Creatures of Light and Darkness by Roger Zelazny

Author:Roger Zelazny [Zelazny, Roger]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2011-11-19T03:10:35+00:00

Wrath of the Red Lady

Megra of Kalgan flees, half unseeing now, through the many-formed shapes of the crowd. As she moves, there comes up a new screaming, from out many throats. A cold, wild wind begins to blow among the colors and shapes of the fairground. Looking upward, she sees a sight that holds her eyes upon it and causes her feet to falter, there amid the buffeted tents and the flapping pennons.

It is the Steel General on the back of Bronze, riding. Downward he comes, slowing, slowing. She has read of him, heard of him, for he exists in the apocalyptic writings of all nations and peoples.

Behind her, a pavilion goes up in a burst of green flame. Now, as she watches, a green flare cuts the air, hovers, burns there.

The great beast Bronze changes his course, slowing, still slowing with each stride, as he descends upon the ruined pavilion where she had left Wakim and Madrak the warrior-priest to their combat. She looks back in that direction, but her height, within any crowd, prevents her seeing beyond whatever walls of humanity may be standing near.

Finally, the Steel General himself is lost to her sight, and she continues to push her way through the many-footed mass and toward the latest tent of death.

She calls upon her strength now to force a path where others would be left standing: she moves like a swimmer doing a breast stroke amid bodies large and many-limbed, machines with faces and feathers, women with blinking lights within their breasts, men with spurs at their joints, hordes of ordinary-appearing persons of the six races, a woman from whose blue thorax violin notes constantly emerge, coming now in a frantic crescendo which it hurts her ears to hear, and passes then by a man who carries his heart within a humming casket close against his side; she strikes a creature like an uncovered umbrella, which encircles her with a tentacle in its frenzy; now she pushes past a horde of pimply green dwarves, turns up an alleyway between pavilions, crosses an open place where the ground is hard-packed, caked with sawdust and straw; she moves between two more pavilions as a gradual diminishing of light begins to occur about her, and she strikes at a small flying thing which circles and gibbers around her head.

She turns then and regards a sight that is like nothing she has ever seen before.

There is a red chariot standing, with empty traces, still smoldering with the dust of the sky. Its wheels have dug deep ruts into the ground for a distance of perhaps three meters. Beyond that, there is no track.

Within the chariot stands the cloaked and veiled figure of a tall woman. A lock of her hair hangs down, the color of blood. Her right hand, almost as red as its nails, holds reins which are attached to nothing before the chariot. The flying, gibbering thing at which Megra had struck stands now upon this woman’s

shoulder, its leathery wings folded and invisible, its hairless tail twitching.

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