Her Majesty's Wizard #1 (26 page)

   Flame exploded from the dragon's jaws. Brunel howled and leaped back-into moonlight. He kept on howling.

   Matt stood over the fluxing, changing form, silver knife in hand.

   "Stab him!" Stegoman commanded. "Now, whilst thou canst! Do not doubt him, Wizard-he will slay thee, an he can. Slay him now!"

   Growling fury answered him. A huge, shaggy shape rose up from the ground with eyes of fire.

   "Strike!" the dragon bellowed.

   "I can't," Matt grated. "He isn't shriven; he'd go to Hell."

   The wolf howled exultantly and sprang.

   Matt dived to the side and rolled, fast. Behind him, he heard a flame-blast and a long-drawn howl of anguish. He rolled to his feet, ran around the charred and churning thing on the ground, and leaped up Stegoman's shoulders.

   "Aye," the dragon rumbled as Matt landed between two huge fin-plates. "Rest thee there, the whiles I purify this thing with fire."

   "No!" Matt snapped. "This is a good man, in spite of his sins and weakness! Back off, dragon! He's a force for the good!"

   The churning form gathered itself and rose up, charred no longer, blood in its eye and murder in its throat.

   "What good could be in such a monster?" Stegoman demanded. "What ails thee, Wizard? Thou'lt help Evil, if thou dost let this monster live."

   "No, I'll weaken it! Don't ask me to explain-I know I'm right!"

   The wolf stalked forward stiff-legged, snarling.

   Stegoman stretched his jaws.

   "Turn and go!" Matt bellowed, slamming his heels into the dragon's throat.

   Stegoman swallowed abruptly, jaws slamming shut. The wolf howled and leaped, landing on the dragon's muzzle with twenty claws. Stegoman bellowed in anger and high octane, and the wolf fell back screaming, curled around a burned-out belly.

   "Now!" Matt bellowed in fury. "Go now, before you torture him any more!"

   Stegoman drew back his head, startled by Matt's vehemence.

   "Go!" Matt howled. Behind him, he could hear the burbling sobs of a wounded creature.

   Stegoman muttered in mutiny, but he waddled into motion. His legs might have been short in relation to his body, but that was a lot of body, and the legs were still six feet long. He could move them quickly, too. Matt had no doubts about the dragon being able to outrun the wolf-if he could get Stegoman moving at top speed. "Go! We've got to get the party moving fast! They've only got horses; we've got to make sure they get a good lead on the wolf!"

   Stegoman jolted into his fastest pace. Matt hung on for dear life as the landscape blurred by. When the wolf's howl of fury rang out over the moor again, it was far behind.

   Matt pulled into camp with a bit of difficulty; stopping a dragon was almost as difficult as getting him moving.

   Alisande and Sir Guy stood armed and ready, the Black Knight scarcely more than a glimmer of face and a sheen of sword in his midnight armor. Sayeesa knelt behind them, throwing earth on the coals of the campfire.

   "You're armed and ready to ride?" Matt couldn't believe it.

   "How could we not be, with the racketing across the moor?" Alisande nodded her head toward Matt's back-trail as a long, hungry howl echoed through the night again.

   "I get it." Matt's lips thinned. "You thought you were gonna have to come pull my bacon out of the fire again. Your faith in me is touching."

   "The dragon was sufficient, then." Alisande took her hand off the pommel of her sword.

   "Definitely, though possibly not the way you're thinking. The bacon at stake right now, though, is Father Brunel's."

   Sayeesa looked up, alarmed.

   Matt noted it and tried to ignore it. "He's coming across the moor, hell-bent for leather, and I don't think he really cares whose hide he takes to the tanners. Mount and ride!"

   "Flee?" Sir Guy frowned. "From one lone wolf-man? Nay! We have swords and a silver blade."

   "You really want him killed?" Matt demanded.

   The knight hesitated, but Sayeesa cried, "Nay! He has offended man and God, aye, but he must not die for all that!"

   "She speaks truth," Alisande said with grim conviction. She turned away to her horse. "Come, Sir Guy! We must ride out the night and this curse!"

   Sir Guy pursed his lips and nodded, a gleam coming into his eye as he turned to his charger.

   Matt looked as they pulled out of camp, with himself riding rearguard. A sleek, long-legged shape came loping over the rim of the moor as he watched.

   They bent to the running, and Stegoman soon overhauled the horses and took the lead, in spite of Matt's protests. "No, no! We've got to stay back! I've got the only weapon that can do any good!"

   "What good, when thou wilt not use it?" the dragon growled. He suddenly swerved to the side, just as a great white owl swooped low. The dragon's head snapped up, and he roared, "Harpies! Foul carrion females, preying on helpless fledglings!"

   "No!" Matt wailed. "It's just an owl, Stego--"

   The dragon blasted, and the owl shrieked, tumbling in flames toward the ground-and, tumbling, stretched, blurred, and hardened into the form of a man.

   "Foul shorshererzh, who sheek dragon'zh blood," Stegoman growled.

   Matt swallowed, hard.

   The Sorcerer's form blurred again just before it landed. It shrank and hardened as it touched ground-and a dark-brown, three-foot iguana scuttled for cover.

   "Lord Matthew," called Alisande, "what means this?"

   "I get the feeling we're being watched," Matt called back. He had no doubt about whose orders the shape-changer had been following.

   He also had a nagging suspicion that Sayeesa's presence wasn't the only reason Brunel had gone were.

CHAPTER 12

   Ten miles later, Matt pulled up beside the Black Knight. "Sir Guy! Any idea where we are?"

   "Far to the west of where we were," the knight told him: "Where else, matters little."

   "We have tended much toward the north," Alisande added. "Saving that, we can say little."

   Matt glanced behind; and, sure enough, there was the wolf, chugging along just this side of the horizon, loosing an occasional frustrated bay.

   "'Ware!" Sir Guy cried, and Matt swiveled back, eyes front.

   A long, dark line stretched across the forward horizon, sweeping away out of sight it either direction. It grew larger as they moved nearer; he began to make out masses of leaves and trunks gleaming silver in the moonlight. "A forest! Any idea where we..."

   "Aye," the princess said grimly. "'Tis the Forest Maugraime and it runs away a score of miles to either side of our path."

   Matt nodded. "I take ii there's no point in trying to go around.''"

   "I would say not."

   "Okay." Matt sighed, heaving himself up for the haul. "Anything particular I should know about this place. Enchanted, or anything like that?"

   "You have named it." Sir Guy's teeth flashed in the moonlight, and Matt almost shuddered. Bad things seemed to happen when the knight grinned. "'Tis a place of weird power, Lord Wizard spells strung 'tween the branches of the trees. 'Tis old power here, but not always unfriendly."

   Matt frowned. "Who runs it?"

   Sir Guy shrugged. "Many, or none. This forest was spellbound before ever men came here, Lord Matthew; 'twill like as not hold enchantments when we are fled."

   That Matt definitely didn't like. If the spirits that ruled here had been here before men, they were elementals, or close to them-embodiments of the forces of nature. Earth spirits and the like.

   Then the companions were in among the branches, and it was too late to consider the matter.

   Matt caught his breath in admiration. Silvered trunks surrounded him; festoons of long, black-and-silver leaves draped down, like Spanish moss. There was a hush to the wood, filled only with a faint, distant murmur of breezes ruffling leaves. They rode in close silence; the thuds of the horses' hooves seemed to strike right next to Matt's ear. The forest swallowed up sound.

   Branches brushed by them; then, as they trotted further down the deer-trail, the branches stiffened, and the brushes became swats. Not good, Matt thought. It would definitely slow them down. A branch clutched at his sleeve; he brushed it away. The wolf, having a lower profile and pads instead of hooves, could make greater speed through the underbrush than they could.

   Sayeesa screamed behind him. Matt tried to turn-and couldn't. Those clutching branches were really clutching. Something jerked hard on his arm, almost yanking him out of the saddle. Small twigs on the end of a branch had wrapped themselves around his arm; it felt like the clasp of a skeletal hand. Something yanked at his other arm. He looked and saw two more leafy hands clasping his other arm and thigh.

   Alisande shouted in anger, and Sir Guy bellowed. Matt craned his neck around and saw the knight and the ladies clasped by a score or more of leafy hands. Sayeesa had been pulled up two feet off the back of her mare. She screamed, more in anger than in fear, lashing out with her feet at the nearest branch. A twig-hand caught her ankle and started pulling.

   "Lord Wizard!" Alisande shouted. "Enchant a spell, I implore you! We cannot free our swords. If you cannot save us now, we will be bound up in bark!"

   It was nice to be appreciated. "Stegoman! Light up!"

   The dragon reared back its head and loosed a blast, raking the trees with flame, and Matt chanted:

   "We shall vanquished be, unless The Burnin' Wood to high Dunsinane hill Shall go from us!"

   Then he added--

   "Anon, me thought, the wood began to move! Within this three mile we may see it go, I say, a moving grove!"

   Something tickled his eardrums-a high-pitched sound, almost too high to hear; but somehow, he knew it was screaming, filling the forest all about them: Stegoman swiveled his head around, blasting back high over Sir Guy's and the ladies' heads. Flamelets leaped up on branches, met, and grew, licking high along the limbs, running on back toward the trunks. Groaning filled the wood, echoing all about them, below the high-pitched screaming. The trees began to rock from side to side, as if a gale were blowing through the forest. Here and there, a great taproot yanked free of the earth-then another and another, until a tree actually pulled up its roots and began to walk backward. Another followed it, then three more, then a dozen, until the whole lane of trees was moving backward on its roots, like great, splayed feet, away from the dragon. Twiggy hands loosed their holds, dropping the humans. Sayeesa fell back on her horse; it jarred an imprecation out of her.

   Overhead, branches whipped at other branches, trying to swat the flames out.

   "Above you," Sir Guy warned softly.

   Matt looked up. Tiny figures filled the branches, foot-high humanoids, wearing shaggy tunics of green and brown and cross gartered bias-hosen, throwing shot-glass-sized buckets of water on the flames.

   "Elves!" Matt cried. "There's intelligence here to reason with!"

   "Dost'a wish to parley, then?"

   Matt whipped around and found himself facing a slightly larger elf, poised atop the head of Sir Guy's horse. A circlet of gold bound his brow; he fixed Sir Guy with a glittering stare.

   Sir Guy lifted his visor in respect. "You are the king?"

   "Headman only," the elf said impatiently. "In your terms, perhaps a duke. I beg you, let not your beast inflame our trees again! If they die, we die! Call them back, the great Barked People! Let them not all flee us! Leave us these, our trees!"

   "Yeah, sure," Matt murmured. Then louder, "Sure, anything, you say! If you call the trees off..."

   But the duke didn't even seem to hear Matt. He dropped to one knee, pleading hands upraised to the Black Knight. "I beg you, Sir Knight! Let the flames depart! Call our trees to halt and set their roots again enduring!"

   Sir Guy glanced at Matt, then back to the elf. "Assuredly, Lord Duke, if you rebuke your trees, instructing them not to harm us and to allow us passage."

   "We will; 'tis done!" The elf leaped to his feet and shot straight into the air, landing on the nearest branch. "Old ones!" he shouted. "Ancient people! Speak you to your trees! Make clear to them that these mortals will leave off a-hurting them, if they hold fast, forebearing to molest the mortals!"

   A murmur of talk, like the buzzing of a thousand bumblebees, filled the forest. The trees hesitated in their backward push:

   "Douse the flames," Sir Guy said quietly to Matt, "and we'll have peace here."

   "More hunterzh! I need more!" Stegoman growled, glowering about him. "Couldn't be these tiny ones; a dragon hunter towers high above a hatchling..."

   "There aren't any dragon hunters here, old boy," Matt soothed. "Calm down; we're getting something resembling peace here, or at least a stalemate." Then he threw his head back, and called to the sky:

   "Rain, rain, come again,