It sensed presences. As the words of the Song of Awakening came to it, a pulsation of power ran through the Sleeper's body and mind. The Demon's consciousness began to swim upward through the clouds that had lain so long on it. Many times in eons past it had attempted this crazy hegira. But now it felt the singing certainty that this time would be different.
'Well met, cousin,' Synalon called cheerfully as she circled Nightwind in to a landing on the rounded hilltop. Prince Rann looked up from contemplating his warbird's corpse. The fallen eagle was a twin to Synalon's save that it bore a blazing scarlet crest. It lay spread out on the hillside before him, the butt of a Zr'gsz javelin protruding from beneath one wing.
'Rather absurd of you to say so, isn't it?' he asked, rubbing at the gingery stubble on his chin. He noticed her nakedness then, and looked away, blushing.
She laughed and jumped down from Nightwind's back. The eagle spread its wings above the corpse of its nest brother and uttered a single desolate cry.
'A pity about the bird,' the princess said. 'He was such a noble creature.' Still looking away from her, Rann nodded. 'I suppose it's reassuring,' he finally said. 'How do you mean?' 'To know that I can feel remorse over the death of a friend.'
Laughing easily, Synalon sat beside him. The warmth of her body washed over him. He began to fidget. He was a small, intense man who seemed put together of wire and spring steel. His eyes and swept-back hair were tawny, his face displaying the same haughty, almost ascetically classic sculpting as Synalon's. The perfection of his features was marred by a tiny network of white knife scars stretched over the skin like a mask. The nearness and nudity of his cousin was for him as exquisite a torture as any he might devise for victims of his sadism.
'You're turning soft,' she taunted him. Then, as mercurial as always, she switched from banter to flashing anger. 'Perhaps that's why you lost my City for me. The security of my realm lay in your hands. You let it slip!'
He jumped to his feet, glad of the chance to get away from the smell of her, the feel of her provocatively bare thigh pressing against his purple-clad leg.
'You're a fine one to talk,' he said quietly. He paced away. His scabbard flapped empty at his hip. His scimitar had plummeted to earth sheathed in the body of Darl Rhadaman, Moriana's champion. 'You fought the real battle. What happened in the air was secondary. I grant you, I failed to stop Moriana's entry into the City. But ultimately, cousin dear, it was up to you to prove your superiority in a test of wills and magic, face to face, alone.' He turned back to regard her sardonically. 'And evidently it was a battle you lost. Or else you wouldn't be in such… dishabille.' She leaped to her feet.
'Don't lecture me, half man! How can a eunuch such as you understand what I have lost this day?'
'What you have thrown away this day!' His face was taut and pale under the lattice of scars. 'With the favor of the Dark Ones, you thought, no price lay beyond your grasp. And now look what you've won. Exile to a lonely hilltop without so much as a cloak to cover your nakedness. A prize fit for a queen – or nothing!'
She smiled at him, savage and evil, raised her arms and stretched so that her heavy breasts rode lazily up her ribcage. His tongue flicked lizardlike over his lips. He turned away again.
'What will you do now, cousin?' Synalon asked silkily. 'Will you leave me on this hilltop fate has set me to rule?' His head drew down between his shoulders. 'You know I cannot do that.' For the first time in Synalon's long memory, the prince's voice was hoarse and choked with emotion. She laughed musically in delight.
'No, of course you can't abandon me. Because, while you hate me, you love me far more. And vastly more even than that, you desire me, O cousin Prince!'
Abruptly, Synalon flung forth her arm. Blue lightning coruscated from outstretched fingertips and struck Rann full in the back. He uttered a croaking cry and fell forward onto his knees, arms hugging his chest, bobbing and gasping in a paroxysm of agony.
'And because you fear me, my good and loyal Prince,' said Synalon, sneering. 'Because you fear me well.' Painfully Rann struggled to his feet.
'It would… seem that you're the one – oh! – who grows soft,' he said, enunciating each word as if a dagger twisted in his bowels at every syllable. 'Still you fail… to exact the final price of my failure.'
'I'd prefer having you available to redeem yourself,' she said in a matter-of-fact tone. 'You are adroit, for all that your recent efforts have not exactly been crowned with success. And you're a tough bastard, Rann. A normal man would at this moment be lying before me unconscious or dead from the bolt I gave you.'
Turning, Rann gradually forced himself to uncurl and stand upright before his cousin. He felt like he was stretched on the rack. He forced his lips to smile.
'A normal man, perhaps, but not a half man, eh?' He shook himself as though throwing off the last of the pain the lightning had left. 'What now, cousin?'
Synalon paused, rubbed her palms together, as if rolling a pill between them.
'We travel to Bilsinx, or Kara-Est perhaps, and marshal our resources. The bitch Moriana found some way to increase her powers. So will I. And whose damned lizard allies of hers – their magics seemed all of a defensive sort. They were potent, but even more so is my hatred. I will find the way to defeat them in spite of that damned smoking jewel of theirs, and then pull Moriana down to a lingering death in the sight of all the City she thought to wrest from me!'
Rann might have pointed out that Moriana had indeed wrested the City away from Synalon. He didn't. He was too preoccupied staring past the pale angle of Synalon's shoulder, past the charred fall of her short hair. She frowned at him. The roundness of his eyes, the relevation of his brows and the slight parting of his lips were equivalent to a shout of horror and disbelief from another man. She followed the stare.
Small objects detached themselves from the rim of the floating City and fell. First a few, then hundreds spilled from all sides of the Sky City like beach sand from a child's palm. The objects rotated as they fell. Synalon's wondering eyes made out the flail of limbs desperately seeking purchase on the air. Screams came to her ears like the cries of distant gulls.
CHAPTER TWO
Fost Longstrider sat slumped in the bishop's stool someone had produced for him and wondered whether or not to get drunk.
All around a crowd cheered itself hoarse. Moriana stood proudly beneath the winged crown of the City in the Sky, her arms outflung as if to embrace her new subjects. For having just fought two desperate battles, one of arms and one of sorcery, and then having come close to flaming death from the stolen magics wielded by High Councillor Uriath, she looked remarkably fresh and radiantly beautiful.
Fost, on the other hand, was slipping from the frenzy of battle into the fog of after-action depression. He was charred all over from his own near incineration by one of Uriath's fire elementals, and was uncomfortably aware that the stench of burned flesh clinging to his sweat-lank black hair had come from Luranni. She had bought his life with hers. Where he wasn't black, he was bloody; where he wasn't scorched, he was scored by swordcuts. His helmet and shield were gone, his breeches blackened and torn beyond recognition and his hauberk reduced to a few rings of steel mail hung around his powerful torso. He still had his broadsword hanging at his hip in a well-smoked hornbull leather scabbard. He looked more like the vanquished than a conquering hero.
In battle he'd always felt a vivid, singing awareness, had felt alive in a way he didn't at other times. Lately he had started to go into a berserker's fury that grew madder as the battle grew more intense. Afterward, however, he felt depleted, soiled, and not at all proud of his prowess at wreaking destruction on his fellow man.
His only consolation was that the venerable ghost of Erimenes the Ethical wasn't crowing in his usual fashion over the glorious bloodletting he had witnessed that day.
Still, Fost thought, his lot wasn't so bad. The woman he loved stood by his side and received the adoration of her City. She had succeeded, as had he. Moriana had regained her precious Sky City; he had been reunited with his lover. An added bonus was that Synalon's madness would never unleash a second War of Powers on the world.
A fatuous smirk crossed his face when he realized he was a hero. Like in all the fairy tales of his youth, he was a hero and had won the privilege of living happily ever after.
He drained his goblet of wine and eyed the swell of Moriana's rump inside her tight breeches. Living happily
