Days of Air and Darkness - Katharine Kerr [135]
“None of them had much stomach for a fight, did they?” Brel considered for a long moment. “Huh, well, I’m not going to judge the entire army by this one detachment. They might have had their reasons for being so demoralized.”
“Just so. We can’t count on this happening again. As for the raven, the dragon’s right. She’s terrified of Arzosah.”
On the morrow, Brel sent the badly wounded men and the roped-together prisoners back to Lin Serr in the care of the lightly wounded, then reorganized his squads and marched on south. Rhodry returned to his scout duty, riding Arzosah high above the line of march. After her feast of dead horse, she was in a splendid mood, swirling and swooping with great flaps of her wings, calling back the occasional jest about what she was going to do with the raven when she found her.
“Roast her, slice her, eat her all up!” Arzosah chanted. “You build me a fire, Dragonmaster, and well have a fine fowl for the table.”
“Roast her yourself,” he called back. “Can’t you breathe fire?”
Arzosah snorted, an explosion of sound.
“Of course not! What a silly tale that is! Why, if we could breathe fire, we’d burn our mouths. We’d bake our teeth and turn them brittle. Disgusting thought, really!”
They swooped toward the dwarven army, which was at that point marching through a shallow valley. As Arzosah overshot them and began to circle toward the west, Rhodry happened to glance at the southern end of that valley, where the road climbed to a narrow pass between the flanks of two hills. Across the pass hung a vast shimmering curtain of mist.
“Stop!” Rhodry shrieked. “Arzosah, turn back, turn back!”
She obeyed immediately, but turning in midair when you’re flying fast is not such an easy thing to do. As she dipped down, Rhodry was thinking out strategy. Obviously, when the dwarves saw the mist, they’d halt. Should they then all try to march through that veil to face Alshandra? The army carried plenty of cold steel, after all, to work her harm, provided they were armed and ready for the fight. When Arzosah straightened out her flight and headed back toward the army, Rhodry realized that the dwarves weren’t stopping, that they were marching straight on into the pass as if they saw nothing there—realized that they must have seen nothing. This mist hung thin and lavender-pale, not thick and billowing like the others, and it must have been invisible to anyone without elven blood or dweomer sight.
Yelling and cursing, Rhodry hung perilously far over Arzosah’s neck and screamed at Brel to halt as the dragon glided downward. Too late. The front ranks jogged forward into the mist; moving at their solid dwarven pace, the rest of the squads followed.
“After them!” Rhodry yelled.
“Are you daft?”
“Do what I say! Follow them!”
With a shriek for the folly of it, Arzosah dived and swooped through the gate of mist into another country. Rhodry found himself flying over a broad brown plain, swirling with dust as the dwarven army below disintegrated into a shouting, spinning confusion. The sky hung low, as copper as the dust, while a great roil of clouds or perhaps smoke masked a bloody sun, huge and hanging low in the west.
“Horrible!” Arzosah moaned. “Absolutely horrible!”
“I see Brel over there trying to restore order at the edge. Land near him.”
Whining and griping, she settled to earth in a spew of copper-colored dust. Rhodry slid down and ran to the warleader, who was alternately bellowing orders and blowing on a silver horn. Garin caught Rhodry’s arm.
“What in the name of every god has happened to us?” the envoy snarled.
“It’s some trap of Alshandra’s. I couldn’t warn you in time. You didn’t see it? It was a mist, like, but purple, and hanging over the road.”
“Not a thing. One moment we were hup-hupping up the pass, the next we were marching out here. Wait. For a bit, there, as we were marching, I thought the light was growing dim, somehow, but I thought I was just tired. Oh, ye gods!”
In a remarkably short time, Brel restored order. The men found their squads, the squads