Robert Vardeman - Istu awakened

Two burly assistant engineers, bare backs gleaming with sweat in the hot sun, spun the double windlass to recock the ballista. Making herself relax, Juun scanned the skies for another target. She had two kills that morning. The bounty would mean luxury for years.

She gestured with a gloved hand. The platform on which the engine was mounted began to revolve, turned by more assistants. As it turned she caught the eye of her friend Falla manning a ballista mounted on a turret at the other end of the building. Two more engines were mounted on the other corners but these lay out of sight behind the pitched roof. Falla grinned and touched the tip of her nose; she had seen Juun's kill. Juun laughed and waved back, then turned to peer through her sights.

She shut her ears to the shrieks as a ludintip fell like a meteor in the next block. The damned Sky Citizens had hellish magic on their side, but even that wouldn't bring them victory over the freedom fighters of Kara-Est. The elite rooftop artillery would exact a far heavier toll of the invaders than their limited population could afford.

She heard a thump, glanced reflexively to her left. A round lump the size of a bushel basket had dropped on the catwalk connecting the two emplacements. Near Falla's end thick greenish black smoke roiled from the ball. Juun turned her attention back to the skies as the rattle of bootheels on stone told her the fire-control crews were rushing to douse the smouldering projectile.

A buff-colored bird entered her field of vision, swooping in on a rising ludintip, its rider launching a stream of arrows at the gasbag's nucleus with breathtaking speed. Shouting broke out to her left, the sounds of struggle. She ignored it, gesturing to her crew to position the weapon. Juun had only a heartbeat before the bird was lost behind its quarry. She drew breath, pulled… the missile arced and fell past the bird's fanned tail. She groaned as the eagle went out of sight, its wings almost brushing the taut bladder of the ludintip.

She didn't hear the creaking of the windlass working against the mighty pull of the bow. 'Snap to it!' she shouted. A gurgling scream answered her.

Juun spun in the saddle, snatching at her dagger. The man on her left was sitting down staring at the shaft of a ballista dart that jutted from his belly. Figures writhed together on the catwalk, some obviously fighting to the death, others naked or partly so, striving belly to belly. In the eyeblink she had to absorb the strange scene, Juun saw others dancing drunkenly around Falla's engine, laughing, singing. A ballista server tottered an instant on the stone railing before plunging to the street eight stories below in a flawless swan dive.

A swirl of smoke curled around her face. It was aromatic; without meaning to, she inhaled deeply.

Her surroundings began glowing with a light of their own. She perceived a world behind the world she had known before, and this was a world she could almost enter. But not quite. Frustration brought hot tears coursing down her cheeks.

When Falla came to her with knife in hand and laughing, she welcomed her friend as she would a lover.

Above the battle for a moment, Rann gulped in great lungfuls of air. Though the sun was well past the zenith, the air up at a thousand feet was stinging cold and cut down his throat like a knife. His whole body tingled with manic energy. His every sense thrummed to the surging strength and pungent smell of the bird beneath him, the stinks and sounds and sights of the battle raging around him and below, the wind in his face. Even the burning line across his back, where an Estil archer had almost punched through his light mail, filled him with fierce exhilaration. Torture and intrigue, battle and flight, these were his loves, his fulfillments, the only ones available to the eunuch prince. He experienced the latter pair to the utmost now.

Pressure from one knee made Terror drop his left wingtip and go into a steep bank. He surveyed the grim situation below. But it differed little from what he had expected.

Things had gone well for the City in the Sky. The staged 'rout' of their ground forces had feinted a good portion of the defenders out of Kara-Est. The burning bundles of Golden Barbarian vision-weed had been shot from the City's walls with commendable accuracy. Hits and near misses had incapacitated a quarter of Kara-Est's rooftop artillery. Rann had learned about the drug when he had been a field marshal of a combined City-Quincunx army that had defeated an incursion of the Golden Barbarians into the Sjedd almost six years before. Whoever breathed its vapors forsook the real world to travel in a realm of visions and delusions – or perhaps in an alternate realm, depending on which school of philosophy one heeded on the subject. What mattered to Rann was that the victims' minds went elsewhere while their bodies provided conveniently helpless targets. High as he was, high enough to drift over the skywall into the City itself, he caught the resinous tang of the vision vapors.

'I hope everyone remembered to take the antidote,' he muttered to himself, the words inaudible even to Terror due to the rush of wind past his lips. The antidote to the drug was more costly by weight than gold. Synalon had grumbled over the expense, but Rann had persevered and knew himself now to be correct.

The assault had gone according to plan. Even so, three quarters of the rooftop engines still spat death. The water battery of warships anchored in the harbor were virtually untouched and the Estil forces, as diminished as they were, still outnumbered his own three to one.

He raised his eyes from the conflict below and peered at his City. A black and silver clad figure stood alone on the prow of the vast stone raft, gesturing with slender arms. Synalon.

He wheeled, keeping her in view. He again wondered if she had as much of the Dark Ones' favor as she believed. He knew his royal cousin, knew that she was the most powerful magician in the Realm and most likely in the entire world, knew also that she was capable of overestimating her power.

He watched the mystic gyration of the sorceress's arms. Briefly he felt the age-old pang, an impotence predating his emasculation. For magical power, like political power, passed along the female line of the Etuul clan. He had no innate magical ability, nor the aptitude to learn spellcraft, though he excelled in every other thing he attempted.

'I should be able to fee! the power flow, to know if Synalon's magic works or not,' Rann mumbled. But that was as inaccessible to him as knowledge of his own destiny. He was utterly at the mercy of his demented cousin, the monarch he loved and hated and, always, served.

He reached for another arrow and set Terror into a long, steep dive. Battle still raged.

Sun-heated stone stung the soles of her feet. Cold wind caressed her bare limbs. Synalon Etuul, Queen of the City in the Sky, shut her eyes against the sun's intrusion and strove to put her soul in touch with darkness. Her guards stood about her fingering their weapons and nervously watching their ruler poise herself on the tip of the skydock with nothing but sky an inch in front of her toes. She ignored them as she ignored the arhythmicthunk of catapults arrayed about the walls, and the tumult of noise that beat like surf against the floating City.

Black hair snapped in the wind like a million tiny whips. Synalon wore a harness of black leather,-a web woven about her otherwise nude body, leaving bare her breasts and the dark, furry tuft of her loins. What seemed to distant Rann some silver garb was only her own skin, as pale as moonbeams.

A black dot appeared in the center of her being. It grew quickly, and with it grew pleasure. Soon it was a sun, a black sun, consuming her in ecstasy and darkness. Her Guards cried out in alarm seeing black flames begin to stream from their mistress's body. She threw back her head and shrieked like a soul in torment. With an oath, a Palace Guard leaped onto the dock and raced to her.