by Ed Greenwood
"And where are you going to get a kerchief?"
Taeauna held up one of her blankets, and a dagger.
Rod winced. "Isn't there some other way?"
Taeauna shrugged. "We can burn all we have as a beacon, and lie down here on the rocks to see which of the Three Dooms gets here fastest, to blast us to bare bones."
Rod sighed. "I'll hold the blanket taut, and you cut, okay?"
"Okay," Taeauna replied. Her mimicry of his resigned "why the hell not?" tone was perfect.
Rod hadn't walked this much in a day since he was a teenager, out camping. And he hadn't liked camping that much.
He was tired, he was cold-the breezes were decidedly chilly, up in these hills-and his feet hurt.
Taeauna was still striding along as smoothly and tirelessly as some sort of young acrobat, sleek and supple, ducking and crawling like a wisp of the wind rather than a winded, clumsy, skinning-knees-and-elbows novel writer. Usually she was just ahead of him, but sometimes she turned to look back behind them, then let him pass and followed him with hand on sword, glaring around alertly.
Yet no Dark Helm or monster had come lunging out at them thus far. In fact, aside from tiny, distant vaugren circling lazily high in the sky, they'd seen nothing living that wasn't a plant, all the way.
They soon saw something dead, all right. Their trail led them past the ancient, abandoned ruin of a castle that even the vaugren seemed to shun. Something that stank like old sewage lay rotting inside it, something so large that its ribcage formed arches of bone that towered above their heads as they stalked warily past.
A neck as long as Rod's driveway stretched up a crumbling castle wall, limp and broken, to end in a severed, insect-swarming mess not far from-
"Aughh!" Rod hissed, trying not to vomit. "What's that?"
High above them, crowning the end of a collapsed wall, perched a leathery, many-horned, greenish-brown monstrosity, a little bigger than Rod's body, that looked a little bit like the head of a triceratops Rod had seen illustrated in dinosaur books. If, that is, triceratops had sprouted dozens of dark, corkscrew-spiraling horns, like antelope or mountain goats or whatever, and tusked fangs around a great jaw like an overgrown cane toad or horned devil or-or-
"Its head. This was a greatfangs, when it lived, and that didn't end all that long ago," Taeauna told him, sounding troubled, her sword drawn in her hand. "I know not how it came to be here, in Ornkeep, but…"
Rod was watching her bone-white face. "But you want to," he said, after it became clear she wasn't going to say anymore. "So, do we run like hell, or is it too late for that?"
The Aumrarr shook her head. "Nothing could slay a greatfangs thus except a wizard's spell, or a true dragon; not even another greatfangs has jaws large and strong enough to behead one of its kin." She shook her head again. "I've only seen two dragons in all my days." Looking straight at Rod-a look that laid bare to him just how tremblingly afraid she was-she added, "And I've seen a lot of Falconfar. Come."
And she walked into the ruin without waiting for his reply, heading for one of the stone staircases that ascended.
Gagging at the stink of the great carcass they were passing, Rod scrambled to follow, muttering, "Why are we…? What if this damned wizard is lurking somewhere around here, waiting for us? Shouldn't we just…?"
The view of the sprawled, dead greatfangs didn't look any more reassuring from atop the wall, and the stones of that wall, cracked and overgrown with low, creeping plants, literally crumbled underfoot.
Wincing, Rod gingerly followed Taeauna out to the end of the wall. He hoped she hadn't decided she was the last Aumrarr, and she should just hurl herself off it and leave him alone here, up in this whistling wind.
She stopped at the end of the wall, close enough to touch the reeking tangle of sharp, stabbing horns that was the severed head, and stared down at something on the crumbling stone right beside it.
Something that glowed.
Something small, blue-white and bright. Magic, of course.
Rod advanced cautiously to where he could see it properly, and stopped, afraid he might slip and knock Taeauna into all those nasty-looking horns, perhaps to slide messily off into a long, fatal fall down onto the rocks below, and taking him with her.
He "was peering at a small, flat stone, and the glow was coming from a complicated little squiggle that had been drawn on it.
"What is it?" Rod murmured, looking all around. He half-expected a dragon, or a wizard- or a wizard riding a dragon-to suddenly race out of hiding, loom up to tower over them, and roar terribly.
Before it ate them, or crisped them with fiery breath, of course.
Gently, coldly, the wind whistled past.
"We were meant to find this," the Aumrarr told him, kneeling beside it. "It's a wizard's rune. The sign of one of the Dooms. Telling us, or anyone passing this way, who slew this greatfangs, to make the way safe for us. It's a trap, of sorts, too; come no closer."
Rod nodded, only too happy to obey. "So you know who put it here?"
Taeauna nodded without replying. She set down her sacks, rummaged in one of them, and plucked forth two stoppered flasks. Pulling the cork from the larger one, she carefully sprinkled an unbroken ring of brown powder that looked like instant coffee around the stone, tapping the flask with a deft finger to make sure she used not a grain more than she had to. She left no gaps, and spilled nothing on the glowing stone.
Restoppering the flask, she returned it to its laedre, and shook the second, smaller flask.
"What's that?" Rod asked.
"Highcrag magic," she replied curtly, pulling its cork.
Rob rolled his eyes. Oh well, perhaps it was incredibly rude to ask such things in Falconfar…
Taeauna put a finger where the cork had been, upended the flask and then righted it again, held her wetted finger over the stone, and cautiously flicked some of the liquid on her fingertip onto the stone.
Nothing happened.
She waited. Still nothing.
"Safe to touch," she deemed, restowing the flask. "Pick it up."
He looked at her doubtfully, and she almost smiled. "It didn't spit sparks, so it won't do you harm," she explained. "Please pick it up. Touch nothing else."
Rod stepped closer, knelt down, and slowly reached out.
"Don't throw it anywhere, or drop it," the Aumrarr warned. "Just hold it, and in a moment or so I'll ask you to put it back down exactly as you found it, so remember how it was lying."
Rod touched the stone. It felt smooth, cold, and hard; just like a normal stone. He closed his fingers around its edges, still keeping his palm away from it, and lifted it straight up.
The rune flared up into blue-white fire, flooding past his fingers; Rod's hand trembled in a sudden stab of fear.
"Don't drop it!" Taeauna snapped. "Hold tight to it!"
Then suddenly, she was embracing him, her arm around him, bosom against him, and she was shaking, shuddering so hard he had to brace himself to stay upright.
"Put…" she whispered, her eyes flaring as blue as the edges of the glow that was now spilling from Rod's hand, the glow he could feel as a faint, thrilling tingling. "Put it back. Just as it was."
He did so, and the blue-white fire died in an instant, leaving the glowing rune on the stone.
"Rod Everlar," Taeauna whispered into his chest, as fervently as if his name was a prayer. She shuddered against him for several long moments more, and then said briskly, "We should leave this place now. Quickly."
She felt good against him. Emboldened a little, Rod dared to ask, "Are you going to tell me what this, holding the stone, was all about?"
Taeauna looked at him. "It proves you do have the power, here in Falconfar. If we can find the right place to free you, and unleash it."
Unleash it?
The Aumrarr slid deftly out from under his arm, rose, and said, "Let's get gone. I enjoy the smell of dead greatfangs no more than you do."
Rod turned and went.
Ahead of them, Arvale looked like a great green sward of farms and trees, with the glimmer of winding water at about its midpoint, and beyond it, a line of hills rose again, dark and terrible, as mountains; brown and purple and towering, like the spikes on the back of a sleeping, buried dragon.
Rod found himself nodding and smiling. Why, this would go great in a book.
"There'll be a guardpost," Taeauna murmured, as the rocks gave way to rock-clinging shrubs and creepers, and then to trees, and Arvale opened out green and dark before them. The light was fading fast. "Let me do the talking. You are old and tired, and uncertain of what to say."
"All true," Rod muttered back, and she gave him the briefest glint of a grin as she went on down the widening track, past places where other, larger
tracks meandered down out of high pastures to join it, to a fence of heaped stones and stumps where three men wearing swords and a fourth with what looked like a halberd stepped out into the road to await them.
"You summoned me, master?"
"Indeed." The wizard Malraun was as curt as he was darkly handsome. He needed no magic to make his sleek, taut-muscled body striking to ladies, despite his small size. Nor, though he could be glib, did he need to waste time being polite to anyone. If he wanted a particular lady, his spells commanded their obedience. What cared he if they were screaming inside, so long as their responses were eager and ardent?
And if some of them were every whit as eager to kill themselves after he was done with them, what booted it to him?
He rose from his chair to give the lorn a commanding look, and strolled across the rather bare circular tower room toward it.
"You will fly in all haste, permitting yourself no diversions there or upon your return journey, to find and take the Aumrarr who used magic at Highcrag yesterday, and thereafter went up into the hills. They have probably passed the ruins of Ornkeep by now; I slew a greatfangs that had just begun lairing there yestermorn, to keep a certain Doom from getting his hands on it. Take also the one she's traveling with, and bring them both to me. Alive, if you can, but dead if you must."
The lorn's horned, mouthless skull-face nodded. It spread its batlike wings, snapped its barbed tail, and then froze at Malraun's sharp command, "Disguise yourself! Be the largest of vaugren as you seek Highcrag, and use the semblance of a man thereafter. I want to hear of no wild rumors of lorn flying over the Falcon Kingdoms!"
The lorn's tail switched angrily, but it nodded again, seemed to shiver all over, and sank down onto all fours, its wings and head changing shape as its hide darkened. Giving sudden throat to a vaugril's mournful screech, it sprang out of the open window and away, circling Malraun's dark spired tower once before flapping off into the gathering dusk, in the direction of distant Highcrag.
Malraun did not bother to watch it go. He had far. more interesting concerns than a mere Aumrarr and her toy. His recent intrigues had brought no less than three thrones to the verge of collapse, and he was determined that two of those realms would be his before another moonrise.
They were well beyond the guardpost, tramping down a rutted dirt road between walled gardens- creeper-cloaked walls of stone with the roofs of thatched homes rising beyond them-before Taeauna took her hand off Rod's arm in a silent signal that they were now far enough from the guards to speak freely.
She promptly did. Beginning with a snort, a shake of her head, and the murmur, "Only in Arbridge would they name an inn so."
"The Two Drowned Knights?" Rod grinned. "I thought it amusing, yes."
"Oh? I thank you for the warning," the Aumrarr said tartly.
She'd done all the talking to win them safely past the wary Arbren warriors, and Rod had been only too glad to stand there looking old and in pain and dull-witted, while the guards discussed him with her as if he were a sack of meat or a placidly deaf ox.
There'd been much discussion, thanks to Taeauna's skillful tongue. They'd learned that a Lord Tharlark ruled in Arbridge now, and that he'd been armsmaster to Sir Sahrlor, the dead knight of Artown, and was a hard-bitten warrior who wanted Falconfar to be rid of all magic and wizards. Tharlark no longer dwelt in town, but had taken Tabbrar Castle at the far end of the vale as his abode, once home to the dead Sir Tabbrar.
It seemed that fear ruled Arbridge now, and kept honest folk abed inside their barred and shuttered homes of nights, but just what caused that fear, the guards had not wanted to speak of, beyond warning the Aumrarr and the old man with her not to camp in a field or hay-heap by night, but to hie themselves inside an inn, pay the coin demanded, and stay there until after sunrise.
"So," Taeauna said, as they reached a moot where cobbled streets of close-crowded stone-and-thatch homes and shops opened out all around them, and men hurrying to get indoors cast them suspicious looks. "Behold The Two Drowned Knights. Old sir, do you again bide silent, and let me talk and pay."
She tapped a purse heavy with takings from Highcrag, and cast a level look at Rod, who nodded silently. Men gazed eagerly upon the Aumrarr, and seemed happy to get her attention and converse with her; whereas he could have been a dusty piece of familiar furniture, too broken-down to use, and too immobile to need noticing.
Taeauna strode across the street as if she lived in Arbridge, and Rod hastened to follow.
The inn was a tall, square, ugly stone fortress of a building, its ground floor lacking any windows that Rod could see. The Aumrarr thrust open its front door and shouldered her way past several muttering local men, into warmth and feeble lantern light. They fell abruptly silent at the sight of the severed stubs of her wings; Rod shouldered through that silence in her wake, meeting the gaze of no one.
The common room was as dimly lit as Rod had expected, and crowded with dark and massive furniture. It wasn't crowded with patrons, though; only a few folk were seated dining and drinking.
Spiced ale, salty broth, or mulled wine: it all came in the same tall, battered metal tankard, and with the same hand-loaves of coarse, dark rallow-bread. Taeauna ordered the wine for herself and the broth for Rod, and they shared them, passing the tankards back and forth like husband and wife.
Not that any of the locals-almost all of them men in leather and homespun, weary after a day's work-cared if the Aumrarr and the old man were a couple or otherwise. They were too busy leaning forward over their own tankards and excitedly impressing a handful of peddlers and traveling wagon merchants with tales of the latest peril to afflict Arbridge.
The Wolfheads, it seemed, had come to Arvale. And the Snakefaces, too.
As the winter past had begun, ran their talk, Dark Helms had suddenly infested Arbridge. Raiding every few days, searching every barn and cottage and swording everyone who didn't flee fast enough, the Helms had scoured the vale from one end to the other, even appearing in Tabbrar Castle. Always they came "from nowhere," apparently melting out of empty air, menacing crofter and lord alike.
In spring the Dark Helms had suddenly stopped coming. The fear they'd brought, however, hadn't faded one whit. For no sooner had the dark-armored warriors ceased to be seen in Arvale, then a new menace appeared: snake-and wolf-headed men who wore masks of living flesh to appear human, and posed as traders by day, but let slip their masks to prowl the vale and murder Arfolk by night.
For years Arbridge had known few visitors from afar, but the Snakefaces were hidden among a flood of unfamiliar wagon merchants from distant holds and kingdoms, who were suddenly everywhere in A
rbridge and Galath, and Tauren and Sardray beyond, too. These merchants sold mirrors, cast metal ewers and decanters, well-made coffers and kegs, saws and hasps and nails, daggers and buckles and cheeses and all manner of things useful and exotic, and bought hides and smoked joints of meat from Arbren.
There had been mages among the traders, too. Not spell-tyrants like the fabled Dooms, but more ordinary folk, both old and young. Bony and fat, I hey worked little charms and wardings, and sold potions to heal the sick and make the uncaring fall in love.
"None of them lasted long," one drover said darkly from nearby, wrapping both of his large and hairy hands around his tankard as if it were a wizard's neck. "The Vengeful saw to that."
Vengeful? Nothing he'd created, Rod was certain. Taeauna was also listening with that slight frown that meant, he was increasingly sure, that she was encountering something new. And troublesome.
"The who?" a wagon merchant asked, rubbing his chin.
The two men of Ar shook their heads and put up their hands in warding gestures, and just in case the merchant was too dense to take the hint, one of them muttered, "Shouldn't have said anything at all; we don't speak of them."
The merchant nodded, but then leaned forward and plucked at the arm of one of the pair, and muttered, "Well enough, I'll not pry. Yet I'd take it kindly if you'd answer me this: I was seeking a woman who owes one of my business partners quite a debt, and was told in Tauren she was slain by the Vengeful. Now, she could well have been a sorceress, from what some have said. Does this sound right to you? These Vengeful; they'd slay a sorceress?"
The Arbren pair glanced around to see if anyone was listening, making Rod glad he'd just looked away from them and was now peering at their reflection in the shiny, unadorned signet ring he always wore on the middle finger of his left hand. Then one of them nodded curtly and emphatically.
"Good," the merchant said, "I can stop wasting time looking for her then."
"So," the drover said to him, "you've come through Tauren? What news? I've a brother lives there…"
"Finish your broth and come," Taeauna murmured to Rod. "And try to look sad and old and exhausted."