Teeth of the Storm

The sky was dark by day, tormented with storms and lit from above by the red blaze of the dying sun. Tathar led his riders into the teeth of the wind, keeping high above the heaviest of it. He had not been this way for many years, and he wanted them to escape notice, for they were very close, now, to the heart of the black imperial power that stretched forth an iron hand over the smoldering earth.

They were not a wing of hunters or warriors, they were a tribe upon the move. Sixteen eagles, each with both rider and passengers seated behind them. Children clung to the leather harnesses, or to their mothers, faces covered against the cold winds. The birds flew slowly, carrying greater weight, and that was another weakness that Tathar feared. If they were caught by the new riders of the emperor on their winged beasts, they would not easily be able to escape.

That was why he flew without anyone to burden him. Zakai was the keenest hunter in the flight, and Tathar the most experienced warrior. If they were found, it would be on him to defend them, to hold back pursuit with the claws of his bird and his thunderlance.

It was that lance that led them onward. He possessed his own, and they had two more taken from slain enemies, but it would not be enough. To be a potent force in a true battle, they must have more. The art of their crafting had been lost, or so Tathar had always believed. Now it seemed there were more than there had been. He knew of one place where there might be some untended, and now he led his people there and hoped he did not lead them to their dooms.

They fought through the gusting winds, and below them the storm grumbled and flashed with sullen lightning. He knew they were close. Before they entered the storm he had taken a sighting and glimpsed the rolling black waves of the sea to their right. The peak he sought was tall enough it would pierce the clouds, and even in the dark Zakai could likely take him there – it was where he had been born.

Then he saw it. The jagged, sheer peak that thrust upward like a dagger, and the clouds roiling around it. He conjured a flicker of fire to the tip of his lance and pointed, making sure they all knew to follow him. He tugged on Zakai’s reins and shifted his weight, and that was all the bird needed to wing over and begin to arc slowly downward. The other birds followed, a line of dark-winged phantoms spiraling down into the flickering storm.

Tathar was careful not to fly too close to the mountain peak, as he knew the winds there would be fierce and changeable. He flew into the gray layer of heavy clouds, and spears of stormfire flickered and caught on his lance-tip, kindling it so it glowed a piercing green. It lit the way as he flew deeper into the storm, past other, lesser peaks, until he saw the sprawling shape of the fortress below.

It had once been the home of the Skylords, even in the earliest days, before they had entered into the service of a long-ago emperor. It was a vast fortification built over many ages, with soaring towers now fallen into ruin and great vaulted openings to the eyries within. Here the great eagles had first been tamed and bred, grown from large, shaggy birds into graceful, ferocious engines of war.

He guided Zakai downward and the eagle needed no guidance to slip into one of the great archways. The walls of stone were cracked with age, and there was dust on everything. Tathar had not seen this place for many years, and he was saddened by how much it had decayed since his youth. Zakai had been among the last generation of hatchlings to be born here. Tathal remembered the day the last of them had flown away and left the fortress behind. He had never imagined he would return to it under circumstances such as these.

One by one, the other eagles came in behind them. He saw the riders looking at the vast hall, craning their necks to see, pulling down the cloths they wore to cover their faces. He looked at Suara landed beside him, her eyes wide as she looked around them. “I have never seen anything so large as this.”

He laughed then. “These eyries were made to be home to dozens of birds, we few will not crowd them.” He looked up at the roof above, hanging with dust and cobwebs as long as a man. “It has been a long time since there was need for so much room.”

“Why is that?” she said, unbuckling their children from the harness. “Are there fewer eagles that there were?”

“It is one of the great mysteries of the Skylords,” he said. “Long ago, even before we took service with the emperors of Zur, the generations of the warbirds had been dwindling. Fewer eggs were laid, and fewer hatched. Some say it was a curse put upon us. Some claimed it was a poison in the air or the water. Others believed we had bred the eagles too closely, altering them too much from what they had been. That we had made them too perfect, and thus they would die out if we did not devote ourselves to maintaining the bloodline.”

“So you left a place so grand as this?” she said, wondering.

“It was collapsing, even in my youth. There would be too much expense and too much work needed to repair and rebuild it. No less because anything needed has to be carried up on the backs of eagles. The stone to build it was carved from the very mountainside we stand on.” He climbed down from Zakai and placed his lance in the socket on the floor that had been made for it in a bygone day. He touched the sword at his side and stretched his back, stiff from long hours in the saddle.

He pointed. “You two go to the mouth of the eyrie and keep watch. The sky is above and the sea below, and both can hold dangers. Men have not dwelled here for more than twenty years, so who can say what kinds of animals have made their homes here since then?” He smiled at Suara and beckoned her. “Come, we will seek what we have come for.”

o0o

Tathar hoped he could find the way, as he had never really ventured down into the crypts in his young days – they had been forbidden to him. In this place the Skylords had been born, when they were a people, not simply a caste of warriors. Here they had bowed to their own kings, and here they had buried them for generations. It was in those deep crypts that he hoped to find what he sought.

Suara followed him, along with a half-dozen others. They lit their lanterns and ventured down a long corridor, the walls carved with a history of wind and wings. Even in his youth, the old histories had been lost and forgotten, and no one knew the names of the old rulers and their steeds. No one could tell the tales of the battles and the victories of lost ages.

At the end of the hall was a great door, and Tathar remembered it polished and glowing like gold, but now the bronze was covered in verdigris and darkened by the sea air. He had been prepared to force it, but he found it open, one door half-broken from the hinges, and he hesitated. There was a smell of the sea here, salty and close, and he knew the caverns below connected to the sea, but that was far, far below the peak of the mountain. It was disquieting to smell the deeps so close.

He led them through, lanterns lifted high to cast back the dark, and he drew his dark, stolen sword to have it close to hand if he should need it. The stairs led down, dusty and worn, so they seemed to sag at the center. He placed his steps carefully, and he watched the others, for he knew they had no real experience with stairways, and little enough with buildings of stone.

They began to pass high, arched openings that led away into blackness, the glimmer of the lanterns revealing only dusty floors and rows of dull columns cut from the black stone. These were the halls where the dead were laid in their tombs, but these were the newer galleries, and he sought older ones.

The floor was wet, and when they left the stairs he found the smooth stone slimy with some black growth that covered the floor and the walls, growing into frills and coils like an unclean fungus. He paused, listening, wondering if he would hear something move in the blackness, but there was nothing save silence the slow drip of unseen water.

“Come,” he said, and he led them through a tall arch and into a hollow hall where their footsteps echoes in the carved silence. Pillars rose on all sides, and in between each pair of columns stood a stone effigy in the form of a man. Once they had been visages of the noble kings of lost ages, but now they were worn and covered with dust and slimy growths. Yet each figure still bore, in an upraised stone hand, the long, keen shape of a thunderlance.

“Here,” he said. “This is the first age of men who wielded the lance, and they were buried with them in those days, before they became so rare and so precious.” He went to the first statue and looked at it, trying to discern the face beneath years of dirt and neglect. Slowly, he reached up and grasped the lance, pulled it free in a shower of debris, and held it up. “Now we have more need of them than the dead.”

“Will they still work, after so long?” Suara said, reaching up and freeing another. She coughed and waved away the cloud of dust.

“Some may not,” he said. “But if we can glean even a few that function, it will be more than the three we have now. To fight the new Skylords, we must have weapons to oppose theirs.” He hefted the lance in his hand, noting many differences in how it was crafted and shaped. “We must have the power of the lightning.”

He gestured to the hall. “Take every one you can. Some will be too old and will have failed, but we will find some we can use. I will teach you the ways to use them. We shall be the war-lords of the air.” He pressed the small control inside the shielded grip, and a blue spark snapped at the tip. “Test them, like this, and if they spark, we take them. Go, and quickly. I dislike the air in this abandoned place.”

o0o

They worked quickly, and Tathar watched the lights of the lanterns move through the great hall, heard the sounds as the lances were taken down, shaken loose from the ancient grasp of their former wielders, and he saw the sparks as they were tested or heard the clatter as dead lances were cast down to the floor. He was glad to see so many sparks. The ancients had crafted well, and the weapons had survived.

He paused when a shudder went through the room and all the riders stopped still and looked around them, falling silent for a moment. Tathar rapped the lance on the floor. “It is all right. This mountain shakes from time to time. It will not fall today.” He waited as another tremor rippled underfoot, and then he smiled. “You see?”

Then he heard the moan, drifting up from the far reaches of the hall. Something mewled like a newborn devil, and he heard something scrape on the stone like steel blades. The riders called to one another and drew back from the darkness, holding lances and lanterns clutched tight, trying to see deeper into the black.

Something else wailed, and then Tathar was among them, pushing them back. “Go, go. Back up the long stair and to the light. Go quickly.” He took a lantern from one of them and held it high, lance poised in the other. It was not the best weapon for close quarters, but the hall was wide and high-roofed. And he would rather have lightning than steel in his fist. He looked at Suara and she was close behind him, a lance gripped in her hands. He had taught her some of the techniques of it, but she was still a learner. She might yet have to learn faster.

More cries came out of the dark, and then a wave of crawling, slithering things erupted into the light. They were small, no longer than his arm, but Tathar saw their mouths gaping with needle teeth, their tails lashing behind them driving them forward on stunted limbs.

Suara gave a cry of disgust, but Tathar did not hesitate; he lowered his lance and loosed a shattering web of blue fire upon the things. It raked across them like a rank of spearpoints, tearing them apart, scattering ichor and flesh across the walls and the floor. Bolts of blue crushed the statues and scorched the ancient stone.

“Back!” he shouted, not waiting to see how many more were coming. “Back to the eagles!” He struck again as another wave of the slithering creatures came snapping blindly after them. He forced Suara back and through the high arch. Beyond the aperture, the floor was a seething mass of wet flesh. The things screeched like hungry young, and he realized that was what they looked like – like something unfinished.

They raced for the stairs, pursued by the choking smell of burnt flesh and the miasma of the sea. He smote the soaring arch with a bolt of lightning and the stone cracked apart, dropping a great mass of charred masonry down on the things seething beneath it.

He turned and ran, holding fast to the lance, glad that the ancient weapons were as light as they were graceful. The stairs were treacherous, slick with the omnipresent damp and smeared with the foul growths that had spread everywhere. The lantern was swinging wildly in his hand as he took the steps two at a time, casting mad, sweeping shadows on the walls.

There was light ahead, and he saw the men he had sent on ahead there, awaiting him with lowered lances and ready lanterns. He cursed and looked back, seeing a glistening, roiling mass of death come crawling close behind them. Desperate, he flung the lantern behind him, shattering it and spilling burning oil down the stairway. The front ranks of the creatures were immolated, but their fellows rolled over them, snuffing the fire with their beslimed bodies and crawling blindly upward.

He turned and saw two of his followers loose blue fire from their lances, but they did not know the finesse of using the weapons in such close quarters without hitting whatever was in front of them. For a moment he saw it all – the twin forks of destruction coming for him and Suara, the air already blistering with their deadly heat.

It was years of training that saved them, as he brought up his own lance and caught the bolts on the very tip, holding them there humming and snarling, and then he flicked his wrist and sent them arcing past him and down upon the onrushing mass of hungry fiends. The fire ravened among them and ripped their bodies asunder, splattered the staircase with gore, and yet he knew it would not stop them all.

He dashed the lances aside, furious. “I told you to go, now run!” He shoved one man, turned to the other just as a wave of slavering black death burst from one of the other arches and knocked him off his feet. The man screamed as he was torn by a dozen sets of jaws at once, and now, so close, Tathar saw the things had stingers on their tail tips, and they struck again and again as they feasted.

The rest of them ran, screaming, kicking the things away. Tathar felt them crush underfoot, slipped and almost fell, but Suara caught him and pulled him up. Another rider went down, shrieking, and Tathar turned his lance on the man, immolated him in a pillar of white fire to end his agony and destroy the things that devoured him.

The rest of them burst through the bronze doors and all of them flung their weight against the portals and wedged them shut. The eagles were alive with rage, screaming and stomping their great talons, stirring wind with their thunderous wings.

Tathar wedged himself against the doors, feeling the weight build behind them slowly but inexorably. “Go! Get in the sky! Go now!” He knew what the stingers meant – or what he suspected – and he had to hope he was wrong.

Suara gave him a long last look, and then she and the others broke and raced for their steeds. Tathar held himself braced to keep the doors from opening as long as he could. He watched while his followers hurled themselves into their saddles and stirred their beasts to fly. The eagles screamed and turned reluctantly away from the smell of the enemy and faced the open sky. The wind in the hall billowed forth a cloud of dust as the birds took to the air, leaping out into the open air and screaming defiance to the oncoming night.

At last it was only him, and the pressure against the doors grew unbearable just as Zakai lashed his way into the air and reached down with one deadly talon. Tathar released the door and leaped, caught fistfuls of his eagle’s steel-hard feathers, and pulled himself up from the floor just as it flooded with dark, crawling things that battered the door aside and sent it crashing to the stone.

He caught the harness and pulled himself into the saddle, even as Zakai was already headed for the open sky. Three beats of his red wings and they were free. He clutched his lance in one hand as he fastened himself in with the other. The cold air rushed past his face as he spiraled upward, gaining height among the other riders.

The storm had broken, and below there was only mist hanging over the jagged rocks of the mountainside, and beyond that the black expanse of the dark sea. Something disturbed the surface, and he stared. A wave was coming into shore, rolling landward with a terrible slowness that he knew was an illusion of distance. It rose higher, and higher, and then something broke the surface of the sea, and reared its massive head into the air.

It was spined and frilled like a sea creature, but it walked on legs as it dragged itself from the depths. He thought it had four legs, then six. It was immense, as tall as a tower, so enormous his eye refused to quite believe it. A great tail thrashed the water behind it, driving it forward onto the stony coast below them.

Something moved on the skin of the sea-beast, something fluttered and crawled, and there he saw unclean things clinging to the scaled hide. At first he thought they were its young, but then one by one they began to drop free and spread their leathery wings. He saw the familiar coiling shape of the serpentine body, and the flickering stingers on the long tails, and he understood.

He understood whence had come the flying beasts of the new Skylords. Here he saw the sea-leviathan that was their breeding ground. In his mind he could envision thousands of eggs laid in the deeps below the mountain, there to hatch and spawn an army of crawling, blind things that burrowed into the rock and the dark caverns and eventually found their way up into the keep. Those that survived and grew strong returned to the water, goaded by some primal instinct, and there they clung to the thing that birthed them – their dark and monstrous mother.

A cloud of hungry beasts rose into the sky coming toward them, and he turned Zakai away. “Inland!” he cried, leading his people in his wake. They could not fight this swarm, not today. He urged Zakai to speed, and the other eagles followed on swift wings. They flew between the mountaintops, skimmed through the layers of mist and rain. They flew away from the sea, away from the nightmares of the dark, and toward the west, where a feeble hope might yet be found.