Falconfar 01-Dark Lord (8 page)

After what seemed like a long time, her laughter gave way to sobs, and then a sniffle or two. Then she pushed herself up off him, and looked away into the cold morning breeze.

"I wish you hadn't said that. 'Tis in my mind, now; I might slip and call you 'Lord Idiot Archwizard' in the company of others." There was just a hint of what might have been a chuckle in her voice.

"And that plain-tongued honesty would be bad how, exactly?"

Taeauna turned her head slowly to regard him, not smiling. "You
are
different from other wizards. From every other wizard I've ever met. You're... soft where they are hard. Gentle where they are savage. A willful fool where they are haughty and threatening. A—"

"Bumbling idiot where they are capable rulers," Rod interrupted her, adding a wry smile. Taeauna sighed, and looked away again. Rod leaned forward to touch her shoulder with one forefinger. "Tay, I—"

"Taeauna."

"Sorry, Taeauna. Uh, Taeauna... I'm sorry I'm not the world-striding godlike cloaked wizard you probably hoped I'd be, able to set things right the moment I set foot in Falconfar."

He felt the stones beside him with his other hand, feeling the coarse, tufted grass between them, and shook his head. "I still can't quite believe I'm here, in this imagin... In this place I never knew was real. But I'm glad I am. And I want to help, however clumsy I am."

He looked around, at other ridges and higher peaks in the distance, and at the great green valleys on either side of the row of hills they were perched atop, groping for the right words. Taeauna was watching him, her eyes on his, waiting in patient silence.

He drew in a deep breath, and said in a rush, "I don't mind being guided by you; in fact, I'd be lost without you and don't want you so much as out of my sight. Yet I... I don't want to just stumble along not knowing
why
we're going to this place or that place. I-I need to know."

The Aumrarr nodded. "Forgive me, lord. It was wrong of me not to have spoken of this with you sooner. I was waiting for a moment of ease, in Highcrag, and then..."

Though her face remained calm, she drew in a ragged breath before adding, "I dared my life to reach you because I was losing it anyway. You were there, dreaming of me, so close. My spilled blood and resolve were enough to open a Way between us. Your power is all mighty, even in your dreams, even when you... know not what you do. You are Falconfar's only hope."

Rod grimaced. "Not to place any pressure on me, or anything like that."

Taeauna shrugged. "I am desperate. I would do anything with you, or," she lowered her voice to a murmur, but kept her eyes on his, "to you, to save Falconfar. You are the only sword I know of, to smite the Dooms.
Ach;
the other three Dooms, I mean."

Rod spread his hands. "Very grand. Stirring, even. But what does my having all this power really mean? I've read fantasy novels aplenty where innocent good guys—and gals—blunder along, saved by their own predestiny, to the end of the book, and then suddenly know the Right Thing To Do, and destroy the Dark..." His voice trailed away as he realized what he was starting to say.

"Dark Lord," Taeauna said for him, with a little smile. "Yes. Our Falconfar legends say the same, many times over. Yet I believe you won't be an ignorant innocent when you face the Dooms, if you can reach the right place before you meet with them. Going to that place will break the spell on you, and your memories will return."

"And then?" Rod felt a stirring of excitement within him, a deep, crawling energy that he'd never felt before. This was all so much wishful talk, wasn't it? And yet... and yet...

"When your memories are restored, you should be able to write with power, so your pen can swiftly change Falconfar back to what it should be. Restore we Aumrarr, destroy the wizards and their Dark Helms, make mages who are simply local dabblers in magic and monsters rare beasts rather than nightly prowlers nigh-everywhere. Return wars to disputes that erupt betimes, not the ceaseless warfare that has become the daily lives of all Falconaar."

Well, that was easily
said.
Write what, exactly? Who was to say it would work? Or if his pen could really affect things, what exactly should he write? What if his changes begat consequences that were worse? Or that he didn't even know about, until it was far too late...

Yet in his mind, he was already seeing himself writing the words "No more Dark Helms" on parchment with a quill pen, then watching all of them instantly fade away into empty, collapsing armor and then dust, clear across vast Falconfar.

Enough. Time enough to burn that bridge once he was standing on it. Keep to the specifics, the next step here and now. "What is this 'right place?'"

Taeauna looked very solemn. "I know not," she whispered, "which is why we'll wander after we're away from Hollowtree and Highcrag. But you will know it. In your dreams."

"B-but... I don't remember my dreams! Not since I got here!" Rod protested, staring at her.

Taeauna stared back at him.

"Oh, shit," she said savagely. As all the color drained out of her face, and bleak despair rose into her eyes.

They were both
on their feet, the Dark Lord and the Aumrarr, striding back and forth in the freshening winds. Huddled against their dismay, they paced among the rocks, back and forth past each other, trying to think.

"So do we just wander the whole world in hopes I'll know this 'right place' when I see it?" Rod Everlar asked incredulously at last, seeing no other possible road. He did, however, picture this "right place" being some jungle-covered ruin slumbering on one continent of Earth while he scoured a busy city on another.

Taeauna whirled to face him. "That's just what we'll have to do!" she said, her voice fierce with sudden resolve. "No matter how long it takes, and no matter how far we must travel! And the reason we'll give to all for our journeying: I'm an Aumrarr guiding you to work off a blood-debt to your family, and you are a man on a death-quest."

These Rod did remember from his writings. The Aumrarr—and only the Aumrarr, as far as he could remember—recognized blood-debts to kin when one of them slew an innocent person through mischance or misunderstanding. A task or service was done, often a rescue or guiding. Death-quests were a widespread Falconfar custom, wherein still-hale elderly folk journeyed to where an ancestor was buried, to arrange to also be buried there. "Aren't I, uh... a little young for a death-quest?"

"You won't look so when I'm done with you," Taeauna replied, giving him a not-so-sweet smile. "Mud rubbed into your face to hide the fire-soot I'll use to draw wrinkles on you, winterleaf in your hair to streak it white, and a kerchief around your head to make you look old and cold, and to keep rain from washing away your wrinkles."

"And where are you going to get a kerchief?"

Taeauna held up one of her blankets, and a dagger.

Rod winced. "Isn't there some other way?"

Taeauna shrugged. "We can burn all we have as a beacon, and lie down here on the rocks to see which of the Three Dooms gets here fastest, to blast us to bare bones."

Rod sighed. "I'll hold the blanket taut, and you cut, okay?"

"Okay," Taeauna replied. Her mimicry of his resigned "why the hell not?" tone was perfect.

Rod hadn't walked
this much in a day since he was a teenager, out camping. And he hadn't liked camping that much.

He was tired, he was cold—the breezes were decidedly chilly, up in these hills—and his feet hurt.

Taeauna was still striding along as smoothly and tirelessly as some sort of young acrobat, sleek and supple, ducking and crawling like a wisp of the wind rather than a winded, clumsy, skinning-knees-and-elbows novel writer. Usually she was just ahead of him, but sometimes she turned to look back behind them, then let him pass and followed him with hand on sword, glaring around alertly.

Yet no Dark Helm or monster had come lunging out at them thus far. In fact, aside from tiny, distant vaugren circling lazily high in the sky, they'd seen nothing living that wasn't a plant, all the way.

They soon saw something dead, all right. Their trail led them past the ancient, abandoned ruin of a castle that even the vaugren seemed to shun. Something that stank like old sewage lay rotting inside it, something so large that its ribcage formed arches of bone that towered above their heads as they stalked warily past.

A neck as long as Rod's driveway stretched up a crumbling castle wall, limp and broken, to end in a severed, insect-swarming mess not far from—

"Aughh!" Rod hissed, trying not to vomit. "What's that?"

High above them, crowning the end of a collapsed wall, perched a leathery, many-horned, greenish-brown monstrosity, a little bigger than Rod's body, that looked a little bit like the head of a triceratops Rod had seen illustrated in dinosaur books. If, that is, triceratops had sprouted dozens of dark, corkscrew-spiraling horns, like antelope or mountain goats or whatever, and tusked fangs around a great jaw like an overgrown cane toad or horned devil or—or—

"Its head. This was a greatfangs, when it lived, and that didn't end all that long ago," Taeauna told him, sounding troubled, her sword drawn in her hand. "I know not how it came to be here, in Ornkeep, but..."

Rod was watching her bone-white face. "But you want to," he said, after it became clear she wasn't going to say anymore. "So, do we run like hell, or is it too late for that?"

The Aumrarr shook her head. "Nothing could slay a greatfangs thus except a wizard's spell, or a true dragon; not even another greatfangs has jaws large and strong enough to behead one of its kin." She shook her head again. "I've only seen two dragons in all my days." Looking straight at Rod—a look that laid bare to him just how tremblingly afraid she was—she added, "And I've seen a
lot
of Falconfar. Come."

And she walked into the ruin without waiting for his reply, heading for one of the stone staircases that ascended.

Gagging at the stink of the great carcass they were passing, Rod scrambled to follow, muttering, "Why are we...? What if this damned wizard is lurking somewhere around here, waiting for us? Shouldn't we just...?"

The view of the sprawled, dead greatfangs didn't look any more reassuring from atop the wall, and the stones of that wall, cracked and overgrown with low, creeping plants, literally crumbled underfoot.

Wincing, Rod gingerly followed Taeauna out to the end of the wall. He hoped she hadn't decided she was the last Aumrarr, and she should just hurl herself off it and leave him alone here, up in this whistling wind.

She stopped at the end of the wall, close enough to touch the reeking tangle of sharp, stabbing horns that was the severed head, and stared down at something on the crumbling stone right beside it.

Something that glowed.

Something small, blue-white and bright. Magic, of course.

Rod advanced cautiously to where he could see it properly, and stopped, afraid he might slip and knock Taeauna into all those nasty-looking horns, perhaps to slide messily off into a long, fatal fall down onto the rocks below, and taking him with her.

He "was peering at a small, flat stone, and the glow was coming from a complicated little squiggle that had been drawn on it.

"What is it?" Rod murmured, looking all around. He half-expected a dragon, or a wizard— or a wizard riding a dragon—to suddenly race out of hiding, loom up to tower over them, and roar terribly.

Before it ate them, or crisped them with fiery breath, of course.

Gently, coldly, the wind whistled past.

"We were meant to find this," the Aumrarr told him, kneeling beside it. "It's a wizard's rune. The sign of one of the Dooms. Telling us, or anyone passing this way, who slew this greatfangs, to make the way safe for us. It's a trap, of sorts, too; come no closer."

Rod nodded, only too happy to obey. "So you know who put it here?"

Taeauna nodded without replying. She set down her sacks, rummaged in one of them, and plucked forth two stoppered flasks. Pulling the cork from the larger one, she carefully sprinkled an unbroken ring of brown powder that looked like instant coffee around the stone, tapping the flask with a deft finger to make sure she used not a grain more than she had to. She left no gaps, and spilled nothing on the glowing stone.