Wings Over Talera - Charles Allen Gramlich [45]
The sky overhead was green in the dawn, a delicately jeweled shade of olive. In Nyshphal, this day would be the culmination of the spring festival, the celebration of regrowth and vigor. I knew that Rannon would have many duties at court and among her people. I wondered if her whole heart would lie in those duties, and I was selfish enough to hope that some part of her was troubled.
I had sent Valyan back to Rannon, and he had gone willingly even though he knew he’d be arrested. But Kreeg needed the treatment he could get only in Nyshphal, and, too, on one issue my feelings were still clear. I loved Rannon and would not see her people devastated. Valyan was to tell Rannon that the source of the attacks on her land lay below the stones of the fallen metropolis of Vohan—in Nyshphalian territory—and that the roots of this aggression traced back to the early days of her father’s battle for Nyshphal, when the Cult of Rampuur had first sought to revive the rule of the “goddess” Vohanna. If I knew Hurnan Jystral, he would launch his own attacks soon after hearing that word.
Graye coughed and I turned and strode toward him. From the corner of my eye I glimpsed an earthen mound that marked a freshly dug grave. I’d cut two sticks of wood and bound them to form a cross to mark the head of that grave. Even though Talerans would not understand it as a religious image, the cross had meant a great deal to Eric Ryall.
I did take with me one thing of Eric’s, the ornate-hilted sword that he’d used against me in Vohanna’s temple. My own blade had been lost, broken off in the body of the laith, but this new weapon more than made up for it. It was a rapier, though of a modified style with a heavy, double-edged blade for use in both cutting and thrusting.
The steel was unlike any I’d seen before. It shimmered like water under sunlight, like moiré silk. But it was flexible and strong and incredibly sharp. The hilt fitted my hand perfectly and the guard was an elaborate swirl of linked chains and metal loops intertwined with runic symbols. It rested now in a sheath hooked at my left hip, and I was glad of something to remind me of my cousin as we mounted our sabruns and left that place. I doubted I’d ever see Eric’s grave again.
The sun was upon us all the way to the coast of Nyshphal, with not a single cloud to mar the green. Though we flew high to avoid patrols, it was not cold as one might imagine. While the temperature plummets as you go higher in Earth’s atmosphere, the reverse is true on Talera. The temperature climbs as you climb because, in fact, on this artificial and encapsulated world you are getting measurably closer to the sun.
The sabruns were tiring by the time we crossed the northern straits of the Temeri Sea and landed in the port town of Elul to eat and rest for the night. Elul bustled and moiled with life—farmers, cattlemen from the interior whose herds were mostly of the short horned terval, a few fishermen and traders. All were here for the spring festival, and to purchase or sell seed and supplies for winter’s end.
Elul also marked the northern end of the Road of Wagons, which runs all the way to Timmuzz. Though I was not particularly worried about being recognized, having never been here before, we stayed away from the crowds as much as possible.
Graye had a local healer look at the sword cuts he’d received in the Kellet’s Bay battle. I had cleaned and bound the gashes before we’d left the Rosjavik Peninsula, but the healer cleaned them again and packed them with curing herbs. With his wounds freshly tended, Graye rejoined me at the sabrun stables and we found an inn that still had a few sleeping spaces to rent on the floor of the common room. I scarcely noticed the hardness of the floorboards; exhaustion softened them.
Only one further incident