High King Urstone landed with a grunt.
“Gesht,” the high king whispered, casting a worried look into the sky. The word might have meant hurry, or follow me. Rhianna could not be certain, so she tried to do both.
She grasped the wings, held them over her head.
The high king leapt forward, shoved the metal prongs into her back, hard.
The pain that lanced through her drove a gasp from Rhianna’s lungs.
But the king spared her no sympathy. He raced to Fallion, took one look at him, and picked him up.
“Gesht! Gesht!” he hissed, and King Urstone leapt into the air, his wings flapping madly, trying to lug Fallion up along with his own bulk.
Wait for me, Rhianna thought forlornly. Her wings felt like dead weight on her shoulders, and she had to wipe away tears of pain.
She heard a shout off to her left, saw a trio of wyrmlings charging out of the darkness. Her own staff was at her feet, so she grabbed it and went sprinting along the wall, fleeing the wyrmlings. In a hundred yards, the wall ended.
Rhianna ran, swiped the tears of pain from her face, and tried furiously to flap the wings.
She had only gone fifty yards when she felt a tingling sensation as the wings came alive.
The heavy footfalls of wyrmling warriors closed in behind her, accompanied by the sounds of bone mail clanking.
Rhianna raced, fearing that at any moment a poison war dart would strike her square in the back, the way that one had with Jaz.
She peered upward, saw King Urstone flying high up the mountain toward a parapet.
A wyrmling roared at her back, came racing up with a burst of speed. Rhianna knew that she couldn’t outrun the monster, so she whirled to her right and leapt over the wall.
A wyrmling leapt after her and grabbed her right wing. She pulled free. The wyrmling plummeted with a scream.
Her wings were barely awake. She could feel blood surging through them, and she flapped frantically as she went into an uncontrolled spin.
She hit the ground with a thud some eighty feet below, her fall softened both by the flapping of her wings and a pile of dead bodies.
There were shouts off to the east. She heard a clang as an iron war dart bounced off the ground beside her.
Rhianna took off, running and flapping her wings feverishly, and then it seemed that some power outside herself took control of the wings, began forcing them to stretch forward and grasp the air in ways that she had not imagined, then pull downward and back, propelling her into the air. The wings had awakened.
Rhianna pumped furiously, aware that it was her own blood that sang through the veins of the wings, that it was her own energy that drove them.
It took great effort to get off of the ground. It was as hard as any race that she had ever run. Her heart hammered in her chest and blood throbbed through her veins as she took flight, but with a final leap she was in the air, her feet miraculously rising up from the ground.
She was boxed-in ahead. A two-story market rose up on one side, a sheer cliff face on the right. She flew to the market wall, batting her wings, and raised herself high enough so that she could grab onto the roof. With a burst of renewed fear, she clambered over the wall and rose into the air, flapping about clumsily like a new fledgling, grateful only to be alive and flying.
She wheeled about, heading upward, her heart pounding so hard that she grew light-headed. She had only one desire: to reach Fallion’s side.
Thunder drums roared and a deafening concussion blasted through the tunnels. Daylan Hammer, with his endowments of hearing, drew back from the door.
“King Urstone is flying up, bearing the wizard Fallion to safety,” the lookout called. “The wyrmlings have got battering rams.”
The thunder drums snarled, and from pedestals inside the iron door, archers shot arrows out through small kill holes.
There was a tremendous boom. Rocks cracked overhead; a split ran along the tunnel wall creating a seam, and pebbles and dust dribbled down. There were strange rumblings, the protests of stones stressed beyond the breaking point.
“Run!” Daylan warned. “The roof is going to collapse!” He whirled away from the great iron door, heard rocks sliding and tumbling outside, banging against the iron, sealing them in.
The warriors of the clan just stood, peering up at the widening rent. Time seemed to freeze.
Daylan could outpace them all, and right now he realized that he needed to do so. There would be no saving them if the roof came down.
“Flee,” he warned, hoping to save at least a few men, and then he darted between them, shoving men aside as lightly as possible, hoping not to throw them off balance.
A cave-in, he thought. This passage will be sealed, leaving only two entrances to defend.
By the time that most of the men had begun to react, he was thirty yards from the door and gaining speed. His ears warned when the rocks began to come down behind him.
He yearned to go back and dig out what men he could, but his duty was clear. Fallion Orden was of greater import than all the men in this cavern.
Vulgnash dropped from the wispy clouds, bits of ice stinging his face, and for a moment he just soared, floating almost in place as he studied the battle below. He was hidden up here, a shadow against the clouds.
Starlight shone upon Mount Luciare, turning the stone to dim shades of gray, almost luminous.
Distantly, he could hear the triumphant battle-cries of wyrmling troops, the rumble of thunder drums.
The city was in ruins. Mounds of dead men littered the streets between the lower gates and upper gates, and now the wyrmling troops had brought up battering rams and were attacking the great iron doors that sealed off the warrens.
Rents had opened up in the mountainside where great stone slabs had slid off, exposing some of the tunnels that had been dug into the mountain.
And there above the battle, a tiny set of wings fluttered clumsily.
It was no Knight Eternal flying there, he knew instantly. The wing-beats were ineffectual, and the body was too small to be one of his own kind. It was one of the small folk, a fledgling, new to wings!
Vulgnash knew that it was the custom among humans to claim wings won in battle.
If that small fledgling is not the wizard I seek, Vulgnash thought, it is one of his kin.
He studied its trajectory, saw where it flew-there, a parapet where another winged human lay wounded.
With a slight folding of the wings, Vulgnash went into a dive.
On the fifth level of the warrens, Alun raced up the gently sloping tunnel. Tiny thumb-lights, hanging from their pegs, lit the way like fallen stars.
But suddenly, the path ahead went black, and the smell of fresh air impinged on his consciousness. He’d found a rent. Part of the rock face had collapsed to his left, leaving the tunnel exposed.
And up ahead, the lights were all out.
He heard a distant wail, the death cry of an old man.
Alun raced past the rent, which was no more than twenty feet wide, and peered down. A hundred and fifty feet below, the wyrmling army crowded in the courtyard. A Death Lord stood at their head, a chilling specter whose form was so dark, it seemed that he sucked in all of the light nearby. There was a boom and the ground shivered beneath his feet, but there was no snarling as was found in the report of a thunder drum.
The wyrmlings had taken battering rams to the iron gates, the city’s last defenses.
“Hurry,” Warlord Madoc urged, racing past Alun.
Alun chased after Madoc, feeling naked, exposed to the sight of the troops below. The wyrmlings could not help but see them sprinting along the open cliff. But soon they were back in the darkened tunnels.
Madoc halted to light a thumb-lantern, and then they hurried ahead.