beneath budding branches ripe with the promise of spring and renewed life. The contrast tore at Moriana's emotions. If the battle had not been lost, Moriana would now be Queen of the Sky City, instead of her sister.
If only he had listened to me, we might have won. Unbidden, the words rang in her mind. Angry at herself, she tried to soften her thoughts. The lusterless brown eyes turned from hers, and she knew he had heard the reproach as clearly as if she'd shouted it. This knowledge added another fresh cut on her soul.
Shaking herself, Moriana returned to the reality of the moment. The young knight who had led the dazed Darl Rhadaman from the field still looked at her beseechingly. She recalled what he had asked. 'You cannot,' she said without thinking.
He recoiled as if she had slapped him. Once more she reproached herself. He was a child and had just discovered that war was no glorious game. She had to give him something to cling to, or destroy yet another life in her fruitless quest. 'The best way you can serve me now is to live,' she said. He brightened.
'You will permit us to fight for you again some day?' A half-dozen eager young voices echoed the question.
'If you wish, perhaps you shall. Some day.' She held back her tears with effort. 'But that's not what I mean. I want you to survive. Live out this day and many more so that I'll not have your death on my conscience, too.'
Bewildered, the youth blinked. Moriana turned to Darl. He regarded her through strange, old eyes. 'I'm… sorry,' he whispered.
Emotion blocked her throat. She reached to take his hand and pressed it against her cheek. 'You tried.' 'What will you do now?' Darl spoke listlessly.
'I can do two things. I can quit – which I shall never do as long as I draw breath. Or I can go elsewhere for assistance.'
'Where will you go?' he asked distantly. 'I have used up my stock with the folk of the North. Where will you find the men for a second army?' Her lips drew back in grimace. 'I will not use men. Or at least, not humans.'
'I don't understand.'
'The builders of the City – Zr'gsz, as they call themselves. They live at Thendrun in the Mystic Mountains.' A gasp burst from her listeners.
Still possessed by the awful calm of shock, Darl asked, 'What can you offer the Fallen Ones? You can't offer them the City.'
'By the Five Holy Ones, no! It's a matter of personal interest to the rulers of the City in the Sky to know how things go with them. There are artifacts, sacred relics, which the Fallen Ones would be overjoyed to recover. Without human aid, they have no chance of regaining them. And I think those trinkets a small price to pay for my City.'
'But what of your soul?' asked another underaged knight with a bloody-bandaged arm. 'They are evil. They are the soul of evil! How can you bargain with them?'
'The Zr'gsz are not the soul of evil, friend. You know little of the Dark Ones if you think any earthly evil can surpass theirs.' The intensity of the feeling with which Moriana spoke caused her to shudder. 'I hate the Dark Ones and fear them far more than you know. More than you can know. But I would sell myself to them…' Her listeners gasped again and drew back. 'Yes, I would do that if it would free my City from my demented sister Synalon. She seeks to return the City in the Sky to the Dark Ones, then give them the entire world. Do you think my soul too great a price to save your wives and friends and children from that?'
The young knight looked away in confusion and dismay at what he'd just heard. Moriana swayed, suddenly weary to the point of collapse. Almost by instinct, a hand went to clutch the Amulet within her bodice.
She felt a fierce impulse to tear the Amulet off and throw it into the clear, cold waters of the creek. Its mystically changing mixture of dark and light in the central stone had brought nothing but doom and death. Then she recalled the impossibly high price she had paid for the talisman bestowing eternal life. She took her hand away.
'We must go,' she said, casting an uneasy look at the sky. Leaden and sullen in the dusk, the clouds hung close overhead. But not close enough to keep the Sky City bird riders from quartering the countryside around the battlefield looking for survivors.
A knight gave her a spare riding dog he'd caught fleeing across the ridge. He had already fastened in place small bags containing provisions and the earthenware jug which housed the spirit of her long-dead companion Ziore. Moriana mounted the huge animal, hiking up the skirt of her gown. To please Darl, she had worn this finery rather than the tunic and breeches and boots that were her accustomed garb. Now the delicate lacebird silk was ruined, stained with mud and blood and sweat, and she had hacked it off at the knees so that it wouldn't bind her legs. The Northern knights blushed and looked away as she settled unchastely astride the black and white dog.
They didn't understand she was a Princess of the City in the Sky, a warrior of great skill, not like the pampered hothouse flowers that were the Northern ladies. Moriana had no time for their affronted mores. Defeat knew no dignity; nor did death.
The party had just set out following the creek as it curved gently northward toward its eventual rendezvous with the River Marchant when the bird rider squad swept over them like a glowing cloud from the guts of Omizantrim. The boy knight who had guided Darl to safety fell with an arrow in his back. Others cried in surprise and pain as feathered messengers of death winged downward from above. Only Darl and Moriana survived, saved by thickening twilight and the almost naked branches overhead that screened them from the eagle riders.
Moriana looked back. The Sky City troopers hadn't realized any escaped their new slaughters. They passed once more above the bodies of their victims looking for signs of life. One figure stirred, trying to raise himself from the mud of the riverbank. A sheaf of arrows drove him down facefirst. Moriana clenched a fist and ground it against her forehead.
Oh, my daughter, my poor daughter, a voice sobbed in her mind. But the princess took no solace even from the comforting presence that rode in the jug at her hip.
Turning their backs to the slaughter, Moriana and Darl Rhadaman rode north. North to the Mystic Mountains and the last stronghold of the ancient enemies of mankind.
'We're too late.' Fost Longstrider slumped in the high pommelled saddle atop his riding bear. The beast grunted sympathy with his master's despair. 'The battle is already lost.'
His companion made a bitter sound. She was a tall woman, with a brush of cropped red hair, high cheekbones, slightly slanted eyes of brown. Her mail hauberk clanked as she raised one arm.
'No, 'tis won,' she said, pointing. 'For them.' Her outstretched finger indicated carrion crows gathering like mourners around the bodies. Larger birds stalked among them, naked heads bowed and aggressively pecking for a larger share of the fine meal. Fost smiled in grim appreciation of the rolling wheel of death and life. One side, the other side, human, dog, eagle – it was all the same to vultures. Whatever misfortune befell others, they fed. And prospered.
Fost and Jennas rested their tired bears in a copse beyond what had been the right flank of the Sky City army. The field lay deserted now, save for the dead – and the feeding vultures.
It had been a long, desperate journey from the south where his lovely and beloved Moriana had left him dead in a city swallowed by a glacier. It seemed half a hundred years since his sorcerous resurrection by the Amulet of Living Flame, since he and Jennas, hetwoman of the nomadic Ust'alaykits, had arrived in Tolviroth Acerte, the City of Bankers, to find that the Princess Moriana had departed days, hours even, before they appeared. Now they had missed her again.
Fost considered Moriana's possible fate. Fled? Killed? Captured? The thought of the latter possibility turned him cold. Capture meant return to the Sky City to face the vengeance of her sister Synalon – and of her cousin Rann, warrior, genius, sadist. Death would be better by far.
They rode on through the eerie stillness of dusk. Fost couldn't rid himself of the sensation that the limp bodies strewn so recklessly about would rise up at any instant with a friendly greeting or outstretched hand. He was no stranger to death; he'd dealt it himself on occasion. But he had little experience with such wholesale slaughter. And no stomach for it at all.
He had been horrified at the carnage at the battles of the cliffs, when he'd helped the People of Ust defeat the Badger Clan and their foul shaman. That had been the mildest of diversions compared to this awful carnage. Together in a heap to Fost's right lay more men and women than lived in either Bear or Badger tribe. He shuddered. He wanted to throw up.
