A Forest of Stars - Kevin J. Anderson [252]
In meadows and thickets, condorflies flew about, sensing impending doom but unable to escape it. Overhead in the sky, wild wyverns swept about in a frenzy; some of the monstrous dragonfly creatures even attacked the warglobes, then died immediately.
Young men who had assembled exotic gliderbikes from scrap components zoomed about, trying to stay ahead of the blaze. Their gliderbikes were mere amusement vehicles, but now the young riders grabbed refugees, playing a desperate game of leapfrog to keep the survivors ahead of the flame front.
As fire spread around the main fungus-reef village, Reynald’s youngest sister, Celli, climbed out of a balcony and crawled onto a branch. She held her balance, as she’d learned in her treedancing classes, and felt the rising ripples of heat and smoke as the fire intensified. To her dismay, she saw she could not reach the ground: Flames were working their way up the scaled bark. Celli felt frustration more than fear for letting herself get trapped in the situation.
At the end of the branch, she bent over, coiled her muscles, and sprang to another branch, bouncing to a second thick frond, but she could not escape from the spreading blaze. All of her treedancer moves had been staged and planned. Now she had to rely on her wits, especially since the trees were already brittle and weakened.
Coughing from the rising smoke, she missed her grip on the third leap, but caught a straggler branch and pulled herself up. Below, the hungry fire rushed and sizzled as it devoured the underbrush. Trapped now, with no place else to go, Celli called for help. Her voice was drowned out in the rising turmoil.
A young green priest riding a gliderbike swooped by. He grabbed Celli deftly by her narrow waist, and she swung onto his vehicle, grasping the airframe as the colorful condorfly wings vibrated and lifted them up, skipping away from the flames. Shouting into the young man’s ear, she tried to thank him.
The flier swayed drunkenly in the air, but the priest flew onward, searching for a place to land while Celli clung to him for balance. There were fewer and fewer safe spots where they could go…
Standing in a clearing, her parents, Idriss and Alexa, watched the ravenous flames lick from branch to branch, passed along like some incandescent virus. They stared up at the creamy, overlapping folds of their fungus-reef city as the hungry fire blackened the hardened outer tissue. Hearing shouts and cries from inside, they knew that not everyone had escaped…
The hydrogues were coming again, and the faeros’ fireballs continued to harry them. As an ominous warglobe came closer, Reynald tilted his head and stared up at it, clenching his fists at his sides as if his own righteous anger could drive it back.
Before the warglobe could unleash another blast of crippling energy, though, a single faero came down like a cannonball. The hydrogue responded with a flurry of frigid steam that slammed into the blinding heat, stopping the ovoid fireball in its tracks. The fantastic enemies rose up, locked in battle as they spun around, globes of fire and ice whirling closer and closer to oblivion.
Reynald could feel the backwash from their mortal duel directly overhead. The enemies drew together, inextricably bound in a death embrace.
Then, overwhelmed, the grappling faero and hydrogue plummeted toward the treetops where Reynald and the green priests stood directly in the path.
Shouting, Reynald tried to dive out of the way, but the warglobe and fireball slammed into the canopy, skipping across the interlocked foliage and ripping apart the topmost layer of the forest.
Reynald barely had time to reach up and cover his eyes before roaring flames and shimmering icewaves obliterated him and all the trees around him, leaving absolute devastation in their wake.
After more than an hour of incredible destruction, the faeros succeeded in driving back the diamond-hulled warglobes. Those crystal ships that had not crashed into the forest