Wings Over Talera - Charles Allen Gramlich [76]
Then the rumble intensified. The world seemed to rock. I grabbed at the wall to steady myself but a sudden jolting lurch threw me from my feet. Some of the hybrids were down too; others milled about, staggering, giving voice to plaintive cries and mewls of terror and surprise.
A stairway loomed to my left. I shoved my sword into my belt, pushed to my feet and grasped the stone railing to drag myself up the steps. I had no idea what was happening. Was it the fleet attacking? It was going on too long to be an earthquake.
Again there came a lurch that threw my boots from under me. My knee cracked on a step. A wall frieze crumbled, dropping blocks of engraved marble around me. I flung my arms over my head for protection. Dust exploded in my face, carrying the dry, worn smell of age.
Something slapped wetly around my leg and I rolled onto my side to see that one of hybrids had—somehow—managed to reach me. It had tentacles instead of arms, and the head of a woman on the body of a human male. Hag-eyes of crimson flared hate at me as its rubbery tentacles wrapped my thigh. I felt them rippling, squeezing as it tried to drag me downward.
Bile burst ripe into my mouth and I lashed out frantically with a foot, kicking, kicking. The heel of my boot pulped half the thing’s face and it released me with a shriek as it tumbled backward down the steps.
Other screaming rang now. I thought it was mine until I heard the pitch of it rise inhumanly high and realized it was the building screaming, that it was stone scraping and sliding rawly on stone. On the landing above me, a hulking obscenity of a statue rocked and fell, went bounding metallically over me down the steps. I heard the tentacled hybrid squeal as the heavy bronze crashed upon it, pinning it beneath half a ton of weight.
Then I was on my feet, hurling myself up the steps despite the shaking. At the landing there branched off corridors to left and right while the stairs unwound forever above me. I took the right corridor, hoping my enemies would follow the stairs, hoping this tunnel would lead to an outside wall—and a door away from this place before it shuddered itself into pieces.
But even as I thought of the pyramid coming apart, and even as I sighted a door at the end of the corridor that I followed, the lurching tremors died away to leave no more than an eerie whisper, as if of silk sliding on callused skin. In the quiet, I knew Vohanna’s guards would be after me again. And soon, if not already, the Nyshphalian fleet would be engaged in desperate battle outside this stone prison.
I had to escape; I hoped the door in front of me was the way. It was shaped like an oval, like a ship’s hatch, and closed off with overlapping panels of steel. I feared it was locked and knew I could not break through it, but it irised open as I slapped the latch across its center.
Beyond, I saw an emerald flash of the spring Taleran sky. With an exultant shout, I leaped through the door—and found myself teetering on the lip of a narrow ledge, with the sharp incline of the black wall beneath me and a thousand foot drop between me and the green-brown earth.
The pyramid was airborne.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
HEART OF WAR
Vertigo gripped me as I balanced on the wafer-thin edge of a fatal fall. Wind beat at my clothes. A wild open sky screamed all around. Below lay the receding jungle, a blast of green among dry, brown plains. And pouring up from among the trees were long dark lines of saddle bird riders—Vohanna’s army.
I ripped myself loose from the edge, threw myself at the open frame of the hatch through which I’d come, and grabbed hold. My heart sped like a loom-shuttle in my chest. The black pyramid was an airship, a dreadnought of the skies.
Abruptly our speed slackened. We drifted to a hovering halt. From below, the birds and their riders began to catch