War of Wizards (8 page)

The three companions stood near a small cluster of archers with their arrows lined in position behind the wall, and a single ballista with a loaded bolt. The men were cursing, glancing over their shoulders as if they wanted to flee back into the city.

Darik nudged Rouhani and Ethan to get them moving. They continued along the wall walk for a few minutes, then came onto the roof of one of the small guard towers that punctuated the wall at intervals. This one stood where the city wall curved to face the northern approaches, and should have been heavily manned, but curiously, only a handful of archers guarded it, and these stood shoulder to shoulder. Their bows were out, arrows notched, but not yet drawn.

In spite of this odd detail, Darik might have stumbled past them if he hadn’t been intently studying the magical trail. But the trail didn’t carry across to the wall walk on the opposite side, it cut to the edge of the tower roof and stopped at the five archers. As he stared, the bows and arrows seemed to disappear in their hands, the golden dragon of the House of Saffa dissolved from their cloaks. They wore gray robes with drawn hoods. Not so different from how Darik and his companions had dressed upon leaving the palace.

Wizards.
Magic hung about them, an aura of power. He’d never sensed that before, but now, still under the influence of the spell he’d cast in the Grand Bazaar, it seemed as much a part of them as their legs or arms. They hadn’t yet spotted the three men cloaked in shadow who had been hunting them.

Darik held out an arm to stop his companions, then gestured with his hooded head toward the enemy wizards. Ethan and Rouhani stiffened. For a moment, the three of them stood frozen. The five wizards had begun to chant. The sun was a ball of flame to the west, falling below the horizon. Soon, it would be night.

Now what? Fight them? But how? Darik’s left hand was blackened into a claw, withdrawn into his sleeve, and throbbing. He could use his other hand to call more magic, but doubt had taken him, and he worried that his effort would fizzle and sputter. And even if it didn’t, he’d then be left with two useless hands, and no way to draw his sword. That would leave Rouhani and Ethan to face five wizards powerful enough to command an army of wights, while Darik tried to raise more men to aid in the fight.

Rouhani leaned in and whispered in Darik’s ears. “Destroy them.”

The captain’s voice was low, no louder than a breeze across the desert sand, but instantly, one of the enemies whipped his head in their direction. He threw back his hood and drew his hands from beneath his cloak. Words of power came to his lips.

Chapter Seven

Daria was exhausted, and her griffin was flagging, by the time she reached the foothills at the base of the Dragon’s Spine. Snow covered the upper peaks, and after so many days flying across deserts and dry plains, she wanted nothing more than to climb to the higher reaches and find an icy stream to bathe in. What a relief that would be! She was dusty and dirty and perpetually hot.

But she’d left her mother on bad terms. Again. Had returned to her aerie after dropping Markal off with Whelan’s army only to hear that a griffin rider had spotted the injured dragon flying out of the desert. Daria told her mother to gather the riders, but Palina had angrily insisted that it was not their fight. Daria reminded her mother who was the leader of the flock, then set off to search for the monster. Now she was anxious to get back and find out if her mother had obeyed the order.

She brought Talon above the meadows and hardwood forests of the hills and into the sweet-smelling pine of the lower shoulders of the mountains. There, she cut south toward her aerie. The sun was already behind the mountains and casting long shadows across the plains to the east. Some instinct drew her attention in that direction.

And it was then that she spotted the dragon wasps. They were three or four miles off, distant enough that Darik would have squinted with his weak lowland eyes, unable to see them, but she could pick them out clearly enough. Medium-size wasps, maybe eight or nine feet long, each carrying a single dragon kin. Wasps were young dragons, and these were probably the offspring of the monster she’d attacked and wounded earlier in the fall.

Under other circumstances, Daria might have turned and chased them off. She was only one against their three, but a few skirmishes over the past two weeks had confirmed Talon’s power. Dragon wasps were scared to approach the aggressive golden griffin, and the dragon kin had a hard time getting close enough to Daria to use their spears. But she was tired, and so was her mount. Still, she couldn’t afford to lead them to the aeries, so she climbed higher in the mountain to lose them before returning home.

Daria came over the top of one of the shorter peaks, flew briefly down into a grassy mountain valley on the western side of the range as she continued south, then came back up over the top again. But when she got to the eastern side, the enemy was waiting for her, this time only two hundred yards east and a thousand feet or so below. They must have continued following the mountains south in anticipation of her return. She’d used that tactic one time too many, and they had apparently learned it.

Daria reached for her horn. She was close enough to home that a long blast might bring more griffin riders to her aid. But there were only three enemies. Surely, she didn’t need help.

Talon spotted the wasps and screamed. He pulled on his tether, anxious to fight. Daria was exasperated, her patience gone, angry with the enemy for following her almost to her very home, and so she let the griffin have his way. He pulled back his wings and dove at the dragon wasps.

The enemy pulled into formation, the kin holding their spears in a line like a row of pikemen bracing against a cavalry charge. Talon hurled himself toward them as if he would impale himself, but at the last moment, Daria gave a tug to the tether, and he angled to one side. She leaned almost completely off the griffin as they flew past. Only her thigh muscles and a single cord wrapped around one ankle kept her from falling to her death. The enemy spear brushed her shoulder. As it touched, she slashed with the sword. Her blade got past the spear, and the tip pierced flesh.

The dragon kin dropped his spear, and it fell spinning toward the trees below. He clutched his neck briefly, then slumped face down on the back of his mount. Blood gleamed on the end of Daria’s sword, and she knew the man would not be rejoining the fight.

With its rider no longer giving directions, the dragon wasp veered away with a screech and fled the battlefield with its leathery wings beating furiously. The other two kin regrouped and tried to gain altitude with their mounts so they wouldn’t be caught from above a second time, but Daria had already brought her griffin around, and they screamed between the two remaining wasps to drive them apart. Then, before they could recover, she came in a third time.

Talon seized one of the wasps by its tail. His beak darted in, tearing. Daria hacked at the creature’s scales. The dragon wasp writhed and screeched and tried to tear itself free from the double attack. As it did, the man on its back lost
his
spear, too, as he struggled to hold on. Daria leaned out again, slashing. She couldn’t reach the dragon kin, but she could get at the tethers and cords and cut through them. The kin lost his grip and fell with a cry. It was two hundred feet to the trees, and he screamed all the way down, falling silent only when he crashed into the branches. Talon took a final stab at the dragon wasp with his beak, then hurled the dying creature down after its master.

The final dragon kin and wasp fled for their lives. She let them go.

Daria didn’t feel triumphant, only exhausted. Defeating wasps and dragon kin was one thing, but the mature dragon, having devoured its rivals and grown to monstrous size, would be another matter. She’d gathered all the riders, fought a terrific battle, wounded it almost at the cost of her own life, and driven it from the mountains. It had retreated to the desert to nurse its wounds, and now, only a couple of months later, was once again terrorizing the skies. She’d spotted it flying in the khalifates.

Praise the Mountain Brother that she’d seen it at a distance, or she’d be dead now. Instead, she’d raced to the mountains to warn her mother, then gone back to the khalifates to search for it. No sign of the thing, though she guessed it was headed east toward the armies brawling outside the gates of Veyre. Daria had flown around for several days, sleeping in ruined hilltop towers and trying to work up her courage to descend into all of those soldiers again so she could warn Markal and Whelan, when she noticed a column of smoke.

The smoke came from the city of Starnar. Its walls had been breached, its palaces and bazaars smashed. Starnar was a mass of flames, and the dead were everywhere, both within and outside the walls. Thousands of refugees had been slaughtered, and thousands more were fleeing in terror.

She found the enemy army the next day. An army of the dead. They were approaching Ter, soon to encircle
its
walls, too. After that, where? Balsalom? Daria had to summon the courage to land among the flatlanders, no matter her fear. She told herself it was to warn the khalifa of Balsalom about the army of wights ravaging the Western Khalifates. But she’d also hoped to find Darik in the city. He was not there. So that morning, she’d lifted from the palace and flown west, toward home.

Daria resisted the urge to stop at her aerie. She’d left a young cousin with her fledglings, and though the boy was only eleven, she had no doubt he was caring for them well. Instead, she continued along the mountains until she reached her mother’s home, several miles farther south and higher in the peaks.

Palina lived in a stone watchtower built next to an ancient and abandoned trade route through the mountains. Here and there you could see remnants of the old road, flat and overgrown with gnarled pine trees except where it passed over bare stone. But most of the road had long since crumbled into a gorge carved by a churning mountain stream. A sheer granite face rose behind Palina’s tower, which was so eroded and overgrown with moss that it was indistinguishable from the mountain itself until you were practically upon it.

Her mother’s griffin cried a warning as Daria brought Talon in for a landing. The smaller, white-feathered animal cringed back against the far wall when they entered the aerie. Daria dismounted and began to untie her saddlebag, while the two griffins eyed each other.

Palina poked up through the trap door in the floor moments later, concern on her face. It vanished when she saw what had caused the disturbance.

“Tie your animal to the rings,” she said.

“Talon won’t hurt her.”

“Yes, but she doesn’t know that.”

Daria frowned, but did as she was told. Had the tower not been so precariously placed, the weather was clear enough that she could have nested Talon outside. She stroked the animal’s feathers and muscular back haunches as she looped the tethers through the rings on the wall. They were meant to discourage untrained fledglings from flying off on their own, but wouldn’t keep Talon if he were determined to free himself. He’d cut them and fly away.

“You be good,” she warned. “If I have to go track you down in the high mountains, I won’t be happy about it.”

He keened, and she kissed him on the beak.

Daria descended the ladder into the single room that made up her mother’s living quarters. A pot of bubbling venison and wild carrot stew bubbled over a crackling fire. The rich aroma made Daria’s stomach growl. She hadn’t eaten anything but rabbit and raw mutton for days.

It was only when she turned her attention from the fire that she noticed the transformation in her mother’s home. The shelves had been cleaned of pots. The books had been stacked into a small pile on one end of the shelf and tied together with birch bark twine. Two swords, a leather breastplate, and a spear stood next to the door, wrapped in deerskin. And there was little evidence of her mother’s trade: no hanging deer hides, and the clay jars of dye had been sealed and put away.

During the long, solitary stretches, her mother passed the time making soft deerskin boots, belts, and cloaks, dying them and then imprinting the leather with the shape of leaves or the heads of owls and hawks. Other riders gave Palina tools, cookware, salt, and even firewood in trade. The braver sorts might then take some of Palina’s handiwork down to the hill country to trade for tools, pottery, and raw iron. Griffin feathers were also a desired commodity outside the mountains, and together with leather and hides, formed the majority of what the griffin riders offered the flatlanders in trade.

Daria had never liked the smell of the leatherworking, which was one of many reasons why she’d chosen to live with her father. But the pungent odor of fresh hides was gone, as well as the sharp scent of dyes.

“Take a seat,” Palina said. “You must be hungry.”

“What is this? Why have you cleaned up?”

“It was a mess. The mice were growing annoying.”

“It was always a mess, and since when have mice bothered you?”

“When they start gnawing holes in clothing to make their nests, that’s when. And then it’s time to clear away their hiding places and kick them out of doors again.”

Daria narrowed her eyes, skeptical. But she took off the hunting horn, hooked the leather thong over the edge of the chair, and sat down, then waited as her mother ladled stew into wooden bowls. She didn’t start eating until her mother sat down.

“This isn’t a clean up. You’re preparing to change aeries. Why?”

“We’re leaving, Daria.”

“Who is leaving? Where?” Daria set the bowl on the edge of the hearth, where it sat steaming. “This is about the dragon, isn’t it? I told you to gather the flock. Why haven’t you done it?”

“What makes you think I haven’t?”

“Then what is all this?”

“You are a war leader, Daria. That’s all it means to be the flockheart. You have no power to command on other matters, only to advise.”

Daria sprang to her feet. “This
is
a war!”