Are you finished yet? inquired Maur’s head.
No, said Aerin fiercely.
I’m glad. This is the finest amusement I’ve had since you fled the banqueting-hall. Thank you for opening the door, by the way. Your folk by the City gates should taste me quite clearly by now.
You shall not bully me again! Aerin said, and, almost not knowing what she did, pulled Gonturan free of her scabbard and slapped the flat of her across the base of Maur’s head where once the backbone had joined. Blue fire leaped up in sharp tongues that lit the entire vault, with its many shelves and cupboards and niches, and doors into further strongrooms. It was a ghostly unhealthy color, but the skull shrieked, and there was a crack like a mountain splitting, and the skull fell off its pedestal to the floor.
Aerin hurled herself at it as it was still moving, and grudgingly it rolled another half turn; but as it fell, the thickness of the despair pressing around them weakened suddenly, and with something like hope again Tor and the beasts shoved too, each as they could; and it moved another half circumference. The moon was high by the time they reached the courtyard, for they could not take the most direct way—the size of the skull precluded all but the widest corridors. The night wind was cold, for they were sweating hard with their labor; and the moon became two moons as Aerin’s tired eyes refused to focus. Tor had found rope, and they had tried to drag the thing, but that had worked even less well than rolling it, so they went back to the rolling. It was not nearly round, and it progressed in lumbering half-circle flops, and each flop jarred Tor’s and Aerin’s muscles painfully; and they had been painfully tired before they began.
“We must rest,” murmured Tor.
“Food, “said Aerin.
Tor roused himself. “Bring some. Wait.”
The slightly moldy dry bread and more than slightly moldy dry cheese he found gave them more strength than they would have thought possible. “Second wind,” said Tor, standing up and stretching slowly till his spine cracked.
“Fourth or fifth wind,” said Aerin grimly, feeding the end of her cheese to her beasts; “and the strength of panic.”
“Yes,” said Tor, and they put their shoulders to the work again, the grim echoes of bone against rock ringing terribly in the dark empty City. Depression still gnawed at them, but in a curious way their weariness worked to their advantage, for depression often went with weariness, and so they could ignore the one as a simple unfearsome result of the other. Maur had lost its ascendance once Gonturan had struck it, and while the skull still stank, it seemed almost an organic stench now, under the open sky; no more than the faint rotting smell of ancient carrion.
It was a little easier once they reached the king’s way; each heave grew a little less, the fall-over a little hastier, and the crash a little more forceful. Then it began almost to roll; for each circle it lurched seriously twice, but it did not quite come to a complete halt each time; Tor and Aerin needed only to push with their hands. Both Aerin’s shoulders were raw beneath her tunic, and there was a long shallow cut along her jaw where one of the dragon’s ear spines had caught her briefly; and the old cut on her palm from Gonturan’s edge throbbed dimly.
Then, just above the City gates, the vast head broke away from them. It was not merely the incline, which was little greater now than it had been down most of the slope behind them; it was Maur’s final moment, and Aerin heard its last scream of gleeful malevolence as it plunged down the road.
“Scatter!” shouted Aerin, just as Tor’ bellowed, “’Ware!”
The folk before the gates had indeed smelled Maur’s foul miasma after the door of the treasure house was opened, and most of them lay or crouched wherever they had been when that dreadful wind had first blown over them. It had lifted a little since, but the days past had been too much, and once undiluted despair had touched them they found it hard to shake themselves free. They shifted a little now, at the voices, and the desperate urgency in them, and looked up.
The fire had burned down, for no one had had the strength of purpose to feed it since the treasure-house door opened. Maur’s skull struck the fire’s center, and the still smoldering branches flew in all directions, and the embers splashed like water; and while a few people cried out with sudden pain, there was too little fire to do much harm. The skull crashed into one of the fallen monoliths, which shattered, and then the black skull disappeared into the night, and there was a rumbling and an echo, like an avalanche, and the people, shaken out of their lethargy, looked around fearfully and wondered which way to run; but no mountains fell. The rumbling grew louder, till people put their hands over their ears, and Aerin and Tor knelt down in the roadway with their arms around each other. The rumbling became a roar, and then there was a sudden storm of wind from the battlefield, laden with the smell of death; but the death smell passed them and in its place came a hot, dry, harsh smell like nothing the green Hills of eastern Damar had ever known; but Tor raised his head from Aerin’s shoulder and said, “Desert. That’s the smell of the western desert.” And on the wind were small gritty particles, like sand.
Then the wind died, and the people murmured to one another; but though there was a half moon it shed no light through the thick shadows that hung over the battlefield. They built up the fire again, but not very large, for no one wanted to venture far to look for fuel; and they tended to each other’s burns, which all proved slight; and rounded up the horses again, who had been too tired to run far, even in terror.
Aerin and Tor stood up slowly and came into the firelight, and the rest of Aerin’s beasts came joyfully up to greet them, those that were still alive, for many of them had not left the battlefield. She blinked up at Tor for a moment and said: “What have you done with the Crown?”
Tor looked blank, then sheepish. “I left it in the treasure hall. Not such a bad place for it; it will be spending most of its time there anyway.”
Aerin felt a curious tickling sensation at the back of her throat. When she opened her mouth she discovered it was a laugh.
Chapter 24
AERIN WOKE TWO DAYS later in her own bed in her father’s castle—Tor’s castle now. It was turning over that woke her; her muscles were so sore and stiff that her weariness was finally less than her aches and pains, and as she rolled onto her right shoulder she woke with a groan.
There was an immediate rustle from somewhere just beyond the bed curtains, and the curtains themselves were pushed back and daylight flooded in. Aerin couldn’t imagine where she was for a moment; her first thoughts were that wherever it was it was doubtless dangerous, and she groped vaguely for Gonturan’s hilt; instead her fingers buried themselves in a heavy fur ruff, and a long tongue licked her hand. She tried to sit up, and a voice, attached to the hands that had just parted the curtains, said brokenly, “Oh, my lady.” Aerin recognized Teka first, and then realized where she was, and then Teka bent down and buried her face in the bedclothes and sobbed.
“Teka,” Aerin said, horrified by her tears.
“My lady, I thought I should never see you again,” Teka muttered without lifting her face, but when Aerin tentatively patted a shoulder and smoothed the sleek black-and-grey head, Teka sat back on her heels, sniffed, and said, “Well, I am seeing you again, and have been seeing you again now for two and a half days, and I am very sorry to have been so silly. You’ll want food and a bath.”
“Two and a half days?” Aerin repeated.
“Two and a half days. Tor-sola is not awake yet.”
Aerin smiled. “And, of course, you’ve been sitting in that chair”—she nodded at a high-backed wooden chair with a pillow propped up for the waiter’s back and neck, and a cushioned footrest, and a small table with sewing paraphernalia tidily arranged on it—“the whole time.”