the City's walls with commendable accuracy. Hits and near misses had incapacitated a quarter of Kara-Est's rooftop artillery. Rann had learned about the drug when he had been a field marshal of a combined City-Quincunx army that had defeated an incursion of the Golden Barbarians into the Sjedd almost six years before. Whoever breathed its vapors forsook the real world to travel in a realm of visions and delusions – or perhaps in an alternate realm, depending on which school of philosophy one heeded on the subject. What mattered to Rann was that the victims' minds went elsewhere while their bodies provided conveniently helpless targets. High as he was, high enough to drift over the skywall into the City itself, he caught the resinous tang of the vision vapors.
'I hope everyone remembered to take the antidote,' he muttered to himself, the words inaudible even to Terror due to the rush of wind past his lips. The antidote to the drug was more costly by weight than gold. Synalon had grumbled over the expense, but Rann had persevered and knew himself now to be correct.
The assault had gone according to plan. Even so, three quarters of the rooftop engines still spat death. The water battery of warships anchored in the harbor were virtually untouched and the Estil forces, as diminished as they were, still outnumbered his own three to one.
He raised his eyes from the conflict below and peered at his City. A black and silver clad figure stood alone on the prow of the vast stone raft, gesturing with slender arms. Synalon.
He wheeled, keeping her in view. He again wondered if she had as much of the Dark Ones' favor as she believed. He knew his royal cousin, knew that she was the most powerful magician in the Realm and most likely in the entire world, knew also that she was capable of overestimating her power.
He watched the mystic gyration of the sorceress's arms. Briefly he felt the age-old pang, an impotence predating his emasculation. For magical power, like political power, passed along the female line of the Etuul clan. He had no innate magical ability, nor the aptitude to learn spellcraft, though he excelled in every other thing he attempted.
'I should be able to fee! the power flow, to know if Synalon's magic works or not,' Rann mumbled. But that was as inaccessible to him as knowledge of his own destiny. He was utterly at the mercy of his demented cousin, the monarch he loved and hated and, always, served.
He reached for another arrow and set Terror into a long, steep dive. Battle still raged.
Sun-heated stone stung the soles of her feet. Cold wind caressed her bare limbs. Synalon Etuul, Queen of the City in the Sky, shut her eyes against the sun's intrusion and strove to put her soul in touch with darkness. Her guards stood about her fingering their weapons and nervously watching their ruler poise herself on the tip of the skydock with nothing but sky an inch in front of her toes. She ignored them as she ignored the arhythmicthunk of catapults arrayed about the walls, and the tumult of noise that beat like surf against the floating City.
Black hair snapped in the wind like a million tiny whips. Synalon wore a harness of black leather,-a web woven about her otherwise nude body, leaving bare her breasts and the dark, furry tuft of her loins. What seemed to distant Rann some silver garb was only her own skin, as pale as moonbeams.
A black dot appeared in the center of her being. It grew quickly, and with it grew pleasure. Soon it was a sun, a black sun, consuming her in ecstasy and darkness. Her Guards cried out in alarm seeing black flames begin to stream from their mistress's body. She threw back her head and shrieked like a soul in torment. With an oath, a Palace Guard leaped onto the dock and raced to her.
Naked bones clattered on stone as the black flame scoured flesh from his skeleton.
The queen did not notice. Unholy pleasure possessed her. Yet through the midnight fires of orgasm burned the cold hard light of Will.
Come to me, the Will commanded. You are mine. Take form before me that my enemies shall be destroyed. By my Power, by the City in the Sky, by the Dark Ones who have chosen me (or Their own, I bid thee – come!
Out over the bay a swirling stirred the air.
CHAPTER EIGHT
'Behold,' said Erimenes. 'The City in the Sky, precisely as Jennas predicted. Now do you believe her visions, Fost? I've told you all along to heed them.'
Fost glanced at Erimenes. The genie leaned jauntily on the weatherworn railing of the ship, as though the splintery, faded wood actually propped up his insubstantial form. 'You did no such thing,' growled Fost.
'Don't quibble. I hadn't thought you so small-minded. I've held all along that Jennas truly was receiving inspiration from Ust the Red Bear. If I didn't say so, it was only because I deemed it so painfully apparent to any thinking being as to require no comment.'
Fost paid no attention. The courier stared into the sky and tried not to be sick.
In any kind of sea, the caravel Miscreate rolled like a pig in mud. Fost and Jennas had turned green the minute she warped out of Port Zorn and stayed that way until the walls of the easternmost lock of Dyla Canal shut behind the Miscreate's round stern. On the sheltered waters of Kara-Est harbor even a beast like Ortil Onsulomulo's slatternly ship rode as smooth as a dream. It was the commotion of the sky beyond the pastel buildings on the waterfront that made Fost's gorge yearn once more for wide-open spaces.
The Sky City was exactly where Jennas had predicted. And it floated in the middle of a battle of awesome proportions.
'Now you know why no one else was willing to haul your carcasses down the coast,' came a voice from behind Fost.
Fost turned to the Miscreate's captain. He was something to behold.
The foremost mariners of the day were the black-skinned Joreans of the continent lying northeast of the Sundered Realm. The fact that Ortil Onsulomulo was half Jorean tended in Fost's mind to balance the disreputable appearance of both him and his vessel.
Joreans believed that each sex possessed its own peculiar essence and that these essences were best not intermingled. Thus, except for purposes of procreation, joreans tended to eschew intercourse with members of the opposite sex, taking those of their own gender as lovers instead. However, like most folk, the Joreans were not insensible to the lure of a little perverse fun. Sailors being what they are, the Jorean mariners were inclined to go all-out when indulging their taste for the unconventional.
Thus Jama Onsulomulo, master of the cog Swift, begot a son with a sallow, blonde-moustached Dwarven woman of North Keep.
With a Jorean's strong moral sense, Onsulomulo had taken it upon himself to see to as much of the lad's upbringing and education as he could. As a result, young Ortil spent half his time on the decks of Swift and half sweltering in the warrens and foundries of North Keep. The boy became a mass of unresolved conflicts between the openness and intellectualism of the Jorean and the dour materialism of the Dwarves. Ortil Onsulomulo became a sailor of notable skill while at the same time flaunting the fact that his vessel was a ghastly ramshackle tub that only a landlubber could possibly mistake as seaworthy.
As Fost, Jennas and Erimenes looked on with expressions ranging from bewilderment to glee, winged shapes and bloated balloons battled across a smoky sky. Anchored off the bow of Miscreate, broad-beamed carracks of the Estil navy flung a hail of darts into the air. One bird rider tumbled from his saddle and another pinned a rider to his eagle for a long fall into the greasy water of the harbor. Farther away, a ludintip shot sideways, its tentacles spasming to drop gondola and crew into the central plaza.
'A nucleus hit,' Erimenes said sagely. 'Some bird rider got either lucky or smart.'
In a single prodigious bound, Onsulomulo leaped to the railing of his ship. He swayed this way and that on the precarious perch. The half-Dwarf kept his balance with almost contemptuous ease, as if hoping to be flung overboard to his doom. He waved a stubby arm at the sky.
'Swine! Rogues! Devil worshippers!' he screamed. 'You'll go too far, mark my words. The land has rejected you, the sea won't have you, and soon the sky itself will cast you from its bosom!'
He looked strange and wonderful standing there with his bare feet splayed on the railing. He was the height of a short man, massive of torso and head, childlike of limb. His hair was a curly orange brush, his skin reddish gold, his eyes liquid amber. Finely chiseled Jorean features mingled grotesquely with the Dwarven lumpishness of his body. Watching him, Fost wondered if he was in one of the manic spells that had gripped him periodically during the journey – or if he, like Jennas, were touched by some higher power.
