by Ed Greenwood
Usually, according to Thalden's latest whisper nigh Rod's ear, there were guards stationed outside the scullery port, to prevent this nightly commerce becoming a vulnerability to any skulking warbands from Hammerhold and Imtowers. Yet not a guard had they found, aside from those waiting their turn to shuffle briefly in through the scullery port.
"Come on, Larl," someone growled resignedly, startlingly close at hand. "Rut with her faster. I'm getting cold."
A gentle breeze arose then, covering the faint sounds the Hammerhand knight in front of Rod made as he rose to clamp a firm hand over that Lyrose guard's mouth.
Then the quickening wind shifted some branches, making them dance and let in moonlight just long enough to let Rod see the knight's dagger slice across the back of one of the struggling guard's hands.
The knight held the man tight, holding the knife high rather than trying to stab him again.
When another moment of moonlight let the hard-swallowing Lord Archwizard see the struggling pair again, long seconds later, the guard was sagging and the knight was trudging a few steps across the lawn under the man's dying weight, to let him down out of the way.
That knife was poisoned. It had to be.
Rod swallowed again, finding his throat a more rough and dry place than ever. Poison cared nothing for titles or high station.
Certainly not for a title like "Lord Archwizard of Falconfar."
"We'll do it," Isk told the Aumrarr quietly. "But then, you knew that."
"We could not be sure. We compel no one against their will," Dauntra replied with dignity.
Then she froze, as Garfist's loud snort turned into barks of derisive laughter. As that harsh laughter rose to roll about the moonlit room, Juskra joined in, the same disbelief in her bitter mirth. A moment later, Isk chuckled.
After a long, reddening time, Dauntra chuckled, too.
The scullery port closed again. The wind had died, and the night was very quiet.
"Now what?" Thalden whispered, his voice the faintest of ghostlike murmurs. "There are none of Lyrose left alive out here, but surely they'll send a patrol around the outside walls some time."
Syregorn nodded, and reached out to tap the nearest knight in a certain manner Rod couldn't see. The signal was passed along, and in a few almost silent moments, the band that had come from Hammerhold were crouching on hands and knees in a ring, faces almost touching. Someone's breath was foul with fish.
"I dislike the standing guards who aren't here, and should be," someone whose voice sounded rough and old muttered. "This feels like a trap to me."
"I am just as uneasy over that," Syregorn replied, "yet suspicious or not, it's let us get very close to Lyraunt before we had to do much killing."
"You dislike killing? You surprise me," a deeper voice muttered.
Syregorn sighed. "Slaying bothers me not, but every killing is a chance you'll be discovered, and the alarum raised. Hence the…"
"Poison," Thalden murmured. As Syregorn's furious hiss arose, he added, "The wizard knows, Gorn. While he was watching us use it, and realizing what he was seeing, I was watching his face."
"Ah yes, the wizard," the deep voice muttered again. "So here we are with the great Lord Archwizard, and do we blast the castle apart? No. We go creeping in like thieves, in the mud and thorns, and him with us!"
"Use magic, when there might be a Doom inside those walls? You are a dolt," the old voice hissed. Then it came to Rod's ears a trifle louder, as its owner turned to Syregorn. "What'd you do to the outlander to turn him into Lord Wizard Babbling-Tongue, anyway?"
"Followed orders," Syregorn snapped. "Now silence. Or he'll start with the questions again, and get us all killed! Quick, now!
To the port-to the walls on either side of it. Tarth and Reld standing, steel ready; everyone else farther along and lying flat. When yon port opens, I want us there and ready. Let the man get out before you fell him, so those within hear and see nothing amiss. Then we slip in, as the latest lusty guards. If a maid screams, mind, we'll probably all die."
The ring melted away into moving shadows, so quietly that Rod blinked in disbelief. He stayed where he was until the familiar firm hand tightened and tugged on his shoulder in an unmistakable "come with me" signal.
Obediently he went, crouching low and making so little noise that the owner of the hand sighed in disgust only twice on their way to the wall of Lyraunt Castle.
I thought this castle had a moat, Rod thought to himself as he went to his knees and then down to rest on his chest and stomach in short-scythed grass, a moment before Thalden whispered, "Malraun's ward-spells did one good thing, anyway: let the Lyroses fill in that stinking moat." The whisper changed, sounding amused. "They regretted it soon after, when they had to start digging graves, not just rolling their dead off the walls and into the water."
Then the scullery port opened with a brief flare of light, a man was butchered in swift and efficient silence in front of Rod's eyes, and the night was full of swift-moving Hammerhand shadows.
The firm hand returned, and a moment later Rod Everlar was bruising his elbows on hard stone as he was thrust forward. The terrified eyes of maids feeling poison burn inside them stared at him helplessly over the brutally-tight hands that covered their mouths and noses.
Then he was past them, turning to try to watch but seeing only the night outside vanishing behind the closing scullery port ere he was wrenched around to face forward and shoved into a dark chamber.
Where the Lord Archwizard came to a stumbling halt, well and truly inside Lyraunt Castle.
Nearby in the darkness, someone laughed. Coldly and menacingly, of course.
Chapter Fifteen
Hammerhand vipers," the unseen man who'd laughed greeted them. "Welcome to your deaths. You won't last aaaaaaa…" The voice trailed away in a dying, fading moan. "That wasn't necessary," Thalden chided someone. "He was a prisoner, chained to the wall. Probably a Tesmer man, who hates Lyrose as much as we do."
"He was being too loud," came the hissed reply. "What if he'd shouted for guards, hey?" The whisper turned less fierce. "This
poison works fast."
"So keep your blades pointing down, not out," Syregorn said grimly, from somewhere behind Rod. "Now silence, all of you. If this Lord Archwizard is to have any chance of defeating the Doom Malraun and getting the Aumrarr he came for out of here alive, it's best he arrives in Malraun's lap as a surprise-not in a grand confrontation, after all Lyraunt's been roused."
Those words were barely out of his mouth when a Lyrose man in livery came around the corner, head down and hurrying, hands already busy at his codpiece. "Falcon bugger all," he was growling to himself. "Late relieving me, taking his own sweet sated time over telling me a jest I didn't want to hear any-"
His words trailed off forever then, but he'd been doomed since Reld's kissing-sharp dagger had sliced him, on his hurrying way by. He'd never even noticed, and he had time only to gape in wonder at all the unfamiliar armed men in the passage before-still gaping-he started to topple.
Syregorn put out an arm, gathered him in with casual strength, plucked him off his feet, and carried him into the cell where the prisoner now hung silent and dead in his chains.
The warcaptain came back out immediately, shrugging the dead man's Lyrose tabard over his head and slapping Tarth's arm on the way past in an obvious signal. As one-with the usual exception of Rod Everlar-the men of Hammerhold moved to follow Syregorn, striding boldly down the passage as if they had every right to be there.
Rod was marched along with them, Thalden's hand in its usual place where Rod's right shoulder turned into his arm. Most of them had sheathed their poisoned knives, but he suspected the little rolled bundle of cloth Syregorn was carrying in both hands concealed his dagger, held ready in the heart of it. Around them, Lyraunt Castle seemed deserted, and that had all of the Hammerhand knights frowning in suspicion.
Rod thought back over all he'd written about Falconfar, knowing he'd never penned o
ne word about daily life in Lyraunt Castle, but… yes, of course. Guards and the day-servants would be few in the heart of a castle in these wee hours, but there'd be-should be-other servants busy everywhere. Those who cleaned, those in the kitchens who baked and roasted, kitchens that should be not far from the scullery port, and those who laid fires in every hearth. Probably lots of others he couldn't bring to mind just now, too. There was something else, though. An air, an atmosphere that was alert and awake… that was it: awake! The castle felt awake around them. Not "the very stones are watching" magically awake, nor yet the bustle and wakefulness of day, but a tension that hinted they were expected.
Oh, shit.
Ahead, their passage met a cross-passage and ended there. A glow of light was coming from the right, toward the front of the castle, but to the left all was dark. Syregorn waved a quelling hand at the floor, and his knights slowed and started moving quietly. Their warcaptain strode on ahead, with an air of bored unconcern.
Reaching the passage-moot, he turned left without hesitation, took a stride, stopped and smote his forehead as if he'd forgotten something, then turned and came back, shaking his head as if in self-reproach and moving faster.
"Guards under the light," he murmured, "so we go left. Casuallike; no stealth, but keep it quiet.''''
They did that, Rod's back a-crawl with apprehension as he turned in the wake of the rest, expecting shouts and pounding feet from behind him at any moment.
The outcry he was dreading did not come. The Hammerhand knights had followed Syregorn around another corner before he let out his breath in a great sigh-and only then realized he'd been holding it. Ahead of him, some of the other knights were sighing too.
They were crossing through about the midpoint of the back half of the castle, as far as Rod could judge, and all around them was dark silence-that waiting stillness-and closed doors. Again a meeting with a cross-passage, though the hallway they were in continued across it this time, and this time the glow of light was coming from the left.
Syregorn repeated the same little tactic he'd used before, with the same result. They headed to the right, away from the guards, all striding along with apparent unconcern.
"He's trying to remember where the stair up is," Thalden muttered to Rod. "There's one somewhere around here that's not as narrow as the servants' stairs at the back, nor quite as public as the grand staircase in the great rooms at the front. As you might imagine, we don't come strolling through Lyraunt Castle often."
"And you never will again," a calm, sardonic voice remarked, out of the darkness near at hand.
Thalden and all of the nearby knights whirled, daggers flashing out, but there was no one there, despite their hard scrutiny and peerings for concealed doors or spyholes. The voice seemed to have come from empty air.
"Sorcery," one knight muttered. "Malraun."
"No," Rod told them firmly. "That wasn't his voice."
Tarth and Reld both hissed curses under their breaths, and hastened to catch up to Syregorn.
The knights were trotting hard after them before the deep-voiced knight observed sourly, "Great. Lyrose has another wizard, too."
"Well," someone else observed merrily, "at least our deaths will be interesting.'"
"So they will," the sardonic voice agreed pleasantly, from far behind them. Rod stiffened, but it seemed only he and Thalden had heard it.
And Thalden's response was to dig his fingers into Rod's arm like so many iron-hard talons, and trot the Lord Archwizard along faster.
This was fun.
More fun than he'd had in years, in fact.
Lord Magrandar Lyrose smiled to himself in the darkness, and took his hand off the speaking-sphere. It was time to join his wife and daughter, in case the more violent of the magics the Doom had given him were needed. He was wearing his best black boots and his most dashing new garb-by the Falcon, the mirror had shown him back a fine figure of a man! — and his chased and polished gorget gleamed at his throat.
His fingers strayed to the familiar, comforting lines of that curving triangle of bright chased metal. He never took it off, these days, even to bed with his lady wife and despite her caustic remarks about it. She felt it shouted to all Falconfar that he trusted her not.
He shrugged. What of that? He trusted no one, and hadn't done so for as long as he could remember. Only fools trusted in others.
And only a fool would take off a personal shield enspelled and given by Malraun the Matchless. A shield that would heal Magrandar instantly of all wounds dealt by metal weapons and the ravages of poison-though it did not spare him the agony and debilitation of such hurts, ere it banished them.
Oh, yes, he could handle a few Hammerhand raiders. Even with most of his guards gone from their posts to muster into Pelmard's Irontarl-seizing force. If the cleverness he'd thought up worked, he'd manage it without even spilling much Lyrose blood. Huh. Pelmard would no doubt see to that.
Patting the hilt of his sword and the bracer hidden beneath the splendid cloth on the forearm of his free hand, he hurried out of his study.
This was a most important social engagement. It wouldn't do to be late.
"This way," Syregorn whispered, and boldly opened the door on the right. The veteran knights kept their stares on the other six closed doors that lined the small, rounded end of the passage, but none of those doors burst open to spew Lyrose knights at them. Syregorn's door led into darkness, and silence-to Rod, that same waiting, listening silence, as tense as a taut bowstring-reigned.
One after another, doing nothing to break that silence, the Hammerhands followed after their warcaptain.
Through the door, into a large open space; a great high hall. A set of doors at one end of it stood just a thumb-width ajar, letting in faint light enough for their eyes, accustomed to gloom, to see two tiers of balconies above, a wide, sweeping staircase ascending to the first of them, tapestries hanging on the walls wherever there were no doors-and there were a lot of doors, all of them in tall, grand pairs.
Except one. It stood open, breaking the only curving stretch of wall that bowed out into the room. This was evidently the base of a tower, because the door opened directly onto a spiral staircase that ascended steeply, entirely filling a cylindrical space beyond. They could tell that much, because faint glows arose from the painted edges of each step.
Right across the room was a gap in the wall, a large open archway rather than a door. It opened into another huge room, so dark that only the nearest end of three long feasting-tables could be seen, stretching away lined with chairs.
The hall itself, if one didn't count the tapestries and four braziers clustered together near the base of the grand staircase, was empty of furniture. Its flat, smooth bare floor was glossy and new-washed underfoot, a small sea of black tiles surrounding the Three Thorns of Lyrose, inlaid in tiles of some lighter hue.
Syregorn did not stride far out across that glossy floor.
"We've been herded here," he said suddenly, darting hard glances in one direction and then another, all around the hall, as he started around the room, keeping close to the walls. "This has been too easy-time and again, no servants where there should be, and too few guards. Lure in one direction, herd in another… Lyrose has meant us to come here, to this room."
"So this would be about the time their archers would come out onto the balconies, casting torches down on our heads to make us targets, and their knights burst in on us through every door," Tarth said bitterly, as the Hammerhand knights followed their warcaptain around the walls.
They all looked up as they did so, as if expecting all of those things to happen in answer to his words, but the dark silence hung unbroken.
Except in one direction. From beyond the doors that were letting in the light, from where that bright radiance was, nearer the front of Lyraunt Castle, there rose sudden loud voices. Voices that came swiftly nearer, accompanied by a bobbing light that could only be a lantern, and the noisy scrapes of boots scuffing along the floo
r.
"Every one of them? Why, there must be six-score! Why can't the Master Steward rearrange his own plates? I'm supposed to set up the braziers around the Thorns, and have all the bowls polished before-"
"I don't give the orders, Greth! Just do it-braziers first, mind! — and do it right for once, and mayhap he won't break any bowls over your head, this time! Not that I can even promise that, after what you-"
Greth and his lantern were almost at the doors, bare moments away from thrusting them open and discovering a room full of Hammerhand knights. Syregorn darted for the dark feasting-hall, and his knights hastened at his heels.
As they passed through the arch, there was a white flash, a purple flickering as strange, surging power awakened and gathered them in-power that reached out a long tentacle to englobe and snatch Rod and Thalden, who were still some strides away-and then the air itself swallowed them all.
Stealthy knights or not, every last one of them, the Lord Archwizard included, shouted in alarm.
But by then, of course, it was too late.
The shouts of the Hammerhands were cut off as sharply as if severed by the edge of a descending sword. In the alcove behind the tapestry, mere steps away from the gate that had swallowed the hated foes, Lord Lyrose unhooded the glowstone and smiled an unlovely smile.
His daughter, who had been peering through a gap in the tapestries to make sure the magic of the gate had snatched away all the intruders, turned, nodded reassurance that they were all gone, and smiled a matching smile right back at him.
"So much for that clumsy Hammerhand attack," he murmured. "I wonder how many others will come, and how soon?"
Mrythra shrugged. "What boots it? We'll crush them all."
Lord Lyrose heard a door open in the distance. His wife, on her way to join him. He seized the moment, before she was within earshot, and could forbid what he was going to order. Ah, suggest.
He leaned forward. "Daughter mine, Pelmard will be expecting me to ride the high whip-wielding lord over him, in this Irontarl foray. I'd like to hand him another little surprise, and have you do so. Flog him literally, if he dares to flee."