Wings Over Talera - Charles Allen Gramlich [68]
The walls of the room lifted in vaulted black marble thirty feet into the air, and oriflammes of scarlet silk were unfurled from ceiling to floor, billowing softly in a zephyr breeze that blew from some unseen source. On that breeze there also carried incense, aromatic and overly sweet. And from above me there arose a light of palest sapphire, not from glow globes, but from living beings captured and held between tall, fluted columns by razor-thin silver wires.
Those beings were Phylari. I had thought them mythological, for I’d seen them only in Taleran paintings where they were often used in the same way that angels are used by Earth’s artists. But these were real and beautiful, suspended as if in flight by the wires piercing their ankles and wings.
The Phylaris’ wings were covered with elongated scales that resembled vein-less feathers. As in the paintings, they had no fore-limbs and their hind-limbs were long and slender, delicately clawed for perching on the high rocky ledges where they are supposed to make their homes. The nearly translucent bodies radiated light in all the pale shades of blue, and even the large, tear-drop eyes were agleam.
I wondered. Had some earthlings once seen a Phylari? Had they drawn it for their fellows and thus given rise to tales of angels? It seemed to me at that moment, very likely.
Then a thousand tiny bells sounded, as if from the air itself, and my attention was drawn toward the front of the throne room. A raised walkway of braided copper wire, intricately looped, led from the door where I stood up through the center of the chamber to disappear within a curtain of fountaining water. But now, that shimmering spray began to still as, one after another, the fountains failed.
I saw the final guards then, beyond the dying veil of water, standing or squatting, on black and red squares that resembled those of a Kyrellian game board. Those guards numbered about forty and they were not human—nor any other natural race of Talera—but twisted hybrids of beasts and beings combined. Those that had hands carried curved swords of ivory-white steel; the others were armed with tentacles or claws. Yet, all of them were alike in the soulless crimson that filled their pupil-less eyes.
I started toward them, striding, and they opened the way for me. Above me in the air the Phylari were silent, and I knew that their silence was a sign of their profound suffering, for it is said of those angels that they sing constantly in melodies more fine than the finest kalina ever strung.
And then I saw the throne. Amethyst and jade it was, onyx and gypsum and lapis lazuli, quartz and opal and olivine, topaz and tiger’s-eye. It sat on a dais of black marble veined with gold, with a fragrant dark wine purling down pale steps before it that were made of skulls. Above it circled more of the winged devils that I’d seen in the temple at Kellet’s Bay when Graye, Valyan, and Kreeg had stood with me against many. And beneath the winged ones, on the throne, there was Vohanna.
Vohanna!
Source of all my pain.
Lodestone for my rage.
She looked no more than eighteen in Earth years. Her skin had the hue of rose petals dusted with amber-gold and blushed from beneath with health. Her moonlit silver hair was feathered with curls of pure snowy white and foamed down over her slender shoulders, down over the simple ebon shift against which her body thrust. All the way to her ankles those tresses coiled, and in no wind that I could feel they moved and danced as if alive.
There were no adornments anywhere upon Vohanna—no web of black pearls in her silken flag of hair, no bright jewels at her finely sculpted ears, no copper brassards clasping her upper arms. She wore no kohl to darken her sable lashes, no paint upon lips that were already riper than the rising sun.
In her form, she looked guileless and fragile. In her face, she looked...innocent. But her gaze was ancient and black upon mine, with firefly runes