Falconfar 01-Dark Lord (32 page)

"If you were a rutting Doom of Galath," Iskarra replied tartly, "most Falconaar would be dead, and the rest of us'd all be in hiding."

Garfist grinned. "That's true. Heh. Let's go get us a wagon."

He peered again up at the soaring walls of the keep. "If there's one place in Bowrock that'll have magic, and coins, and gels, lying around for the taking, it's in there. Where the bloody velduke is probably snoring away, reclining on heaps of them right now."

"Heaps of coins or gels?"

"Both, Isk." Garfist belched so violently he filled his mouth with searing gulped-once ale, and had to swallow it down again. "Both!"

Taeauna set her
boots ready beside the bed, drew her sword, and got into bed with it. Thankfully, she put it by her sword hand, to the outside, rather than between them.

Which left her free to roll over on her side, head propped on one elbow, and ask Rod, as he struggled to keep his eyes on, her face, "So. Are you going to show me these magics that have been appearing out of nowhere and dropping into your hands?"

"No," Rod said shortly. "Not yet. I don't want to touch them again. Yet."

"You're scared of them," the Aumrarr murmured, her gaze sympathetic.

"No, I'm not scared. Okay, yes, I am," Rod admitted. "I... that castle. I'm afraid if I do anything with them, even handle them too long, I'll somehow get taken inside that castle."

"And what do you fear will happen to you there?"

Rod looked at her. "That someone will hand me all this power you keep saying I have."

"And?"

"And I'll do the wrong thing, and wreck Falconfar."

'"Wreck?"'

"Kill everyone, hurl down kingdoms, make the mountains erupt, the seas drown the land, that sort of thing."

"But what you write, everything you do, you can reverse by writing more. You can put it all back."

"No, Tay," Rod whispered. "You can't. I can't. One can't. No one can ever put it all back. Once something's done, it's done. You can try to put it back, but the damage is done; you can never repair it all."

Something sad and terrible rose in Taeauna's eyes, and she whispered, "You're learning. Lord Rod Everlar, you are learning, and finally handing me hope thereby."

And she turned and blew out the last lamp.

Her voice had sounded as if she was on the trembling edge of tears; hesitantly Rod reached out a hand for her, in the darkness, meaning only to comfort.

It was captured in her fingers, and firmly turned over. Her lips brushed his palm in the softest of kisses before his hand was firmly returned to him.

"Please, lord, let me sleep," she whispered, sounding even closer to tears.

"Of course," Rod mumbled, rolling over.

He lay there as still as he could, listening for her to settle into sleep, but Falconfar's god of slumber—if Falconfar had a god of slumber—got to him first.

*   *   *

"Which one, old
viper?"

"Well, we don't look like the most respectable traders, now do we?" Iskarra whispered hoarsely. "So then, we need one of the better-looking wagons. Not too grand, or we'll seem out of place riding it. But solid, respectable; all the things we aren't."

"Huh. I'm solid enough," Garfist growled, thumping the large, descending slope of his belly. "The other, I'll grant ye. Not that I see—"

"That one," Iskarra said, pointing across the walled wagon-yard. "Off by itself, there, hard by the wall."

Garfist promptly hefted his keg to a more comfortable carrying position under his arm, and set off across the yard.

Iskarra's choice was a larger wagon than most, nondescript and solid. It bore no badge nor painted name on the gray side or end she could see, and the two men busy around it were hitching its team of four draft horses back up, rather than unhitching and hobbling them for the night.

Iskarra turned her back, pulled out her tankards—it wouldn't do to bare all her secrets before she had to—and trotted hastily after Garfist, calling softly, "Ale? A quaff for the night? Only one copper tarth."

"No sale," one of the drovers said curtly.

"Begone," the other suggested, in no more friendly a manner.

Garfist sighed heavily and set down his keg.

"Blast and bugger-all," he growled. "Ye, too? What's a man got to do, to sell any ale in this— whoa!"

The drover beside him had drawn his sword. "See this? Get gone!"

"Well, now," Garfist growled, "that's not friendly!"

"It's not meant to be." The man showed his teeth, and jabbed the point of his sword in the general direction of the fat man's belly.

Garfist swiftly plucked the keg up and thrust it forward, catching the point of the drover's blade in its staves. When he flung the keg down, the sword was wrenched out of the man's grasp, and Garfist reached out with one ham-sized hand, caught the man by the throat, and snatched him off his feet to dangle in midair, kicking and strangling.

"Must be valuable, whatever's in there," he growled at Iskarra, as she darted past him to confront the second drover, who was advancing menacingly from his end of the wagon with drawn sword in hand.

"Likely," she agreed over her shoulder, running straight at the man and hurling her tankards, hard and accurately. His blade deftly struck them aside, and then thrust ruthlessly at her; she slowed not a whit, but twisted herself sharply sideways as she snatched a hairpin out of the tangled mess of her hair.

The sword went right through Iskarra, piercing the crawlskin back and front, plunging through her false breast and back, but thanks to her twisting, missing her emaciated real body within. By then her arms were around the drover, and she was stabbing his back hard and repeatedly with the hairpin. His leathers prevented it from going in that deep, but it didn't have to; Iskarra had dipped it plentifully in the strongest sleep-inducing drug known in Falconfar.

Nose-to-nose, the drover grinned mirthlessly at her, and then kissed her. "Skaekur, huh? Never forget the feel of it, bubbling through the body. Pity I'm spellguarded against it."

Iskarra tried to pull free, but there was suddenly something in her head, like a dark purple cloud stealing across her thoughts, dark and heavy... She couldn't seem to think straight, to care about anything anymore, but she could see, as if from a great and numb distance, that she was now energetically embracing the drover, and returning his kisses.

With a furious effort she managed to. swing their locked-together bodies around until she could see along the wagon to where Garfist had been happily throttling the other drover.

Her mountainously stout partner had set the man down and was now gently massaging the drover's bruised throat and dusting him down as carefully as a mothering-maid. Garfist turned and gave Iskarra a smile, and she saw that his eyes had gone purple.

Nodding a respectful farewell to the drover, the fat ex-pirate came lurching along the wagon. The darkness in Iskarra's own head was forcing her to gently disengage herself from her drover, now, and spread her legs to accept his hands on haunch and crotch, boosting her up the back of the wagon to open its rear doors wide.

She did that, swinging them clear just as Garfist rounded the wagon and boosted himself inside, with a great rolling grunt and a heave that shook the wagon and made the hitched horses snort and paw.

Then the force in Iskarra's head was compelling her forward into the darkness of the wagon, between the stacked wooden crates of swords and arrows, to pluck aside a central stack she shouldn't have been able to budge an inch.

The end of the stack proved to be false, a single panel adorned with sawed-off ends of stacked crates. Behind it, smiling rather unpleasantly at her, sat an unkempt man with curly hair of dirty gold, and unruly eyebrows and a jaw-fringe beard to match.

His large, dark purple eyes were in her head already, floating dark and heavy and all-seeing. He was the source of the magic now ruling her and Garfist. Yardryk, his mind identified himself, apprentice of Arlaghaun. He was young and supremely arrogant and overconfident to a fault, she could tell; neither his name nor that of the great wizard he served was information she was supposed to know. He seemed unaware of how much his thoughts were leaking into her head.

Yardryk was hiding among all these swords and arrows so he could get into the velduke's personal keep; the wares had been chosen to make them irresistible to warriors facing a siege. The idea was Arlaghaun's, but the schemings and details had been Yardryk's own, and he was very proud of them.

He was also greatly pleased, now, by the unexpected arrival of Garfist and Iskarra, now that he had made sure no rival mage had sent them to him as lures, or was lurking in their mind. They were just what he needed: outlanders not of Bowrock or of Galath, who had been drovers before and could serve so again now, freeing his warriors to pose as guards of so precious a load.

This would enable Yardryk and one of the warriors to slip off into hiding, once the wagon was inside the velduke's keep; thereafter, they could work much mischief. Leaving one guard for the load, and two owner-drovers up front to flog the goods and suffer the daggers of the Bowrock warriors, if the velduke wanted to escape paying or grew overly suspicious of so convenient an arrival of weapons.

Yardryk saw no reason not to take the wagon to the keep right now, seeing as other carters, despite the coming of night, were still running their wagons of food and casks of wine to the velduke's buyers. Food and wine that, properly handled by the velduke's cooks and cellarers, could not help but be preferable to what wagon-merchants could buy from the market fry-stalls, come morning. Oh, yes, the luck of the Falcon was with Yardryk Brightrising just now, making his family name proud truth at last...

He gave Garfist and Iskarra one last sneering smile as they fitted his false crates back in place in front of him, and the stout former panderer heaved and grunted a real stack of crated swords into place in front of that.

The two grinning guards then pulled up crates in front of the stacks to sit on, Garfist and Iskarra closed and fastened the doors on them, and before long the solid gray wagon was rumbling through the cobbled streets of Bowrock with two silent, mind-ridden drovers at the reins, heading for the velduke's keep.

*   *   *

There was a
small, round skylight in the domed ceiling, high over the huge guest bed; Rod had never noticed it before.

He found himself blinking blearily at it now, however. The first sun of morning was blazing above it, making it a bright blue eye staring down into a room that was still dim, and cold, and very, very still.

He was naked, of course, and lying flat on his back in the bed, but there was something small, heavy, and hard on his chest, and he was otherwise bare. Where were the linens? The sleeping furs?

And where was Taeauna?

Rod lifted his head enough to see that he was alone on a bed that didn't seem to have any furs or linens on it anymore. There was a small metal
something
on his chest that looked somewhat like an ornate brass-finish sink faucet handle that a television design show host might have chosen or sneered at, not something of Falconfar at all. It looked like it had been welded onto three mock miniature dagger letter-openers, splayed out at angles. It must be another "gift from nowhere" thing of magic, fallen on him while he slept.

So he'd missed the whole glowing air thing, or had he? This looked almost as if he'd been arranged, for some sort of ritual.

"Taeauna?" he asked softly.

Silence. He couldn't even hear her breathing.

He put a hand up and took hold of the metal thing on his chest, and was abruptly aware of a reek of smoke and a flash of heat.

Not from it, but inside his head... and linked to it, or caused by his touching it. Yes, definitely. His fingers told him it was cool, his nose told him it smelled of nothing more than metal and possibly a little whiff of long-ago oil of some sort, but his mind was telling him that it had erupted in some sort of intense heat, and something had burned, swiftly and sharply, leaving behind smoke.

Rod sat up, holding the enchanted gewgaw carefully, and peering all around the room. No servants, and no guards. Bars across the insides of the doors, where Taeauna had put them last night, and—

"Jesus!" he spat, flinging the metal thing down and hurling himself forward off the bed, landing hard on his knees and clawing his way across the rugs. "God,
no!"

Taeauna of the Aumrarr was as naked as he was, and was lying sprawled and senseless on the floor halfway across the room, face up, and not breathing. Her face looked empty, her eyes blank. And the fingers of her left hand, stretched out toward him, were charred to ash.

"Taeauna!" he cried, touching her cheek. "Taeauna!" Her skin was cold, and when he shook her gently, she moved loosely under his touch, as if he were rocking something empty. She wasn't breathing!

Frantically he tried to remember that CPR course, the mouth-to-mouth business of wiping the plastic dummy with a foul-tasting alcohol wipe... hyperextend neck, mouth sweep with his finger—
shit
!