The black-haired enchantress stopped laughing and gave him a cool, appraising look.
'Come, Prince. Tell me what you really intend. How shall we face this menace?' He grimaced, as if she had made to strike him.
'I wasn't joking, Your Majesty.' On arriving in Kara-Est after the flight across the Quincunx lands, Synalon had resumed the title of queen, though of what she had failed to specify. From his unique position, Rann generally disdained to give her that title and addressed her as Highness. But now much rode on her good favor. If he could get it by feeding her vanity, he would do so.
'We are prepared for defense,' she said tolerantly. 'We have walls against ground attack, and our eagles fighting beside the Estil gasbags and rooftop engines will make short work of the skyrafts used by the stinking Hissers.' 'Very well. The Vridzish we may defeat. But not Istu.'
'No?' A frown clouded her fine features. 'I have meditated much since we were driven from my City. I have some new tricks, half-man.'
Ignoring the jibe, he shook his head and replied, 'Moriana defeated you, and she couldn't best Istu. Moreover, Istu had just awakened when she faced him. He had yet to come to his full power.' He slapped his gloves across the palm of his left hand. 'No, Your Majesty. If your sister could not defeat Istu, neither can you. We have no chance of defeating the Fallen Ones.' 'But my own powers.. .'
'How much of the powers you've come by of late have been through the dispensation of the Dark Ones? I doubt they will allow you to muster strengths which they have lent you against their sole begotten son.'
She folded her arms. Mad blue sparks danced in her eyes and crackled in the roots of her dark hair.
'Would you have us skulk away in the night then, cousin? Come, I thought you were a man in spirit, if not in flesh.'
The scars at eyes and mouth turned white with strain. 'We would only throw our lives away.'
'What of it?' she demanded, head held high. Blue flames raced along the wings of her hair. 'If it's our lot to go down to defeat before these inhuman scum, then we shall die fighting, as befits the Skyborn! Let the groundlings flee, if they wish.'
'While we live there's always a chance of finding some way to win,' Rann said doggedly. 'Felarod did, after all.'
'Damn Felarod!' she spat. 'That creature!' As a devotee of the Dark, Synalon had always despised the man who had undone the Lords of Infinite Night before.
'His enemies are now our own, cousin,' Rann pointed out. 'But if you hold him in such contempt, why not seek a way to do him one better?'
She smiled and turned away, the gown swirling like mist around her long, sleek legs. Below her spread the glimmers of the seaport city, red torches, yellow lamps, green lanterns bobbing at the corners of ships out in the harbor. Somewhere in the distance a dog barked. The wind had veered to come up from the fens with the thick, moist breath of corruption riding on it. She drew it in like a fine perfume.
'Maybe I will. Moriana was a weakling at heart. She let me live when I lay naked and powerless against her. I am steel at the center, not mush. If Istu would pit his will against my own, it may be the Demon who is surprised.' Her words glowed with hatred. The Demon's progenitors had used her for their devious ends and cast her aside. Her pride still smarted over the injustice. Had a human injured her pride, death would have been painful and long. So fierce was her rage that she would forge from it a weapon fit to wound even the Lords of the Void.
Rann sighed. Like Tonsho, Synalon was a genius in her own way. He had to grant both women that. But he had long ago learned the sad lesson that not all of genius were stable.
'Is that your answer?' he asked, his voice as soft as wind among swamp reeds. 'Yes.' She spoke without turning. 'We fight.'
The corners of his mouth drew up in an expression that wasn't a smile. His left hand dropped to his left boot-top, withdrew the yellow dart which Tonsho thought he'd brought or her. His hand whipped up.
The dart blurred across the room. Wary as a unicorn stag stalking a hunter, Synalon had half spun when the missile thunked home in soft, white flesh between her ribs. Red blossomed like an insane flower against her skin's pallor.
Both Rann and the Thailint poison were quick acting, but neither was fast enough. Rann's face twisted in agony as blue-white lightning lashed from Synalon's fingers and bathed his right side in flame. They fell together.
The doors burst open. Young Cerestan of the Guard stood there, eyes wild and hair awry, curved blade in his hand. He saw the royal cousins sprawled on the floor a few paces apart and gasped. The Guards crowding in at his back stopped and looked in horror.
But both forms refused to remain still. Synalon lay on her back, arms outflung, closed eyes turned to the vaulted ceiling, her entire body spasming. Rann, his jacket and tunic smouldering, painfully hoisted himself from the limestone floor.
'It is done.' The words fell from Rann's lips in jagged fragments. 'Cerestan, see that the evacuation continues. We must be away from here before…' Strength left him. He fell face-down on the cold stone.
CHAPTER TWO
'I know little of practical magic but have read much of the theory in books,' the small, round man said. 'But from what I do know, yes, it could have been an illusion and nothing more.'
Fost Longstrider leaned back in his chair, fingering his chin thoughtfully. The appearance of the goddess Jirre at such an opportune time at the Battle of the Black March troubled him. Moriana Etuul was a great sorceress, yes, but she had been physically and emotionally drained by the Zr'gsz magic and was hardly able to fling a small lightning bolt, much less maintain a greater than life-sized illusion. The battle had been ill-conceived due to the bickering between the various factions comprising the army, and Fost was still more than a little surprised at the victory against the superior army of reptiles. His eyes narrowed. He didn't have to ask Oracle the question. The being – the projected image – read it from his mind.
'It seems to me,' the image of the little man went on, 'that an illusion properly cast, especially by one who'd never performed such a spell – and the Princess Moriana had not – might befuddle the caster as well as its intended objects. So, assuming that the apparition of the goddess Jirre was no more than it seemed, it still might have served to uncover untapped reserves of power within Moriana. Focusing that power might account for the destruction of the Zr'gsz skyrafts when the apparition struck its lyre. The way the Hissers died when she swept through them can be attributed to suggestion. But as you pointed out, it stretches credibility beyond the breaking point to speculate that the rafts themselves possessed some consciousness for the illusion to play upon. I,' said Oracle firmly, 'therefore conjecture Moriana has unsuspected powers that caused the craft to disintegrate.'
Oracle possessed much of the knowledge stored in the great Library of High Medurim and shared it willingly with Fost. The real body of the entity called Oracle lay in the next room. It was nothing more than a gleaming blue-white mound of fungus the size of a peasant's hut. The nutrient vat in which it rested bubbled and reeked like garlic, but this didn't stop the legion of savants whose droning penetrated the wall in a beehive buzz as they read aloud from ancient volumes. The more they read, the more Oracle absorbed into its consciousness, and the more information it could integrate, evaluate and pass along to Fost.
The living, thinking, reasoning fungus was a triumph of genetic magics commissioned by the Emperor Teom.