Robert Vardeman - Istu awakened

Naked bones clattered on stone as the black flame scoured flesh from his skeleton.

The queen did not notice. Unholy pleasure possessed her. Yet through the midnight fires of orgasm burned the cold hard light of Will.

Come to me, the Will commanded. You are mine. Take form before me that my enemies shall be destroyed. By my Power, by the City in the Sky, by the Dark Ones who have chosen me (or Their own, I bid thee – come!

Out over the bay a swirling stirred the air.

'Behold,' said Erimenes. 'The City in the Sky, precisely as Jennas predicted. Now do you believe her visions, Fost? I've told you all along to heed them.'

Fost glanced at Erimenes. The genie leaned jauntily on the weatherworn railing of the ship, as though the splintery, faded wood actually propped up his insubstantial form. 'You did no such thing,' growled Fost.

'Don't quibble. I hadn't thought you so small-minded. I've held all along that Jennas truly was receiving inspiration from Ust the Red Bear. If I didn't say so, it was only because I deemed it so painfully apparent to any thinking being as to require no comment.'

Fost paid no attention. The courier stared into the sky and tried not to be sick.

In any kind of sea, the caravel Miscreate rolled like a pig in mud. Fost and Jennas had turned green the minute she warped out of Port Zorn and stayed that way until the walls of the easternmost lock of Dyla Canal shut behind the Miscreate's round stern. On the sheltered waters of Kara-Est harbor even a beast like Ortil Onsulomulo's slatternly ship rode as smooth as a dream. It was the commotion of the sky beyond the pastel buildings on the waterfront that made Fost's gorge yearn once more for wide-open spaces.

The Sky City was exactly where Jennas had predicted. And it floated in the middle of a battle of awesome proportions.

'Now you know why no one else was willing to haul your carcasses down the coast,' came a voice from behind Fost.

Fost turned to the Miscreate's captain. He was something to behold.

The foremost mariners of the day were the black-skinned Joreans of the continent lying northeast of the Sundered Realm. The fact that Ortil Onsulomulo was half Jorean tended in Fost's mind to balance the disreputable appearance of both him and his vessel.

Joreans believed that each sex possessed its own peculiar essence and that these essences were best not intermingled. Thus, except for purposes of procreation, joreans tended to eschew intercourse with members of the opposite sex, taking those of their own gender as lovers instead. However, like most folk, the Joreans were not insensible to the lure of a little perverse fun. Sailors being what they are, the Jorean mariners were inclined to go all-out when indulging their taste for the unconventional.

Thus Jama Onsulomulo, master of the cog Swift, begot a son with a sallow, blonde-moustached Dwarven woman of North Keep.

With a Jorean's strong moral sense, Onsulomulo had taken it upon himself to see to as much of the lad's upbringing and education as he could. As a result, young Ortil spent half his time on the decks of Swift and half sweltering in the warrens and foundries of North Keep. The boy became a mass of unresolved conflicts between the openness and intellectualism of the Jorean and the dour materialism of the Dwarves. Ortil Onsulomulo became a sailor of notable skill while at the same time flaunting the fact that his vessel was a ghastly ramshackle tub that only a landlubber could possibly mistake as seaworthy.

As Fost, Jennas and Erimenes looked on with expressions ranging from bewilderment to glee, winged shapes and bloated balloons battled across a smoky sky. Anchored off the bow of Miscreate, broad-beamed carracks of the Estil navy flung a hail of darts into the air. One bird rider tumbled from his saddle and another pinned a rider to his eagle for a long fall into the greasy water of the harbor. Farther away, a ludintip shot sideways, its tentacles spasming to drop gondola and crew into the central plaza.

'A nucleus hit,' Erimenes said sagely. 'Some bird rider got either lucky or smart.'

In a single prodigious bound, Onsulomulo leaped to the railing of his ship. He swayed this way and that on the precarious perch. The half-Dwarf kept his balance with almost contemptuous ease, as if hoping to be flung overboard to his doom. He waved a stubby arm at the sky.

'Swine! Rogues! Devil worshippers!' he screamed. 'You'll go too far, mark my words. The land has rejected you, the sea won't have you, and soon the sky itself will cast you from its bosom!'

He looked strange and wonderful standing there with his bare feet splayed on the railing. He was the height of a short man, massive of torso and head, childlike of limb. His hair was a curly orange brush, his skin reddish gold, his eyes liquid amber. Finely chiseled Jorean features mingled grotesquely with the Dwarven lumpishness of his body. Watching him, Fost wondered if he was in one of the manic spells that had gripped him periodically during the journey – or if he, like Jennas, were touched by some higher power.

A sharp bronze beak lanced through the water toward them. Fost barely made out the low black hull of a galley, its gunwales almost swamped by its own bow wave as twenty pairs of oars rose and fell with the same easy unison as an eagle's wings.

The courier cried a warning. Onsulomulo capered on the rail and shouted crazy laughter. But the black ship was not trying to ram them. It swept by, as clean and quick as a shark, rocking the much heavier caravel with the power of its passing. Streaming out from the mainmast in the stiff breeze cracked a familiar ensign: a red field emblazoned with a tentacled black triangle, from which glared a single red eye.

'Cowards!' Erimenes shouted at the fleeing ship. 'Go about! How can you flee from a handful of overgrown sparrows?'

Onsulomulo cackled laughter, a surprisingly ancient sound from one who looked to be Fost's age.

'Never in my hearing has anyone ever called the sailors of the Tolviroth Maritime Guaranty cowards, smoke-man,' he said. 'They've completed their commission of guiding some fat merchant fleet to safety. No one's paying them to stick around and fight the flyers.'

A rock cast from the City landed on the waterfront and bounced like a bowling ball along the pier. It struck an anchored merchant ship, scattering spars and sailors like eightpins. Fost gulped, acutely aware that he was heading into a witch's cauldron of battle from which the redoubtable warriors of the TMG were fleeing. He felt Jennas's eyes on him. 'What now, Longstrider?' she asked calmly.

'We get the captain to put us ashore,' he said with no great enthusiasm. 'Then we try to find a way into the City.'

'Then we try to stay alive long enough to find a way into the City,' corrected Erimenes. 'You must beware of imprecision in speech, friend Fost. I've told you before…'

An unearthly moan froze Fost's blood in his veins. It came again and he realized it issued from his war bear Grutz's capacious chest, who sat man-fashion on his rump on the deck not far away. The bear stared into the air beyond the Miscreate's aft rail and hunched his head down between his shoulders. 'Look!' Jennas's brawny arm shot out.

Fost squinted. He made out a disturbance in midair. Ghosts of color danced within as though the sun's light were being broken into component colors. As he watched in uncomprehending fear, the disturbance grew and a tail dipped toward the surface of the bay.

'Ust preserve us,' breathed Jennas. 'A sylph!' The spinning tail of the air elemental touched water and a waterspout loomed above the vessel, a thousand feet tall.

Though he expected it, Rann's lips drew back in a grimace as the waterspout blossomed in Kara-Est's harbor. 'She does have the power!' he exclaimed in wonder.