Again, his steel met something solid, slicing past it into air. The hiss burst into wet squalling.
Rod pulled his sword back hastily, feeling Taeauna straining beside him to hold the foe's sword with hers, and started to hack and chop wildly, putting his strength into it.
The dark bulk abruptly fell away, thumping solidly onto the ground, its squalling ending in a wet spewing sound that quickly faded.
"Dare we…?" Rod whispered.
"Get… the… laedlen," Taeauna snarled, and half fell out the window.
Rod hurried to obey, joining her with an awkward somersault that brought him down hard on the body of whatever he'd just felled, and sent his sword bouncing one way and the two laedlen the other.
Taeauna staggered up to him. "Bring them," she gasped. "I can't carry…"
Rod brought them.
Through the half-open door, the knight's face was grim. "Dursra the peddler, lord. We got her drunk, as you ordered, and she's talking. I came straight. As you ordered."
Lord Eldalar of Hollowtree gently set aside the reluctant-to-let-go arms of his wife, and rolled out of the welcome warmth of their bed with a grunt of irritation. "Aye, she would be. Nothing good, I take it?"
"Something you should hear, before I lock her away in the old turret so her words reach no one else."
The Lord of Hollowtree threw on his breeches, stamped his boots onto his feet, shrugged on his grand tunic, scratched at his gray beard, and reached for his sword. Never let your folk see you half-dressed. Or less.
Fastening the tunic as he went, he followed Lhauntur along the dimness of the secret passage into the room of the ledgers, and thence to the long passage that led to the back chamber. Grim-faced guards nodded at their approach and stood aside.
Fat old Dursra lay on her back on the cot where prisoners were usually shackled, unbound but in no state to stand, let alone go anywhere and work any menace on anyone. The sour reek of Durraran's wine was strong in the room, and Durraran himself sat on a stool nigh Dursra's head with a bucket, awaiting the inevitable time when she'd spew.
She was babbling. "'Ware all, from one end of falcons' flight to the other, for the Fourth and greatest Doom is come… walking with a wingless Aumrarr, as humble as a frightened shepherd… as powerful as all the other Dooms together… slipping into Falconfar… stumbling until he awakens, when it will be time for wizards and kingdoms to stumble…"
Lord Eldalar listened grimly as these words were repeated. Thrice. More slurred, sometimes, but with not a word changed.
"That's all she says," Lhauntur told him gruffly. "We were right."
The Lord of Hollowtree shrugged. "We treated him well." After a moment he added, "Taeauna called him our last hope."
"Fortunate us," the knight grunted, sounding unimpressed.
Eldalar shrugged again. "My thanks, Lhauntur. I'm for bed. Rouse me if the Four Dooms start tearing Hollowtree apart around our ears. Anything less can wait for morning."
The swordblade thrust through the chink in the ramshackle wooden wall without warning. The fat man blinked at it for a moment in the feeble light of the candle-lantern, and then brought one of his great hairy fists down on it, as hard as he could.
The sword broke off with a ringing clang.
"Cheap stuff," the man rumbled. "This'll be the gels' father, come calling."
He shuttered the lantern, snatched up the door-bar, flung the door open, and rammed one end of the door-bar out into the night, hard.
It struck something solid. There was a wet, strangled cry, something small and light bounced off his boots, and then the scream started; a long, raw, descending cry that was punctuated by several crashes of the railings of various flights of stairs being struck on the way down.
The fat man slammed the door, dropped the bar back into place, and snatched the lamp off the table to peer at what had hit his boots. A human tooth, trailing several threads of bright red blood.
The fat man grinned, ere turning to bellow, "Isk, he's caught up to us again! Start packing!"
The stream of profanity that came from the other room made him grin all the wider. Ah, dainty ladies these days…
Suddenly the moon showed itself through fast-scudding, smokelike clouds, night going from gropingly dark to merely dim in an instant. Rod and Taeauna could suddenly see that they were staggering along an Arbridge alley together, rather than merely feeling their way along it. There came an angry hiss from far behind them.
Rod turned his head and saw snake-headed men, scales gleaming in the moonlight: three of them, with drawn swords in their hands.
"Shit," he spat, "I don't remember…"
"This would be something else you can blame on Holdoncorp," Taeauna said grimly, leaning on him even more heavily. "Just keep going. Head for those trees ahead."
Rod obeyed. "Looks… Looks like a cemetery." He glanced back over his shoulder again. "They'll catch us long before we get there."
"I know not 'cemetery,'" the Aumrarr said calmly. " Yon's a burial yard, if that's what you mean. Where folk lay their kin to rest under enspelled stones."
Rod frowned. "Enspelled stones?"
"To keep the dead down," Taeauna explained. Rod could see dark wetness all down her belly and legs, and she was using her sword like a walking stick as well as clinging to him. He looked back again.
"They're-"
"Keep going," the Aumrarr snapped. "Drag me."
"I… yes, Taeauna."
Her grin was more a grimace of pain than anything else. "That's better," she said. And then staggered, her face twisting, and she gasped, "Rauthgul!"
Rauthgul. Rod's invented Falconfar equivalent for the f-word.
Rauthgul indeed, damn it!
There was no way they were going to reach the yard before the snake-men caught them, no way! And the burial yard was just that: a yard, an open plot of grass and trees walled on three sides but open to a street that Rod and the Aumrarr would soon be crossing. Or would try to; there remained the little matter of winning the sword-fight that would erupt right in the middle of it, when the snake-men caught up with them.
There were grassy humps in that yard that must be tombs, and little stone houses, too, dark with moss and age; crypts? The trees were old and gnarled giants, and it all might as well have been on the far side of the Falconspires, for all the likelihood Rod Everlar had of ever reaching them alive.
They were going to die here, a handful of minutes from now. He and Taeauna were going to be sliced and hacked apart, butchered very messily by swords Rod hadn't a hope in Hades of stopping.
Dark-armored figures suddenly streamed out of a side alley, hacking and thrusting, and a snake-man went down, making those horrible squalling sounds. Dark Helms!
"Hurry!" Taeauna gasped, clutching at the throat of Rod's tunic, all of her weight hanging from her claw-like fingers. "Lord, hurry! Please!"
Her last word was a sob of pain, as tears came and she shuddered all over, sagging against him.
Rod swore and gasped and got an arm around her, struggling to shift her weight to his hip so he could limp along in clumsy haste.
Swords rang off each other behind them, someone groaned, there was some hissing, and then they were out onto the dust of the street, Taeauna hanging like a dead weight. Surely there'd be Dark Helms pelting this way in a moment or two.
When they reached the grassy unevenness of the burial yard, Taeauna clawed her way up Rod until she was upright and peered into the night gloom.
Trees and crypts and their shadows were all around; Rod glanced back at the battle now going on. There seemed to be more snake-men, yet the Dark Helms weren't retreating. Fighters were sagging down with wounded groans or slumping dead, but the fray wasn't getting any closer. There just might be a chance for…