bird's neck, feeling the taut muscles beneath her fingers.
'The silly slut,' she said, 'is probably wiping away a tear for her evil twin,' she said to her eagle. Synalon grinned savagely. 'Ah, yes, the evil but great-souled twin who took her own life rather than face the disgrace of being exiled among the groundlings or lifetime captivity.' She laughed, long and loud.
Synalon had feared only one thing as she stepped to the windowsill in her throne room. The heat from the living firestorm of the salamanders summoned by the traitorous Uriath to slay both her and Moriana had abated slightly. But under no circumstance did she fear the fire elementals – or even the Destiny Stone Uriath had stolen and which had destroyed him. The major obstacle to overcome had been Moriana's lover Fost. He might suspect trickery and check to see if she had actually fallen to her death. He may have been a lowborn groundling but he was as cunning as if he had spent his life untangling the threads of intrigue in the Imperial court at High Medurim.
In other circumstances Moriana might have suspected some ploy on her sister's part. But she had been exhausted physically and spiritually by the last duel with Synalon for possession of the Sky City they both coveted. Besides, she had wanted to believe her sister capable of making such a noble choice as suicide over imprisonment or exile.
Wary of pursuit, Nightwind swiveled his head back and forth constantly studying the horizon and the sky to both sides. Looking back the way they'd come, he gave a sudden sharp cry.
Synalon came immediately alert. Her vision wasn't that of an eagle but it was far sharper than an ordinary human's. On a distant knoll almost swallowed by the shadow cast by the City in the noonday sun sat a small figure. Before the figure a great black cruciform object lay on the ground. Synalon's eyebrows arched in surprise. Her thin lips drew back in a smile. With pressure of her knee, she set Nightwind into a long banking curve and headed back.
The procession turned into the alley and stopped. Quiet lay like a blanket on the streets. From the center of the City came wild cries of celebration. Most of the population had massed in the great Circle of the Skywell to acclaim the new queen. Of the rest, some waged a final hopeless fight against the invaders in back streets and warehouses, or huddled behind shuttered windows fearful of the forces that stalked the City in the Sky that day. The backs of deserted buildings looked down blankly upon the knot of the faithful.
It was an unremarkable wall constructed of seamless gray stone shot through with veins of dull green, worn to a glossy smoothness by the passage of wind and countless ages. Like the older structures in the City, like the bulk of the City itself, it was a gigantic crystal grown in the ages before the coming of man to the Southern Continent. Rooms, passageways and doors had been hollowed out of it by the patient labor of clawed hands.
A hand like those of the original builders, dark green, finely scaled, possessed of thumb and three clawed fingers, held aloft a black diamond that smoked as though plucked from a furnace. The huge gem's facets glittered dully, not in the light of a sun masked by a high cloud layer but with an inner luminescence of its own. The worshippers fell silent. The hand pressed the stone against the wall. The jewel smoked furiously and a section of wall vanished soundlessly, leaving no trace.