Quag Keep (24 page)

That they could use the body for a barrier against clouds of whirling dust Milo doubted. But perilous though such a chance might be, to find any better escape was now out of the question.
So they dug with a will, heaping the dust they dredged out on the far side of the scaled body. Suddenly Yevele spoke.

“If that were set down”—she pointed to the stuff they raised and tossed beyond—“would it not cake into a greater barrier? See, here the dragon's blood has stiffened this dust into a solid surface. We fight against dust not sand. What we deal with is far lighter and less abrasive.”

“It is a thought worth the following.” Milo looked to where those skins filled with the ship's wine lay. If one balanced drinkers' needs against such a suggestion—which would give them the best chance for survival?

“A good one!” Wymarc started for the skins. “As you say we do not face sand—for which may the abiding aid of Faltforth the Suncrown be praised!”

They decided that two of the skins might be sacrificed to their scheme. It was Deav Dyne and the bard who, between them, dribbled the wine across the heaped dust beyond the dragon's bulk. Milo took heart at their efforts when he saw that indeed the blood that had seeped from the slain creature had puddled and hardened the fine grit into flat plates which could be lifted and used to reinforce the wine-stiffened dust.

They worked feverishly, moving as fast as they could. Now one could see the dust cloud darkening the sky. Moments later they crouched, their cloaks drawn over their heads to provide pockets of breathable air—air that was air whether it be tainted with the stench of the dragon's body or not. The rough edges of the dead beast's scales bit into their own flesh as they strove to settle themselves to endure attack from this subtle and perhaps more dangerous foe.

15

MILO STIRRED. A WEIGHT PINNED HIM TO THE GROUND. SOME
time during the force of the storm he had lost consciousness. Even now his thoughts were sluggish, blurred. Storm? There had been a storm. His shoulder rasped against something solid and his nose was clogged not only with the ever-present dust, but also with a stench so evil that he gagged, spat, and gagged again. To get away from that—yes, that was what he must do.

It was dark, as dark as if the dust had sealed his eyes. He forced his hands into the soft powder under him, strove to find some firm purchase there to enable him to heave himself up, to shake the burden from his back. There was no such solid surface. None but the wall scraping at his shoulder. Now he flung out an arm and used it to push himself up and away.

Dust showered down as he wavered to his feet, steadying himself by holding onto the rough barrier he had found. At least he was upright, looking up and out into night. Night—?

Milo shook his head, sending more powdery stuff flying outward
in a mist. It was difficult to marshal coherent thought. Some stealthy wizardry had claimed him—freezing, not his clumsy body, but his mind into immobility.

But. . . .

Milo's head turned. He had heard
that
! He edged around so that, though the barrier against which he had sheltered still half-supported him, it was now at his back. On his wrist there was movement. Still deep in the daze which nullified even his basic sense of danger, he saw the dice flicker alive, begin to turn.

There was something—something he must do when that happened. Only he could not think straight. Not now—for from the waste of dunes came that other sound, sweet, low, utterly beguiling. The song of a harp in the hands of a master? No, rather a voice that shaped no words, only trilled, called, promised.

Milo frowned down at the bracelet. If he could only think what it was he should do here and now! Then his arm fell to his side, for that trilling sound soothed all his wakening anxieties, pulled him. . . .

The swordsman moved forward toward the hidden source of that call. He sank nearly to his knees in the dust drifts, floundered and fought, dust shoes near forgotten until he strove impatiently to lash them on. The need to find this singer who used no words moved him onward as if he were drawn by a chain of bondage.

Fighting against the insidious pull of the dust, he rounded the base of a dune. Moonlight sent strange shadows across his way. The night was bitterly cold. But there was no wind and the dust disturbed by his floundering efforts fell quickly back again.

There was light—not moonlight but a stronger gleam, though
it did not have the warmth of a torch or the steady beam of a lantern. Rather. . . .

Milo came to a stop. She stood with her back to him, her hands upheld to the moon itself. Between those hands swung a disk on a chain—a disk that made a second moon, a miniature of the one above her.

Yevele!

No helmet covered her head now, nor was her hair netted tight. Instead it flowed about her like a cloak. The pallid light of her moon pendant took away the warmth of color that was in her hair by day, gave to all of her a silvery overcast.

She had used the spell of immobility—what other sorcery could she lay tongue and hand to? There were women secrets that even the wizards could not fathom. Milo had heard tell of them. He shook his head as if to loosen a pall of dust from his mind, as he had in part from his body.

Women magic—cold. Moon magic. . . . All men knew that women had a tie with the moon which was knit into their bodies. What she wrought here might be as alien to him as the thoughts and desires of a dragon—or a liche—if the dead-alive had thoughts and not just hungers and the will of Chaos to animate them. Yet Milo could not turn away—for still that trilling enticed, drew him.

Then she spoke, though she did not turn her head to see who stood there. It was as if she had knowledge of him, perhaps because she had sent this sorcery to draw him. That sudden thought, he discovered, held a strange new warmth.

“So you heard me then, Milo?” There was none of the usual crisp note in her voice, rather gentleness—a greeting subtle and compelling as a scent.

Scent? His nostrils expanded. The foul odor of the dead dragon was gone. He might have stood in a spring-greened meadow where flower and herb flourished to give this sweetness to the air.

“I heard.” His answer was hardly more than a whisper. There worked in him now emotions he could not understand. Soldier's women he knew, for he had the same appetites as any man. But Yevele—though mail like unto his own weighted upon her, blurred the curves of her body—Yevele was unlike any woman he had stretched out hand to before.

Now his right hand did rise, without any conscious effort on his part, reaching toward Yevele, though she still did not turn to look at him. The cold light caught on the bracelet he wore with a flicker. It might have been that one of the dice had made a turn of which he was not aware. But the thought hardly touched his mind before she spoke again, driving it fully from him.

“We have powers, Milo, we who follow the Horned Lady of the Sword and Shield. It is sent to us from time to time—the forelooking. Now it has come to me. And this forelooking tells me that our lives are being woven into a single cord—both of us being the stronger for that uniting. Also—” Now at last she did move and he saw clearly her features, which were as solemn and set as might be those of a priestess intoning an oracle from a shrine. “Also we have in truth a duty laid upon us.”

Her straight gaze caught and held his eyes, and there appeared a dazzle between them. He raised higher the hand he had put out to her, to shade his eyes from that bemusing sparkle of light. But it was gone in an instant. Then he asked dully, “That duty being?”

“We are to be the fore of the company, because we are in
truth meant to be one. Strength added to strength shall march in the van. Do you not believe me, Milo?”

Again the dazzle sprang between them. His thoughts fell into an ordered pattern, so he marveled that he had not realized this all long ago. Yevele spoke the truth, they were the ordained spearhead of the company.

“Do you not understand?” She took one step, a second toward him. “Each of us has a different talent, welded together we make a weapon. Now is the time that you and I, swordsman, must play our own role.”

“Where and how?” A faint uneasiness stirred in him. But Yevele before him was not the source of that uneasiness—she could not be. Was it not exactly as she had said? They were each but a part—together they were a whole.

“That it has been given me to see in the foreknowledge.” Her voice rang with confidence. “We march—there!” The hand still holding the moon disk swept out, away—and the disk appeared to blaze, giving a higher burst of cold light to her pointing fingers.

“See—” Now the stern quality left her voice. In its place was an eagerness. They might be fronting an adventure in the safe outcome of which she had full assurance. “I have brought the dust shoes. The moon is high and the light full. Also the storm is past—we have the night before us.”

She stooped to pick up the crude shoes he knew well. Then her fingers touched lightly on Milo's wrist, below the band of the bracelet. Though she looked so cold in this light, yet a warmth spread upward along his arm from that lightest of touches. Her eyes held his again, commanding, assured.

Of course she was right. But . . .

“Where?” He repeated part of his question.

“To what we seek, Milo. No, you need no longer depend upon that ring of yours with its near-forgotten map. The Lady has given full answer to my pleas. See you!”

She whirled the moonlit disk at the length of a chain, letting it fly free. It did not fall, to sink and be hidden in the dust. Rather there was another dazzle of light and Milo blinked. For in its place a spot of light hovered in the air at the level of Yevele's eyes.

“Moon magic!” She laughed. “To each his own, Milo. I do no more than any who has some spell training can do. This is a small thing of power, it will be drawn to any source of Power that is not known to us, or that is alien to our understanding. Thus it can lead us to that which we seek.”

He grunted and went to one knee to tighten the lashings of the sand shoes. Magic was chancy—he was no spell-user. But neither, he was certain, could any agent of Chaos have marched with them undiscovered since they had left Greyhawk. Deav Dyne—Ingrge—both would have known, caught the taint of evil at their first meeting with Yevele.

“The others?” he half-questioned as he arose again. She had moved a little away and there was a shade of impatience on her face. Though she now bore her helmet in the crook of one arm she made no attempt to re-net her hair and place it on her head.

“They will come. But no night is without a dawn. And our guide can only show its merit by the moon under whose blessing it was fashioned. We must move now!”

The disk of light quivered in the air. As the girl took a step forward, it floated on, always keeping at the same distance from the ground and ahead.

One range of dunes was like unto another. Twice Milo strove to check their way with those lines upon his ring. But the veins in the stone were invisible in this light, which gathered more brightly around Yevele. She had begun that trilling again, so that all he had known before this time now seemed as dim as the setting of his strange ring.

There was no change in the Sea of Dust. Dunes arose and fell as might the waves of a real sea. Looking back once, Milo could not even sight any trail that they left, for the powder straightway fell in upon and blurred any track. In fact he could not even tell now in which direction lay the body of the dragon and those others who had marched with them. This troubled him dimly from time to time. When such inner uneasiness awoke in him Yevele's soft trilling struck a new note, drawing him back from even the far edge of questioning what they did—or were to do.

Time lost meaning. Milo felt that he walked in a dream, slowly, his feet engulfed by a web that strove to entangle him. Still that disk floated ahead, Yevele sang without words, and the moon gave cold light to her floating, unbound hair, the carven features of her face.

It was chance that brought a break in the web that enmeshed Milo. Or
was
there such a thing as chance he sometimes wondered afterwards? Did not the priests of Om advance the belief that all action in the world, no matter how small or insignificant, had its part in the making of a pattern determined upon by Powers men could not even begin to fathom with their earthtied senses?

The fastening on one dust shoe loosened and he knelt again to make it fast. As he pulled on the lacing, his left hand was uppermost.
The dull dust clouded the setting of his second ring. But, though it was indeed filmed with dust, it was no longer dull! Milo wiped it quickly across the edge of his surcoat, for glancing at it alerted that uneasiness in him.

No, it was no longer dull gray, without any spark of light. Something moved within it!

Raising his hand against his breast Milo peered more closely at what was shafting within it. What—?