Robert Vardeman - Istu awakened

No light defiled the sacred darkness of the chamber cruelly gouged from the mountain's interior. With a sense that was not sight, the gathered worshippers knew the presence of their priest and leader, resplendent in his long robes of pallid, fine-textured leather and headdress of obsidian and iridescent green metal. They perceived not the colors of Light, which were a lie; they knew the subtle shades of blackness.

The priest raised a strong hand and spoke to heads bowed in dark communion.

'In the secret places of the Mountain,' he intoned, 'pent in the stone that flows like water, that burns without the foulness of Light, the mother fluid of our race, there beats' Ritually, he paused. At once came back the ringing answer; 'A Heart!' 'Our Heart.' Another pause, then, 'And it is lost to us.'

'Lost!' The word scored the soul with a keening of pain honed fine by the grinding centuries. 'But when shall we forget?' 'When the Great Dark ceases to fill the space between the stars.'

He nodded gravely. The blackness he wore like a shroud about him brightened in the non-vision of the faithful as he built to the climax of the ancient ceremony.

'But know you it shall be returned to us, and its power will again pulse through the veins of our People.' 'So shall it be!'

'And when that time comes, what will be our destiny?' 'To conquer!' The intensity of the shout caused the cavern walls to tremble. 'And when,' he asked, growing in size and power as he spoke the climactic words of liturgy, 'shall our time come?'

Eleven-score and ten mouths opened to give the final response. But no sound came. The subterranean chill of the chamber grew colder still, and an icy wind swept over the worshippers, a wind from nowhere, like the wind that blows between the stars.

His eyes widened in mingled fear and religious ecstasy, muscles cording in great knots on his neck and back, the leader-priest felt the nearness of a Presence his kind had not known for ten thousand years.

The Dark Ones' time came again.

Far to the southwest, the mountain Omizantrim trembled. Across long years it had built itself in fitful vomits of core-stuff from the planet until it stood thus, a black fang piercing the sky. Now it jetted a cloud of boiling hot ash and smoke, a roiling blackness shot through with flame and vivid lightning. A herdsman watching his flock of one-horned deer grazing the short grass that clung to the lower slopes of the mountain, was caught by surprise. He screamed as the awful heat enveloped him, boiling water from his tissues in an instant, mingling volcanic cloud and human body in the deadly stew.

The cloud rolled on, leaving the herdsman with his charges, now turned to gray ash statues scattered randomly on a lifeless hillside. The folk who dwelt lower on the slopes were luckier. They saw the cloud spew into the night like venom from a serpent's fang and retreated to special shelters dug in the cooled lava flows that jutted from the mountain like diseased roots.

Others, farther away, viewed the eruption with foreboding. Timid and wise alike made signs in the air and muttered fervent prayers to personal deities. But the wise were little comforted by their godly importunings. They knew that Those whose voice spoke through Omizantrim were mightier by far than the gods of Earth.

Farther south, all lights were extinguished at once in a City whose foundations rested on nothing more solid than the air itself. The Sky City's new queen, celebrating her fresh victory over her hated sister and rival to the throne, felt outrage welling within her breast. She sat in her great entertainment hall watching a subtle and sophisticated drama involving a half-dozen stalwart and naked young men, an assortment of implements of curious design and even more curious function, and a lovely young girl of a house which had dared oppose the queen's succession. The girl's screams marking that part of the program which the queen awaited most eagerly had only begun to echo through the hall when darkness fell abruptly.

Her pleasure thwarted, the queen ordered a hundred of the stewards of the Palace of the Winds, whose job it was to keep the lamps trimmed and filled with oil, exiled from the City in the Sky. The Palace Guard herded the unfortunates down the ancient avenue paved with skulls of past rulers toward the center of the City. Wailing, weeping, pleading for forgiveness, the stewards huddled at the lip of the Skywell. Her nakedness wrapped only in a lush fur robe, the queen had made a quick inspection of her City. In spite of the great festival she had decreed celebrating the victory at Chanobit Creek, she saw no lights. It meant that greater powers were loosed.

But it would not suit the majesty of the new queen to be indecisive and revoke the punishment she had commanded. Besides, having been cheated of the climax to which her private diversion had been building, she felt the aching need for some other release. The mass exiling would serve; the short walk from the Palace had made her sleek body hum with anticipation. A single hand gesture sent a hundred men screaming to their deaths on the snowy prairie a thousand feet below.

Later, when the drugged wine she had imbibed as part of her evening's merriment wore off, she wondered again why the lights had gone out all over the City. No comforting answer came.

And in that dark womb far to the north, the air began to vibrate and formed a single word from nothingness. That one word was the answer, the promise, the exaltation, the vindication of millennial faith.

The word was: Soon.

'Your Highness, Your Highness,' called the dishevelled youth. The knight was young, his cheeks hardly touched with downy beard. Tears rolled unnoticed down his dirty face. It was not merely the unendurable anguish of defeat that made him weep. Only an hour or so ago he had seen the loveliest face he had ever known snarling at him over the hilt of a Highgrass dog rider's saber. The tradition of chivalry dinned into him over a lifetime of training had almost stayed his hand, but loyalty to his princess and the ages-old urge to save his own life had acted with a will of their own. He had heard his own voice cry out in terror as his bright, straight blade hacked the woman's face into a ruin of blood, brains and gleaming bone.

He had passed the test he, like so many other warriors young and unblooded, dreaded above all: he had faced mortal danger and had not flinched. But he wondered if he had not failed another test in the same moment.

'We've brought you failure and disgrace,' the youth almost sobbed. 'How can we restore to you what our worthlessness has lost?'

Moriana Etuul brushed a strand of red-gold hair from her eyes and sadly shook her head. She gazed past the young knight at the man lying exhausted and in dubious safety beside the broad race of Chanobit Creek. The day had dawned as if especially tailored by this man. The sky had been filled with low clouds lying in a cool white blanket on the land to keep the bird riders grounded and out of the fray. Without their most deadly weapon, the Sky City soldiers would prove easy prey. Believing this, Darl Rhadaman, Count-Duke of Harmis, had taken the forefront with his sword held high, the eerily diffuse milky early light glinting from his sword's keen edge and the mirror-bright steel of his breastplate. Then, his face had been alive and almost boyish with the certainty that he fought for right and would triumph in its cause. Now his sword was nicked and blunted, his armor so hacked that the deep metallic cuts already scabbed red with rust in the damp air. Dull eyes stared out of a face as listless as a slab of meat on the butcher's block.

His brown eyes met her green ones, but no contact was made. Pity welled in her heart for him. It had meant far more than his life to him to bring victory for his Bright Princess, as he called her. Now, defeated, he faced her beneath budding branches ripe with the promise of spring and renewed life. The contrast tore at Moriana's emotions. If the battle had not been lost, Moriana would now be Queen of the Sky City, instead of her sister.