The Ruin (3 page)

Taegan couldn’t tell what effect the warlock intended to create. But he suspected it was likely to kill or cripple him, and that the subtle illusion that had thus far frustrated the lancers wouldn’t hinder it in the slightest. Unfurling his wings, he gathered himself for a desperate spring at the magician. A sword stroke, even if it failed to connect, might rattle the Nar and spoil his conjuring.

Unfortunately, the nomads to either side of the wizard discerned Taegan’s intent and angled their lances to protect their comrade. If the avariel made the leap, he would only impale himself on the tips of the spears.

A plume of glittering vapor swept upward from the ground and in an arc from right to left. Caught in the fumes, the mage, his protectors, and even their mounts swayed drunkenly. Smirking, chortling, the spellcaster broke off his incantation, from the sound of it just a syllable or two short of the conclusion.

Jivex popped into view. By making an attack, he’d forfeited the veil of invisibility that had shielded him before. The arrow stuck in his back, where one platinum butterfly wing joined the torso, revealed why he was crawling instead of flying.

Jivex scurried toward Taegan. Other Nars, who’d avoided a whiff of the faerie dragon’s breath weapon, kicked their mounts forward and lowered their spears to stick him.

Jivex whinnied as if he were a horse himself, and most of the mounts shied. Taegan lunged at the one that kept coming, hacked the head off the rider’s lance, then balked the steed with a slash to the shoulder. The animal screamed and floundered backward.

Jivex leaped onto Taegan’s back and clung between the roots of his pinions. The avariel hadn’t expected it, and the sudden weight sent a twinge of bright agony through his ankle and knocked him staggering.

“Stop clowning!” Jivex said. “Get us out of here.”

Taegan began the spell, dodged one lance and parried another. Jivex stared and by dint of his innate magical abilities, produced coils of thin gray mist. When the stuff touched a tribesman or his mount, they faltered as if it had abruptly become difficult to remember what they were supposed to be doing.

Taegan reached the end of his incantation. The world shattered into spinning light, then formed itself anew. But the milling Nars were hundreds of yards away. Taegan threw himself down in the grass so the barbarians wouldn’t spot him.

“Ouch!” said Jivex, still clinging to his back. “Be careful! When you fling yourself around, it hurts my wing!”

“As you’re rending my shoulders,” Taegan replied. “Was it truly necessary to sink your claws in?”

The dragon sniffed. “Don’t whine so much. You sound like a hatchling.”

Taegan sighed. “Hop off and let me inspect your wound.”

Pavel scanned the darkening sky, looking for some sign of Taegan and Jivex, who’d flown off to the north, then descended behind a rise. According to Raryn, it had been to make contact with a column of horsemen. Pavel had no idea how the squat, ruddy-skinned arctic dwarf knew that, but had no doubt his friend was correct.

“Kara and I could go after them,” said Dorn, standing beside the wagon, his enormous iron arm and leg black and vague in the failing light. “We could fly there in just a minute or two.”

“But only if I take dragon form,” Kara said. At the moment, she wore her more customary shape of a slender woman with violet eyes and moon-blond hair. “And if the Nars see a wyrm approaching, they’re likely to panic.”

“Particularly with an ogre-ish thing made half of metal

mounted on your back,” conceded Dorn, but without so much of the old bitterness. Since he and Kara had become lovers, his capacity for self-loathing had diminished. “Still, if our friends are in trouble—”

“Here comes Taegan, anyway!” exclaimed Will, standing in the wagon bed amid the bundled gifts they carried to ingratiate themselves with the tribesmen. Curling black lovelocks framed the halfling’s face, and his curved hunting sword, seemingly oversized for a member of a race the size of half-grown human children, hung at his side. “But where’s Jivex?”

Raryn peered, blue eyes squinting beneath bushy white brows. “Taegan’s carrying him. They did have trouble, and we’d best be ready for more.” He removed his bow from the wagon and strung it with one smooth, seemingly effortless motion.

Taegan touched down, wincing as his feet received his weight, favoring the right one. He set Jivex gently on the ground, and the faerie dragon rewarded him with a hiss.

“Jivex needs your help, Master Shemov,” the avariel said, “and afterwards, I’ll be most appreciative if you can look at my ankle.”

“Of course,” Pavel said. He kneeled down to examine the dragon’s wound.

Will ostentatiously turned away. “I won’t watch the charlatan butcher another victim. My heart can’t bear it.”

“Quiet,” snapped Dorn. He pivoted toward Taegan. “What happened out there?”

“About what you’d imagine,” said Taegan. He sat down on the ground and massaged his ankle through his oxblood leather boot, which he still kept polished to a gleaming shine even after tendays on the trail. “We approached a few dozen Nars, not realizing they were a war party. They gave us some trifling trouble before we won clear.”

The broadhead arrow had driven deep into muscle. Pavel knew his magic could mend the wound, but only after he extracted the shaft. “I need to cut this out,” he murmured,

“and it’s going to hurt. It will help if you can remain still.” “Of course I can,” the faerie dragon said. “I am Jivex, after all.”

“Were the Nars hunting us in particular?” asked Dorn.

Taegan shrugged, a gesture performed by the gleaming raven wings as well as the shoulders. “I can’t say. But now that they’ve found us, indeed, skirmished with a pair of us, I’m reasonably certain we’ll see more of them. They don’t seem the sort of fellows to leave a quarrel unresolved.”

Pavel opened his pouch of surgical instruments and purified the steel scalpels, probes, and tongs with a pulse of conjured redgold radiance.

“Where are they, then?” asked Will, scanning the horizons, his warsling dangling in his hand. “They must know where we are, if only by watching where Taegan landed, and those Nar horses are fast. It shouldn’t take them this much time to gallop over here.”

“I imagine Taegan and Jivex used magic to escape,” Raryn said. “That may have convinced them to proceed with caution. To wait a while and make a night attack.”

Pavel sliced into Jivex’s shining scales. The faerie dragon hissed and stiffened, but true to his promise, kept himself from flinching. Fresh blood welled forth, filling the human’s nose with its coppery tang. Kara took a step back, lest the scent enflame the frenzy caged in her mind.

“Well,” said Will, “in any case, it’s really not a problem, is it? Like Kara said, one look at her in dragon form, and they’ll run. You should probably reveal yourself now, singer, before they shoot any more arrows our way.”

“I could,” Kara said, “but then we’d lose our chance to talk to them.”

Will snorted. “I believe that bird has already flown.”

“I hope not,” Kara said, “because we’ve already conferred with the Adorabe, the Var, the Dag Nost—all the friendly tribes—and learned nothing. We must now find a way to question those without ties to Gareth Dragonsbane. Otherwise, our mission will fail.”

“It might come to nothing in any case,” Taegan said. “The savage Nars may know no more than the others.”

“At the very least,” said Pavel, without looking up from his work, “I’m reasonably certain Sammaster spent some time in Narfell. One of the inks he used to write his cipher—”

“There you have it!” said Will. “If the imbecile thinks we have something to learn here, we can be sure it isn’t so.” He chuckled. “Still, it would be nice to have some tidbit to chuck onto the table at the Feast of the Moon.”

The seekers and their allies had agreed to assemble in Thentia on that date three months hence, to share their discoveries and formulate a final plan of action. If they had no new information, or too little to point them to their goal, then, soon after, the metallic dragons’ psychic defenses would fall before the ever-burgeoning power of the Rage, they’d all go mad and remain that way forever after, and their ruin would mean death, suffering, and oppression for countless other folk across the length and breadth of Faerűm.

“It would indeed,” said Taegan. He smiled at Kara. “What do you have in mind, radiant Lady?”

“Music,” she said. “My magic will ensure the Nars hear the song a long way off, before they come close enough to begin shooting, and likewise enhance the charm of the music. Once they do venture near, sorcery will make me seem the most beautiful, virtuous, regal woman they’ve ever seen. The right sort of conjured light, playing around my person, will heighten the glamour. With luck, the total effect will cozen them into approaching us peacefully.”

Dorn scowled. “I don’t like it. You’re talking about fixing all their attention on yourself, and such charms don’t always work. It could be you’ll wind up making yourself a nice, shining target in the dark.”

Yes, Pavel thought, and while in human form, Kara is as susceptible to harm as any ordinary woman.

He drew the arrow from Jivex’s wound, wiped the blood from the point, examined it, and found no sign of poison or death magic.

“I’m not inordinately enamored of the idea, either,” Taegan said, “particularly since the Nars have a wizard of their own. It’s possible he’ll resist your enchantments, then do his utmost to free his comrades from your influence. On the positive side, however, if the barbarians do attack, their first effort will likely take the form of a volley of arrows. We have a spell to protect you from that.”

“Too bad the elf who knows it lacked the brains to cast on me,” Jivex muttered, just loudly enough to make sure everyone heard.

“What if the magician hurls fire or ice?” Dorn asked. “Do we have a charm to shield her from that?”

“Not with absolute certainty,” Kara said. “But I know wards that will improve my chances.”

“In addition,” said Taegan, “Raryn and Jivex can see in the dark, and Kara has a spell to confer that ability on the rest of us. Some of us can spread out, hide, and monitor the Nars. With better chances,” he added, “than they have of seeing us. If one of them tries to initiate hostilities, we’ll spot it, and take him down at once.”

Dorn shook his head, grotesque with the iron half-mask sheathing the left profile and the traces of puckered scar tissue peeking out from underneath. “No. It’s too—”

Kara silenced the half-golem simply by giving him a smile. “A few nomads aren’t that much of a danger, are they, compared to what we already faced, in Northkeep and the Monastery of the Yellow Rose?”

He hesitated, then growled, “No. I suppose not.”

Pavel’s imagination filled in the words his friend couldn’t bring himself to say, at least, not in front of everyone: It’s just that I love you so much, I’m terrified of losing you, and sometimes it slips out.

“But,” Dorn continued, “we’re going to be do this as safely as we can, and at the first sign of trouble, you transform.”

Kara inclined her head and curtsied. “As my captain commands.”

Pavel murmured a healing prayer, and his hand tingled with warmth and crimson light. He pressed it against the gory cavity at the base of Jivex’s wing. New tissue grew to fill the gap, and unblemished scales sprouted to seal the rawness over.

A skiprock ready in his sling, Will lay on his belly behind a clump of grass. Thanks to Kara’s magic, he could see clearly for a few dozen yards, though colors mostly washed out to gray.

Wreathed in soft, shifting, multicolored light, the bard sang a ways behind him, near the seekers’ horses, ponies, and wagon. The song’s lyrics celebrated the joys of wandering far on horseback, and the bond between rider and steed. Infused with glamour as it was, it kept threatening to captivate Will as thoroughly as it was supposed to enchant the Nars. He had to keep wrenching his attention back to the task at hand.

Off to Will’s right, Pavel lay in a depression in the earth. It wasn’t much cover—the flat grasslands were miserly when it came to providing places to hide—but in the dark, perhaps it would serve. The lanky, yellow-haired priest cradled a crossbow in his hands.

Walking their horses with nary a whicker, a creak of tack, or a jingle of harness, the Nars began to appear at the limits of Will’s vision. Like Kara’s defenders, the barbarians had spread out, perhaps even encircling the outlanders completely.

But as they rode closer, the halfling saw reason for hope that they wouldn’t follow through on their hostile designs. Bows and lances dangled, seemingly forgotten, in their hands. Some smiled childlike smiles.

Not all of them, though, at least not all the time. Certain Nars, those with the strongest wills and sharpest wits, most likely, periodically balked, frowned, blinked, or shook their heads, as if trying to cast off some manner of confusion.

The fellow who hesitated most often and seemed to be struggling the hardest was a sharp-nosed runt with a black wand in his hand. He must be the magician Taegan and Jivex had mentioned. Will considered slinging a stone and knocking him unconscious, but decided against it. If the other Nars noticed their comrade had suffered an attack, that might break Kara’s hold on them all by itself.

The mage muttered something to an ugly, hulking barbarian who was likely the chief. Will suspected it was a warning. Enthralled by Kara’s vibrant melody, though, the leader didn’t seem to hear. He just rode closer to the singer in her veils of shimmering light, and after a moment, the warlock’s mouth stretched into a grin. He stuck his wand inside his boot and followed his companion.

This is going to work, thought Will. Dip me in pitch if it isn’t.

Somewhere in the darkness, something squawked—or seemed to. With Kara’s song amplified to carry over a distance, and infused with a power that made a listener want to attend to it and it alone, it was hard to catch other sounds. Will wasn’t sure what he’d actually heard.

But he knew he’d heard something, because the warlock and some of the other Nars reacted. They reined in their horses, sat up straighter, looked around, and readied their weapons.