around his legs, and he couldn't resist striking a pose.
It didn't smell of mold or feel like it was about to crumble or tear; it felt solid and trustworthy and warm.
Reassuring, even. Rod took a few strides and nodded. Somehow, with the cloak swirling around him, he felt capable. Confident. Right.
Yes, and he should be heading this way, to the blank and empty back wall a good four paces behind the throne. The chill was gone, and he could feel himself relaxing, the tightness in his fingers and shoulders and back, from hunching against the cold, now slipping away…
Yes, here. Why hadn't he known it or felt it before? The wall cracked soundlessly at his approach, parting in a hitherto completely hidden door, that opened inward into darkness beyond, with a strange, brief sound like a jangle of strummed harp strings.
A stray thought told him he shouldn't stride quite so boldly forward into such proverbial pitch darkness, and reminded him that he had in fact been exploring Yintaerghast far more cautiously just a few rooms ago, but somehow, now, it didn't matter. This was the right thing to be doing, the fitting thing, he was where he belonged, expected…
That brought him up short, blinking in the impenetrable darkness. Expected? By whom?
As if that thought had been a cue, the darkness rolled back as if it was a curtain, to leave him staring at… a stool and beyond it a slope-topped writing desk of some glossy-polished wood. There was a huge book open on the desk, a row of glowing inks of various hues in dark metal florette holders set into the top edge of the desk in a row, and… three magnificent quill pens, hovering in a silent, immobile line in midair.
His pens, something was telling him. So this must be his place to be a Shaper. At last, here in front of him.
With no Taeauna to tell, anymore.
His throat closed again, tears rose in him… And in a sudden fury of madly-swirling cloak he was seated at the desk and impatiently plucking one of the quills out of the air, stabbing it into ink, and drawing.
He tried to draw Taeauna's face, tried to capture her staring up at him out of the page, but somehow the faces-he drew dozens across the two blank facing pages, in mad haste, exasperation rising in him-were all real, and vivid, and even seemed to move slightly, whenever he looked away from them. But they were other people's faces. People he'd never seen before. Beautiful women, even Aumrarr, but not Taeauna.
In baffled rage he threw up his hands, drew a big-nosed, bearded dwarf with Norse-like sword and helm and armor, and then put a stone arch behind him, with tentacles reaching through it. Now, his dwarf would need a mace, a dagger or three, and so Rod swiftly drew sheaths belted here, there, and everywhere, straps crisscrossing, and added a shield. With a blazon on it, of course. Hmm, two crossed hammers…
God, he was a lousy artist. What was he trying to do, entertain himself with bad cartoons? Writing was what he did, and writing was what he was good at. Wherefore…
'Korgrath Foehammer was an even surlier dwarf than most,' he scribbled, 'and this day was not a good day. But then, days for Korgrath seldom were…'
The fresh sentinel trudging forward to begin the next watch nodded to the gruff old dwarf he was replacing. 'Anything?'
'Naught.'
'Korgrath in a temper?'
'No more'n usual,' came the very dry reply, delivered with a knowing look as Auld Orvran lurched on his way. 'He might not gnaw your nose off, if you keep to yerself an' far enough away.'
Baurgar grinned and went on out through the arch, to join Korgrath Foehammer on the high ledge. It would have been astonishing news if Korgrath wasn't snarly and surly. Korgrath lived his life out in a standing bad temper.
'I'm here,' he said in polite greeting, coming around to where Korgrath could see him.
'Get out of my watch-view, dolt,' the Foehammer snarled, eyes still fixed on the endless, unchanging vista of brown, needle-sharp mountains thrusting up into the sky. Not even greatfangs were witless enough to come near Stonebold, anymore. 'Hard to watch for foes with you standing in the way like a brainless heap of meat.'
Baurgar had already started moving aside, silently mouthing Korgrath's all-too-familiar words as they were uttered, until his gaze happened to fall on the Foehammer's shield.
'New blazon, Foehammer?' he asked, startled. This was a change, and Korgrath never changed. The shield looked the same as it had yestereve; the same dents, the same scratches. The arms painted on it were neither new nor bright, yet they were different: a pick shattering a stone in two had become two crossed hammers.
'What foolishness speak you?' Korgrath snapped, glaring at Baurgar and then down at the shield. 'I've not…'
He fell silent, staring open-mouthed at the crossed hammers.
Then he looked up at Baurgar again, an unfriendly glare that became something far more dangerous as his eyes narrowed under bristling brows. 'Have you dared to work magic here? On watch, before the very gates of Stonebold?'
Baurgar stared steadily back at him. 'As if I can afford any magic, let alone wield it! No doing of mine, Foehammer. On the name of my house I swear this.'
Korgrath stared into his face for a long and silent time, and then nodded, slowly.
Then he looked down at his shield again. 'I believe you. Which means a thing more: I have to say I know not at all how these crossed hammers came to be here.'
Then he went pale, and Baurgar went pale with him, as the same thought came to them.
What came out of Korgrath's jaws was a stream of low, fierce, and biting oaths.
What came out of Baurgar's mouth was the murmur, 'There's a Shaper at work in Falconfar.'
Klammert clawed his way up a wall that seemed to be leaning this way and then that, and allowed himself a groan. 'Master?' he mumbled. Arlaghaun had been summoning him…
There was a splitting agony in his head, and sharp stabbing pains in his neck. He groaned again, and clung to the wall. There were some healing magics hidden in a room down
Into every life, a little pain must fall. Why, by the Falcon, did it fall into his so abundantly?
Rod's stomach growled suddenly, reminding him of its emptiness. Hmm. How long had he been sitting here?
He looked down at the quill in his hand, and the words he'd just written: 'The storm that swept now across the Sea of Storms was a lightning bolt-hurling chaos of flashing, glowing skies and a roiling of waves like so many uncounted storms before it…'
He sat back from the book and blinked. Where was he, anyway? How had he come here?'
He blinked again, and when he next became aware of himself, he was writing something else: 'There was a beast that hunted lorn, a great black leathery thing of bat-wings and ripping jaws and three-taloned feet, but for centuries it had slept in its own shape, one more ornamental gargoyle among the rest, on the battlements of Dorn Keep. Now it was awake, and great was its hunger…'
The cloud of lorn streaked toward Bowrock, eager to rage along its battlements plucking off heads and disembowelling knights and armsmen. They hissed jests and sneering comments about the oh-so-proud, yet oh- so-feeble warriors who served Deldragon, and taunted that they wouldn't still be alive to do so by sunset. None of them bothered to fly rearguard or watch with any care; dragons were so rare as to be nigh-mythical, these days, and besides were far too large to approach unseen, and nothing else in all Falconfar was left to defy lorn this high in the skies.
Wherefore the grotesque dark, sinuous thing of many jaws, many pairs of bat-wings, and many claws, all joined together in a disorderly string of bobbing limbs and muscled bulk, rose unregarded from among the dark and endless trees to ascend and follow the lorn. It looked too ungainly to stay aloft, let alone manage any speed through the skies, but its wings carried it with uncanny speed up above the cloud of lorn and into their bright- blinded spot, where looking back would mean gazing into the sun.
And then it really started to fly.
The dozen or so lorn at the rear vanished into those jaws without fuss or outcry. By the time the rest
