Falconfar 03-Falconfar (27 page)

Its light exploded in front of a great leonine face, which narrowed its eyes in hatred—and exploded into a great bound forward.

Two frightened wizards hastily stammered out the same word— and two invisible blades plunged through the great cat's half-seen breast while it was still in the air, jaws opening, paws extended.

Instead of landing in a charge that would turn into a bloody rush, the beast shuddered in midair and landed belly-down on the unyielding stone with a great crash, already dying.

Mori and Tethtyn circled around it, running hard into the darkness whence it had come, lit by Mori's handfire as Tethtyn conjured a new flame as fast as he could.

Ahead of them, a musky, heavy beast-smell was growing stronger, and they slowed, still unable to see much of anything. The reek was everywhere, and they were heading right into it.

Something skittered underfoot, and they both froze, aiming their handfire and peering hard.

There was a bone, large and long and well-gnawed, still rocking gently on the stones where Mori had unintentionally kicked it. It looked very like one of the long bones of a man's leg.

They stepped forward even more cautiously, and soon saw other, smaller bones: ribs.

"A lair? Of the thing we killed?" Mori muttered, coming to a stop again.

"Or a whole den full of them, with the rest still waiting for us. somewhere up ahead?" Tethtyn murmured back.

He held up his handfire to see farther—and it seemed to catch fire on the passage wall beside him, tracing a straight vertical line.

Hastily he moved his hand away. The line winked out.

He looked at Mori. Who stared back at him, then shrugged and reached out with his own handfire.

The line reappeared, and Mori extended it by moving his hand along the wall. Tethtyn peered at the route the line was taking along the otherwise smooth stone, then moved his own handfire and made another line spring into being.

They were tracing the outlines of a door.

Tethtyn looked at Mori again, remembering the last spell they'd looked at together.

"Do it," Mori whispered, and Tethtyn laid his glowing hand flat against the cool stone, and murmured the word he remembered reading. The wall melted away under his palm.

The space beyond the now-empty doorway was dimly lit from above. Flat stone floor, a large, silent room with many open doorways. The mages cast wary looks back up their dark passage of bones, then leaned into the new room to peer around.

As they did so, a man fell down into it from above, and a weird- looking monster—all jaws and smoke—plunged after him.

Their landing shook the room.

Tethtyn's fingers glowed blue, and answering glows flared up from where the man had fallen.

"Magic!" the two wizards shouted, as one—and flung up their hands to hurl the mightiest battle-spells they'd learned.

ROD LANDED HARD, feeling a sharp pain below his left knee and high in his right shoulder and knocking all the air out of his lungs. His abandoned staff clattered loudly on the stone floor nearby, bouncing to a stop.

Not that he had any time to care.

Fire from his undluth seared Rod's leg for a moment, and then he was rolling desperately away across the floor, he knew not where, the rod held out away from the rest of him. He had to get clear—

Of the great stone-rattling crash as the maercrawn slammed into the floor just behind him, jaws first.

Its fangs and one jawbone shattered deafeningly, shards cartwheeling through the air, and the beast gave a gurgling, piercing shriek. Then the thrashing, roiling smoke of its body vanished in a roaring burst of purple flames.

The flames spat and spread in a crawling filigree to the corners of the room. By their actinic purple light, Rod saw two young, intent men in a doorway, now rushing forward into the room.

Apprentices of Malraun, or the first wizards to come plundering his tower; they had to be.

And his doom, right here and now, if he didn't get out of here damned fast.

He bent his head again and kept rolling, keeping low and trying to ignore his body's protests. There were open doorways everywhere, and right now he just wanted the nearest one on the far side of the room from these new arrivals, one that led not into a dead-end room but out to a passage that could take him—

The door he was heading for was suddenly full of grim-looking men with swords and knives in their hands, wearing motley armor or dirty clothes. Men streaming out into the room, seeing him but paying him no attention as they stared at the wizards—and then charged at them.

Near the rear of this flood of newcomers strode a man—bald, blue of skin, and cold-eyed—who cast a keen glance at Rod Everlar before glaring across the room to spit an incantation at the two mages.

Narmarkoun!

Shit! If it wasn't one Doom of fucking Falconfar, it was another!

Rod desperately slashed at the wizard with his undluth, knowing how feeble its fires must be against a Doom—but grimly aware that he had to do something.

Bronze fires lashed cold blue skin, and Narmarkoun stiffened, but didn't even spare Rod and his undluth a glance, keeping all his attention on the two mages across the room. Whatever magic Narmarkoun had cast was already bursting into being around them, with force enough to rock the room. Rod tried not to think or his own pains as he scrambled to his feet—Christ, that hurt!—and charged at the blue-skinned man, raking the air with his undluth.

Fire swirled and slashed at Narmarkoun, scorching his head. The blue wizard shook himself, and ducked as if to shield himself from rain, but was still facing the two mages across the room as he muttered another vicious spell, gesturing furiously.

The room rocked again, exploding into bright amber light amid ragged cries, as torn and blackened bodies came tumbling back through the air at Narmarkoun, hurled by the spell.

Most of them, Rod suspected as he kept pounding across the floor in his desperate charge, were Narmarkoun's own men. A human head with no body attached to it plunged past his nose, and a moment later he slipped in gore and found himself looking back across the room, into dying amber flames.

Outlined against them stood the scorched and blackened bones of the maercrawn, reduced to a skeleton but not yet fallen, still moving feebly toward Rod in its dying charge.

In the air above and behind it, Rod's lost staff was spinning wildly, pulling in the flames of Narmarkoun's spell and absorbing them. Beyond it, the two young men were still on their feet and casting spells, their hands shaping the air desperately in front of their pale, frightened faces.

Some of the warriors were still standing. Running, actually, charging at the young wizards in slow motion. Caught in the grip of a magic Rod had never seen, they hung in the air in mid-run, limbs moving inch by treacle inch as everything else roiled and flashed around them.

"Falcon shit," Rod murmured in amazement, dragging his gaze from them almost reluctantly to turn back to Narmarkoun. He was doomed, of course, but he might as well be looking at the man killing him, in the instant before they slammed into each other.

He was in time to see a tendril of bright magic form around his wrist, with Narmarkoun's cold blue smile behind it. A tendril that was tightening to crush Rod's wrist and force him let to go of the undluth.

Rod's hand spasmed and opened, but even as the undluth tumbled from his fingers, tongues of flame fading, he knew Narmarkoun's magic would go on tightening until it wrenched his hand off.

With his other hand Rod tugged the lurstar out of his belt, and swept it up to slash through the tendril.

He saw Narmarkoun's sneer falter at the sight of it—and then Rod drove into him, dropping his shoulder like a football player to take the necromancer low in the chest and try to knock him off his feet.

A fresh spell broke over them both, as cold as a torrent of ice water and so bright white it blinded them both for a moment—a moment in which Rod felt the wizard under him slam into the floor, and then his own body sink hard into Narmarkoun with satisfyingly solid force. Then the tendril was gone from his wrist, the lurstar torn from his hand, and the Doom under him was crying out in pain as rings and fine chain bracelets and more tore bloodily free from his blue-skinned body and flew away across the room.

Rod shook his head, fighting to see, and got a distorted, blurry glimpse of the undluth, lurstar, and a score or so of smaller things— rings and the like, some of them trailing thick blue blood—sailing across the room in a cloud that was converging on one of the two young wizards.

The other mage was staring triumphantly at Narmarkoun as he shouted another incantation—and the Doom sobbed and cursed in pain.

Of course, Rod's knees, elbows, and fists might have had something to do with that.

In one of his Cold War thrillers, Rod had written a scene where the hero stopped a guard from shouting a warning by punching him in the throat. Gritting his teeth, he punched Narmarkoun's throat as hard as he could.

It didn't seem to plunge the wizard into agony, or stop his increasingly frenetic struggles under Rod, so Rod did it again. Then he remembered something he'd written in his first Falconfar book: the difficulty wizards would have castings spells correctly once someone had broken all their fingers. And thumbs.

He bent one of the Doom's fingers over backwards against the floor and flung the whole weight of his body atop the man's hand—and felt the snap. Narmarkoun grunted under him, then kicked and wriggled, spilling Rod across the floor.

The Doom whirled to his feet, tall and slender and terrible, and Rod flung himself desperately back at the man's boots, to try to trip Narmarkoun or claw his way up the wizard or—or—

A new spell washed over the scene, a piercing emerald in hue. a rich green that filled the air across the chamber and turned it into an undersea grotto from a children's book, some sun-dappled never-never reef where pirate skeletons danced like seaweed among open chests of gold, and—

Rod's fancy vanished in a teeth-rattling impact with the stone ceiling that would have split his skull open if he hadn't started from flat on his belly on the floor, twisting while being hurled at the ceiling to strike it boots-first, with numbing force.

Elsewhere in the room, others weren't so lucky. Warriors slammed into the ceiling hard enough to break bones loudly.

The spell ended, the emerald cast winked out with dizzying speed and all those who'd struck the ceiling plunged back hard to the floor.

The two young wizards on the far side of the room were grinning openly as they hefted Rod's staff, and undluth, and lurstar.

In the wake of his landing, Narmarkoun writhed and shuddered on the floor right in front of Rod, in obvious agony. Somehow he'd managed to draw his dagger, but all he was using it for at this instant was to repeatedly pound the floor with its pommel in his pain.

"A good time to vanish," Rod whispered, wincing and shuddering. Breathless and fighting the pain, he spun around on his side on the cold stone and crawled as swiftly as he could out the nearest doorway.

As more warriors came charging in through that doorway, swords drawn and fear warring with anger in their eyes.

"Taeauna!" Rod gasped, seeing who led them. He stretched out his hand to her—and saw a gleaming blade swinging down at him.

TALYSS TESMER RECLINED at ease on the polished leather of the huge new lounge. Grand and magnificent, the lounge had been meant for the ease of the King of Galath alone.

"So tell me, Annusk," she murmured idly, sipping from the great goblet of nightwine that her watchful manservant kept refilling. "How soon, exactly, is King Brorsavar expected here at Galathgard?"

Lost in the warm caresses of the braethear coiling within him as he knelt at her feet, Klarl Annusk Dunshar left off tenderly licking sweat and journey-dust from between her bare toes with reluctance, to murmur dreamily, "I know not, Lady, for his arrival will be delayed by the visits to loyal nobles he makes along the road, as he journeys from his home castle to here. How long he tarries with each in feast and parley, and what time it takes them to muster their knights and ride on with him, you see. I have sent knights of my own house to many keeps, with orders to depart them and bring word to me of the unfolding royal approach. Yet I very much fear we'll not have time enough to remake this ruin into the grand seat it once was, and will be again."