Dark Lord

CHAPTER EIGHT

Rod Everlar was awakened by the screaming. Shrill, agonized shrieking from overhead that sent him bolt upright in the near-darkness, and wakened the bound wizard beside him into a squirming frenzy of frantic muffled calls through his gag.

Rod was still blinking and trying to gather his wits when Taeauna and the baron, both unclad, burst into view at the top of the spiral staircase, bloody swords in hand. Tindror half-ran and half-fell around the first curve of the stair, fetching up against the rail and turning to face whatever might be following them, and the Aumrarr vaulted over the rail to crash down feet-first on the edge of the bed, tipping it up wildly in a great groaning of wood. Rod and the struggling wizard were hurled into the air, and the bundle of boots and clothing Taeauna was carrying burst apart in all directions.

Taeauna's landing was hard enough to hurl her across the room into a wardrobe; it rocked, boomed against the wall behind it, and flung its doors open in protest, but didn't topple as she caromed off it into a run.

The wizard squalled through his gag as she sprinted right at him, but she merely freed him with two swift slices of her gore-dripping sword and whirled away in search of her boots, hissing at Rod, "Get dressed! Find your sword! We're under attack!"

Tindror joined the hunt for clothes, panting hard and snarling, "They must have emptied the Falconspires of lorn! There must be hundreds out there!"

"There'll be hundreds in here, once they hew through all the furniture," Taeauna panted back at him. "Sorry about your bed!"

The bearded baron shrugged. "Just so long as we both live to see you help me warm the next one." He found his belt and fumbled at the buckle, which started to glow, lifting the darkness they were all groping in to mere dimness. "Can't find my damn boots in all this gloom! Why can't they attack after morning soup, like decent bandits?"

Rod stared at him.

"'Twas a joke, silent man!" Tindror snarled, while hopping on one foot as he struggled, one-handed, to tug on what must be Galathan underwear. Then the baron saw that Rod's stare was fixed on his sword, which was dripping bright blue ichor. Tindror waved it. "Hoy, silent man, haven't you ever seen lorn blood before?"

"N-no," Rod admitted. "We don't put it in our morning soup."

Baron Tindror blinked at his guest, and then roared with sudden laughter.

"Ho, but that's the spirit! That's the flaming backbone, by Galath!"

He whirled suddenly to wag a finger in the half-dressed wizard's face, and said, "Don't let me catch you trying to hurl spells at our backsides, or use them to slink away, either! That motherless rump-licker Murlstag is out there with all his knights, nigh a score of Helms against every one of ours, ringing Wrathgard all around, and lorn by the score are roosting on all our roofs and turrets and battlements! You know as well as I do which Doom is behind this, and if you don't know by now what Dooms do to lesser wizards when they catch them, trust me thus far: you don't want to find out!"

The wizard whimpered, gabbling his words twice before he could say them clearly. "Isn't this the safest place to stay, right here? With the long staircase Baron Murlstag's swords will have to fight their way up."

"It would be," Tindror snarled, "if the lorn hadn't burst in on us up there! When my father's grandsire built Wrathgard, there were no lorn in Galath, none of us had ever seen such a beast. So my bedchamber has eight windows, each as tall as two men-or had; they just smashed them all, coming in at us all at once!"

He lowered his voice into a fierce muttering, and added, "The only reason they're not down here clawing and biting at us right now is that Tay and I pulled my best suit of armor down into the top of the stair after us, and chanted nonsense over it; the lorn think it's enspelled and waiting to do them harm if they so much as touch it. No, we have to get down and go deep, to the cellars where our well is, and the granary and armory around it, where old spells are laced through the stones and no wizard of today, Doom or otherwise, can make those stones walk to thunder into battle against us, or melt to fall on our heads! Come, while we still can!"

By then, Tindror was speaking to three hastily dressed people. He and Taeauna traded looks, she lifted aside the bar across the door, Rod handed her the key to its lock, and they started down the steep, narrow staircase and into the growing din of battle.

Murlstag's men had won past the gates and were already inside the castle.

"Oh, shit," Taeauna whispered, and turned to Rod. "Lord, this is not the ending I hoped for. I am sorry."

Tindror and the wizard both looked at Rod, startled at that "lord."

He kept his eyes on Taeauna, and told her fiercely, "We're not dead yet. You… you have nothing to apologize to me for. I… I'm starting to like this. Even with all the blood and doom."

Her sudden smile made her eyes flame. "Oh, I can give you more of that."

"I don't doubt it," the wizard said suddenly from ahead of them, slowing as they reached the bottom of the staircase and the clash and clang of swords grew suddenly louder. "But what of right now? What should-?"

"Stand aside," Lord Tindror told him brusquely, "and save your spells until I ask for their hurling. 'Tis time to fight! Good old butchery, carving up foes like carcasses for the kitchens!"

He thrust himself past the shuddering wizard and sprang down the last few steps, bellowing, "For Wrathgard! For Tarmoral!"

The stair opened into blood-drenched tumult. Bodies lay sprawled in spreading pools of blood everywhere, and rats were boldly scurrying from one corpse to another, unheeded in the desperate fray. There was no sign of the baron's maids or any other women of the castle, except among the dead, and the few men of Tarmoral were busily swarming and hacking down two foes in full plate armor, holding their arms and feebly kicking legs as daggers worked at armor joints and snarling men wrestled against locked-down visors to open breach enough to slip a knife blade in.

The baron rushed over to the nearest enemy knight, dug his fingers under the edge of the man's helm, and tore at it, twisting viciously. The neck inside it cracked just before he got it far enough up that his men, stabbing past him, could bury half a dozen daggers into the exposed Murlan throat.

Blood fountained, and streamed down Lord Tindror as he turned and stalked over to the second Murlan knight, snapping, "Belgard! Guard yon door! Gethkur, I want every stick of furniture you can swiftly lay hand to packed-and packed tight, in a real tangle-into the forehall, and its doors barred and braced, both ends!"

His men leaped to obey. Their fellows kept stabbing at the second knight who was dying by the time the baron reached him.

"The least of Murlstag's hounds," Tindror said sourly, "have better armor than any man of Tarmoral has ever owned. And for years the bulk of our crops have been demanded by the Throne of Galath, while all they ask of Morngard is a dozen new-forged swords and shields every harvest-tide. 'Twill be a pleasure swording warriors who invade us at the behest of the king."

"I've been busy at that pleasure since before dawn," a graybearded Tarmoran panted, rising from the task of tugging armor off a dead Murlan knight. "Murlstag is out there; I saw him myself, sitting his saddle under his banner. No one else this side of a field hawk has those yellow eyes. We think he brought a few hundred more than a thousand with him, under arms; we've taken him down under the thousand, all right, but… then there're the lorn."

Tindror nodded. "There are," he replied curtly. "How much of Wrathgard do we still hold? Are all the lower floors-?"

"No. These and the rest up here came up a ladder to that big window in the Shields Hall; the lorn broke it and held the upper end of the ladder firm, against our shovings and hewings from within. They still have Shields Hall, but we've forced them back to its doors. Down below, the main doors are still shut against them for now, but a few of the Murlans who came up the ladder are skulking about, swording anyone they can reach. We're hunting them."

"Well done, Lemral. The lorn: have any of them dared to enter Wrathgard?"

"Not that I know of, lord, though they could be swarming through the upper rooms of all six towers and I'd not know it. I have seen them out windows, just as I ran past; they're perched on our roofs and ramparts like trees in the forest!"

"The North Stairs?"

"Still ours. The Purple Stairs, too. We're going below, lord?"

Tindror nodded.

"Good. Tori and Baereth have been guarding the well since first warning was cried by the wall-watchers."

The baron smiled. "Good and better. Have-"

Faintly, from outside the walls, came a sudden swell of sound. Angry shouting, cries of alarm, a thundering of many hooves, and then a long, rolling succession of dull, meaty, heavy crashes, laced with the screams of horses and men.

Then a war-horn sang out, high and clear, in a distinctive three-note call. It was echoed by two more, and they were all answered by a rising din of shouts and steely clanging, the ringing of hundreds of swordblades striking each other.

"Deldragon?" Tindror snapped, wild hope in his face. He and Lemral sprinted off down a passage.

Taeauna followed every bit as quickly, taking firm hold of Rod's elbow as she passed, to tow him along, and snapping at the wizard, "Come, wizard! Come, or I'll hunt you!"

They all pelted along the passage, through one door and then another, into a room where lorn were perched on the sills of shattered windows, and dead Tarmoran guards lay sprawled and silent on the floor.

The lorn took flight, hissing, as Lord Tindror charged right at them. He fetched up at the broken window, panting, to stare past his raised sword, out and down.

In the morass of churned earth that the Murlan horses had made of the ditch and great slopes around Wrathgard, the men of Murlstag were dying in their dozens under the lances and blades of even more magnificently armored knights, a great sea of moving steel that had charged into them without warning from behind and smashed through their ring, trampling and slaughtering, before the war-horns had sounded.

Through that breach the newcomers were now flooding in all directions, charging besieging Murlans. Tindror laughed aloud as he beheld Baron Murlstag's own banner flapping raggedly, far off to the left in frantic flight toward the mountains. A small and dwindling knot of Murlans around it were being ruthlessly harried and hacked down by hard-riding knights, and three dragon banners streamed above those pursuers.

Everywhere the baron looked, he could see busy butchery of Murlans, their maroon banners with white stag heads falling here, there, and over yonder. And everywhere the eye turned, steel-hued banners emblazoned with a crawling red wyrm were advancing.

He held up his sword to them in salute before turning from the window.

"Deldragon," Lord Tindror announced slowly, deep satisfaction in his voice. "Deldragon has come to save us all."

Crimson dragons flapping on steel-gray banners fell into liquid shapelessness as the scrying-spell faded, and left the wizard Arlaghaun watching nothing at all.

"Amalrys," he ordered his chain-girt apprentice flatly, "cast it again. I must see if that fool Murlstag survives and manages to return to Morngard."

She nodded in the gloom of the old stone room, eyes downcast for fear of drawing his ire. They both knew how displeased he was at Deldragon's sudden appearance, and how had that meddlesome, oh-so-valiant velduke known of Murlstag's ride on Wrathgard, anyway? What wizard was whispering in his ear?

Her cruel master sat silently watching her casting, as he often did, looking like a sharp-nosed warhound in his gray garb, his brown eyes ablaze. At first she'd thought he watched her so intently because his chains were all Arlaghaun suffered her to wear and he enjoyed indulging his lusts, but she might have been bared down to her bones for all the man-reaction his face betrayed right now.

That sharp, thin-lipped face was a mask of calm as her chains chimed around her. Amalrys made her casting as graceful a dance as she could, swaying her hips and tossing her head to make her long, unbound honey-blonde hair swirl about her shoulders, thrusting her breasts and hips at him in as sinuous a manner as she could manage, offering herself to him with longing in her eyes, just as he preferred… but when at last she was done and turned to face Arlaghaun, fingers spread in the last gestures, he wasn't looking at her at all.

He'd been busy casting his own spell, all this time. A compulsion magic.

Her master gave her an expressionless nod. And then he did something surprising. Though he'd never bothered to tender her any explanations before, he did so now.

"I have worked a compulsion," he announced calmly, "to draw all the nobles under my control to Galathgard, to receive the king's next decrees. It will take some days for all of them to reach the castle; you and I shall use that time to work tantlar magic. A lot of tantlar magic. When Deldragon arrives home, he will find his wells and flour poisoned, and every last item of magic in his castle gone."

Amalrys couldn't help herself. She went white and started to shake.

Arlaghaun smiled slowly, obviously enjoying her terror for what seemed to her a very long time before he added gently, "Calm yourself. I will not be requiring you to test the magics we seize. Klammert and Yardryk are both more expendable than you; they can see to braving any traps and unforeseen discharges."

"Has he?" Taeauna murmured. "You're sure he's not ridden by a Doom, who sent him here to slay or capture us?"

Tindror sighed and waved his arms wide, his drawn sword still in his hand. "I can be certain of nothing, Tay; you know that. Yet he's the last noble in all Galath I'd suspect of doing any wizard's bidding. Yes, yes, I know that makes him a more suitable wizard's pawn than the rest of us, but somehow I just can't believe… no. No."

The bearded baron shook his head, and then shrugged. "And if he is? How can we stand against him? Murlstag's men were more than my loyal blades can handle; Deldragon can bury us in knights, all of them better armed and armored than we are. So when this fray is done, and he comes to our doors, I'll let him in, and welcome him as the friend he has always been to me. And if he then seizes you and your silent lord, or butchers me where I stand, and all of my household with me, then… he does so. Whether I like the fate he hands me or not, what can I do?"

Four dirty-booted merchants crouched behind spreading saliva branches and peered out over a battlefield at the distant towers of Wrathgard. They wore no badge or colors to tell Falconfar they were of the Vengeful, but they didn't need to. Real merchants would have been fleeing as fast and as far as they could from this pitched battle, not sitting on a ridge, albeit in bushes, staring down at it. The screams of horses and men and the clang of steel on steel drifted up to them all too clearly.

"So what do we do?" the oldest, deepest-voiced one asked. Thrayl was seldom at a loss for what to do next, but this was one of those rare occasions. "Go back to Lord Tharlark and tell him all Galath is risen in war? Or that the two we were sent to find must have been captured or slain? Or go not back at all? Or go on into this?"

"I'm not lying to Tharlark," small and sly Carandrur put in, his whining voice sounding affronted, almost bitter.

The third Vengeful, a coffee-colored man with a row of small, simple earrings riding each of his ears, shrugged. "Well, I'm not getting myself killed because Tharlark wants to collect heads of folk he's never even met, who passed through Arvale and were gone out of our lives where we should safely leave them." The fourth Vengeful, a darker, taller man, nodded silently.

"Dombur, I don't recall the lord asking your opinion of his commands," Carandrur snapped. "Nor you, Pheldur, if you stand with Dom."

"Carandrur, I don't recall the lord making you any sort of commander over us," Dombur replied flatly. "Nor did I tell Lord Tharlark I'd do as he directed. Both you and he seem to forget I'm not of Arvale; nor is Pheldur, here. He seems forgetful indeed to me, Tharlark does, as he's obviously forgotten something else, too: that the Vengeful are not his to order about as his personal servants."

"Aye," Pheldur rumbled. "I haven't the hips, nor the breastworks, come to that, to be one of his 'personal servants.' I'm more the simple 'wizard-hating, get on with my life, slay all magic-dabblers when I find them' sort. Let strutting lords hire, train, and pay their own skulk-swords, if it's slayings they want done of travelers who eluded them and might, or might not, have magic."

"Are you two mad?" Carandrur hissed. "Have you forgotten how many Arbren the two we're hunting slew, back in Arbridge?"

"Friend Carandrur," Thrayl snapped, "I don't count Snakefaces or Dark Helms as proper folk of Arvale. Now, how would things be if you were abed in an inn with your woman, and in the dark of the night men with blades burst in to slice you up, and you happened to be awake and have your own sword to hand? Are you telling me you'd not defend yourself, nor hotly proclaim your perfect right to do so, if you survived? Hey?"

Carandrur grimaced, then shook his head and spat, "I obey my Lord of Arvale, as any loyal Arbren should. If he is mistaken, then he is mistaken; it's not my place to pause and ponder if he is or not."

"Oh?" Thrayl folded his arms across his chest. "Lord Tharlark demanded that a wingless Aumrarr and a wizard who'd passed through his lands, and were clean gone, be hunted and slain outside our borders, and their heads brought back to him. Well enough: he is my lord, and I'll obey. Yet what if I find this Aumrarr and the man with her isn't a wizard at all, what then? And since when do thinking folk want to slay Aumrarr, who do good for all, albeit in a way that often rubs lords a-wrong? Are we to murder passing innocents, because my Lord Tharlark's bloodlust is up and he feels the need to count another wizard in his tally? Or because he's angry that two folk slipped through his fingers, and feels the need to show Arbren he's in firm charge of all that befalls in the vale, and will hunt beyond our borders what he missed seeing when they were standing under his hand? And what if word gets around to more way-merchants, of how Arvale will hunt down any of them that Arvale's lord gets to thinking might be a wizard? How many merchants will come into our vale at all, then?"

Carandrur's face darkened, and he folded his arms across his chest in exaggerated mockery of what Thrayl had done. "I didn't come here to the blundering edge of a battle, Thrayl, to bandy words with you."

"Well, now, think on those words you've just said a moment, Carandrur. That's just it; we're sitting on the edge of a great fray, and find this end of Galath, at least, roused to arms and rushing about killing each other with right bright enthusiasm! What boots it if our hunt for two folk we only think came this way, remember, rouses one of these warbands below to hack us to the ground and ride in anger right up into our little vale-defended only by Tharlark's sharp tongue and a handful of guards, mind-and lay waste to all Arvale, end to end, because we dared stride into Galath to hunt and slay?"

Thrayl sat back and added quietly, "Just think about it a little more, Carandrur. That's all I'm asking. While we still have our heads on our shoulders to do some thinking with."

By the time Deldragon's war-horns blew a triumphal flourish, Lord Darl Tindror had led his wizard and his two guests down to the towering front doors of Wrathgard, and ordered them flung wide.

Some of his men gave him grim looks, but hastened to obey, dragging out the huge beams that barred and braced the doors against rams, and thrusting the huge doors open, the ponderous arches groaning deeply as they were moved.

Tindror sheathed his sword and strode to stand where the two doors had met. His timing was perfect; Deldragon's knights had cleared the dead from before the doors and formed two rows, astride head-tossing horses, to give the velduke's bodyguard an avenue to ride along, forward to Wrathgard with Velduke Deldragon himself shielded from attack behind them.

The bodyguard, four stout-armored knights twice the height of some of their fellows, rode right up to Tindror and then parted, turning aside with cold, alert gazes, to leave the bearded baron standing staring up at a fair-haired, familiar figure in dazzling enspelled armor, mounted on a magnificent horse covered in mail and barding-plate.

From his flaxen mustache to his piercing ice-blue eyes, Velduke Darendarr Deldragon might have been a shining hero straight off the cover of one of Holdoncorp's game boxes. Bareheaded, he waved a gleaming gauntleted hand at the baron and called, "Darl! I hope you don't mind this intrusion. I felt a hunger to hunt Murlstag, and the spoor led me here!"

"Murlstags are bad at this time of year," Tindror observed, smiling. "I thank you for this and stand in your debt."

"Not at all, not at all. Murlstag fled, I'm afraid. My men are chasing him, but running is something he's very good at, and lorn came down like a cloud as he got near the Spires. He may make it home to Morngard yet."

"Wrathgard yet stands, and I have you to thank for that," Tindror said quietly. "Will you come in?"

"Alas, but I cannot stay. A certain wizard watches Bowrock, and means to do mischief whenever I am away from home."

"You have much to do with wizards?"

"As little as I can, friend Tindror. As little as I can. I have no love for the thought of ending up dancing to any spell-tune, if you take my meaning."

"So you smelled Murlstag in the air?"

Deldragon grinned. "No, nor used magic either. I have spies in that boar's wallow, and they have ways of signaling me swiftly. When I saw he'd gone to war, it fell to a simple matter of taking to horse and following him."

He looked up at the walls and towers of Wrathgard, drew his snorting horse nearer, and said more quietly, "Darl, to these eyes it looks as if Wrathgard is breached, and your healthy armsmen are now… but a handful. Need you sanctuary, at Bowrock?"

Lord Tindror's chin lifted. "Thank you, Darendarr, but no. I'll bide on my own lands, defend my own, and take my chances."

His voice was curt, but he held out his hand as if pleading, and added, "Yet I have two guests I can no longer give fitting shelter to; guests a wizard watching from afar might well send a stag to fetch. They could use your sanctuary."

He turned and pointed to Taeauna and Rod. The Aumrarr gave Deldragon a solemn nod, so Rod did the same, and endured a moment of feeling as if he was being skewered to the heart on a lance of ice-blue eyes before the velduke smiled and nodded.

"I extend my offer to you both, if you are minded to ride with me to Bowrock. Begging the pardon of my Lord Tindror for saying so, there's no finer castle in the land."

"I should be honored," Taeauna said loudly, "just as I was deeply honored by Lord Tindror's hospitality, aid, and friendship." She looked at Rod, and said, "I speak also for my traveling companion, Rodrell, whose wits have been spell-twisted. There are things he can't remember, and others he can't utter. He is on a death-quest, and can neither say nor remember the place he seeks. We Aumrarr owe a blood-debt to him, wherefore I am guiding him."

Deldragon's brows lifted. "Ah. Entertaining guests, I see. Be welcome in my home, provided, of course, we get there. Once the very rock of peace, justice, and order, Galath has become a rather more interesting place."

Without turning his head, he raised a voice a trifle and called, "Pari?"

"Lord Velduke?"

"How many Murlan horses can be ridden?"

"We have ten-and-nine, lord."

"Provide our two guests with one apiece, keep two as remounts, and give the rest unto Lord Tindror, in payment for disturbing his tillage."

He looked down at the baron, who nodded and said, "Deldragon, you are a decent man."

"Galath demands, Darl. Galath demands."

The velduke watched horses being brought to Rod and Taeauna, and Deldragon knights assisting them to mount by cupping gauntlets around their boots and through sheer strength lifting them up onto their horses. Deldragon nodded, let his own restive mount trot in a tight circle, and came back to Tindror to murmur, "You're sure you'd not want to feast tonight in Bowrock? Natha would be glad to see you, and Laranna, too!"

Baron Tindror stared up at him. "Tempting. Thanks. I find myself strong enough to stay. Where I belong."

Deldragon inclined his head. "Darl, you're a decent man, too. Fare you well, in the days ahead; they bid fair to test us all." He looked across the churned slopes of dead and dying men and horses, and added, "You've weathered the first test handily. I wonder if there's such a thing as a lorn-slaying spell?"

Tindror shrugged. "There's such a thing as too much magic in a kingdom, that much I know."

Deldragon shook his head, watching servants hasten out of Wrathgard to hand his two new guests each a small, half-full laedre. "Too much magic? That's like saying 'too much boar' or 'too many knives.' 'Tis not the magic… 'Tis those who wield it; their weakness, that they get so seduced by power as to use it for their every whim. But this is converse for a fairer day, another time." He turned his head and cried, "We ride!"

"We ride!" the Deldragon knights roared in chorus, and set about turning their mounts in thunderous unison.

Deldragon nodded to Tindror, raised his open hand in salute, and said to Rod and Taeauna, "Guests, will you ride with me?"

"Bright Lord of Galath, we will," the wingless Aumrarr replied, framing her words in the tones and serene dignity of a noble lady of long years and high standing.

The velduke flashed his teeth at her in a delighted smile. "I believe I'm going to enjoy this ride home even more than usual."

Taeauna inclined her head to him, and turned to raise her hand in salute to Baron Tindror, who was still standing with his arms folded, in the open doorway of Wrathgard. He lifted his hand in response, face carefully expressionless.

Aside from Taeauna, who was watching for it, Rod was the only person who saw Tindror's lips move, soundlessly framing the words, "I love you."

Then Wrathgard and its bearded baron were behind them, Deldragon knights closing in around them in a jingling, clottering forest of trotting riders.

The velduke leaned close to Taeauna and said, "A good man; one of the few. You have just seen the pride and folly of Galath. If we were all a bit less noble and high-minded, and a bit more surly and… and…"

"Pragmatic," Rod murmured, earning himself a startled look from Deldragon, and then a fierce nod.

"Come," the velduke cried then to the knights all around, spurring his horse into a canter. "Ride in earnest! Lances up! 'Tis a long ride to Bowrock!"