Blood Of The Wizard (Book 1) (14 page)

Chapter 26

The morning found us sore, and soaked with so much sweat and blood that we glistened. 

Halvgar and Delthal, badly bitten, went immediately about washing their wounds.  And I had no idea how they even did that much. 
Cleave my arse, but I struggled to even keep upright, so utterly spent that I worried I might pass out. 

It was almost fortunate that I had been bitten on the ankle, for it meant that I could sit to clean the wound.

The light also revealed that we had run through several camps of the beasts.  But calling them “camps” was being generous indeed.  I sat, tenderly scrubbing my wound, looking about:  They were just nests of stone and hide, really, with bones and dung scattered everywhere.  Every nook, cleft, and cranny was filled with them.  But though the hillsides were abandoned, the wind was still stinking with the smell of the creatures themselves.  It was a harsh, musky scent not unlike sulfur. 

A
nd we once again walked, ever wearily, ever slow.

R
ains were gathering and starting to dampen the hills, adding to the odor.  It was a light rain, but noisy weather for all the flat rocks and the echoes of the hillside.  But it felt good on our grimy faces.  In time, the rains picked up, and as our strength returned, we trotted up a tree line to escape the cold downpour. 

We all stood wet and motionless, our adrenaline
still pumping through our veins. There were several small pits with stinking, empty nest at the bottom.  Some of the fellows sat.  While a few of them settled in for a smoke or a nap, Delthal and I crested a nearby hill as lookouts. 

First,
though, we had to sink slowly deeper into a hollow before the ravine rose again, bringing us up the opposite slop.  Crooked, shrubby pine jutted across our path.  The needles were black with some moldy disease.  We pulled ourselves along a fallen tree, sitting, holding our axes close. 

There were a dozen or fourteen young goblins staring at us from a distant hill.  They were more halted than the others, and much smaller.
Their bellies were protracted from malnutrition. They looked around often. 

There was something pitiful about the beasts, and
something pitiful about my own mind, worrying whether or not we had made orphans of those vile things.

Through the better part of the morning, Delthal and I waited there, watching them, breathless and dripping from the intermittent fall of rain.  And the day was a long affair, being so stiff, so very well exhausted, and cold.  Nearing afternoon, the young goblins began to sit or leave.  Some just kept staring.  Others pulled their supplies in
crude, brown fiber packs beside them and slept.

Delthal and I took turns sleeping, watching with great care, but under the bleak and rainy skies, I must admit, I dozed off a few times on my watch. 

Once, when I woke, the young goblins had disappeared 

Panicking, I looked around for them and saw nothing. I turned to see the older fellows, snoring away blissfully under the tree line.  But there was no sign of the young goblins to be seen. 

They might have just slinked off to build new nests. 

But I had a peculiar feeling
….

Suddenly,
movement exploded from behind me.  Everything blurred into molten shadows like a nightmare.  My heart raced.  I could only vaguely sense being surrounded, and no sooner had I realized it arms, fists, and steel were whirling in every direction.  Axes arrows flashed in impossible sweeps; it was impossible to distinguish the bite of one from the sting of another.  Delthal bore his teeth, lunging into the confusing mayhem before he was even awake.  The fearsome thwacks and pings were chorusing my own grunts now as I recognized my foe—they were dwarfs.  Females.  The warmaids from Beergarden roared with animalistic wailing.  And as Delthal went tearing his way through the tumult, chopping, his axe was pulled from his hands, and the strength gushed out of my legs as one thwacked me atop the skull.

Then, with the abruptness of a startled animal, I regained consciousness just in time to see one of them telling the others to hold.

Being bound, then dragged along the gravels like a carcass, I looked up at the backside of a dwarf maid with long black hair and legs as powerful as a mule.  She had a muscular arse and was growling rubbish about how much I weighed.

My fellows, readying their bows, halted when the
y saw the warmaids’ prizes, namely Delthal and I, hog-tied by our wrists and ankles.

“
Master Dwarves, Merry Cutters, Wyrmkillers, hear us!” the one carrying me called.

“
Thundering hell!”  Uncle Jickie roared.  “Now what’s all
this
!”

“
In Beergarden, your own Master Gilli decreed that if any among us were stout or clever enough to down anyone of you, then we would be allowed to accompany you on your mission!”

I knew it!,
I thought. 
There had to be more to the tale!  Unpaid prostitutes don’t travel across rugged countryside seeking vengeance.

“
The one you speak of, the fine dwarf who uttered that decree, is buried in the black grasses of the Naked Ones.”

“
Yet, as one of your warparty, are you not bound by honor to keep his word?”

“
Pah!  And who are you to question the bounds of honor?”

“
The ones who took not one, but
two
of your best dwarves!”

“
Best?!
” Mighty Kenzo thundered.  “You’ve done nothing, maids, but unburdened us of our two horniest fools!”

At which all the fellows had a hard-earned and much-needed round of laughs.

The dwarf maid looked down and eyed me suspiciously.  I looked up at her, and shrugged. 

She growled. 
“Stubborn old oafs!” she roared back them.  “Do you have anything resembling a plan?”

“
Quite so!”  Uncle Jickie called, waving them in.  “Why, my dears, already we’ve caught some helpers with our bait, now haven’t we?”

Chapter 27

I was stunned to see the old boys welcome the maids so readily.  Indeed, as they went crookedly up the sandy rocks, the rain a full-blow storm now, a volley of hullos greeted the dwarf maids like they were long-lost friends. 

No hearty greetings escaped the maids’ lips, however.  Twenty of them, the full score of them
who I had seen dancing half naked in Beergarden’s Nilbi’s Nest, lofted a goblin head each upon the ground to send the snarling, lifeless faces crashing down the stony hillsides.

“I am Ollief,” the one that drug me said.  “And these, my honorable fellows, are the Dancing Warmaids of Beergarden.  Each of has lost a husband, or else brothers or fathers, to the wyrm.  We are at your service, old masters!”

“
Frobhur Farewell, at your service!”

“
Jickie Warbuck, at your service!”

“
Halvgar Stonebreaker, at your service!”

“
Kenzo Bonewalker, at your service!”

“
I am Delthal Blackaxe, at your service!”

“
And I, I am Fie Wyrmkiller, at your feet!”

“
Hullo, ye Merry Cutters!  I would ask what took you so long, but that I knew your friend, Master Gilli, the one called Bellhammer, great, great, grandson of Bardo Bellhammer, made his challenge to us in the haste of drink!  And you, Merry Cutters all, are oathed and bound to accept the word of even the least of your warriors,” she said, at which she rolled her eyes downward at me.

The feisty
little bitch had a point.  And a nice rump, should the rather rugged, muscular and short type be to your liking. 

The
n the one that drug me motioned another to her side, and she told her to unbind Delthal and me. 

In the next instant, a thousand voices seemed to call out, but it was only the maids as they gave such a high-pitched, lilting war cry that I jumped with a start.

“Bloody madmaids!”  Mighty Kenzo thundered, then squalled laughing. 

As laughs poured like beer from the rest of the fellows, the maids did something that surprised me.  I got a little dizzy as I stood, watching a dozen of them break off into pairs, and each pair picked out a dwarf and approached.

Ollief nodded.

“
We know where there are the ruins of a castle.  It is not far from here.  It is on the shore of Heir’s Sea.  Let us go there, and you merry folk for battle, and share our designs for the Black One!”

Chapter 28

I could hardly imagine a stranger circumstance than cresting only three more hills and seeing what remained of a castle.  It was on an inlet, which cut our journey to the shore by half a week.

Perched atop a lonely chunk of rock, the waves of the vast
sea beyond it pounding away at its base, I had not ever seen anything so desperate and desolate, yet so sturdy and welcoming.  Strange, how hard it was to imagine what I was seeing, but I had no trouble imagining the restless spirits that no doubt still prowled the halls.  Then I realized, that the Dead King I see once ruled here.  What must it have felt like ruling in the far south?  It was like a fairy land in an epic told by a gloomy poet; the king must have felt like the earth’s last habitant. 

For strangely long time, we all stood on that knoll of treeless land and watched the broad-brimmed waters, pewter and black, recede and crash again at the base of ruins. 

In time, though, the warmaids accompanied us along a road, of sorts, which rose up to meet us, forking into several, crumbling dead ends to either side into deep and brackish pools.  We strode swiftly forward, and while I would have given all I possessed for the welcome of a roaring fire, we plunged waist-deep into frigid water for some hundred yards of low road, only to arrive at a somber, dark stone place.  It was nearly June, but the wind that raced off the water, howling through the broken castle, seemed as cold as Faerland’s autumn frost.  There was a smell that was hard to describe.  Again, it was like autumn, but sour, tinged with the hectic flush of coming death.

Only then I noticed that our motley party had with us a half a dozen goats, and even the beasts seemed leery to go any nearer.

Bik and Andi, the two noisome redheaded warmaids that had adopted me, drew closer.  Apart from a pat on the hands, I responded coldly to these warm overtures.  But Bik pulled me closer still and pointed to a gray monolith, a lone, giant black mountain to the east.

“
The lair of the Black One,” she said in a kind of whisper.  “The thunderwyrm.”

T
hen I felt the unyielding agony that welled in Halvgar’s eyes.  There, with any luck whatsoever, was his beautiful Shiri and his wonderful little Cullfor, somewhere in the bowels of that mountain, enduring unknown hells.

The
y were not three miles away.  The mountain they had been tucked away in was scarred, bleak, and lonely.  It was half a mountain, really.  The part that should have jutted out into the ocean looked as though they had been chiseled away by some enormous, mystical hammer.  There were no foothills or peaks rimming it, just the lone monolith, bizarre, black and angular, rising from the water’s edge as if it had been dropped there from the heavens.

I strained my eyes for any sign of the beast against the black slopes or the sheer, dark cliffs, and I thought for a moment I saw figures against the horizon.  Sometimes my eyes did that though. 

We made camp just inside, with a pathetic excuse for a fire and not so much as a pile of hay to sit on.  There was a solitary window-slit facing the mountain.  And while the tiny fire burned pitifully in the enormous, towering hearth, Delthal kept watch.  He said nothing of it, but I realized I had lost a great deal of trust with him, letting the maids catch us off our guard..

I could smell
sea’s brine, blending with the thin smell of the fire’s scrub pine.  Everything felt too still, and everything was strangely quiet as Bik and Andi pulled me aside.

Others were taken aside two, I noticed, before that brought me upstairs, producing picks and combs from the folds of their thick mid-dresses.

I looked out through a broken section of wall, breathing deeply.  I stared out at the black mountain.  It was disappearing into the gathering night, but it was no less impressive.

I thought of Dhal.

Andi knelt before me.  She was freckled and pretty, with eyes that let you know she had known melancholies that no maid should ever have to endure.  She pulled the twine from the braids of my beard.  Bik approached.  She was mannish and tough, but somehow the more fragile-looking and easily the prettier of the two.  She scooted behind me, then pulled off my helm.  With her fingernails she scruffed up my hair and unbound my pony tail.  She would gradually loom into view, head first, combing and pawing at the front part of my hair before she began snipping at it here and there with small scissors.  Then she would disappear behind me. Under my chin, Andi spread a bit of cloth over my lap, proceeding to even out lengths of my fire-singed beard.  She told me to hold my chin high.  Then, with a sharp razor, she sawed at the tangles under my jaw.  I had never received, nor even seen, such care and attention.

“
They say the wyrm cannot resist the cry of a child.  It is like the cry of a rabbit to a fox,” said Andi.

“
Yuh,” I whispered, unable to nod with the razor beneath my chin.

“
That is why we brought the goats.”

I raised an eyebrow questioningly.

“Have you ever heard a goat being bled from the throat?”

“
I see,” I mumbled.  “You plan to lure it out with them.”

Bik whispered into my ear from behind,
“As smart as you are easy on the eyes, Mister Fie!”

“
And twice as generous,” I said puckishly.  “Though I’m afraid you’ve arrived at the auction too late, my dears.  The one called Dhal has stolen away with your prize bull.”

At once, they both giggled, but then stopped themselves too soon.

“What?” I whispered, Andi trimming again on my beard.

“
Nothing, master.”

“
Don’t call me intelligent then play me the fool!  You obviously know her!  What is it?”

“
A small matter, sir.  It’s just that Dhal, she’s…”

“
She’s what?”

“
Barren, sir.  Poor Dhal cannot conceive.”

I grunted, softly.

In my mind, I had no doubt that this was as villainous a trait to these generous dwarven maids as arson, or even murder.  And that I would fail, no matter how hardily, and cleverly, we might try to have a little one of our own, should embitter me unspeakably.

But it was not so.

Instead, my heart gathered around the thought of her more tenderly than ever, endearing her to me more fully.

“
We understand, sir,” Bik said, changing the subject, seeming to mistake my silence for rage, “that your company of Merry Cutters does not mean to kill the beast, only to steal away with the wife and babe of the one called Halvgar?”

“
True,” I said, though I was not entirely certain that was the plan.

Then the absurdity of that hit me
…. thundering depths!  Somehow we had drug ourselves halfway across the known world, and we hadn’t even discussed what we were going to do once we got here!

“
Very good, sir.  Then luring it out of your path will serve both of our parties well!”