Gagging at the stink of the great carcass they were passing, Rod scrambled to follow, muttering, 'Why are we…? What if this damned wizard is lurking somewhere around here, waiting for us? Shouldn't we just…?'
The view of the sprawled, dead greatfangs didn't look any more reassuring from atop the wall, and the stones of that wall, cracked and overgrown with low, creeping plants, literally crumbled underfoot.
Wincing, Rod gingerly followed Taeauna out to the end of the wall. He hoped she hadn't decided she was the last Aumrarr, and she should just hurl herself off it and leave him alone here, up in this whistling wind.
She stopped at the end of the wall, close enough to touch the reeking tangle of sharp, stabbing horns that was the severed head, and stared down at something on the crumbling stone right beside it.
Something that glowed.
Something small, blue-white and bright. Magic, of course.
Rod advanced cautiously to where he could see it properly, and stopped, afraid he might slip and knock Taeauna into all those nasty-looking horns, perhaps to slide messily off into a long, fatal fall down onto the rocks below, and taking him with her.
He 'was peering at a small, flat stone, and the glow was coming from a complicated little squiggle that had been drawn on it.
'What is it?' Rod murmured, looking all around. He half-expected a dragon, or a wizard- or a wizard riding a dragon-to suddenly race out of hiding, loom up to tower over them, and roar terribly.
Before it ate them, or crisped them with fiery breath, of course.
Gently, coldly, the wind whistled past.
'We were meant to find this,' the Aumrarr told him, kneeling beside it. 'It's a wizard's rune. The sign of one of the Dooms. Telling us, or anyone passing this way, who slew this greatfangs, to make the way safe for us. It's a trap, of sorts, too; come no closer.'
Rod nodded, only too happy to obey. 'So you know who put it here?'
Taeauna nodded without replying. She set down her sacks, rummaged in one of them, and plucked forth two stoppered flasks. Pulling the cork from the larger one, she carefully sprinkled an unbroken ring of brown powder that looked like instant coffee around the stone, tapping the flask with a deft finger to make sure she used not a grain more than she had to. She left no gaps, and spilled nothing on the glowing stone.
Restoppering the flask, she returned it to its laedre, and shook the second, smaller flask.
'What's that?' Rod asked.
'Highcrag magic,' she replied curtly, pulling its cork.
Rob rolled his eyes. Oh well, perhaps it was incredibly rude to ask such things in Falconfar…
Taeauna put a finger where the cork had been, upended the flask and then righted it again, held her wetted finger over the stone, and cautiously flicked some of the liquid on her fingertip onto the stone.
Nothing happened.
She waited. Still nothing.
'Safe to touch,' she deemed, restowing the flask. 'Pick it up.'
He looked at her doubtfully, and she almost smiled. 'It didn't spit sparks, so it won't do you harm,' she explained. 'Please pick it up. Touch nothing else.'
Rod stepped closer, knelt down, and slowly reached out.
'Don't throw it anywhere, or drop it,' the Aumrarr warned. 'Just hold it, and in a moment or so I'll ask you to put it back down exactly as you found it, so remember how it was lying.'
Rod touched the stone. It felt smooth, cold, and hard; just like a normal stone. He closed his fingers around its edges, still keeping his palm away from it, and lifted it straight up.
The rune flared up into blue-white fire, flooding past his fingers; Rod's hand trembled in a sudden stab of fear.
'Don't drop it!' Taeauna snapped. 'Hold tight to it!'
Then suddenly, she was embracing him, her arm around him, bosom against him, and she was shaking, shuddering so hard he had to brace himself to stay upright.
'Put…' she whispered, her eyes flaring as blue as the edges of the glow that was now spilling from Rod's hand, the glow he could feel as a faint, thrilling tingling. 'Put it back. Just as it was.'
He did so, and the blue-white fire died in an instant, leaving the glowing rune on the stone.
'Rod Everlar,' Taeauna whispered into his chest, as fervently as if his name was a prayer. She shuddered against him for several long moments more, and then said briskly, 'We should leave this place now. Quickly.'
She felt good against him. Emboldened a little, Rod dared to ask, 'Are you going to tell me what this, holding the stone, was all about?'
Taeauna looked at him. 'It proves you
Unleash it?
The Aumrarr slid deftly out from under his arm, rose, and said, 'Let's get gone. I enjoy the smell of dead greatfangs no more than you do.'
Rod turned and went.
They trudged down into Arbridge just as the sun was lowering, leaving the cold breezes of the hills behind them. Rod didn't have to do any acting to stagger like an old man unsteady on his feet, with knees and hips that hurt; they did hurt. He'd lost count of the number of times stones had rolled under his feet and he'd slid bruisingly into various rocks that thrust unfriendly sharp points and edges into the track they were following. A goat track, Taeauna had termed it, but it must have been made by goats about the size of house cats, if its narrowest places and crawl-holes were anything to go by.
Ahead of them, Arvale looked like a great green sward of farms and trees, with the glimmer of winding water at about its midpoint, and beyond it, a line of hills rose again, dark and terrible, as mountains; brown and purple and towering, like the spikes on the back of a sleeping, buried dragon.
Rod found himself nodding and smiling. Why, this would go great in a book.
'There'll be a guardpost,' Taeauna murmured, as the rocks gave way to rock-clinging shrubs and creepers, and then to trees, and Arvale opened out green and dark before them. The light was fading fast. 'Let me do the talking. You are old and tired, and uncertain of what to say.'
'All true,' Rod muttered back, and she gave him the briefest glint of a grin as she went on down the widening track, past places where other, larger
tracks meandered down out of high pastures to join it, to a fence of heaped stones and stumps where three men wearing swords and a fourth with what looked like a halberd stepped out into the road to await them.
'You summoned me, master?'
'Indeed.' The wizard Malraun was as curt as he was darkly handsome. He needed no magic to make his sleek, taut-muscled body striking to ladies, despite his small size. Nor, though he could be glib, did he need to waste time being polite to anyone. If he wanted a particular lady, his spells commanded their obedience. What cared he if they were screaming inside, so long as their responses were eager and ardent?
And if some of them were every whit as eager to kill themselves after he was done with them, what booted it to him?
He rose from his chair to give the lorn a commanding look, and strolled across the rather bare circular tower room toward it.
'You will fly in all haste, permitting yourself no diversions there or upon your return journey, to find and take the Aumrarr who used magic at Highcrag yesterday, and thereafter went up into the hills. They have probably passed the ruins of Ornkeep by now; I slew a greatfangs that had just begun lairing there yestermorn, to keep a certain Doom from getting his hands on it. Take also the one she's traveling with, and bring them both to me. Alive, if you can, but dead if you must.'
The lorn's horned, mouthless skull-face nodded. It spread its batlike wings, snapped its barbed tail, and then froze at Malraun's sharp command, 'Disguise yourself! Be the largest of vaugren as you seek Highcrag, and use the semblance of a man thereafter. I want to hear of no wild rumors of lorn flying over the Falcon Kingdoms!'
The lorn's tail switched angrily, but it nodded again, seemed to shiver all over, and sank down onto all fours, its wings and head changing shape as its hide darkened. Giving sudden throat to a vaugril's mournful screech, it sprang out of the open window and away, circling Malraun's dark spired tower once before flapping off into the gathering dusk, in the direction of distant Highcrag.
