Falconfar 03-Falconfar (18 page)

RAMBAERAKH, SLAYER OF Dragons, regarded Rod balefully, shriveled eyeballs ablaze.

"Well, man? Ye hesitate! Why?"

Rod felt the gentle touches of swords—or the rusting, broken remnants of them—on his shoulders, chest, and back. He did not have to look—hell, did not want to look—to know that grinning skulls would be floating above both his shoulders, facing him with unwinking stares. And that the velvet-soft, yet chill feelings now at the back of his neck—momentary touches, no more—were skeletal fingertips that would move snake-swift to strangle him, if he gave the wrong reply.

Yet he wasn't a good liar. Never had been. The truth was all that came readily to his lips, and...

"Tell me, Rod Everlar!"

Die for truth, not for a lie.

Rod swallowed, ducked his head a little, and blurted, "I—I fear unbinding you will mean you'll slay me, as swift as it can be done, men go hunting all living things across Falconfar, killing everyone and everything. And I—"

He let out a deep, unhappy sigh, then drew himself up and added firmly, "I can't allow that."

"So ho! Decided 'tis time to play Lord Archwizard again, have ye ? Well, now, I can tell ye plain and straight that we intend to kill 10 one, that we'll not do either of the things ye fear—but ye seek proof, don't ye? Trust no floating severed heads this month, aye?"

"A-aye," Rod agreed hesitantly, managing the trembling beginnings of a smile.

"So name thy proof! What will it take to convince ye?"

"I don't know." In exasperation, Rod waved his arms and started to pace, ignoring sudden warning taps from many sword points. The skeletons moved with him, smoothly and precisely. So did the scarred, rotting head.

"I believe you're who you say you are," Rod told it, "and that these are indeed your Dark Helms, or the forerunners of Dark Helms, rather... and I certainly believe you urgently want me to work some sort of magic that you for some reason can't, but... but I don't even know how it is that you know my name, and I'm heartily tired of being lorded over by wizard after wizard since I got here! Why, I..."

"Aye?"

"Nothing. There's nothing you can swear by that I can trust in. Nothing."

"Oh? Not even Taeauna, whom ye seek so desperately? In the name of the wingless Aumrarr ye cherish, and by the Falcon itself. I promise ye—"

"How do you know about Taeauna? Are you reading my mind?"

"Of course, Shaper. How else would I know ye're called Rod Everlar? 'Tis not a name I'm likely to hear, bound down here in the coils of Malraun's spells, now, is it?"

Rod shook his head. "Then you should see why I can't trus: anything you say! You can just read whatever it is I want to hear from my mind and say it to me! Yet now that I know that, I can't—"

"Hold a bit, man, hold a bit! A little calm, a little less shouting and waving the hands about! Some of the dead down here are still asleep, ye know! This reading of minds can work both ways, mind, if I draw aside my mindcloak."

"Mindcloak?"

"Letting ye read my sincerity, even as I read thy memories and the fiercest of thy passing thoughts."

Rod hesitated, trying to stare into those sunken, angry eyes.

"Afraid of stepping into the mind of another wizard? Well, ye should be, of course. I'd hesitate, too, if the last cesspool I'd been wading in was the mind of Malraun the Matchless. And if I didn't want oblivion so sorely."

"That's what this is all about? Suicide? You want to be unbound so you can die?"

"Aye, though I know not this word 'suicide.' I can see in thy mind that it carries fear, that death is bound up in it, and that 'tis a crime—and that ye worry about doing crimes. So what, exactly, is suicide?"

"Taking your own life. It's wrong."

"Well, so 'tis, unless ye spend thy life to save others, or slay great evil, or do much good. Otherwise, thy death is a waste, and the Falcon is displeased. So, know ye, man, that neither Rambaerakh nor his loyal warriors—" The floating head revolved slowly, its moving gaze seeming to make the bobbing skeletons glow wherever it was looking, then regarded Rod once more. "—hold with suicide."

"But—"

"Pah! This oblivion we seek is not suicide! Our lives were torn from us years upon years ago! We have been dead and beyond dead for more seasons than ye can count! Rail at us not of crimes and guilt and morals! Man, we ache to be alive again, but cannot, so ache all the more to seeing and talking with and being near those who are! Ye cause us pain right now, by being here and being alive!"

Rod tried to step back, but the points of swords gathered behind him in an unyielding wall.

"I—" He swallowed. "I'm sorry."

The grizzled, much-scarred head bobbed rapidly up and down, as if in exasperation.

"Man, man, be'not sorry! 'Tis the dead who have time and cause to be sorry! Just waste not the life ye have!"

Rod stared into those sunken, burning eyes. "Show me your mind," he said quietly.

The wizard's floating head rose and drifted nearer, closer than it had ever been before, until it was hovering right in front of Rod, their noses almost touching. Not that Rambaerakh had all that much of a nose left.

"See, man. See..."

Rod quelled a sudden urge to giggle. That hollow voice had uttered the exact words used by a femme fatale to entice her lover into her arms, in an old and very bad movie he'd seen once on late- night television—and in the same low-pitched, earnest manner.

Then he seemed to slide forward and down, down through those burning eyes and into cavernous darkness beyond, all thoughts of giggling gone in his wake...

He was in a place of labyrinthine, crazily-tilting passages, all dark blue and purple against black, with tattered drifting shadows everywhere and thick pillars too smooth to be stone.

So this was what a dead wizard's mind looked like.

One who wasn't afire with the need to destroy you...

Rod was gliding along, slowly and uncertainly, seeing nothing but passages and pillars, and hearing nothing at all. If there was proof here he was supposed to see, there was no sign of it at all. not even—

The wall beside him seemed to ripple and billow like a black curtain. Sudden dread rose in him, as he pictured an unseen horror straining at the barrier, ready to lunge out at him...

The curtain faded away, leaving a slender man in black, ankle- length robes facing him. A man whose head was severed from his shoulders, and floated above them. It was a head Rod recognized, of course.

"Rambaerakh, Slayer of Dragons," he greeted it calmly, and the floating head bobbed in a polite nod.

"At your service," it replied, "Behold what you came to see."

The darkness fell away, and Rod now seemed to be standing on nothing at all, with bright shards looming above and beneath him. each showing a different scene, like so many windows into films that were all playing at once. It resembled what he'd imagined a satellite television control room must be like, all—

His gaze was caught and held by the image of a breathtakingly beautiful woman, welling up on his right, from below. He felt a surge of affection for her, then all the love in the world; he was fighting to stare at every last inch of her looming face through a sudden waterfall of tears as that love turned to despairing grief. Then her face was gone, melting into a yawning skull surrounded by her flowing hair, with a spade tossing loose dark soil onto it...and as it all fell away behind him, another face was looming, a man with an infectious, lopsided smile, and Rod found himself grinning, too, in friendship this time, just in time for that smile to become a scream, and flames to roar through the head and leave it a blackened skull, collapsing into bone shards and revealing another woman, younger and even more beautiful than the first, beyond. Love danced within him again, leaping to the fore once more and leaving him sobbing...

On his knees on cold stone, within a ring of lowered, rusted blades, with a severed head hovering above him.

"Ye're out again, Everlar," it told him, almost kindly. "Did ye see enough?"

Rod managed to nod, through his tears. He felt so desolate, so...

"I've lost many," Rambaerakh murmured. "Too many to go on. So have we all, my Helms and I. We're too tired to go marauding across the Raurklor, let alone Falconfar. Unbind us, and let us rest at last."

"Oblivion?" Rod asked dully. "Just... nothing?"

"Not quite," the wizard's head replied, smiling a crooked smile. "Thy releasing of us will accomplish one thing. One last revenge. Spending our passing doing something, after all."

"Revenge on whom?"

"On Lorontar. Who intends to school younglings in wizardry, and return here riding their bodies to hold the great magics he knows are hidden here. Magics we can rob him of, and give the roundation of all his gloating plans a good shake—perhaps, just perhaps, one that will shatter them and bring them tumbling down."

Rambaerakh sank a little lower, until he was nose to nose with Rod again. "Well, man? Will ye?"

Rod Everlar set his jaw, wiped tears away with an impatient swipe of the back of his hand, and said grimly, "I'll do it."

"Faugh! Did ye have to set us down in the shit-heap?"

Garfist staggered as he spat those words, holding his nose. Then he slipped in something slippery, windmilled his arms desperately for balance—and dropped into a low, braced stance to keep from railing over in the waiting muck.

"No," Juskra replied sweetly. "We thought you'd prefer not to take a sword through that ample belly of yours right away, wielded by some Galathan who happens—like nigh all Galathans—to be suspicious of anyone who consorts with wingbitches. But we can certainly snatch you up, flap over yonder, and dump you right on the threshold of the Stag's Head, if you prefer. Losing most of that belly would improve your looks—and balance, too, by the looks of things."

Garfist responded with a loud, coarse description of Juskra's character and anatomy. Some of his phrases made both Dauntra and Iskarra wince, but Juskra merely smiled broadly, sketched an elaborate, exaggerated bow, and waved him in the direction of the inn.

The Aumrarr and their passengers had landed amid much broker, old furniture and rotting remnants of carts and casks. This refuse was almost hidden in the tall grass, clinging vines, and various wild and thorny bushes that bordered the deeper forest around the reeking midden behind the inn.

From where they stood, they could peer around the shoulder of the dung-heap that so offended Garfist, to see the sagging, ramshackle chaos of the Stag's Head's back kitchen.

Almost disappearing in overgrowth of its own, it was a crudely- built, low wooden wing that seemed to have been assembled by drunken carpenters in fits and starts over the decades, always disagreeing in style and direction of expansion or repair with what had been done earlier. The result had many corners and mismatched joinings, at least one set of steps up to nowhere at all, and several warped and buckled doors, some obviously so unusable that old tables had been piled against them to rot or boards had been nailed across them. However, the back kitchen thankfully boasted no windows.

Which meant the four travelers had hopefully thus far passed unnoticed, both upon their arrival and during the pleasantries exchanged since.

Garfist finished stripping off the leather straps of his carry-sling, flung them in Juskra's general direction without looking back, and started picking his way carefully around the edges of the muck, snapping off branches and trampling down vines with a series of deafening crashes that left Iskarra and the two Aumrarr—who hastily folded their wings and crouched down—wincing.

"Garfist Gulkoun," Dauntra said quietly but firmly, after him. The fat man paused for a moment in his noisy lurchings and stumblings, but did not turn.

"Garfist," the Aumrarr repeated, no more loudly.

This time he swung around, a furious expression on his face.

"You should know what's afoot in Galath, just now," Dauntra offered, her voice quieter than ever. He leaned back to hear her— and almost slipped into the muck doing so.

Spitting curses and waving his arms for balance, Garfist started stumping back toward them, circling through the grass and thorns to keep out of the muck.

Iskarra and the Aumrarr waited nervously for someone in the inn to hear the din and peer out a window, whereupon they could hardly miss the lurching, tramping warrior.

No one did, and Garfist fetched up against a nearby sapling— which sagged visibly under his weight—to glower at Dauntra and snarl, "What?"

"You and your lady should be aware of some things," Juskra said crisply, and waved at her fellow Aumrarr. "So listen to her."

Garfist nodded curtly, and glared at Dauntra.

The Aumrarr smiled and murmured, "Right now, Galath is just one or two killings away from erupting into civil war. Bands of knights are riding across the realm, bloodying their blades in each other in the name of this challenger for the throne or that one. Every man is suspicious of every other—and strangers, it should come as no surprise, are mistrusted more than most."

She leaned forward and held up a quelling hand as Garfist drew himself up to speak. "So hear me, Gar and Isk. We are Aumrarr, and Aumrarr try to be fair, and more than fair, with the few we consider friends. We will remain near for the rest of this day, and until the sun rises highest on the morrow. Should you need to be plucked away from the inn in a hurry, call on us. Shout these words: 'Old king or no king!' Twice at least, and as loud and slow as you can. We shall hear... and we shall come."