Wings Over Talera - Charles Allen Gramlich [84]
From beyond the black steps came the high-pitched cackle of Vohanna’s inhuman laughter. And as sure as if I could see it, I knew that another Nyshphalian ship had been torn from the sky.
My face burned with a sudden anger that was mixed with fear for both my brother and my adopted country; my teeth ground together from the need to act. With an oath and one quick cut, I passed the dagger through the skin beneath the toir’in-or and plucked the milky jewel from the left side of Bryce’s throat.
I had cut shallowly but still the blood spurted. A scarlet jet of it pulsed across my leg and boot. My heart thudded and I almost screamed as I grabbed for the wound with my hand. But then the hole was closing, sucking itself shut as a burst of some residual heat from the milkstone cauterized it.
Bryce jerked and heaved in apparent agony, but—like Eric Ryall before him—he did not awaken and seemed to slump deeper into unconsciousness as the toir’in-or was removed. Quickly, then, I cut the second stone free. Again, red fluid sprayed, and again the wound sealed.
I closed my right fist over the two stones. Crimson dripped from my hand. I picked up Bryce with both arms—he did not seem heavy—and straightened to stalk up the steps before me. At the top I halted, incarnadined with my brother’s blood, and stood looking down into a small, hollowed area within the heart of the witch’s sphere.
I saw Vohanna, and knew: death has wings and black eyes.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
VOHANNA
Vohanna’s sanctum was lined with niches in which bodies stood. There were dozens of the still forms, behind glass panels in rectangular recesses within the sphere’s ebon walls. Human and inhuman waited there, the mythical and the extinct standing next to the common. Some of the bodies seemed more machine than flesh; others mimicked the cephalopod or the arachnid.
As strange as was that parliament of bodies, however, it was Vohanna who held the stage. I had time to see her here, as I had not that night in the temple at Kellet’s Bay or in the arena below where I’d fought Bryce. She hovered above the floor, over a table of scintillant gold. Her four lower limbs were thin as sticks and seemingly useless. It was her wings that held her, and they were not feathered like those of birds, not membranous like those of bats, not brittle and diaphanous like insect wings. There were four of them—blue, red, black, yellow—and they were moist and translucent as they beat. Through the skin I could see a webbing of platinum bones and what resembled razor-thin wire.
Vohanna’s fragile, insectile legs dangled beneath an abdomen that looked like an elongated human torso. Her upper body was sexless and glinted dully, as if made of chitin or some glazed ceramic armor. But her hands were beautifully human, with four delicate fingers that danced a ballet over a matrix of a dozen milkstones loosely embedded in the surface of the golden table. From those stones her moving fingers wrung sprays of light and a whispering, haunted melody that I knew must provide power to this ship’s engines and guns. And to its mistress.
The table over which Vohanna labored was near the far wall, across the floor of the sphere from me, but though the witch faced in my direction she did not see me. Her gaze was held by the display that swirled and eddied in the air before her eyes. It was, I suddenly realized, a simulacrum—a replica—of the war outside.
Struck to stillness by such sorcery, I watched as the scene roiled with miniature war-birds from the armies of Vohanna and of Nyshphal, all of them wheeling and dipping in wild disarray. The galleons of the Nyshphalian fleet were there as well, like fist-sized clots within the tapestry of battle. Though concentrated fire from the big ships had torn gaping holes in the hordes of Vohanna’s bird riders, nearly half the Nyshphalian vessels were aflame. Cannons had pounded them, and some in Vohanna’s army still carried—and had used—the exploding crossbow quarrels. I had not, apparently,