His wife shrugged. "The Master does not tell me such things. I know only that his forces took it by storm. Perhaps he was riding greatfangs, and wanted to give them some experience of striking from the sky under his command."
Tesmer nodded. "Yes, I can see that. You know only these three places, you said; he has others, with a false Narmarkoun dwelling in each?"
"So I believe."
The Lord of Imtowers started to pace again, anger gone but fresh worry rising in him, instead. "Yet if he has so many false selves, why did he not quell all these tales of his destruction by having one of them appear with thunder and hurled spells, to make all Falconfar think him stronger than Malraun?"
"He's trying to feign dead, for some reason," Lady Tesmer replied firmly. "Perhaps until Malraun overreaches himself, somehow."
"But if Malraun's armies come here…"
"We flee or die," Lady Tesmer said crisply. "Unless Narmarkoun awakens in our heads to compel us to do one or the other-or something else-our fates will be in our own hands. Which means the sooner we plan how we'll escape Ironthorn alive, the better!"
Lord Tesmer winced. "Flee? Leaving the gem-mines and…"
"Dead men can't gloat over gems," Telclara Tesmer told him sharply. "And though I doubt you've noticed, Irrance, live Falconaar women are seldom foolish enough to gloat over anything. Doing so always seems to goad the gods, or fate, or greedy neighbors to come and take whatever we're gloating about away from us. Along with our lives, usually."
Lord Tesmer winced again.
Chapter Thirteen
His sword still drawn, Darlok led the way.
The eerie glows that had lit up the hilltop were now feeble, dying things, but flames-real flames, not strange magical radiances-were flickering here and there among the fallen, splintered trees.
Ironthar knew better than to trust in moonlight when in the woods, so the knights hastening along behind their hard-striding lord-and the sweating priest struggling to clamber over fallen trees fast enough to keep up with him-had brought torches.
Darlok's report had been vivid enough. A gigantic winged beast, probably a greatfangs, had crashed to earth, thankfully dead, and there were signs of battle. Specifically, other bodies. Human.
For the taciturn warcaptain, that was eloquent. There had been only three lorn. So, spies rather than an invading force, to Hammerhand's thinking. The lord and his knights had made short work of them.
Not that the slaying had left Lord Burrim Hammerhand in all that bright a temper. He had welcomed the chance to follow Darlok up into the shattered part of the forest to see matters on the hilltop for himself, and hadn't sheathed his sword.
It was still drawn now, as he came out into a clearing that hadn't been there before. A long scar of devastation clove the forest from east to west, wide enough to park three wagons or more, tail-to-tail, as if some titan larger than a greatfangs had driven a plow through rocks, trees, and forest loam alike, turning them aside in a great furrow. The scar was a good three bowshots long, a path of heaped and broken trees that shone like so many pale broken bones in the moonlight.
"A new place we'll have to guard," Hammerhand growled aloud, "or we'll have Lyrose massing up here for mischief every day."
He took a few steps around a massive tree-limb, to where he could tramp around that fallen waerwood tree and along the scar in Darlok's wake. Stifling a curse, the fearful Lord Leaf followed, still panting from all the clambering up through the trees, and shaking a numbed hand he'd slammed into a very solid bough in the insufficiently torchlit darkness.
After a dozen more breaths of lurching along climbing on his knees over hard yet splintered wood and bruising himself against branches too strong to give way before him in the blinding tangle of leafy boughs, the priest came out into the westwards end of the open area. And stopped, aghast at what he saw.
A great scaled bulk stretched from near his boots for a long, long way to where the scar ended, in a clump of trees leaning perilously over the open area as if anxious to topple into it. It was the largest beast Cauldreth Jaklar had ever seen, and it lay in a sickeningly deformed heap. Broken-off treetrunks, dark with glistening gore, thrust up out of its rolling, twisted flesh like spears here, there, and over yonder.
It was dead, all right.
The lord of Hammerhold came tramping back along the huge corpse-Jaklar's stomach heaved as he realized what he'd thought was an upthrust, splayed tree in the distance was actually the talons of one large, dark dead claw, frozen in a last, futile clawing of the air-to growl, "Well, Jaklar? Know what you're looking at?"
"A greatfangs," the Lord Leaf managed to say, though he was certain his voice quavered. "Or what's left of one."
Hammerhand nodded. "It had a rider."
"Oh. You found the body?"
"No. Which means we may have a Doom lurking near us right now. I hope you've magic enough, Lord Leaf."
"Narmarkoun," the priest murmured, too afraid to bristle at Hammerhand's words.
The lord of Hammerhold nodded. The Doom called Narmarkoun was known to breed and ride greatfangs, and this great bulk beside them, all scales and tail and a dark, spreading lake of blood that was starting to stink, was the shattered corpse of a greatfangs.
The Lord Leaf swallowed. He knew of no priest of the Forestmother-not even Loroth the Highest-who could hurl magic enough to fight off a Doom. Fight off, not destroy.
"Lurking near us, right now," he whispered to himself.
Hammerhand looked at him sharply, then turned to a knight who was hastening up with a torch, and pointed in silent command.
The knight nodded, stepped forward, and bent to let torchlight fall where his lord was pointing.
Something small, pale, and bloody glistened in the flickering radiance. It took Jaklar a moment to recognize what he was seeing: bloody fragments of bitten-through human bodies. His stomach lurched.
Lord Hammerhand bent down and picked up the largest lump as calmly as if he'd been a butcher gutting boar in his own kitchens. It flopped in his hand, heavy but shapeless, rows of shattered ribs protruding from dripping flesh. One shapely breast thrust forward from the gory piece of ribcage.
"Female," Burrim Hammerhand said grimly, holding it up for a better look.
Jaklar vomited violently, staggering aside almost blindly as his stomach emptied itself in a hard, unstoppable, heaving rush.
When he could see again, the lord of Hammerhold had dropped that obscene lump and was holding up another, severed scraps of leather war-harness dropping from it. It was part of the shoulder of a sleekly-muscled woman's back, with the base of a bitten-off limb that shouldn't have been there protruding from it.
"Aumrarr," he added tersely.
The priest swallowed. Hammerhand thought he was trying to ask a question, and explained, "A wing."
Jaklar's stomach heaved again, trying to rid itself of meals that were no longer there. He drooled bile helplessly, swallowed, then gaspingly turned back in time to see Hammerhand hold up the most grisly thing of alclass="underline" a head, minus jaw and everything below.
The Lord Leaf caught sight of a face, all smeared hair and blood across dark, forever-staring eyes, as Burrim Hammerhand held it up and calmly looked into that dead gaze.
Then the lord of Hammerhold shook his head and let it fall back into the darkness with a wet thud. "No one I know."
Cauldreth Jaklar found himself fighting to be sick again, though there was nothing still down him left to come out.