Falconfar 01-Dark Lord (44 page)

The Doom of Falconfar strode up to the tall, ornate oval mirror that adorned one wall, turned it with his fingers, just a little, until he heard the hidden catches
click,
then slid it aside to reveal the dark, narrow opening behind it. The glass had taken a long time to enchant, so he left it standing open behind him, hoping none of his guardians would shatter it while pursuing him.

Then he was hurrying down the short, curving, narrow way it had hidden, to touch the little glow on the rough stone wall at its end, and leave Ult Tower behind, through one of its most hidden gates.

"Fear my return," he murmured, the metallic shrieks of his armored sentinels shouldering against stone after him, fading as the glowing mists took him, "for I shall be exacting payment for this. And the price will be high."

*   *   *

"He's gone!" Amalrys
spat, slamming her hand down on a defenseless crystal in a rattle of protesting chain. "Gone! Falcon take him and break him!"

She glared wildly around at the array of glowing crystals, seeing striding chaos in a dozen chambers of the tower as aroused guardians hastened to do whatever she'd goaded them to. She should calm them and return them to their resting-places, for Arlaghaun had destroyed many of them, and their own misadventures damaged more. Fires were raging in two rooms, and there was wrack and shattered ruin everywhere.

One scene caught her attention; blue eyes blazing, she thrust forward her manacled hands as if to throttle that crystal, the better to stare into its glowing depths.

She was seeing the row of gates out of the tower that all the apprentices knew of, and used often at the master's bidding, and the wide passage before them. Three intruders were sitting there together, in the lee of a riven, still-struggling armored guardian: rhe Galathan noble, the wingless Aumrarr, and the mysterious man who traveled with her.

As Amalrys watched, they rose, blood-spattered but seemingly unhurt, and looked to the gates.

Stop them,
a voice thundered in her head, sending her reeling.
Send the guardians against them! Let them not escape!

Mind whirling, drooling blood across glowing crystals—Falcon, she'd bitten her own lip, and no wonder, at that mind-thunder!—Amarlys sprang to do just as she was told, hissing commands and slapping crystals and...

Arching back and away from it all in a sudden spasm, control of her own limbs torn rudely from her, as a stronger voice than the first roared,
"LET THEM GO. HARM THEM NOT!"

And so it was that the wizard Malraun became directly aware of the wizard Narmarkoun, in the torn and tortured depths of Amalrys's mind. Two furious mind-bolts lashed out as one, each seeking the death of the other... and each fading into futility as the ravaged mind around them exploded.

Amalrys collapsed across the array of scrying-spheres, her eyes two burnt and empty holes.

Smoke curled forth from her ears, mouth, and nostrils as her lips gasped the last thought she'd clung to: "Arlaghaun, I love you."

In the passage
of Ult Tower where the row of gates hummed and glowed, Rod, Taeauna, and Deldragon turned at sudden rising sounds of thundering haste, to behold a host of clawed, bladed, armored things racing toward them from one end of the passage, and another, similar host hurrying from the other.

Great jaws, closing...

"Falcon!" the velduke cursed in a slow whisper, aghast, as they saw death coming for them.

I can't believe
this!" Garfist Gulkoon said I delightedly, launching himself into a slide.

Shining gold coins parted in two waves before his ample chest as he came slithering down the highest of the bright, golden hills that filled the little room, in a cascade of gleaming wealth, to fetch up against the back wall beside Iskarra in a prolonged and hissing crash. "Bright fancy-tales often talk of rooms full of gold, but this is real!"

"Nice it is, to know your wits still work, Gar, if slowly," his longtime partner replied bitingly, parting the little belly and striking breasts her reunited crawlskin had given her, and raking handfuls of coins inside. "Everyone has to keep their coins somewhere, and this wizard obviously has too many to fit them all into boot heels and moneybelts. I presume you've refilled yours?"

"Uh, well... no," the fat man frowned, settling himself beside her.

"Why not? 1 don't recall you strolling nonchalantly out of a home you'd just plundered all that often. I
do
recall you running for your life, many a time, with breath running short and swords slicing at your backside. Not much time for picking up coins then, aye?"

"All right, aye, right ye are," Garfist growled, scooping up coins and starting to kick his boots off. Iskarra wrinkled her nose at the smell.

"Right as ye always are, Isk," he added grudgingly, scooping out a leather insole to get at the hollow heel from within. "But can ye believe this? I mean, all this gold, and he just leaves it in an unlocked, unguarded room!"

"Shows you how much gold matters to him, aye? Gar, he rules Galath, even if he doesn't wear the crown. Where the rest of us have to pay for everything, he just takes what he wants. So what's gold to him? And, look you, I'm not so sure 'tis as unguarded as all that; we walked in easily enough, but we haven't tried to get out yet."

Garfist frowned. "This is a trap, ye mean?"

"This is a wizard's tower, I mean. So 'tis full of magic, see? So every second stone in the wall could hurl itself at us or turn into a stabbing sword or fall away to let out some sort of guardian like that armor we watched come together. If you can work that with spells, it seems to me it'd be simple enough for you to make a spell that unleashes a guard like that when a gold coin from this room goes past you, except in the wizard's purse! Or just 'past you,' and he uses some secret way in and out we haven't found yet. There still seems to be fighting going on, so let's bide here a little while. Mayhap someone'll kill the wizard for us!"

"Ye really think so?"

"No, but I'm tired, Gar. Tired of running about. I wouldn't mind a little lounging around on heaps of gold. A little while, only." Iskarra stirred the coins beside her with a bony fingertip. "Something to tell your children about."

"Viper," Garfist growled, "I'm hardly likely to have any brats now, after all the years of—
hem—
dalliance afore I paired with thee, when I fathered none."

Iskarra gave him a look.

"What? I fathered no brats!"

Iskarra's look didn't change.

Garfist stared at her. "I did?"

Her nod was slow but definite. "Your pander-lasses grew not round with child from the herbs they ate, not from any failing of your seed. Those merchants in Torond, and Srelkar? Their daughters didn't know about those herbs."

"So that's why they've tried to have me downed so many times, for so long," Garfist muttered. "Fart of the Falcon!"

He shook his head and added softly, "Glorking world. So I've sons and daughters, hey?"

"Daughters only, that I know of. Quite a number. They're who I send those clay jugs I make to, with all the fictitious births scratched on them. Handy custom, birthing jugs; make the bases thick enough, and you can hide a dozen-some coins in the clay, with no one the wiser."

Garfist was starting to look aghast.

"Oh, aye," Iskarra told him. "I send them all coins on your behalf, when we have any to spare."

Garfist snorted. "As if we ever do! Why, Viper mine, if we'd coins to spare, we'd not have to still be running about thieving and swindling and hacking at folk. We could be—"

"Sitting on our backsides drinking ourselves into graves, in some fine keep in the forest? Lord and lady of a handful of muddy farms? Would you really sit still for that, Gar? Longer than, say, six nights, or however long it took you to bed all the good-looking lasses, and all the rest of us females who gave you sharp words and scorn? Tell truth, now!"

"Truth?" Garfist turned a face to her that was both earnest and solemn, and said, "Isk, there was a time as I'd not have stopped running or fighting for anyone or anything. But my bones ache, now, and my wind comes hard, and betimes I dream of a Falconfar where no one spends their time stealing or swinging swords as a profession, and there's food enough for all. Wouldn't that be a world, now!"

They stared into each other's eyes for a long, silent time before his face changed, and he burst out laughing. "Nah! Never happen! Never happen!"

A sudden thunder arose all around them, the clamour and din of many large and heavy creatures moving in haste. From rooms all around them it came, a rushing in one direction that went on and on.

Looking over the heaped coins and out the door of the room, they could just see, in the passage beyond, a motley army of flying lorn, running Dark Helms, and all manner of lumbering monsters, strange metal automatons with blades or pincers for hands and wheels as well as feet. All rushing past as Iskarra and Garfist cowered down together, slowly going pale at the thought of trying to fight past so many guardians.

Coins slid noisily as they trembled, and a metal helm as large as Garfist's middle thrust through the doorway, peering.

Garfist and Iskarra closed their eyes and stayed as still as they could, barely daring to breathe. No man was ever so tall and broad, and no man snuffled so loudly and wetly as it sniffed the air for the scent of humans, but whatever sort of beast it was wore oversized armor of the same design as the Dark Helms.

It seemed like a heavy-booted, hastening eternity to the cowering pair before it snorted in disgust and was gone, joining the headlong hurry.

"Falcon spew!" Garfist hissed. "'Tis coming back, after, to seek us out. I know 'tis! It snorted just as night-wolves do, when they do that. What're we going to do?"

"Stop mewling and dig," Iskarra snapped. "Down right here, down the wall, and see if this room has a door in it like the last three did; the row of empty ones, remember? Then see where it leads."

Nodding like a fool, the panicked ex-pirate elbowed her aside and started scrabbling in the coins, clawing them aside with his hands like a child in a frenzy to recover a favorite lost and buried toy. Almost immediately he let out a shout of triumph, and dug even faster.

"Careful, idiot!" Iskarra snapped. "Bury yourself headfirst and the coins will kill you, never mind about monsters coming back for us. They slide, look you. And if that door opens into this room, forget it! We'll never thrust it open against the weight of all of these."

"Doesn't," Garfist panted, disappearing rapidly deeper amid all the sliding wealth. His ample behind and two well-worn boots were all she could still see of him now; her warnings might just as well have been given to a stone wall.

Garfist managed to do something, and the half-revealed door burst open, away from them, shoved by an enthusiastic flood of coins. With a wordless roar of triumph Gar rode them through the doorway and into—

A sudden, raging glow of magic, roiling up bright and purple.

"Oh, Falcon!" Iskarra cursed wearily. "Where now?"

The gate-magic had already swallowed Garfist, so she shrugged, raked a huge armful of coins down her bodice and grabbed two fistfuls more, kicked off, and slid after him.

Into softly falling mists of blinding brightness, through which she tumbled, so gently that not a coin strayed out past her throat, to...

A hard stone floor somewhere, where she bounced, coins bounding in all directions, some already rolling or
clink-
slithering, with Garfist rolling over ahead of her with a frown on his face, feeling for his handiest weapon.

They were in a turret room, high in a castle, with disbelieving warriors frowning at them and dropping jaws at all the gold coins that had accompanied them. Grim warriors with crossbows in their arms, standing at windows ready to use them.

A face or two among them looked a little familiar. As another handful of gold coins bounced and rolled out of the front of her ragged garb, Iskarra struggled to her feet, heart sinking, and gasped, "We come in peace! What castle is this?"

"Bowrock," one warrior snarled, bringing his bow around to aim at her breast, so close that the point of its quarrel almost grazed her slight bosom. "Are you wizards?"