The Gold Falcon (37 page)

With a caw of triumph, Salamander hopped onto the improvised sack and sank his claws into the cloth. He sprang into the air and flew, flapping in wide circles over the fort far below. On his last pass by the tower, he saw the window of his former prison still glowing with silver light. Out in the ward tiny figures of Horsekin scurried around, heading for the tower. Their frantic voices drifted up to him, but he could understand nothing of what they were shouting to one another.

There’s nothing like a good miracle,
Salamander thought,
to keep the holy-minded occupied.
Fighting the wind currents, he headed south.

Salamander had guessed right about Dallandra’s distracted mood. Two of Cal’s archers had been courting the same young woman, and eventually they’d come to blows. Dallandra had just fallen asleep in the grass near her tent when Calonderiel came running to wake her. She sat up and listened to his report in sullen annoyance.

“Why do you need me?” she said finally. “The bruises—”

“It’s worse than bruises,” Cal said. “One of them drew his knife.”

Hurriedly, Dallandra got to her feet. “I need to get my tools from the tent,” she said. “How bad is the cut?”

“More than one. The other drew his, too.”

“Of course. Why did I ever think otherwise?”

While she was stitching up the worst of the slashes, Dalla was aware of Salamander trying to reach her, but with the blood still flowing down her patient’s arm, she could spare the gerthddyn none of her concentration. After both love-sick warriors were stitched, dosed with herbs, and properly berated, Dallandra did try to contact Salamander, but this time it was his mind that refused to respond. She received a general impression of rushing wind and a view of night-dark trees that rose and fell in a steady rhythm.
By the Dark Sun!
she thought.
He must be flying.

All she could do was wait for him to regain his proper body.

As the night wore on, Salamander found it harder and harder to stay in the air. His wings ached, and he took to gliding upon air currents whenever he could. His legs hurt as well; his talons in bird-form were at root his feet and toes, parts of the body that were normally spared such work as carrying heavy sacks. Still, he forced himself onward. He could think of two possible outcomes if the Horsekin caught him. In one, Rocca would prevail upon them to kill him quickly. In the other, the pains he was feeling at the moment would seem like pleasure compared to what they’d do to him.

Below him the scrubby tableland kept dropping down, until at last he saw only a roll of low hills and beyond, grassland. A river, silver in the gray dawn light, flowed steadily south between tree-lined banks. He circled an old, drooping willow, then flapped down through its curtain of fine twigs and leaves; he let the sack fall to the ground below and settled on a heavy branch to roost. He was greeted with a rattling call of rage from another magpie, who ducked his head low, spread his wings, and danced a threat close to the tree trunk.

“Aren’t you the hospitable sort?” Salamander’s voice came out as a croaking rasping parody of human speech.

The sound seemed to make the magpie notice just how large his sudden neighbor was. With a squawk of sheer terror, the real bird flew off screeching. Enough of Salamander’s current nature was magpie for him to be tempted to go through the other’s nest and steal whatever trinkets it had hidden there, but he put the temptation firmly out of his mind. That he’d even thought it signaled a dangerous exhaustion. With a flap of his aching wings, he settled to the ground next to the sack.

For some little while he rested among the rasping blades of marsh grass, but his wings trailed uselessly, and he needed feet more than claws. He reversed the dweomer, imaging his own body in his mind and sending the image out to apparent solidity in front of him. In spite of his ever-present fear of being trapped in bird-form, his real body built up fast, sucking the etheric substance back into it of its own will. Salamander heard a sudden click, a percussive hiss; then he was sitting dazed and naked on the hummock of grass, and there was nothing left of the magpie but claw marks in damp ground.

Just a few feet away the rising sun rippled and glinted in flecks like fire on the river. He dumped the contents of his sack, turned the sack back into brigga, and put them on before limping to the riverside on cramped feet.
Now for Rocca,
he thought.
I’ll never forgive myself if she’s come to harm.

He knelt with a grunt of exhaustion. When he thought of Rocca, the vision built up on the sun-touched water. It seemed that he was hovering some twenty feet above the altar of the Outer Shrine. Rocca stood in front of it, her arms outstretched, her face glowing with such joy that he knew she believed in his artificial miracle. She was wearing his filthy, sweat-stained shirt around her shoulders like a cloak. On the ground Sidro knelt, her raven-dark head tossed back, her arms crossed over her chest. Behind her stood the Horsekin priestesses. Every now and then one of them gave Sidro a random sort of kick as Rocca continued her prayers.

Salamander focused the vision down until he could see Sidro more clearly. He was expecting her to be humiliated and terrified, but the look on her face and the trembling of her shoulders spoke of sheer cold rage. Watching her, Salamander felt oddly frightened.
Don’t be stupid
, he told himself.
She’s miles away, and she doesn’t even have dweomer
. Yet suddenly he wasn’t so sure of that. What had she seen that prompted her to call him Vandar’s spawn? Although anyone who knew the Westfolk well could have picked up traces of his mixed blood, still he looked far more human than elven. Yet Sidro had challenged him with perfect confidence. He broke the vision, half-fearing she would realize that he was watching her.

Besides, he needed to contact Dallandra. On the fiery surface of the water, Dalla’s image built up quickly, wavered, then steadied.

“Where are you?” Dalla thought to him. “I’ve never felt your mind so exhausted! Where’s your shirt?”

“In Zakh Gral, where it’s become a holy relic,” Salamander thought back. “So are my horses and all my gear, though I don’t suppose those will end up on the altar. My manly chest, however, has escaped with me, although little black flies, alas, are trying to bite it even as we speak.”

“Will you stop babbling like that?”

“I’ll do my best. As you’ve doubtless guessed, I took bird-form and did get clean away, and I remembered to bring along some evidence that the place exists. Alas, I couldn’t carry everything, which means I’m foodless as well as shirtless. And they kept my table dagger, blankets, horses—the lot. So here I am, alive but plunged into poverty and despair. I have no idea how far from you I am, but I doubt if I can fly again.”

“I doubt if you should. Here, are you having those odd broken visions again?”

“Oh. I don’t know. Here, let me see.” He looked around and realized that the trees, the grass, even the cold gray rocks tumbled along the stream bank were refusing to hold steady. They pulsed around the edges, they seemed to glow from within—he shook his head hard. “Yes, the world is beating like a heart.”

“I was afraid of that. I can feel the strains in your mind. One more difficult working, and your old madness could return.”

“But madness begins to sound better than being eaten alive by gnats, flies, wild wolves, bears—”

“Ebañy, stop it! You’re one of the People. You know how to survive in wild places. Besides, you won’t have to walk the whole way south. I’m coming to fetch you.”

Salamander felt a sudden burst of hope which, since he was exhausted, broke the vision beyond his power to call it back. He waded out to the shallows to drink the clean water there, then plastered his upper body with mud to keep off biting flies. By the time he finished, the pulsing world seemed to rotate around him; he barely had the strength to crawl back under the willow’s lacy overhang before he fell asleep.

“Canyoureally reach Ebañy this way?”Valandario said. “When Evandar crossed the River of Life, didn’t all the hidden roads close?”

“Some of the mother roads, yes,” Dallandra said. “Those are the ones that led between different worlds. But the short paths, the ones between places inside our world, they still work. I think they existed long before Evandar came here. They’re harder to find now, though.”

“They must have drawn their life from the mother roads.”

“They did, or, come to think of it, they must still do so. There has to be at least one mother road that’s still open. Otherwise all the daughter roads would be gone.”

“They might well disappear, someday. I just hope you can get back again.”

“So do I.” Dalla paused for a sharp laugh. “But I think the roads will last long enough for that. Ebañy’s not all that far away. Five or six days’ ride, I’d say.”

“The fort’s that close? By the Black Sun herself! Those Horsekin—bold as stoats and twice as stinky!”

“Well, Ebañy flew a good ways south before he came to earth. But if we’re not back in two days, send Cal and his men north after us.”

Dallandra borrowed a shirt for Salamander from his father, then put it and some food into a sack. She took Valandario along when she left the camp and headed for a nearby stream that ran through the tall grass out by the horse herd. Dallandra was looking for the subtle signs that mark the beginning of an etheric road. Since the combined auras of the horses and the men guarding them blurred the boundaries of the planes, she led Valandario along for a good mile before she finally found what she was looking for. The stream formed a pool at the bottom of a slight drop, and a tangle of hazel withes had sprung up around it. She could see the glimmer of etheric force marking a boundary.

“There!” Dallandra pointed. “On this side just before you reach the hazels. See it?”

“No,” Valandario said, then sighed. “I just don’t have your gifts.”

“Well, I can’t scry the future like you can.”

“True. Now, be careful. I’ll be watching for you both.”

Dallandra stepped into the quivering lozenge of etheric force. For a brief moment elemental energy, an etheric outpouring from the running stream beyond, threatened to trap her. She felt it grab her with invisible hands, but in a quick slither she broke free and found herself standing on a low outcrop of rock, a peculiar rock as much blue as gray, that shimmered under her feet. She had found a road.

For a moment she paused to make a detailed image of Salamander in her mind. Since he had dweomer himself, the image came easily, showing him mud-encrusted and asleep under a willow tree. He seemed to be lying only a few yards away, but as she walked toward him the image receded, leading her onward. After what seemed a brief interval, the image held steady, then strengthened, turning three-dimensional as she stepped down off the etheric road onto the physical riverbank. In the sky sunset flamed. Traveling the roads meant stepping out of Time, which as usual had run far faster on the physical plane than on the network of astral roads.