Days of Air and Darkness - Katharine Kerr [85]
Rhodry was about to argue, but Arzosah got in first.
“He’s right, Dragonmaster. Oh, please, I know I have to obey you, but please, don’t make us go alone. Look at how those wretched Horsekin killed my mate. They’re not to be trifled with, dweomer or no.”
“Well, that’s true spoken.”
“We’ll be marching soon enough,” Garin went on. “Cengarn’s walls will hold for a while longer, lad.”
Rhodry hesitated, wondering if he wanted to explain. As long as he had some task on hand, whether traveling or fighting, he could forget about Angmar and Haen Marn, the woman he’d come to love, the place whose magic was bound up with that love.
“What’s so wrong?” Garin said. “You look heartsick.”
“Ah, well, it just gripes my soul, sitting up here in the mountains, not even knowing if Cengarn stands or how it fares.”
“It still stands. I can tell you that. Some of our women have a little dweomer of their own, you know.”
“I do know.” Reflexively, Rhodry laid his hand over the talisman he wore under his shirt. “Didn’t Otho’s mother give me this stone?”
“Well, there you are then.”
“But here, Cadmar’s allies? His main alliance is with Gwerbret Drwmyc of Dun Trebyc, and I’ve never met a more justice-minded man. He’ll do everything he can to fulfill their treaties. Some lords might weasel, but not Drwmyc.”
“That gladdens my heart.” Garin paused for a grin. “Now, five hundred dwarven axmen are worth a thousand human beings, but from what I gather, there’s a cursed lot of these flea-bitten Horsekin round the town.”
Rhodry laughed at the jest, but he was thinking hard, trying to estimate just how many men Drwmyc might be able to scrape up, down in the rough borderlands of the kingdom. Not enough—that was the one thing he could be sure of.
That very night, Garin’s prudence proved its worth. Rhodry’s chamber in the old gatehouse was small, round, and dusty-bare except for his own gear, but it had a grand view out across Lin Serr’s park land. He was sitting on one of the enormously thick window ledges, watching the moon rising over the distant cliffs, when he saw movement out in the grass. Although an ordinary man would have seen nothing, Rhodry had inherited his vision from his father’s people. When he looked carefully, he could make out a pack of strange creatures trotting across the grass and heading straight for the gatehouse. Bronze gleamed in moonlight. Smiling a little, he drew his sword and waited.
Down at the base of the tower they assembled, a shuffling pack of misshapen warriors dressed in bronze armor and waving bronze knives. In the moonlight, he couldn’t see them clearly, but he knew from previous experience that they were a jumble of human and animal bodies. They looked up, pointing with hand or paw. At the sight of Rhodry in the window, they began to curse and shout in a babble of languages, swirling round in an eddy of malice.
“Come up, then,” he called out. “Come up if you’re so brave.”
They screamed and gnashed, howled and cursed, while they danced back and forth before the door. Suddenly, with a roar, Arzosah dropped from the high tower and flew. With one last shriek, the pack disappeared back into whatever world it was that they came from. The dragon swooped out into the park land, then turned and flapped back, settling up on the high tower’s roof again. Rhodry leaned out his window and yelled.
“My thanks!”
“Most welcome, but I wasn’t worried about you.” Her vast rumble drifted down to him. “They were keeping me awake.”
Rhodry had been right to worry about the situation in Cengarn. The next morning, at about the time that he was telling Garin how Alshandra’s creatures had threatened him in the night, Jill was sitting in the window of her chamber, high up in one of Dun Cengarn’s towers. Except for a small shelf housing some twenty books, a fabulous number in those days, it was an ordinary sort of chamber, a half-round of a room with stone walls on the curved side and woven wicker on