Screaming people dangled from its gondola as the sausage rose from the streets to be dragged clear of the City by a laboring eagle. Bird riders helped refugees mount eagles. Each could carry only a single passenger, and Fost saw more than one scimitar fall and come up red as hysterical men and women tried to fling themselves onto already overburdened warbirds. Moriana's step faltered. 'My poor people!' she cried. 'Only a handful will escape!'
Fost knew beyond doubt she was about to decide that she had to remain until all the Sky Citizens possible had been saved. He prodded her with his broadsword.
'Go on, damn you! We need your magic if we're to have a prayer of winning this!' Her eyes were green daggers, but she picked up the pace again.
Something whined past Fost's cheek. He slapped at it, thinking it an insect. His palm came away red.
He glanced back. The Vridzish had taken the Circle and were slaughtering refugees intent on fleeing forward to the prow decks. The lizard warriors moved with inhuman swiftness, their weapons all but invisible as they struck yielding flesh. Behind them, Istu stood in the Circle of the Skywell, horned head thrown back, raping the sky with his basso profundo laughter.
A pressure on Fost's arm brought him up short. They were at the waist-high wall ringing the City. 'Now what?' he asked.
Moriana's answer was to sling her bow over her shoulder, jerk out her longsword and parry the blow of a mace with one smooth motion. This snarling lizard man riposted with increasing speed. Moriana scarcely weaved out of the arc of the flanged mace before Fost lopped off the gray-green arm and plunged his blade through the Hisser's chest. Other lizard men ran toward them. 'Can you hold them?' shouted Moriana. 'No!'
Ignoring his response, Moriana turned and leaped as lithely as a cat to the top of the rimwall. She stepped forward into space. Fost cried out in loss. Her despair had driven her to suicide!
'It's you who's about to suicide, dolt! Turn around. Fight!' At Erimenes's urging, Fost moved to slap away a spear jabbing for his midsection. The spear pulled back only to shoot forward again and take him in the belly. He doubled over, gagging. The Hisser's throat swelled in triumph.
Grabbing the haft of the spear, Fost stabbed out with his sword. The Hisser gave a croak of surprise as the blade pierced his throat sac.
Fost rose, ripping his sword free and wrestling the spear from the lizard man's death grip. The Vridzish hadn't struck with enough force to drive the obsidian-pointed spearthrough Fost's mail, though links had parted under the force of the blow. Luck had been with him this time.
A high caste Zr'gsz stood before him, breastplate gleaming green. The finely scaled skin of face and hands were so dark as to be almost black. The Vridzish flicked a two-handed mace at Fost. Instinct made Fost turn and block with the spear, which was almost knocked from his grasp. He cut at the Hisser's head. The mace knocked his sword aside, iashed out again. It struck chips from the wall as Fost dodged to one side.
Recovering his balance, he launched a whining multiple attack, one-two-three cuts in rapid succession. The mace met and countered each. He only saved himself from the crushing head by falling forward. The wooden shaft that had saved his life once now slammed into his left shoulder. He gasped in pain as his clavicle snapped.
He hacked at the Vridzish noble's side. His blade met the metal breastplate and was robbed of its force. He heaved, bringing his sword up along the inhuman's armored side to slice into the unprotected armpit. The Hisser dropped the mace between his body and Fost's and shoved the courier back.
Wary of the head with its five ugly flanges, Fost was caught off-guard when the Vridzish shifted his grip and whipped the butt of the weapon into Fost's face. Fost heard the crunch of his nose breaking. Lightning ricocheted inside his skull and nausea turned his flesh to water. He reeled, blinking to clear his eyes, saw the gleaming metal head rise up, up, up, poising to smash in his brains. ..
Shot from pointblank range, the broadheaded arrow stuck the Hisser in the neck with such force tt nearly severed the neck. Fost saw the lizard man's look of final surprise as the head lolled to one side. Then the Zr'gsz fell flopping and kicking while black blood fountained from its neck to spray the lower caste Hissers behind.
They shrieked mad sibilants and lunged forward with weapons raised.
'Jump, you fool! It's your only chance!' Impossibly, the voice was Moriana's.
His skull pounding, his sight blurred, his left arm swinging at his side like so much dead meat, Fost couldn't hold back the reptilian Hissers for even a heartbeat. Knowing he was going to his death and loath to fall to these villains from a child's fable, he spun and dived over the rimwall into open air.
The ground loomed up at him from a thousand feet below. CHAPTER
FOUR
Fost Longstrider fell only four feet.
He had both arms crossed in front of his face. They took most of the force of his landing on the slate gray stone platform. His broken nose smacked hard against his forearm, sending a white-hot lance of pain into his brain. The wire-wound grip of his broadsword twisted in his hand, giving him a nasty cut on his left forearm. Even worse than the other abuses to his body, the force of his fall caused the stone platform to sink beneath his weight, leaving his stomach inches above his spine.
He felt the platform stir, rise. Fost lay dazed, watching the fireworks in his head and wondered whether or not he was glad he hadn't plunged the other 996 feet to the ground. The stone slab rocked gently like a boat bobbing at a dock. The nausea he felt from his broken nose was made all the worse by the motion. He guessed what had happened and where he was, but he kept his eyes clamped tightly shut. At this stage he didn't want to know.
'Is he all right?' he heard a worried feminine voice ask. Since it wasn't Moriana, it had to be Ziore. Her voice came out sounding elderly but strong and resonant and distinctly different from the screeching sounds she'd made at Erimenes.
A thump and a scrabble of claws came only a foot away from his head. The raft rocked under the impact of the added body. He heard the swish of a weapon cleaving air, the thunk of Moriana's longsword intercepting the axe-cut aimed at the back of his head.
The reek of Zr'gsz stung acridly in his nostrils. Anger filled and drove back nausea and pain. If the reptilian bastards weren't going to let him lie in peace, he'd make them sorry for it.
He seized the lizard man's ankles. The skin rippled smooth and dry, its texture differing only slightly from human skin. Before the reptilian Hisser reacted, Fost yanked hard on the ankles and flipped the creature into space between the blunt nose of the slab and the City wall.
He still wanted little more than to lie down and die, but the berserk fury he'd come to know in moments of battle settled on him like a cloak. He rose up and scythed three Zr'gsz from where they stood poised to leap from the rimwall.
'Bravo!' cried Erimenes, as the three sundered bodies plunged from view to the ground so far below.
Moriana thrust by him with a spear, not at a Vridzish swarming up onto the sky wall to attack but at the gray stone of the Sky City itself, pushing the skyraft clear. With a speed he didn't know himself capable of, Fost parried the stab of an obsidian-headed spear, then severed with a rapid backlash the claw that gripped it. Surprised, the Zr'gsz spearman lost his balance and fell into the rapidly widening gap betwen skyraft and City.
With the raft slowly drifting from the City, Moriana flung the spear at the Hissers, striking one in the shoulder. Panting with the fury of his own bloodlust, freshly roused and scarcely satisfied, Fost chanced a glance at the young queen.
'Faith-breakers!' she screamed. 'I'll pay your folk back as I pay you now!'
Like sheet lightning, a wave of red flame burst from her body. The dozen Zr'gsz crowding onto the rimwall screamed, not screams of agony but the screaming of superheated air blasting from their lungs as the flame consumed them. So frightful was the energy blazing from Moriana that when the fire died it left a huge glowing yellow spot etched on the very stone. The few Zr'gsz left alive in the vicinity of the rimwal! broke and fled toward the Circle of the Well of Winds and the comforting presence of the Demon.
Fost opened his mouth. Before he could speak Moriana's sea green eyes dimmed and closed. She fell heavily. Only reflexes honed to unnatural keenness by the berserker fit enabled him to catch her before she pitched headlong over the nose of the raft.
