The Gold Falcon - Katharine Kerr [208]
Panic! Salamander thought. Understandable, but why wait till now? Eventually he noticed that every now and then, someone would point to the sky and the rest all fall silent to look up. The dragons, of course, the two evil minions of our supposed dark lord Vandar! One of the guards atop the dun wall must have seen Rori fly over and Arzosah join him. Salamander couldn’t quite remember if their appearance meant that the end of the world was near or merely that Vandar himself was taking a hand in Honelg’s destruction. Either way, those trapped inside the dun doubtless felt that their last hour had come.
“And they’re right enough about that,” Salamander said aloud. “I sincerely hope that the Great Ones have got hold of dear Alshandra. I want her to see just how much evil she’s worked.”
Salamander took a couple of strides in the direction of the encampment, but all at once he felt such grief overwhelm him that he sank to his knees. For a long time he knelt in the wet grass, struggling with both pity and guilt for those souls he’d helped doom, until at last Dallandra came looking for him.
“What’s so wrong?” she said.
“I hardly know.” Salamander scrambled to his feet. “Except I wish I’d never ridden Honelg’s way.”
“What? We had to find out about Zakh Gral.”
“Oh, of course. I just wish I’d done my spying some other way.”
Visibly puzzled, Dallandra was watching him as if waiting for him to do or say something more. Salamander thought of trying to explain further, but he knew it would be futile. Her work for her own kind had come to rule Dallandra’s life, and she hated any who were their enemies, no matter how piteous.
“Come have some breakfast,” she said at last. “You’re going to need your strength.”
With two dragons as allies, Gerran allowed himself a thin slice of optimism, which took the form of his thinking ahead to the problem of reaching Zakh Gral once they’d disposed of the current siege. The men in the army had their doubts. Rumors ran through the entire encampment, in fact, that the dragons were only pretending to support Ridvar’s cause and in truth were spies for the Horsekin, that they weren’t dragons at all but dweomer illusions or evil human sorcerers, and that they would demand human flesh as payment for their aid. Since the noble-born spent the day in Prince Voran’s tent, wrangling over various plans for taking the dun, Gerran and Salamander were left with the job of calming everyone’s nerves.
“Ye gods,” Salamander said, “if I had a silver coin for every time I’ve said ‘that’s not true’ today, I’d be as rich as Prince Voran.”
“True spoken,” Gerran said. “We’ve shoveled a lot of horseshit.”
It was just at sunset, and they were taking a well-deserved rest by the fire in the Red Wolf camp. A couple of servants were frying chopped salt pork and big handfuls of sliced onions in an iron pan while a kettle of barley porridge simmered nearby, dangling from a tripod. Clae and Coryn were taking turns stirring the porridge, which, judging from the effort it took to move the wooden paddle, seemed to be thickening up nicely.
“I suppose,” Salamander said, “that eventually those cooks are going to dump the one pan into the other and call it the warband’s dinner.”
“Most likely,” Gerran said. “You’re welcome to join us if you’d like.”
“Oh, I wasn’t fishing for an invitation, I assure you!” Salamander looked faintly ill. “Just an idle wondering.”
“What I’m wondering about is that council of war. You’d think it’d be over by now.” Gerran stood and peered uphill through the twilight toward Ridvar’s white pavilion. As he watched, men began leaving, a few at a time. “Huh! And it is.”
Tieryn Cadryc was one of the first out. He came striding up to the fire and paused