Free Falconfar 01-Dark Lord by Ed Greenwood Page A

meandered down out of high pastures to join it, to a fence of heaped stones and stumps where three men wearing swords and a fourth with what looked like a halberd stepped out into the road to await them.
    "You summoned me , master?"
    "Indeed." The wizard Malraun was as curt as he was darkly handsome. He needed no magic to make his sleek, taut-muscled body striking to ladies, despite his small size. Nor, though he could be glib, did he need to waste time being polite to anyone. If he wanted a particular lady, his spells commanded their obedience. What cared he if they were screaming inside, so long as their responses were eager and ardent?
    And if some of them were every whit as eager to kill themselves after he was done with them, what booted it to him?
    He rose from his chair to give the lorn a commanding look, and strolled across the rather bare circular tower room toward it.
    "You will fly in all haste, permitting yourself no diversions there or upon your return journey, to find and take the Aumrarr who used magic at Highcrag yesterday, and thereafter went up into the hills. They have probably passed the ruins of Ornkeep by now; I slew a greatfangs that had just begun lairing there yestermorn, to keep a certain Doom from getting his hands on it. Take also the one she's traveling with, and bring them both to me. Alive, if you can, but dead if you must."
    The lorn's horned, mouthless skull-face nodded. It spread its batlike wings, snapped its barbed tail, and then froze at Malraun's sharp command, "Disguise yourself! Be the largest of vaugren as you seek Highcrag, and use the semblance of a man thereafter. I want to hear of no wild rumors of lorn flying over the Falcon Kingdoms!"
    The lorn's tail switched angrily, but it nodded again, seemed to shiver all over, and sank down onto all fours, its wings and head changing shape as its hide darkened. Giving sudden throat to a vaugril's mournful screech, it sprang out of the open window and away, circling Malraun's dark spired tower once before flapping off into the gathering dusk, in the direction of distant Highcrag.
    Malraun did not bother to watch it go. He had far. more interesting concerns than a mere Aumrarr and her toy. His recent intrigues had brought no less than three thrones to the verge of collapse, and he was determined that two of those realms would be his before another moonrise.
    They were well beyond the guardpost, tramping down a rutted dirt road between walled gardens— creeper-cloaked walls of stone with the roofs of thatched homes rising beyond them—before Taeauna took her hand off Rod's arm in a silent signal that they were now far enough from the guards to speak freely.
    She promptly did. Beginning with a snort, a shake of her head, and the murmur, "Only in Arbridge would they name an inn so."
    "The Two Drowned Knights?" Rod grinned. "I thought it amusing, yes."
    "Oh? I thank you for the warning," the Aumrarr said tartly.
    She'd done all the talking to win them safely past the wary Arbren warriors, and Rod had been only too glad to stand there looking old and in pain and dull-witted, while the guards discussed him with her as if he were a sack of meat or a placidly deaf ox.
    There'd been much discussion, thanks to Taeauna's skillful tongue. They'd learned that a Lord Tharlark ruled in Arbridge now, and that he'd been armsmaster to Sir Sahrlor, the dead knight of Artown, and was a hard-bitten warrior who wanted Falconfar to be rid of all magic and wizards. Tharlark no longer dwelt in town, but had taken Tabbrar Castle at the far end of the vale as his abode, once home to the dead Sir Tabbrar.
    It seemed that fear ruled Arbridge now, and kept honest folk abed inside their barred and shuttered homes of nights, but just what caused that fear, the guards had not wanted to speak of, beyond warning the Aumrarr and the old man with her not to camp in a field or hay-heap by night, but to hie themselves inside an inn, pay the coin demanded, and stay there until