Falconfar 01-Dark Lord (7 page)

Before he could reply, she added, "Ah," in far more interested tones, and plucked something small out of hiding. It looked like the sort of tiny box jewelry store purchases came in, only of smooth-polished wood.

And then she'd slipped past him as smoothly as any snake and was heading out the door again, into the death-filled garden. Rod followed, wanting to ask her what she was doing but wise enough to hold his tongue. For now, at least.

Taeauna headed straight for a body Rod hadn't noticed before amid all the others, an Aumrarr on her knees with both hands thrown up in front of her, her face twisted and her mouth frozen open in a shouting position. There was something unnatural about this corpse; Rod stared at it.

Of course. Twisted like that, and rearing back on its knees, it should have fallen over. Something— magic?—must be holding it up, frozen in its contortion.

"Taeauna..." Rod burst out, because he could keep quiet no longer.

"Tried that blade yet?"

"Tay..."

The woman who'd brought him to Falconfar drew in a deep breath, and then said quietly, "This was Marintra. One of my closest..."

Her voice trailed away, and without saying more, she turned abruptly and thrust the wooden box into his hands. Rod dropped the sword as he fumbled with it, hissed a hasty apology, and then got it open.

He was staring at two flat, smooth stones. Nondescript beach pebbles, or more likely streambed stones, if they'd come from anywhere around here. Rod touched one of them with his finger, and a tiny swirl of sparks arose from the stone, to fade away almost immediately.

Which meant that these must be the Holdoncorp creations known as speech-stones. Placed on the tongue of a corpse, each of them would work but once, making the dead say again the last words they uttered when alive.

He nodded gravely and handed the open box back. "She died shouting something that'll be useful to us, you think?"

Taeauna's face was as calm as her voice. Only the fire raging deep in the shadows in her eyes betrayed her fury. "I hope. And no vaugril has yet been at her tongue."

She turned, took one of the stones, and with slow, gentle care laid it in Marintra's mouth.

They saw that pale throat quiver, cords standing out anew, and the flesh around her mouth seemed to creep, as if starting to move with slow reluctance. Then the dead mouth filled with dancing sparks, and moved normally.

The sobbing groan was slow and deep, but its words were quite clear: "Arlaghaun, I die cursing you! By my blood, wizard, may you die a worse death than mine own!"

The sparks promptly died, and the stone was gone. Marintra went on glaring at no one, but her jaw now hung slack.

More so as not to have to look at Marintra for any longer, Rod turned to Taeauna. "I guess... we'll be hunting Arlaghaun now... right?"

Taeauna looked back at him, her face as smooth as stone, and observed quietly, "You're good at guessing things, Lord Archwizard."

Something in her tone made Rod shiver again.

Silently, she turned away and walked back into Highcrag.

The new chains
were finer, and tinkled almost more than they rattled when she moved.

The sharp-nosed man in gray smiled approvingly as she came into his many-shadowed study, the angry fire in his brown eyes ebbing, and she took that as a sign to scramble up from her knees to take and kiss his hand, letting her long, honey-blonde hair trail across it first; she knew he liked that. The web of chains joining her wrists to her ankles chimed, and the spells it bore made it wink and flash in the gloom of the old stone room.

"You're troubled, master," she murmured. "Can I help? In any way?"

At another time, her hopeful purr and those ice-blue, almost pleading eyes might have distracted him, but just now the wizard's thoughts

were ensnared, returning again and again to that strange stirring last night, that
flow
of force...

Like magic, but not magic. What
was
it?

Something new, something he'd never felt before. Like the fabled storm-dreams of the Shapers, the tumults that led ignorant fools to call the strongest Shaper "Lord Archwizard," when Shapers weren't really wizards at all.

Whatever it was, he must find it and tame it. His rivals couldn't have failed to feel it, and if one of them came to wield it, he could be doomed as surely as if he'd never mastered a single spell, but proclaimed himself king of all Falconfar with nothing to defend himself but a smile.

As empty as the smile he was smiling now.

There were some
very artful hiding places in Highcrag, Rod Everlar mused, some hours later. Taeauna knew them all, of course, and was rapidly assembling a pile of small, useful-looking things that seemed too large for their laedlen. When he started to point this out, she reminded him that he still hadn't tried that second sword he was carrying along in her wake. And then she'd gone into a side-chamber and come out with a pair of dark leather thigh-high boots, all laces and feminine points, and tossed them to him with the words, "These should be your size, and far more comfortable than what you're wearing."

Taeauna was foraging for food, too, but no matter what she sought, she mainly found death. Death and more death.

Messily slain Aumrarr were everywhere, long limbs draped over chairs and beds and splintered tables. When one corpse shocked Rod into audible disgust, Taeauna threw him a decanter of wine and told him to drink only a single swallow.

Rod watched her tireless peering and gathering, and wondered when she was going to snap.

If he was in the way, whenever it happened, he was doomed. She could carve him up in an easy instant, probably without even slowing down in her opening of wardrobes and tossing items onto beds.

And then, quite suddenly, she was plucking at his sleeve and dragging him back toward the rooms where she'd assembled the largest piles of items.

"We must be well away from here before night falls. Beasts will come that we'll not want to meet; too many of them."

Rod nodded and hurried after her. A deep anger was rising to choke him, and he felt so sick at what he'd seen that he could barely imagine what Taeauna must be feeling. This was her home; these were her friends...

Dead, every last one of them.

"Tae... Taeauna? Is... Are you the last Aumrarr?"

The wingless woman whirled around so swiftly he shouted in alarm, but all she said was, "I hope not. Not all of my sisters are here. Unless some lie dead in the rocks beyond the gardens that I've not seen yet. I'm not inclined to go looking. Hasten."

Rod knelt and started scooping items into his laedre, his new boots squeaking. Idly, as he stowed and stuffed, he wondered how ridiculous he looked. There'd been a tall oval of brightly polished metal mounted on the sloping front of a mountainous wardrobe in one of the rooms, pretty close to what was sometimes called a "cheval glass" in some of the arty furniture catalogs that came in the mail, hut he hadn't much wanted to look at himself.

A mutter of disgust came from close behind him, and one of Taeauna's long arms reached past him into his sack, to pluck something out that he'd just put in there.

"Taeauna," Rod said then, watching her long fingers emerge with something small and metallic that he couldn't begin to identify, "there are..."

He didn't know how to say this, but he had to try. "There are things about Falconfar that I hate. Butchery like this. The wizards. The Dark Helms, and the suspicion. If my books—my dreams—can change Falconfar,
how
? How can I control things, to make just the changes I want?"

In the lengthening silence that followed, her other hand took hold of his shoulder, and turned him gently.

"Lord Archwizard," Taeauna of the Aumrarr whispered, tears glimmering in her emerald eyes as they faced each other nose-to-nose, "I... I don't know."

They spent that
night high in the mountains, huddled together in a crevice. Both were wrapped in their own blankets, which did little to make the rocks they were lying on less sharp and unyieldingly hard. Taeauna used a sling made of the sword belts she'd brought from Highcrag to bind the rolled blankets together around her shoulders, and with this crude aid, pulled large stones into the mouth of the crevice, to partly wall it closed.

"Wolves?" Rod had asked, as he chinked the big stones by wedging little ones around them, as he was instructed.

"Worse," she'd told him tersely, and he hadn't felt like asking further. Taeauna had used something from Highcrag that was like a tall metal tankard—only it was as tall as the length of her forearm—to scoop up water from a mountain spring. That and a few berries eaten in grim silence had been their supper, and immediately after that Taeauna had gone to relieve herself and then returned to curtly order him to do the same. He'd been startled, returning to the crevice, to see her standing atop the rocks above it with her sword drawn, obviously having watched over him, but she said not a word as they secured the last rocks in place to wall themselves in, and rolled into their blankets.

Taeauna had fallen asleep almost immediately, but started to whisper names and weep softly. Rod had lain beside her staring up into the darkness, wondering if he should reach out to comfort her, and sleep had been a long time coming for him.

He'd come awake suddenly, later, when the darkness outside the gap-studded wall of rocks was absolute, and something with an unpleasant smell, a low and rumbling growl, and long claws that scratched on stone had nosed around just outside.

It had thrust a snout—at least, Rod assumed it was a snout, though it was too dark to see a thing—between two of the stones they'd wedged, and Taeauna had calmly and silently thrust her sword deep into it, held firm to her steel as it shrieked and clawed wildly at the stones, sending some of them tumbling down her body and bouncing off Rod's blanketed shins, and then gone right back to sleep again.

Her soft weeping awakened him again, later, but when he'd put out a tentative hand to touch her shoulder comfortingly, the cold steel of the flat of her blade had slapped his wrist firmly, and she'd said quietly, "No, Dark Lord."

"Sorry," Rod had whispered into the darkness, drawing his hand hastily back into the meager warmth of his blankets. She'd made no reply.

And now it was morning, and colder than ever, and he was blinking as his breath drifted past his nose like mist, and Taeauna's emerald eyes were regarding him with something like contempt and something like pity.

"Lord Archwizard, reporting for duty," Rod tried to joke.

Her face might have been carved from stone, it remained so expressionless, as she slapped his stiff and aching crotch with the back of her hand and ordered, "Relieve yourself. I'll stand guard. We have much country to walk this day."

He did sorely need to empty his bladder, and rolled out of his blankets into the frigid morning air wincing and shivering. "Much country? Where are we heading?"

"Arbridge," she said flatly.

Rod dimly remembered Arbridge as a pleasant little vale with a castle at one end, a town at the other, and a stream winding through it with farms and little woodlots everywhere. He'd written about a bridge midway along the farm-filled valley where two feuding knights had fought a battle to the death, both drowning in the stream after they'd gone off the bridge tangled together and stabbing each other.

The knight from the castle fights the knight from the town, and no one wins. He'd liked the story, a wrinkle on the old, much-used "making a last stand guarding the bridge" tale. As far as he could recall, he hadn't ever returned in his writings to look at the aftermath for Arbridge.

Which meant, of course, it could be anything now.

A road wandered down the vale, from the town to the bridge and from bridge to castle, and gone up over the hills to other places at both ends, places he couldn't rightly remember just now.

"Why Arbridge?"

"'Tis the fastest way to get down into Galath."

Ah. Now Galath he remembered. One of his creations he was most fond of—if he'd really created anything in this world. A splendid forest kingdom of knights and ladies, old gruff monocled dukes with huge mustaches and pretty ladies riding at their sides, and sinister, oh-so-politely-warring nobles who did each other dirty with poisoned daggers and honeyed words, trying to snatch real power away from a decadent royal family.

"Galath. Yes," he said, smiling.

Taeauna gave him the coldest look she'd yet favored him with, and said, "You'll find it much changed, Lord Archwizard."

Rod looked at her, feeling more than a little helpless. "Taeauna, what have I done to... to..."

"Earn my displeasure? Nothing. I am not angered with you, lord."

"Then why—?"

"I am enraged, lord. Enraged with whichever of the wizards stole your memories from you, furious with the wizard who slew all my sisters at Highcrag, and—" "Aria—"

"Speak not his name
! Idiot!" "Uh. Sorry. Ah, shouldn't that be 'Lord Idiot?'" Taeauna stared at him for a moment, all the color gone from her face. Then suddenly she rushed forward and flung her arms around him, laughing and weeping at once, so wildly and fiercely that in a hectic instant Rod found himself winded, on his back on the stones, being tugged this way and then that in iron-strong arms as she rocked back and forth.