She was babbling. ''Ware all, from one end of falcons' flight to the other, for the Fourth and greatest Doom is come… walking with a wingless Aumrarr, as humble as a frightened shepherd… as powerful as all the other Dooms together… slipping into Falconfar… stumbling until he awakens, when it will be time for wizards and kingdoms to stumble…'
Lord Eldalar listened grimly as these words were repeated. Thrice. More slurred, sometimes, but with not a word changed.
'That's all she says,' Lhauntur told him gruffly. 'We were right.'
The Lord of Hollowtree shrugged. 'We treated him well.' After a moment he added, 'Taeauna called him our last hope.'
'Fortunate us,' the knight grunted, sounding unimpressed.
Eldalar shrugged again. 'My thanks, Lhauntur. I'm for bed. Rouse me if the Four Dooms start tearing Hollowtree apart around our ears. Anything less can wait for morning.'
The swordblade thrust through the chink in the ramshackle wooden wall without warning. The fat man blinked at it for a moment in the feeble light of the candle-lantern, and then brought one of his great hairy fists down on it, as hard as he could.
The sword broke off with a ringing
'Cheap stuff,' the man rumbled. 'This'll be the gels' father, come calling.'
He shuttered the lantern, snatched up the door-bar, flung the door open, and rammed one end of the door-bar out into the night, hard.
It struck something solid. There was a wet, strangled cry, something small and light bounced off his boots, and then the scream started; a long, raw, descending cry that was punctuated by several crashes of the railings of various flights of stairs being struck on the way down.
The fat man slammed the door, dropped the bar back into place, and snatched the lamp off the table to peer at what had hit his boots. A human tooth, trailing several threads of bright red blood.
The fat man grinned, ere turning to bellow, 'Isk, he's caught up to us again! Start packing!'
The stream of profanity that came from the other room made him grin all the wider. Ah, dainty ladies these days…
Suddenly the moon showed itself through fast-scudding, smokelike clouds, night going from gropingly dark to merely dim in an instant. Rod and Taeauna could suddenly see that they were staggering along an Arbridge alley together, rather than merely feeling their way along it. There came an angry
Rod turned his head and saw snake-headed men, scales gleaming in the moonlight: three of them, with drawn swords in their hands.
'Shit,' he spat, 'I don't remember…'
'This would be something else you can blame on Holdoncorp,' Taeauna said grimly, leaning on him even more heavily. 'Just keep going. Head for those trees ahead.'
Rod obeyed. 'Looks… Looks like a cemetery.' He glanced back over his shoulder again. 'They'll catch us long before we get there.'
'I know not 'cemetery,'' the Aumrarr said calmly. ' Yon's a burial yard, if that's what you mean. Where folk lay their kin to rest under enspelled stones.'
Rod frowned. 'Enspelled stones?'
'To keep the dead down,' Taeauna explained. Rod could see dark wetness all down her belly and legs, and she was using her sword like a walking stick as well as clinging to him. He looked back again.
'They're-'
'Keep going,' the Aumrarr snapped. 'Drag me.'
'I… yes, Taeauna.'
Her grin was more a grimace of pain than anything else. 'That's better,' she said. And then staggered, her face twisting, and she gasped, 'Rauthgul!'
Rauthgul. Rod's invented Falconfar equivalent for the f-word.
Rauthgul indeed, damn it!
There was no way they were going to reach the yard before the snake-men caught them, no way! And the burial yard was just that: a yard, an open plot of grass and trees walled on three sides but open to a street that Rod and the Aumrarr would soon be crossing. Or would try to; there remained the little matter of winning the sword-fight that would erupt right in the middle of it, when the snake-men caught up with them.
There were grassy humps in that yard that must be tombs, and little stone houses, too, dark with moss and age; crypts? The trees were old and gnarled giants, and it all might as well have been on the far side of the Falconspires, for all the likelihood Rod Everlar had of ever reaching them alive.
They were going to die here, a handful of minutes from now. He and Taeauna were going to be sliced and hacked apart, butchered very messily by swords Rod hadn't a hope in Hades of stopping.
Dark-armored figures suddenly streamed out of a side alley, hacking and thrusting, and a snake-man went down, making those horrible squalling sounds. Dark Helms!
'Hurry!' Taeauna gasped, clutching at the throat of Rod's tunic, all of her weight hanging from her claw-like fingers. 'Lord, hurry! Please!'
Her last word was a sob of pain, as tears came and she shuddered all over, sagging against him.
Rod swore and gasped and got an arm around her, struggling to shift her weight to his hip so he could limp along in clumsy haste.
Swords rang off each other behind them, someone groaned, there was some hissing, and then they were out onto the dust of the street, Taeauna hanging like a dead weight. Surely there'd be Dark Helms pelting this way in a moment or two.
When they reached the grassy unevenness of the burial yard, Taeauna clawed her way up Rod until she was upright and peered into the night gloom.
Trees and crypts and their shadows were all around; Rod glanced back at the battle now going on. There seemed to be more snake-men, yet the Dark Helms weren't retreating. Fighters were sagging down with wounded groans or slumping dead, but the fray wasn't getting any closer. There just might be a chance for…
'That one,' the Aumrarr said wearily. 'Slide the stone aside.'
Rod looked at the dark slab of stone, then at her pain-wracked face, and shook his head in disbelief. It was about the size of a door and as thick as his hand, lying on the ground on a lip of stone blocks set into the grass.
'Let me down,' Taeauna whispered, 'and
Rod did as he was told, leaving the Aumrarr sitting facing the fight back in the alley with her sword across her knees. He tapped the stone with the toe of his boot; it was heavy, all right.
Thrusting his sword into the turf near at hand, he knelt down, put his fingers along the edge of the slab, and heaved.
He managed only to overbalance face-first onto the stone, skidding along on his nose to the accompaniment of Taeauna's ragged, pain-ridden laughter. When he rolled onto his side to glare at her, she was clutching her belly and wincing at the pain of her own mirth.
'Don't…' she gasped. She then put her head on her knees and managed to say, 'Don't make me laugh again, please. It hurts so.'
'It may astonish you to learn this,' Rod growled, as he got up, 'but Lord Archwizard Rod ruddy Everlar wasn't trying to make you laugh. I can't move this rauthgulling thing. It must weigh as much as a car!'
'Car?'
'Oh, never mind,' Rod snapped wearily, going back to the slab to try again.
'Lord,' Taeauna hissed urgently through clenched teeth, 'look for a stone among the rest, around the edge, with a slot in it. Put your sword in the slot, and thrust sidewise to the slab. Across, if you take my meaning. Don't twist, or you'll break the sword.'
Rod stared at her wordlessly, then shrugged and looked for such a stone. It looked to be right by his foot. 'This slot; can it be full of moss?'
'Yes. Very likely.'
Rod snatched his sword out of the ground, looked back at the fight, and saw that the snake-men seemed to
