Falconfar 01-Dark Lord (41 page)

And where was Amalrys, to aid him? Where was she?

The Doom of Galath started running again, sliding his shoulder along the wall, too weak and dizzy to thrust himself away from the stone and not quite daring to, anyway, in case he fell and bared joints failed him. He was close, now, deep in the heart of the tower... Just a few more doors, just a few more...

Two more, now, as his rings flared again and seemingly solid stone melted away before him. Arlaghaun dared to let himself hope again, dared to let out his rage. How by the glorking Falcon could one stranger with two questions—no spells, not even a dagger in his hand;
two glorking questions!
—reduce him from ruling Galath to fleeing for his life, just like that? And where had Deldragon gotten such a ring? Shards and stars, what else in the way of magic did he have hidden away in Bowrock?

Arlaghaun tugged open a door that no magic he knew of would make open or shift into shadows, raised a hand that flared warningly as a trap-rune blazed up and then faded away again before one of his rings, tore open the last door, flung it shut behind him, rocked in the resulting slam, that must have shaken all Ult Tower—and fell thankfully over the stone lip into waiting relief.

The waters of the pool were warm and heavy, as always, like oil. As he surfaced, already soothed and numbed, Arlaghaun saw the weird lights converging on him, as the pool awakened to his need.

From the dark and distant corners they came, rushing to him, and he groaned in relief as the pain left him, holding his fingers clear of the water so his enchanted rings would do nothing to harm or twist awry the healings of the pool. What was left of his clothes were dissolving; he dragged the wandwing in its harness off his back and slung it over the low rampart, onto the tiles around the pool, and then started plucking off rings and gently tossing them after it.

The pool was sliding into him with a warmth that brought an almost sexual rapture, healing and soothing and banishing taints and aging and poisons... If it wasn't for the memories this most precious of Galathan magics stole, every time, he'd bathe here every night.

Come to think of it, this time there was something he wanted to forget: Ult. Let the pool go on sinking through him. He, Arlaghaun, was going to sink down into himself, too, and rout and shatter all that had once been Ult, once and for all.

He felt the lurking node of thoughts not his own, thoughts racing with renewed hope, with schemes against him. Taking care not to focus on it, and so alert it to his approach, Arlaghaun grinned a savage grin.

Ducking down, he surged closer in his mind, sharpening his will to a sword-keen edge...

Then he burst into the heart of Ult's buzzing thoughts with a savage roar, slashing, burning, rending: pouncing on the shrieking, fleeing light that was Ult.

Claw, slice, sear; ruthlessly lessening Ult here and then there, vanquishing his foe as he should have done years ago, tearing free memory after memory and thrusting them apart in his own mind, so that nothing of the lurking sentience of Ult could cling to them.

It took a long time, but every moment was worth it.

When at last Arlaghaun knew peace of mind and body, he floated in the gentle, shifting glows, immersed and warm, staring at the ceiling overhead. Not for the first time, the thought occurred to him that this most hidden of rooms was of bare, rough stone, as unfinished as a tomb. Now why was that?

Well, he'd just slain the last remnants of the only being who could have given him an answer. He shrugged. Let not curiosity ever become obsession.

"So who is that man?" he whispered to the dark and silent stone. "I'd never seen him before I first glimpsed him at the Aumrarr's side, I know I haven't, yet he looks so familiar."

“So
that's just
how it was, lord," Iskarra said warmly, concluding a long and fanciful tale as to why she and Garfist Gulkoon were in the cellars of Deldragon's keep in the heart of Bowrock.

As they all strode together down yet another long and many-doored passage in this seemingly endless tower, Deldragon regarded her thoughtfully, something impish or merry dancing in the depths of his ice-blue eyes. "I don't believe a word of it," he said, firmly but politely, as he stroked his flaxen mustache. "So tell me something else, instead: what are your intentions now?"

"To take every last bit of magic we can carry from these rooms all around us," Garfist growled, "and get ourselves far away from here. Somewhere in Falconfar, I care not where, that the mage whose tower we're standing in can't find us."

"There is no such place," Taeauna snapped. "Nor can you escape his scrutiny for longer than it takes him to mumble a rather simple spell, if you carry off even one of his things of magic. Your schemes doom you."

Iskarra sighed. "They always have."

"Yet we're still here!" Garfist rumbled triumphantly. "So I think we'll just keep right on scheming, and not listening to folk who have their own reasons for saying us nay for this and that."

Taeauna didn't bother to shrug; she was too busy pointing ahead. "Gates! A row of them!"

As if her words had been some sort of cue, the air brightened into a bright silver-gold shimmer and the passage around them rocked. From out of that shimmering, something small, strange, glowing and golden fell into Rod Everlar's hand. It resembled a miniature coach-horn, only with valves like a trumpet, and three misshapen eyes that winked and glowed with moving, vary-hued radiances.

It was soft, rather than as hard as any other metal object he'd ever touched, and warm, too, and...

That was all the staring at it he was able to manage, as something more sinister caught his eye. Down the passage ahead of him, just this side of the row of distant glows that Taeauna had just pointed out as the way out they were seeking, a warrior's helm—close-faced and menacing, for all that it was empty—was floating slowly down out of the ceiling.

Literally out of the ceiling. Rod saw it emerge from apparently solid stone, sliding down to hang in the air. As if it were watching him, and worn by a man whose stomach was on a level with the tousled top of Rod's head.

Shit. It certainly didn't look friendly; Taeauna and Deldragon were already stepping forward, swords rising.

At least it was just a helm, without arms and shoulders to swing some great big sword.

Something else was emerging out of the solid stone walls on either side of the passage, drifting forth in eerie silence. Arms, or rather hollow assemblies of armor plate to cloak the arms of an absent body, from flaring shoulder-plates to elaborate gauntleted fingertips. A giant's body, by the size of them. They were converging below the helm, where they would probably mate with...

A breastplate and chain-linked assembly of overlapping back plates, now rising in stately silence up out of the floor, to—

"Falcon!" Iskarra spat. "Are we just going to stand and watch it? Hack it to ribbons, or let's run!"

"Now," Taeauna said calmly to the velduke a moment later, as the drifting pieces came to smooth halts, and the air between them seemed to brighten. "Right where they're meeting."

Deldragon didn't bother to nod. Sword-fire streaking from the point of his blade was already lashing the armor where it was drawing together, snarling and clawing at the plates, curling around and between them.

And seeming to harm them not at all.

Leg armor was rising up out of the floor, and a sword as long as a lance was sliding out of the wall, wisps of smoke curling along its deadly-looking blade. Deldragon aimed his sword to blast its hilt with his sword-fire, trying to halt it and prevent it from joining the assembling armor.

He might have been shining a flashlight on the sword, for all the effect it had, and Rod and Taeauna gasped in unison as the sword-fire darkened, faded, seemed to cough and fade... snarled and spat, faded away completely... spat again, and then faded...

"That sounds not good," Garfist growled. Is it...?"

He fell silent. The sword-fire was gone again, and the blade of the velduke's sword was crumbling to rust-red dust, a collapse into nothingness that raced down the steel in a silent haste so swift and menacing that Deldragon barely had time to fling down the hilt before it reached his hand.

The hilt burst into dust as it hit the floor, and was gone just like that, and all in velvet silence.

Beyond it, a crackling arose in the air, a singing tension that rose in pitch as the armored guardian, wholly bonded together and with sword in hand, took its first tentative step toward them.

Its second stride caused a squeal of metal against metal, yet was smoother, more confident, with none of the swaying of the first. Its third brought it smoothly into the crouch of a veteran warrior, hefting that huge blade from side to side, its reach blocking the passage, walling off any way to the gates beyond.

Everyone cursed.

"What's that thing of magic in your hand?" Deldragon snapped at Rod. "Something we can use?"

Rod and everyone else stared at Rod's palm where the golden-valved horn was sinking into his flesh, apparently dissolving into him. He shook his head slightly in disbelief; he couldn't feel a thing, not even weight. If he closed his eyes, it felt like his hand was simply... empty.

Empty...

Dared she?

Amalrys stopped in front of the closed, featureless stone door, her eyes like two small but bright blue lamps, shivering in her chains not from being otherwise bare in the cold darkness, but from excitement.

And fear.

Dared she, really? To raise her hand against the man who'd put these chains on her, claimed her so cruelly, lorded it over her daily because he could destroy her at his pleasure?

Dared she lash out at him at last?

Yes,
a voice whispered exultingly, deep within her. She laid her hand on the door, trembled as the glow grew around it, and then scraped her bare skin on its opening edge as she slid past a trifle too soon, in her eagerness to get inside.

Far from a
woman in chains forcing her way past a door in Ult Tower, a short, slender, and darkly handsome wizard rose from his claw-footed chair in one lithe movement to clench his fists, the better to hurl his will at her.

"Yes," Malraun breathed, putting all of his fierce will behind that word, feeling the distant Amalrys yield to it and embrace it as her own. "Yes, little unwitting slave," he murmured, "strike down your tormentor at last. Let there be one fewer Arlaghaun in the world."

As agile as any dancer, still thrusting his way deeper into the mind of Amalrys, he spun around and sprang back onto his chair, bouncing several times until his body was at rest again, his concentration never wavering.

"And if his slaying is beyond you this day," he remarked almost pleasantly, "let him taste torment, and be afraid, and be lessened. Aye, see that you humble Arlaghaun the Mighty."

He smiled, and told the ornately painted ceiling above, "For increasingly, his swaggering truly bothers me."

*   *   *

In a dark
chamber of slowly dripping water, where every solitary drop plummeting the height of a castle into a patiently waiting pool awakened its own uncaring echo, the tall, blue-skinned wizard Narmarkoun sat alone, as always, and at ease.

Nearby stood the staff he'd been augmenting, upright in the air though there was no hand to hold it there. The cold fires of his spells still flickered up and down its length betimes, reflecting back off his scaled hands.

He smiled.

"Goad her indeed, Malraun, and think yourself her master," he told the darkness. "Succeed or not, survive or not. I care not. Her mind is an open door into yours, and you are mine as surely as she is, whenever I care to reach out and take you.

"And then squeeze."

The watchers saw
the gold-hued bauble disappear entirely into Rod Everlar's palm, sinking out of sight beneath his unbroken, unblemished flesh.

With a squeal of grinding metal, the armored guardian took another step forward, blade reaching out menacingly.

Rod Everlar reeled, raised a hand to his head, and fell, toppling onto his face without a sound, to lie in an unmoving heap right in front of the lumbering guardian.

Taeauna rushed to stand over him, sword raised against the reach of the looming guardian. Garfist and Iskarra looked at each other and with one accord spun around and fled back along the passage, leaving Deldragon standing alone where he was, stroking his mustache as he watched the guardian take another ponderous step, and then another.

The velduke seemed to reach a decision. He drew his dagger and snapped at the Aumrarr, "Get back! Yon guardian will kill you."

"If it does," Taeauna told him, her voice trembling on the edge of tears, "it does. Nothing in all Falconfar matters more than keeping this man alive right now."

Deldragon stared at her as the guardian took another slow step, and swung its sword that was longer than either of them stood tall, up and back, ready to sweep down and shear through anything less solid than an ox or a stone pillar. Then it paused again, waiting, motionless and expressionless.

The velduke stared up at it, then drew another dagger from his boot and hurried to Taeauna. "He's a Shaper, isn't he?" he asked quietly, his eyes very blue.