Free Dragonslayer: A Novel by Wayland Drew Page B

Ulrich's conjuring room. Galen entered, crossed to the window, and for a long time stood numbly there, letting the sun warm him, gazing out across the countryside. In the far distance to his right, across the river and beyond the tangled wood, rose a plume of dust that he knew was Tyrian's patrol making its way toward the village. Closer, on the road to the west, he caught glimpses of the doleful band of Ur-landers as they retreated, appearing and disappearing among the trees.
    Countless times during his childhood he had stood at this very spot in front of Ulrich's window and looked out over the green land that had seemed always full of purity and innocence. The meanders, the gently curving slopes, the canopies of great oaks touching the horizon, the occasional tended field and cluster of cottages with their lazy smoke—always before the serenity of these things had filled him with ingenuous peace. But now, although nothing in the landscape had changed, it was not the same for Galen, for he knew that in it lurked agents of madness, instruments of Evil.
    His gaze was drawn away down to the moat by a rumbling on the drawbridge. Hodge emerged, wiping his eyes on his sleeve at one moment and chortling with some irrational merriment the next, leading a mule hitched to a tumbril cart on which, covered with the purple silken cloak he had used for grand occasions, lay Ulrich's body. Galen watched as the old retainer led the mule down the path to the little lake of Cragganmore, maneuvered the tumbril so that the corpse could be lowered gently into a waiting boat, and rowed out to the islet where, according to Ulrich's wishes, a funeral pyre had stood waiting these many years.
    Behind him, the birds mewed softly—the pigeons, the gyrfalcon, the heron—restless on their perches. One by one Galen released them, letting fall the tiny silver leg bands crafted years before by small folk gone forever. One by one they responded, lifting their legs experimentally and, finding themselves free, spreading their wings and rising silently into the room and through the window. Every day at this time, Ulrich had released them, and so they had soared through the noon and the afternoon to return at dusk, each in accordance with its own agreement with the magus. This time, however, each bird in its turn glided toward the lake of Craggan-more and circled, crying and spiraling ever higher above the corpse of Ulrich. The falcon went last; with one sweep of its great wings it flew through the window and glided across the tarn, and Galen could hear its plaintive, falling cry of farewell as the bird rode higher and higher, became a mere speck at the edge of the cloud, and vanished.

CHAPTER FOUR
    Sighing, Galen turned back into the room. There was nothing to hold him now. Into his knapsack, which he had brought to the conjuring room already packed with his few belongings, he gathered those potions whose use he knew—dried herbs for the curing of simple ailments; unguents and potions for the soothing of skin disorders, vialled substances whose combining produced explosive results—all of these he gathered with increasing misgivings, for he seemed to be weighing himself down. He could see himself becoming one of the odd, ragged old men who roamed the byways selling charms, curatives, and, for Christians, pieces of the True Cross, and he had almost decided to leave all charms and potions to rot in the ruins of Cragganmore, when he opened a drawer in the conjuring table itself, directly beneath the now-still liquid in the stone bowl.
    There lay the amulet.
    In the shock of Ulrich's death he had forgotten the stone, but now it lay before him, its center glowing like a small moon at the bottom of a sea. Its gold chain coiled around it, and it was this chain that, after a moment's reflection, Galen took. Gold! Now there was a good companion for a journey and the means by which many a man had preserved himself; Galen knew that much of the world. But what could he