Maggie Furey - Harp of Winds

“But you could come with me!” Anvar interrupted. “The Gods only know, we could use you.”

Elster’s feathers hackled. “What—and abandon our rightful Queen? Without the skills of Cygnus and myself, Raven will die, for certain.” Seeing the flash of anger in Anvar’s eyes, she rose to her feet. “You may not care whether or not the Queen survives, Anvar—but I do. I must.” Seeing him about to protest, she took her leave hastily. “I will return when I can,” she promised, and launched herself, with unseemly haste for a Master and a physician, out of the mouth of the cave.

It was still dark, though a faint glimmer of dawn was beginning to brighten the bleak sky beyond the mountains. Elster beat upward, feeling the icy wind go whistling through her feathers, banking in a wide looping turn that took her well away from the mountain’s wall. To the physician’s relief, a few scattered lights could still be seen among the towers of the city, allowing her to get her bearings and head for home. She hated flying by night—the dangers could not be underestimated—but if she wanted to visit Anvar undetected, it was the only time to do it, while the other Winged Folk were safely at rest.

Elster’s home was located in a crumbling turret that clung to the side of an ancient building in the lower part of Aerillia. In Flame wing’s day, the physician’s quarters had been grander and close to the palace itself, but now she felt safer dwelling in obscurity and anonymity. A few leaks and drafts were well worth suffering if it kept her out of the High Priest’s way!

Landing with care on her snowy porch, Elster pushed open the door to her rooms—and hesitated, one hand on the latch, peering into the gloom within. Surely I left a lamp alight? she thought with a frown, and then shrugged. Perhaps it had gone out in her long absence, or been blown out by one of the whistling drafts. The physician had not gone three paces inside the room when she was seized.

“Why have I been arrested?” Bruised, bound, and guarded as she was, and facing Blacktalon’s hard, expressionless eyes, Elster had to fight to keep her voice steady. He knows, she thought despairingly. Oh Yinze—he must know! The physician had never been inside the priest’s high tower in the Temple of Incondor, and was unnerved by the tomblike blackness of the polished obsidian walls. Outside, the screeching plaint of Incondor’s Lament swirled round the tower, sending shivers through the physician’s body, and preventing her from concentrating her thoughts to form some kind of defense.

Blacktalon lifted a sardonic eyebrow. “Did you really believe you were the only one prepared to fly in darkness?”

Elster stifled a gasp, and fought to keep her face expressionless. “What do you mean, High Priest? A physician must often fly in darkness, if there is an emergency—”

Blacktalon burst into peals of mirthless laughter—the most chilling sound that Elster had ever heard. “Elster, my spy was hiding just beyond the mouth of the cavern. He heard everything! Next time, if you insist on playing the innocent, I would suggest that you occasionally look outside whilst you are plotting with a prisoner.” His eyes glinted. “Not, of course, that there will be a next time for you, I have Cygnus to keep Raven alive, though your unguarded words condemned him also.” He shrugged. “For now, however, I will permit him to keep his life-—for as long as he is needed.” Again, that mirthless smile.

The flash of rage as she realized that Blacktalon was savoring her fear was the only thing that kept Elster from collapse—until the High Priest’s next words; “It has come to my attention, Elster, that you are lax in your religious observances. I have never yet seen you attend a sacrifice within the temple.” His voice grew hard. “Tonight, at sundown, we will rectify that omission. You shall experience the next ceremony—as the victim?”

Even by the standards of an Immortal, it had been a long time. Aeons had passed since the Moldan of Aerillia Peak had last been wakeful. She gauged the intervening centuries by the subtle differences in the society of the Winged Folk, who dwelt upon and within her body: the alterations in culture, clothing—and above all, the changes in the language. The Moldan was accustomed to such shifts. For her, the passing centuries were an eye’s blink apart. Nowadays, only events of great significance awakened her—momentous times, times of struggle and change. What had wakened her this time? The Moldan cast her senses forth, surveying the domain that was her body, roaming the flanks of the mountain that was her flesh and bone, and outer skin.

Ah—significant. On the upper reaches of her pinnacle, the temple whose foundations were being laid when she had last lost herself in the mists of sleep, had grown into a massive structure. The tortured rock, in the shape of a clawed and grasping hand, looked like melted, twisted bone, and the Moldan shuddered, reminded of the riven corpse of her brother, far to the east. What warped brain had designed such a hideous edifice?

Below the temple the city had prospered and grown. Here, the delicate beauty that she remembered as typical of Skyfolk architecture had blossomed into many new and incredible forms. In the past, the Moldan had been indifferent to the flitting Skyfolk who had colonized her after the departure of her own Dwelven population, looking upon them as trivial, ephemeral beings. Now, for the first time, she felt a smug sense of pride in their achievements. Apart from that hideous temple on her peak, their works had done much to adorn and accentuate her natural beauty.

With regret, the Moldan wrenched her attention away from her contemplation of the city of Aerillia. It was then that she felt it—the slow, erratic approach of a source of incredible power.

Dishes rattled in the upper city and possessions fell from shelves as a thrill of mingled terror and delight ran through the Moldan’s massive form. In her lonely tower, the captive Queen Raven twisted in her sleep, and cried out in pain. In the Temple of Incondor, Blacktalon looked up frowning from the sacrifice he was about to dispatch, as the menacing black edifice shuddered on its massive foundations. In the older quarter of the city, a crumbling parapet toppled, and went crashing down the mountain’s face in a cloud of snow.

The Moldan paid no heed to the puny beings that infested her slopes. Her entire attention was fixed on the approaching Staff of Earth.

“Anvar? Anvar, can you hear me? For the last time, will you not answer?” Shia waited, her head cocked expectantly, for the space of many breaths, but no reply was forthcoming. Despondently, the cat turned back to her companions.

“The human must be asleep,” she sighed. “I cannot wake him.”

Khanu shook his mane. “So what do we do now?” he demanded. Hreeza lifted a heavy paw and cuffed him into silence. He whirled on her, eyes flashing balefully, but Shia stopped his retaliation with a sharp command. She knew that although the old cat was making a valiant effort to hold fast to her courage, Hreeza was dismayed, as were they all, by what they had found at the end of their journey.

Had Shia been human, she might have railed against the gods at the unfairness of it. The long struggle up the stony knees and snowy breast of Aerillia Peak had been difficult and toilsome, taking them several hard and hungry days of traveling under the cover of darkness to foil the farseeing vigilance of their skyborne foes. As the cats made their slow ascent, the cultivated terraces of the Winged Folk had given way to steep, sloping valleys clad in spruce and hemlock, which thinned at last to reveal a stark and lonely land of soaring crags and snow-scoured rock.

Shia and her companions had forced their way ever higher, going ever more slowly as the snow grew deeper, and the whistling winds grew ever more chill. Despite their thick coats, the cats were pierced through and through by cold and hunger, for all animal life had long since fled from the inhospitable upper slopes of the peak. Grimly they had struggled on, Khanu and Hreeza driven forward by Shia’s threat to leave them where they lay, should they founder. This dawn had found the cats scrambling in single file, up between the jaws of a narrow, snow-choked gorge. As they reached the top, the fanged crags dropped away to their right, to reveal the lower mountains of the northern range spread out beneath them, their jagged, snow-capped peaks seeming to float like islands on a sea of blood red cloud. The smoldering ball of the newly risen sun lurked beyond the hunched shoulders of the mountains, glowering beneath low brows of heavy cloud that capped the sky above.