Wings Over Talera - Charles Allen Gramlich [3]
Blood sprayed. A new scream cut through the old ones. The fellow reeled in his saddle and I got hold of his boot with my hands and hurled him from his seat. The hyr-quall struck at me over its shoulder and I hammered its face with the pommel of my blade to make it behave. Then I mounted. I had ridden a hyr-quall before. Once. I hoped that I remembered what I had learned.
Heril was near me. I saw him axe down a second raider who he had thrown from the saddle. Valyan had taken yet a third hyr-quall for his own and I signaled him to join me. Heril mounted too, and the three of us moved up the street toward the far end of the town where half a dozen of the enemy had begun setting fire to the huts. They seemed more intent on doing damage than on acquiring loot for themselves. This, too, told me that we were dealing with no common marauders.
There were extra lances beneath my right knee and I drew one out and weighed it in my hand. I knew little of mounted spear work—swords were my strength—but I knew enough not to let better lancers close with me. Our foes dropped their torches as we approached and couched their own lances. Our two groups charged at the same time.
The hyr-quall does not run as smoothly as a horse or a tasaber. They are more like drums, and now their feet were pounding and pounding. And the dust was rising around us. I saw the glittering heads of spears, heard the rattle of armor and the creak of leather.
At ten paces from our enemies, I stood in my stirrups and hurled my lance into a dark-clad marauder. The wedge-shaped head of the weapon shattered through the man’s face-plate and exploded into splinters. He went backward, hauling convulsively on the reins, and the lizard that he was riding reared up on its hind legs and fell over into its fellows.
Chaos followed. One hyr-quall snapped its teeth into the neck of another. Heril went past the pile-up on the left, his Koro axe shearing through enemy bone and mail. Valyan’s mount smashed head on into the imbroglio, but the Nakscherii warrior had already loosed his feet from the stirrups and he somersaulted over the heap to safety. He left his lance buried in an enemy throat.
We closed on the survivors, our steel hacking. More of my men joined the slaughter, and in a few red moments the battle was over, though it would be long and long before the village would recover completely from its wounds. I left half my crew behind to start that recovery and flew on toward my meeting with a sphere gate. That could not be delayed if I wanted to reach Earth.
In the end, the battle had not delayed my quest. I’d made it to Earth. Now, tonight, I was going back to Talera. There, I would join the woman I intended to marry, and would begin another quest—to locate my brother Bryce, who had been drawn to Talera with me nearly two years before and who had never been found.
But I did not want to go back remembering blood. I opened my eyes from my thoughts and in that moment I saw Rannon’s sweet face, Rannon Jystral, the dark-haired Taleran princess who had said she loved me. Her visage seemed to float in the clearing before me and I took it as a sign that the gate was near.
I waited, and there was no sound.
Then there was.
One moment there were the stars and the shadowy trees and the quiet. In the next there came a humming, and a gray, whirling vortex opened in the air a few feet from my fire. I stood up, dashed the flames to blackness, and went forward, carrying nothing with me save a present for Rannon.
I stepped into the swirling air and felt something pluck lightly at my body, at my clothes, at my hair. There was an instant of chill and of twisting in my stomach, an instant of pain. And then I stepped out of the same air onto a flat wheel of stone that lay half buried amid drifts of snow. It was morning in this place, the sun rising blue-white, and the breeze that stroked my body was that of Talera.
Of home.
CHAPTER ONE
COMING HOME
Where