Wings Over Talera - Charles Allen Gramlich [56]
As I glanced from the rope bridges to Ahrethane, I had the sudden impression that the walkways behind me had filled with slender men and women, strolling, chatting, smiling, stopping here and there to hug—or to kiss. And for that instant I swore that I heard the sweetly languid sounds of the kalina, the seven-stringed Taleran guitar, drifting over the clearing. Then the feeling was gone and I understood finally what had been lost here in this place.
I looked away from the woman who stood beside me. I looked up into the brilliant green sky and the last of my pride went down my throat in a lump. I wanted to tell her I was sorry for my anger. She gave me no time; she pointed to a hempen bridge at my right hand.
“That is the route,” she said. “At the jungle’s center it is anchored to the top of a black pyramid. But do not follow it all the way. At a tree with a lighting-blasted limb you will leave the bridge. Under that limb is a door into the tree’s heart. A ladder will take you down. Flat in the ground at the bottom you will find a strange, smooth stone as big around as a man’s body. This lifts. If you have the strength. There, is an entrance to the underground. One that I think Vohanna may not know.”
I was about to thank her one last time when she turned and silenced me with a finger to my lips. She rose on tiptoes to dab a kiss at the corner of my mouth, then pulled back, her brilliant eyes studying mine.
“I am sorry if I sounded...unkind before,” she said. “Do not be angry with me. It is only that I want an end to Vohanna as badly as you do.”
She stepped back, into the narrow doorway of her strange abode. “Go with the storm,” she said, and disappeared inside.
For a moment, I hesitated. There was no storm except the one in my thoughts. I glanced into the sky, glanced back to the tree of Ahrethane.
Then the faces of Bryce and Diken Graye, and of Rannon, swam up before my eyes. I turned and started along the bridge that Ahrethane had indicated to me. And from the trees all around arose a vast cloud of Emperor moths, like a blizzard of scarlet snow. They gathered, so many that I could hear the thrum of their wings and feel the stir of wind currents in the air.
A crackle of static electricity discharged in the clearing around me. Lightning answered from above. I saw a drop of rain, then more, and ran for the trees at the other side of the open space. The moths peeled away in flight, diving for shelter as a tempest exploded in fury out of what had been clear air moments before.
I ran. And though the storm stomped in the forest it barely brushed my path with wet fingers. Something protected me.
I ran.
And whispered: “Coming for you, Vohanna.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
GOING BELOW
Moving within the storm’s shroud, I reached the lightning-savaged tree that Ahrethane had told me to watch for. No one, no thing, contested my passage; I saw no sign of enemies, though I sensed something malevolent nursing at the very air through which I passed.
But if there were foes here, they must have had their heads bent against the flood of rain and wind. I wondered if they prayed to Vohanna as a goddess to save them. I doubted she’d be much help. This forest, at least, was still under Ahrethane’s dominion.
In the distance ahead of me, shrouded in robes of rain over the tops of the trees, there lifted the matte black pyramid Ahrethane had warned me to avoid. That pyramid lay at the center of ruined Vohan, the city over which the jungle had grown, and I recalled that when Diken Graye had released our saddle birds they had flown to that building and settled. We had both suspected then that Vohanna