Wings Over Talera - Charles Allen Gramlich [92]
Directly beneath us was a second Nyshphalian galleon, rising toward us to come to our aid. It was still a hundred yards down when Vohanna hit on her back directly upon the spear-shaped head of the vessel’s flagpole. That bolt of metal ripped through her spine and erupted a foot out of her chest in a spray of blood and tissue.
She hung there. Impaled. Her body jerked. Blood welled like dark lava out of her mouth and spilled down her chin. Her hands that had grasped at empire grasped now at air and found it just as impossible to hold.
A last spasm wracked her; her arms dropped to spread out wide from her sides. Vohanna was dead. And over the curve of the rescue ship I saw the massive cloud of dust that had spiraled slowly up from the jungle below where her pyramid had met its own end.
The war was over.
Then a fresh scream was wrung from my lips as the rope was jerked from above and I was hauled upward like a bait on a fishhook. The world spun crazily beneath my head before a dozen sets of strong hands grasped my legs, my hips, my shoulders, and dragged me backward over the rail of the ship.
I saw faces that I recognized—Valyan, Rannon’s father, and her brother. There was only one face I wanted to see. And then I did see it as Rannon Jystral dropped to her knees beside me and rained kisses on my face that scalded hot with tears.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
AFTERWAR
It was hushed in the hallway where Rannon and I walked. Outside these palace walls, the heart of Timmuzz beat with the sounds of manufacturing and trade, the sounds of a country once more at peace. But here, where our feet spurned soft rugs of golden weave, a late afternoon stillness held sway. And things were not quite at peace.
After the fall of Vohanna and her black pyramid, the witch’s saddle bird army had melted away rather than face the hammering of the Nyshphalian war-fleet. Then, troops had landed to clean out the caverns beneath the jungle. The remaining gunpowder and the notes on the making of the powder and the steam engines had been confiscated. Even now, Nyshphalian scientists toiled to build a new generation of weapons and airships. The technological genie was out of its bottle on Talera, and I regretted it. Who knew what changes would be wrought on this world that I loved in the next ten or twenty years.
But, in truth, I was thinking little of possible futures at the moment. Rannon Jystral walked beside me. The cedar and rose scent of her hair and skin was a living thing in my nostrils. Her breathing was as clear and sweet as a carillon’s ring.
She stopped at hall’s end, her fingers resting on the brass handles of a set of thorn-wood doors. I halted with her, dressed at least partly in bandages and limping a little on my right leg, which had been dislocated only a few days before in that final fight with Vohanna. My gaze sought Rannon’s and lingered. She smiled, a bit wanly I thought.
“Don’t tell me,” I said jokingly, waving a hand toward the closed doors. “You’ve planned a surprise party for me.”
I wanted to hear her laugh, but she didn’t. She shook her head, then said: “There’s been no time for us to speak since Vohanna’s death. Too many duties. Too many worries over whether Bryce and Rhandh would live.”
She was right. After our flurry of shared kisses on the deck of her father’s ship, we’d been forced in different directions by the needs of those we cared about. Soon, days had passed with little more than kind smiles, stolen hugs, and a few words of concern that only scratched the surface of what we needed to say to each other.
“That talk can’t be put off any longer,” Rannon continued. “But first there’s something I want you to see.”
She pushed open the doors and stepped inside. I followed, stopping just beyond the threshold. Rannon walked to the center of the room and turned to face me. She wore a long-sleeved gown of white velvet, belted with silver. Her eyes were as blue as I’d ever seen them,