Wings Over Talera - Charles Allen Gramlich [81]
We staggered up at the same time, both of us groggy and worn. My brother, too, was breathing hard now. And sweat was on him. Even the tattoos that had writhed across his chest were still, as if they were as exhausted as the rest of him.
“Bryce,” I started. And he charged me.
I grabbed his shoulder and arm, used his momentum against him, and threw him over my hip. He landed in a jarring tangle of limbs, but as I came after him he snapped a kick up over his head and caught me flush in the mouth with the toe of his boot. I staggered back, fresh blood at my lips and running down my chin, and with teeth loose in my gums.
The cannons boomed from beneath us in the pyramid. Smoke wafted up, stinking of sulphur. Bryce climbed to his feet like an old man. My own movements were no better. On earth we’d been trained by the same teachers. Our physical differences in size, speed, strength were minimal; we were well matched. But now we were both tired and hurt. And angry.
Yet, my rage was different from Bryce’s. His was false, grafted onto him like a limb that didn’t belong by the witchery of Vohanna. My anger was true, though not directed truly at my brother. I had reasons for my feelings, reasons that extended into my heart rather than lying on the surface of my mind. In the end, I thought my wrath would give me strength where his would not.
I spat a mouthful of blood over the railing as the cannons roared again like a voice from Hade’s throat. The sound brought a thought to me, a possibility. The Nyshphalian fleet’s catapults had not yet responded to the cannon that tasked them. They were still too far away.
I grinned, wolfishly I knew. Perhaps aboard the slave ships and in the lava mines of the Klar I had learned to bank my anger until it was time to stoke it. Perhaps I’d learned to temper fury with cunning.
I began to circle Bryce, bringing up my hands, my weight held forward over the balls of my feet. Bryce turned with me, cocking his own fists, until his back was to the railing and I saw over his shoulder that two more of the Nyshphalian ships were aflame.
Saddle birds swept by with flashing wings. I glimpsed the pale faces of their riders, both friend and foe, and the flights of crossbow quarrels that leaped between them like dark rain. Many birds carried dead men still strapped on their backs, and though there were those among the living who saw us, none had time from their own battles to interfere between Bryce and myself.
Then I saw what I’d hoped to see. The fleet of Nyshphal had been battered but the catapults of the forward ships were finally within range of the pyramid. Galleon decks shuddered as those catapults released; I saw the dark boulders whipped skyward. The ships of the fleet could never pound through the stone-sheathed walls of the pyramid fast enough to keep the cannon from tearing them up, but that wasn’t what I was hoping for now.
I waited; Bryce took a step toward me. It was only seconds but it seemed longer. The missiles of the catapults arced up...came down...toward the top of the pyramid...where we stood. Bryce did not know they were coming.
I tensed. And the boulders hit, raining down like giant hail cast from an ogre’s fist. A sixty pound stone slammed into the rail of our ledge with a mad shriek of tortured iron. Others hit below us, and above, and to either side. The world rang with loudness.
Bryce’s pupils dilated wide in surprise. He half spun to face the noise behind him. I loosed my rage, let it flame up behind my eyes, and I hurled myself forward, at his feet, rolling into his knees as he heard me coming and tried to turn back.
I swept his legs from under him. He twisted in mid-air, like a cat, but still hit jarringly