Masques (42 page)

Aralorn heard the noise behind her and twisted her head to see the ae’Magi getting to his feet even as she reached for the staff. She turned back to Wolf to warn him, and noticed something she would have seen right away if she hadn’t been so dazed—she’d been in enough fights to know a broken back when she saw it. She saw the same knowledge in Wolf’s face.

He smiled at her with a haunting sweetness as she touched the staff. He said something that might have been “I love you, too” but a jolt of magic traveled up her arm, and she blacked out.

When she woke up, the floor she was looking at was bare stone, not cobbled as the floor in the dungeon was. Wolf’s staff lay beside her, the crystals in the top smoky dark. The musky smell of the books told her where she was.

“
No!
You stupid son of a . . . Plague take you, Wolf!” Her scream was muffled by the rows of bookshelves in his library. Helplessly, she pounded a fist on the floor, letting rage keep back her tears.

“The sword.” She didn’t see anyone, but a firm hand pulled her to her feet. The Old Man materialized and shook her by the shoulders. Who else could it have been? His features were the too-perfect features of a shapeshifter.

“The sword, you stupid girl. Where is the sword?”

Aralorn had been through a lot. She had long since outgrown any patience with being manhandled. With a deceptively easy twist recently learned from Stanis, she freed herself and backed away.

With the distance between them, she could see the aura of age that clung to him despite the smooth skin on his face. He was only a few inches taller than she was and far more beautiful to look upon. At another time, she would have been more courteous to the Old Man of the Mountain, but Aralorn wasn’t in the mood for politeness.

“What sword are you talking about, old man?” she spat. Hundreds of miles away, Wolf was fighting for his life—she refused to believe that he was dead. She had no patience left.

“The sword!
The
sword!” His arms swung widely in one of the overblown gestures that shapeshifters favored. He dropped into their language, and Aralorn had to struggle to understand the dialect he spoke. “You haven’t let the ae’Magi get his hands on it, have you? Where is it? He mustn’t have control over it.”

“What sword?” Aralorn’s voice was harsh with impatience; she needed to travel back to the castle, and a goose wasn’t the swiftest of fliers. It would take her days. Too late. She would be too late. “Sir, you will have to explain yourself more clearly.”

“Your
sword
, did you leave it there? Didn’t . . .” He stopped and looked behind her.

Curious, she looked behind her and saw her short sword, the one that she had left in its usual place under the couch, floating gently in the air behind her. She could almost see the person holding the sword—it was like looking at an image in rough water, impossible to discern any specific features.

“You didn’t take it?” The Old Man’s voice was filled with disgust. “What is wrong with you? I
told
you. Told
you
. If it weren’t for the fact that Lys cares about that Wolf, I would let you stew in your own pot.”

He stalked to the sword and took it from the apparition that held it. He unsheathed it and swung it once. “
This
is the third of the Smith’s great weapons. Ambris.” He gave it another name, but Aralorn was too distracted to translate it. “If the ae’Magi gets his hands on her and realizes what he has, there will be no one who can stand against him. You were supposed to take her with you and use her. I take it that your silly little spell didn’t work?”

He didn’t wait for her nod, but continued, “I thought that he just might pull it off. Here”—abruptly the shapeshifter’s voice lost its force and became querulous like that of a very old man—“take it and go back. I’m very tired—maintaining this shape is burdensome. Lys?” He shoved the sword at Aralorn and was gone with an abrupt pop.

Aralorn took the sword and looked at it. It looked no more magical than it ever had, but still . . . it did match the description given for the Smith’s sword.

And the sword gave her another idea. Sheathing it abruptly, she slipped it onto her belt. With Wolf’s staff in one hand, she ran out of the library to find Myr.

TWELVE

Myr was never difficult to locate. Aralorn simply had to look for the largest group of people and head in that direction. She found him just outside the cave entrance, giving knife-fighting lessons to a group of the younger refugees. He glanced up and saw her as he was avoiding a crudely wielded blade; the distraction almost cost him a slit throat.

He spoke for just a minute to his former opponent, who was white-faced and shaking. It was no light thing to come so close to killing a king. Aralorn shifted impatiently from one foot to the other as Myr dismissed the class and strode to her.

He took a long look at her, noting the scrape on her cheek that she’d gotten rolling across the floor; the filth that clung to her; and Wolf’s staff, which she held clutched in one hand. He didn’t demand any explanations, merely asking in a businesslike tone, “What do you need?”

“I need you to call the dragon to take me back to the ae’Magi’s castle. I can’t get there fast enough by myself.” She noticed with detached surprise that her voice was steady.

Myr nodded, gestured for her to wait for him, and ducked back into the caves. He returned carrying his sword in one hand, the belt dangling from its sheath, and led the way through a thicket of brambleberry to a smallish clearing.

Carefully, he unsheathed his sword and gave a rueful look to the blade that years of his grandfather’s warring had left unmarred. Then he drove it into the sandy soil, trying not to wince at the grating sound. Another time, Aralorn would have smiled.

When he was done calling the dragon, he stood quietly beside her, not asking her what had happened. It was Aralorn who finally broke the silence.

“We made it into the ae’Magi’s castle. He was waiting for us in the dungeons. I think that Wolf’s spell would have worked anyplace else. There was too much old magic, and the spell wasn’t strong enough and backlashed. I was on the floor already so it didn’t hit me very hard. The ae’Magi was knocked out momentarily. Wolf . . .” Her voice cracked and she stopped, swallowed, and tried again. “Wolf’s back is broken, he tricked me into touching his staff and sent me back here. I don’t know how fast a dragon can fly. Even if it consents to take me to the castle, it will probably be too late.”

She laughed then, though it could have been a sob, and clasped the staff tighter. “He may have been right, and it was too late when he sent me back.”

Myr didn’t say anything, but he put a comforting hand on her shoulder. A cold wind swept down the mountainside, and Aralorn shivered with impatience as much as chill. Even though she was watching intently, she didn’t see the dragon until it was overhead. Silver and green and as graceful as a hummingbird, the great reptile landed and eyed them with interest—or perhaps hunger.

“I need you to get me to the ae’Magi’s castle as fast as possible.” Aralorn knew she was being too abrupt, but she was desperate and couldn’t find courtesy when she needed it. The dragon tilted its head back in offense.

Myr’s grip tightened warningly on Aralorn’s shoulder, as he said, “Dragon, the only one of us who stands a chance of facing down the ae’Magi is hurt and fighting alone at the castle. We need to get there to help him, or the ae’Magi has won. You are our only chance of doing so in time.”

Aralorn started at the “we,” but decided not to protest as it was likely to offend the dragon even more.

The dragon hesitated a minute, then asked, “Speed is important?”

“Very, sir,” Aralorn said carefully, keeping a respectful tone.

It nodded, once. “I can travel much faster than flying, but it means that because of your safeguards against magic, I cannot take you, King Myr. The shapeshifter half-breed I can take.”

Myr looked unhappy, but he nodded his acceptance. When the dragon lowered its belly to the ground and folded its wings, Myr helped Aralorn up as she was hampered by the necessity of keeping the sharp claws at the end of Wolf’s staff away from the dragon.

The scales on the dragon’s back were slick, but otherwise it was no worse than riding a horse bareback—until he began moving. The wings beat steadily until they caught an updraft, then flattened and spread wide—letting the wind pull them south.

Abruptly, the dragon lurched forward, and Aralorn felt a familiar dizziness seize her and clutched the fist-sized scales reflexively. He’d transported them the same way Wolf had sent her back to his library. When she was able to focus her eyes again, the castle of the ae’Magi lay just below.

Shouting, so that the dragon could hear her past the sound of the wind, Aralorn said, “Land wherever you can find a safe place, Lord. I can find my way in.” She still had that little follow-me spell on Wolf’s boot. He’d changed his clothes preparing to face his father, but not his boots.

In acknowledgment of her words, the dragon changed its angle of flight until it was losing altitude fast. Aralorn’s ears popped painfully, and she tightened her grip on the dragon’s scales until they cut into her hand. When the dragon landed, the jolt loosened Aralorn’s grip, and she landed with a thud next to an impressively armed forepaw.

She rolled to her feet with more speed than grace. She turned to face the dragon and bowed respectfully. “My thanks, sir, and apologies for my clumsiness.” Without waiting for a reply, she shifted quickly into a goose and flew as fast as she could to the castle.

The moat didn’t smell any better than it had before, and it took her some time to find an intact pipe that was not plugged with grime. Once she found one, maybe the same one she’d used before, she balanced precariously on it until she could turn into a mouse. Even in mouse form, she had trouble negotiating the tricky business of crawling into the pipe from the top, but she managed. All the while, part of her wailed that she was being too slow.

The corridor she entered was only dimly lit by wall sconces, and from what she could see, it was not one that she’d been in before. She considered staying a mouse but decided that she would have a better chance of recognizing something familiar if she were in human form since she’d been in human form while she was following Wolf.

When she took her own shape again, the staff appeared beside her (she hadn’t been sure that it would). She wondered if it had changed with her, like the sword and her clothes, or if it was following her on its own. She remembered how Wolf would just reach out and it would be there, under his hand. She’d thought it was something Wolf had done. The idea that it had been the staff all along caused her to pick it up gingerly as she started down the hallway.

There were still Uriah posted in the halls. As before, they allowed her to pass without bothering her though they followed her progress with their eyes. She kept a steady, rapid pace, hoping that she would find a clue to where she was soon enough to be of some help to Wolf. The spell on Wolf’s boot was harder to follow in the ae’Magi’s castle than it had been in the caves. She could feel it, but it was a faint whisper instead of a call.

The castle was eerily silent, so that when she heard sounds coming from inside a room, she stopped impulsively and opened the door. Kisrah looked up, startled, from where he’d been eating breakfast in bed with a giggling young beauty.

“Lord Kisrah, you wouldn’t be interested in showing me the way to the dungeons, I suppose?” asked Aralorn. She wondered if she should draw her sword or knife. She didn’t have a chance to act. Something flashed at her out of Lord Kisrah’s hands. Instinctively, because it was already in her grip, she moved to block it with the staff. When the flash hit the dark, oiled wood, the crystals on one end of the staff, which up to this point had been dull and lifeless, flared brightly, and Lord Kisrah’s magic dissipated without a sound.

Unwilling to let him get another spell off, Aralorn attacked with the staff. Lord Kisrah, unarmed, not to mention unclothed, didn’t have much of a chance against Aralorn, who was wielding her favorite type of weapon. Her first blow broke his arm and her second knocked him unconscious on the floor next to the bed.

Aralorn turned to his bedmate with apologies on her lips, but something about the girl made her tighten her grip on the staff instead. Focused intently on the unconscious man, the red-haired woman slithered out of the bedclothes, knocking the bed table with their food onto the floor.

Remembering the harpy that she and Wolf had met earlier, Aralorn tapped the girl’s shoulder gingerly with the clawed end of the staff. She hadn’t realized how sharp the claws were until they drew blood. She felt bad about it until the girl turned and Aralorn got a good look at her.

The girl snarled, and Aralorn jumped back and seriously considered leaving Lord Kisrah to his fate. As the girl moved, her shape altered rapidly into something vaguely reptilian, with a large spiked tail and impressive fangs, not the same as the silk-merchant girl, though maybe they were at different stages.