Brotherhood of the Wolf (69 page)

He did not flap his arms as if they were wings. Nor did he make any other odd motion. He merely cackled and spread his arms wide, as if he were a flying squirrel, and let the wind take him.

A sudden burst of air whirled around him, battering his blue cloak, lifting him unexpectedly. He soared over Iome's head. His leap carried him a hundred feet in the air and two hundred yards downwind.

He came to rest like a crow in the huge oak tree above the stream where Iome had first seen him. The upper branches bobbed and swayed under his weight.

“By the Powers!” Sir Hoswell swore, racing to the base of the tree. He reached around behind his back, pulled his steel horsebow, and such was his uncommon strength that he actually strung it while in the saddle. He prepared to send a shaft up to hit the fellow.

The courier settled between three branches and chortled like a madman as Iome and Myrrima approached. Iome advanced toward him warily, wondering why this fellow had changed his demeanor so dramatically—from the grinning assassin to the chortling maniac.

“He's a Sky Lord!” Myrrima cried in wonder.

“Nay,” Sir Hoswell growled angrily, “a Sky Lord would have flown away from here. He's just a damned Inkarran wizard!”

Now that Hoswell said it, the fellow did look somewhat Inkarran. He had the silver hair, which was a rare enough trait here in the north. But his skin wasn't quite pallid enough, and his eyes were a dark brown rather than silver or gray. Not Inkarran, Iome thought, only a half-breed.

Hoswell sent a shaft into the tree, blurring upward from his steel bow, but the assassin merely dodged aside, or perhaps a sudden gust of wind moved the arrow.

“Greetings,” Iome called to the fellow, raising a hand to warn Hoswell not to shoot again. The courier continued to cackle.

Iome studied him. She could feel it, now that she tried. She had always been sensitive to the Powers, and now she could feel the Power that drove him. The fellow was not a cold, calculating assassin. He was passionate, chaotic, and utterly fearless—one who had given himself to the wind. Iome had recognized this
wrongness
in him almost immediately, even when she'd first seen him from a distance.

The courier continued to snicker. Iome tried to smile in return, catching his mood, feeling the power that drove him. She knew little of Air magics. Air was an unpredictable master, wild and variable. In order to harness it, one had to learn its moods, and mirror them.

Certainly the gibbering, cackling creature before her could not have acted the assassin like this. No, I see what he is doing, Iome thought. He adopts this mood to curry favor with the Air. But the wind is an unstable master, as likely to give a man ten times the power he needs as to let him down.

She thought of the Darkling Glory, of the elemental of Air that had escaped it. Could it have sent the assassin? she wondered. Could it have initiated this subtle attack?

Sir Hoswell glowered at the courier. “Who sent you?”

“Who? Who?” the fellow shouted. He gaily flapped his arms as if he were an owl. His broken wrist left one hand flopping. He looked at it and winced, gazed accusingly at Iome. “That hurt.”

“Why don't you come down?” Iome said.

“Down?” the fellow shouted. “Down to the ground? Down to the
ground?”
he cried in alarm. “Nay! Goose down. Eiderdown. Spider down!”

The fellow's eyes suddenly lit up as if he had an idea. “Thistledown!” he screamed. “Thistledown. Pissle down. Why don't
you
turn to thistledown and fly up? You could, you know! You could if you would. You would if you could. In your dreams!”

Iome's heart pounded. She'd dreamt of thistledown last week, of turning to thistledown and flying over Castle Sylvarresta, drifting up into the air away from her problems.

The courier opened his eyes wide, stretched out his good hand and beckoned to her. “Come to me, O cumbrous Queen of the Sky, you need no feathery wing to fly!”

He's serious, Iome realized. He wants me to join him.

A powerful blast of wind slammed into Iome's back, halfway ripping her from her saddle. Iome grabbed the pommel and clung to it. She remembered Gaborn's warning, and wondered now at her own stupidity.

If she let go, the wind would tear her from the saddle, and she feared where it might carry her. She screamed for help.

Hoswell let a shaft fly. The arrow lodged in the tree near the assassin's head, breaking his concentration. The wind around Iome died.

The assassin spun and snarled like some vicious dog, angered at the unexpected attack.

“No?” he cried. “No? No! She won't go! She won't grow. Not like the son within her grows!” He snarled as the Darkling Glory had. “Give me the King's son. I smell a son in your womb. Give it or I'll take it!”

The assassin grasped the arrow, wrung it from deep in the oak where the bodkin was buried, and hurled the bolt back at Hoswell. The arrow flew with astonishing speed, blurring as it whipped toward Hoswell, soaring left and right as no arrow should.

It struck Hoswell on the shoulder, merely to bounce off his armor and go blurring toward the grass.

“Beware!” Gaborn's Voice warned Iome.

Iome ducked just as the arrow soared upward and whipped around. It drove past her head, blurring as it picked up speed. Then it sailed off into the distance, lost to sight. Without her endowments of metabolism, she'd have been skewered.

“Damn him!” Hoswell shouted. “I'll go into the tree after him if I must.”

“Wait!” Iome warned.

She stared up at the assassin. He looked down at her, gibbering in laughter.

She felt the Power that moved him. She'd never met a wizard of the Air.

She felt confusion around him, indecision, a great buffeting wall. The man had no mind of his own, no will of his own. He moved as the wind moved him. He gave himself to it even further now, hoping that it would preserve him.

She felt his instability. The Air was taking him.

He was no longer human in this state, could hardly think sequentially. He was a gibbering lunatic blown by the wind. A wretched creature bereft of will. The horror of it settled into her as she realized that he wanted her to join him, to become like him.

Her dream of turning to thistledown. She remembered now that she'd dreamt it during a storm, with the wind blowing all around.

No, the wizard didn't want her to become like him. The wind did. The Powers of the Air.

Throw yourself into the sky. Let me take you away.

“So, good fellow,” Iome asked in an effort to divert his attention, “do you think you can teach me to fly?”

“Fly? Sky fly? Fly. Walk like a fly? Talk like a fly. Talk to the sky? Why? Why? Does she ask why?” the assassin began to gibber. He raked his good hand nervously over the bark of the oak, and Iome was amazed at his strength, for he absentmindedly began to rip huge shreds of bark away.

Iome calmly walked her mount over to Sir Hoswell. He'd nocked another arrow but was unsure whether to shoot. His last shaft had come within an inch of skewering the Queen.

Iome licked her lips and kissed the arrow's point, shaft, and fletching, wetting it in the same way that Myrrima's arrow had been wetted when she slew the Darkling Glory.

“Shoot him now,” Iome whispered.

The assassin shrieked, searched about for some means of escape. His sudden terror let her know that she had guessed right. Hoswell brought up his steel bow.

The fellow leapt into the air, and the wind shrieked around him, howling as if the wind itself were in fear. It beat his robes, so that they flapped around him like wings.

Hoswell loosed the shaft. The arrow became a dark blur and caught the assassin in the shoulder.

The assassin spun half a dozen times in the air.

Then the strange winds that held him suddenly dissipated, and his body hurtled downward as if he'd fallen from a limb. He landed with a dull thud.

But a groaning sound escaped his throat and moved off through the sky, whirling overhead, circling the great oak.

In horror Iome gazed upward.

The wizard's body might be lying at their feet, but something of him was left still: a swirling expanse of air that circled overhead and moaned of its own accord.

Hoswell dropped from his mount and rolled the corpse over. Hardly any blood flowed from the fellow. The arrow in his shoulder provided a minor flesh wound that should not have killed him.

Yet the Inkarran lay unmoving, unbreathing, his eyes staring fixedly.

We did not kill him, Iome realized. Not the way that Myrrima slew the Darkling Glory. This wizard had chosen to leave his body.

Hoswell wrapped one hand around the throat of the corpse and squeezed, then grabbed a handful of dirt, gouged it from the soil, and began shoving it in the dead man's mouth and nose. He glanced about fearfully as he worked.

“I've heard it said that if you disembody a Sky Lord, you should put him in the ground quickly,” Hoswell said to Myrrima and Iome. “That way he can't take his body back. It's best to sew his mouth and nostrils closed, too, but a little dirt shoved up there should hold it for a while.”

Iome knew little of such things. She was not a soldier of the line, had never imagined that she'd find herself battling magical creatures. Yet she had to wonder. She'd not done these things to the corpse of the Darkling Glory. Could it come back?

A strong gust of wind roared from the sky with a sound like a cry, slammed into Hoswell's back and drove him to the ground. The wizard's body suddenly bucked and heaved about as if in its death throes.

Hoswell threw a handful of soil in the air, and the magical wind whirled away in retreat. As if in frustration, it roared up into the heights of the tree and shot through the desiccated leaves, sending them raining down all around.

“Wait!” Iome said, horrified at the gruesome pains that Hoswell was going through to kill the man.

Hoswell looked up at her curiously.

“I want to know what he's after. Why did he attack us?”

“You'll not get any sane answers by questioning one of the wind-driven,” Hoswell said.

“Search the body,” Iome ordered.

Hoswell went through the fellow's purse, but found nothing.

Hoswell pulled off the man's right boot. His foot and calf were covered in blue tattoos, in the style of the Inkarrans, but the image there was not of the world tree, as was common, but instead bore the symbol of the winds among his family names. Iome knew a little of Inkarran glyphs, could barely read what was written there.

Hoswell scratched his jaw, studying the fellow's tattoos. “He's an Inkarran, all right. His name is Pilwyn. Zandaros is his patriarchal line, but the bitch who sired him is named Yassaravine,” Hoswell said meaningfully. He looked up into Iome's eyes.

“Yassaravine coly Zandaros?” Iome asked. “The Storm King's sister?” The Storm King was perhaps the most powerful lord in all of Inkarra. Legend said that his line descended from the Sky Lords, but that his forefather had fallen from their grace.

Hoswell was telling her that this wind wizard she had at her mercy was a powerful lord in his own right.

The Inkarrans did not fight wars. Their leaders settled disputes by battling among themselves. But Inkarran methods of battle were often subtle and perverse. Seldom did two lords actually bear weapons against one another. More often, a victim might be poisoned or humiliated, or driven to madness or suicide.

As Iome considered this man's actions, she gaped in wonder.

He'd probably taken great delight in dressing as a messenger of Mystarria. He'd have enjoyed the irony of riding as a courier of the land he sought to destroy.

Iome understood that creeping sensation she'd felt when she'd touched the message case. Magical runes were written on it, written with wind. Iome had no doubt that if Gaborn had touched that message case, the “message” written there would have destroyed him.

More than that, this fellow had either sent Iome dreams to trouble her mind, or he'd peered into her dreams.

“Is this what I think it is?” she asked Hoswell

“Aye, I fear so,” Hoswell said. “For the first time in history, the Inkarrans have come to war against Rofehavan, milady, and they're going to teach us a whole new way to do battle.”

In frustration, Iome clenched her fists and gazed up into the sky. She didn't want to kill another lord, especially not a foreign lord with family members who would seek retaliation. Why would the Inkarrans want war? She wondered if she could reason with him.

The wind was moaning around the upper branches of the tree. She called to it now. “Pilwyn coly Zandaros, speak to me.”

The mass of whirling air quit thrashing through the branches, stood quivering above the tree, as if listening to her.

“We have not attacked your people,” Iome shouted. “Nor do we seek battle with Inkarra. We hope to be allied with you in the dark times to come.”

The wind did not answer. She did not know if the Inkarran lord could speak to her in his present form. Perhaps it was too complex a task, Iome reasoned.

“Sir Hoswell, take the dirt from his mouth and nose.”

“Milady?” Hoswell asked.

“Do it,” she said.

Hoswell did as she commanded, but the corpse did not move. It merely lay smiling mysteriously up into the tree. Iome noted that its eyes had not glazed.

Iome rode her horse back up the road a couple of hundred yards, until she reached the leather scroll case. She dared not touch it. Instead she threw dust on it by the handfuls. For a moment two runes written there in wind whirled about, then at last dissipated, drowned in dust.

Only when they were gone did Iome open the case and read the message that fell out, scripted on yellow parchment.

Ah, to taste the lively air—
                           no more!

The scroll had carried a curse, then. One that would have strangled her husband, had he dared to touch the scroll case.