he saw them clearly, three tines to the side, as the young man turned and bounded away like a hart, on four strong legs, each of them slamming into the ground simultaneously, and then thrusting him upward in mighty bounds. He looked like a hart, sailing through the air and then falling to the earth with each bound, as he raced away across an open field.
“What is that?” Jaz asked in amazement.
“A legend,” Talon said, “and not one from your world.”
“A legend?” Fallion asked.
“A galladem,” Talon said. “Legends say that in ages past, the galladems were friends of the true men. Those that hunted wolves and bears would often have them come to their campfires, where the galladems would tell tales of the forests. They would tell what the trees dreamed of as they slumbered through the long winter, and would translate the songs of birds into the human tongue. They helped guide the men on their hunts, for the wolves and bears and rock lions were enemies to the galladems.”
“Can you talk to him?” Jaz asked.
Talon shouted across the fields in a strange tongue, and the galladem halted for a moment, stared back at her quizzically, and then began walking away slowly.
In defeat, Talon said, “It has been hundreds of years since last a galladem was seen. I fear that we no longer speak the same tongue.”
“What did you say?” Gaborn asked.
“I spoke the words of a blessing in the old tongue,” Talon said. “May the fruits of the forest and the field be yours. May you bask in sunshine in the meadow, and find shelter in the hills. May you refresh yourself with cool water, and never know want.”
Suddenly the creature stopped; it turned its head at a seemingly unnatural angle and shouted back.
When it fell silent, it bounded away.
“What did it say?” Rhianna begged. Talon had to think a bit.
“It spoke in the old tongue,” Talon said. “I think…it said that ‘the earth is in pain. The stones cry out in torment, and jays bicker and the wrens wonder why.’ It warned us to watch for wolves upon our trail, wolves that cannot die, and it wished us well.”
Fallion wondered for a long time. When I melded these two worlds, did I heal them just a little bit? Did I help restore a creature to life that was only a legend-or had the galladem been there upon the shadow world all along? Perhaps it was just a rare specimen, the last of his kind.
Fallion had no way of knowing. Nor could he be sure what its warnings meant.
But soon they were back to running. With each step their feet brushed the full heads of wheat and oats, sent the seeds scattering. Fallion imagined that it was music, a rattle formed by nature, and the sweat streaming from him watered the earth like a rare rain in the dry season.
He lost consciousness as he basked in the full sunlight, and all that was in him was motion, the sound of his lungs working like a bellows, the jarring of footfalls, and sigh of the wind, the droning of bees and flies in the meadows.
At noon they found an abandoned “inn,” and Jaz begged for a halt. Talon’s pace was brutal, and none of them had their full strength yet. Fallion had been loath to mention it in front of the others, but his legs felt weak and rubbery, and his head had begun to spin. During the run, he concentrated on keeping one foot in front of the other, and hoped that soon he would get his second wind.
But he suspected that he would never get a second wind. So he was glad when Talon called a halt, determined to have a brief rest and a quick meal.
“It looks as if there is a brook down beyond those trees,” Jaz said. “I’ll go fill some flasks for us.”
Fallion was glad for that. He wanted some water, but it looked too far to go.
“Eat,” Fallion told the others. “But keep your portions small. Better to take little and often than to eat much.”
He got into his pack, pulled out his food. The good people of Castle Coorm had provided well. He suspected that Farion herself had packed the food. There was fresh bread and well-aged cheese, roast beef, and a small savory pie that smelled of chicken and onions. There were even a few fat strawberries.
Fallion ate those first, for their juice was staining his pack. By then, Jaz had returned with the water. Fallion decided to save the beef and the savory for later, so he took some bread in his mouth and strode about, studying the inn.
It was like no building that Fallion had ever seen. It was laid out in a circle, and huge stone slabs formed the walls. There were three levels, one atop another, with a watchtower built at the very pinnacle. Each stone slab in the wall was thirty feet tall, rectangular in shape, and six feet wide. The slabs were fitted together so perfectly that a mouse could not have squeezed between them, and once there had been fair carvings embedded in the stone- images of a hunting party riding with hounds, chasing an enormous elk. But the images had been chiseled down by vandals, and now there were foul markings laid over the fair, glyphs painted in black, white, and red.
Talon went inside, and Fallion ducked his head in. The building had been gutted by fire, but the vestiges of campfires showed that it was still used as a shelter sometimes.
Fallion stepped back out into the sun, for it smelled unhealthy inside, and he studied the glyphs with mounting curiosity. He had never seen writing that in itself seemed evil. But here it was-glyphs portraying a giant spider with a child beneath it, images of warriors decapitating women, a man eating an enemy’s liver.
“What do these glyphs say?” he asked Talon when she came back outside.
Talon glanced away, as if she feared to look upon them. “Wyrmlings have camped here,” she said. “It is their writing. They paint in only three colors-black, white, and red, for those are the only colors that the wyrmling eye can see.”
“Can you read the glyphs?”
“Some.”
Talon pointed up at a black circle with a red squiggly line coming out of it. “This is the symbol of Lady Despair, the great wyrm that infests the world. Like the worm in an apple, her influence continues to spread, until the whole will be diseased. She is the one that the wyrmlings venerate, and obey. The rest of the writing is a prayer to her.”
She pointed to the white spider above a black child. “This is a prayer that the Stealer of Souls will leave our human children stillborn. The rest of the glyphs…you can imagine.”
“The Stealer of Souls?” Fallion asked.
“He is a wrym, what we would call a locus on our world, a wyrm of great power.”
Fallion’s heart skipped. He’d known that wyrmlings were giants of some kind, like the frowth giants on his own world. But they were more than just giants, they were giants infected by loci, by creatures of pure evil that fed upon their spirits and led them into deeper perversion.
Fallion had faced loci before and sent them into retreat. But somehow, he wasn’t eager to face them now.
Too much had changed. Too much was still unknown.
“Tell me more about the wyrmlings,” Fallion said.
“They are tall,” Talon said, “half-a-head taller than even our largest warriors, and strong. It is said that they were human once, but you could not tell by looking at them. For eons they have served the wyrms, thinking it an honor to be possessed by one of the mighty. There is no kindness in them, no decency or truth. They respect only power. They are motivated only by fear and greed. The best of them have no wyrms in them, but even they are dangerous beyond all measure. They would gladly tear you from limb to limb, hoping only that by doing so they might be found worthy to be taken by a wyrm. The worst of them…” Talon shuddered, turned away.
“What?” Fallion asked.
“The worst of them are possessed by powerful loci, sorcerers who remember lore that should have best been forgotten when the world was young. These are the Death Lords. You do not want to meet them…” her voice trailed into a whisper, “but I fear we have no choice. We heard the sound of wings last night. They are coming.”
Fallion shuddered. He peered at the image of Lady Despair, at the world beneath her, and suddenly he saw a wheel of fire again, the Seal of the Inferno, burning like a forge. He blinked the image away, rubbed his eyes.
Was it only in my dreams that I could heal the Earth? he wondered.
