Falconfar 01-Dark Lord (48 page)

God, he was a lousy artist. What was he trying to do, entertain himself with bad cartoons? Writing was what he did, and writing was what he was good at. Wherefore...

"Korgrath Foehammer was an even surlier dwarf than most," he scribbled, "and this day was not a good day. But then, days for Korgrath seldom were..."

The fresh sentinel
trudging forward to begin the next watch nodded to the gruff old dwarf he was replacing. "Anything?"

"Naught."

"Korgrath in a temper?"

"No more'n usual," came the very dry reply, delivered with a knowing look as Auld Orvran lurched on his way. "He might not gnaw your nose off, if you keep to yerself an' far enough away."

Baurgar grinned and went on out through the arch, to join Korgrath Foehammer on the high ledge. It would have been astonishing news if Korgrath wasn't snarly and surly. Korgrath lived his life out in a standing bad temper.

"I'm here," he said in polite greeting, coming around to where Korgrath could see him.

"Get out of my watch-view, dolt," the Foehammer snarled, eyes still fixed on the endless, unchanging vista of brown, needle-sharp mountains thrusting up into the sky. Not even greatfangs were witless enough to come near Stonebold, anymore. "Hard to watch for foes with you standing in the way like a brainless heap of meat."

Baurgar had already started moving aside, silently mouthing Korgrath's all-too-familiar words as they were uttered, until his gaze happened to fall on the Foehammer's shield.

"New blazon, Foehammer?" he asked, startled. This was a change, and Korgrath never changed. The shield looked the same as it had yestereve; the same dents, the same scratches. The arms painted on it were neither new nor bright, yet they were different: a pick shattering a stone in two had become two crossed hammers.

"What foolishness speak you?" Korgrath snapped, glaring at Baurgar and then down at the shield. "I've not..."

He fell silent, staring open-mouthed at the crossed hammers.

Then he looked up at Baurgar again, an unfriendly glare that became something far more dangerous as his eyes narrowed under bristling brows. "Have you dared to work magic here? On watch, before the very gates of Stonebold?"

Baurgar stared steadily back at him. "As if I can afford any magic, let alone wield it! No doing of mine, Foehammer. On the name of my house I swear this."

Korgrath stared into his face for a long and silent time, and then nodded, slowly.

Then he looked down at his shield again. "I believe you. Which means a thing more: I have to say I know not at all how these crossed hammers came to be here."

Then he went pale, and Baurgar went pale with him, as the same thought came to them.

What came out of Korgrath's jaws was a stream of low, fierce, and biting oaths.

What came out of Baurgar's mouth was the murmur, "There's a Shaper at work in Falconfar."

Klammert clawed his
way up a wall that seemed to be leaning this way and then that, and allowed himself a groan. "Master?" he mumbled. Arlaghaun had been summoning him...

There was a splitting agony in his head, and sharp stabbing pains in his neck. He groaned again, and clung to the wall. There were some healing magics hidden in a room down
that
hall, if he was remembering rightly.

Into every life, a little pain must fall. Why, by the Falcon, did it fall into his so abundantly?

Rod's stomach growled
suddenly, reminding him of its emptiness. Hmm. How long had he been sitting here?

He looked down at the quill in his hand, and the words he'd just written: "The storm that swept now across the Sea of Storms was a lightning bolt-hurling chaos of flashing, glowing skies and a roiling of waves like so many uncounted storms before it..."

He sat back from the book and blinked. Where was he, anyway? How had he come here?"

He blinked again, and when he next became aware of himself, he was writing something else: "There was a beast that hunted lorn, a great black leathery thing of bat-wings and ripping jaws and three-taloned feet, but for centuries it had slept in its own shape, one more ornamental gargoyle among the rest, on the battlements of Dorn Keep. Now it was awake, and great was its hunger..."

The cloud of
lorn streaked toward Bowrock, eager to rage along its battlements plucking off heads and disembowelling knights and armsmen. They hissed jests and sneering comments about the oh-so-proud, yet oh-so-feeble warriors who served Deldragon, and taunted that they wouldn't still be alive to do so by sunset. None of them bothered to fly rearguard or watch with any care; dragons were so rare as to be nigh-mythical, these days, and besides were far too large to approach unseen, and nothing else in all Falconfar was left to defy lorn this high in the skies.

Wherefore the grotesque dark, sinuous thing of many jaws, many pairs of bat-wings, and many claws, all joined together in a disorderly string of bobbing limbs and muscled bulk, rose unregarded from among the dark and endless trees to ascend and follow the lorn. It looked too ungainly to stay aloft, let alone manage any speed through the skies, but its wings carried it with uncanny speed up above the cloud of lorn and into their bright-blinded spot, where looking back would mean gazing into the sun.

And then it really started to fly.

The dozen or so lorn at the rear vanished into those jaws without fuss or outcry. By the time the rest noticed something was amiss, and wheeled to see what it was and give battle, a second dozen had been devoured.

Learning what little they could do against this strange nightmare of a foe cost the lorn a score of their remaining strength.

Learning that they couldn't flee from it by outflying it cost the rest of the lorn their lives.

But then, truly wise lorn have always been a rarity.

So
this wasn't
godhood, this being a Shaper. Rod Everlar didn't sit down and deliberately decide to write that Arlaghaun's hands, manhood, and head all abruptly fell off, and then sit and watch some great magic instantly make that happen. Whatever he wrote seemed to pour out of him without his having any conscious control over it at all.

So what would happen when he dreamed? Did he reshape Falconfar, or did it whisper instructions to him?

Glorking bloody sh...

Rod shook his head in exasperation, and flipped back through the book. There were all his sketches—heads of beautiful women he didn't even know, though he supposed they were now walking around Falconfar or perhaps even rising from tombs they'd been sadly put in—and the dwarf by the archway, and then page after page of scribbled text. Eight pages in all, so little of the blank book that it scarcely showed as a page-thickness, around the edges.

Rod shook his head and yawned. Whoa, did he feel tired, suddenly. No longer cold, not at all, but bone-weary. So was it all the running and fighting? The grieving? Or was Shaping inherently exhausting?

Or had he just been sitting here for a long, long time, and didn't know it? The moment he'd sat down, a faint, warm glow had started to occur in the air, like lantern light, and it was still there above him, the air amber to golden, as he glanced at it.

He caught himself yawning again, and shook his head. This would never do; if he was going to fall asleep, he needed someplace to lie down that was safe from... creeping shed human skins and... and...

Huh. This room was the safest, most comfortable place he'd found yet in Yintaerghast, and he suspected that if he got off the stool, he'd be wobbling-legged weary, far too tired to even safely walk around the castle, let alone face monsters and traps and Falconfar knew what else...

Rod moved the quill back into position in the line in midair, and let go of it. It floated in the air, rather than falling. Cool.

He took hold of it, waved it around, and put it back in the air again. It floated serenely, as before.

He smiled at it... and that was the last thing he remembered doing...

Dust drifted across
a dark floor in Yintaerghast, gathering into a serpentine line whose drifting
hiss
was so soft that an awake and warily alert warrior would not have heard it, let alone someone cozened by enchantment, who was now slumped over an open book at a writing desk, snoring gently.

The dust went on gathering unhurriedly, until it had built into a heap about the height of a large man's fist. Then it stirred, swirling into the air in a slow and silent spiral that outlined the ghostly figure of a tall, thin, bearded man who towered over the sleeping Rod Everlar, growing slowly more solid.

The face that watched the sleeping writer was at first just an oval with hints of two eyesockets, then something that had a nose, a long, strong nose, with bristling black brows above, and a bald pate above that...

A soft smile was clear upon that face long before it had features enough to tell an observer who'd been alive for centuries—had there been any such entity present—that the dust had taken on the semblance of the long-dead Lord Archwizard of Falconfar.

Red eyes, burning with power. The eyes of Lorontar, the builder of Yintaerghast, called by some the Smiling Tyrant.

Then the dust slowly sank down again, for undead shadows skulk best when they keep hidden from those they stalk. The dust scattered and faded, still smiling.

The guardians were
gathering in such numbers—striding, rattling, and flying down every passage to the hall, and coming yet—that Dauntra and Juskra were now panting as they fought. The beautiful Aumrarr and her fierce, scarred sister were almost too winded from their hewing to gasp, "Lorlarra! Aid! We grow weary, and they tire not! Still they come!"

Dark-armored Lorlarra had just turned from the mirror to fly up and answer their plea, hefting her mace in one hand and her bright blade in the other, when Ambrelle, who was still staring into the depths of the glass, cried out, "Sisters mine! Let us tarry here no longer. I've found something far more desirable to slay than nigh-mindless enchanted minions. Come! To the gates!"

She soared up on high, but each of the younger Aumrarr swooped down and past the mirror to see for themselves before they rose to join her in a flapping, excited cloud, taking up the cry, "To the gates! To the gates!"

Through guardians large and small, seeking battle or lying defeated, the four winged women raced, seeking a good gate to plunge through.

Rod Everlar found
himself abruptly back in front of the writing desk, blinking. He'd been striding through the castle like a conqueror, parting walls at a touch and causing pillars to swing open by his very approach, to yield up to him glowing swords and gauntlets, wristlets and scepters, and—and something he didn't know the name of, that he'd been holding up and staring at a moment ago...

Dreaming. He must have been dreaming. So none. of those beautiful glowing things were real. He was sure the items were magical. He sighed sadly; beautiful glowing things never were real, were they?

Or were they? Were the dreams this castle's way of telling him where its treasures were hidden?

Magic had been at work on him from the moment he'd first stepped inside Yintaerghast.

Excitedly Rod slid off the stool—finding himself just a little stiff—and strode out of that hidden chamber, pausing apprehensively only for a moment when its walls closed up again behind him. In the dreams, he'd walked past the throne and across its room, and a pillar had yawned open to offer him a scepter floating above a sword.

In front of him, a pillar opened to do just that. Shaking his head in bemusement, Rod took hold of both floating items without hesitation, feeling tinglings crawling up his arm from their power.

He hefted the sword, and the tingling rose into almost a song.

"Wow," he murmured, feeling power course through his arms. "Rod Everlar, dragon slayer."

A wall across the room opened, and something yellow-eyed and baleful slunk in. It looked something like a crocodile, and it was big. As it waddled purposefully toward him, Rod backed uncertainly away.

This certainly hadn't been in the dream.

In a room in
Ult Tower far from battling guardians, a tall and handsome man stood before a glowing mirror, sound asleep. Far away across Falconfar, on the other side of that glow, a Doom was watching approvingly. A scaly, blue-skinned Doom.

"Whole again, entirely healed," the wizard Narmarkoun murmured. "And my pawn, though you'll know it not until the right time comes, and I force you to do my bidding. You may thank me."

"My... deepest... thanks," the sleeping man mumbled, his words evoking gentle chiming that told Narmarkoun the spell was done, and the mind-link sealed.

Still asleep, the healed man turned from the mirror and lurched stiffly across the room, awakening just as the gate that would take him to Bowrock claimed him.

After all, it wouldn't do for Velduke Darendarr Deldragon to march into his own besieged home fast asleep and snoring.