Blood Of The Wizard (Book 1) (25 page)

And while the
Dwarf-King’s warriors and berserkers screamed in fear or agony, the little captain roared obscenities and screamed things like, “Dip an oily eel in ginger and shove it up my arse if this ain’t a good time, ya!”
 

Chapter 57

When my adrenaline settled, I was so mentally and physically spent that I could not join the revelry as we made our way back up into the light of the courtyard.  Crawling on our hands and knees, Dhal and I could not hope to keep up with the nimble halflings.  With every step back up the castle walls, dull aches went crashing through my body, and a bone in my heel had somehow cracked.  The sail barges were gone, which meant that the victory was not as complete as I had imagined, as it took a great many dwarves just to pilot them. 

And
King Bhiers, dwarven Mage-Lord of all Yrkland, had eluded capture.

But
little Cullfor, smiling, high on a stone parapet above the sea, was alive. 

And on
that small stone parapet, high above the sea, I smiled as I pulled him down into my arms. 

“I don’t suppose you could go for a nap?” I asked.

Cullie hugged my neck.

It was hard to say how much time had passed before we actually slept, but it was sometime in the thin and grayish pale light of dusk before we all woke. 

Half-asleep, I
heard the sound of the ocean breaking in the distance.  And I pulled Dhal closer.  I was surprised at the emptiness of my thoughts, and the great, enormity of the peace in my heart as I slept, breathing deeply, smiling, and warm under a pile of blankets. 

Then a clap of thunder underscored a
what I thought was a distant commotion:  the truth of it was that we were surrounded by smiling faces. 

My n
arrowing eyes scanned a pair of drafthorses, each pulling full carts.  The king himself sat atop one.

“Some essentials
,” King Alberik said, pointing to the cart opposite him.  “As few items to make your new farmhouse more comfortable… should you choose to stay.”

Dhal woke up smiling, squeezing my arm in delight.

“And in this one,” the king added patting a fourteen foot pile of goods behind him, “a few toys to keep that wonderful little lad entertained.  His, should you choose to stay or not, ya!”

As Cullfor rose, skipping victoriously to the back of his cart, my decision was made. 

I kissed Dhal and turned to the king. 

“
We’ll stay, liege… so long as you will marry us first!”

PART TWO

FOREWARNING:

Silence your mind, my king.  Listen, and hear the quiet of your hardened rangers.   Take note of the stillness of your veteran warriors, and the unease of your timeworn campaigners.

Do you hear them now, those distant drums?  They are the summons of a war that cannot be won.

Aye, look at your men again.  Watch as your cruelest Cutters pause.  See them scan the distant rise.  Realize that they refuse certain forest passages and speed through others.  Such warriors do not protest lightly.  Yet remonstration is there, my lord, silent and deep.  It is between their words.  In the drinks they refuse.  In the lyrics of songs left unsung.  For they know what the others do not:  the powers that seek your army are terrible and strange, and they come from that which no living thing should face. 

They fear the shadowflyer, my king, the paling wraith. 

Aye, the battle that it is to come is such that even the old ones dare not fathom it.  There are no legends they can tell to advise you toward victory.  I bid you, lord, make ready your heart, and do not discard what you know of war. 
Burn
it.  Such a war would have men turn steel against their own flesh.  Yet it is no wraith that brings it to your shores.  It is no army, nor any beast known to men. 

It is I…

Chapter 58

             
“Rabbit tears:  The notion that the rabbit sometimes craves the attention of the fox, else it would not cry in the snare.”

—Axiom of the Delmark warrior.
             

THE YOUNG WIZARD SMELLED HATRED.  The odor was like glowing hot iron, extinguished in beer.

Dirty Gig, the old halfling witch who trained him, had warned once that his hermitage and meditation might waken his demons. 
Forest road fidgets, my boy.  They will wreck your bloody mind, turn your own senses against you.
  He wished that was it.  But he knew better.  He and his human “uncle” had ended hundreds of men.  They had wrecked dwarven berserkers and torn apart would-be assassins in a manner befitting their trade.  He knew fear.  Fear was like a sneeze, brief and annoying.  He could dull fear.  He could edit fear into the true mathematics of a situation, by damn. 

Something followed out in the forest, just beyond sight. 

It was a presence he had never felt. 

Cullfor raised a brow, keenly aware of it, and just as aware of his own dual nature.  As a
dwelf
, he had all the instinct of his cunning elvish blood, and his fiery dwarven heritage gave him all the gumption he needed to act on them.  Yet he was frozen, staring into the dank column of trees.  The quickening, invisible thud of his senses told him the presence was not only real, it was close.  The living, black air of the late-winter night was alive with it. 

Still, he saw nothing.  Ahead of him was just the cold dip and lee of the path.  The stillness of the giant timbers.  The presence had not left, but it had grown no closer.  Cullfor grunted, shaking his head.  At length, in wet boots and a pensive humor, he forced himself back down the forest road.   Though he could feel it staring as he trekked, ever behind him, ever watching, he remained calm.  He counted his breaths in the quiet, trying to keep his head from swiveling around to look up at it. 

It was in a tree now, just over his left shoulder.  Then it was one the ground, scuttling.  Something ancient, something wicked. 

Yet he trekked on.

Nearing midnight, he halted once again at the ruins of an old tollhouse.  The trail had narrowed to little more than a thin ridge.  He stepped through the crumbling brickwork, the hillside plunging to either side of his steaming feet.  Slowly, he peered down to his right, down into the noiseless black. 

He saw nothing.  Just two dewy spots at the head of a twisted black log that seemed to stare back up at him.  Then suddenly an aching, sticky sort of sobriety washed over him like a suit of wet grass—the thing was hovering atop him now, inches over his head.  And as the fiend roared, like the high-pitched and icy cackle of a wyvern, Cullfor bared his teeth in fear and began to run.   

__________

When the young wizard neared Gintypool, his modest home, dawn was graying all but the deepest pockets of forest.  Thirteen hours of running had left him footsore and bleary-eyed. 

Very soon, the silence in his head and the ache in his feet would be memories.  He would be feasting with his uncle, celebrating his Auntie Dhal’s birthday.  He would be drunken and stuffed. 

Cullfor, at last, allowed himself a grin. Perhaps later he’d be stuffing ol’ Ma’am Mockingbird or Frieda Firestone, for these halfling women took to the novelty of him—some for his dwelvishness, others for his wizardry—like hummingbirds to morning glories.   He half-laughed.  Novelty might by even be understating the case.  If his human aunt and uncle were unique to the land of halflings, he was more curious still—he was the only dwelf in all of Arway, and one of only three wizards in the known realms.  At nineteen, it sometimes seemed the world was at his feet.  At other times, he felt like a pup in a world full of wolves.  He was blessed, either way, he conceded.  But good thundering hell if today was something altogether stranger.  Rot his eye if he wasn’t ready to get his feet in front of a good fire and drink away the strange feeling in his head. 

Growling large yawns, he trekked another mile to the crest of Nameless Hill.  Leaning on his walking cudgel, half asleep, he swayed a bit, almost snoring.  He righted himself in jerks. 

Rolling up to his feet were the Watershed’s prime river bottom fields.  They were dotted with clusters of sheep and wrapped by a lazy bolt of the Gardenwater River.  At the edge of it all was Gintypool, a jumble of thatched blonde cottages along the water with the audacity to call itself a village.  From here, the predawn blue made the homes and shops appear little different than a knot of sleepy cattle, jostling at the water’s edge for a drink. 

Easing down the long, wet slope, he could feel the soil beginning to soften.  The itchy familiarity of home began to set in.  He could see the open, slate roof of that incorrigible little oaf who called himself a blacksmith.  Beyond it was his own little herb patch, where a beast named Laney Largo had been digging up his onions.  He thought briefly about her, about how a child could be so obsessed with onions.  It was a mystery to him.  Truly, it just boggled his mind beyond damned boggling. 

Then he squinted, noting a peculiar fog.  He traced its path to his own little corner of the grain field.  It was strangely fast.  He watched it flow downriver just as quickly.

“What the shivering hell?”

Even as he asked, he knew.  It was not fog—and the bizarre fact of this wormed into his mind slowly. 

It was smoke. 

But damn it to the depths,
it was coming from the water
.

The smoke
rolled from Gardenwater River to curl through the scattered gardens.  It made islands of the dung heaps, which stood as high as the two-story gristmill.  A burnt-bread smell began filling his mouth.  He glared past the village once more to the river.  He understood the grain barges must be aflame, but they were docked across the river to prevent that.

Cullfor sidled down the long slope, his stomach tightening.  Sneering, he watched the distant forms of his halfling neighbors as they began to stream from their homes, scattering in uncertain directions.  Shrieks carried across the fields.  As he jostled further down, some of the forms were gathering along the river.  A few were nude despite the chill, clutching robes or woolen blankets.  Others carried swords or farm tools.

He halted on a rocky outcrop.  Here, he could see that he was right.  The grain barges were half-sunk, rolling over as they burned.  Sparks rose like hellish bugs from a year’s worth of taxes to swarm across the river onto the gristmill. 

The last of the stores began to smolder. 

“Rot my eyes… Run boys!  Get some water on that fire!”

But as the flames sprouted, the men just stood on the bank.  Transfixed.  They were staring out into the river.  Cullfor ran toward them, the field seeming to stretch like in a dream.  Halflings were fleeing now out into the fields.  Others were running his way. 

Midway down the slope, he saw a familiar figure.  Well ahead of everyone, the swineherd was holding a brace of piglets in his arms.  His eyes were panicked.  Several of his sisters were following.

“Bardo, what the devil is going on!”

He froze, startled.  Just as suddenly, recognition washed over him. 

“Cullfor!  Run, young fellow.”  He began waving him up the hill.  “Ye need to scoot!”

“Why!  What for?”

In the next instant, a tight cluster of thumps resounded all around.  Cullfor ducked, spinning in every direction to pinpoint the noise.  Shock tingled through his core when he noticed the arrows that flowered the ground all around him.  One stuck from the frosty mud, just inches from his boot.

Back downhill, the women were screaming. 

Cullfor growled in anger, turning to see them alongside the pigger, face-down.  White fledged arrows were jutting from their backs.  Endless training reminded him to think, to locate the archers before he moved.  But his head was burning in anger.  He ran to kneel amid the writhing wounded.  Grimacing, he retrieved the dirk from his boot and snapped off the protruding shafts.  There were nine of them, an enormous task as they crawled or stood to run, only to drop again in agony. 

Cullfor kept scampering to help, shaking his head to a chorus of pained, pitiful noises that ranged from yelps to screams.  Then he growled at them to clutch each other. 

“Hold firm on the wounds, girls!”

It proved impossible.  Having to abandon them to their misery, he looked toward the village.  His uncle was nowhere amid the smoke and confusion.  Still crouching, he moved toward it, low and irregular to stay in the smoke.

Then he paused.

Atop the river, the wooden head of a beast was surging through the smoke.  It was a strange longship.  Massive but sleek, the great dwarven war machine revealed its full length as it lunged between the barges.  Dwarven archers were wading in the vessel’s shadow. 

Cullfor fixed a narrowing eye on them, knowing he had brought this nightmare to this beautiful land.  He shook his head, and spat.  As the boat slowed between the docks, the dwarves pounded on the hull and the oars withdrew as if slurped.  Bands of the stout little warriors leapt over shields that hung on the gunwale.  Flanked by the archers, they stomped ashore carrying the long Yrklandic axes of King’s Cutters.

A few of Gintypool’s halflings-at-arms had gathered into a band.  They kept their tight wall, their shield wall, like a good warband, but most carried only knives or sickles.

Cullfor drew a tight breath, running.

“Run, you damn fools!  Run like you hear the devil’s hoofs behind you!”

His voice was lost in an echo of growls.  He paused and breathed, summoning the calm he needed to “hold” he air between the dwarves and the halflings.  He held out his hand, pointing with his thumb.  He could feel the fabric of life itself, pooling from just under his naval then flowing into his arm.  But as it poured out of his thumb, a sudden wash of smoke tumbled over their forms.  He could not see them as the sounds of yowling and crying rose and cut short.  There were long
oohing
noises.  With a turn of fire-driven wind, everything cleared. 

Still standing there, he saw the nightmare he feared.  Dark blood lurched from the halflings as they were axed down, scooting away.  They were begging for their lives.  When the dwarven invaders finished the butchery, they fanned out enter homes, bursting into the pub and the church.

When they emerged, they carried nothing.

They are looking for me… then by damn they will find me.

He began running toward them, yelling for their attention.  But none turned to him.  Closer now, smoke billowed toward him without end, blistering his senses.  He dodged Laney, the poor girl crying and naked as she dug obsessively in his herbs.  Her mother wailed as she scooped her up, hurrying into the ankle-deep mud of the fields.  He stood and moved the force of his magic behind them. Arrows began to stud the ground around them. 

He saw one of the archers, very near.   

Suddenly, Cullfor’s toes wrenched the edge of the courtyard.  He tripped, skipping at first.  Then the impact of the pavingstones slammed him.  He rolled over, wheezing.

When he looked up, he saw a berserker.  The dwarf was smirking.  Under the helm’s eye-rings, a single orb pivoted downward.  The man raised his elongated axe.  In the same instant, Cullfor hopped to his feet, thrusting his arm forward.  The dwarf lurched, his head rocking back.  As he brought the axe down, he collapsed.   His jaw was dislocated, freezing his face into the look of a silent howl.  The axe fell beside him.  Gasping for air, Cullfor grabbed the axe and bashed across the throat twice before he spat, recognizing a chunk of his tongue in spittle. 

Blood was sheeting out of his mouth as he heard a cry behind him.  He spun—another dwarf was running at him, growling, just a split second away.   He reached forward, and the dwarf crimped.  But his momentum carried him.  The dwarf lunged into him, sideways and balled-up.  The blow sent them both to the ground.  As they grunted and rolled, both gained their footing.  But the dwarf dropped the instant he stood.

Cullfor nodded, seeing he had splintered the dwarf’s nose nearly in two under the amphibious-looking helmet—nearly removing one his eyes as well.  He stepped on the dwarf’s neck to cut a long moan short.  Then he felt more blood coming from his mouth.  His chin and chest was red.

An arrow whisked by his chin.

Cullfor ducked and ran.  The archers were appearing from everywhere now, their helmeted eyes turning to him.  But they did not fire. 

Ahead, an older dwarf was approaching.  He was smaller than the others, with a more ornate helm.  The man wore a cape, clasped together with an unmistakable golden clip.  It was rimmed with odd, random clusters of stars that encircled a strange symbol, which looked look like a pointed, upside-down fleur de li.  There was no doubting it now; these dwarves were Merry Cutters, sent by Jorigaer, the Dwarf-King.  And the rumors about them seemed true as well.  These former warrior-workers had the disciple of veteran campaigners.  With something like a salute, the old dwarf ordered the bowmen to lower their weapons.