by Ed Greenwood
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 noticed something was amiss, and wheeled to see what it was and give battle, a second dozen had been devoured.
Learning what little they could do against this strange nightmare of a foe cost the lorn a score of their remaining strength.
Learning that they couldn't flee from it by outflying it cost the rest of the lorn their lives.
But then, truly wise lorn have always been a rarity.
So THIS WASN'T godhood, this being a Shaper. Rod Everlar didn't sit down and deliberately decide to write that Arlaghaun's hands, manhood, and head all abruptly fell off, and then sit and watch some great magic instantly make that happen. Whatever he wrote seemed to pour out of him without his having any conscious control over it at all.
So what would happen when he dreamed? Did he reshape Falconfar, or did it whisper instructions to him?
Glorking bloody sh...
Rod shook his head in exasperation, and flipped back through the book. There were all his sketches—heads of beautiful women he didn't even know, though he supposed they were now walking around Falconfar or perhaps even rising from tombs they'd been sadly put in—and the dwarf by the archway, and then page after page of scribbled text. Eight pages in all, so little of the blank book that it scarcely showed as a page-thickness, around the edges.
Rod shook his head and yawned. Whoa, did he feel tired, suddenly. No longer cold, not at all, but bone-weary. So was it all the running and fighting? The grieving? Or was Shaping inherently exhausting?
Or had he just been sitting here for a long, long time, and didn't know it? The moment he'd sat down, a faint, warm glow had started to occur in the air, like lantern light, and it was still there above him, the air amber to golden, as he glanced at it.
He caught himself yawning again, and shook his head. This would never do; if he was going to fall asleep, he needed someplace to lie down that was safe from... creeping shed human skins and... and...
Huh. This room was the safest, most comfortable place he'd found yet in Yintaerghast, and he suspected that if he got off the stool, he'd be wobbling-legged weary, far too tired to even safely walk around the castle, let alone face monsters and traps and Falconfar knew what else...
Rod moved the quill back into position in the line in midair, and let go of it. It floated in the air, rather than falling. Cool.
He took hold of it, waved it around, and put it back in the air again. It floated serenely, as before.
He smiled at it... and that was the last thing he remembered doing...
DUST DRIFTED ACROSS a dark floor in Yintaerghast, gathering into a serpentine line whose drifting hiss was so soft that an awake and warily alert warrior would not have heard it, let alone someone cozened by enchantment, who was now slumped over an open book at a writing desk, snoring gently.
The dust went on gathering unhurriedly, until it had built into a heap about the height of a large man's fist. Then it stirred, swirling into the air in a slow and silent spiral that outlined the ghostly figure of a tall, thin, bearded man who towered over the sleeping Rod Everlar, growing slowly more solid.
The face that watched the sleeping writer was at first just an oval with hints of two eyesockets, then something that had a nose, a long, strong nose, with bristling black brows above, and a bald pate above that...
A soft smile was clear upon that face long before it had features enough to tell an observer who'd been alive for centuries—had there been any such entity present—that the dust had taken on the semblance of the long-dead Lord Archwizard of Falconfar.
Red eyes, burning with power. The eyes of Lorontar, the builder of Yintaerghast, called by some the Smiling Tyrant.
Then the dust slowly sank down again, for undead shadows skulk best when they keep hidden from those they stalk. The dust scattered and faded, still smiling.
THE GUARDIANS WERE gathering in such numbers—striding, rattling, and flying down every passage to the hall, and coming yet—that Dauntra and Juskra were now panting as they fought. The beautiful Aumrarr and her fierce, scarred sister were almost too winded from their hewing to gasp, "Lorlarra! Aid! We grow weary, and they tire not! Still they come!"
Dark-armored Lorlarra had just turned from the mirror to fly up and answer their plea, hefting her mace in one hand and her bright blade in the other, when Ambrelle, who was still staring into the depths of the glass, cried out, "Sisters mine! Let us tarry here no longer. I've found something far more desirable to slay than nigh-mindless enchanted minions. Come! To the gates!"
She soared up on high, but each of the younger Aumrarr swooped down and past the mirror to see for themselves before they rose to join her in a flapping, excited cloud, taking up the cry, "To the gates! To the gates!"
Through guardians large and small, seeking battle or lying defeated, the four winged women raced, seeking a good gate to plunge through.
ROD EVERLAR FOUND himself abruptly back in front of the writing desk, blinking. He'd been striding through the castle like a conqueror, parting walls at a touch and causing pillars to swing open by his very approach, to yield up to him glowing swords and gauntlets, wristlets and scepters, and—and something he didn't know the name of, that he'd been holding up and staring at a moment ago...
Dreaming. He must have been dreaming. So none. of those beautiful glowing things were real. He was sure the items were magical. He sighed sadly; beautiful glowing things never were real, were they?
Or were they? Were the dreams this castle's way of telling him where its treasures were hidden?
Magic had been at work on him from the moment he'd first stepped inside Yintaerghast.
Excitedly Rod slid off the stool—finding himself just a little stiff—and strode out of that hidden chamber, pausing apprehensively only for a moment when its walls closed up again behind him. In the dreams, he'd walked past the throne and across its room, and a pillar had yawned open to offer him a scepter floating above a sword.
In front of him, a pillar opened to do just that. Shaking his head in bemusement, Rod took hold of both floating items without hesitation, feeling tinglings crawling up his arm from their power.
He hefted the sword, and the tingling rose into almost a song.
"Wow," he murmured, feeling power course through his arms. "Rod Everlar, dragon slayer."
A wall across the room opened, and something yellow-eyed and baleful slunk in. It looked something like a crocodile, and it was big. As it waddled purposefully toward him, Rod backed uncertainly away.
This certainly hadn't been in the dream.
IN A ROOM IN Ult Tower far from battling guardians, a tall and handsome man stood before a glowing mirror, sound asleep. Far away across Falconfar, on the other side of that glow, a Doom was watching approvingly. A scaly, blue-skinned Doom.
"Whole again, entirely healed," the wizard Narmarkoun murmured. "And my pawn, though you'll know it not until the right time comes, and I force you to do my bidding. You may thank me."
"My... deepest... thanks," the sleeping man mumbled, his words evoking gentle chiming that told Narmarkoun the spell was done, and the mind-link sealed.
Still asleep, the healed man turned from the mirror and lurched stiffly across the room, awakening just as the gate that would take him to Bowrock claimed him.
After all, it wouldn't do for Velduke Darendarr Deldragon to march into his own besieged home fast asleep and snoring.
THE SWORD SPAT purple lightning that was mightier than Deldragon's blade. Rod turned away from the cooked, smoking hulk of the crocodile, smiling and shaking his head. He hadn't even tried the scepter yet.
His stomach rumbled again. Hmm. It wasn't likely that an abandoned, half-ruined castle would have pleasant edibles lying around for the taking, and he'd certainly seen none. Nor had he ever heard of or written about any sort of magic sword or wand or anything in Falconfar that conjured up food. It
was just one of the things enchanted items didn't do. Blast things, yes, change their shapes, all of that, but not serve forth steaming, filling food.
There were all those half-remembered fairy stories about mud and weeds being turned into mouth-watering food that got eaten, and then the magic wore off and the diners got very, very sick as, inside them, the transformed viands turned back to what they'd been before the magic got at them. That was probably why he'd never written about such things in Falconfar.
The Holdoncorp designers had put little glowing tankards into their games; you touched one (usually at full run, fleeing or charging at monsters), it flashed and vanished, and you were instantly healed and made bright with fresh energy. But somehow, in their games you never actually sat down and ate.
All of which meant that he could wander around this castle collecting these glowing, humming, monster-blasting goodies until he collapsed from lack of food and water. Fairly soon.
He had to get out of Yintaerghast. And find someone who'd feed him instead of killing him, without Taeauna at his side to know what to do, how to pay and speak and all of that. Without her beauty to lower bows and open doors. Taeauna...
No! Rod turned and slammed his fist against the wall, not caring how much it hurt. He was not going to slide back into tears now; he was not!
She was gone, and that was it. Nothing was going to bring her back.
"But I," he promised the silent gloom in a fierce whisper, "am now at war with the wizard Arlaghaun. And every last lorn in Falconfar. I will blast them all. In her name, I will blast them all."
And for that, he would have to give in to the whisperings in his head. The ones that had started the moment he'd touched the sword floating inside the pillar. The ones that were urging him on, right now, to cross this room and pass through the hidden door he could not yet see, and in a chamber beyond do thus and so, to gain an enchanted, hidden circlet and gorget.
Even a Lord Archwizard could never have too many gewgaws that blasted this and set fire to that. Magic wasn't limitless, and there were a lot of lorn.
Not to mention three Dooms who might take a lot of blasting.
Rod gave in to the whisperings. It seemed to him that he trudged around Yintaerghast for a long time, growing increasingly light-headed, dry-throated, and afflicted with rumbling of the innards; and increasingly weighed down with items that glowed and tingled with power, a belt and a baldric bristling with them, plus all the things he was wearing.
There came a time when at last the whispering told him to go back to the castle door he'd first come in by.
He obeyed, and came down the great stair just itching to raise a little scepter of twisted silver metal set with sky-blue gems. The moment it came into his hand, and glowed as if pleased to be selected, the swirling milk-white void outside the door melted away, to reveal...
The starlit darkness of a night lit by a low moon. Rod Everlar stepped out onto the sward half-expecting to find Arlaghaun standing like a statue waiting for him, wearing a cruel smile as lorn rose in clouds from the trees to rend him. Lorn that might well have perched up in those boughs to tear Taeauna's dangling body apart. He felt sick.
Something stirred in him, then. Something colder and firmer than the whisperings, but in the same place. Something that ran up his spine and forced him upright, abandoning his grieving shudderings, to lurch away across the grass until Yintaerghast loomed well behind him.
Then he found himself turning, to face northeast, and running a hand along his belt until his fingers were resting on the carved ivory head of a dagger. It glowed, and Rod was abruptly... elsewhere.
On a bare, high hill above rolling farmland, with the mountains much closer and woods mere dark and distant smudges under the moon.
He tried to gaze all around since this view of Falconfar was beautiful, serene under the stars, but that cold firmness within him-was making him turn slightly, to look at a particular height on the horizon, and reach for the dagger again.
The moonlit hill suddenly held a standing, staring Rod Everlar no longer. He was now two long, teleportational journeys away from Yintaerghast, where a dark, taloned creature flapped bat-like wings to rise off a branch and streak off toward Ult Tower, to warn Arlaghaun.
THE WIZARD WITH the sharp nose and the blazing brown eyes was halfway up the long hall before he mastered his temper, and turned abruptly aside to thrust two fingers into the eyes of a statue, to cause the wall behind it to roll back.
"By the Falcon," he whispered softly, seeking to let out a little of the rage still towering in him.
His own guardians had been roused against him. He hated to blast and mangle his own work, but he would hate even more to be injured and then slain by his own hacking, punching automatons. The lorn and Dark Helms would gleefully swarm him if they saw him struggling along, wounded.
Arlaghaun drew on a pair of gauntlets he'd hoped he'd never to have to use, donned a cloak that would enable him to fly as deftly as any lorn, and caught up a staff from behind the door that was taller than he was.
Cloak swirling, he left the hidden room, drew its door closed, whispered a word to the door, and kissed it, to seal it to all creatures save himself.
Then he turned hastily to face the dozen or so marching metal giants that were already headed toward him.
Arlaghaun hefted the staff, smiled a grim smile, and blasted the foremost striding titan to shrieking, tinkling shards. The other guardians kept coming, mindlessly.
He raised the staff and fired again. The largest metal automaton plunged face-first to the floor, its slow topple ending in a thunderous crash.
Arlaghaun used his cloak to leap and then hover aloft, that he not be hurled off his feet. All around him rang out lesser crashes, as just that fate befell the other guardians.
He let his thin lips form a warmer smile. He would rule in Ult Tower again. Very shortly. Even if it had no guardians left.
Except him.
"IT'S ANOTHER OF those nights," one knight in magnificent armor said to another, who'd just arrived to relieve him.
"Where he just sits, staring at nothing and breathing? Like he's empty?"
The first knight nodded sourly, stepped around the new arrival, and strode off down the dark passage that led out of Galathgard.
Across the moonlit courtyard was the gatehouse, and in the gatehouse there was a fire, and smoked meat hanging over the table in front of it, and a great wheel of cheese, and casks and casks of wine, and a bed.
So he hurried. Until he came out into the moonlight, when he couldn't help but stop and stare in amazement at what was blocking his way onwards. And shouldn't have been there.
Barefoot in the ruins, stunningly beautiful in the moonlight, a nude woman was standing waiting for him.
Aye, for him. She was looking right into his eyes, and smiling provocatively, her arms spread welcomingly. Pert and saucy, impish...
Beautiful... Falcon, what a beauty! Those breasts, large and night-dark smiling brown eyes, and... He'd just started to notice the wings soaring up behind her shoulders when strong fingers caught hold of his helm from above and jerked it around sideways with brutal force. All the way around.
And then he was beyond noticing anything at all, ever.
"Dauntra," the owner of those strong, scarred hands commented, letting the knight fall into a lolling, lifeless heap. "I get to do the preening and posing next time. You look about as alluring as a carthorse."
"Spare us your preferences, dear," Dauntra replied serenely. "And there isn't going to be a 'next time.' That's the last bodyguard, save for the three who are in there with him until morning."
"Well, I'll be the one who strips down and minces in to distract them, then. You've had your fun."
"How so? You killed him before I could! And before you come up with a jest about my loving the dead, Juskra, just leave off trying, hmm? I've heard them all before, anyway."
"I'm not surprised, sister," Juskra said sweetly. "Here, hold this."
"Am I your dressing-maid, now?"
"Oooh, now there's a calling that suits you. I—"
"Juskra," Ambrelle interrupted severely, "will you shut up? Just get your clothes off and get in there. Lorlarra should be in place by now, and I'll be right behind you." The oldest of the four Aumrarr hefted her sword meaningfully, tossing her magnificent purple-black mane. "And if you stoop to any more such sauce when we're in there, I'll feed this up your backside!"
"Sister!" Bared, the fiercest of the four Aumrarr was a mass of crisscrossing sword-scars; her forearms looked like white snakes were tangled tightly around them. Which made her mock-scandalized pose, fingertips at her throat and eyes wide, all the more ridiculous.
The three Aumrarr chuckled together, and Dauntra held out her arms to receive the last of Juskra's war-harness.
Giving her a look, the scarred Aumrarr filled those waiting arms, and then defiantly peeled off her yellowed and stained bandage, and laid that on top of the heap, too.
"Juskra," Dauntra growled softly.
The scarred Aumrarr elegantly put out her tongue in reply.
THE KING OF Galath muttered something darkly, under his breath, and stirred in his great chair, booted feet sliding along the polished tabletop. The fire crackled unregarded in the hearth.
"Pardon, your majesty?"
King Devaer lifted his eyes to give the knight standing over him an unfriendly look. "I said: I want a woman."
"But majesty..."
"I know, Glaroskur, I know. Not a wench within a day's ride of this crumbling ruin, and I don't fancy the backsides of any of you. But what's the good of being glorking King of Galath, and Lord of the rutting Falcons, too, if I can't have a woman? Go and get me a woman!"
"Majesty?"
"Go to the stables, get on a horse, take Joss and Rakaer with you, find some suitably beautiful woman, bring her back here without taking her yourselves, and bring her to me!"
"But your highn—"
