Aumrarr.
'Tell us both,' she replied quietly.
'1 saw the castle again.'
'The castle? Which castle?' She frowned. 'What other times have you seen this castle?'
'The castle I saw when the wand touched me. I'd never seen it before then. It's tall and black, and has a thin spire rising out of one corner.'
Taeauna went a little pale, drew in her breath sharply, and then asked carefully, 'A squared-off tower, with four turrets at its corners, three of them just bulges that rise no higher than the.battlements joining them, but the fourth a cylindrical tower that rises above the turrets for half again their height, then narrows to a smooth needle-pointed spire?'
Rod nodded.
The Aumrarr added grimly, 'And this castle has no moat nor outbuildings, and stands in the heart of a green, growing forest. The trees close around it are dead and bare. Yes?'
Rod nodded again.
Stroking his flaxen mustache, Deldragon looked a silent question of his own at Taeauna.
'Yintaerghast,' she whispered, in reply. 'Lorontar.'
Then it seemed to be the velduke's turn to shiver, go pale, and take a step back from Rod.
Amalrys stiffened suddenly, and then erupted into wild spasms, her chains clashing as well as chiming, her honey-blonde hair lashing the air as she jerked her head about, her hands like wriggling claws. Then she slumped over in her chair, head lolling and drooling.
Arlaghaun looked up in annoyance, brown eyes flashing, and closed his book with a sigh. Thoughtfully, he tapped his sharp nose for a moment, then cast a careful spell over his apprentice.
She neither moved nor spoke.
The gray-clad wizard shrugged. Good. No rival mind was infesting hers. Her will must have failed under the strain of fighting to command her scrying-probe through Deldragon's hired defenses.
Such things happened. Such would happen to her again, until enough practice strengthened her mind sufficiently.
Shaking his head, the greatest Doom of Falconfar went back to his book. He'd been working out a cleverly hidden message in a particularly fascinating passage…
Narmarkoun smiled slowly. 'Always they forget about me. Arlaghaun the Arrogant-Beyond-Belief and Malraun the Matchless Dolt. Far too powerful to concern themselves even with the notion that someone else just might,
The tall, blue-skinned wizard shifted on his smooth and shifting bed of ice-cold wenches, their dead bodies responding to his will. They began to caress his scaly body and accept him in, their eternally grinning skulls regarding him with eyes that were no longer there.
'I'm not the greatest yet; not even close,' he told one skull, as the body attached to it started to stroke him and grind ardently against him, 'but already I have achieved far more than either of my oh-so-exalted rival Dooms. Where they fiddle with spells that were old before their grandsires were born, adjusting tiny details of casting and result, I breed greatfangs.'
He raised his voice, clenching his scaly fists, and told them proudly, 'I augment greatfangs. I tame greatfangs and ride greatfangs and take the shape of greatfangs… and know the love of greatfangs. I can hide in the form of a greatfangs if ever I am beset, and I can steal the loyalties of apprentices without their masters even noticing. Arlaghaun, your precious Amalrys is mine now!'
He frowned and peered around his womblike bedchamber of dark red velvet, but found no answer to what was now troubling him. When he spoke again, his voice had fallen to a thoughtful murmur. 'But I wish I knew what mage is protecting Deldragon. Malraun fled from him, Arlaghaun didn't even notice him, Amalrys was casually foiled by him; who is he? Deldragon has coins aplenty to spend among the Stormar, and has spilled more than a few of them on spells and black-bearded, bright-robed spell-hurlers, but I've heard of no wizard among them that has such power, and casual mastery of it.'
He reared back from the skull-headed wench embracing him far enough to catch hold of its shapely shoulders, and shake it fiercely. Its jawbone rattled.
'Can another Doom have arisen?' he demanded of it. 'Has the fourth Doom come at last, and none of us noticed him?'
Grinning silence was its customary reply, and grinning silence was what it gave him now.
'Well, something's upset them,' Iskarra said peevishly. 'Just look out there: bees from a kicked-over hive! Now, it can't be Deldragon being foolish enough to make war on someone; he just came back from doing that, and the going then didn't take half this fuss. And he won, didn't he? So there'd be not the urgency, this time.'
She pointed a little unsteadily out the cleanest window of the dingy taproom, and waited for the grunt that would tell her Garfist had looked and seen what she'd been watching over his shoulder.
Thirsty from all that talking, and not sure if she'd said everything clearly thanks to all the drink already aboard her, Iskarra shook her head, looked into her almost-empty tankard as if it might hold some inspiration, found nothing promising, and clunked it down on the tavern's dirtiest table again. When would these lasses who danced on tables while hauling off their clothes learn to wipe their boots first?
Garfist grew tired of staring at running knights and frantically trotting drovers and turned back to face her, his own tankard almost invisible in his huge and hairy fist. 'I'll tell ye what it is, Isk, dearie. It's a siege they're preparing for, that's what it is.'
Iskarra stared at fat old Garfist Gulkoon as if he'd suddenly grown another three heads, all of them beautiful and feminine and eagerly trying to kiss each other, and protested, 'But it can't be! We'd've heard! Besides, so would they, out there! You can't march an army around Galath without giving everyone else in the realm more than plenty of warning.' She waved one long-fingered, spiderlike hand in the direction of all the bustle out in the street and snapped, 'And that is
'Aye, I'll grant ye that. I'll grant ye that.' The onetime pirate belched loudly, farted just as thunderously, turned his head in the direction of the bar, and bellowed, 'More ale! And none of yer stingy tankards this time. Bring a keg, man!'
The master of the Gauntlet and Feather was privately of the opinion that the two uncouth, dirty visitors from the South had already taken aboard more than enough ale to rot their insides, and it in turn had already done its work on their brains. Yet they were his only customers, looked to already be past the point of destructive belligerence, and if all they did was spew all over the table, floor, and each other, and then flop face-down in their own mess and start snoring, well, he had maids enough to clean up after that.
Wherefore he called, 'Of course, Master Gulkoon! I'll go fetch it,' and hurried into the back to get Narjak to help him carry up the oldest, flattest, wormiest keg of soured ale from the cellar. These two must have been too far gone to taste what they were downing six tankards ago.
If Iskarra and Garfist had known the tavern master's opinion of them, or what he was now planning to pour into them, they'd have been neither annoyed nor surprised. Tavern masters were all heartless bastards, and besides, this latest one hadn't judged them far wrong.
They made their livings largely from thievery, these days. Wherefore their presence here in Bowrock, where they'd fetched up after a hasty flight from justice in three Sea of Swords ports. This was certainly the unlikeliest place for anyone to seek them.
The persistence of that Arlsakran merchant had really surprised them both. After all, the man had fourteen daughters; couldn't he spare the best-looking three to a life of tavern dancing and pleasuring men, rather than staying home digging daily in the mud of the family farm and pleasuring their father nightly, all in the same gigantic, groaning bed? And he'd looked too fat to chase anyone through three cities, too!
Almost as fat as Garfist himself: a onetime pirate who'd promoted himself to forger when his girth made him too slow for deckfights, then a hiresword all over the lands east of the Spires, thereafter a panderer for a long time, and now a thief. He was still covered with a pelt of the same thick red hair, all over, that had adorned him since his youth, but in the years since he'd lost almost all of his teeth, and broken his shovel-sized hands so often that they looked like gauntlets of spiky bone, calluses, and corded veins.
Iskarra 'Vipersides' might look as fat as Garfist, but her bulk was all magical crawlskin, not her own itching
