Falconfar 01-Dark Lord (35 page)

If Arlaghaun had been telling the truth about how many creatures he was going to send through the gate to overrun Deldragon's keep, those screams might not last all that long.

Gates were hungry things.

"Well," Garfist rumbled, "I
don't exactly look like someone even a starving sailor would lust after. I mean, look at this face! Tits can only do so much."

"Yes, but what tits," Iskarra grinned.

He cuffed her playfully across the forehead. "Now we have to steal something that'll do up over them. All this for a bit of food and wine."

"Lantern, don't forget the lantern," Iskarra reminded him, earning herself a sour look from the feminine travesty Garfist Gulkoon had become.

"Look at me!" he snarled, waving two shovel-sized, hairy hands. "Who'm I supposed to fool, eh? I mean, how many blind folk am I likely to meet on my way to the kitchens? Blind folk without hands to feel these—and then the rest of me—with?"

"Gar, don't be surly. We have to eat. The occasional man still looks at me, remember."

"Aye, but... but..." Garfist became aware of Iskarra's dangerous glare and the dagger that had very suddenly appeared in her bony hand, very close to him, and settled for saying, "but there's no safe thing I can say just now, is there?"

"Well, you could say 'Dearest Iskarra, whose body I will worship fervently and often in these days ahead, you are right in all things, always, and of course in this, so how can I best pass myself off is a woman, I who am not worthy to be counted among womanhood no matter how hard I try?' But somehow I doubt you're going to say that.”

"I can't say that," Garfist rumbled. "Ye lost me after 'fervently and often.' I sorta got... got..."

"To thinking about that. Of course." Iskarra's voice dripped with acid. "Things will go much better, Gar dear, if you just stop trying to think and start trying to do what I tell you to do. Whenever you don't, you wind up finding one thing with frightening speed: trouble."

"Found a lantern," Garfist replied sullenly, pointing.

"Good. Go fetch it. Yes, with your front all hanging out like that; if someone sees you, just leer at them, and don't run or look furtive or guilty. And bring the lantern back here. Then we'll talk about finding clothes."

Garfist nodded and trudged off down the passage. Iskarra watched his broad-shouldered figure dwindle toward the distant lantern, hanging from a beam where two passages met, and winced. He looked less like a woman—even a large and lumbering woman—than anything she'd ever seen.

Garfist reached up for the lantern, and then lowered his arm again and peered intently down one of the side-passages. He thrust his head forward, sinking it between his shoulders like a vaugril, and then stalked down the side-passage, slowly and intently, hunting prey.

Iskarra flattened herself against the cold stone wall, wincing. "No, you great stupid ox!" she hissed. "Don't try to get clever. Just get the lantern and get back here. Don't..."

Garfist burst into view around the corner again, running hard, his false crawlskin breasts bouncing up and slapping him in the face with every pumping stride. There was a gutted boar carcass in one of his hairy hands, still trailing the hook it had undoubtedly been hanging from.

Right behind Garfist, and running hard, was a red-faced, snarling cook with a great cleaver flashing in his hand. Followed by another four—no, seven—other cooks and scullions, waving various knives and skewers and pans.

Iskarra whispered every profanity she could think of as she waved to Garfist and then turned and ran.

Deeper into the cellars, where there just might be a place to hide.

FAir morn, Lord
Deldragon," Taeauna I greeted the velduke gravely, striding up to him. Rod kept a careful pace behind her, as if he were her faithful shadow. "How best can we...?"

Deldragon was wearing a smile as he lifted his hand in greeting and opened his mouth to speak, but his face fell into astonishment and anger as he looked past his two guests, his ice-blue eyes seeming to catch fire. Rod and Taeauna were turning to see what disaster was behind them as he bellowed, "Lorn! Raise the alarum! Lorn in the keep!"

Bowrock knights and armsmen erupted out of passages and doorways by the dozens, and the velduke roared, "Bows! Guard every archer we have, from this moment on! I don't want a single one harmed by lorn, and I want every glorking archer out here and filling these lorn with arrows!"

Even before the nearest knight could shout a warning, the velduke whipped around, sword leaping into his hand to precede his turn, and so, without even meaning to, spitted a lorn that was diving at him, claws spread wide and poised to rend.

Taeauna hacked at one of those claws to make sure it didn't fold up around the velduke's blade and rake him as it died; Deldragon struck its other aside himself.

It shuddered and started to curl up in death; as Deldragon shook it off his steel, kicking it toward the floor, the thunder of many hastening boots was heard in the passage the lorn had erupted from. Bowrock knights formed a line of bared steel across the passage even before the first Dark Helms burst into view.

The velduke groaned aloud at their numbers, for the passage looked to be filled for a long way back with a seemingly endless flood of gleaming black armor. "Fall back!" he shouted. "Fight and fall back, fight and fall back to the Warhorn Chamber! We'll make a stand there!"

More lorn swooped at him, over the heads of the surging army of black-armored warriors, and Deldragon pointed his blade at them as if it were a how, whispered something, and then vanished behind a sudden bright blossoming of flame from its tip. In an instant that fire filled the air before him with a roiling sphere of fire, and started to spit forth long tongues of flame.

Those tongues lashed out thrice the length of a lance to sear and sizzle lorn after shrieking lorn, until they circled away from that offered death, squalling. The velduke bellowed, "Men of Bowrock! Get out of the way!" and leveled his sword, even as knights and armsmen scampered aside, aiming it right down the throats of the onrushing Dark Helms.

Who staggered, screaming and writhing, as they cooked in their armor and flames raged among them. The velduke calmly moved his blade back and forth, seeking to immolate as many as he could. Some Dark Helms tried to struggle on into the inferno, but most turned and tried to flee, pushing and even hacking at their fellows behind them.

Yet all too soon, the flames flickered, faltered, spat, coughed, and went out, the velduke's sword going dark.

"Men of Bowrock!" he shouted. "Form a line! Spears to the fore!"

A few of the Dark Helms raced forward to try to surround the velduke, before Bowrock's knights and armsmen could block the way, but Deldragon retreated even as Bowrock spears and hurled shields struck and assailed those few bold foes, and Taeauna stepped forward in front of him like a champion, sword raised.

"Tady of the Aumrarr," Deldragon said approvingly, "again you risk yourself in my battle!"

Taeauna shrugged. "I am an Aumrarr; I fight Dark Helms. That blade of yours can't burn every last one of them."

"True," the velduke agreed grimly, as the men of Bowrock clashed with the Dark Helms in front of them. "I can't call up that power many more times ere it's exhausted; I doubt it will last through this siege. Even if I do."

"None of us will survive to see the siege begin if we don't deal with what's in your cellars now," Taeauna warned.

"The well, again?"

"No. The lorn, all these Dark Helms; look at them! This can be no new tantlar, lord. There's a wizard somewhere in your keep who's just opened a gate. And all the armies outside your walls will pour right through it, if we don't destroy it."

Darendarr Deldragon went white and said a very dirty word. His hand shot up to stroke his flaxen mustache, as unnecessarily as always.

"Come!" said Taeauna, clapping him on the shoulder. "Leave the battle here to your knights; someone else can rally them in the Warhorn Chamber. Bring two of your best blades, and show me a way down into the cellars that isn't already full of Dark Helms!" She waved at the passage full of fighting, hacking, and dying men in bright armor and in dark. It was a . hopeless tangle of shouting combatants, heaped corpses, and the sagging or writhing dying.

The velduke stared at her for a moment, shaking his head. Then he bit his lip, whirled around, and bellowed, "Tarsil! Amandur! Belros! To me!"

"Lord, I come!" someone shouted, through the din, and "Lord!" someone else echoed; Rod saw a tall knight pushing through the milling Bowrock knights from one direction, and two armsmen doing the same from another.

The knight got there first. "Lord?"

"Tarsil," Deldragon snapped, "take command here. Try to hold the Helms, and have the archers save their shafts for any lorn they see. If many lorn break past you, or the Dark Helms press, fall back to the Warhorn Chamber and make a stand there. Do it!"

"Lord!" Tarsil acknowledged with a bow, and the velduke clapped him on the arm and turned to the two armsmen.

"Amandur, Belros! Come, out of this! With me! We're going hunting!"

Deldragon waved to Taeauna, and she nodded, ducked around some trotting Bowrock armsmen, and sprinted across the passage, Rod right behind her, and the velduke and his two armsmen right behind Rod.

The Aumrarr plunged into a side-passage that seemed, by the smell, to lead past kitchens, and slowed for the others to catch her up. "Darendarr, if you wanted to get back down to the well-chamber but not take yon passage, all choked with Dark Helms, which way would you take? And is there a goodly choice, or only a few routes?"

Deldragon shook his head ruefully. "There are dozens. My great grandsire did not build this keep with thoughts of defending it floor-by-floor, up or down, in mind. Do you think haste on our part is most important, or descending by a way least likely to meet with our foes repeatedly, along the way?"

"The back way," Taeauna snapped. "As 'back' as you can fashion for us, lord. We must not get buried in lorn or Dark Helms before we find that gate!"

The velduke nodded. "Then this way!" he said, darting into another passage and starting to run. They all plunged after him. Rod kept his sword in its sheath and devoted himself to just running; he suspected he was going to be rushing around in dark stone hallways for quite some time.

Almost immediately Deldragon saw something ahead that made him snarl a startled curse and duck through a door into a very dark room. Wrenching open a door on its far wall, he led them out into a narrower, dimly lit passage, growling, "Getting more and more 'back' as we go. 'Ware! Stairs down!"

Then he seemed to plunge into the floor and disappear.

Enthusiastically, everyone followed, Rod running hard to keep up and frowning as he caught hold of an aging iron railing and swung himself around and down, plunging deeper into the stone roots of the velduke's keep.

From what he'd seen thus far, all Galathans seemed to be in a very great hurry to get themselyes killed.

The great cleaver
had hewn through boar and oxen many a time, but boar and oxen seldom wore armor.

So when the furious cook swinging that cleaver puffed his way around a corner, snarling out obscenities as fast as he could breathe, and came face to face with a trio of chuckling Dark Helms, the hard-swung cleaver rebounded from the black breastplate of the foremost warrior, ringing in protest and trailing sparks.

Boar and oxen seldom thrust swords at a cook, either.

The head cook of Deldragon's keep would then have perished swiftly indeed if a second wave of Dark Helms hadn't charged out of a side-passage beyond the grinning trio, roaring triumphal roars, and thrust forth a forest of gleaming blades that forced the incongruously bosomed Garfist Gulkoon to desperately windmill his arms into a wild, skidding stop.

Spitting out fervent curses of his own, Garfist tried to turn and flee back the way he'd come and blundered right into the backs of the trio of Dark Helms menacing the cook, sending them toppling and sprawling helplessly.

They shouted in fear. So did the cook whose cries doubled in volume and fervency a moment later, when his seven undercooks and scullions ran right into his backside, hurling him helplessly forward atop the three Dark Helms.