Wings of Thunder

They flew by day, for they had learned that the hunters saw better by night. Tathar led his people through the rugged hill lands, skulking through the misty skies and lairing in hidden rifts and vales by night. Under the red sun they haunted the edges of the crags and cliffsides, seeking the wake of the sea beast as it swam along the great estuary. They hunted it, following always from a distance as it moved west. Tathar sensed a purpose in its motion. It had a destination, and he thought he had some thought of what that might be.

Sometimes the water was too shallow, and it moved overland, lumbering on great, clawed feet, leaving a trail across the earth that could be seen for miles. When it moved from the water it grew wary, and they had to follow from a distance, watchful of the spiral of hunting beasts that rose above it. Tathar wondered if those were its own young, and whether each winged beast might someday grow so immense. It seemed impossible – surely the world could not encompass so many behemoths.

Now Tathar flew ahead beneath a lowering sky and the dim glow of the copper sun. The beast was moving to the north, making way for the deeper waters of the sea, but Tathar wanted to know what its purpose might be. Everywhere through the civilized parts of the empire they had seen pillars of smoke and marks of pillage and death. Kurux had loosed all his war power to bring chaos upon the world, tormenting even his own empire for no purpose save terror and slaughter.

Zakai’s wings left trails of mist threaded through the cold air as he and Suara flew ahead to scout the way. They saw a last barrier of sharp-edged cliffs and then the land turned green and gentle, sloping downward to the north. Tathar knew that long slope led to the waters of the Numarean Passage – the long thread of the sea that led past the Black City and in the west opened out into the Sea of Azar.

They flew onward, the birds glad of the open sky, and Tathar was pleased to look on the green, tree-covered hills rolling below. It was pleasant country, if stony and all but useless for farmland. They swept down over the hills and through layers of fog until they saw the sea, dark and rolling slow beneath the sky. And there, filling the waters, was an armada of ships with crimson sails billowing, and Tathar knew what the thing from the sea was coming to do.

He drew up, circling over the waters, counting the ships, and then through the mist he saw an army strung out along the shore, moving in long lines across the wide beaches. They were mounted on some kind of beasts, and he counted tens of thousands of them.

This was a war-fleet and an army coming from the west, following the ancient path that would lead them to the gates of Zur itself. He looked down at them and wondered who commanded, and under what banner they marched. Part of him wanted to land and find out, but he was wary. If this was an army marching against the emperor, he wanted to join his force to theirs, but he wanted to meet them after a show of strength.

He signaled Suara and turned back to the south, staying high and above the mist. Perhaps the birds would be seen, but no one would be able to see riders from so far away. He would gather them, his new Skylords, and they would shadow the sea monster until the moment came to strike. He would show what his warriors could do, and then meet this army in the shadow of wings.

o0o

Shath and Ashari moved their forces along the water’s edge, his riders glad of the easy progress. The country was desolate but lovely, with plenty of grass for the beasts and mist to keep away the sun. To the Urugan, reared in a deadly wasteland, it seemed indeed like the paradise he had promised them, and they chanted their praises of Shath the Iron-Handed around their campfires by night.

He was wary here in this empty land, and he sent riders out ranging through the hills and along the coastline, seeking the next attack he knew must come. Kurux would not be cowed by the setbacks he had suffered, and he still possessed the might of an empire at his command. Shath knew it was only a matter of time before that full might was turned upon them, and so he watched and waited and suspected everything, especially the quiet.

At night Ashari came ashore to his tent, and he was always taken by her form, so gilded with jewels and silks. She looked like a pampered creature of the harem still, and yet he knew she was not. There was a steel buried in her that nothing could blunt, and she held her armies and her captains with a will as great as his own. Yes, she used her power over minds to control them, but also she had become more than mortal to them – a symbol they followed even to death. Kurux had destroyed their ancient city, driven them from their homelands, and so they would fight him no matter what came, and they would follow in her wake.

Her Horane riders had left the ships and now rode among his own men, testing strength and finding warriors who they could respect and call brethren. Shath smiled to see it, knowing that his own people, now dead, would have mixed in among them gladly. They were hard-riding men born of hard lands who loved the saddle and the freedom of the far horizons. He understood them.

Ashari he did not understand, and yet he trusted her. Perhaps he should not, and yet he remembered the night she had set him free, delivering him from torment and death, giving him the chance to survive. She was the reason he rode free now at the head of an army, bent on his path of revenge.

She reclined in the cushions brought for her, and on the low table before her she spread the map she had used to plot their route of march. Now they came to the most worrisome part of the passage, and he looked at the markings suspiciously as she traced out the path.

“Here the hills come down to the sea, and grow into cliffs,” she said. “We will sail on and meet you here, where the lands lowers again, but you must take the path this way, away from the sea, through these valleys here. I am told they are forested and well-watered, and you should have no troubles with forage.”

“It is not forage I am concerned with,” he said. He did not like the thought of close, forested valleys where an ambush could be easily set for his force. “It would be wisest for Kurux to strike at us while we are separate, and this will be his last chance before we are within the empire’s heartland. If he seeks an opportunity, this will be his best.”

“True,” she said, “but he did not expect my arrival, and so he cannot have prepared for it. He may send some strength against me, but I can more easily evade him at sea than you can on land. If a blow is to fall, it will most likely fall upon you. Yet he cannot know you have bolstered your force with my Horane warriors, and now you have greater numbers than once you had. And you possess the sky-sword you have spoken of. It will tip the balance should you find yourself hard-pressed.”

Shath grunted, wondering if it were true. The weapon struck hardest against fixed positions and massed troops. If Kurux set his forces to attack from all sides in a deep woodland where he could not see where they stood, he would have a hard task to use it for a single great blow. A strike in forestland would start a fire, and his men might be as much a victim of that as their enemies. “It is not so simple as that, and he may yet have forces we have seen nothing of. As yet he has not turned his Skylords against us on the march, and I am certain he is readying a great counter-stroke.”

Ashari stretched. “I think we have taken him by surprise. He knew you were coming, but did not anticipate the power you brought with you, and he did not expect me to escape and come against him with the strength I have. Now we are combined, we are a great threat to him. Surely he will wish to check our advance, but even he, with all his might, cannot move men magically from one place to another. He must gather again the force he scattered in order to invade so many places at once. He spread himself too thinly, and now while he corrects that, we have the freedom to act.”

“Perhaps,” he said. He stood and paced, knowing there was no other course open to them, and knowing that was what made him uneasy. Kurux would know as well that they had to take the paths before them, so he would know where they were and where they were moving. He could choose the hour and the place for his counterattack.

Ashari caught his hand and drew him down beside her. “Now there is nothing more we can do. We have our plans and our worries and our burdens.” She reared up from where she lay and he felt the flicker of her tongue on his lips, bent and kissed her with heat and rising need. When she broke from him she smiled and showed her sharp little teeth. “Let us have our pleasures while we may.”

He gave way and lowered himself atop her, enticed by the smooth skin to be found between the golden chains and strings of jewels, of the silk that parted under his hands. With her, inside her, he found a pleasure he had almost forgotten, and it sustained him through the passes of the night.

o0o

The day was filled by low clouds and the rumble of thunder out over the ragged hills. Mist clung to the peaks and the vales, and Tathar flew above it all, watchful. He could see clearly the progress of the army below him as it made its way through the twisted valleys amid the trees. Even concealed beneath the boughs, the river of men and beasts was impossible to hide, and he saw they when they wound their way up from the deeps and spilled over the ridges.

He knew that from where they toiled they could not see ahead to the cloud arising over the cliffs, a cloud that was not mist or smoke but winged death heavy with envenomed stings. It came in from the sea, moving against the morning breeze, and he led his wing of riders to meet it, uncertain, but fixed of purpose. If they could not defeat many times their number they would not survive, but then if they could not prevail, they would have little value to potential allies.

They gained height, sweeping higher in the sky until the storm roiled below them, lit from within by flickers of lightning. He did not intend to engage the enemy on equal terms – he intended to strike them by ambush from within the storm itself, on wings out of the dark. All of his riders now held thunderlances; all of them had been given as much training in the use of them as he had been able to grant. They were not the Skylords he had once led to war, but they were young and filled with fire, ready to prove themselves and strike hard at their enemies. He tipped his lance, white fire playing on the tip, and he led them down in a deadly dive.

The wind began to scream past him, and he saw the riders leaving trails of mist behind them in the sky as the eagles all folded their wings and plummeted downward. The air buffeted his mask and whipped his leathers behind him like a banner. He held his lance upright and ready, poised to strike. The control of the weapon was all a matter of finesse and turns of the wrist. He feared his students would not be able to do their best in the heat of battle, and so he took more upon himself, and promised to be a ravening storm against the foe.

They plunged into the clouds, and everything vanished around him. He coaxed his lance to burn brighter so his riders could see it in the gloom and follow it, but he did not know if they could. Zakai pierced layers of cloud that flickered with fire, and then a hail of rain slashed into them and they burst through into open sky where the sting-tailed demons flew in their disordered mass. He saw them there, whole and entire, and for a moment he wondered at what was missing before he realized that not one of the things bore a rider.

Then there was no more time for looking, and Zakai slashed through rain and wind and he pointed his lance, calling down fire from the storm, and a bolt of brilliant blue lightning lashed outward and coursed through three of the devils, bursting them apart and sending them hurtling downward in smoking ruin.

Zakai screamed in battle-wrath and Tathar struck again and again, blasting the enemy apart with the dancing flickers of azure fire. Then he was joined, and lightning lit the sky as bright as day. The other riders swept down, striking clumsily but with murderous intent, and the storm became a battlefield.

The sky beasts scattered under the onslaught, howling their battle cries into the wind, and they threshed their great wings to rise and meet their enemies. The storm fought beast and eagle alike, and it was not easy to keep distance from the counterattack. Tathar saw the beasts close on two of his riders, saw the stings lash and strike, and the eagles fell, entangled with their enemies, lighting pursuing them downward.

He looked up as a shadow crossed him, and a great beast loomed close, claws outstretched to seize him from the sky. Zakai spun and met it talon to talon, and the world spun around them. The thing snapped its jaws at Tathar and he flinched back as the teeth slammed closed an arm’s reach from him. He had a moment when he knew the stinger would be coming in to kill his eagle, and then he struck.

The beast opened its jaws again and he flicked the lance upward, touching the tip to the roof of the fanged maw and sending a bolt of lighting shattering through it from end to end. The eyes burst and the skin turned black, and Zakai kicked free of the thing as it convulsed, let it fall into the swirling clouds below. His eagle screamed in fury, and he screamed as well, calling down the lightning to surround them both in a cage of light. Burning demons fell from the sky, and he smelled the stench of burning flesh in the whirlwind of battle.

o0o

Ashari watched from the prow of her warship, uneasy as the winds shifted. A storm thundered and billowed to the south, over the cliffs on the shore, and she was not certain if it would turn north out over the water. Her ships had to constantly shift their rigging as the prevailing breeze moved restlessly from quarter to quarter. There had been a great deal of thunder not long before, and even though it had died away, it left her disquieted. She sensed something at the edges of her perception, something that flicked her like the tip of a wing.

There was a cry from the lookout, and she turned to look at the sea ahead, seeking the sign of sails or the foam of other ships cutting the water. Instead she saw the waters heaving up as though driven from beneath. A wake rose up of something huge surging under the surface, rushing toward them, and she had a moment of blood-freezing fear before she cried out for the men to get to their war-stations. She saw the lead ships in the fleet beginning to turn aside, trying to get out of the path of the thing, but even now she could see they were going to be too late.

A scaled crest broke the water, and then the sea parted and something vast heaved itself up from the deep. Ashari saw a huge mouth dripping with glassine fangs, a frilled and spined skull with water sluicing off it as it burst out of the water. It rose higher and higher, seemingly too immense to be real. It sent the lead ships scattering, washed aside by the waves of its bulk. It splintered two of them with casual shrugs of its body, and she flinched as it bellowed into the afternoon sky.

She flung her mind outward, seeking to grasp and control it, but the mind she found was like a black, blank wall of stone, and she could find no purchase on it. It felt her, and she saw one vast yellow eye turn to look at her, the pupil shrinking as it tried to focus on something so small.

The fleet was scattering, trying to escape and simultaneously bring their siege weapons to bear. Ashari had no hope that iron-headed ballistae or flaming stones would deter such a leviathan. It was simply too big, and by the time they even wounded it, it would have torn them all asunder. She watched it come, like a doom out of lost times, all armored flesh and deadly teeth, and she swallowed bitter bile at the power that had sent it against her. She prepared herself to leap from the ship and swim for her life. Kurux would not be rid of her that easily.

Then thunder echoed overhead, and she looked up, saw blue lightning lace the sky and a swarm of black specks drop from on high and swoop downward, leaving trails in the air from sheer speed. For a moment she did not understand what she was seeing, and then she heard the distant scream of eagles and she knew, and her heart lifted inside her.

As of old, she watched the Skylords descend upon an enemy, and then they lit its brow with a crown of fire. Lightning traced over the lines of its scales and frills, and she saw smoke rise from the reptilian flesh. It bellowed and thrashed in the waves, sending forth swells that rocked under her feet. Eagles circled it, lancing it again and again with deadly stormfire. One of its eyes erupted and seared black, and then the thing gave a last roar and plunged again beneath the waters, vanishing into the gray deeps from which it did not return.

o0o

They met at sunset, the three of them. Ashari’s ship put into the harbor she found there, and Shath led his riders down from the hills, the sound of their war-songs echoing through the valleys and back from the high cliffs they soon left behind. All looked upward to the sky and saw the two dozen eagles come circling down from on high, wings wide and seeming to grow with every pass. Ashari knew the size of the birds of old, so she was not alarmed, but she saw and heard the wonder of those who followed her.

The great red eagle came in low, beating his wings, and then landed on the earth, digging great talons into the soft soil. The rider astride him was masked and his face hidden, and Ashari watched as he swung down from the saddle and stood before her with his deadly lance light in his hand.

When he drew off his mask she knew him, and she smiled. He looked older, and weathered by years of wind and cold, but he was Tathar who she had once known, and who once had allowed her to escape, and to live. She came down from her dais and went to meet him, drew him in and embraced him fiercely. “I never thought I would see you again. I never thought I would have the chance to thank you for what you did for me. And now in the hour of my need you come as from a legend to my side.” She touched his face. “Time has been hard on us all. I am glad to see you survived it.”

She stepped back as Shath emerged from among his riders and came down from the saddle. Tathar looked at him, and she remembered that these two had met before in battle. It seemed an age ago, but warriors remember.

“When I faced you before it was not a fair contest,” Tathar said. “I have held something in trust for you, and now my conscience bids me return it.” He took a long bundle from the side of his saddle, and when unwrapped she saw it was Shath’s old sword, the blade of ancient metal undimmed by time. Tathar held it forth in its scabbard, and Shath took it from him with unreadable emotion in his eyes.

“Will you fight for it again?” Shath said.

“I will not,” Tathar said. “It is yours, as are my riders. I too was driven out by the emperor, and now I am come to join with you in war against him. I did not know who led this force, but now I see I was right to come here. The empire must be overthrown, and Kurux slain and cast down. I have come to pledge my lance to that cause.” He looked at Shath. “Will you accept it?”

Shath drew forth his old sword, and for a moment something flickered in his eyes. He nodded, wordless, and held forth his hand of flesh and blood to clasp it with Tathar’s, and then Ashari laid her own hand atop them both. A shout went up from the hordes gathered around them, and the men on the ships gave cry as the eagles screamed their glory to the red sun. A sound rose up on all sides, and it called for the death of an empire.