Rod heard her moan softly, murmur a name, or whisper a curse, but she never stopped to weep.
He followed along anxiously behind her, looking around often to be sure no Dark Helm or anyone else was creeping up on them, and because he knew not what else to say, he blurted, 'Sorry. Oh, Taeauna, I'm so sorry! This must be horrible for you…'
Taeauna did not reply. When she reached the far side of the dell, she caught up a splendid curve-bladed sword-like a Civil War cavalry saber, only without any sort of basket hilt-and hefted it in her hand. Nodding, she found its scabbard and belt, stripped them from the bloody, headless ruin that had once been a fellow Aumrarr, and donned the sword herself. Then she drew herself up and slammed the old sword Lhauntur had given her into a trampled flowerbed with sudden ferocity, leaving it quivering upright.
Without a word she took a long pace to one side, flung up her chin, and then started back across the dell toward the ledge they'd come from, bending and peering, and from time to time reaching down to draw open a pouch, or roll a body up to see what might lie beneath. Her face might have been carved from stone.
'Taeauna? Taeauna, I…'
Her grim search took her into a heap of bodies, and a cloud of vaugren rose to flutter and flap and screech at her. Rod hastened forward, thankful to have something helpful to do, to shoo them away with wild sweeps of his heavy sword. He stumbled on something smooth and slick-a blood-soaked breast, perhaps, though he was trying not to look down-and almost fell on his face into the fly-buzzing innards of a hacked-open Aumrarr ribcage.
He vomited helplessly then, stumbling and retching until he had to use his sword like a crutch, leaning over weakly to empty his stomach long after there was nothing left there to lose.
Taeauna never paused. Her hands were covered in dark, sticky gore as she gently rolled what was left of old friends over and aside to look at other bodies beneath. Searching, always searching. As soon as Rod's dizzy head and aching guts let him walk steadily again, he hurried to catch up to her.
By then, she was almost back at the ledge, and tugging another curved sword out of its scabbard. She peered critically at the blade, hefted the weapon, and then slammed it back into place, wiped her hands on the tunic of the corpse she was robbing, and set to work on buckles.
When Rod came scrambling up to her, she thrust the sword at him, scabbard and belt and all, without even looking his way. The moment his hands gingerly closed on it, she tugged at his Hollowtree sword, almost dragging him into a face-first fall. Hastily he gave it to her, and she stalked on for a few more paces, past a body sitting against rocks whose familiar face made her sigh, and planted the heavy blade upright, just as she'd done with the first one.
As she stepped silently to one side, to begin another grim journey across the garden of the dead, Rod moved with her. 'Taeauna, I'm-I just want to tell you… I'm so sorry…'
Her newly acquired sword flashed up out of its scabbard and past his nose so fast Rod did nothing but blink at its passing flash and dazzle.
'Dark Lord, be still!'
Taeauna's face was still a web of blue veins, and silent tears were running down her face like water. Those emerald eyes might have been the points of two swords, above a chest that was heaving, but there was no trace of a sob in the harsh voice that snapped, 'You didn't do this; spend no breath apologizing for it. Just bide with me in silence, and don't stand in my way when I see my next Dark Helm.'
As she stalked past, bending to look at two Aumrarr who lay curled up around each other, broken swords in their hands and agony twisting dead and now eyeless faces, Rod frowned.
Dark Helms. There were no fallen Dark Helms anywhere in the gardens that he could see. He looked down to where the gardens ended and rocks began, and then back the other way, at the open doors in the mountainside that presumably led into the chambers where the Aumrarr really lived, or
He started to look more closely among the dead, trying to see if perhaps a man lay among the blood- drenched women. Some of the Aumrarr had been wearing dark leather armor, and the closer he looked, the more beautiful faces and graceful limbs he saw-and gore. Flies, everywhere flies, and those damned birds walking stiff- legged, to peck and stab and tear away…
Rod shuddered and turned away, gorge rising. Even with his eyes closed, he could see a particular Aumrarr face, slack and still with insects crawling on it, but still achingly beautiful. It was staring pleadingly up at him, looking so much alive that he'd almost reached down a hand to… to the severed head whose body, wherever it lay among all the torn and twisted carrion, wasn't within three or four of his strides. No matter how much he shook his head, he couldn't look away from those eyes. Brown, not the fierce emerald of Taeauna's, and never blinking…
'I've seen enough,' Taeauna said from beside him, almost tenderly, 'and more than enough. But we must go in. There are… things I must see to.'
Rod swallowed, trying to banish a beseeching brown stare, and then opened his eyes and said hoarsely, 'Taeauna, there're no Dark Helms here. D-did they somehow fight well enough that none of them died?'
Taeauna's face was calm again, and her eyes were dry, but there was a shadow in her gaze that hadn't been there before. 'You don't know what Dark Helms truly are, do you?'
Rod blinked. 'Uh, evil men in black armor,' he said slowly, 'whom wizards can control.'
'Yes,' she agreed bleakly. 'Even beyond death.' She pointed, and Rod looked and saw the curled fingers of a. black gauntlet beneath the distractingly bared hip of a dead Aumrarr. Then she pointed again, and Rod stared at blood-covered black shards for some time before he realized that he was looking at the shattered remains of a black warhelm, its visor twisted up among them like a set of false teeth turned on edge.
Taeauna took a step past Rod, touching his arm with her pointing finger, and then indicated a row of rocks that marked one lip of a tiered garden bed. On the largest stone lay a black hilt, and from it, where the blade of a dagger should have been, stretched a smoke-scar, a scorch mark that ended abruptly, without a point.
'Some of their blades bear spells,' Taeauna told him gently. 'When broken, they burn away to nothing. A
'So… this means…?'
'A wizard was here.' The Aumrarr turned, strode a few steps toward the head of the garden and the open doors waiting there, and then stopped to point again.
This time, she was indicating a sister who sat against a low stone wall, arms spread wide in agony, the flesh of her chest melted and drooping like the wax of a burned candle.
'Magic did that,' Taeauna added coldly. 'And the one who cast it took away his fallen, to bind pieces of ravaged bodies together into men once more and send them shuffling out again to do his bidding another day, dead and beyond dead, rotting inside their armor. 'Tis the armor that truly moves them, not the muscles within. The day a mage improves the spells so a thrust that slays a living man will fail to stop an undead Dark Helm is a day that will doom most folk still alive in Falconfar. '
Something in her voice left Rod shivering as she hefted her new sword again and strode on through the nearest doorway. He looked around the dell, and at more vaugren wheeling hungrily down out of the sky to land in it, and then hurried after her.
'Watch behind us,' she ordered, the moment he was inside.
They were standing in a high-domed room carved from solid rock, with sunlight shafting down through an oval window high overhead, and dead Aumrarr heaped everywhere. The smell of cooked flesh hung strong and heavy in the air, and several of the twisted corpses were a strange iridescent purple.
'Wizards' work,' the living Aumrarr muttered, peering rapidly here and there, as if hidden foes might rise up to blast them both at any moment. The thought awakened an idea in Rod.
'Can wizards go invisible?' he blurted.
'Some know that spell, yes,' Taeauna told him, as briskly as one of his long-ago schoolteachers. 'It's imperfect, though, unless the mage remains still, and it does nothing about noises like breathing and footfalls. There's no spell-hidden watcher here, if that's what you fear.'
She went to one of the niches in the walls where potted plants cascaded lush, waxy green leaves down into the room, and touched a particular spot in the carved stone lip of the opening. To Rod, it looked no different than any of the other shapes amid the running knotwork design, before or after Taeauna's touch. She bent down again to touch another particular spot, in a second lip carving.
