Dark Lord

CHAPTER THREE

“Taeauna," Rod blurted, not knowing what to say but knowing he had to say something.

"Taeauna, I…"

In grim silence Taeauna stepped off the ledge and stalked down into the battlefield, ignoring the angry flapping and cries of disturbed vaugren. Rod hastened to follow, trying to ignore what he was stepping on. He got one good look at a hooked beak tugging at an eyeball, the flesh that held the orb stretching obscenely yet refusing to part company with its eye socket, and hurriedly looked away, swallowing.

The dell reeked like an open latrine, overlaid with the sweet stink of blood. Armored and half-armored Aumrarr lay sprawled everywhere, some of them so hacked apart they resembled the roasts of a publisher's buffet more than women. Wings that should have soared were crumpled and trodden, bloody boot prints marring the white. And there were feathers, feathers everywhere.

Taeauna was peering intently at one body and then at another, searching for something. From time to time Rod heard her moan softly, murmur a name, or whisper a curse, but she never stopped to weep.

He followed along anxiously behind her, looking around often to be sure no Dark Helm or anyone else was creeping up on them, and because he knew not what else to say, he blurted, "Sorry. Oh, Taeauna, I'm so sorry! This must be horrible for you…"

Taeauna did not reply. When she reached the far side of the dell, she caught up a splendid curve-bladed sword-like a Civil War cavalry saber, only without any sort of basket hilt-and hefted it in her hand. Nodding, she found its scabbard and belt, stripped them from the bloody, headless ruin that had once been a fellow Aumrarr, and donned the sword herself. Then she drew herself up and slammed the old sword Lhauntur had given her into a trampled flowerbed with sudden ferocity, leaving it quivering upright.

Without a word she took a long pace to one side, flung up her chin, and then started back across the dell toward the ledge they'd come from, bending and peering, and from time to time reaching down to draw open a pouch, or roll a body up to see what might lie beneath. Her face might have been carved from stone.

"Taeauna? Taeauna, I…"

Her grim search took her into a heap of bodies, and a cloud of vaugren rose to flutter and flap and screech at her. Rod hastened forward, thankful to have something helpful to do, to shoo them away with wild sweeps of his heavy sword. He stumbled on something smooth and slick-a blood-soaked breast, perhaps, though he was trying not to look down-and almost fell on his face into the fly-buzzing innards of a hacked-open Aumrarr ribcage.

He vomited helplessly then, stumbling and retching until he had to use his sword like a crutch, leaning over weakly to empty his stomach long after there was nothing left there to lose.

Taeauna never paused. Her hands were covered in dark, sticky gore as she gently rolled what was left of old friends over and aside to look at other bodies beneath. Searching, always searching. As soon as Rod's dizzy head and aching guts let him walk steadily again, he hurried to catch up to her.

By then, she was almost back at the ledge, and tugging another curved sword out of its scabbard. She peered critically at the blade, hefted the weapon, and then slammed it back into place, wiped her hands on the tunic of the corpse she was robbing, and set to work on buckles.

When Rod came scrambling up to her, she thrust the sword at him, scabbard and belt and all, without even looking his way. The moment his hands gingerly closed on it, she tugged at his Hollowtree sword, almost dragging him into a face-first fall. Hastily he gave it to her, and she stalked on for a few more paces, past a body sitting against rocks whose familiar face made her sigh, and planted the heavy blade upright, just as she'd done with the first one.

As she stepped silently to one side, to begin another grim journey across the garden of the dead, Rod moved with her. "Taeauna, I'm-I just want to tell you… I'm so sorry…"

Her newly acquired sword flashed up out of its scabbard and past his nose so fast Rod did nothing but blink at its passing flash and dazzle.

"Dark Lord, be still!"

Taeauna's face was still a web of blue veins, and silent tears were running down her face like water. Those emerald eyes might have been the points of two swords, above a chest that was heaving, but there was no trace of a sob in the harsh voice that snapped, "You didn't do this; spend no breath apologizing for it. Just bide with me in silence, and don't stand in my way when I see my next Dark Helm."

As she stalked past, bending to look at two Aumrarr who lay curled up around each other, broken swords in their hands and agony twisting dead and now eyeless faces, Rod frowned.

Dark Helms. There were no fallen Dark Helms anywhere in the gardens that he could see. He looked down to where the gardens ended and rocks began, and then back the other way, at the open doors in the mountainside that presumably led into the chambers where the Aumrarr really lived, or bad really lived, but… no black-armored men lying anywhere. Not one.

He started to look more closely among the dead, trying to see if perhaps a man lay among the blood-drenched women. Some of the Aumrarr had been wearing dark leather armor, and the closer he looked, the more beautiful faces and graceful limbs he saw-and gore. Flies, everywhere flies, and those damned birds walking stiff-legged, to peck and stab and tear away…

Rod shuddered and turned away, gorge rising. Even with his eyes closed, he could see a particular Aumrarr face, slack and still with insects crawling on it, but still achingly beautiful. It was staring pleadingly up at him, looking so much alive that he'd almost reached down a hand to… to the severed head whose body, wherever it lay among all the torn and twisted carrion, wasn't within three or four of his strides. No matter how much he shook his head, he couldn't look away from those eyes. Brown, not the fierce emerald of Taeauna's, and never blinking…

"I've seen enough," Taeauna said from beside him, almost tenderly, "and more than enough. But we must go in. There are… things I must see to."

Rod swallowed, trying to banish a beseeching brown stare, and then opened his eyes and said hoarsely, "Taeauna, there're no Dark Helms here. D-did they somehow fight well enough that none of them died?"

Taeauna's face was calm again, and her eyes were dry, but there was a shadow in her gaze that hadn't been there before. "You don't know what Dark Helms truly are, do you?"

Rod blinked. "Uh, evil men in black armor," he said slowly, "whom wizards can control."

"Yes," she agreed bleakly. "Even beyond death." She pointed, and Rod looked and saw the curled fingers of a. black gauntlet beneath the distractingly bared hip of a dead Aumrarr. Then she pointed again, and Rod stared at blood-covered black shards for some time before he realized that he was looking at the shattered remains of a black warhelm, its visor twisted up among them like a set of false teeth turned on edge.

Taeauna took a step past Rod, touching his arm with her pointing finger, and then indicated a row of rocks that marked one lip of a tiered garden bed. On the largest stone lay a black hilt, and from it, where the blade of a dagger should have been, stretched a smoke-scar, a scorch mark that ended abruptly, without a point.

"Some of their blades bear spells," Taeauna told him gently. "When broken, they burn away to nothing. A very painful passing, if such steel is inside you."

"So… this means…?"

"A wizard was here." The Aumrarr turned, strode a few steps toward the head of the garden and the open doors waiting there, and then stopped to point again.

This time, she was indicating a sister who sat against a low stone wall, arms spread wide in agony, the flesh of her chest melted and drooping like the wax of a burned candle.

"Magic did that," Taeauna added coldly. "And the one who cast it took away his fallen, to bind pieces of ravaged bodies together into men once more and send them shuffling out again to do his bidding another day, dead and beyond dead, rotting inside their armor. 'Tis the armor that truly moves them, not the muscles within. The day a mage improves the spells so a thrust that slays a living man will fail to stop an undead Dark Helm is a day that will doom most folk still alive in Falconfar. "

Something in her voice left Rod shivering as she hefted her new sword again and strode on through the nearest doorway. He looked around the dell, and at more vaugren wheeling hungrily down out of the sky to land in it, and then hurried after her.

"Watch behind us," she ordered, the moment he was inside.

They were standing in a high-domed room carved from solid rock, with sunlight shafting down through an oval window high overhead, and dead Aumrarr heaped everywhere. The smell of cooked flesh hung strong and heavy in the air, and several of the twisted corpses were a strange iridescent purple.

"Wizards' work," the living Aumrarr muttered, peering rapidly here and there, as if hidden foes might rise up to blast them both at any moment. The thought awakened an idea in Rod.

"Can wizards go invisible?" he blurted.

"Some know that spell, yes," Taeauna told him, as briskly as one of his long-ago schoolteachers. "It's imperfect, though, unless the mage remains still, and it does nothing about noises like breathing and footfalls. There's no spell-hidden watcher here, if that's what you fear."

She went to one of the niches in the walls where potted plants cascaded lush, waxy green leaves down into the room, and touched a particular spot in the carved stone lip of the opening. To Rod, it looked no different than any of the other shapes amid the running knotwork design, before or after Taeauna's touch. She bent down again to touch another particular spot, in a second lip carving.

There was a soft click, and the living Aumrarr went to the frame of an interior doorway and thrust her fingers at it. The doorframe swiveled on hidden pivots, moving top to bottom as a single board, to expose a tall, shallow cavity of many finger-sized niches, most of which seemed to hold keys. She selected two of these, and then bent and took something from the bottom of the cavity.

Rod had just remembered her order to guard their rear, and was turning away. He almost dropped the scabbarded sword she suddenly tossed him, and stood holding it uncertainly until she said, as calmly and as quietly as if she were asking him to pass over a newspaper, "Swing that once or thrice. 'Tis probably a better length for you than the one I gave you earlier."

Before he could reply, she added, "Ah," in far more interested tones, and plucked something small out of hiding. It looked like the sort of tiny box jewelry store purchases came in, only of smooth-polished wood.

And then she'd slipped past him as smoothly as any snake and was heading out the door again, into the death-filled garden. Rod followed, wanting to ask her what she was doing but wise enough to hold his tongue. For now, at least.

Taeauna headed straight for a body Rod hadn't noticed before amid all the others, an Aumrarr on her knees with both hands thrown up in front of her, her face twisted and her mouth frozen open in a shouting position. There was something unnatural about this corpse; Rod stared at it.

Of course. Twisted like that, and rearing back on its knees, it should have fallen over. Something- magic? — must be holding it up, frozen in its contortion.

"Taeauna…" Rod burst out, because he could keep quiet no longer.

"Tried that blade yet?"

"Tay…"

The woman who'd brought him to Falconfar drew in a deep breath, and then said quietly, "This was Marintra. One of my closest…"

Her voice trailed away, and without saying more, she turned abruptly and thrust the wooden box into his hands. Rod dropped the sword as he fumbled with it, hissed a hasty apology, and then got it open.

He was staring at two flat, smooth stones. Nondescript beach pebbles, or more likely streambed stones, if they'd come from anywhere around here. Rod touched one of them with his finger, and a tiny swirl of sparks arose from the stone, to fade away almost immediately.

Which meant that these must be the Holdoncorp creations known as speech-stones. Placed on the tongue of a corpse, each of them would work but once, making the dead say again the last words they uttered when alive.

He nodded gravely and handed the open box back. "She died shouting something that'll be useful to us, you think?"

Taeauna's face was as calm as her voice. Only the fire raging deep in the shadows in her eyes betrayed her fury. "I hope. And no vaugril has yet been at her tongue."

She turned, took one of the stones, and with slow, gentle care laid it in Marintra's mouth.

They saw that pale throat quiver, cords standing out anew, and the flesh around her mouth seemed to creep, as if starting to move with slow reluctance. Then the dead mouth filled with dancing sparks, and moved normally.

The sobbing groan was slow and deep, but its words were quite clear: "Arlaghaun, I die cursing you! By my blood, wizard, may you die a worse death than mine own!"

The sparks promptly died, and the stone was gone. Marintra went on glaring at no one, but her jaw now hung slack.

More so as not to have to look at Marintra for any longer, Rod turned to Taeauna. "I guess… we'll be hunting Arlaghaun now… right?"

Taeauna looked back at him, her face as smooth as stone, and observed quietly, "You're good at guessing things, Lord Archwizard."

Something in her tone made Rod shiver again.

Silently, she turned away and walked back into Highcrag.

The new chains were finer, and tinkled almost more than they rattled when she moved.

The sharp-nosed man in gray smiled approvingly as she came into his many-shadowed study, the angry fire in his brown eyes ebbing, and she took that as a sign to scramble up from her knees to take and kiss his hand, letting her long, honey-blonde hair trail across it first; she knew he liked that. The web of chains joining her wrists to her ankles chimed, and the spells it bore made it wink and flash in the gloom of the old stone room.

"You're troubled, master," she murmured. "Can I help? In any way?"

At another time, her hopeful purr and those ice-blue, almost pleading eyes might have distracted him, but just now the wizard's thoughts

were ensnared, returning again and again to that strange stirring last night, that flow of force…

Like magic, but not magic. What was it?

Something new, something he'd never felt before. Like the fabled storm-dreams of the Shapers, the tumults that led ignorant fools to call the strongest Shaper "Lord Archwizard," when Shapers weren't really wizards at all.

Whatever it was, he must find it and tame it. His rivals couldn't have failed to feel it, and if one of them came to wield it, he could be doomed as surely as if he'd never mastered a single spell, but proclaimed himself king of all Falconfar with nothing to defend himself but a smile.

As empty as the smile he was smiling now.

There were some very artful hiding places in Highcrag, Rod Everlar mused, some hours later. Taeauna knew them all, of course, and was rapidly assembling a pile of small, useful-looking things that seemed too large for their laedlen. When he started to point this out, she reminded him that he still hadn't tried that second sword he was carrying along in her wake. And then she'd gone into a side-chamber and come out with a pair of dark leather thigh-high boots, all laces and feminine points, and tossed them to him with the words, "These should be your size, and far more comfortable than what you're wearing."

Taeauna was foraging for food, too, but no matter what she sought, she mainly found death. Death and more death.

Messily slain Aumrarr were everywhere, long limbs draped over chairs and beds and splintered tables. When one corpse shocked Rod into audible disgust, Taeauna threw him a decanter of wine and told him to drink only a single swallow.

Rod watched her tireless peering and gathering, and wondered when she was going to snap.

If he was in the way, whenever it happened, he was doomed. She could carve him up in an easy instant, probably without even slowing down in her opening of wardrobes and tossing items onto beds.

And then, quite suddenly, she was plucking at his sleeve and dragging him back toward the rooms where she'd assembled the largest piles of items.

"We must be well away from here before night falls. Beasts will come that we'll not want to meet; too many of them."

Rod nodded and hurried after her. A deep anger was rising to choke him, and he felt so sick at what he'd seen that he could barely imagine what Taeauna must be feeling. This was her home; these were her friends…

Dead, every last one of them.

"Tae… Taeauna? Is… Are you the last Aumrarr?"

The wingless woman whirled around so swiftly he shouted in alarm, but all she said was, "I hope not. Not all of my sisters are here. Unless some lie dead in the rocks beyond the gardens that I've not seen yet. I'm not inclined to go looking. Hasten."

Rod knelt and started scooping items into his laedre, his new boots squeaking. Idly, as he stowed and stuffed, he wondered how ridiculous he looked. There'd been a tall oval of brightly polished metal mounted on the sloping front of a mountainous wardrobe in one of the rooms, pretty close to what was sometimes called a "cheval glass" in some of the arty furniture catalogs that came in the mail, hut he hadn't much wanted to look at himself.

A mutter of disgust came from close behind him, and one of Taeauna's long arms reached past him into his sack, to pluck something out that he'd just put in there.

"Taeauna," Rod said then, watching her long fingers emerge with something small and metallic that he couldn't begin to identify, "there are…"

He didn't know how to say this, but he had to try. "There are things about Falconfar that I hate. Butchery like this. The wizards. The Dark Helms, and the suspicion. If my books-my dreams-can change Falconfar, how? How can I control things, to make just the changes I want?"

In the lengthening silence that followed, her other hand took hold of his shoulder, and turned him gently.

"Lord Archwizard," Taeauna of the Aumrarr whispered, tears glimmering in her emerald eyes as they faced each other nose-to-nose, "I… I don't know."

They spent that night high in the mountains, huddled together in a crevice. Both were wrapped in their own blankets, which did little to make the rocks they were lying on less sharp and unyieldingly hard. Taeauna used a sling made of the sword belts she'd brought from Highcrag to bind the rolled blankets together around her shoulders, and with this crude aid, pulled large stones into the mouth of the crevice, to partly wall it closed.

"Wolves?" Rod had asked, as he chinked the big stones by wedging little ones around them, as he was instructed.

"Worse," she'd told him tersely, and he hadn't felt like asking further. Taeauna had used something from Highcrag that was like a tall metal tankard-only it was as tall as the length of her forearm-to scoop up water from a mountain spring. That and a few berries eaten in grim silence had been their supper, and immediately after that Taeauna had gone to relieve herself and then returned to curtly order him to do the same. He'd been startled, returning to the crevice, to see her standing atop the rocks above it with her sword drawn, obviously having watched over him, but she said not a word as they secured the last rocks in place to wall themselves in, and rolled into their blankets.

Taeauna had fallen asleep almost immediately, but started to whisper names and weep softly. Rod had lain beside her staring up into the darkness, wondering if he should reach out to comfort her, and sleep had been a long time coming for him.

He'd come awake suddenly, later, when the darkness outside the gap-studded wall of rocks was absolute, and something with an unpleasant smell, a low and rumbling growl, and long claws that scratched on stone had nosed around just outside.

It had thrust a snout-at least, Rod assumed it was a snout, though it was too dark to see a thing-between two of the stones they'd wedged, and Taeauna had calmly and silently thrust her sword deep into it, held firm to her steel as it shrieked and clawed wildly at the stones, sending some of them tumbling down her body and bouncing off Rod's blanketed shins, and then gone right back to sleep again.

Her soft weeping awakened him again, later, but when he'd put out a tentative hand to touch her shoulder comfortingly, the cold steel of the flat of her blade had slapped his wrist firmly, and she'd said quietly, "No, Dark Lord."

"Sorry," Rod had whispered into the darkness, drawing his hand hastily back into the meager warmth of his blankets. She'd made no reply.

And now it was morning, and colder than ever, and he was blinking as his breath drifted past his nose like mist, and Taeauna's emerald eyes were regarding him with something like contempt and something like pity.

"Lord Archwizard, reporting for duty," Rod tried to joke.

Her face might have been carved from stone, it remained so expressionless, as she slapped his stiff and aching crotch with the back of her hand and ordered, "Relieve yourself. I'll stand guard. We have much country to walk this day."

He did sorely need to empty his bladder, and rolled out of his blankets into the frigid morning air wincing and shivering. "Much country? Where are we heading?"

"Arbridge," she said flatly.

Rod dimly remembered Arbridge as a pleasant little vale with a castle at one end, a town at the other, and a stream winding through it with farms and little woodlots everywhere. He'd written about a bridge midway along the farm-filled valley where two feuding knights had fought a battle to the death, both drowning in the stream after they'd gone off the bridge tangled together and stabbing each other.

The knight from the castle fights the knight from the town, and no one wins. He'd liked the story, a wrinkle on the old, much-used "making a last stand guarding the bridge" tale. As far as he could recall, he hadn't ever returned in his writings to look at the aftermath for Arbridge.

Which meant, of course, it could be anything now.

A road wandered down the vale, from the town to the bridge and from bridge to castle, and gone up over the hills to other places at both ends, places he couldn't rightly remember just now.

"Why Arbridge?"

"'Tis the fastest way to get down into Galath."

Ah. Now Galath he remembered. One of his creations he was most fond of-if he'd really created anything in this world. A splendid forest kingdom of knights and ladies, old gruff monocled dukes with huge mustaches and pretty ladies riding at their sides, and sinister, oh-so-politely-warring nobles who did each other dirty with poisoned daggers and honeyed words, trying to snatch real power away from a decadent royal family.

"Galath. Yes," he said, smiling.

Taeauna gave him the coldest look she'd yet favored him with, and said, "You'll find it much changed, Lord Archwizard."

Rod looked at her, feeling more than a little helpless. "Taeauna, what have I done to… to…"

"Earn my displeasure? Nothing. I am not angered with you, lord."

"Then why-?"

"I am enraged, lord. Enraged with whichever of the wizards stole your memories from you, furious with the wizard who slew all my sisters at Highcrag, and-" "Aria-"

"Speak not his name! Idiot!" "Uh. Sorry. Ah, shouldn't that be 'Lord Idiot?'" Taeauna stared at him for a moment, all the color gone from her face. Then suddenly she rushed forward and flung her arms around him, laughing and weeping at once, so wildly and fiercely that in a hectic instant Rod found himself winded, on his back on the stones, being tugged this way and then that in iron-strong arms as she rocked back and forth.

After what seemed like a long time, her laughter gave way to sobs, and then a sniffle or two. Then she pushed herself up off him, and looked away into the cold morning breeze.

"I wish you hadn't said that. 'Tis in my mind, now; I might slip and call you 'Lord Idiot Archwizard' in the company of others." There was just a hint of what might have been a chuckle in her voice.

"And that plain-tongued honesty would be bad how, exactly?"

Taeauna turned her head slowly to regard him, not smiling. "You are different from other wizards. From every other wizard I've ever met. You're… soft where they are hard. Gentle where they are savage. A willful fool where they are haughty and threatening. A-"

"Bumbling idiot where they are capable rulers," Rod interrupted her, adding a wry smile. Taeauna sighed, and looked away again. Rod leaned forward to touch her shoulder with one forefinger. "Tay, I-"

"Taeauna."

"Sorry, Taeauna. Uh, Taeauna… I'm sorry I'm not the world-striding godlike cloaked wizard you probably hoped I'd be, able to set things right the moment I set foot in Falconfar."

He felt the stones beside him with his other hand, feeling the coarse, tufted grass between them, and shook his head. "I still can't quite believe I'm here, in this imagin… In this place I never knew was real. But I'm glad I am. And I want to help, however clumsy I am."

He looked around, at other ridges and higher peaks in the distance, and at the great green valleys on either side of the row of hills they were perched atop, groping for the right words. Taeauna was watching him, her eyes on his, waiting in patient silence.

He drew in a deep breath, and said in a rush, "I don't mind being guided by you; in fact, I'd be lost without you and don't want you so much as out of my sight. Yet I… I don't want to just stumble along not knowing why we're going to this place or that place. I–I need to know."

The Aumrarr nodded. "Forgive me, lord. It was wrong of me not to have spoken of this with you sooner. I was waiting for a moment of ease, in Highcrag, and then…"

Though her face remained calm, she drew in a ragged breath before adding, "I dared my life to reach you because I was losing it anyway. You were there, dreaming of me, so close. My spilled blood and resolve were enough to open a Way between us. Your power is all mighty, even in your dreams, even when you… know not what you do. You are Falconfar's only hope."

Rod grimaced. "Not to place any pressure on me, or anything like that."

Taeauna shrugged. "I am desperate. I would do anything with you, or," she lowered her voice to a murmur, but kept her eyes on his, "to you, to save Falconfar. You are the only sword I know of, to smite the Dooms. Ach; the other three Dooms, I mean."

Rod spread his hands. "Very grand. Stirring, even. But what does my having all this power really mean? I've read fantasy novels aplenty where innocent good guys-and gals-blunder along, saved by their own predestiny, to the end of the book, and then suddenly know the Right Thing To Do, and destroy the Dark…" His voice trailed away as he realized what he was starting to say.

"Dark Lord," Taeauna said for him, with a little smile. "Yes. Our Falconfar legends say the same, many times over. Yet I believe you won't be an ignorant innocent when you face the Dooms, if you can reach the right place before you meet with them. Going to that place will break the spell on you, and your memories will return."

"And then?" Rod felt a stirring of excitement within him, a deep, crawling energy that he'd never felt before. This was all so much wishful talk, wasn't it? And yet… and yet…

"When your memories are restored, you should be able to write with power, so your pen can swiftly change Falconfar back to what it should be. Restore we Aumrarr, destroy the wizards and their Dark Helms, make mages who are simply local dabblers in magic and monsters rare beasts rather than nightly prowlers nigh-everywhere. Return wars to disputes that erupt betimes, not the ceaseless warfare that has become the daily lives of all Falconaar."

Well, that was easily said. Write what, exactly? Who was to say it would work? Or if his pen could really affect things, what exactly should he write? What if his changes begat consequences that were worse? Or that he didn't even know about, until it was far too late…

Yet in his mind, he was already seeing himself writing the words "No more Dark Helms" on parchment with a quill pen, then watching all of them instantly fade away into empty, collapsing armor and then dust, clear across vast Falconfar.

Enough. Time enough to burn that bridge once he was standing on it. Keep to the specifics, the next step here and now. "What is this 'right place?'"

Taeauna looked very solemn. "I know not," she whispered, "which is why we'll wander after we're away from Hollowtree and Highcrag. But you will know it. In your dreams."

"B-but… I don't remember my dreams! Not since I got here!" Rod protested, staring at her.

Taeauna stared back at him.

"Oh, shit," she said savagely. As all the color drained out of her face, and bleak despair rose into her eyes.