Falconfar 03-Falconfar Read Free Page A

his smashed and broken body.
    It was what was left of a wall, and the whirlwind of clawing magic moaned through it as if its cracked stones had been mere butter, or no more than smoke.
    His body crushed, Narmarkoun writhed in agony, sobbing in the heart of a cloud of gore, clinging to one thing in his thoughts, a rune that blazed brightly...
    By the time the whirling cloud of blood reached a second wall and collapsed into a wet smear of gore across it, the pitiful remnant of the wizard was no longer at the heart of it.

     
    "AS WE PLANNED, Bel?"
    "As we planned. Galath, departing just as soon—and as quietly—as we can. I'd rather not have to fight my way out of the home I grew up in."
    "Not even if it means killing as many of the family as we can?"

     
    NARMAKOUN PLUNGED INTO the rune, became the rune, and the agony suddenly ebbed away. He was whirling again, even faster than Malraun's savaging magic had spun him, rushing along far from the riven tower of Malragard, racing home.
    His own cold castle. Its familiar silent chill unfolded around him and enshrouded him as he sped on, an eerily whirling glow whose approach made his undead playpretties turn to stare expressionlessly. On, on down long passages and through high, balconied chambers seared out of the solid rock, past many rotting shoulders and silently gliding legs, toward just one of his beauties, who awaited him on her knees, as naked as all the others, her mouth open and eyes staring in astonishment.
    The glow of the rune he clung to was answered by an identical glow issuing from her mouth, from the matching rune that his spell had long ago left in her head for just this need.
    A glow his rune raced towards, Narmarkoun whimpering in anticipation of the agony that was to come.
    Rune met rune, and what little was left of his playpretty's mind died as her world, and that of her master, burst into soundless mage-light.
    She writhed, jerked and flailed on the stone floor in the heart of the flaring and fading light. The other playpretties stared as Narmarkoun shuddered in the grip of greater pain than even Malraun's spell-clawings had brought him, fighting to master his new body while still unable to control his own reeling mind...
    After what felt like a very long time, Narmarkoun felt his agony ebb and the thrashings and spasms of his new body lessen. He slowly became aware that he was sobbing, a deep and ragged mewling that died away into a wordless whimpering.
    Which was about the time he realized something else. A severed head had just struck the stones beside him, to bounce and then roll past. A headless but otherwise shapely body followed, toppling loose-limbed.
    Narmarkoun blinked, his whimpering ending in astonishment. As a sword flashed past, not far from his nose, to slice deeply into the cold, bloodless body of another of his playpretties.
    Narmarkoun blinked again, hardly daring to look up. He was fresh out of runes.

     

     
    ROD EVERLAR PELTED down seemingly endless stairs, step after racing step—how deep did Malragard go, anyway?—as he watched the open maw of the closest greatfangs looming behind him.
    Half Falconfar, if they knew the Lord Archwizard was more than a mere fancy-tale, probably thought he could spin around, wave his hands, grandly declaim some thunderous words of magic, and in an instant blow the greatfangs—all of the greatfangs, all six of them—to a rain of blood and scales that would still be fading away as he dusted his hands together in satisfaction, turned away, and strolled down the last few steps.
    Into what looked to be the cellars, or dungeons—did a Doom of Falconfar have dungeons, with prisoners or their forgotten skeletons dangling from walls in chains in every dark corner of them?—of Malraun's tower of Malragard.
    Yet Shaping didn't work like that, and Rod was a Shaper, not a wizard at all. Still less a Lord Archwizard, able to lurk for centuries in the minds of others or in waiting magic swords or rings or crowns