Then the vision was gone, as abruptly as it had come, and Rod was blinking at the same thing Taeauna was.
The wand and gauntlet had both vanished, in a winking instant, leaving Taeauna's sword hand bare, empty, and unmarred.
Rod stared at her, and she stared back at him. 'Are you… all right?' they asked each other, in perfect unison.
Then they both shrugged. 'I saw things inside my head,' Taeauna blurted, while Rod was still struggling to find the right words.
'Yes!' was what he settled for. 'I saw a dark castle; some fortress I've never seen before. What did you see?'
Taeauna shrugged again. 'I…'
More warriors came running out of the darkness, lots of them, the thunder of boots almost deafening. The Aumrarr gave Rod a weary look and turned to face the doorway again, hefting her sword.
The warriors flooded into the room. They wore motley armor, not black with identical visored helms, and Velduke Deldragon strode at their head, flaxen mustache bright and ice-blue eyes peering everywhere.
He stopped, very suddenly, when he beheld Rod and Taeauna standing guard before the well, and dead Dark Helms piled up in a great arc around them.
'How by the Falcon Aflame did you get down here?' Deldragon asked, his voice slow and deep with amazement.
'Darendarr,' Taeauna snapped, 'first tell me: is there a place down here in your cellars where three passages meet like this,' she gestured swiftly, 'and then a fourth comes in a little way along, about up here?'
Deldragon frowned, and then nodded. 'Yes.'
'Send a score or more of your knights there, to the room in this angle of the three-way moot. It holds a tantlar-fire; that's where these Dark Helms are coming from!'
Deldragon spun around and started snapping orders.
'That,' Taeauna murmured to Rod, pointing to her own head, 'is what I just saw.'
The velduke's orders were sending most of the knights who'd come with him racing off again. When he was done barking instructions, Deldragon turned back to them with a smile. 'My thanks. So, tell me now: how come you to be here, instead of in the rather better appointed guest chambers I provided for you?'
'I thought it most unlikely that Dark Helms would be welcome in Bowrock,' the Aumrarr told him. 'So when I saw them rushing past in such numbers, it was clear this keep was beset. Either they would prevail, and we'd all be too dead to care, or you would beat them back, whereupon defending your well during their withdrawal would be crucial. So we sought it.'
She went closer to the velduke, and added in a voice that was little more than a whisper, 'I learned of that tantlar in a vision, just now. Darendarr, have you ever seen a gauntlet appear magically on someone's hand, here in your keep?'
Deldragon shook his head, and answered in a similarly guarded voice, 'It seems we three have some matters to discuss. Later. Right now, we of Bowrock are preparing for a siege. Several nearby Lords of Galath have been seen mustering all the armsmen they can. I strongly suspect they intend to come here, and that the rest of the surviving lords of the land will be joining them, and bringing their own armies along, too. I gave you my protection, but I must now lay a choice before you. Some of my best knights will be escorting certain persons here in Bowrock south out of Galath just as fast as they can ride; would you two like to be among them?'
'No,' Taeauna replied firmly. 'Deldragon, we will stand here with you.'
'We are well provisioned, have other wells, and are well-trained for war, but if all the armies of Galath come to our gates, the siege may not end well,' the velduke said quietly.
'If that befalls, so be it,' the Aumrarr murmured, looking at Rod.
He shrugged and told her, 'I stand with you, Tay. If you are staying here, so am I.'
Deldragon bowed. 'I am honored. Come with me, please.' He gave some swift orders that made most.of his remaining knights take up positions around the well to guard it, and told two of them to ''Fetch the Waterboys, and tell them the way is clear to come down again and start dipping.'
That pair of knights hastened away, and the velduke led Rod and Taeauna out the door and in another direction, through doors and up short flights of stairs and along passages to more stairs.
They climbed many flights of stairs and traversed many passages before the velduke shouldered through a door that opened into a small, bare chamber, nodded at Taeauna to close it, leaned back against the wall, and asked, 'Lady of the Aumrarr, tell me more of this gauntlet you spoke of. Please.'
Taeauna shrugged, and held up her sword hand.
'It just appeared, out of nowhere, here on this hand, and I could not get it off. A large, heavy war-gage. Well made, in good repair, and magical. The air glowed around my hand, and… well,
As the words left her lips, the air promptly started to glow and sing, just as it had before. This time, however, the glow enshrouded an alarmed Rod Everlar.
Taeauna and Deldragon turned to stare at him in time to see something small, dark, and horsehead-shaped appear in the air above the quiet man's hand and fall into it.
Rod juggled the thing for a moment, as if he might drop it. Then he held it up in his right hand to peer at it.
He seemed to be holding a model or statuette of a horse's head, cast and then worked in some dark olive- hued metal to bring forth fine details. It was surprisingly heavy.
Then he wasn't seeing the thing in his palm at all, but the black, odd-spired castle once more, suddenly and so vividly that he might have been standing in front of it, with a cool breeze rising around his shoulders.
'It's the same place,' he whispered again, in bewilderment. 'The dark castle.'
Amalrys turned to her master in a chiming of chains. Under dark brows, her ice-blue eyes were frowning. 'Master, something in Bowrock is thrusting my scryings aside. I was seeing into the velduke's keep without hindrance, but now, just like that, I cannot. Something within leaves me gazing at empty sky, or south out of Galath, whenever I try.'
Arlaghaun looked up from the old and heavy metal-bound tome he was studying, preoccupation giving way to uninterest on his sharp-nosed face.
'Deldragon has hired a few lesser mages,' the gray-clad wizard mused. 'Wherefore it will do you good, Amalrys mine, to wrestle against them a time or two. So try your scryings again, and yet again, for the practice will do you good. And bother me not.'
His thin lips shaped a mirthless smile. 'After all, there's nothing of consequence the good velduke
can hide from us before he dies.'
'Put it down!' Taeauna snapped at Rod, eyes blazing. 'Throw it down!'
He regarded her calmly, cradling the heavy thing in his palm as he thought. 'No.'
He put it in his laedre instead. 'Its magic won't help us in fighting, or a siege, but is too useful to just throw away.'
Taeauna gave Rod a sharp glare. 'You know what'it does?'
'I do now.'
'So you are a wizard,' Deldragon said softly.
'No,' Rod replied, meeting the velduke's ice-blue eyes steadily. 'No, I'm not. If you held that horse-head, it would tell you what it does, too.'
'Well?' Deldragon asked, holding out his hand.
'No,' Rod told him. 'Not now. If we survive the siege, yes, but it would be bad for you to touch the thing at this time.'
Taeauna was still watching Rod intently. 'It showed you something else, didn't it?'
'Yes.'
'What?'
Rod looked at her, then nodded his head in Deldragon's direction, and looked a silent question at the
