a melting snowflake.
Perhaps it wasn't.
A scream rang out and was cut short.
Falconsbane slashed, all claws extended, and the hapless slave fell to the stone floor, choking on his own blood. Falconsbane watched him with anger raging unappeased through his veins, as the boy gurgled and clutched desperately at his throat. Blood poured between his fingers and splattered against the cold gray marble as the slave twitched and gasped and finally died, his eyes glazing, his body twitching, then relaxing into the limpness of death.
Not enough. Falconsbane looked for something else to destroy, cast his eyes about the study, and found nothing that he could spare or did not need. He had already shattered the few breakable ornaments; the upholstery of his couch was slashed to ribbons. The table beside the couch was overturned, and he would not touch the books; they held knowledge too precious to waste.
So he turned back to his final victim, and proceeded to reduce the body to its fundamental parts, using only his hands.
When he was done, he was still full of burning rage. He kicked the door of the study open, hoping to find someone lurking in the hall, but they knew his temper by now, and had cleared out of the corridors.
Likely they were all cowering behind locked doors and praying to whatever debased gods they worshiped- besides him-that he would appease his anger with the slave they had sent him. Cowards. He was surrounded by worthless, gutless cowards.
He growled deep in his chest. Not as gutless as the slave is now.
He stormed out into the corridors of his fortress, and ran upward, toward the rooftops. The place stifled him with its heat and luxury. He wanted to destroy it all, but instead, he went seeking the darkness of the night and the quiet of the snow to cool his temper.
He found a spot where he would not be tempted to destroy anything more because there was nothing to destroy-the top of one of the four corner towers.
It was open to the wind and weather, and since the quiet and cold did nothing to cool his anger, Falconsbane found another outlet for his rage.
He reached out to the storm about him and whipped it from a simple snowstorm to a blinding, howling blizzard, taking fierce comfort in the shrieking wind. Wishing that it was the shrieks of dying Hawkbrothers he heard instead.
Thwarted. Again! It could not have happened. He'd posted sentries to spy upon them. They had done nothing out of the ordinary. They made no efforts at all to use the twisted power of their Stone. Instead, they had sought to drain power from it, and it, of course, had resisted as it had been trained to do. Their mages were exhausted; they had no reserves, no Great Adepts.
The timing could not have been better. And yet he had been thwarted.
First, his attempt to retake his pawn Starblade failed. All of the channels he had so carefully established into the Bird-Fool's heart and mind were gone. Not blocked, but gone completely, healed by some strange application of magics with a taste he could not even begin to sort out.
Strongly female and laced with an acid protectiveness that made him flinch away.
That was bad enough, having to abandon his best tool, but when he tried to turn his controlling of Starblade into an attack on the k'sheyna Heartstone as planned, he could not springboard to the Stone. Infuriating!
Not once, but twice; blocked at the Stone itself, by shields he could not penetrate, and blocked again at the channel he had tied to Starblade's life-force! Where had those fools gotten the Adept that had shielded the Stone? There had been no one, not even the Outland girl, with so much as the potential for power like that! And what had they used to block his death-strike on Starblade? Not only did he not recognize it, but his mind still reeled beneath the blinding counter it had made to his strike. What had intercepted his fire-bolt? It had taken all his power and transformed it into a force he could not even remotely name.
Either of those alone would have been bad enough. Together they awoke a killing rage in him that demanded an outlet. He had stormed out of his working-place and into his study, intending mayhem.
He discovered there was more-much more.
His outriders had been waiting for him; they had come in to him, all bearing the same story. Black-clad riders on black horses, haunting the edges of his domain. Riders who did nothing; simply appeared, watching for a moment, as if making certain that they had been seen, and vanished again. Riders who left no mark in the snow; whose faces could not be seen behind their veilings of black cloth.
His mages had come to him with more news of the same ilk, hundreds of tiny changes that had occurred while he was dealing that aborted attack to k'sheyna. Along and inside all of his borders, there were tiny pinprick- upsettings of his magic. Traps had been sprung, but had caught nothing, and there was not even a hint of what had sprung them. Leylines that had been diverted to his purposes had returned to their courses, but they went to nothing specific nor any new power-poles. Areas that he had fouled to use for breeding his creatures had been cleansed. Yet there was no pattern to it, no plan. Some lines had been left alone; traps side-by-side showed one sprung, the other still set. Areas near to the Vale had been left fouled, while others, farther away, had been cleansed.
He snarled into the howling wind. He hated random things! He hated fools who worked with no plans in mind, and changes that occurred with no warning! And most of all, he hated, despised, things that happened for no apparent reason!
Every one of those pinpricks had taken away his order, interfered with his careful plans-and left chaos behind. And all to no purpose he could see!
He shouted into the night, and let the wind carry his anger away, let the cold chill his rage until it came within the proper, controllable bounds again. How long he stood there, he was not certain, only that after a time he knew that he could descend into his stronghold again, and be in no danger of destroying anything necessary.
He dismissed the stormwinds; without his will behind them, the winds faded and died away, leaving only the snow still falling from the darkened, cloud-covered night sky.
