"So, Is
he
? Or not?"
The voice outside the window was gravel-rough-arid impatient, but the innkeeper's shrug held no trace of fear.
"I cannot tell. He is suspicious, and so you should know of him. What you do cannot be my affair."
"Urrhh." The grunt held neither agreement nor dispute. "The Vengeful shall be told."
A boot shifted on loose stones, and then the night outside the window was empty. In the pitch darkness, the innkeeper shrugged and slid the window panel closed.
Rod Everlar came
awake suddenly and painfully, out of a dream that seemed to involve his blood-drenched bed at home, when a hard and heavy boot took him in the ribs.
"Rod Everlar!" Taeauna shouted. "Up, and defend yourself!"
Blinking in the darkness, Rod was dimly aware of Taeauna leaping over him to his left, so he flung himself to his right, trying to grab at the hilt of his sword as his body rolled over it.
Swords clanged together on one side of the bed as Rod fell off it on the other. Someone or something hissed like a snake, steel rang on steel again, and a horrible wet-throated squalling burst on Rod's ears out of the darkness. He fumbled for his sword and tried to get to his feet, as swords skirled musically and blades glanced off each other from where Taeauna must be fighting. The squalling died down into wet coughing near the floor, and two or three short, angry hisses sounded at once, one of them from right in front of Rod.
He stopped trying to get up, and used both hands to sweep his blade across in front of him, angled upwards, as if he were trying to bury an axe into a tree looming above him, or better yet, slice that axe right
through
a tree.
Halfway through its swing, Rod's blade hit something solid and meaty, jarring his hands to numbness, and... cut through, spattering him with unseen but swamp-reeking wetness and causing a bubbling-wet shrieking overhead that was startlingly loud and near.
As swords clanged again across the room, and he heard a sob that might have been Taeauna—
Taeauna!
—something bumped against Rod's left boot, so he rolled hastily to his right again, coming up against the wall.
"Taeauna?" he shouted desperately.
Behind him the unseen creature he'd wounded fell heavily onto the edge of the bed and thumped to the floor, its shrieks dying into squalling. Rod turned and lashed out with his sword again, hacking wildly at what must be lying beside him.
He couldn't see a thing, couldn't—
"Taeauna!"
She hadn't answered! Hadn't...
Wetness fountained audibly under the edge of his sword, and the squalling stopped, trailing away into a lowering
hiss.
Across the room, blades clashed again, and there was a sudden wet growl of anger. Taeauna cried out a short
"huunh!"
of effort, as if she'd done something strenuous that caused her pain, and then a loud hissing arose, and a body I humped rapidly backwards, off balance, and fell to the floor with a
crash.
"Rod?" Taeauna panted. "Lord Rod?"
"Here," Rod replied uncertainly, raising his sword straight up. "I can't see a thing."
"Get to the window," she gasped. "Crawl across the bed."
Rod pointed his blade down to the floor and prodded gingerly ahead with it, finding feet almost immediately. He went around them and found the bed. "The laedlen?" he asked, remembering that Taeauna had tossed the inn's cushions to the floor and used their sacks as pillows.
"Bring..." Taeauna panted, "them."
She was hurt, all right.
"Tay, do you need my—"
"Not here," she snapped. "Help me... The window bar..."
Rod clambered across the bed, encountering something smooth and scaly that shouldn't have been there—it was wet and sticky, but thankfully didn't move—and found the floor on the far side.
"Tay," he muttered, to let her know it was him as he reached out. His fingers met with something solid. Leather. "Your leg?"
"My leg," she sighed, and he felt a trembling under his fingertips.
Rod rose, hastily. "I'm here."
"Hurry," she whispered. "Please."
Rod felt for the wall, found the wooden bar, and lifted it. It was heavy; the far end wavered as he wrestled with its weight.
"Just drop it," the Aumrarr murmured. "I'm clear."
Thankfully, Rod let go, remembering to jerk his own boots back just in time.
The bar landed with a crash, and bounced onto his toes anyway.
Its landing brought a few weak hisses out of the darkness behind them, but Taeauna was already pushing at the shutters. "Get the laedlen. We must leave."
"Out the window?"
"Yes, wise old man, out the window." Her snap was as half-hearted as it was quiet.
Rod thrust the window shutters open, smacking someone in the face who was standing outside in the night, who responded by swinging a sword right past Rod's nose.
Rod snatched up his own sword from where he'd left it leaned against his crotch, and thrust it out into the dark bulk. Hard.
It went into something, a little.
That brought a loud and furious
hiss,
and the blade swung back to clang against Taeauna's. She sobbed in pain, and Rod angrily thrust with his sword again, aiming for where the hissing was coming from.
Again, his steel met something solid, slicing past it into air. The hiss burst into wet squalling.
Rod pulled his sword back hastily, feeling Taeauna straining beside him to hold the foe's sword with hers, and started to hack and chop wildly, putting his strength into it.
The dark bulk abruptly fell away, thumping solidly onto the ground, its squalling ending in a wet spewing sound that quickly faded.
"Dare we...?" Rod whispered.
"Get... the... laedlen," Taeauna snarled, and half fell out the window.
Rod hurried to obey, joining her with an awkward somersault that brought him down hard on the body of whatever he'd just felled, and sent his sword bouncing one way and the two laedlen the other.
Taeauna staggered up to him. "Bring them," she gasped. "I can't carry..."
Rod brought them.
Through the half-open
door, the knight's face was grim. "Dursra the peddler, lord. We got her drunk, as you ordered, and she's talking. I came straight. As you ordered."
Lord Eldalar of Hollowtree gently set aside the reluctant-to-let-go arms of his wife, and rolled out of the welcome warmth of their bed with a grunt of irritation. "Aye, she would be. Nothing good, I take it?"
"Something you should hear, before I lock her away in the old turret so her words reach no one else."
The Lord of Hollowtree threw on his breeches, stamped his boots onto his feet, shrugged on his grand tunic, scratched at his gray beard, and reached for his sword. Never let your folk see you half-dressed. Or less.
Fastening the tunic as he went, he followed Lhauntur along the dimness of the secret passage into the room of the ledgers, and thence to the long passage that led to the back chamber. Grim-faced guards nodded at their approach and stood aside.
Fat old Dursra lay on her back on the cot where prisoners were usually shackled, unbound but in no state to stand, let alone go anywhere and work any menace on anyone. The sour reek of Durraran's wine was strong in the room, and Durraran himself sat on a stool nigh Dursra's head with a bucket, awaiting the inevitable time when she'd spew.
She was babbling. "'Ware all, from one end of falcons' flight to the other, for the Fourth and greatest Doom is come... walking with a wingless Aumrarr, as humble as a frightened shepherd... as powerful as all the other Dooms together... slipping into Falconfar... stumbling until he awakens, when it will be time for wizards and kingdoms to stumble..."
Lord Eldalar listened grimly as these words were repeated. Thrice. More slurred, sometimes, but with not a word changed.
"That's all she says," Lhauntur told him gruffly. "We were right."
The Lord of Hollowtree shrugged. "We treated him well." After a moment he added, "Taeauna called him our last hope."
"Fortunate us," the knight grunted, sounding unimpressed.
Eldalar shrugged again. "My thanks, Lhauntur. I'm for bed. Rouse me if the Four Dooms start tearing Hollowtree apart around our ears. Anything less can wait for morning."
The swordblade thrust
through the chink in the ramshackle wooden wall without warning. The fat man blinked at it for a moment in the feeble light of the candle-lantern, and then brought one of his great hairy fists down on it, as hard as he could.
The sword broke off with a ringing
clang.
"Cheap stuff," the man rumbled. "This'll be the gels' father, come calling."
He shuttered the lantern, snatched up the door-bar, flung the door open, and rammed one end of the door-bar out into the night, hard.
It struck something solid. There was a wet, strangled cry, something small and light bounced off his boots, and then the scream started; a long, raw, descending cry that was punctuated by several crashes of the railings of various flights of stairs being struck on the way down.
The fat man slammed the door, dropped the bar back into place, and snatched the lamp off the table to peer at what had hit his boots. A human tooth, trailing several threads of bright red blood.
The fat man grinned, ere turning to bellow, "Isk, he's caught up to us again! Start packing!"
The stream of profanity that came from the other room made him grin all the wider. Ah, dainty ladies these days...
Suddenly the moon
showed itself through fast-scudding, smokelike clouds, night going from gropingly dark to merely dim in an instant. Rod and Taeauna could suddenly see that they were staggering along an Arbridge alley together, rather than merely feeling their way along it. There came an angry
hiss
from far behind them.
Rod turned his head and saw snake-headed men, scales gleaming in the moonlight: three of them, with drawn swords in their hands.
"Shit," he spat, "I don't remember..."
"This would be something else you can blame on Holdoncorp," Taeauna said grimly, leaning on him even more heavily. "Just keep going. Head for those trees ahead."
Rod obeyed. "Looks... Looks like a cemetery." He glanced back over his shoulder again. "They'll catch us long before we get there."
"I know not 'cemetery,'" the Aumrarr said calmly. " Yon's a burial yard, if that's what you mean. Where folk lay their kin to rest under enspelled stones."
Rod frowned. "Enspelled stones?"
"To keep the dead down," Taeauna explained. Rod could see dark wetness all down her belly and legs, and she was using her sword like a walking stick as well as clinging to him. He looked back again.
"They're—"
"Keep going," the Aumrarr snapped. "Drag me."
"I... yes, Taeauna."
Her grin was more a grimace of pain than anything else. "That's better," she said. And then staggered, her face twisting, and she gasped, "Rauthgul!"
Rauthgul. Rod's invented Falconfar equivalent for the f-word.
Rauthgul indeed, damn it!
There was no way they were going to reach the yard before the snake-men caught them, no way! And the burial yard was just that: a yard, an open plot of grass and trees walled on three sides but open to a street that Rod and the Aumrarr would soon be crossing. Or would try to; there remained the little matter of winning the sword-fight that would erupt right in the middle of it, when the snake-men caught up with them.
There were grassy humps in that yard that must be tombs, and little stone houses, too, dark with moss and age; crypts? The trees were old and gnarled giants, and it all might as well have been on the far side of the Falconspires, for all the likelihood Rod Everlar had of ever reaching them alive.
They were going to die here, a handful of minutes from now. He and Taeauna were going to be sliced and hacked apart, butchered very messily by swords Rod hadn't a hope in Hades of stopping.
Dark-armored figures suddenly streamed out of a side alley, hacking and thrusting, and a snake-man went down, making those horrible squalling sounds. Dark Helms!
"Hurry!" Taeauna gasped, clutching at the throat of Rod's tunic, all of her weight hanging from her claw-like fingers. "Lord, hurry! Please!"
Her last word was a sob of pain, as tears came and she shuddered all over, sagging against him.
Rod swore and gasped and got an arm around her, struggling to shift her weight to his hip so he could limp along in clumsy haste.
Swords rang off each other behind them, someone groaned, there was some hissing, and then they were out onto the dust of the street, Taeauna hanging like a dead weight. Surely there'd be Dark Helms pelting this way in a moment or two.
When they reached the grassy unevenness of the burial yard, Taeauna clawed her way up Rod until she was upright and peered into the night gloom.
Trees and crypts and their shadows were all around; Rod glanced back at the battle now going on. There seemed to be more snake-men, yet the Dark Helms weren't retreating. Fighters were sagging down with wounded groans or slumping dead, but the fray wasn't getting any closer. There just might be a chance for...