King of Swords (The Starfolk) (36 page)

The Pythia had been an interesting hallucination, though. Had she been anything more than a warning generated by his own subconscious and memories of what Sphinx Praecipua had said? “What was mightiest in the mighty” might be nothing but plain old stupidity, and even the unmighty, like him, could be catastrophically stupid. He was still debating whether his headache or his nausea was worse when
Saidak
dived out of the night sky at him like a sounding whale.

For one moment of horror he thought he was going to be swatted flat by the gangplank and the solitary passenger clinging to it, but the wind slackened and the mermaid regained control at the last possible instant. Whoever the starborn on the end of the plank was, she did not lack for courage or strength, because she slid over the edge feet first, and then
dangled there. The moment she came within reach, Rigel caught her ankles, and she let go.

They hit the ground in a heap, and what felt like the same rocks that had hit him upon his own landing struck him in what felt like the same spots on his back. His cry of pain did not quite hide the sound of a rib or two breaking.

“Well done,” Cheleb said, scrambling off him. “Up! Quickly!”

It was all very well for her to say that, but somehow he obeyed and was able to help catch Talitha. He set her down gently as the barge swooped away and disappeared into the murk.

“What a horrible place!” Talitha said. “Oh, you’re hurt! Let me—”

Cheleb pulled her hand away. “No, wait! Let him bleed a little more. Unless you want to walk a hundred stadia over this glass heap? The wind is erratic, but it seems to be blowing more or less landward, and cockatrices are attracted by the smell of blood.”

“Your sympathy is touching, starborn,” Rigel said.

“Impertinence! You must be wearing a coagulant amulet, or you would be bleeding much more.”

“Would it help if I cut an ear off?”

“It would help if you kept your mouth shut,” the mage shouted.

“You brought me along as bait?”

“You are well qualified. You did offer to help any way you could, so stand there and keep your eyes open. Stay upwind of him, Talitha dear, and be ready to throw fire.”

For the first time in the Starlands, Rigel felt truly cold, though some of his shivering was undoubtedly from terror. His feet, leg, and back hurt abominably, and he was surrounded by jagged boulders, any of which might conceal
predatory monsters. Just when he thought things were as bad as they could be, hail began dancing off the rocks in all directions like tousled white fur. It rattled deafeningly on his helmet, needled against his bare skin, and cut visibility to a few meters. He felt a sudden tingle at his wrist. Then the gauntlet and sword suddenly sprang into being, and a cockatrice charged out of the hailstone fog.

It was far bigger than he had expected, a horse-sized ostrich at least three meters tall, with outspread wings and a beak that could bite his head off, helmet and all. Its eyes burned bright with evil, painful to look at even through his protective mask.

Saiph cut its head off. Rigel leaped aside as the huge corpse dived into the ground. It somersaulted over him, but a leathery wing swept him off his feet. He landed on the rocks again, and this time his brains would have been smashed out if he had not been wearing Meissa.

Talitha crouched beside him. “Are you all right?”

“Been better,” he admitted. “Try to be faster with that fire next time. But—” He gasped as he tried to sit up. “Now that you’ve got better bait, can you do something about my ribs? And my leg?”

She made a light and cried out at what she saw. “Cheleb! Come here and heal Rigel.”

“You do it,” the mage said. “We’re going to have cockatrices all over us any minute.”

“I’ll watch for them.
Come here and heal Rigel!”

Nice to feel appreciated…

The headless cockatrice was still flopping and flapping in its death throes, bleeding exorbitantly. If Rigel’s few spoonfuls of blood had brought forth that monster, the torrent spilling from its neck stump ought to fetch the entire cockatrice population of Tarazed.

Grumbling disapproval, the mage came to tend to Rigel’s injuries, although from the odd way she walked, he suspected that her feet were not touching the ground. She banished his pain and staunched his bleeding with a few gentle touches and some rapid incantations.

“That will have to do for now,” she said.

The hail had stopped. The wind died down, as it did periodically. Two cockatrices attacked almost simultaneously, charging into the light cast by the starfolk’s amulets. Cheleb’s fireball got one and Talitha’s got the other. Hit with purplish flames, the monsters staggered and sagged to the ground.

“Hold its head down!” the mage shouted to Talitha. “Come here, halfling! Get on this one’s back.”

That was easier said than done. Apart from its rooster head and thick, feathered neck, the monster was scaly and slippery. Its two long legs ended in bird-like feet with dagger claws, and there was a vicious barb at the end of its reptilian tail. It lay sprawled at an angle, one side higher than the other, and only its outspread wings kept it from rolling over.

Still, Rigel followed Cheleb’s directions and scrambled aboard, wrapping his legs around the beast’s neck and gripping its fleshy comb with his right hand. His face was pressed against the beast’s feathers, which stank horribly. As long as he forced its head down, it would be unable to move—so the mage said, anyway, and for the moment the cockatrice seemed to believe her. Rigel had no doubt that it was many times stronger than he was, and could flick him off with a shake of its head, but for the moment it just twitched and made harsh piping noises.

A surge of lavender fire announced the arrival of a fourth monster. Cheleb disabled it and then scrambled aboard, but it needed time to recover, and others were arriving fast on its
heels. Talitha stunned two, and two more began feeding on the corpse of the one Rigel had killed.

“Prepare for flight!” the mage shouted. “Heads up!”

“You heard her, Gruesome!” Rigel hauled back his mount’s comb. It struggled and staggered to its feet, tilting almost vertical so that for a moment he was virtually hanging free, alarmingly high above the ground. When he tugged on its right wattle—copying what Cheleb was doing—it turned to face the wind and spread its giant wings. Then, with surprising grace, the cockatrice rose into the air.

To Rigel’s relief the three cockatrices did not immediately scatter into the night, which suggested that they naturally traveled in flocks, but Gruesome wanted to lead and did not favor the direction that Cheleb did. Nor did it want to fly very high. Fortunately the mage was a skilled rider, and she literally flew rings around the other two, shouting out orders like a drill instructor. After a while Rigel mastered the knack of wrenching his mount’s head to the correct angle, and then he could lead the expedition on its way across the fiery wastelands of Tarazed with only an occasional shouted course adjustment from Cheleb.

Hot updrafts from lava fountains made for extreme turbulence, and once something that might have been a wyvern or small dragon tried to contest their passage—or possibly grab a halfling snack on the wing—but the combined stare of three cockatrices sent it tumbling into the fiery lakes below.

The mage had not explained where they were going, but her aim was true. A long climb, a wheel of cloud below them, a dive through cold dampness, and the cockatrices emerged
above the surface of a calm and moonlit lake. Tarazed was gone, leaving only a lingering sense of horror, like a too-well-remembered nightmare.

Again the cockatrices had to be coaxed to climb into the sky, although they obviously disliked such heights. Even by elfin standards it was cold up there among the stars. The moon was nearing the horizon and dawn would not be far off. They had to make haste. Invading Phegda to rescue Izar would be dangerous enough in darkness; by daylight it must surely rank close to suicide.

Rigel recognized a cryptic cloud gyre ahead as another link and braced himself for the jump.

And another, this time very high…

A vast snow-capped range glowered like a march of specters in the last rays of the setting moon. At first glance Rigel thought the great marble monolith ahead was one of the mountains. Then he realized that most of what he was seeing was a single building. It stretched along a high ridge, true, but he could not even guess at its dimensions or how many thousands of rooms it must contain. The only thing he had ever seen that looked remotely like it was a photo of the Dalai Lama’s palace in Tibet, the one at Lhasa.

“Land on it,” Cheleb shouted, her voice growing hoarse now, “somewhere high up, near the middle.”

“Heads down to land?”

“Of course. Head level now, and glide.”

Gruesome was probably as tired as its rider; it seemed happy enough to stop flapping and float down onto the staggering stone pile—balconies, towers, endless staircases, and multitudes of empty-eyed windows. Rigel let the cockatrice choose its destination, and it selected a flat rooftop terrace as a suitable runway, spreading its talons. Being as inexperienced at manned flight as its rider, it misjudged its loaded momentum and skidded awkwardly on the tiles, but Rigel managed to stay aboard. He couldn’t get the stupid brute to lie flat, though. It stood almost vertical, so his weight rested entirely on his thighs and he had to cling to the creature with his legs, which were not designed for such exercise. His knees ached, but he didn’t dare straighten them.

Talitha was able to land quite close to him, and Cheleb ostentatiously came down exactly halfway between them.

“Well?” she said.

“Yes,” Talitha said. “No doubt about it.”

“Then where do we try next?”

“No doubt about what?” Rigel demanded angrily.

“Izar’s location amulet,” Talitha explained. “It’s here, in Phegda Palace.”

“It is?” It would take years to search a place this size.

“So Izar isn’t.”

Rigel’s expression must have revealed his confusion, because Cheleb said, “Oh, work it out, boy. The first thing big, bad Hadar would do after stealing Izar away from his mother would be to take off the boy’s ear stud so that she couldn’t find him. And if the bad man thinks a certain bold but dumb knight will show up to steal Izar back again, and he wants to get a hold of that knight’s sword, then he’ll set a trap for him using the ear stud as bait, now won’t he?”

Rigel was too tired to bandy barbs. “You’re assuming that Saiph was his sole reason for kidnapping Izar. I know Tarf implied that it was before I sliced him open, but Tarf was in a tight place and hardly a reliable witness. The Hadar crew may have taken Izar only because his daddy wanted him. He’s their daddy too.”

“And they murdered twenty-three people for that? That seems a bit much even for a child custody dispute.”

“Please, starborn!” Talitha said. “We don’t have time or energy to waste on squabbling. Rigel, the reason we went to Spica before going on to Tarazed is that Starborn Cheleb has a way of locating people that doesn’t rely on their amulets. We went to Spica to find a hair from Izar’s head. We took one off his pillow, and Cheleb put it into a ring she gave me. That amulet is not reacting, so I know that Izar’s not here.”