Falconfar 03-Falconfar (5 page)

"Aye, lass, aye. I'm not a dullard. How far's this Telphangh place, hey?"

"Never mind that," Isk told him sharply. "Is there a good spot near us, up ahead, where you can land?"

"Hope so," Dauntra replied grimly. "Jusk?"

"Not a good one," Juskra said slowly, "but I believe we're already past waiting for good ones. Shield your face and pull your arms and legs in, fat man."

"Are ye addressing wer"' Garfist asked, in mock anger, even as he obeyed her.

"Nay, I was talking to the small army of fat men I seem to be lugging through the night," Juskra told him with a grim smile. "Hold tight!"

Before he could reply, they crashed through a tangle of branches. She winced—and then groaned aloud as Garfist got caught among them for long enough to yank her over on her side.

Growling, he let fly a lusty kick at an unseen bough, thrusting them free. Juskra wobbled like a drunkard through the sky, hissing curses, almost slamming into the next tree before she righted herself and drew in her wingtips in time to plunge between two thick stands of gallart-tops, and burst through the upper branches of a pine.

In grim silence, Dauntra followed her, keeping higher to spare herself and Iskarra the battering. Juskra was ducking and darting down a narrow, tree-choked cleft between two ridges, somewhere in the heart of the Raurklar, and a wet flatness that might be water—or just might be a bog—could be seen somewhere ahead.

"Here?" Gar growled at the battlescarred Aumrarr above him, waving a hand at it.

"Don't do that," she snapped back at him, as his gesture set them to rocking in the air and turned a smooth banking glide into frantic flapping. "No, not here. I've no wish to try to fight lorn up to my neck in sucking mud."

"So why not—"

"Garfist Gulkoun," Juskra growled fiercely, "shut your endless roar and listen to me. I'm about spent. That ring I gave you? Think of a sunrise, remember? Once it glows, it can strike someone—yes, it works on lorn—senseless at a touch. It won't glow again right away, though, and each time you use it in the same fray, it'll be a little slower to awaken than the last time. Oh, and one thing more: it seems to only work once on someone. So if you send a lorn to sleep, don't try using it on the same lorn a second time. And don't use it on me."

"Oh? Why? Ye'll get upset?"

Juskra rolled her eyes. She couldn't see Gar's grin, but she could hear it in his voice.

"Yes," she replied evenly. "I'll get upset—and we can't have that."

Despite herself, Juskra was grinning as she ducked around a huge old pine tree, misjudged the space beyond—and slammed hard into a gallart-top that had been tall and strong when Highcrag was built.

And was now old, hollow, dead, and the size of a small castle keep.

Juskra moaned in pain as she crashed through a dozen lichen- cloaked, long-dead branches and into the main trunk beyond, winding her and smashing something small in her left wing—and shattering the rotten trunk in an explosion of dead-dry wood.

Garfist's cursing, as he crashed along in her wake, ended in helpless coughing and choking as he breathed in a cloud of wood dust, and the air around them echoed with the dull snap of the trunk breaking right through and the rest of the tree starting to topple on them from above, breaking apart as it came.

Which was a good thing for the startled Dauntra and Iskarra, who flew right into it all with identical startled shrieks.

Already beyond the tree they'd destroyed, Juskra and Garfist were tumbling helplessly through a sharp tangle of other branches that broke loudly as they fell. Juskra was too breathless and pain-wracked to say anything, her wings snagging and tearing and snagging again, and Garfist was strangling as he fought to breathe.

The lorn diving after them would have smiled in triumph, if they could have. Not having mouths to smile with, they did it with their eyes.

As they swooped down, jostling each other in their haste to reach their quarry first, and personally do the killing.

IT WAS NO USE. He couldn't Shape with greatfangs after greatfangs sweeping down on him, blotting out the sky, couldn't concentrate—

Shaking his head, anger rising, Rod Everlar threw himself sideways and up a few steps, rolling and curling up into the hard stone corner where a step met the side-wall.

The talon that had just stabbed out to slice him open from throat to crotch sliced the air above his shoulder and swept past, its owner hissing out its anger like a deafening, castle-sized kettle.

Rod cowered down, hugging the stone, and felt rather than saw the huge bulk pass over him, the tail of the irritated greatfangs lashing the steps above him, shattering them and showering him with rubble. He risked a glance up the stair—and saw the next two beasts swooping down the stairs at him.

They were much smaller than the first two—which meant that they were as long as a dozen horses, each, and their jaws would have to bite him in half to swallow him. Which they looked more than capable of doing.

The one that was in the lead was already angling over to one side as it flew, so it could come along the step he was cowering on rather than across it, and simply scoop him up with fang and talon. Bite, bite, chew, chew, and that'd be it. No more Rod Everlar, no more Archwizard of Falconfar, no more... anything, for him.

Spitting out a curse, he sprang to his feet, whirled around, and started running down the endless steps again, barely aware that the fifth and smallest greatfangs was circling high in the sky above, and that the largest of them was disappearing into clouds in the distance. Presumably with Malraun and Taeauna in its belly. There was no sign of either of them, and her cries had been moving farther and farther from him so fast...

Below him, farther down the steps, the greatfangs that had missed eviscerating him let out a roar—and started lashing out with its tail and talons like a dog digging in sand, smashing what was left of the walls of Malragard right around it.

As if that had been a signal, the two smaller greatfangs swerved in opposite directions to wreak mayhem on the stones of Malragard, too, and the last, smallest greatfangs plunged down out of the sky to join them.

As Rod watched, mouth open in astonishment, the five greatfangs swarmed angrily over Malraun's tower, tearing open roofs, tumbling walls, and shredding the contents of the rooms with great raking sweeps of their talons.

Had Narmarkoun worked some sort of commandment into these monsters, to make them destroy the abode of his rival Doom? Or was he somehow sending them orders right now?

Whatever the reason, Rod doubted he'd be spared forever; if they got done reducing the tower to rubble while he was still standing here on this stair, they'd likely come for him again.

So where, with the roofs of Harlhoh yonder—a small village with plenty of folk cowering, pointing and running in it; fellow targets to lure greatfangs talons, all of them—and tilled fields stretching everywhere else to the dark and distant line of the surrounding Raurklor, could he go? Or hide?

Deep in the forest would be best, but there was no way he could outrun five of the beasts, across all that farmland.

The alternative was to find rubble, hunker down in it, and hope by the Falcon that he didn't end up crushed or buried alive, if the huge flying beasts kept at it after leveling the tower, reducing Malragard from rubble to gravel.

The largest of the remaining greatfangs whirled, in a sinuous rwisting of its scaly bulk that Rod wouldn't have believed possible if he hadn't seen it, to hook its talons under the roof of the lower levels of the tower, and tug as it flew overhead.

Stone and slate shingles tried to bend, with an almost human shriek, and then shattered into scores of pieces and fell apart, creating a brief rain of tumbling shards and leaving the ponderous beast holding nothing at all.

Its latest attack had wrought something else. Well down the stair from Rod, below a landing now choked with tumbled ceiling-beams, a long sliver of ceiling had been torn away, so that someone running down the stair could leap sideways through the tapering gap, into the darkness below. Where there was a room, presumably—quite possibly a ready-made tomb, if the greatfangs' assault kept up—but better shelter than the open air he was standing up in now, alone and prominent on the stair, with two smaller greatfangs headed his way.

Rod dashed down the stairs, leaping heaps of rubble or skidding through them on his boot heels, like an out-of-control skier about to crash, where they formed drifts too large and deep to jump over or dodge. One of the greatfangs was definitely heading for him, veering from what it had been doing to open a fanged mouth that wasn't the huge cavern of its two bigger brethren, but still the size of a grand pair of double doors.

And definitely large enough to bite him in two in one swift lunge.

Rod had time enough to get a very good look at that mouth, and its fringe of sharp fangs—the largest were as long as his arms— before he had to duck and wriggle and bruisingly slam his way through a tangle of fallen beams. Whereupon, as he struggled free of them, gasping, the greatfangs looming up like a huge dark curtain overhead, the narrow gap was right in front of him.

He launched himself into it head-first, quickly raising his hands to shield his face and throat.

One wrist banged numbingly on the edge of the gap as he went through it, but he had time, in the long plunge that followed, to get both hands up.

He fell a long way in the darkness. His landing—

—Was a crash through an unseen awning or canopy, which held him for the merest of moments before tearing with an angry sound and choking and blinding him with swirling dust. Then he slammed into what felt like a mattress—cloth and straw and ropes that groaned and held for agonizing moments ere they snapped with strange singing sighs—and slammed with it into something beyond, something hard, flat and unyielding.

The floor, Rod concluded brilliantly, in the last moment before the worst of the choking took him, and he writhed and spasmed helplessly in the dust, lungs and throat afire and precious air nowhere to be found. He rolled desperately, blind and in agony and just wanting to get away from the dust.

Once, long ago, on a school trip, Rod had spent a few memorable minutes wallowing in a great box of foam mattress stuffing, giggling but helpless, and the dust roiling around him now felt about like that. He rolled and rolled, clawing at the floor to try to move faster, shuddering at the agony in his lungs, panting but unable to sob...

Until it all ended, and he could breathe.

And cough. And cough some more, curling up in a helpless ball to hack, and retch, and then spew his guts out.

Or so it felt, as he rolled weakly on into the darkness, just trying to get farther from the dust—and the faint light of the sky he could now see, through swimming eyes, somewhere above and behind him.

Timbers groaned, a little way off in one direction, rising to a shriek and breaking off into dull, floor-shaking crashes. The greatfangs demolition crew were still at work.

Another crash, this one closer. Tomb indeed, brought right down on his head, if he didn't move.

Still coughing, Rod forced his eyes open and tried to sit up. The crashing he was hearing was coming from right there—and there, in this now-dimly-seen room, was a place where the wall was bulging outward as he watched.

To break, jaggedly, showering the room with fieldstones, mortar dust, and splintered wood that a moment ago had been paneling; a tumbling cloud of wreckage that fell away from a row of dark, curving knives that Rod recognized all too well as greatfangs talons.

Talons now sweeping across the room at him, even as a scaly and sinuous neck looped in the air above, to bring one cruel eye to peer in at him.

Sighing out a curse, Rod Everlar stared back at it and made a rude gesture before hurling himself into a frantic roll again.

He was heading for the unseen, unknown far end of the room— but he was really just striving to get away.

It was all happening so fast.

The talons swerved toward him, the body of the greatfangs blotted out all light, and Rod tried to console himself with the thought that the beast was flying overhead; it would be past and gone in another moment.

The trick would be living through that moment.