ROD Everlar was
awakened by the screaming. Shrill, agonized shrieking from overhead that sent him bolt upright in the near-darkness, and wakened the bound wizard beside him into a squirming frenzy of frantic muffled calls through his gag.
Rod was still blinking and trying to gather his wits when Taeauna and the baron, both unclad, burst into view at the top of the spiral staircase, bloody swords in hand. Tindror half-ran and half-fell around the first curve of the stair, fetching up against the rail and turning to face whatever might be following them, and the Aumrarr vaulted over the rail to crash down feet-first on the edge of the bed, tipping it up wildly in a great groaning of wood. Rod and the struggling wizard were hurled into the air, and the bundle of boots and clothing Taeauna was carrying burst apart in all directions.
Taeauna's landing was hard enough to hurl her across the room into a wardrobe; it rocked, boomed against the wall behind it, and flung its doors open in protest, but didn't topple as she caromed off it into a run.
The wizard squalled through his gag as she sprinted right at him, but she merely freed him with two swift slices of her gore-dripping sword and whirled away in search of her boots, hissing at Rod, "Get dressed! Find your sword! We're under attack!"
Tindror joined the hunt for clothes, panting hard and snarling, "They must have emptied the Falconspires of lorn! There must be hundreds out there!"
"There'll be hundreds in here, once they hew through all the furniture," Taeauna panted back at him. "Sorry about your bed!"
The bearded baron shrugged. "Just so long as we both live to see you help me warm the next one." He found his belt and fumbled at the buckle, which started to glow, lifting the darkness they were all groping in to mere dimness. "Can't find my damn boots in all this gloom! Why can't they attack after morning soup, like decent bandits?"
Rod stared at him.
"'Twas a joke, silent man!" Tindror snarled, while hopping on one foot as he struggled, one-handed, to tug on what must be Galathan underwear. Then the baron saw that Rod's stare was fixed on his sword, which was dripping bright blue ichor. Tindror waved it. "Hoy, silent man, haven't you ever seen lorn blood before?"
"N-no," Rod admitted. "We don't put it in
our
morning soup."
Baron Tindror blinked at his guest, and then roared with sudden laughter.
"Ho, but that's the spirit! That's the flaming backbone, by Galath!"
He whirled suddenly to wag a finger in the half-dressed wizard's face, and said, "Don't let me catch you trying to hurl spells at our backsides, or use them to slink away, either! That motherless rump-licker Murlstag is out there with all his knights, nigh a score of Helms against every one of ours, ringing Wrathgard all around, and lorn by the score are roosting on all our roofs and turrets and battlements! You know as well as I do which Doom is behind this, and if you don't know by now what Dooms do to lesser wizards when they catch them, trust me thus far: you don't want to find out!"
The wizard whimpered, gabbling his words twice before he could say them clearly. "Isn't this the safest place to stay, right here? With the long staircase Baron Murlstag's swords will have to fight their way up."
"It would be," Tindror snarled, "if the lorn hadn't burst in on us up there! When my father's grandsire built Wrathgard, there were no lorn in Galath, none of us had ever seen such a beast. So my bedchamber has eight windows, each as tall as two men—or
had;
they just smashed them all, coming in at us all at once!"
He lowered his voice into a fierce muttering, and added, "The only reason they're not down here clawing and biting at us right now is that Tay and I pulled my best suit of armor down into the top of the stair after us, and chanted nonsense over it; the lorn think it's enspelled and waiting to do them harm if they so much as touch it. No, we have to get down and go deep, to the cellars where our well is, and the granary and armory around it, where old spells are laced through the stones and no wizard of today, Doom or otherwise, can make those stones walk to thunder into battle against us, or melt to fall on our heads! Come, while we still can!"
By then, Tindror was speaking to three hastily dressed people. He and Taeauna traded looks, she lifted aside the bar across the door, Rod handed her the key to its lock, and they started down the steep, narrow staircase and into the growing din of battle.
Murlstag's men had won past the gates and were already inside the castle.
"Oh, shit," Taeauna whispered, and turned to Rod. "Lord, this is not the ending I hoped for. I am sorry."
Tindror and the wizard both looked at Rod, startled at that "lord."
He kept his eyes on Taeauna, and told her fiercely, "We're not dead yet. You... you have nothing to apologize to me for. I... I'm starting to like this. Even with all the blood and doom."
Her sudden smile made her eyes flame. "Oh, I can give you more of that."
"I don't doubt it," the wizard said suddenly from ahead of them, slowing as they reached the bottom of the staircase and the
clash
and
clang
of swords grew suddenly louder. "But what of right now? What should—?"
"Stand aside," Lord Tindror told him brusquely, "and save your spells until I ask for their hurling. 'Tis time to fight! Good old butchery, carving up foes like carcasses for the kitchens!"
He thrust himself past the shuddering wizard and sprang down the last few steps, bellowing, "For Wrathgard! For Tarmoral!"
The stair opened into blood-drenched tumult. Bodies lay sprawled in spreading pools of blood everywhere, and rats were boldly scurrying from one corpse to another, unheeded in the desperate fray. There was no sign of the baron's maids or any other women of the castle, except among the dead, and the few men of Tarmoral were busily swarming and hacking down two foes in full plate armor, holding their arms and feebly kicking legs as daggers worked at armor joints and snarling men wrestled against locked-down visors to open breach enough to slip a knife blade in.
The baron rushed over to the nearest enemy knight, dug his fingers under the edge of the man's helm, and tore at it, twisting viciously. The neck inside it cracked just before he got it far enough up that his men, stabbing past him, could bury half a dozen daggers into the exposed Murlan throat.
Blood fountained, and streamed down Lord Tindror as he turned and stalked over to the second Murlan knight, snapping, "Belgard! Guard yon door! Gethkur, I want every stick of furniture you can swiftly lay hand to packed—and packed tight, in a real tangle—into the forehall, and its doors barred and braced, both ends!"
His men leaped to obey. Their fellows kept stabbing at the second knight who was dying by the time the baron reached him.
"The least of Murlstag's hounds," Tindror said sourly, "have better armor than any man of Tarmoral has ever owned. And for years the bulk of our crops have been demanded by the Throne of Galath, while all they ask of Morngard is a dozen new-forged swords and shields every harvest-tide. 'Twill be a pleasure swording warriors who invade us at the behest of the king."
"I've been busy at that pleasure since before dawn," a graybearded Tarmoran panted, rising from the task of tugging armor off a dead Murlan knight. "Murlstag is out there; I saw him myself, sitting his saddle under his banner. No one else this side of a field hawk has those yellow eyes. We think he brought a few hundred more than a thousand with him, under arms; we've taken him down under the thousand, all right, but... then there're the lorn."
Tindror nodded. "There are," he replied curtly. "How much of Wrathgard do we still hold? Are all the lower floors—?"
"No. These and the rest up here came up a ladder to that big window in the Shields Hall; the lorn broke it and held the upper end of the ladder firm, against our shovings and hewings from within. They still have Shields Hall, but we've forced them back to its doors. Down below, the main doors are still shut against them for now, but a few of the Murlans who came up the ladder are skulking about, swording anyone they can reach. We're hunting them."
"Well done, Lemral. The lorn: have any of them dared to enter Wrathgard?"
"Not that I know of, lord, though they could be swarming through the upper rooms of all six towers and I'd not know it. I have seen them out windows, just as I ran past; they're perched on our roofs and ramparts like trees in the forest!"
"The North Stairs?"
"Still ours. The Purple Stairs, too. We're going below, lord?"
Tindror nodded.
"Good. Tori and Baereth have been guarding the well since first warning was cried by the wall-watchers."
The baron smiled. "Good and better. Have—"
Faintly, from outside the walls, came a sudden swell of sound. Angry shouting, cries of alarm, a thundering of many hooves, and then a long, rolling succession of dull, meaty, heavy crashes, laced with the screams of horses and men.
Then a war-horn sang out, high and clear, in a distinctive three-note call. It was echoed by two more, and they were all answered by a rising din of shouts and steely clanging, the ringing of hundreds of swordblades striking each other.
"Deldragon?" Tindror snapped, wild hope in his face. He and Lemral sprinted off down a passage.
Taeauna followed every bit as quickly, taking firm hold of Rod's elbow as she passed, to tow him along, and snapping at the wizard, "Come, wizard! Come, or I'll hunt you!"
They all pelted along the passage, through one door and then another, into a room where lorn were perched on the sills of shattered windows, and dead Tarmoran guards lay sprawled and silent on the floor.
The lorn took flight, hissing, as Lord Tindror charged right at them. He fetched up at the broken window, panting, to stare past his raised sword, out and down.
In the morass of churned earth that the Murlan horses had made of the ditch and great slopes around Wrathgard, the men of Murlstag were dying in their dozens under the lances and blades of even more magnificently armored knights, a great sea of moving steel that had charged into them without warning from behind and smashed through their ring, trampling and slaughtering, before the war-horns had sounded.
Through that breach the newcomers were now flooding in all directions, charging besieging Murlans. Tindror laughed aloud as he beheld Baron Murlstag's own banner flapping raggedly, far off to the left in frantic flight toward the mountains. A small and dwindling knot of Murlans around it were being ruthlessly harried and hacked down by hard-riding knights, and three dragon banners streamed above those pursuers.
Everywhere the baron looked, he could see busy butchery of Murlans, their maroon banners with white stag heads falling here, there, and over yonder. And everywhere the eye turned, steel-hued banners emblazoned with a crawling red wyrm were advancing.
He held up his sword to them in salute before turning from the window.
"Deldragon," Lord Tindror announced slowly, deep satisfaction in his voice. "Deldragon has come to save us all."
Crimson dragons flapping
on steel-gray banners fell into liquid shapelessness as the scrying-spell faded, and left the wizard Arlaghaun watching nothing at all.
"Amalrys," he ordered his chain-girt apprentice flatly, "cast it again. I must see if that fool Murlstag survives and manages to return to Morngard."
She nodded in the gloom of the old stone room, eyes downcast for fear of drawing his ire. They both knew how displeased he was at Deldragon's sudden appearance, and how had that meddlesome, oh-so-valiant velduke known of Murlstag's ride on Wrathgard, anyway? What wizard was whispering in
his
ear?
Her cruel master sat silently watching her casting, as he often did, looking like a sharp-nosed warhound in his gray garb, his brown eyes ablaze. At first she'd thought he watched her so intently because his chains were all Arlaghaun suffered her to wear and he enjoyed indulging his lusts, but she might have been bared down to her bones for all the man-reaction his face betrayed right now.
That sharp, thin-lipped face was a mask of calm as her chains chimed around her. Amalrys made her casting as graceful a dance as she could, swaying her hips and tossing her head to make her long, unbound honey-blonde hair swirl about her shoulders, thrusting her breasts and hips at him in as sinuous a manner as she could manage, offering herself to him with longing in her eyes, just as he preferred... but when at last she was done and turned to face Arlaghaun, fingers spread in the last gestures, he wasn't looking at her at all.
He'd been busy casting his own spell, all this time. A compulsion magic.
Her master gave her an expressionless nod. And then he did something surprising. Though he'd never bothered to tender her any explanations before, he did so now.
"I have worked a compulsion," he announced calmly, "to draw all the nobles under my control to Galathgard, to receive the king's next decrees. It will take some days for all of them to reach the castle; you and I shall use that time to work tantlar magic. A
lot
of tantlar magic. When Deldragon arrives home, he will find his wells and flour poisoned, and every last item of magic in his castle gone."
Amalrys couldn't help herself. She went white and started to shake.
Arlaghaun smiled slowly, obviously enjoying her terror for what seemed to her a very long time before he added gently, "Calm yourself. I will not be requiring you to test the magics we seize. Klammert and Yardryk are both more expendable than you; they can see to braving any traps and unforeseen discharges."