Wings Over Talera - Charles Allen Gramlich [82]
I got up, wrapped my fists in Bryce’s dead-white hair and hauled him to his feet. He slapped at me weakly as he choked desperately for oxygen, and I chopped him across the throat with the blade of my hand. Then I ran him forward and threw him head first into one of the stone basilisks that guarded the doorway into the pyramid. He struck it with a thud and went down.
Still I was seething, standing over him with my mind gone wild and my fists closed so tight the nails bit into my palms. Wrath is hard to collar again once it’s unleashed. It wants to prey. But my brother did not get up to provide a quarry.
The cannons fired. More catapult boulders crashed around us. Part of our ledge broke off and went avalanching down the steep side of the pyramid. But Bryce was not getting up.
In sudden anguished fear, I dropped to my knees beside him. Blood ran from his split-open scalp. “Bryce,” I muttered, calling to him. He was my brother! And if I had killed him....”
My hand went out, grasped his shoulder, rolled him over. He did not stir, but in his throat fluttered a weak pulse. He lived! I breathed again.
More boulders hit around us. Another piece of our ledge cracked away. I glanced up from Bryce, saw the sky alive with flame and smoke and the wheeling specter shapes of vullwings and half a dozen other species of saddle bird, from the big hespern transports to the predatory kryll. The great galleons of Nyshphal forged on, trying now to encircle the pyramid and hammer it down. But the cannons bit at them ravenously, smashing one after another into tangled, drifting wreckage.
I got my feet beneath me and stood, dragged Bryce up and over my shoulder. I could not leave him here to be crushed by the Nyshphalian catapults. Between the carven basilisks, the gate into the pyramid stood open. The corridor beyond beckoned. Somewhere within this stone pile would be Vohanna, and there was little time to find her before the fleet was crushed.
Just inside the mouth of the corridor lay the sword Bryce had discarded when he’d chosen to take me with his hands. I plucked it up, sheathed it in my belt beside my own, then hurried forward along the polished and narrow hall. Light globes of dark purple made the air look bruised. Those globes shook, from the pulse of cannon fire within, from the pound of catapults without.
At corridor’s end was a second door, also ajar, and I burst through it onto another ledge within the heart of the pyramid. A railing bordered this ledge also, and only the iron weave of that balustrade kept me from falling, for the core of the pyramid was an open well that seemed to drop forever beneath me.
My heart tripped, and slowly recovered its beat. Then a deep, low thrumming caught my attention. I looked up. The apex of the pyramid was scarcely forty feet above my head. But below that roof, suspended in the center of the well by a web of barbed cables, there hung a huge, black crystal sphere shot through with veins of pewter and bright brass. Shadows flickered like hunting bats around that sphere, and from within came flashes of intense violet-white light.
“Vohanna,” I muttered.
Glancing wildly around, I searched for some way to reach the witch’s crystalline lair. Then to one side I glimpsed a set of wide, bronzed steps that anchored that lair to the ledge upon which I stood. Bryce was getting heavy. I switched him from my right shoulder to my left, then raced around to the steps and up them. They ended at a silver door in the wall of the black sphere. I tried it. It was locked.
In raised metal relief in the door’s center there loomed a tusked and horned skull of what is called among Talerans, a bane—which is supposedly the offspring of a demon and a human ghost. The mouth of the skull was open, the tongue extruded like a finger-less palm. On impulse, I pressed down on that tongue.
There