'If I've told you once, I've told you twelve thousand times,' Erimenes said loftily, 'I despise your barbaric imprecisions. Neither I nor that foolish cow Zir or Zor or Zoot or whatever she's called could possibly have made a spectacle of ourselves, since we're not visible. Why do you insist on changing the subject?'
'Majesty! Your Majesty!' Standing near Fost, Moriana looked up from a consultation with a group of officials who for reasons of conscience had allied with her.
A girl in her teens pushed her way through the throng almost to the queen's side. She wore breeches and a tattered tunic and a shortsword so thoroughly nicked as to appear sawtoothed. Her face was deathly pale beneath a coating of soot and grime, and one cheek was laid open to bleed freely and disregarded. Ribbons in Moriana's colors circled one arm.
'What is it?' asked Moriana, brow creasing in annoyance. She restrained the men who moved forward to disarm the girl, though the functionaries clucked with disapproval at her raggedness and impudence.
The girl took a deep breath. She swayed. Moriana caught her arm and supported her.
'The Hissers, Your Majesty,' she got out, and then her knees buckled with the onslaught of a coughing fit. She finally controlled herself long enough to blurt out, 'The Vridzish're attacking, Your Majesty! All over the whole damn City they're falling on top of us, armed and unarmed alike. It's t-treachery!' She fell forward so abruptly that Moriana scarcely prevented her from smashing face down on the pavement. It was only then that the queen saw the broken shaft of a black Zr'gsz arrow protruding from the girl's shoulder.
At the aft edge of the Circle, screams announced the arrival of the Hissers.
The stink of burning warehouses stung Fost's palate as his mind, fogged by drink and post-battle depression, struggled to come to grips with the girl's jagged-voiced warning. A flickering caught his attention, a quarter turn around the Circle of the Skywell. He looked that way in time to see a black flash and a fountain of scarlet. The Hissers swarmed into the Circle from the broad avenue that ran aft along the City's main axis. They freely wielded obsidian-edged swords.
He turned to Moriana. Her face was the color of a corpse's, and her lips moved without sound.
Then, 'Ziore!' she cried. Without waiting for the genie to answer, Moriana spun away to snap orders at the warriors who stood about staring in horror at this unexpected attack.
Gathering a knot of armed men and women about her, Moriana set off toward where the street mouth disgorged a stream of greenish Zr'gsz into the wide Circle. She and her troops made slow progress, bucking the current of humanity fleeing the wrath of its ancient enemies.
Fost felt a pang of surprise and betrayal that Moriana had called upon her Athalar spirit rather than upon him in her anguish. Then he decided that she was far more used to turning to Ziore in recent months than to him. The leaden lethargy that had gripped his limbs evaporated into a bright humming of adrenaline frenzy. He hitched Erimenes's satchel higher on his shoulder and drew his sword with a jerky motion.
A hand gripped his biceps. He whirled, swordarm preparing for the thrust. At his side a Sky Guardsman who bore Moriana's colors turned ashen but didn't flinch.
'Sir Longstrider,' he said, not quite knowing how to address this obviously important groundling. 'The captive soldiers – what shall we do with them?'
Fost glanced after Moriana, who was fighting her way through the panicking crowd like a fish swimming upstream, shouting for her men to come to her aid. It was hopeless trying to call to her over the wails of the multitude. Off toward the end of the City he saw thin trails of smoke twisting into the air.
He looked at the captive bird riders and Guardsmen, who stood where they had before, still unable to assimilate that they were free.
'Tread warily, my impetuous friend,' advised Erimenes from his jug. 'If you presume to give orders that Moriana finds objectionable, you may regret it later. The lady has shown a marked propensity to place the dictates of statecraft above those of the heart.'
'Shut up, Erimenes,' snapped Fost. Worry and anger grew. He felt the Guardsman's wondering eyes on him.
'The Hissers are unlikely to distinguish between us and them,' he told the waiting soldier. 'Arm them.'
With Erimenes belaboring him as a fool, Fost dashed off in pursuit of his queen and lover.
Faint and distant, the sounds of conflict seeped through rock and penetrated the awareness of the thirteen who wove mighty magics in front of the ancient door. Khirshagk paused, the harsh incantation rattling to a stop in his throat.
'Our people strike prematurely, Instrumentality,' one of his assistants reported.
He nodded. His long, handsome face was composed, serene. Despite the absolute darkness in the long- sealed and forgotten chamber, his twelve followers discerned every detail of his features, of the feathered ceremonial cloak he'd donned over his scratched green cuirass, and of the immense black diamond held smoking in the clawed hand. A black radiance pulsed from the depths of the stone, its tempo increasing second by second, like the beating of a heart touched with growing arousal.
'It matters little,' he murmured. 'The Children have waited many centuries for this moment. After such patience, the Dark Ones will forgive them their impetuosity. It will not alter the outcome.' And so saying, Khirshagk, Instrumentality of the People, raised his black diamond that was the Heart of the People and resumed the chant to weaken the spells laid long ago by Felarod.
'Come, lads, we've got them on the run!' cried a bearded North-lander, brandishing his broadsword so that the rings of his mailshirt tinkled musically. Up the narrow street a clot of low caste Zr'gsz in loincloths broke and fled under a vicious rain of arrows from Nevrym foresters and grounded bird riders. Knowing something of the Nevrymin and their attitudes toward the Hissers, Fost had been concerned over which side they'd take in this tight. However, the Vridzish had made savagely clear their intention of slaying everything human in the City. The foresters allied with the Sky Citizens by default. Their longbows did much to roll back the advantage of surprise gained by the Zr'gsz.
Seeing Moriana's troops strike the attacking Hissers with spear, sword and a singing cloud of arrows, a group of defenders had veered down a sidestreet to meet a probe by the lizard men. Fost had gone along, and already felt useless. By his own estimation the very worst archer in the world, Fost wished to close and use his sword.
He trotted up the street between the clanking mailed City States man and a rangy Nevrym forester with one eye. They passed the bodies of several of the Zr'gsz quilled like porcupines by the human archers. An obsidian- tipped spear lay by one's outflung talon.
'Ha! What fuss to make over these decadent savages,' Erimenes said scornfully. 'If they craft weapons of stone they cannot be too formidable.'
The one-eyed forester glanced at Fost. Having accompanied Moriana and Ziore in the assault on the City he was accustomed to disembodied voices emerging from satchels.
'You'd soon learn better had you a body, old one,' he told the genie. 'The volcano glass of the Zr'gsz holds -'
A small, light-skinned lizard man popped from the doorway of a shop a few steps ahead and brought his arm whipping forward. An obsidian axe whirled to embed itself with a crunch in the mailed chest of the bearded Northlander. The man coughed astonishment and blood. His legs gave way beneath him. The Nevrymin drew and loosed his arrow as the Hisser dodged back into the doorway.
'- holds an edge far sharper than the finest steel,' he finished. He paused, only slowing the fluid rhythm of his run, and confirmed with a quick glance at the City Stater's unnatural posture and unwinking, glazed stare that he was beyond assistance. 'Course, obsidian'!! shatter against steel plate, or even good iron. But it can bust right on through mail.'
Fost gulped. In his imagination, his own mail vest already rent by ill-use took on the consistency of wet paper. His grip tightened on his sword as he loped past the doorway from which the axe-wielding Hisser had emerged. The Nevrymin didn't spare a glance. The Vridzish lay huddled inside the pointed archway with his sharp chin slumped to the shaft of the arrow jutting from his sternum.
Fost's peripheral vision noticed the timeworn frieze graven around the shop's arched door. The architecture and ornamental stonework of the City in the Sky had disturbed him before, though he'd never been able to understand the reason. Now he knew the cause of that uneasiness. The City had originally been constructed by the Zr'gsz. The many additions later wrought by humans had imitated the original style. Whiie these additions lacked the eldritch quality of the older structures, they still jarred the unaccustomed eye. But it was the ornamentation that bothered Fost the most. The figures in the bas relief were wrong in nameless ways, subtly distorted, yet
