Falconfar 01-Dark Lord (24 page)

He got sparks almost immediately, into his waiting, bone-dry tinder. He let it smolder until it caught, fed it more kindling, and then blew on it at just the right moment. His fire flared.

His hand went again to his belt, and drew forth a small metal token shaped like a coin. Twigs were snapping, now, and smoke began to rise as his blaze quickened. Taerith dropped the tantlar carefully into the heart of it and stepped back, drawing a dagger so he could cast a manydaggers spell if a Deldragon knight or servant burst into the room.

Then he waited, heart racing. Fear was raging in his dry mouth and pounding innards, but he had been an apprentice to Arlaghaun long enough to fear his master far more than intruding into a castle whose folk would probably seek to slay him on sight.

The fire freshened, building into a small, steady snapping of sparks and streaming of flame, smoke drifting out and away, stealing from the room out into the passage beyond.

And something ghostly started to appear in the air above the little fire. Shoulders, a helm-covered head... that head turning to glare, a raised sword slowly melting into view...

Faint and distant sounds arose, from far beyond the passage outside the door, and Taerith's head jerked up. Fast,
thump-thump-thump
sounds; someone in boots, running. No, several someones!

Getting closer fast. Deldragon's guards, for all the coins in Galath. Smoke does have a smell that carries...

Taerith raised the dagger in one hand, kissed it and then kissed his other hand, lifted that hand with the fingers curled just so, and waited.

They'd not use bows, not indoors, in such small, dark rooms. Wherefore he could afford to wait until just the right moment.

Which was...
now
!

A knight burst into the room, lantern waving wildly in hand, sword out and seeking the fire.

Taerith cast the spell, his first murmured words bringing the man's head snapping around to stare at him. The knight charged and Taerith stepped carefully away from the wall and fed him a stream of phantom daggers, blades of magical force flashing out like half a dozen arrows fired nose-to-tail to thud home in the man's throat arid face, shredding it into a red cloud and tatters of flesh.

The headless body ran on, stumbling, and Taerith kept walking, striding aside to let the dead knight collapse into the spot where he'd been standing.

The Dark Helm above his fire grew solid, muttered a curse, and hopped hastily out of the flames as Taerith made his daggers loop around the walls of the room, to await another foe.

Another foe came, and then another; two Deldragon knights burst through the doorway, waving their swords. They shouted a challenge to the Dark Helm and charged, even as a second Helm started to appear in the fire.

"Tantlar magic!" one of them shouted, and clawed a horn from his belt. Its call came out as a weak, wavering blurting as Taerith sent all of his flying daggers arrowing into the knight's neck from behind, almost severing his head. The other knight felled the Dark Helm and rushed at Taerith who fled along the wall, willing his conjured daggers to strike.

The second Dark Helm stepped out of the flames and lunged at the running knight, who struck aside the blade reaching for him, reeling and hopping to try to keep his balance. Taerith's daggers caught up with him as he regained it, parried the Helm's sword, and slashed his foe's head so hard that the helm went flying.

Those daggers sank home, and the Deldragon knight groaned, staggered, and went down, but when Taerith willed his flying weapons up and out of the dying man, their blades were dwindling and wreathed in swirling smoke; the magic of the spell was fading.

Another Helm was materializing above his fire already. Taerith hurried forward to nudge the logs closer into the flames and heard more shouts in the distance. They sounded like names; someone was calling for the missing knights, wanting to know what they'd found.

Well, strolling through the cellars to give them the answer "death" hardly seemed practical now, when they could be shown it firsthand.

Taerith grinned at his own gallows humour, daring to start enjoying this foray at last. The third Dark Helm stepped out of his fire, gave him a nod, and headed for the door, even as the shadow-shape of the fourth began to form above the flames.

A horn sounded, echoing from far off in the cellars, and Taerith lost his smile.

The tantlar wasn't bringing through his master's warriors fast enough to defeat a lot of knights. Oh, shit.

He had another teleport spell to take him home, but certain death at his master's hands awaited him if he used it now, with the task not done. The well to poison, all the other lesser apprentices to bring through, the entire keep to be scoured of magic items...

He had another manydaggers spell, too, and conjure armor that would slow swords striking at him, but not much else. If it came to fighting knights, he was doomed.

"No," Taerith hissed, fear starting to rise in his throat.

"Oh, yes," the fourth Dark Helm disagreed gleefully, shouldering past him into the passage beyond.

Taerith watched the fifth one slowly form with a growing sense of dismay. Too slow, much too slow...

The room was thick with smoke, now. Should he dump out the rest of the wood around the fire in a ring and move to another room?

Perhaps he could hide, and let the Dark Helms battle all the knights he could hear hurrying this way. Perhaps...

The passage lit up with the light of many lanterns, laced with racing shadows. Taerith cursed in earnest and hurried to the back of the room. He dare not teleport without putting up a proper fight. He discovered his hands were shaking just about the time the fifth Dark Helm charged at the door, the sixth appearing wraith-like above the freshening flames, and the doorway erupted in Deldragon knights, a dozen or more—yes, definitely more!

Taerith frantically cast his manydaggers spell and tried to destroy the faces of the foremost knights with his racing blades, as they swiftly and ruthlessly hacked down the fifth Dark Helm and swarmed forward, kicking the sack aside.

They were going to destroy the fire, they were going to—

There was a shrill, high, but oddly faint scream from those flames, as four or five Deldragon blades met in the still-forming sixth Dark Helm, who toppled sideways and faded from view. Taerith saw some of his racing daggers struck to the floor with swords, and stamped on to keep them there, as unsmiling men in armor closed in on him.

With trembling hands he ended the manydaggers magic and tried to cast his teleport spell, twisting desperately aside from the first sword thrusts.

"Farewell, Taerith," Arlaghaun's voice said quietly from his belt buckle.

Those dreaded words were the last thing the apprentice ever heard, as Falconfar exploded into bright crimson around him.

The explosion in
the cellars rocked the keep with a deep shuddering, blasting three Dark Helms at the other end of the tantlar to dust. In the cellars of Bowrock, what little was left of the ceiling cracked and fell into the whirling dust, spilling the contents of the storeroom above down into the deep pit that the cellar room had become. A few hands, fingers, and twisted fragments of sword blades bounced and rolled far down the passage from the riven room; in the room itself, nothing was left but roiling dust, busily adhering to cracked walls that were now covered with a red mist of blood.

Taerith Saeredarr had always wanted to make a splash in Falconfar, and he'd certainly achieved his fondest wish.

SWordguard Markoun Darfest's
head was ringing as if all the war-horns in Bowrock were blowing at once, close around him, and some how he kept staggering bruisingly into the wall. His sword-arm felt like it was on fire, just above his elbow, but when he stared at it he could see only blood and torn armor, no flames at all.

So he must be dazed, then, as well as wounded, and no wonder. He'd been far down the passage from the room where the firelight and all the fighting was taking place, at the back of a long line of Deldragon guards, but what a blast!

He'd been hurled back and around a corner, smashing into the roof of the passage, with his fellow guards all around him in a meaty tangle that had shielded him even as their bones and helmed heads shattered and crunched around him. They had died, all of them, leaving only him to stagger out of the slaughter.

Nothing could have survived that blast, nothing. Yet his orders were clear: "Find out what lurking foe is down there, slay or capture, and report back." There was no one left to find out anything but him, now.

Markoun rebounded off the wall one more time, shook his head ruefully, and devoted all of his effort to walking down the rubble-strewn passage without kissing its walls every fifth or sixth step.

He managed it, and was quite proud of himself as he left the shattered rooms behind, certain that no foe was still alive to do anything to anyone. A few more limping strides brought him to the passage-moot where a left turn would take him to stairs up, when something sharp and sudden and cold as ice slid across his throat, leaving him breathing only blood.

As his choking started and his slayer dragged his head ruthlessly around, Markoun Darfest found himself staring helplessly at the helmed and visored head of a Dark Helm, thrust forward almost nose-to-nose with him.

There was a malicious grin behind that gleaming black metal; Markoun could feel it. As the darkness rushed in, the last thing he saw was a fire in a cellar room behind the Dark Helm's shoulder, and Dark Helm after Dark Helm striding out of it.

Rod Everlar was
lying on a vast and very comfortable bed, dozing in the largest, fluffiest bathrobe or "warming-robe," if he'd caught Tay's murmurings properly, he'd ever encountered. Dozing, but hoping he'd not fall really asleep. '

He was waiting for Taeauna to finish in the big round pool of smooth stone that served guests housed in these chambers as a bathtub. He sorely needed a bath of his own.

Earlier, she'd been splashing and murmuring in contentment, and Rod had half-hoped she'd call him in to help her scrub or wash her hair, but she'd settled down to mere occasional sighs of contentment. He suspected she was dozing, too.

Ah, well, at least they weren't—

From behind the wall just to Rod's left, there came a short, choked-off cry, followed by some heavy thuds and bumps.

A man being murdered, inside the wall? That's certainly what it sounded like.

The bathroom erupted in a sudden crash of sheeting water, and Taeauna burst out into the bedchamber, bare and dripping.

"Get dressed and armed, now!" she snapped, snatching up her sword from where she'd laid it ready on the bed. "Throw me your robe; I'll dry myself with that!"

Heart pounding, Rod scrambled to obey.

No
banners fluttered
from the turret-tops of Galathguard, and no horns rang out in greeting. The gates stood open with no sign of guards or any living person within, at all.

Birds darted, perched, and flew as if there were no humans near, and a lone, statue-like perched vaugril was the only living thing visible on the battlements.

As Baron Margral Nyghtshield and his bodyguard of knights rode in through the grand gate and looked around at dark doorways, the hooves of their horses echoed back emptiness. Weeds and saplings sprouted amid the stones, and no servants came running, no one stood watching; there was not one stick of furniture or a lantern in sight.

"Looks like a ruin," Nyghtshield muttered to his shield-knight, peering about with the one eye he had left; the battle that had robbed him of the other was so long ago that he'd almost forgotten it. He hadn't, however, forgotten the shambles that the once-grand Galathgard had become. "Even worse than before."

The knight pointed to a distant gaping archway. "We're not the first here, lord."

"Oh? How so?"

"Horse dung. Fresh. There, just inside the arch."

"Hmmph. Eve seen better stables." The baron urged his horse forward at a careful walk; the shield-knight turned, waved a swift signal, and watched knights dismount and trot ahead, one of them stepping away from the horses to ready and light a lantern.

Galathgard certainly wasn't the most welcoming of royal palaces.