Mistress Of The Ages (In Her Name, Book 9) (6 page)

A head appeared over the wall, then a hundred more in but a few heartbeats. Enemy warriors dropped over the wall, shedding themselves of ropes and other unfamiliar accoutrements they had used to scale the sheer rock. Without pause, they hurled shrekkas at the shocked warriors and robed ones around them before charging forward, swords drawn. More continued to pour over the wall as the defenders rallied. The builders fell back as a thin line of acolytes and those of the priesthood rushed forward, desperate to push the attackers back over the edge before they could gain a firm hold.
 

“They scaled the face of the plateau,” Alena-Khan said, incredulous. “No one has ever done that before…”

“And so we did not think to be on guard,” Dara-Kol finished in a bitter voice. “But that is not our last worry.”
 

“What do you mean?”

Dara-Kol pointed to the sky. The rain had stopped for the moment and the dark clouds had thinned slightly, just enough to reveal the advancing shadows of dozens of enormous airships, coming in waves from all points of the compass.
 

“Those, I do not fear,” Alena-Khan told her. “I will take the rest of the priesthood with me to board the airships and destroy them. Then we will attack into the midst of Syr-Nagath’s forces and show them the meaning of fear. We have been on the defensive long enough. It is time to put our sword to the enemy’s throat. I give you command until my return.”

“No,” Dara-Kol told her. “Keel-Tath entrusted you with the temple’s defense, and I am not a priestess, let alone the most high. You are their leader now.”

Alena-Khan opened her mouth to argue, the slowly nodded. “It is as you say.” She left the Kal’ai-Il and called a group of seventeen priests and priestesses, who gathered in a semicircle around her. Alena-Khan briefly explained her plan, gesturing toward the approaching airships. They saluted her, and she returned the honor before they vanished into the sky.

***

Traveling through the frozen emptiness that stood between
here
and
there
came as naturally as walking or breathing now to Uhr-Nagan, one of the older priestesses of the Desh-Ka sent to attack the airships. It had not always been so. She had been terrified the first time she had used the power after she had become a priestess. It was not widely known among the acolytes, nor was it kept a guarded secret, but sometimes travelers through the ether disappeared, never to return. The Books of Time recorded some few who had been found sometime after they had disappeared, entombed in rock or ice. Like a sword, the gift of teleportation could be a powerful weapon in skilled hands, but acquiring that skill could be a deadly and sometimes terrifying process.

Choosing one’s destination was an act of mental visualization. Uhr-Nagan did not have to see where she wished to go with her eyes, or even her second sight, although that made the process easier. She simply had to picture in her mind where she wished to go, hold fast to the image, and will herself to be there. Despite the simplicity of the concept, to travel thus was not a natural act, or one that came easily. It required a great deal of mental discipline and mentoring to use it effectively.
 

In this case, she had chosen the nearest of the airships approaching the temple. The others of her hunting party had each chosen a different ship. She knew the craft were frail and the gas that lifted them into the sky, from the tales she had heard, was prone to burn at the least provocation. She could have chosen to simply materialize above the vessel and ignite the volatile gas with a bolt of cyan energy, but that was not the Way. The crew had come to give battle, and she would indulge them with sword and claw.

Whirling through the darkness in a space that was beyond time, beyond reckoning, eternity was reduced to an instant as she appeared on the bridge of the enemy airship.

“Welcome, priestess of the Desh-Ka.”

A warrior stood before her as if he had been awaiting her, his sword in his hand. A handful of others were clustered behind him. The gondola could have held over a hundred warriors, but only these few were here.

Then she noticed something else. His armor was battered and decrepit, as if it had not been tended by an armorer for many cycles. Looking more closely, she could see from the long braids coiled around his upper arm that one was missing. “You are an honorless one,” she said quietly, confused. The others, she saw, were the same.
Why would Syr-Nagath crew her precious airships with warriors such as these?

He bowed his head and saluted, as did the others with them. “No longer shall we be after this day,” he told her. “Syr-Nagath offered to restore our honor and our names in the Books of Time.”

“She would not do such a thing lightly.” No one would. It was exceptionally rare that honorless ones ever redeemed themselves.
 

He shook his head. “No, she would not.” Drawing himself up to his full height, displaying a measure of pride that Uhr-Nagan suspected he had not felt in a long time, he told her, “To die by the hand of a priestess of the Desh-Ka is a great honor, more than I or my companions could ever have hoped for. But an even greater honor would be to take your life. Behold, our names shall be restored in the name of the Ka’i-Nur.”

Only then did Uhr-Nagan notice the warrior at the far end of the compartment, who held a small torch in one hand. He met her gaze with great solemnity before dropping the torch into a small round opening in the deck.
 

The airship exploded.

***

Tara-Khan was knocked to the ground by the shockwave. The nearest of the airships, which by now was quite close, disappeared in an enormous fireball that scorched those on the trail with a surge of heat, followed by a rain of burning and smoking debris.
 

In the span of a single breath, sixteen other airships blew up, artificial suns that tore away the dark gloom of the clouds for a brief, terrifying time.
 

The three Desh-Ka who had been hacking away at the attackers fell to their knees, their cries of anguish carrying above the artificial thunder that rolled over the plateau.
 

Recovering from their own moment of shock, many of them transfixed by the horrific spectacle above, the horde of attackers swarmed toward the stunned priests and priestess.
 

“What…what…” Drakh-Nur, who like Tara-Khan had been knocked to the ground, could not get out any more than that as he stared at the unfolding disaster.

Tara-Khan got to his feet. Helping up Ka’i-Lohr, who was still shaking his head and blinking his eyes clear, Tara-Khan shoved them back down the trail. Running as fast as his exhausted legs would carry him, the battle lust in his blood rekindled into a roaring flame, Tara-Khan dashed past his two companions. Grabbing up a second sword from those that lay on the ground, left behind by the dead, he leaped over the writhing Desh-Ka and slammed into the first rank of the attacking warriors. With both blades whirling and slashing, he managed to hold them at bay for a few moments.

“Get them back to the temple!" he cried as the enemy warriors relentlessly drove him back.

Drakh-Nur stooped and picked up a priest in each arm, while Ka’i-Lohr leaned down and draped the priestess over his shoulder. The two of them turned and struggled back up the trail as Tara-Khan bought them time.

***

Dara-Kol felt as if she had been hit with a titanic war hammer, then hurled into a flaming pyre. The explosions had been bad enough, but she and the others of the Desh-Ka bloodline, including all who remained at the temple, had been cast into shock by the force of the sudden silencing in the Bloodsong of those of the priesthood who had attacked the airships. Those whose blood ran more true to the ancient lineage were affected far worse than those whose ancestors had chosen to forge a union with one of the other bloodlines. Few of Dara-Kol’s ancestors had strayed far from their ancestral home, and the deaths of the priests and priestesses paralyzed her. Lying on the dais, she stared into the flaming sky, watching the wreckage of the destroyed airships collapsing to the ground. The airships had been a cunning ruse to lure the Desh-Ka into a trap. The priests and priestesses had gone to meet the enemy and do battle with honor, all of them forgetting that Syr-Nagath had none.

“Mistress! Mistress!”
 

She blinked and moved her eyes to see the two young warriors, Kula-Me’ir and Ul-Gar, kneeling beside her. Black streaks of mourning crept down their cheeks below their eyes, and Dara-Kol could feel the sad warmth of her own mourning marks. “Help me up,” she rasped, reaching for them with shaking hands.

More pain lanced through her, as if a carrion eater were plucking chunks of flesh from her dead body. More priests and priestesses were taken from this life, killed before they could recover from their shock at the deaths of so many of their brothers and sisters.
 

Kula-Me’ir tugged at her. “Mistress, what is thy command? Alena-Khan lies dazed, unable to speak. What must we do?”

For the first time in Dara-Kol’s life, all hope fled from her. The ancient order of the Desh-Ka, the most powerful warriors among her kind who had ever lived, and the only power that might have been able to stand against the Dark Queen and the scourge of the Ka’i-Nur, was being destroyed. Everything she saw around her was cause for despair. The enemy warriors who had somehow scaled the face of the plateau were swarming against the dazed acolytes, who fought with desperate ferocity against ever mounting odds. Below, she could see the horde of the Dark Queen’s warriors advancing quickly up the trail, all resistance having been eliminated. And she did not need the second sight of a priestess to know that the warriors crossing the river to the north were now advancing with all haste, the approaches to the temple from that quarter now undefended after the five priests and priestesses there had been overcome. Above, another wave of airships drew closer, drawing about in a circle around the plateau. Even as she watched, weapon ports on the long gondolas snapped open. A cloud of hundreds of fist-sized globes of dazzling cyan shot out from the airships to rain down on the temple.
 

“
Take cover!
”
 

The order came from Alena-Khan, who had managed to struggle to her knees at the place where she had been standing after ordering the attack on the airships. A handful of others of the priesthood were with her, trying to shake off the effects of the emotional trauma they all had suffered.
 

Dara-Kol drove the two young warriors with her down behind the waist high wall that encircled the dais as the globes fell. But the wreckage of the temple offered no shelter from the deadly rain that came from all points of the compass. As the globes struck, the outer shell of glass shattered to release a cyan bolt of power not unlike that unleashed by the Desh-Ka. Stone was scorched, wood set aflame, and flesh incinerated wherever the globes landed. The temple grounds reverberated with the screams of the wounded and the dying. Many of those struck were among the robed ones, who flung their own bodies over the younglings to protect them. The barrage was indiscriminate: many of Syr-Nagath’s warriors who had scaled the face of the plateau fell victim, as well.
 

The Kal’ai-Il, at the center of the temple, was a convenient aiming point, and the ancient stone was pelted by dozens of the hellish weapons. Ul-Gar hissed as a bolt singed his leg and left a smoking hole in his metal armor, but he was the only one of the trio cowering there to suffer.

Braving the rain of projectiles, Alena-Khan stood and called the other surviving Desh-Ka to her. Forming a small circle facing outward, they reached their arms above their heads even as another volley of cyan globes was fired from the circling airships.

A web of cyan burst from their hands into the sky, higher than the great coliseum, but not so high as the airships. As it reached the apex Alena-Khan had chosen, the web arced outward and down, quickly forming a dome over the central part of the temple complex.
 

But along with the survivors of the Desh-Ka, many enemy warriors were now trapped within the protective dome of cyan fire. They fought toward Alena-Khan and the others at the center, who could not both defend themselves and maintain the temple’s shield.
 

An enemy warrior who had attacked over the wall drew back his arm to hurl a spear at Alena-Khan. Dara-Kol cried out a warning, but she had already used her own shrekkas and was helpless to interfere.

But a shrekka found him, taking off his spear arm.

As the body fell to the ground, Tara-Khan, Ka’i-Lohr, and Drakh-Nur came into sight at a full run from the direction of the trail’s entrance to the temple, two priests and a priestess in company. Tara-Khan did not bother to pause as he finished off the warrior, lopping his head from his body with his sword.

“With me,” Dara-Kol told the young warriors with her, and the three of them joined forces with Tara-Khan and his companions even as the priests and priestess rushed to reinforce Alena-Khan and the others. Dara-Kol gathered the surviving acolytes to form a protective ring around those of the priesthood and the robed ones sheltering the younglings, hammering back the enemy warriors trapped inside the defensive perimeter.
 

The second volley of cyan projectiles slammed into the protective dome, their discharges flaring white against the web of energy and to burn momentary holes through the dome. Alena-Khan and the others cried out in pain as the branches of lightning spitting from their hands flared. The flesh of their hands was singed and the armor of their gauntlets smoked from the unexpected heat.

As if sensing they were having an effect on the Desh-Ka, the airships closed in to orbit in a circle around the temple. The first wave was joined by a second that took up position at a slightly higher altitude. After a brief pause, the assembled fleet of over forty airships opened fire, launching over a hundred globes from each ship in a massive broadside.