Robert Vardeman - Istu awakened

Ludintip-borne observers signalled news of impending disaster. Hausan barked orders and scattered demotions like seedcorn. Reinforcements began to flood in from the hills.

'Cease bombardment,' Rann ordered. Several of his aides remarked among themselves he had not smiled so since he had come up from a diverting evening torturing the virgin daughter of Mayor Irb, late of Bilsinx.

The prince walked to where the apprentice mage Maguerr sat in a bishop's chair peering into a new geode.

'Get me Dess.' The visage of the City's ground commander peered forth one-eyed from the geode communicator. Rann spoke briefly; the other nodded. He had been a colonel of the Guard until an arrow robbed him of one eye and the binocular vision essential to bird-back warfare. Rann trusted Dess to carry out his orders, no matter how distasteful.

Reinforcements joined the Estil battles, roaring lustily with eagerness to be at the foe. No sooner were fresh troops engaged than the black and purple lines began to waver. In a matter of heartbeats, the City forces had turned their dogs' tails toward their enemy in headlong flight.

Back in the Hall of Deputies Hausan crowed with delight at the news and restored the ranks he had been pruning mere moments before.

'But, sir, the ludintip report that many of our reserve forces are marching forth to join the pursuit.'

'Are they now? Spirited lads! I shall see a medal struck to commemorate this day.' He turned to Tonsho and the Marshal with an expansive wave of his hand. 'Did I not tell you the fight would be decided on the ground? Let them fly their pet gerfalcons against us now. The day is won!'

Tonsho and the round-cheeked Suema exchanged thoughtful looks. Without a word, the plump little Sky Marshal left to issue commands of his own. Ludintip rose from the city, titanic animated gasbags, some as large as a hundred feet across. The oblate spheroids of their hydrogen sacs glared orange-red in the sun. Shield-sized nuclei moved freely across the surface of the sacs avoiding only the tightly held sphincters the ludintip used to steer. The vast fernlike feeding fans were folded beneath the creatures. Tentacles as thick as a man's thigh clung to special brackets set in the gondolas; much slimmer tentacles studded with sting cells carrying an agonizing nerve poison waved in agitation. The gondolas swinging below the creatures bristled with spearpoints and engines of war.

Smiling oddly for a man who has just seen his army routed, Rann went to his war bird and accepted the reins from a cadet, who danced back with obvious relief. The eagle scowled at him.

'Easy, Terror,' Rann soothed. The bird spread its wings once with ineffable emotion as the diminutive prince swung into the saddle. Rann gripped the shaft of the implement that rode in the lance stirrup by his left leg. He hoisted it in salute to his queen. Synalon returned his salute with a small, haughty upward motion of her chin. It was all Rann could expect in way of acknowledgement now that the Power was on her. He kicked vigorously and Terror exploded into the air with a boom of wings. Seeing the red-crested war bird soar, the bird riders of the City took flight as one.

A score of gold brassarded riders formed on Terror. Each carried a shield in one hand and a lancelike object similar to Rann's in the other. The implements were wood shafts ten feet long, each tipped with an eighteen-inch cylinder of red fired clay, capped and sealed with a curious glyph. A wire ran back from the cap to a ring set on a lever at the point where each rider's hand gripped. Through vents in the bottom of each cylinder came a dazzle of flame.

Bolts arched gracefully from the cloud of ludintip. Prematurely loosed, they dropped harmlessly into the Hills of Cholon beyond the lordly palaces and great houses. Rann's grin widened, but he did not fail to note that more of the Estil artillerists had prudently held fire than loosed in panic.

A shaft went by to the left, its whine lost in the thunder of Terror's wings. Rann let his 'lance' drop level, pressing the butt to his ribs with his elbow.

From the clay vessel came an agitated chittering. Guiding the eagle with his knees, Rann swerved in full flight until the tip of the cylinder pointed at a gasbag so immense that a full two score men and two catapults rode the gondola beneath. The chittering increased to a frenzy of liquid syllables just the far side of coherent speech. Taking measured breaths, Rann waited until the sound reached a crescendo. His forefinger tugged the ring.

The cap snapped open. A blue nimbus of flame sprouted from the end as the sealing glyph was broken. An instant later the fire cloud became an arrow-straight line of fire between lancetip and ludintip.

The ludintip exploded in a brilliant blue flash as the fire elemental buried itself lustily in the hydrogen inflating the gasbag. Screaming, the Estil aviators began their last journey home.

Lines surged on either side of Rann, one red, one green, to converge on a second ludintip. Terror fought the thunderclap buffeting from the first explosion with powerful wings as another blossomed, and another.

With the wind at his back, Rann distinctly heard the tunk! tunk! tunk! of the City's own artillery, even above the screams and blasts and the tremendous noise of Terror's passage. A black bundle soared by, trailing smoke, to fall among the pitched rooftops at the western fringe of the City.

Rann glanced back. His cheeks grew taut. Only ten bird riders still followed him, spread in a loose echelon. The aerial artillerists of Kara-Est were proving formidable foes indeed.

Explosions splashed all over the sky as bird riders launched fire salamanders against the ludintip. The Palace mages of the Sky City had spent weeks conjuring small fire sprites into specially enchanted containers that would trap the creatures and their killing heat inside until the lids were opened and the magic seals broken. No more efficient weapon for eliminating the animated airships of the Estil existed.

Rann let the staff with its special jar drop in a lazy spiral to the cobbled streets below. Other bird riders would circle back to munitions carriers for more staffs. He had other concerns. With the unconscious skill of great practice, he performed the acrobatic feat of reaching for the recurved Sky City bow slung across his back while taking in the situation around him.

The tight formations of eagles had scattered themselves ail over the sky on their firing pass through the tudintip. Smoke trails grew like vines into the sky on all sides. A score and more of the gasbags had been set aflame by the salamanders. Rann's own forces were too spread out among the remaining enemy forces for him to appraise casualties. In planning, it was assumed they would be high. All he could do was hope they were not too high.

Two hundred feet ahead and to his left a dark brown eagle suddenly flashed into flame. The prince heard the mingled screams of bird and rider as they tumbled toward the earth. They burned like paper in the embrace of the salamander.

Rann cursed. Special vents were tapped in the rear of each fire sprite's jar so that its eager chittering would tell the bird rider when it was fixed on target. The fire elementals sensed the presence of inflammable substances and sped directly for the most volatile when released. Some fool of a eagle rider had pulled the trigger without being certain what his elemental was tracking. It had struck a comrade instead of a foe.

There was nothing Rann could do about that. Nocking an arrow, he put Terror into a circling dive toward a fat orange sphere rising from Kara-Est.

The black iron frame bucked like a wild beast as the bow of the ballista slammed to. Engineer First Class Juun held her breath as she watched the missile's flight with eyes scarcely less keen than a bird rider's. The eight-foot spear reached the top of its arc, tipped down and punched between the ribs of a war eagle as the creature's wings rose to gather wind. The bird convulsed in midair. Cheers rang from the tiles of the roof as the creature plummeted, its rider falling at its side in a helpless flailing of limbs.