Wings Over Talera - Charles Allen Gramlich [72]
“Above,” she snapped with tight drawn lips. “You’ll make him pay.”
My brother’s rage subsided instantly, as if he were a tamed ghyre on a leash. And Vohanna’s words must also have been a signal because the floor gave a little jerk and began to move. Startled, I glanced down, then realized that we all—Vohanna, Bryce, the hybrid guards and myself—stood on a long, wide platform that was rising slowly, through the roof of the throne-room into the upper portion of the pyramid.
The movement was smooth, with scarcely a whisper of friction from the walls around, and in moments we reached the destination Vohanna had chosen for us. I turned, seeing that we’d come to rest at the border of a small, rectangular amphitheater whose floor was dusted with fine sand. There were tiers of seats to my left and right, with a tightly woven fence of wickedly barbed wire between those seats and the sand.
Directly across some two hundred feet of open space from me was a black wall in which a circular gray door was centered. That door stood closed but I suspected that beyond it would lie pens where prisoners could be held for this arena.
I looked toward Vohanna. She ignored the stands, returned to her throne and seated herself upon it with a flourish. Her winged guardians found roosts among the thick, dark rafters above; her other minions gathered around her protectively. Except for Bryce.
My brother walked past me onto the sand, his gaze still locked upon me. He unfastened his sword sheath from the scabbard hooks on his belt, drew the blade and tossed the lacquered sheath aside. Breeks of black leather encased him from the hips down, and he wore a high-collared shirt of crimson silk that he stripped off and let fall like so much litter beside his silver-studded boots.
The blade in my brother’s metallic fist glimmered evilly in the smoky light of overhead glow globes, but it was not the weapon that held my attention. In Bryce’s throat, just where the left and right carotid arteries slipped beneath the clavicle of his collarbone, twin milkstones pulsed in obscene harmony. They’d been hidden behind his shirt collar and were the largest implanted stones I’d yet seen. Most of Vohanna’s servants bore only specks of the toir’in-or but these were the size of hummingbird eggs.
Beneath the milkstones, down his chest, over his torso, the tattoos that marked my brother’s face and neck continued. I saw...things there: will-o’-the-wisp images of scorpions and nightshade moths, and of reeths, those jaguar-sleek predators which Talerans sometimes call harlequin-wolves for their mocking smiles. And I saw what Diken Graye had once told me I would see. The tattoos moved. They crawled. Like a living canvas of scars.
I snarled at myself then, shoved away the cloying dread that threatened to overwhelm me. Bryce and Vohanna would not beat me so cheaply. I drew my own sword, the one that I’d taken from Eric Ryall at Kellet’s Bay. Its blade winked as sharp in the light as Bryce’s did. I, too, threw aside my scabbard.
Bryce motioned to me with his left hand, his fingers urging me to come. I offered him a cold smile and started toward him; but my thoughts burned. I could not kill my brother. I could not let him kill me. I’d carried some passing fancy of delay, of holding Vohanna’s attention rapt until Hurnan Jystral and Rannon arrived with the Nyshphalian air fleet.
Foolishness. It was all foolishness.
But Bryce did not let me wallow in self-recrimination.
“Are you thinking about dying, Ruenn?” he called.
I stopped walking, and looked across a dozen feet of sand into the crimson hellishness of my brother’s eyes.
“Why, Bryce?” I shook my head. “Surely you know this hate you feel for me is Vohanna’s doing.”
He snarled but I kept on talking—while the milkstones in his throat pulsed opalescent.
“You and I were friends, Bryce. Not just brothers. Don’t you remember?”
And now he started toward me. I took a step backward.
“Our parents raised us to watch each other’s backs. Not to fight among ourselves. Blood for blood. You have to