Maggie Furey - Harp of Winds

His blow sent the winged girl spinning across the room. “Foolish, deluded child.” Blacktalon stood over her, shaking his head reprovingly. “Did you think I would give you the chance to escape again, and lead an insurrection?” His eyes were pitiless and hard. Raven shrank away from him, and a shudder of dread went through her. The High Priest pressed her mercilessly, playing with his victim to prolong her torment. “There are certain laws of the Winged Folk, my Princess, that not even you can circumvent. Who, among your people, would follow a crippled Queen?”

He beckoned to his warriors, and for the first time, Raven saw that they were armed with heavy maces. Her heart turned to ice within her. “No! she whispered, as they advanced. “No ...”

Blacktalon stood watching, calmly sipping his wine and savoring the sound of her screams. The Heavy iron maces lifted, over and over again, and came smashing down with all their weight upon the fragile bones of Raven’s wings.

Afterward, Anvar could remember little of his airborne journey to the citadel of the Winged Folk All that remained in his, mind were vague impressions: half glimpsed shapes of four winged figures clasping the net above him, darker silhouettes against the dark night sky, and the ceaseless rhythmic drumming of their tireless wings; the discomfort of dizziness and nausea from the swinging net; the piercing cold searing into his face as Miathan’s knife had done; the latticed pattern of the net’s coarse rope digging into his skin; fierce pain from the burn on his cheek and the dull throb of bruises where he had been struck and manhandled by his captors. But though the Mage was still half stunned, fear and anger and desperation all combined to keep his consciousness struggling back to the surface, again and again. Anvar’s first clear memory was coming back to awareness as though waking from, the clinging clutch of some dread nightmare, and seeing Aerillia in the dawn. For a little while, all thoughts of his plight vanished from his mind, for that first sight of the city was utterly breathtaking. Most of the sky was covered by a thick layer of ominous cloud, the purple-gray of slate, but the rising sun slipped through a narrow gap between the white-fanged backdrop of the mountain range and the darkly shrouded sky above. The delicate architecture of Aerillia threw back the level rays of sunrise into the Mage’s eyes, gleaming like a filigreed coronet of pearls across the craggy brow of the mountain peak. Closer, and the towers and spires of the city took shape under Anvar’s marveling gaze—unbelievably delicate structures wrought in the palest of stone that looked, from this distance, as fragile as spun webs of milky glass. Now Anvar knew from whence had come the shimmering stone with which the ancient buildings of the Academy had been wrought. But the structure of Aerillia was so alien, yet so perfectly beautiful , . . Notwithstanding his own pain and peril, and his desperate fear for Aurian, the Mage was lost in wonder.

Carved from the living mountain, the pinnacle towers formed fantastic shapes and structures that no earth-bound builder would ever have attempted. Clusters of dwellings seemed to grow out of the sheer rock like the delicate corals that Anvar had seen underwater in the warm southern bay where Aurian had taught him to swim, Others, of varying shapes, had been suspended like bubbles or drops of water or icicles, hanging from outthrust ledges over a terrifying drop. Yet others grew upward in spirals or helices or fluted, tapering spires, their slender tips so high that they were veiled in tattered banners of low-hanging cloud. The stone of their construction glowed rose and cream and gold in the delicate light of dawn, against the grim and threatening background of the slate-gray sky—then the lowering cloud closed in like a lid, shutting off the sun, and the city became a wraith of its former self, sketched in brittle penstrokes of silver and grisaille.

The wind was blowing harder now. As the Mage, hanging in the net between his captors, neared the city, he became aware of a desolate, dissonant keening that ached in his teeth and ears, vibrating within the bone of his skull and chilling his soul with an overwhelming sense of oppression and terror. The sound grew louder and more shrill as they approached the city, until the clouds that veiled the top of Aerillia peak were swept away like a curtain drawn aside. Anvar looked up—and was transfixed in horrified disbelief.

There, on the utter pinnacle of the mountain, loomed a huge and ghastly structure of night-black stone. Every inch of the asymmetrical, buttressed monstrosity was carved with leering gargoyle images of demons, horned and beaked and breathing fire, and winged, like great carrion birds with decaying corpses clutched between their claws. Anvar, fighting a desperate urge to vomit, found it impossible to look away. The hunched and twisted edifice was topped with five inward-curving spires that raked the sky like ebon claws—the source of the gut-wrenching pain that throbbed with exquisite agony between Anvar’s ears. Each of the spires was pierced with a multitude of holes, dark and round as the eye sockets in a skull, and through these the freely moving winds had been trapped and strained and twisted, then spewed forth in this distorted, tortured form to howl their agony at the unfeeling peaks.

The trembling Mage was relieved when his Skyfolk escort bore him lower, and the grotesque structure was lost to sight behind the towering walls of a precipice. The sound, unfortunately, still followed to torment him. Below the level of the city, the mountainside plummeted in a sheer, featureless cliff, curving round to the western face of the mountain, and after a time, Anvar saw an opening in the rock ahead, a gaping black maw with bristling stalactite fangs. The meshes bit into his skin as his winged captors gathered up the net and flew directly at the aperture, moving at tremendous speed, and Anvar cringed, biting down on a scream as the jagged rocks around the mouth of the opening came hurtling toward him. Too small! It’s too bloody small! We’re going to—

The air was knocked from Anvar’s lungs as his net brushed the lintel of the cave. As the Skyfolk let go, he went rolling over and over, carried forward by his own momentum, entwined in the meshes so tightly that he could hardly breathe. For an instant, the world turned dazzling black as he crashed into the wall at the rear of the cave. The winded Mage heard a rustle of feathers as the Winged Folk stood over him, their half-spread pinions filling the space of the cavern and blocking the light from the entrance. “Is he conscious?” one of them asked.

Wings folded—Anvar blinked in the light, and saw a sharp-boned face above him, upside down. It nodded once with a jerky motion. “He wakes.”

“Then let us make haste.”

Anvar felt steel snick against his skin as they reached through the meshes of the net to cut the ropes that bound him. Then one by one they launched themselves quickly from the mouth of the cave—had the notion not been ridiculous, Anvar would have said they were afraid of him—leaving the Mage to free himself from the net as best he could as the hissing thunder of their wings faded into the distance.

Stiff and numb as Anvar was with cold and fatigue and all his hurts, it took him a long, frantic age to free himself from the tightly wrapped meshes of the net. So firmly was he entangled that more than once, the Mage came close to throttling himself as he writhed and rolled on the cavern’s uneven floor. Again and again, he had to force himself, with a desperate effort of will, to cease the panic-stricken struggling that was only binding him tighter, to relax, and think it through, and try to twist himself another way until the ropes that cut into his body were slackened once more. Though the open cave was cold indeed, sweat was soon drenching his body and running down his face in rivulets, stinging the blistered skin of his burned cheek. And all the time, as he tired, his chances of freeing himself grew less and less. When the Mage finally thought of the obvious solution, he was ashamed that it had not occurred to him sooner. What was he doing, struggling like a mindless rabbit in a snare, or some common, helpless Mortal without magic! What would Aurian have said, if she could see him? Oh Gods, the thought of her in Miathan’s power was an agony to him! Anvar swallowed hard. Not now, he told himself. You need all your concentration to get out of this accursed net! But first, he had to rest a little, to gather his strength. It was only then that Anvar became truly aware of the piercing cold within the cavern. He did his best to ignore it, and occupied his mind instead with how best to use his powers to achieve his escape. Reluctantly, he decided it would have to be Fire—not his preferred element, and decidedly risky, so close to his skin. After Miathan’s torture, the thought of being burned again made his skin crawl and cringe with terror.