While the guardsmen plunged closer, and the sand scarp ripped loose like unraveled knit beneath their destriers' pounding sprint, he spun a fast cantrip to mask his horse's copycat impulse to bolt.

The stayspell locked down barely in time. Arithon's mount hit the rein in a spinning plunge, shredding new skin from Dakar's fingers; then hot on the heels of the Hanshire guardsmen came the predators which hazed them.

Seardluin burst over the skyline, four streaks of muscle and bared talon that came on like shot oil to overtake. Plowed sand and ripped footing caused them no missed stride. Nor was time given for prey to react or defend.

The lead creature sprang with sinuous speed. It overtook the trail- ing rider, closed a stride and a half lead in one bound, its thick, plated tail streamed behind. One snap of armored jaws decapitated the horse. The animal pinwheeled, fountaining blood. Its rider catapulted ahead. He crashed in a rolling spray of sand, but never came to rest before the predator pinned him. One goring swipe of its horn left him a disemboweled carcass.

The survivors pounded on through another mired stride before the Seardluin charged among them. Their horses' berserk panic scattered them right and left, chaff before the oncoming stroke of Sithaer's scythe. The king male snatched a mare by one hind leg. Half her haunch tore away in one razor-clean swipe. His Seardluin mate cleared the steed's scissoring struggle in a powerful leap. She landed ahead of the next horse, tucked and rolled, then extended a taloned forepaw as a hook. The horse was jerked out of its run like a galled 422.

FUGITIVE I~RINCE.

fish. It crashed, splayed and gutted. The downed guardsman died as fast, bludgeoned silent by a swipe of the Seardluin's armored tail.

Blood pattered a fine rain on parched earth, the spray masked by the whistling shriek of another gelding, collapsed with a severed wind- pipe. The final horse thrashed in a heap of maimed limbs, its rider crushed in the tangle.

Dakar never knew how the last came to die. The butchery ended too quickly. Nothing alive remained standing to kill. Seardluin stalked narrow eyed through the razed carnage, their frenzy of blood- lust unsated. They slashed and snapped at the slain underfoot, while the rent limbs of horses and men shuddered through the tormented spasms of flesh torn untimely from life.

The furnace-dry breeze wafted the reek of ripped bowels and the stench of violent death. Dakar's bay gelding and Arithon's mare sidled in demented fear. The gray trembled, with Felirin doubled over the pommel of his saddle in the throes of a gut-rending nausea.

The spell cantrip on the horses was fading. The Mad Prophet yanked the mare's bit before flight instinct could revert into stamped~ ing terror, then curbed his own milling horse by forcing its panic into frustrated circles. While Arithon's mount jibbed and jolted against the lead rein, he shook off stunned shock and strove through a virulent attack of the shakes to sort out what mage-sight now showed him.

"Those men, those horses had no auras," he forced out in a strained whisper. "If they were alive when they entered this grimward, they became changed into something unnatural."

As though the recent deaths had not signified, no shocked dis- charge of animal magnetism hazed the air with blank light; and yet, the Seardluin had tracked every hapless victim that they slaughtered on sight.

Felirin straightened, wrung pale as a specter. "What are you say~ ing?" He wiped his mouth with the back of a wrapped hand, and insisted with gritty disbelief, "Those were guardsmen from Hanshire.

I knew them."

Behind, on the dune, amid the strewn gore of carnage, the preda- tors crouched down to gorge. Snarls carried downwind, punched through the snap of cracked bone. The horrors worried their kills as they ate, tearing and ripping through meat and entrails with greedy, savage abandon.

Dakar's stomach turned. "I don't care if those men were your milk brothers from childhood, we'd better get out of here, now!"

The slightest release of his hold on the rein, and the horses he gripped plunged ahead. Dakar resisted their snorting, brash lunges.

423.

JANNY WURTS.

He could do nothing more than cling to blind faith that theiT part?

would not be attacked. Headlong flight could not outstrip ~ Seard.

luin's charge. If he gave way to nerves and let the horses gall~p ~~, the loose sand would tire them beyond any chance of recover~'

Felirin eased his jigging gray up beside Dakar's flank. "WI~ those drake-spawned furies see our presence?"

Dakar swallowed hard, yet the rank taste of bile stayed w~tn him.

"I can but guess;_In some wa)~ we haven't crossed fully into their realm of existence. We traverse a dream. Our lives are not }~:~,t ~,~ it, but only passing through."

"Those guards," Felirin started, then coughed back a spasm. Wretched beyond speech, he shook his head.

"I can't know for certain." The mare plunged ahead, yanked yet again by Dakar's iron hold on the reins. Swearing, he lost anotl~r patch of raw skin before he resumed his snagged thought. "Th(~e men must have interfered with the dream in some way. Drago~~, unruly and powerful beings, a law unto themselves. Their minds could seed life. Why not the reverse? If a man in careles~ rance killed game in the wood, or lit a small fire for comfort, '~~,~ a thread of continuity would be tom by his act. A kinetic balance ,,., become inadvertently upset. In forfeit, the drake might well [31(,, ~,!

the offender's life aura, and knit the repossessed magnetic en~ into the dream's fabric to restore the gap."

"Ath's mercy on them," Felirin murmured, his sad, lined eyes ahead. "If you speak the truth, they are lost for all eternity, and their fear and their suffering was no less for the fact that their spirit~ were unstrung before death."

Dakar had no word of comfort to assuage the minstrel's sorrowf~~ insight. Nor did he dare broach the evil possibility that Arith~n unguarded mind may have seeded that vortex of killing violence.

nursed his tired mount over loose, sliding sand, or the brittle salt ~t cracked hardpan. Though the site of the slaughter might lie behi~ the ugly memory persisted, too vivid and sharp to unburden. A led in circles by worry and privation could not help but imagine ~,h~ fates might befall the rest of the company from Hanshire, drawn her in determined and foolhardy duty, and left to the perils of their ignc rance.

Other packs of Seardluin prowled the desert. More than one clawed spoor stitched across the spiraling track carved out by the horses' labored passage. By the wayside, the hacked and gutted corpse of a young dragon lay broken. Splayed wing leather shriveled, half-silted under blown sand, and the ripped coils of entrails were 424.

FUGITIVE PRINCE.

strewn like sun-blackened rope in clots of rank, congealed blood.

Here, most oddly, Dakar sensed the hazed energies of torn life force; as though the continuum of Fate's Wheel still contained the unmoored wraith of this creature's whole being at the moment an untimely death claimed it. The enigma gave rise to a headache, out of phase with the throb of his skinned palms. Dakar endured. He refused to acknowledge the chorus of complaint from an overweight body kept in the saddle too long. Nor would he hear the fool's urge to dismount and ease the discomfort of racked joints.

To guess by the pug marks pressed into stained sand, the Seardluin which had stalked the slain drake weighed as much as a draft horse.

Then that kill, too, fell behind. As the riders' blown mounts breasted another crest in the dunes, the desert with its perils melted away, replaced by what seemed like a southland orchard gone wild.

Glossy leaves rustled, stirred by kind winds to a ruffled embroidery of orange blossom.

Another chill puckered the hair at Dakar's nape. No natural trees should bear ripened fruit and spring flowers in the same season.

Almost, it seemed as if the grove was presented in temptation, invit- ing tired travelers to forget the firm strictures by which they might walk this existence unscathed.

"Don't pick any fruit," the Mad Prophet cautioned. He wondered in stark honesty whether Arithon's deranged guilt could be party to this latest invention; or whether Felirin's loose fancy offered the deadly peril of a sleepy, spring grove whose climate encouraged tired travelers to linger.

Those creeping suspicions entwined with another current, elusive and powerful, but there as a sparkle of unseen energy that invaded the periphery of vision. Dakar knew spellcraft. Step upon step, his suspicion gained impetus, that something or some power tempered each new train of event, and dammed back the cascade of disaster. Yet each time he tested to fathom the source, the currents he searched for slipped past him.

Felirin brushed a shower of shed petals from his hair, too pained and dispirited to indulge his ebullient imagination. His gray was stumbling tired, and fretful in its efforts to evade its rope muzzle and snatch at the knee-high grass under the fruit trees. Out of pity, the bard dismounted to walk.

For the bay mare, they could offer no such relief. Arithon remained fallen into a stupor. The drawn angles of his face were mercifully eclipsed by the shadow of the drover's cloak, and his hands dangled slack from the restraints which secured him to the saddlebow. He 425.

J~ss~ WURTS would not arouse, despite Dakar's efforts. Even a spell-turned cation to his Name failed to raise any flicker of awareness. If s'Ffalenn prince was lost in the dreaming quagmire the combined debilitation of backlash and despair would find healing in this place. Nor could aught be done to reverse his malady, but keep on and hope for the relief of escape.

"We can't ioumey on indefinitely without water," Felirin husked~ long length.

Dakar drew rein, sucked clean of the will to laugh for the "We aren't likely to find water here. If we did, it would be too drink."

"What makes you sure?" No matter how desperate his state vation, the bard's curiosity knew no bounds.

"Great dragons hated a drenching worse than a cat does, or Sethvir once explained." Dakar stamped back the ripe fear threatened an explosion of temper. His nerves were drawn wire.

heaved his fat bulk from the saddle and almost collapsed in a from the spike of sharp pain which shot through his and hips. In mulish rebellion against abused dignity, he pursued thought to the end. "Rainstorms were said to send the great drakes into rampaging fits of irritation. That's just as well. We dare not inter- act with anything we didn't bring with us. Heed well. The penalty could be to share the same fate as those foolish guardsmen from Hah-'

shire."

The minstrel breathed in the incongruous, sweet tang of the orange trees, morose. "For a creature that gloried in live flame, wet weather would naturally pose a problem." The tightening scabs on his bums made him seem a slouched and arthritic old man. "How long do you suppose we can survive in this place?"

The Mad Prophet had no answer that did not offer outright dis- couragement.

Overhead, the sky burned a lingering gold, lucent as marigold enamel. The grove melted away like a lifted curtain into a wind- beaten vista of steppelands. Dakar set his back to the task of driving on balky horses without help from the switch he needed, but dared not braid, out of plucked stems of tough grass. He could not fathom how far they had traveled, nor yet, how much longer they could ven- ture without falling victim to lethal mishap.

Seemingly out of nowhere, the deep, booming note of a centaur's horn call shook the ground, answered Flke echo by the clarion reply of a mature male dragon. Felirin stopped short with a gasped cry of wonder.

426.

FUGITIVE PRINCE.

Dakar stared also, amazed and gaping. High over the beaten-brass furrows of the plain, a mated pair of dragons cavorted, sleek as shot quarrels as they closed leathered wings and swooped from the zenith to the horizon. Sun-caught scales flashed fire like tipped gold, and tails streamed and snapped like armored ribbon. No legend, no awed description, even from Sethvir's keen memory, could do justice to the searing, unworldly grace of the great drakes at their prime strength.

Before their vast size, the Khadrim were as toys, and the wyverns of Vastmark no more than petty and quarrelsome vermin.

The drakes spiraled upward and dwindled to gilt flecks, lost at last in the molten brass dome of clear sky.

Dakar expelled a gusty sigh, brought back to awareness that he had suspended his breathing.

Felirin shed his awe in an uncharacteristic bent of practicality.

"Before we see more inhospitable country, do you suppose we'd be wise to rest?"

"Better to push on," the Mad Prophet disagreed. "Whatever is spinning this dream we experience, it's being tempered by some out- side influence." He resisted another tug at the reins as the mare tried again to snatch grass. "I can't imagine the immensity of power needed to stabilize this existence enough to allow for our presence, but there won't be a second chance should we outstay the limit set on our welcome."

In stark proof of concern, the ground changed again. Plains and grass flowed away, replaced by volcanic rock and a blackened, clogged sky. The air churned with smoke like stirred sludge, and the foot'mg rippled with heat haze. Jagged stacks of porous rock notched the scarp, scoured to red veins where magma had leached glowing sores through the crust.

The horses tossed their heads, sidling, tails high and nostrils dis- tended. Their hooves clanged on rock, a rugged array of slabbed basalt ledges, seamed with the angry flows of lava and bubbling, sul- furous mud pots.

"If this is a drake's dream," the Mad Prophet ventured, "what we now cross would be their preferred habitat." He broke off, forced to cough from the acidic bite of swirled ash. "Sethvir told me once the dragons used to roll in molten rock the way birds splash their feathers in a rain puddle. Burned the dross off new scales as a snake would shed an old skin."

Had the horses not been dull with exhaustion, main force could not have coerced them to abide such a crossing. The ground was hot enough to blister through boot leather, and singe nasal membranes at 427.

JANNY WURTS.

each breath. Scoured eyes streamed hot tears. The porous, sharp edges of solidified lava slit skin at a glancing touch.

Suffering still from smoke-damaged lungs, Felirin hacked and spluttered. Then Arithon's mare gashed her fetlock in a stumble.

Though she moved lame, Dakar feared to stop. The ground was unstable. Too much could go wrong if they tarried to shift the prince's slack form to another mount.

"If we linger, we'll sicken," he rasped through a raw larynx. "The fumes here are poison."

No choice remained but push on, each stumbling stride accom- plished in unalloyed misery. Through the plodding, grim labor, Dakar could not tell if the spiral they walked seemed smaller and tighter, or whether the effect was the offshoot of headache and dizzi- ness. Feathered drifts of ash caved in to hide tracks. Canyons of etched lava confounded each effort to sight lines for orientation. lie could scarcely manage the task of tugging his horse and Arithon's forward. All hope was lost if the spiral's last coils departed from a safe track.

At weary length, the lava flows faded to smoking pits of used ash.

The stone smoothed, bleached to a powdery, fine dust as clinging as pulverized porcelain. Smoke and fumes leached away to a turbid, blank haze, and the heat ebbed to dry, cruel cold.

No moss grew; no trees. What passed for sky seemed a drumhead of cloud, stretched the flat, dull pallor of scraped chalk. Against that unmarked, monochrome backdrop, a skeleton loomed like spired iron. The ribs spanned through air in vast, gabled arches. Long, scy- thing horns on the knobs of each vertebra spiked upright, a gigantic array of pronged tusks. The bones gleamed a glossy, unearthly pearl white, with stripped cartilage lucent as quartz.

"Dragon," breathed Felirin. He blinked, rubbed soot from gummed eyelids. The splayed, flint black curves of three talons pierced the ground, of a size to paralyze reason. A destrier could have walked underneath without hindrance. Speechless, stunned, the min- strel stared, riveted. "Ath, the terrible size of her!"

Dakar as well felt his flesh bathed in chills. As a child, he had seen living Paravians, whom none could encounter without change. This behemoth wreckage was long dead, and yet, it commanded a pres- ence which rankled his nerves into shivers. No feat of mortal imagi- nation could capture the monumental grandeur of what was scribed in these glyphs of naked bone.

Braced in arched rows, such ribs could have served as the vaults of a palace; and had, Dakar recalled through a vague flick of memory.

428.

FUGITIVE PRINCE.

Melhalla's last high kings had convened court and served judgment under just such a buttressed hall. The domed, copper roofs had been shingled in drake scales, a legend even before the great uprising, when the ruling seat at Tirans had been gutted by fire and cast down into ruins.

The tail, with its delicate, vaned rudder and needle-thin spines rested curled in an exquisite, neat grace that bespoke the coiled threat of a predator. Despite such vast size, no creature from any past era in Athera could react with the speed of a dragon.

"Sethvir once confided the great drakes were agile enough to brave the crosswinds in a thundercloud." Dakar shook his head, bemused to amazement. Credibility balked at the scale of such feats. These shining remains had tasted the ice crystals combed into white cirrus, when once, clothed in glittering gold scales and wild malice, the live dragon had knifed through the riptide currents of high altitude.

The skull they encountered loomed the size of a hay byre. Its black, shadowed eye sockets did not seem empty. Even in death, their uncanny survey guarded the shadowy realms past the Wheel. They appeared alert still, broodingly hooded in massive, spiked horn, and overlapped plates of etched bone.

Felirin ventured a timorous query. "Is it so, that the relics of drag- ons carry a bane?"

"Who knows?" Dakar stamped back his shivering dread. The inescapable fact remained that their steps were being guided ever nearer to the colossal skeleton. "There's truth to the saying that where centaurs fell, the stones of the earth weep in sorrow. Dragon bones are much older and by lengths more eldritch. I've heard the skulls of the unhatched younglings have ties to dark magecraft, but that could be taletelling, for all I know of the details."

They rounded the serrated spurs of a forelimb. Ahead, like sheared porcelain, the long, scything fangs propped open the gates of horned jaws. Rows of incisors gnashed through the blanketing dust, razor tipped as the prongs on a whipsaw.

Nor were the three exhausted fugitives the first to arrive at the site.

Light shattered the clogged air like hurled blades, fanned through the points of knobbed bone. A figure in dark robes astride a black horse shouted in pealing urgency. He bridged the small gap where the dragon's forked tongue had once flickered, his outstretched hands streaming power like beacons. The flux of raised forces stormed across mortal senses like the roar of impending cataclysm.

Felirin froze in his tracks, undone by dread. "Ath Creator keep us safe."

429.

~ANNY ~URTS.

"Not Ath at all. That's Asandir." Dakar shot out an arm and hauled the bard forward. The unwholesome fumes seared his throat as he croaked, "We can't linger."

No Fellowship Sorcerer ever burned reckless power without cause.

By the singing charge that lashed his awareness, Dakar understood the danger loomed too vast to grapple. Only once before had be seen Asandir unleash his full strength, and that on the hour the Mistwraith had attacked Lysaer and Arithon at Ithamon.

Then as now, the power streamed outward in crackling rays, n0 brute stab of force, but the unbridled might of fine energies called down by a spirit schooled into peerless unity with every facet of Ath's creation. The result ranged harmonics like a hammer blow to bronze, showering light in waves of continuous vibration.

"Come on," Dakar gasped. "We're in deadly peril." The unshielded might of a Fellowship Sorcerer could derange mortal thoughts, even leave a man witless and paralyzed.