The small party plowed on, horses laboring chest high through sifted pockets of snow. Stuffed like a sausage in two of Felirin’s court-style tunics, Dakar blinked melted snow from his lashes and startled to the clang of shod hooves on rock. The frigid air left his lungs in a gasp as the stars and bleak snowfields all vanished.
The three riders moved now under a sky streaked with dawn, across sands grooved and black as raked basalt. The air held the forge-tang of desert and a flint-dry cloy of fine dust. No birds flew. The arid vista seemed lifeless as Kathtairr, except for the massive, clawed tracks of a predator which scored the ribbed flank of a dune.
“Seardluin,” Dakar whispered through a throat parched to paper by a devastating stab of fresh fear. In Athera, Fellowship intervention may have battled the monstrous killers to extinction; yet in the sheltered existence of drake-dream, the creatures would prowl still, their marauding thirst for blood raised to a scale of unimaginable viciousness. “If even one catches wind of our horses, we’re finished.”
Felirin pushed back the limp folds of the drover’s hood. “Arithon’s unconscious,” he said softly.
The Mad Prophet vented an explosion of oaths. No telling, now, whether the defenses ingrained in the Shadow Master’s mage training might contain the subconscious poison past memories and grief might engender.
Between blowing on numbed hands and fighting to slip the stiffened straps of the buckles on his saddlebags, the Mad Prophet flung back stopgap instructions. “Felirin, pack up that cloak. You may need your hands free. And we’ll have to shift Arithon back onto the mare.”
The spellbinder scrounged out two stout pairs of horse hobbles. Focused and made desperate by full awareness that he must safeguard the body that housed the self-haunted powers of s’Ffalenn conscience, despite the latent potential for disaster that same mind might seed to envelop them all, Dakar tossed the restraints to Felirin. “Tie your Masterbard astride. Don’t think of pity Strap him down tight, or he’s lost if we have to gallop.”
“The horses are spent. We ought to be leading them.” Felirin fumbled with poulticed hands to assist as Dakar directed. Together, they fastened the stiff leather cuffs around Arithon’s wrists and ankles, and bound his slack form to his horse’s girth and breast strap.
That grim preventative was scarcely completed when Dakar looked up. “Dharkaron wept!” A massive, dark shadow slunk sinuously into the hollow where they took shelter. He snatched the bard’s wrist. “Don’t move or breathe.”
Felirin glanced back, aghast. The next moment the three horses shied sidewards and tore at the reins trying to bolt.
Dakar held on, half-weeping, though both of his hands were skinned raw. Standing or running, they had no chance at all once the monsters that approached charged to hunt.
There were four of them, coats like rippling sable, and horned heads burnished to polished gold under the harsh desert sunlight. The powerful, maned shoulders stood high as an ox. The forefeet bore fearsome talons. The muzzles extended into jaws with scaled plates, and fangs that were cruelly poisonous. The eyes were pale as poured oil, and slitted like a snake’s. Dakar was aware through the hammer of his pulse that nothing alive looked more lethal. While at large on Athera, Seardluin had outrun the gazelles of Sanpashir, which took bounding flight like racing shadows over parched grass and flint sands.
Never had the spellbinder known such blank fright as that moment, when the creatures on the dune paused to snuffle the wind, ears pricked to strain out the footfalls of prey. Those wide-set, mean yellow eyes swung and fixed, and seemed to stare right through him.
Then the lead creature howled in a key to bristle the hair and tear a hole through a man’s slackened bowels. Slumped on the mare’s crest, Arithon groaned.
Dakar reached out, pitiless, and muffled the cry with his palm.
Then, as if tuned to one thought, the Seardluin moved on, lithe, deadly, and uninterested. They passed not three yards from the horses, who quivered and dripped sweat in rank fear.
Felirin shrank, shaking, against the damp heat of his gelding. “Ath’s blessed mercy, I don’t think they knew us.”
Weak kneed with shock, Dakar resisted the urge to collapse where he stood. “We must not be visible to them in this spectrum of dream. If we were, I assure you, we’d be torn limb from limb.”
Felirin offered no argument. Once the horses had settled enough to walk calmly, he remounted and pressed on, trailing the mare which bore Arithon. From behind, the wind carried a drawn-out howl, then the sounds of a snarling fight. Screams that sounded human sliced the baked air, then the drumroll report of hapless horses set to flight, sheared through by a chilling clang of steel.
“Hold fast!” Dakar tightened his grip on Arithon’s reins, and twisted to see over his shoulder.
Five horsemen burst over the ridge at his back, mounts stretched to a lathered gallop. Down a grade unsuited to headlong flight, they slid and skated. Sand caved and gave way beneath panicked hooves. Against the fierce, copper glare off the dunes, Dakar made out the Hanshire town blazon sewn on their saddlecloths and surcoats.
“Felirin!” he cried, tensed to stab heels to his own mount and run. Even here, the Alliance pursuit had overtaken them.
Yet even before reflex could spur startled flight, the last guardsman cleared the crest, shouting like a madman and driving his horse with the unsheathed flat of his sword. A grue like the precursor to prophetic sight caused Dakar to hold back raw instinct. He reined in. While the guardsmen plunged closer, and the sand scarp ripped loose like unraveled knit beneath their destriers’ pounding sprint, he spun a fast cantrip to mask his horse’s copycat impulse to bolt.
The stayspell locked down barely in time. Arithon’s mount hit the rein in a spinning plunge, shredding new skin from Dakar’s fingers; then hot on the heels of the Hanshire guardsmen came the predators which hazed them.
Seardluin burst over the skyline, four streaks of muscle and bared talon that came on like shot oil to overtake. Plowed sand and ripped footing caused them no missed stride. Nor was time given for prey to react or defend.
The lead creature sprang with sinuous speed. It overtook the trailing rider, closed a stride and a half lead in one bound, its thick, plated tail streamed behind. One snap of armored jaws decapitated the horse. The animal pinwheeled, fountaining blood. Its rider catapulted ahead. He crashed in a rolling spray of sand, but never came to rest before the predator pinned him. One goring swipe of its horn left him a disemboweled carcass.
The survivors pounded on through another mired stride before the Seardluin charged among them. Their horses’ berserk panic scattered them right and left, chaff before the oncoming stroke of Sithaer’s scythe. The king male snatched a mare by one hind leg. Half her haunch tore away in one razor-clean swipe. His Seardluin mate cleared the steed’s scissoring struggle in a powerful leap. She landed ahead of the next horse, tucked and rolled, then extended a taloned forepaw as a hook. The horse was jerked out of its run like a gaffed fish. It crashed, splayed and gutted. The downed guardsman died as fast, bludgeoned silent by a swipe of the Seardluin’s armored tail. Blood pattered a fine rain on parched earth, the spray masked by the whistling shriek of another gelding, collapsed with a severed windpipe. The final horse thrashed in a heap of maimed limbs, its rider crushed in the tangle.
Dakar never knew how the last came to die. The butchery ended too quickly. Nothing alive remained standing to kill. Seardluin stalked narrow eyed through the razed carnage, their frenzy of bloodlust unsated. They slashed and snapped at the slain underfoot, while the rent limbs of horses and men shuddered through the tormented spasms of flesh torn untimely from life.
The furnace-dry breeze wafted the reek of ripped bowels and the stench of violent death. Dakar’s bay gelding and Arithon’s mare sidled in demented fear. The gray trembled, with Felirin doubled over the pommel of his saddle in the throes of a gut-rending nausea.
The spell cantrip on the horses was fading. The Mad Prophet yanked the mare’
s bit before flight instinct could revert into stampeding terror, then curbed his own milling horse by forcing its panic into frustrated circles. While Arithon’s mount jibbed and jolted against the lead rein, he shook off stunned shock and strove through a virulent attack of the shakes to sort out what mage-sight now showed him.
“Those men, those horses had no auras,” he forced out in a strained whisper. “If they were alive when they entered this grimward, they became changed into something unnatural.”
As though the recent deaths had not signified, no shocked discharge of animal magnetism hazed the air with blank light; and yet, the Seardluin had tracked every hapless victim that they slaughtered on sight.
Felirin straightened, wrung pale as a specter. “What are you saying?” He wiped his mouth with the back of a wrapped hand, and insisted with gritty disbelief, “Those were guardsmen from Hanshire. I knew them.”
Behind, on the dune, amid the strewn gore of carnage, the predators crouched down to gorge. Snarls carried downwind, punched through the snap of cracked bone. The horrors worried their kills as they ate, tearing and ripping through meat and entrails with greedy, savage abandon.
Dakar’s stomach turned. “I don’t care if those men were your milk brothers from childhood, we’d better get out of here, now!”
The slightest release of his hold on the rein, and the horses he gripped plunged ahead. Dakar resisted their snorting, brash lunges. He could do nothing more than cling to blind faith that their party would not be attacked. Headlong flight could not outstrip a Seardluin’s charge. If he gave way to nerves and let the horses gallop on, the loose sand would tire them beyond any chance of recovery.
Felirin eased his jigging gray up beside Dakar’s flank. “Why don’t those drake-spawned furies see our presence?”
Dakar swallowed hard, yet the rank taste of bile stayed with him. “I can but guess. In some way, we haven’t crossed fully into their realm of existence. We traverse a dream. Our lives are not part of it, but only passing through.”
“Those guards,” Felirin started, then coughed back a heaving spasm. Wretched beyond speech, he shook his head.
“I can’t know for certain.” The mare plunged ahead, yanked short yet again by Dakar’s iron hold on the reins. Swearing, he lost another patch of raw skin before he resumed his snagged thought. “Those men must have interfered with the dream in some way. Dragons are unruly and powerful beings, a law unto themselves. Their conscious minds could seed life. Why not the reverse? If a man in careless ignorance killed game in the wood, or lit a small fire for comfort, then a thread of continuity would be torn by his act. A kinetic balance would become inadvertently upset. In forfeit, the drake might well bleed off the offender’s life aura, and knit the repossessed magnetic energies into the dream’s fabric to restore the gap.”
“Ath’s mercy on them,” Felirin murmured, his sad, lined eyes fixed ahead. “If you speak the truth, they are lost for all eternity, and yet, their fear and their suffering was no less for the fact that their spirits were unstrung before death.”
Dakar had no word of comfort to assuage the minstrel’s sorrowful insight. Nor did he dare broach the evil possibility that Arithon’s unguarded mind may have seeded that vortex of killing violence. He nursed his tired mount over loose, sliding sand, or the brittle salt of cracked hardpan. Though the site of the slaughter might lie behind, the ugly memory persisted, too vivid and sharp to unburden. A man led in circles by worry and privation could not help but imagine what fates might befall the rest of the company from Hanshire, drawn here in determined and foolhardy duty, and left to the perils of their ignorance.
Other packs of Seardluin prowled the desert. More than one clawed spoor stitched across the spiraling track carved out by the horses’ labored passage. By the wayside, the hacked and gutted corpse of a young dragon lay broken. Splayed wing leather shriveled, half-silted under blown sand, and the ripped coils of entrails were strewn like sun-blackened rope in clots of rank, congealed blood. Here, most oddly, Dakar sensed the hazed energies of torn life force; as though the continuum of Fate’s Wheel still contained the unmoored wraith of this creature’s whole being at the moment an untimely death claimed it. The enigma gave rise to a headache, out of phase with the throb of his skinned palms. Dakar endured. He refused to acknowledge the chorus of complaint from an overweight body kept in the saddle too long. Nor would he hear the fool’s urge to dismount and ease the discomfort of racked joints.
To guess by the pug marks pressed into stained sand, the Seardluin which had stalked the slain drake weighed as much as a draft horse.
Then that kill, too, fell behind. As the riders’ blown mounts breasted another crest in the dunes, the desert with its perils melted away, replaced by what seemed like a southland orchard gone wild. Glossy leaves rustled, stirred by kind winds to a ruffled embroidery of orange blossom.
Another chill puckered the hair at Dakar’s nape. No natural trees should bear ripened fruit and spring flowers in the same season. Almost, it seemed as if the grove was presented in temptation, inviting tired travelers to forget the firm strictures by which they might walk this existence unscathed.
“Don’t pick any fruit,” the Mad Prophet cautioned. He wondered in stark honesty whether Arithon’s deranged guilt could be party to this latest invention; or whether Felirin’s loose fancy offered the deadly peril of a sleepy, spring grove whose climate encouraged tired travelers to linger.
Those creeping suspicions entwined with another current, elusive and powerful, but there as a sparkle of unseen energy that invaded the periphery of vision. Dakar knew spellcraft. Step upon step, his suspicion gained impetus, that something or some power tempered each new train of event, and dammed back the cascade of disaster. Yet each time he tested to fathom the source, the currents he searched for slipped past him.
Felirin brushed a shower of shed petals from his hair, too pained and dispirited to indulge his ebullient imagination. His gray was stumbling tired, and fretful in its efforts to evade its rope muzzle and snatch at the knee-high grass under the fruit trees. Out of pity, the bard dismounted to walk.
For the bay mare, they could offer no such relief. Arithon remained fallen into a stupor. The drawn angles of his face were mercifully eclipsed by the shadow of the drover’s cloak, and his hands dangled slack from the restraints which secured him to the saddlebow. He would not arouse, despite Dakar’s efforts. Even a spell-turned invocation to his Name failed to raise any flicker of awareness. If the last s’Ffalenn prince was lost in the dreaming quagmire of his conscience, the combined debilitation of backlash and despair would find no healing in this place. Nor could aught be done to reverse his deep malady, but keep on and hope for the relief of escape.
“We can’t journey on indefinitely without water,” Felirin husked at long length.
Dakar drew rein, sucked clean of the will to laugh for the irony. “We aren’t likely to find water here. If we did, it would be too risky to drink.”
“What makes you sure?” No matter how desperate his state of privation, the bard’s curiosity knew no bounds.
“Great dragons hated a drenching worse than a cat does, or so Sethvir once explained.” Dakar stamped back the ripe fear that threatened an explosion of temper. His nerves were drawn wire. He heaved his fat bulk from the saddle and almost collapsed in a heap from the spike of sharp pain which shot through his cramped knees and hips. In mulish rebellion against abused dignity, he pursued his thought to the end. “Rainstorms were said to send the great drakes into rampaging fits of irritation. That’s just as well. We dare not interact with anything we didn’t bring with us. Heed well. The penalty could be to share the same fate as those foolish guardsmen from Hanshire.”
The minstrel breathed in the incongruous, sweet tang of the orange trees, morose. “For a creature that gloried in live flame, wet weather would naturally pose a problem.” The tightening scabs on his burns made him seem a slouched and arthritic old man. “How long do you suppose we can surviv
e in this place?”
The Mad Prophet had no answer that did not offer outright discouragement.
Overhead, the sky burned a lingering gold, lucent as marigold enamel. The grove melted away like a lifted curtain into a wind-beaten vista of steppelands. Dakar set his back to the task of driving on balky horses without help from the switch he needed, but dared not braid, out of plucked stems of tough grass. He could not fathom how far they had traveled, nor yet, how much longer they could venture without falling victim to lethal mishap.
Seemingly out of nowhere, the deep, booming note of a centaur’s horn call shook the ground, answered like echo by the clarion reply of a mature male dragon. Felirin stopped short with a gasped cry of wonder.
Dakar stared also, amazed and gaping. High over the beaten-brass furrows of the plain, a mated pair of dragons cavorted, sleek as shot quarrels as they closed leathered wings and swooped from the zenith to the horizon. Sun-caught scales flashed fire like tipped gold, and tails streamed and snapped like armored ribbon. No legend, no awed description, even from Sethvir’s keen memory, could do justice to the searing, unworldly grace of the great drakes at their prime strength. Before their vast size, the Khadrim were as toys, and the wyverns of Vastmark no more than petty and quarrelsome vermin.
The drakes spiraled upward and dwindled to gilt flecks, lost at last in the molten brass dome of clear sky.
Dakar expelled a gusty sigh, brought back to awareness that he had suspended his breathing.
Felirin shed his awe in an uncharacteristic bent of practicality. “Before we see more inhospitable country, do you suppose we’d be wise to rest?”