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
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
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
