The Flight of the Horse Read online

  The dragon collapsed. His thick neck was cut half in two, behind the scales. The Warlock wiped his weapon on his pantaloons and held it up.

  Aran felt suddenly queasy.

  The Warlock laughed again. "'What good is a glass dagger?' The fun thing about being a magician is that everyone always expects you to use magic."

  "But, but-"

  "It's just a glass dagger. No spells on it, nothing Wavyhill could detect. I had a friend drop it in the pond two days ago. Glass in water is near enough to invisible to fool the likes of Wavyhill."

  "Excuse my open mouth. I just don't like glass daggers. Now what?"

  The corpse and shell of the snail dragon still blocked the gate.

  "If we try to squeeze around, we could be trapped. I suppose we'll have to go over."

  "Fast," said Aran.

  "Right, fast. Keep in mind that he could be anywhere." The Warlock took a running start and ran/climbed up the curve of the shell.

  Aran followed almost as quickly.

  In his sanctum, the snail dragon had said. The picture he had evoked was still with Aran as he went up the shell. Wavyhill would be hidden in his basement or his tower room, in some place of safety. Man and the Warlock would have to fight their way through whatever the enemy could raise against them, while Wavyhill watched to gauge their defenses. There were similar tales of magicians' battles...

  Aran was ravenously hungry. It gave him a driving energy he hadn't had in years, decades. His pumping legs drove a body that seemed feather-light. He reached the top of the shell just as the Warlock was turning full about in apparent panic.

  Then he saw them: a horde of armed and armored skeletons coming at them up a wooden plank. There must

  have been several score of them. Man shouted and drew his sword. How do you kill a skeleton?

  The Warlock shouted too. Strange words, in the Guild language.

  The skeletons howled. A whirlwind seemed to grip them and lift them and fling them forward. Already they were losing form, like smoke rings. Aran turned to see the last of them vanishing into the Warlock's back.

  My name is legion. They must have been animated by -a single demon. And the Warlock had pulled that demon into a demon trap, empty and waiting for thirty years.

  The problem was that both Man and the Warlock had been concentrating on the plural demon.

  The Warlock's back was turned, and Man could do nothing. He spotted Wavyhill gesticulating from across the courtyard, in the instant before Wavyhill completed his spell.

  Man turned to shout a warning; and so he saw what the spell did to the Warlock. The Warlock was old in an instant. The flesh seemed to fade into his bones. He looked bewildered, spat a mouthful of blackened pebbles-no, teeth-closed his eyes and started to fall. Man caught him.

  It was like catching an armload of bones. He eased the Warlock onto his back on the great snail shell. The Warlock's breathing was stertorous; he could not have long to live.

  "Aran the Merchant!"

  Aran looked down. "What did you do to him?" The magician Wavyhill was dressed as usual, in dark robe and sandals and pointed hat. A belt with a shoulder loop held his big-hilted sword just clear of the ground. He called, "That is precisely what I wish to discuss. I have found an incantation that behaves as the Warlock's Wheel behaves, but directionally. Is this over your head?"

  "I understand you."

  "In layman's terms, I've sucked the magic from him.

  That leaves him two hundred and twenty-six years old. I believe that gives me the win.

  "My problem is whether to let you live. Aran, do you understand what my spell will do to you?"

  Man did, but-"Tell me anyway. Then tell me how you found out."

  "From some of my colleagues, of course, after I determined that you were my enemy. You must have consulted an incredible number of magicians regarding the ghostly knife in your heart."

  "More than a dozen. Well?"

  "Leave in peace. Don't come back."

  "I have to take the Warlock."

  "He is my enemy."

  "He's my ally. I won't leave him," said Aran.

  "Take him then."

  Aran stooped. He was forty-eight years old, and the bitterness of defeat had replaced the manic energy of battle. But the Warlock was little more than a snoring mummy, dry and light. The problem would be to get the fragile old man down from the snail shell.

  Wavyhill was chanting!

  Aran stood-in time to see the final gesture. Then the spell hit him.

  For an instant he thought that the knife had truly reappeared in his heart. But the pain was all through him! Like a million taut strings snapping inside him! The shape of his neck changed grindingly; all of his legs snapped forward; his skull flattened, his eyes lost color vision, his nose stretched, his lips pulled back from bared teeth.

  The change had never come so fast, had never been more complete. A blackness fell on Aran's mind. It was a wolf that rolled helplessly off the giant snail shell and into the courtyard. A wolf bounced heavily and rolled to its feet, snarled deep in its throat and began walking stifflegged toward Wavyhill.

  Wavyhill was amazed! He started the incantation over, speaking very fast, as Aran approached. He finished as Aran came within leaping distance.

  This time there was no change at all. Except that Aran leapt, and Wavyhill jumped back just short of far enough, and Aran tore his throat out.

  For Aran the nightmare began then. What had gone before was as sweet dreams.

  Wavyhill should have been dead. His severed carotid arteries pumped frantically, his windpipe made horrid bubbling sounds, and-Wavyhill drew his sword and attacked.

  Aran the wolf circled and moved in and slashed-and backed away howling, for Wavyhill's sword had run him through the heart. The wound healed instantly. Aran the wolf was not surprised. He leapt away, and circled, and slashed and was stabbed again, and circled...

  It went on and on.

  Wavyhill's blood had stopped flowing. He'd run out. Yet he was still alive. So was his sword, or so it seemed. Aran never attacked unless it seemed safe, but the sword bit him every time. And every time he attacked, he came away with a mouthful of Wavyhill.

  He was going to win. He could not help but win. His wounds healed as fast as they were made. Wavyhill's did not. Aran was stripping the flesh from the magician's bones.

  There was a darkness on his brain. He moved by animal cunning. Again and again he herded Wavyhill back onto the slippery flagstones where Wavyhill had spilled five quarts of his blood. Four feet were surer than two. It was that cunning that led him to bar Wavyhill from leaving the courtyard. He tried. He must have stored healing magic somewhere in the castle. But Aran would not let him reach it.

  He had done something to himself that would not let him die. He must be regretting it terribly. Man the wolf had crippled him now, slashing at his ankles until there was not a shred of muscle left to work the bones. Wavyhill was fighting on his knees. Now Man came closer, suffering the bite of the sword to reach the magician...

  Nightmare.

  Aran the Peacemonger had been wrong. If Aran the rug merchant could work on and on, stripping the living flesh from a man in agony, taking a stab wound for every bite-if Aran could suffer such agonies to do this to anyone, for any cause- Then neither the end of magic, nor anything else, would ever persuade men to give up war. They would fight on, with swords and stones and whatever they could find, for as long as there were men.

  The blackness had lifted from Aran's brain. It must have been the sword: the mana in an enchanted sword had replaced the mana sucked from him by Wavyhill's variant of the Warlock's Wheel.

  And, finally, he realized that the sword was fighting alone.

  Wavyhill was little more than bloody bones. He might not be dead, but he certainly couldn't move. The sword waved itself at the end of the stripped bones of his arm, still trying to keep Aran away.

  Aran slid past the blade. He gripped the hilt in his teeth and pulled it
from the magician's still-fleshy hand. The hand fought back with a senseless determined grip, but it wasn't enough.

  He had to convert to human to climb the dragon shell.

  The Warlock was still alive, but his breathing was a thing of desperation. Aran laid the blade across the Warlock's body and waited.

  The Warlock grew young. Not as young as he had been, but he no longer looked-dead. He was in the neighborhood of seventy years old when he opened his eyes, blinked, and asked, "What happened?"

  "You missed all the excitement," said Aran.

  "I take it you beat him. My apologies. It's been thirty years since I fought Glirendree. With every magician in the civilized world trying to duplicate the Warlock's Wheel, one or another was bound to improve on the design."

  "He used it on me, too."

  "Oh?" The Warlock chuckled. "I suppose you're wondering about the knife."

  "It did come to mind. Where is it?"

  "In my belt. Did you think I'd leave it in your chest? I'd had a dream that I would need it. So I kept it. And sure enough-."

  "But it was in my heart!"

  "I made an image of it. I put the image in your heart, then faded it out."

  Aran's fingernails raked his chest. "You miserable son of an ape! You let me think that knife was in me for thirty years!"

  "You came to my house as a thief," the Warlock reminded him. "Not an invited guest."

  Aran the merchant had acquired somewhat the same attitude toward thieves. With diminished bitterness he said, 'Just a little magician's joke, was it? No wonder nobody could get it out. All right. Now tell me why Wavyhill's spell turned me into a wolf."

  The Warlock sat up carefully. He said, "What?"

  "He waved his arms at me and sucked all the mana out of me, and I turned into a wolf. I even lost my human intelligence. Probably my invulnerability too. If he hadn't been using an enchanted sword he'd have cut me to ribbons."

  "I don't understand that. You should have been frozen into human form. Unless...

  Then, visibly, the answer hit him. His pale cheeks paled further. Presently he said, "You're not going to like this, Aran."

  Man could see it in the Warlock's face, seventy years old and very tired and full of pity. "Go on," he said.

  "The Wheel is a new thing. Even the dead spots aren't that old. The situation has never come up before, that's all. People automatically assume that werewolves are people who can turn themselves into wolves.

  "It seems obvious enough. You can't even make the change without moonlight. You keep your human intelligence. But there's never been proof, one way or another, until now."

  "You're saying I'm a wolf."

  "Without magic, you're a wolf," the Warlock agreed.

  "Does it matter? I've spent most of my life as a man," Man whispered. "What difference does it make-oh. Oh, yes."

  "It wouldn't matter if you didn't have children."

  "Eight. And they'll have children. And One day the mana will be gone everywhere on Earth. Then what, Warlock?"

  "You know already."

  "They'll be wild dogs for the rest of eternity!"

  "And nothing anyone can do about it."

  "Oh, yes, there is! I'm going to see to it that no magician ever enters Rynildissen again!" Man stood up on the dragon's shell. "Do you hear me, Warlock? Your kind will be barred. Magic will be barred. We'll save the mana for the sea people and the dragons!"

  It may be that he succeeded. Fourteen thousand years later, there are still tales of werewolves where Rynildissen City once stood. Certainly there are no magicians.