Days of Air and Darkness - Katharine Kerr [7]
When it was gone, she lowered her arms, then visualized a sword of light in her right hand. Once the image lived apart from her will, she circled the roof, walking deosil, and used the sword to draw a huge ring of golden light in the sky. As the ring settled to earth, it sheeted out, forming a burning wall round the entire town of Cengarn. Three times round she went, until the wall lived on the etheric of its own will. At each ordinal point, she put a seal in the shape of a five-pointed star made of blue fire. After the sigils of the kings of the elements blazed at the four directions, she spread the light until it was not a ring but an enormous sphere of gold, roofing over the dun and the town both and extending down under them as well. Two last seals at zenith and nadir, and Cengarn hung in the many-layered worlds like a bubble in glass.
At the end of the working, she withdrew the force from the image of the sword, dissolving it, then stamped three times on the roof. Sunlight brightened round her, and she could hear the sounds of the dun, shut out earlier by sheer concentration. The portion of the sphere above the earth, however, remained visible—that is, visible to someone with dweomer sight. Such sight could never penetrate the glowing shell, and everyone inside the sphere would be safe from prying eyes as well as from spirits sent by their enemies.
Before she left, she made one last attempt to find Rhodry. This time, nothing—not one scrap of vision, not the slightest sense of place. With a shake of her head, she went down to the noise and bustle of the great hall, where men talked in low voices of matters of war.
Rhodry was at that moment flying south from the Roof of the World on dragonback, which is not the smoothest sort of traveling in the world. Each wing beat thrust Arzosah forward in a rolling motion, at times close to a jump, especially when she was gaining height. Sitting on her neck or shoulder felt like standing on the prow of a small boat heading out from shore against the waves. After some days of practice, though, Rhodry had found his balance. Rather than trying to straddle her neck like a horse, he knelt and sat forward, steadied by his knees, resting as much on his own heels as her flesh so that he could roll with her wing beats. Bracing himself against them was futile. At times, he would let go the ropes, first with one hand, then with both, to see how secure he really was.
What he needed to learn next, he realized, was fighting from dragonback. He carried a curved elvish hunting bow which might serve him in battle, though he wanted to fight close in as well as from an archer’s distance. A spear would do splendidly, he decided. He could brace himself between two scales and thrust with a long spear as his Deverrian ancestors were said to have done back in the Dawntime, before they’d left their original homeland, that mysterious country called Gallia, now lost to their descendants forever.
By leaning well forward and screaming at the top of his lungs, Rhodry could talk to Arzosah in fits and starts.
“Have you seen any traces of Horsekin?”
“What do you mean, traces? You can see the road they took as well as I.”
He sighed. He was learning that she could be very literal minded.
“I mean, have you seen any Horsekin? Now, I mean. Ones we can fight.”
“Oh. No.”
“Well, keep an eye open, will you?”
“Of course, I— Here! What’s this?”
She flung up her head and sniffed the wind, then with a curve of her wings beat backwards to slow and steady herself in midflight.
“Horsekin?” Rhodry said.
“Dweomer! I smell it strong!”
Rhodry swung his head round, scanning for enemies. He, too, could feel a sensation for which smell seemed as apt a metaphor as any, a tingling in the air that transmitted itself to the skin of his face and hands. For the briefest of moments, the sky ahead of them