Falconfar 03-Falconfar (25 page)

Which meant he could now at least name what was about to kill him. Well, that was progress of a sort...

Rod drew in a deep breath, reached out his hand, and firmly took hold of the nearest intact undluth.

Nothing happened. It proved to be solid, cold, and smooth; touching it caused nothing to blow up, no sparks to spit anywhere, and nothing to boil up in his mind. It was like holding a splendidly carved stick.

Until a little window seemed to sigh open in his mind, showing him lines of bronze-hued flame spurting smoothly from the points of the undluth, and a word slowly appeared around the window: nressae.

Well, now...

Rod shrugged, held the undluth up and carefully out to one side, tilted it so neither of the points were aimed at him, and announced to the room calmly and clearly, "Nressae."

Bronze fire leaked silently out of the tips of the undluth with no fuss at all, as readily and simply as if he'd turned on a tap.

"Nressae," he said again—and the fire stopped, the fiery lines hanging down in midair slowly fading back up toward the points of the undluth.

No, no, they were burning their way back to the points where they'd come from, consuming themselves like a long fuse running to sticks of dynamite in an old movie. As Rod watched, they reached the points and winked out.

He blinked. A good thing, that; it hadn't crossed his mind until just now that the undluth could have exploded when they reached it, coming from either side, and met.

No, impossible, his mind told him rather scornfully— Rambaerakh, for all the tea in China—yet someone inside his head, some memory that hadn't belonged to the wizard, had fully expected that result. Probably due to seeing it happen once.

His mind hurled a severed hand at him, cartwheeling out of the darkness and past his nose fast enough to leave him blinking, trailed by a raw, throat-stripping scream of agony.

Then it was gone, and he was staring at the silent, reassuringly solid undluth in his hand again.

Rod shrugged. "Nressae."

Bronzen fire awakened once more. He watched it blaze for a moment, then drew his hand carefully up and to the right, with the exaggerated sweeping grace of a ballerina, so as to swing those lines of fire up onto the bench around a trio of pulsing, backlashing wands to where a row of burnt staves and scepterlike things lay.

So ho, he could do this! As deftly as a dancer, that had been...

The charred things sprang into the air, spitting sparks, at the first touch of undluth-fire. Rod flinched.

In prompt response, the lines of bronzen flame undulated like a snake, traveling along the battered bench like someone sending waves along a skipping rope. Enchanted items bounded up, spat spectacular showers of sparks, and flew apart—sending thrilling discharges of magic back down along the fires and up his arm.

Rod was trembling in an instant, caught in the thrumming heart of more magic than he'd ever felt before, power that lifted him right off the floor to hover a few inches above it.

"Wow!" he gasped aloud, then saw the lines of fire still snaking along the bench, toward a tangle of staves that still looked intact—

"Nressae!" Rod shouted desperately, hauling back on the undluth, hard.

Bronze fire danced above the bench, recoiling and lashing, reaching out writhing tendrils toward a staff that almost seemed to stir and then bend to greet them, as if yielding to the pull of a gigantic magnet in a Saturday morning cartoon—and faded back toward Rod, without reaching any of the staves.

Thank the Falcon.

Well, he'd certainly be keeping this. It was about time he had something in his hand to deal with evil wizards or veteran warriors— what had one of his history teachers called them, so long ago? Oh, yes, "well-practiced murderers with swords"—and he liked the feel of this. Or rather, he liked the way it made him feel.

Powerful, dangerous, and capable. For the first time in years.

Not that he particularly wanted to be dangerous to anyone. He just wanted respect. To be treated like someone it would be dangerous to casually mistreat, thrust aside with scorn, or use as a pawn.

Yes. Rod hefted the undluth. He'd certainly be taking this with him.

Which meant he dared not carry any other undluths away from here, or he'd be the one in danger. Undluths did bad things with other undluths carried by the same person.

Now, how had he known that?

From one of the memories that had flooded into him, yes, but whose? Who had those bobbing skeletons been?

Rod frowned, shrugged, and turned to peer at the tangle of staves. He already knew they didn't all look alike, but hadn't yet applied himself to finding out what they did look like.

Hmm. Not that just looking was going to give him much of a clue as to what each one did. They lacked handy labels, and though they had decorations of a sort, mostly carved collars bordering the smooth handgrip, the style of those borders told him nothing about the intended purpose or powers of the staff. One or two of the borders looked a little like Celtic knotwork. yet formed parallel ridges of different heights, like the flaring decorative bands on Staunton chess pieces.

So Rod shrugged, took hold of a staff that looked to be about the right height to serve as a walking-stick and that wasn't too badly tangled up with other staves, and pulled it free.

No revelations rushing into his mind, no stirrings of power in his mind. It was a stick. Smooth, heavy and reassuring in his hand, but still just a stick. Until, he supposed, he said or did the right thing.

Which he would never ever happen to blindly, mistakenly do. Probably.

Rod shrugged, lifted the staff and turned it to make sure there were no little inscriptions hidden anywhere on it.

No. Nothing. There was no way the repeating curves of this border could be letters, or hide words—or even a rune, unless the whole danged thing, all around the curve of the staff, was a symbol. He recalled being taught about an ancient wartime code that used a strip of paper wound around a staff, but there was nothing on this staff that would help tell him if a code like that would work with this staff, and no little cracks in it where pieces of paper—or anything else—might be hidden.

His father's perennial gruff Christmas morning question: "What? No instructions?" rose into Rod's mind, and he smiled wryly. Shrugging, he turned to look for a rod, or a lurstar, or a wand, to take along, too.

One of each, no more, one part of his mind was warning him.

Yet an instant later, someone else's memories showed him men trudging along with bundles of wands bound at their belts, and six or seven staves lashed together and slung across their backs in baldric-carriers.

Rod shook his head, grinned, and decided to look thoroughly all over the room, pick up everything that he really liked the look of, make sure nothing so much as brushed against anything else, rig up some practical way of carrying everything, and take it all. After all, he doubted he'd be coming back.

In fact, a restless part of him wanted him to get going, to get out of this scorched and battered room without delay. There wasn't really much left of Malraun's arsenal of magic, all crowded and gleaming and neatly arranged along the shelves as he'd first seen it. He was looking at an aftermath, and what little wreckage had survived.

Some of it for not much longer, by the looks of the awakened wands whose pulsing, arcing magics were still wrestling weirdly with each other and getting feebler. Most looked like they'd just go dark, fading away into spitting and then silent exhaustion, but a few looked angrier; more dangerous, as if they'd explode rather than fading. Perhaps that was behind his growing restlessness.

"Begone," he murmured, selecting a wand he liked the look of. "Begone."

He thrust it through his belt, judging the slightly bulbous ends— both of them flared the same way, both of them carved with squiggly grooves that might mean something significant, or might be mere decoration—would keep the thing from falling to the ground unnoticed, as he walked. Then he saw a lurstar, uncracked among a group of broken ones, and took it, too, thrusting it through his belt nigh his other hip. Which left him with no hands free, if he was going to carry the staff and the undluth and let none of them touch each other.

Right. Magic he hadn't time to master—even if he could. Time to go.

As if that decision had been some sort of silent signal, staves and wands and lurstars awakened, all over the room, kindling into insistent, pulsing glows—and Rod's head was flooded with memories not his own. Striding out of this very chamber and along the passage ahead—not rubble-strewn and collapsed, but lit by a neat row of flickering torches. Meeting with powerful robed men. Wizards. Regal and feared—and rightly so.

One turning to face him, in a high-collared robe of maroon, hair and beard flecked with white, with great dark eyes... Lorontar.

He shivered, although it was only a memory, and was almost wildly glad when the figure was gone and others stood in its place; younger, darker men robed in green and sky-blue and brown. Lorontar's foes, these, though they were all dangerous in their own ways, too, wizards with no one to govern them and little to recommend them save that they had banded together to stand against Lorontar.

Dead now, most of them, and the rest gone into hiding. A secret society of sorts, hiding all over Falconfar and in places beyond, behind dozens of hidden gates. The Moon Masked, they were called, for their ability to cloak their faces with pearly radiance like moonlight.

They survived still, whoever had provided this memory was sure. Yet he—not Rambaerakh, so it must have been one of the skeletons—also knew they had not been seen or heard from in the lifetime of any living Falconaar he knew of, and that many— priests and sages and Aumrarr—believed the Moon Masked gone forever, done with Falconfar and with their struggle against Lorontar.

Rod shook his head to put such distracting thoughts aside—not now, this room was about to blow apart, or something or someone was headed here to investigate the first blast—and headed out of the room, along the passage.

Not that he knew his way around Malragard all that well. He had a vague idea that he had to turn around, and ascend a floor, to get to ground level and to the parts of the tower he knew.

Which were chock-full of Malraun's nasty little traps.

Right. Burn that bridge when we get to it. Right now, hurry. So turn left here, and—

Rod came to an abrupt halt, hefting the undluth in his hand— and was very glad he was holding it.

Something had been coming to investigate the magical explosion. But this...

Only a fantasy game designer could come up with this.

It was too damned ridiculous.

Rod was staring at two tawny, muscular legs that ended not in the paws that should have been there, but sticky, splayed feet like a gecko's.

The beast moved carefully, planting each foot securely before unpeeling the other behind it from the stones, then repeating the process... for all the world as if the sticky toes anchored it to the ground. Maybe they did; its bulbous, tapering body was made of swirling smoke that trailed behind it as it moved.

At the front end were great fanged jaws and an arc of four eyes that seemed to float in the air above them.

A maercrawn!

A which? Several memories had rushed up into Rod's mind to hand him that name, and were now crowding and overlapping confusingly. Deadly, for all its ridiculous looks, another added helpfully.

The maercrawn took two more slow, silent steps toward Rod, who found himself thinking that the beast's legs looked as strong and sleek as a lion's—and opened its jaws impossibly wide.

Rod stared at them.

It was as if a construction site backhoe had opened its scoop- bucket, and was trundling towards him. Except that it was ringed by very long, sharp teeth, and was coming straight for him.

CAREFUL," TAEAUNA MURMURED, her voice so low and soft that the men with her had to stop to hear her.

Which was exactly what she wanted them to do. Rushing around Malragard—this floor of it, at least—was apt to be fatal. For those who wanted to live, caution and stealth were imperative. The traps were many, and Taeauna didn't know precisely where and what all of them were, or how they worked. She suspected Malraun's longtime bodyguards knew even less than she did, once they stepped past their simple, memorized warnings like "don't step here unless you want to die." She'd overheard Eskeln muttering that to himself, once, as they clambered over the rubble of a fallen ceiling, toward a gaping doorway beyond.