Dragon's Tongue (The Demon Bound) (49 page)

But suddenly, Vagner was there. He seized up the pair without so much as a “may I,” and dove over the rim.

Alaric thought his stomach had already taken the leap ahead of him.

Shona squealed with a mixture of fright and delight.

Then the demon gathered them close and soared upward like a giant bird.

“Where are Fenelon and Etienne?” Alaric shouted.

The demon swung back around towards the rim. Trees had finally ceased to fall. A few tumbled down the sheer face into the valley below.

But of Etienne and Fenelon, Alaric saw no sign.

FIFTY TWO

Vagner wheeled over the site of the destruction, making several passes at Alaric’s command, and still no sign of Fenelon or Etienne could be found. The demon sensed Alaric’s distress growing, and worried that without Etienne’s knowledge of healing, he would make himself ill.

“They’ve got to be here,” Alaric said after the fifth pass. He closed his eyes, and Vagner felt the stretch of mage senses. But even the demon could find no sign of life. As if the earth had opened up a void and swallowed them whole.

Perhaps it did,
he thought. The ground up on this rim had a peculiar composition, and while Tane’s presence below was a faint glimmer the demon sensed from time to time, the life essence he associated with Fenelon and Etienne was gone. But then, the demon also knew that whatever bred the ancient magic that lie in the ground, it had designed the grids of power to do just that. Repel any attempt to penetrate it from beyond.

What does it shield?
the demon pondered. A mere sword? An artifact of power? Just what secrets were buried in the heart of this strange world beneath the ice?

“Go around again,” Alaric ordered, and Vagner was tempted to tell him the results would remain unchanged; that neither Fenelon nor Etienne would be there. Besides, Vagner could sense the “other” in his little master was growing restless. And Alaric was weakening.

But demons bound by their True Names could only obey, no matter how onerous or useless the task might seem.

So he swept back around to make another pass over the now-flattened copse of broken, frozen trees.

~

Though Alaric pushed his mage senses as far as he could, he felt nothing of Fenelon or Etienne.
How could that be?
he thought as he wearily scanned the wreckage of broken glazed chunks of wood and the remnants of the deer creatures who had not been fortunate enough to escape. Horns, but they stank in death, as though blood and bone and fiber were born of some rot.

“Is it what they are,”
Ronan said.
“They are more than just a perverse sort of demonkin.
They are hatred and destruction and all the wretchedness that rots in men’s souls.
In the time of Na’Sgailean, they ran these valleys by the thousands.
The early Haxons called them trolls and Dokkalfar, and said they were the evil cousins of the Hidden Folk.”

Trolls, Alaric thought. Somewhere in his memory, he had learned a song about trolls. How they carried the wickedness of the world in their blood and marrow.

“Where could they be?” Shona said softly, her voice hinting to Alaric that she was close to tears.

Alaric sighed. “I don’t know, but we must not give up until we find them.”

“Fool!”
Ronan suddenly snarled.
“We’ve no time for sentimentality!”

“We have time,” Alaric said through gritted teeth.

“What?” Shona said, tearing her eyes away from the search to glance at him.

“We have none!”
Ronan retorted sharply enough to make Alaric wince.
“Tane is getting close to his destination, and it will not be long before he has the Dragon’s Tongue, and then it will not matter whether you find their corpses or not!”

Alaric put his hands over his ears as though that very act had the power to stop Ronan. “They can’t be dead!” he shouted so loudly, his voice boomed off the rocks and echoed across the lower valley.

“Alaric?” Shona said and reached over to touch his hand. “Please, stop. You’re frightening me…”

He did stop, and looked at her wan face, her eyes swimming with tears. “I’m…I’m sorry,” he said. “Ronan was…”

“Oh…” She swallowed. “I forgot about him.”

“I wish I could,” Alaric said with a sigh.

The heat of Ronan’s anger flared inside him.
“Forget me not!”
the bard chided.
“We have a duty.
Tane must not reach the Dragon’s Tongue!”

Alaric closed his eyes.
How can I go on or even care without knowing whether or not Fenelon and Etienne lived or died?
he thought.

Ronan heaved a long sigh, and his anger lessened.
“If it is any consolation, the sudden, violent death of a mageborn always leaves its mark.
Their last moment would have released that essence so you could find it easily enough, even in this perverse place.”

Alaric blinked and looked at Shona. “Do you feel their deaths?” he asked.

She looked puzzled for a moment before realization burnished her features. Shona shook her head and whispered, “No.”

“Neither do I. Which means they could be alive.”

“And they could be off looking for us,” Shona said.

It was a hope, Alaric would admit.

“Then that settles it, and it is now up to us four to stop Tane,”
Ronan said.

“Four?” Alaric blurted. “We are three, Ronan, and you are dead and…”

He caught the look Shona now wore. She pursed her lips. “If you plan to start talking to yourself in public, Alaric Braidwine,” she said, “I may have to have second thought about courting you.”

His face flushed. “I was talking to Ronan,” he said.

“And who is going to believe that…besides myself and poor Vagner here?” she asked.

“Right,” Vagner said emphatically.

It’s a conspiracy, I swear,
Alaric thought.

“Conspiracy or not, we need to go on,”
Ronan said.
“Once we have stopped Tane, we can come back and search for them at our leisure.”

All right,
Alaric thought, then glanced up at the demon. “Vagner, let’s go on.”

“Are you sure?” the demon asked.

“We’ve got to stop Tane,” Alaric said. “We’ll come back for them when we are done.”

He looked at Shona, half expecting her to protest. Grim-faced, she nodded.

~

“Damn that idiot demon!” Fenelon said and pushed against the wall of stone now blocking the cavern entrance. This fissure in the hillside had proven a fortuitous place to flee at the time, and Etienne had to admit a certain sense of gratitude for its presence. The thought of being crushed under a great weight of frozen wood lacked appeal.

But the collapse of the trees had blocked the most immediate and obvious way out. And as she held up a faint glim of mage light that would not drain her mage essence, she could not help but worry about Shona and Alaric.
Please, Blessed Lady of the Silver Wheel, let them be all right,
she thought.

“I’ll shove his tail barb down his throat when I get out of here!” Fenelon added and slapped the stone wall of their prison, only to hiss when pain burned him.

“Well,” Etienne said. “Perhaps we should concentrate on using our energy towards getting out first?”

“Yeah, well in order to use a gate spell, one of us will have to give essence to the other,” Fenelon said and rubbed his hand. “Which means one of us will be too exhausted to defend if those ugly spawn of Annwn are still hot for our blood. Shall we draw straws?”

Etienne rolled her eyes. “I had something more mundane in mind,” she said. “Or can it be you haven’t noticed the draft for all your own wind?”

He frowned at her. “Well, actually, I had,” he said and pulled his cloak tight.

“And where there is a draft in a cave, there is usually an outside opening,” she reminded him.

“True,” he said and pointed to the crevice beyond her light. “But the path would appear to lead down, my love.”

“Up or down, the first order would be to get out,” she said.

He nodded, looking perturbed at her desire to remind him of the order of importance events should take. “So what are we waiting for?” he asked.

“I was waiting for you,” she said.

“Me?” he said and slipped past her to start down the trail.

“Yes, you,” she said. “I know perfectly well when to crush your ego, and when it is wiser to let you take out your aggressions on mere rocks.”

“Nothing mere about these rock,” Fenelon said and touched the surface nearest him. “Have you tried to scry through them?”

“As a matter of fact, I have,” Etienne said. “It is as if the stones themselves have the power to block our senses.”

“Exactly,” Fenelon said as he picked his way along the narrow path. For the most part, it appeared smooth, almost glass-like to Etienne’s eyes, but here and there, chunks of rubble had sloughed off like old skin and littered the way. “My father once noticed it was impossible to scry into some part of the Ranges,” he continued. “That is one of the reason my father chose to explore them. He found a number of places that literally caused spells to bounce back or fail.”

“Voids?” she suggested.

Fenelon shook his head. “You can’t use any sort of magic in a void. Not even your own. These mountains have places that allow us to draw power from ourselves and each other, but not from the mountains themselves.”

“Hmmm,” Etienne said. “I am suddenly reminded of one of the old Haxon stories I heard as a young girl. It told that even the gods could not know what happened within the realms of the Hidden Folk, for the mountains in which they dwelt were made of magic stone.”

Fenelon rapped the stone nearest him as he walked along. “Weren’t the Hidden Folk supposed to be like our Old Ones?” he said.

“With one exception. They had no love of mortalkind, and despised the Stone Folk for showing mortals the secrets of the deepest earth.”

“Not the friendliest sort, then,” Fenelon said. “Hey, I think I see daylight.”

“Daylight?” Etienne said hopefully.

Indeed, she was pleased to note their path did seem to open out, and around a turn, it rose towards a growing brightness. Fenelon still had the lead, and he suddenly stopped with a curse. Etienne came up beside him and frowned.

Well,
she darkly noted to herself,
it would be a way out if I had the wings of a bird.
The opening revealed a deep circular valley, a sheer face of rock, and the river below. By the Silver Wheel, it looked like the mouth of a volcano. She had seen enough sketches and read enough stories of them in old Haxon Chronicles to know she was right. In fact, some of the ancient Haxon tale had told of a fire mountain in the Ranges known as the Forges of Thunor.

This was a volcanic crater with black glass and pumice on its sheer cliffs. It must have been dormant for a long time, she speculated as she took in the breathtaking view of a forest, a river and stretches of lush open pasture. Why, there even appeared to be deer…real deer wandering the forest edge and birds.

And then, she saw what looked like a giant wyvern with tiny figures clutched close to its chest as it flew into the heart of the valley below.

“Oh, dear,” she said and pointed.

“Damn!” Fenelon said. “They’re going on without us!”

Etienne fixed him with a sharp glance. “At least, they are alive,” she said.

“Well, yeah, but…”

“Oh, I know what you mean,” she said and sighed. “Why are they going on without us?”