"And things didn't go well."
"Indeed. It fell, flamed the instant it touched my fingers, and as I let go, it spat lightning at me. You saw what it did, yet we were no more than the thickness of my hand above your chest, and it touched you not; not even one hair is scorched, and yes, I've looked. The bolt went down my arm and into me, and hurled me right off the bed, furs and all, and left me as you found me; wounded unto death."
Rod reached down under the linens and furs on his side of the bed, to where he'd slipped the gewgaw under discussion to keep the servants from seeing it.
Taeauna winced as he brought it up between them in the darkness, to peer at it curiously and turn it over and over in his hands.
"Are you seeing something, now?" she asked softly. "That castle?"
"Yes," Rod muttered. "Yes, and now, for the first time, I feel as if I very much want to go in there."
"Oh, shit," Taeauna whispered. "Oh, Rod."
Sounds were returning
in waves, like surf pounding on Stormar shores. Iskarra winced and tried to move her fingers and toes. Thank the Falcon, everything responded, and there were no knife-like stabs of agony.
The dark, pitted curve of a well-traveled wagon wheel was hard by her head, and a stunned or unconscious Garfist was drooling on the other side of it. As she gazed at him, his eyelids fluttered and his lips shaped a disgusted, "Too bloody typical. Always I get the whack. Always."
Iskarra read his lips more than she properly heard those words, but hearing was coming back to her. Yes, it was coming back.
She risked turning her head, looking back to where the gray wagon had been. A few knights were standing looking grimly down at the shallow pit, but most activity and attention was on the fires flickering on other wagons, and the buckets of sand and water being dashed over them.
The courtyard gates had been closed, and there were more hard-eyed knights standing with their shoulders against them. A lot more hard-eyed knights.
She reached out a hand past the curve of the wheel to dig her fingers into Garfist. Who stiffened and rolled over to glare at her.
"Oh. Isk. I can't hear anything, Isk!"
She tapped an imperious and bony warning finger across her lips, then pointed at him and at herself and then upwards, miming a set of steps with her hand, and then pointing up again.
It was time for them both to slip away and up into the keep, before all the tumult died down and they were noticed again.
Thank the Falcon, Garfist was nodding agreement.
As
the two
roads converged, and the many-bannered armies riding along them drew very close to meeting, one commander gave a signal, and war-horns rang out again. They were promptly answered from the other glittering host.
One last reassuring exchange of "peaceful parley" notes. Good. Arduke Tethgar Teltusk did not allow himself to relax, however. He didn't think even a weasel like Glusk Chainamund would risk treachery after Devaer's stone-cold-simple orders and threats, but one never knew.
The wits one wizard could twist one way, another mage could as easily turn another way, after all.
"Ho, Teltusk!" the fat baron called, from beneath his fluttering, yellow-and-scarlet horned ox-head banners, all joviality in what looked like new silver-bright armor studded all over with great round rivet-heads. "Any sign of Deldragon knights?"
"None," the raven-haired arduke called back, in as affable a tone as he could muster. "I think he's hunkering down inside his best armor and just waiting for us to come a-battering!"
"Good!" Chainamund bellowed, straw-yellow mustache quivering. "Let this be a grand day for battering, then!"
Walking away from
the courtyard of wagons down one of the dark stone passages slowly and casually, as if they belonged in the keep, had taken all the nerves Garfist and Iskarra had left to muster. By the time they reached a long, dark, rotting-food-stinking passage somewhere behind the kitchens, they'd been trembling and only too glad to break into a run.
That brisk sprint took them down the rest of that passage, around a corner, and into an even darker passage, where Garfist's winded state brought them to a panting halt.
Iskarra sniffed. "Mildew. Well, better than rotten meat and eggs."
Garfist waved such trifles away with one hairy fist. "What made the dratted cart explode, anyway?" he growled.
"Your wits did get scrambled, didn't they?" Iskarra asked sharply, tapping his forehead with one bony finger. "The wizard. Taking care of his man, who might be made to talk."
"Shit. He'll come after us, won't he?"
"Not if he doesn't think we're still alive," Iskarra snapped, tugging open the front of her clothing one more time. "So you are going to wear the crawlskin as a pair of fittingly huge breasts, and become the heftiest washerwoman in all Falconfar, and I'm going back to my skeletal self. And we're just going to have to hope he hasn't left some sort of magic in our minds that will let him find us and rule us at will."
Garfist stared at her. "Oh, shit," he rumbled. "We're right back in it, aren't we? Even worse than fleeing an angry Arlsakran, this is. Running around a keep hoping a skulking wizard doesn't see us while a siege sets in."
Iskarra smiled and shrugged, as the crawlskin rose and wrapped itself high around her bare chest, shaping huge breasts that rose invitingly toward him. "You want to live out your life sitting in boredom, Gulkoon, growling about the adventures of your youth as they fade in your memories? Let's live a little!"
Garfist's hands clamped down on her proffered false flesh, and by those shapely handholds tugged her against him. "Oh, 'tisn't adventurous living I'm so wary of, Viper. 'Tis more the dying that's got me worried!"
"I
wish you
hadn't put your blade through him," Yardryk snapped, his dark purple eyes sharp with anger. Running his hands nervously through his curly gold hair, he looked down again at the Bowrock servant sprawled on the floor. A bright ribbon of blood was wandering lazily over the stones from the just-slain man's throat to wherever a low spot would make it pool.
"Next time, when I say 'strike him senseless,' I expect a loyal swordsman of the master we both serve to do just that."
"You know magic, wizard," the warrior said curtly, "and I tell you not how to do that. Kindly leave the brawling to me. He was about to scream, and my blade prevented that."
Yardryk sighed and turned away. "Very well," he said curtly.
The warrior watched him, glowering. Arrogant young hightrews!
The least of Arlaghaun's apprentices, but still, one of the Master's apprentices.
Thinking dark thoughts about idiot warriors, Yardryk bent to the satchel he'd carried since he'd teleported them both out of the wagon that he'd just been forced to destroy, throot it, though at least he'd had the pleasure of obliterating a dozen-some of the most eager Bowrock knights, along with it. He undid the clasps, and plucked out two metal spheres. They were smooth, they were heavy, and they more than filled his palms. He turned to the warrior.
"Korryk? I need you to hold these."
The warrior stared at him coldly for a moment, and then strolled slowly forward and took the spheres into his own hands, his every movement a slow, eloquent shout of "you're no better than me" insolence.
Ah, but to be a wizard was to be unloved.
"Thank you,"' Yardryk told him expressionlessly, turning back to his satchel. "Please, for your own safety, take great care to keep the spheres apart."
He wasn't certain how much Korryk knew of the task they were here to do, or how much the veteran could correctly guess. Arlaghaun wasn't in the habit of telling warriors all that much, but then veteran warriors in his service didn't live long enough to be veterans if they were stupid.
Yardryk drew in a deep breath, took the little braziers out of the satchel, and then the little sack of powdered steel—shavings and filings that had once been tempered swordblades; naught else would do—and silently thanked the Falcon that he had no need of flint strikers and kindling and the messy business of blowing on sparks just so. Filings in brazier, will the flame to flare at his fingertip, murmur the words that would make the iron burn readily, touch and step back. One brazier, and then two.
Yardryk made a little show of placing one burning brazier in just the right spot on the floor, stepping back to frowningly survey it, stepping forward to move it a few inches, stepping back again, and finally nodding. Yes.
The other brazier he left where it was, hoping Korryk would heed it not. He busied himself over the first one, getting out a dummy wand (a simple stick of wood, not magical in the slightest) to wave is he used his other hand to trace the runes in the in that mattered, murmuring after each the word that would make it take fire and glow, building on the previous runes in a long, faintly humming chain that rose up from the brazier like a column of purple flame.
He walked around it, peering at it as if seeking flaws. Stopping finally on the far side of the shaft of purple magic from the warrior, Yardryk nodded as if satisfied with his work, and commanded, "Korryk, I need those spheres now."
The warrior ambled over in a slow slouch this time, giving a gusty sigh to make it very clear that magic bored him. He thought it was scarcely as useful as a shrewdly swung sword, and for something treated with such wary awe, it seemed to need a lot of help.
Yardryk gave the sullen warrior a tight little smile, and pointed at one rune in the humming column. "This one; I need you to touch that ball to this rune. Gently. Don't worry, nothing bad will happen."
Reluctantly, giving Yardryk a glare that was heavy with suspicion, Korryk rather gingerly extended the sphere.
The column bulged to take it in, for the first time giving the impression that the purple air, or whatever it was, was rushing up and down past the runes, and now rushing around and over the metal ball, too.
By now, a tingling should be rushing through Korryk's arm. Nothing painful or even uncomfortable, but... unusual.
"Do... do I let go of it?" the warrior asked, sounding more wary than sneering. At last.
"No," Yardryk said warningly. "That would be bad."
He stepped forward, drew another rune, and chanted a swift incantation.
For a moment, as Korryk stared up at the rushing purple column, nothing happened.
Then, as swiftly as a striking snake, the column bent over, swooped down from on high toward the second brazier, and swung sideways in its plunge at the last moment to race at the second sphere Korryk was holding. It swirled around the sphere for a rushing moment that left the warrior's arms shuddering and his mouth open in rising fear, and then swooped away, to bury its end in the second brazier.
Yardryk smiled tightly and lifted his hand with the careless indolence of an indulged and haughty emperor.
And the purple snake rose and straightened into a smooth, high archway, rooted in the two braziers, and hauled Korryk off his feet, still clinging to the two spheres that were now embedded in the curving purple arc of magic, well off the ground.
"I
—help,
Yardryk! I can't let go!"
"No," the wizard replied, almost purring in satisfaction. "You can't."
There was a crackling in the air, a sudden tension and heaviness that shouted silently that something powerful was about to happen.
As the warrior started to kick wildly, thrashing his arms in increasingly frantic attempts to get free, the air along the inside of the purple column started to shimmer, like the air above a raging fire. Within its shimmering, the shadowy dimness of the cellar room split apart like tearing canvas, to reveal a larger, slightly better lit chamber beyond, a cavernous space that was certainly not visible outside the purple arch.
Something was moving in that larger hall, something—no, several somethings—that flapped and glided, flying swiftly nearer...
A trio of lorn, and then another, swooped through the arch and soared up to circle the cellar room of Deldragon's keep. Then they shot out of its doorway, wings raked back, heading elsewhere fast.
More lorn followed, and Dark Helms, too, a score or more of men in black armor, drawn swords in their hands and visors being swung down into place as they stepped into the gloom of the cellars.
"You see, Korryk," Yardryk said gloatingly, "just as you were ordered by our master to serve me, I was ordered to complete a specific task here: to construct a magical gate between our master's keep and this one. Unlike a tantlar, many living things like lorn and Dark Helms, for instance, can traverse a gate swiftly, at the same time. A tantlar-link can be destroyed very easily, by extinguishing the fire its destination tantlar is being warmed in, or removing that tantlar from the flames. This gate, however, feeds on magic hurled at it, and can even survive these braziers being extinguished or removed; it will only collapse when what powers it is gone. And it's powered by the life force of a living human, or humans."
"No!" the warrior shouted. "Noooo!"
"One such could have been the servant you killed," Yardryk added, with a ruthless smile. "Now, it's going to be you."
He turned his back and walked away, heading for the doorway of the cellar, where the trapped warrior's screams would be less deafening.