Falconfar 03-Falconfar

by Ed Greenwood

  "You wear it, brother," she replied with a sweet smile. "If you continue this career of going around killing Galathan nobles in front of witnesses..."

  She lifted a languid hand to indicate the white, shaking Dunshar. "You're going to be needing it more than me."

  ROD LAY VERY still, trying to think of the storm blowing away and how strange it felt to so suddenly be back here, in his own backyard, instead of wandering through ruined Malragard back in Falconfar...

  He knew the mind-link was still firm and strong; he could feel Narmarkoun's mind at work as the wizard prowled the dusty, deserted house, peering alertly at everything. Thank the Falcon, Narmarkoun's attention was entirely on his exploration right now, but...

  Rod was discovering just how hard it was to not think of something.

  Something exciting, that he could feel happening to him, slowly and tinglingly. Something that so far was obviously, as writers say, "unbeknownst to" Narmarkoun.

  Something he could tell, from the faint wet whisperings of the grass beside him, where Taeauna lay, was affecting her too.

  Evidently some sorts of magic faded very quickly on Earth, magic that a wizard of Falconfar trusted in, because on Falconfar it lasted much longer. The muscle-lock was failing already, lessening its grip as the wizard moved from the nearer rooms at the back of the house to front rooms farther away.

  Rod fought to turn his head and look at Taeauna—and managed to shift the section of sky he was staring at, moving his nose a few inches. It felt like shoving against a concrete wall, and seemed to take a straining eternity—enlivened, in the back of his mind, by Narmarkoun's observations, where the wizard had just about finished his first foray around the ground floor, and was debating climbing those open stairs to the few rooms above, or descending into the basement ("the cellars" to Narmarkoun, of course) first. Opening and examining all these books would come later, after more immediate concerns—such as anyone who might be hiding in the house—were dealt with. The mind-link let him see nothing of the wizard's thoughts beyond the most lasting and general images, though that might change if Narmarkoun turned his attention back to Rod, which was very much not wanted, and—

  Something loomed up against the gray sky, very close by, and looked down at him. Taeauna!

  "Tay!" he tried to cry, but managed only a wordless mumble. His jaws felt stuck together, as rigid as stone.

  "Hush," she whispered soothingly, leaning close to his ear. "We're together again at last, yes. Lord Rod, I have missed you just as much as you have missed me."

  Sounds like dialogue from a bad romance novel. Unthinkingly he tried to say that thought out loud, but his mouth was still frozen.

  "Yes, the wizard's magic is fading," Taeauna murmured, as cool and crisp as any police officer Rod had ever heard, "but it may rise again when he comes back closer to us. If this gives us any chance for freedom at all, that chance is now. Come."

  A stiff and fumbling hand took hold of Rod's shoulder and hauled on it, hard, rolling him over onto his side in the wet grass. Taeauna gave him the briefest of smiles and kept on tugging at him, rolling Rod right over onto his face—his nose meeting the wet lawn—and then, faster now, up to face the sky again.

  Over, and again. Over and again; she was doing it! Dragging him away down the yard...

  Rod grinned, thinking he was seeing more of his yard, close up, than he had in months. Years.

  It was frighteningly slow, and Taeauna was gasping and panting as if hurling all her strength into back-breaking labor—but then, she was, wasn't she?—but they were moving.

  Rod found he could now move his fingers, though he still couldn't feel them, and turn his head, too. Most heroic.

  Well, he'd always known he was no hero, just a man who wrote about heroes. Yet thanks to Taeauna's dogged pulling, all of his movements were coming a little faster now... and he was losing the helpless feeling at last.

  "Guide me, Lord Rod," she gasped suddenly. "Down to the end of your yard we must go, yes, but whither then?"

  Rod tried to answer, but all that came out was a frustrating sequence of grunts.

  Taeauna rolled her eyes, set her jaw, and grimly but briskly rolled him over twice or thrice more. "Guide me."

  "Roll me," Rod croaked back, finally able to move his jaws and tongue properly; or almost properly.

  "Lord Rod," she said almost sternly, obeying him twice more, "we don't have much time."

  "For me to play the idiot, you mean?" Rod managed a smile. "Right down at the back, right-hand side, there's a gate. It opens right onto a little trail behind all the houses, where all the neighbors walked their dogs. The other side of that, forest, for quite a ways, down to the creek."

  "Thick forest? Then we head down. Unless your neighbors—"

  "No help there. Nice enough, but none of them own guns, and not one is likely to be much use against an angry wizard. They won't even believe he can use magic on them—until he does, and it's too darned late."

  He could crawl on his own, now, and Taeauna dragged him to his feet and into a sort of stumbling run, that took him maybe eight strides at her shoulder before he fell onto his hands and knees. Yet those eight strides had covered a lot of ground.

  "Again," he gasped, and without a word she hauled him up, into another shambling, off-balance run. This one took them clear down to the end of the yard.

  It was a big backyard, overgrown by Rod's feeble attempts at a wildflower garden on one side and a vegetable garden on the other, both long untended. The back gate was just as he remembered it. Aluminum frame with bars and chain-link fencing stretched across them, held closed—no lock—by a bendable metal latch set into an old and rotten wooden post.

  Rod glanced over at the corner post, where Narmarkoun had found his spare door key. It was just as ruinous as the wizard had said. One of the young wild trees growing on the outside of his fence had been blown over and fallen on the fence, bending it down, pulling the old thing right apart...

  "Lord Rod," Taeauna said urgently, in his ear, "I know this place is dear to you, but our lives are dearer to us both, surely? May I suggest—"

  Rod turned, gave her a grin, and tried to kiss the end of her nose. It might have worked better if she hadn't been pulling back and away from him, and hadn't looked so irritated. "Suggest," he told her. "In fact, command. It works better when you just tell me what to do."

  Taeauna contrived to somehow look amused and irritated at the same time.

  "Lord Archwizard Rod," she said, almost severely—and then stopped, with her mouth open.

  For one horrible moment Rod thought Narmarkoun had just cast a spell on her, or Lorontar had arisen from somewhere in the depths of her mind to take her over, but then she pursed her lips, shook her head, and began again.

  "Rodrel," she said, "I know not what to do. We cannot run and hide from a wizard who is linked to your mind; he will always know where you are and what you are doing—and see and hear everything you do if he wants to, even use you against me.

  Close-standing trees that he knows not well can keep him from translocating at will to us, and hamper him in blasting us with battle-spells, but I cannot lead you through heavy forest if you are bound and gagged and blindfolded!" She spread her hands in exasperation.

  Rod tried to check on Narmarkoun without thinking about him, but found it nigh impossible, so he snatched his mind away again. Whatever the wizard was doing, he was paying no attention to his helpless captives. Yet.

  He nodded to Taeauna. "To say nothing of the fact that you don't have anything to tie or gag or blindfold me with," he agreed.

  She gave him a disgusted look, and tugged at what she was wearing, miming that it could easily come off to be used as bindings on him.

  "Geez, Rod, I had no idea you were into that sort of stuff," a hesitant but all too familiar voice said, from behind the dark, thick cedar that grew just outside the gate.

  Up until that moment, Rod Everlar had thought only people in books jumped straight up into
the air when they were really startled.

  But for a beginner, he managed it very well.

  WHEN HE CAME down again, Rod was facing the right way to stare.

  He knew the owner of that voice, who thankfully was alone, and just as Rod remembered him: short, balding, with an untidy goatee, blue-stubble cheeks, thick black spectacles, and one of those bad suits he always wore, summer or winter, rain or shine. He was also wearing brown, buckled rubber boots, and carrying a crumpled, empty plastic bag.

  It was Max, all right. He stood blinking through those thick, smudged glasses not at Rod, but at Taeauna.

  "And who's this lovely lady? Ma'am, I'm Max—ah, Maxwell Sutherland. Ah, I'm in real estate. And I'm Rod's next-door neighbor."

  Max turned his head back to Rod. "Speaking of which: Rod, where've you been? The cops and everyone were looking for you, and—"

  "Mister Sutherland," Taeauna said crisply, opening the gate and advancing on Rod's neighbor, "do you have a dog? A large dog?"

  Max looked a little alarmed. He stepped back a pace.

  "You, ah, you like dogs?" he asked, a certain apprehension rising in his eyes.

  "Not in conjunction with gags or blindfolds or play involving such things, if that's what you mean," Taeauna replied, as crisply as any severe schoolteacher. Then she repeated patiently, "Do you have a dog?"

  "Well, yes, but it's not an outside dog. That is, it's really Muriel's—that's my wife—and it's a Chihuahua. Honeybell, we call it, and it—er, she, but she's fixed, you know?—very much feels the cold, so she wears these little pink sweaters that Muriel knits her, but she never goes outside, and—"

  "Fascinating," Taeauna said, witheringly. "Thank you, Mister Sutherland."

  It was a clear dismissal, but Max merely blinked at her for a moment and then swiveled his head back to look at Rod. "So, uh, Rod, where've you been?"

  "Away," Rod replied brightly, and managed a wide smile. He really didn't know what to say. Everyone on the street thought Max was more than a little crazy, but the man was a blabbermouth, and if the police had been—

  "The cops searched your house," Max told him excitedly, almost as if he could read Rod's mind, "and it's all locked up—I guess you found that out, huh?—because the lawyers for your creditors and relatives are all fighting about it. They said you couldn't be declared dead yet. And they were right, because here you are— and aren't! Dead, I mean, that is!" "And here I aren't," Rod agreed. "So far, at least." Taeauna reached back through the open gate, took firm hold of Rod's arm, and started towing him through it.

  "I—uh—I hope you don't mind," Max said hastily, holding up the empty plastic bag. "I've—uh—I've been coming over and, uh, harvesting your vegetables sometimes. I mean, it seemed a shame to let them go to waste, and—"

  "Max," Rod told him, "that's great. I'm glad you did that. I've been very busy, very far away, and it's good to hear that they ended up on your plate. You just go right on doing that, because I may not be back again for a while, maybe a long while, and—" "Oh," Max said, and looked back at Taeauna. "'Cause of her, huh?" "Well, yes and no," Rod replied, as the Aumrarr drew him to her side and started across the path, into the trees. "We've still got a lot to do together, you see, and—and—"

  The jet of flame that roared down the garden then crisped two trees and a bush, set the old, wet posts and scaling-paint boards of the back fence aflame, and missed Rod himself only because the fire had also flared up in his mind—driving him to fall to his knees, to clutch at his head.

  Narmarkoun was standing on the back deck, tall and terrible, his eyes blazing with anger. Letting fall an unfolded, yellowing piece of paper that looked like one of Rod's phone bills, and thrusting his dagger back into his belt-sheath, he raised his hands into the air, and started to spit out a long and ugly sounding incantation.

  During which Taeauna plucked Rod bodily to his feet and raced into the trees with him, holding him up by main strength.

  Max Sutherland stared not at her or his departing neighbor, but at the blue wizard. He listened to the incantation for just long enough to let his mouth drop open and his eyes follow the path of the now-vanished flame—a line of blackened tree trunks topped with ash, where all their upper branches were now simply gone— right down the garden, and started to shake.

  A moment later, he wet himself, started gobbling like a turkey, turned, and fled wildly.

  Right into a tree, slamming into it face first, hard.

  He ended up on the ground, nose streaming blood, but picked himself up with remarkable speed, managed to catch—out of sheer habit, without really looking—both halves of his broken glasses as they fell from his nose, and ran blindly on, pounding past his own backyard and the Jenkins' and the Smiths' and the old Miller place that no one lived in now, dwindling into the distance.

  GARFIST SHIFTED HIS behind to get clear of a particularly uncomfortable knob of rough wood—and almost lost his grip on the tree for the third time.

  "Sit still, and you won't be in quite so much danger of falling," Juskra's voice came down to him, from the branch above. It did not sound all that sympathetic. "Tell me, when you were so enthusiastically killing patrons back in yon tavern, Gulkoun, did you happen to notice any badges or blazons, or hear any names? Sir this or Lord that?"

  "Why?" the fat man growled, trying to find a more comfortable stretch of bough to sit on. "Are ye keeping score in some game of count-the-surviving nobles?"

  "Yes, as it happens," she replied crisply. "And before you ask why, know this: it's just one more of those crazy, mysterious things Aumrarr do. That'd be those same Aumrarr who flew you to safety."

  "Call this safety?" Garfist asked gloomily, looking down. It looked to be a long, long way to the ground.

  "And the same Aumrarr you'll need to depart your current perch—er, refuge—safely," she added.

  Garfist peered up at her. "No," he said sharply. "No, I did not. My killing enthusiasm must have gotten the better of me. Being a mere flawed human, an' all that. Does it matter?"

  "Eventually. If they all go on behaving like arrogant idiots. Galath will run out of knights and nobles some day."

  "Ye think so? Myself, I'm not thinking any realm'll ever run out of such pests unless they're all rounded up and put to the sword at once, every last one of them. They breed, y'see. All of them, hey? D'ye by chance wager on this, ye wingbitches?"

  Dauntra laughed merrily, from the lower branch she was sharing with Iskarra. "Don't tempt us, Gar. Don't tempt us."

  "Well, Wouldn't be fair," Garfist growled. "Ye Aumrarr kill folk and suchlike, too. Ye can make a wager and then go out an' bring something about that ye've just bet on happening. That's hardly fair.'"

  Juskra snorted. "You're how old, fat man? And you think life is fair? Well, you are an idiot."

  STRIDING DOWN THE garden, Narmarkoun ignored the fleeing human utterly. What cared he for any hue and cry raised in this otherwhere?

  His attention was bent, with the piercing stare of the hunting eagle, on a storm of hissing murmurs and crashing noises in the trees. They were thicker than he'd thought, almost a swamp thicket of bushes and dead saplings, and his storm of force-arrows might well do little harm to anyone who got down low, quickly enough.

  The spell was fierce but brief, and he stood at the very edge of the trees and listened hard, hearing its brief echoes die away but trying to hear something else. Everlar's mind was still alive, but the fool was holding his hands over his eyes, or the Aumrarr was holding her hands over them, so he could learn nothing beyond the mere survival of the so-called Lord Archwizard.

  Then he heard what he'd been expecting: faint but repeated crackling sounds as two bodies rose cautiously and started moving through dead leaves and fallen branches. Moving away from him, of course.

  He took a step back, not even bothering to curse, and with unhurried care cast another, longer spell.

  This time, the faint forest sounds coming back to him included a chorus of ringing clangs. Narmarkoun
smiled faintly, picturing what he got to see moments later, albeit blurred and confusedly, through borrowed eyes: his magic was working, snatching at every last piece of metal they wore or carried, pulling it irresistibly back toward him. Small or loose metal things—daggers riding in unstrapped sheaths, keys and coins in unfastened pouches— would be torn away and whirled off into the forest, flying or bouncing or rolling toward him. To stop right about there, where the reach of the magic ended. If either of them wore armor under their clothing, or didn't get rid of all their daggers in time, they'd be hauled back to him as surely as fish caught in a net.

  Probably about as naked, too; this magic often ripped buckles and pins right out of the target's clothes.

  He retreated a few steps, to give himself time to cast whatever spell might be best, and waited, smiling coldly. Did these idiots know nothing about magic? Did they honestly believe they could hide from a wizard—much less a Doom of Falconfar—who was linked to the mind of one of them? They'd have done better to have split up, to have the Aumrarr lurk and slink and try to slay him with a lucky dagger-thrust, while Rod the Shaper played unwitting lure.

  Not a challenging role, after all.

  Everlar, so far as he could tell, hadn't moved since throwing himself to the ground when the spell erupted. The Shaper was still cowering back there in the trees, wondering how to hold his pants up now that his belt was gone. He was whimpering in fear, a singing dread that left him trembling.

  Narmarkoun's lip curled. Lord Archwizard of Falconfar, indeed. A child could be more capable. Shriek and quake in terror, little mindless thing, as Narmarkoun comes for you...

  A branch danced, right in front of his nose, and the Aumrarr burst out from behind it, leaping right at him. She was half-naked, and was whirling the torn remnants of her jerkin with both hands like a cloak as she screamed, "Rod! Now!"

  In the wake of that shriek, she fell on Narmarkoun like a whirlwind, clawing and kicking and—and biting, damn her!

  Narmarkoun tried to snap out a spell that would hurl her away, but her flailing jerkin caught him in the teeth. He couldn't see, couldn't hear, everything was a confused roaring. Punches rained bruisingly on him, and he was choking, his mouth full of wadded cloth and what felt like her fingers thrusting more in deeper.