Falconfar 03-Falconfar (30 page)

"This is the Lady Talyss Tesmer, of Ironthorn," Klarl Dunshar said stiffly, hurrying around Hallowhond to interpose himself between the glowering velduke and the serenely smiling woman on the lounge. "Who has come here to—"

"To be your bedpretty, by the looks of things," the velduke grunted. "I know, I know, the pressures of such hectic work, all the demands on you and the hardships of luring good masons out here into this monster-haunted wilderlands with too little coins to entice them. Good thing you managed to find coins enough to pay her, now, isn't—"

Dunshar's dagger-thrust was low, brutal, and swift. He tugged his blade viciously upwards, right in under Hallowhond's ribs, ere he pulled it out and stepped back to let the noble crash to the floor.

The klarl paled, mouth falling open as he stared down at the fallen velduke, aghast. "What have I done?"

"I'm wondering the very same thing," Mespur Hallowhond snapped, scrambling up and drawing his sword. "Very stupid of you, Dunshar. Fatally stupid, in fact. But then, if you'd had any brains, you'd have expected any velduke riding across Galath right now, what with all the troubles, to be magically protected against swords and daggers."

Sword raised, Hallowhond advanced menacingly on the stumbling klarl. He set himself to lunge, but abruptly reeled and toppled, crashing onto his face, sword clattering from his hand.

There wasn't much left of the back of the velduke's head.

Belard Tesmer looked at the blood-drenched stone block in his hands, sighed, then let it fall almost regretfully onto the bloody mess it had caused. "Shoddy mason-work. The curse of every hasty rebuilding job. Such an unfortunate accident."

He bent down, his dagger hissing out, and cut off one of Hallowhond's fingers, sporting a ring that had begun glowing.

"So much for magical protection," he murmured. "If we must speak of fatally stupid behavior, my lord velduke, ignoring a mere servant standing behind you as you draw your sword and start to threaten folk with it is a striking example."

He calmly tossed away the bloody finger, then held up the dripping ring. "Useful little trinket. Talyss?"

"You wear it, brother," she replied with a sweet smile. "If you continue this career of going around killing Galathan nobles in front of witnesses..."

She lifted a languid hand to indicate the white, shaking Dunshar. "You're going to be needing it more than me."

ROD LAY VERY still, trying to think of the storm blowing away and how strange it felt to so suddenly be back here, in his own backyard, instead of wandering through ruined Malragard back in Falconfar...

He knew the mind-link was still firm and strong; he could feel Narmarkoun's mind at work as the wizard prowled the dusty, deserted house, peering alertly at everything. Thank the Falcon, Narmarkoun's attention was entirely on his exploration right now, but...

Rod was discovering just how hard it was to not think of something.

Something exciting, that he could feel happening to him, slowly and tinglingly. Something that so far was obviously, as writers say, "unbeknownst to" Narmarkoun.

Something he could tell, from the faint wet whisperings of the grass beside him, where Taeauna lay, was affecting her too.

Evidently some sorts of magic faded very quickly on Earth, magic that a wizard of Falconfar trusted in, because on Falconfar it lasted much longer. The muscle-lock was failing already, lessening its grip as the wizard moved from the nearer rooms at the back of the house to front rooms farther away.

Rod fought to turn his head and look at Taeauna—and managed to shift the section of sky he was staring at, moving his nose a few inches. It felt like shoving against a concrete wall, and seemed to take a straining eternity—enlivened, in the back of his mind, by Narmarkoun's observations, where the wizard had just about finished his first foray around the ground floor, and was debating climbing those open stairs to the few rooms above, or descending into the basement ("the cellars" to Narmarkoun, of course) first. Opening and examining all these books would come later, after more immediate concerns—such as anyone who might be hiding in the house—were dealt with. The mind-link let him see nothing of the wizard's thoughts beyond the most lasting and general images, though that might change if Narmarkoun turned his attention back to Rod, which was very much not wanted, and—

Something loomed up against the gray sky, very close by, and looked down at him. Taeauna!

"Tay!" he tried to cry, but managed only a wordless mumble. His jaws felt stuck together, as rigid as stone.

"Hush," she whispered soothingly, leaning close to his ear. "We're together again at last, yes. Lord Rod, I have missed you just as much as you have missed me."

Sounds like dialogue from a bad romance novel. Unthinkingly he tried to say that thought out loud, but his mouth was still frozen.

"Yes, the wizard's magic is fading," Taeauna murmured, as cool and crisp as any police officer Rod had ever heard, "but it may rise again when he comes back closer to us. If this gives us any chance for freedom at all, that chance is now. Come."

A stiff and fumbling hand took hold of Rod's shoulder and hauled on it, hard, rolling him over onto his side in the wet grass. Taeauna gave him the briefest of smiles and kept on tugging at him, rolling Rod right over onto his face—his nose meeting the wet lawn—and then, faster now, up to face the sky again.

Over, and again. Over and again; she was doing it! Dragging him away down the yard...

Rod grinned, thinking he was seeing more of his yard, close up, than he had in months. Years.

It was frighteningly slow, and Taeauna was gasping and panting as if hurling all her strength into back-breaking labor—but then, she was, wasn't she?—but they were moving.

Rod found he could now move his fingers, though he still couldn't feel them, and turn his head, too. Most heroic.

Well, he'd always known he was no hero, just a man who wrote about heroes. Yet thanks to Taeauna's dogged pulling, all of his movements were coming a little faster now... and he was losing the helpless feeling at last.

"Guide me, Lord Rod," she gasped suddenly. "Down to the end of your yard we must go, yes, but whither then?"

Rod tried to answer, but all that came out was a frustrating sequence of grunts.

Taeauna rolled her eyes, set her jaw, and grimly but briskly rolled him over twice or thrice more. "Guide me."

"Roll me," Rod croaked back, finally able to move his jaws and tongue properly; or almost properly.

"Lord Rod," she said almost sternly, obeying him twice more, "we don't have much time."

"For me to play the idiot, you mean?" Rod managed a smile. "Right down at the back, right-hand side, there's a gate. It opens right onto a little trail behind all the houses, where all the neighbors walked their dogs. The other side of that, forest, for quite a ways, down to the creek."

"Thick forest? Then we head down. Unless your neighbors—"

"No help there. Nice enough, but none of them own guns, and not one is likely to be much use against an angry wizard. They won't even believe he can use magic on them—until he does, and it's too darned late."

He could crawl on his own, now, and Taeauna dragged him to his feet and into a sort of stumbling run, that took him maybe eight strides at her shoulder before he fell onto his hands and knees. Yet those eight strides had covered a lot of ground.

"Again," he gasped, and without a word she hauled him up, into another shambling, off-balance run. This one took them clear down to the end of the yard.

It was a big backyard, overgrown by Rod's feeble attempts at a wildflower garden on one side and a vegetable garden on the other, both long untended. The back gate was just as he remembered it. Aluminum frame with bars and chain-link fencing stretched across them, held closed—no lock—by a bendable metal latch set into an old and rotten wooden post.

Rod glanced over at the corner post, where Narmarkoun had found his spare door key. It was just as ruinous as the wizard had said. One of the young wild trees growing on the outside of his fence had been blown over and fallen on the fence, bending it down, pulling the old thing right apart...

"Lord Rod," Taeauna said urgently, in his ear, "I know this place is dear to you, but our lives are dearer to us both, surely? May I suggest—"

Rod turned, gave her a grin, and tried to kiss the end of her nose. It might have worked better if she hadn't been pulling back and away from him, and hadn't looked so irritated. "Suggest," he told her. "In fact, command. It works better when you just tell me what to do."

Taeauna contrived to somehow look amused and irritated at the same time.

"Lord Archwizard Rod," she said, almost severely—and then stopped, with her mouth open.

For one horrible moment Rod thought Narmarkoun had just cast a spell on her, or Lorontar had arisen from somewhere in the depths of her mind to take her over, but then she pursed her lips, shook her head, and began again.

"Rodrel," she said, "I know not what to do. We cannot run and hide from a wizard who is linked to your mind; he will always know where you are and what you are doing—and see and hear everything you do if he wants to, even use you against me.

Close-standing trees that he knows not well can keep him from translocating at will to us, and hamper him in blasting us with battle-spells, but I cannot lead you through heavy forest if you are bound and gagged and blindfolded!" She spread her hands in exasperation.

Rod tried to check on Narmarkoun without thinking about him, but found it nigh impossible, so he snatched his mind away again. Whatever the wizard was doing, he was paying no attention to his helpless captives. Yet.

He nodded to Taeauna. "To say nothing of the fact that you don't have anything to tie or gag or blindfold me with," he agreed.

She gave him a disgusted look, and tugged at what she was wearing, miming that it could easily come off to be used as bindings on him.

"Geez, Rod, I had no idea you were into that sort of stuff," a hesitant but all too familiar voice said, from behind the dark, thick cedar that grew just outside the gate.

Up until that moment, Rod Everlar had thought only people in books jumped straight up into the air when they were really startled.

But for a beginner, he managed it very well.

WHEN HE CAME down again, Rod was facing the right way to stare.

He knew the owner of that voice, who thankfully was alone, and just as Rod remembered him: short, balding, with an untidy goatee, blue-stubble cheeks, thick black spectacles, and one of those bad suits he always wore, summer or winter, rain or shine. He was also wearing brown, buckled rubber boots, and carrying a crumpled, empty plastic bag.

It was Max, all right. He stood blinking through those thick, smudged glasses not at Rod, but at Taeauna.

"And who's this lovely lady? Ma'am, I'm Max—ah, Maxwell Sutherland. Ah, I'm in real estate. And I'm Rod's next-door neighbor."

Max turned his head back to Rod. "Speaking of which: Rod, where've you been? The cops and everyone were looking for you, and—"

"Mister Sutherland," Taeauna said crisply, opening the gate and advancing on Rod's neighbor, "do you have a dog? A large dog?"

Max looked a little alarmed. He stepped back a pace.

"You, ah, you like dogs?" he asked, a certain apprehension rising in his eyes.

"Not in conjunction with gags or blindfolds or play involving such things, if that's what you mean," Taeauna replied, as crisply as any severe schoolteacher. Then she repeated patiently, "Do you have a dog?"

"Well, yes, but it's not an outside dog. That is, it's really Muriel's—that's my wife—and it's a Chihuahua. Honeybell, we call it, and it—er, she, but she's fixed, you know?—very much feels the cold, so she wears these little pink sweaters that Muriel knits her, but she never goes outside, and—"

"Fascinating," Taeauna said, witheringly. "Thank you, Mister Sutherland."

It was a clear dismissal, but Max merely blinked at her for a moment and then swiveled his head back to look at Rod. "So, uh, Rod, where've you been?"

"Away," Rod replied brightly, and managed a wide smile. He really didn't know what to say. Everyone on the street thought Max was more than a little crazy, but the man was a blabbermouth, and if the police had been—