Blood Of The Wizard (Book 1) (29 page)

In time, he approached Bib’s place, Red Horn Pub.  But a sign on the door said that he’d left on business and wouldn’t return for a week. 

He looked in the window in the odd hope that he might have just hung the sign and hadn’t left yet. 
What he saw instead was the reflection of several figures, a gang of sorts, approaching from behind them.  Closer, they appeared to be just boys.

They were staring at his purse.

Cullfor turned, mustering what menace he could.  Two of them were subconsciously thumbing at the knives in their belts.  He was wearing his finest cloak, so he knew they had mistaken him for a knight, or worse, a merchant.  He urged the inglorious truth onto his face, and with no more than a look, he told them not to be idiots.

They understood, or seemed to.  And they were smart enough not to scatter.  Several nodded, acting as if they had only been curious at what he was stating at.

Satisfied and secretly relieved, Cullfor nodded back.  After confirming that Bib was in fact gone, having left for Seven Patricks, he got himself moving.  Then he was surprised to find that several of the boys had not left.  He watched the pair with knives fall away from the others.  They were not looking at him, though, which was a bit too overt.  He had seen that sort of non-attention before.

“Salty little bastards.”

He made an exasperated sound, twisting his way through the narrowing thoroughfare.  As the street came to a sort of ending, he was surprised to find himself a little unnerved.  The street was little more than an alley now.  Through the middle ran a thin and crooked sluice.  Minding his breath, he was careful to avoid stepping in the wet filth.  Still his stomach chided him.  He was only able to breathe as he passed through to another street.

Here, he grunted, shouldering through a chord of milling drunks.  Every day in Muttondon was the Feast of Mad Hamm, he realized.

He tried to gauge whether or not he felt like he was being watched, and could not decide.

Beyond the drunks were the slate roofs of the butcher shops.  He could make out the blood-ponds and dark sunken doorways of the slaughter houses.  He was halfway to a more open road called Butcher’s Line.

Suddenly he felt a quick pull at his purse.

Cullfor cocked an eye and refused to look.  Instead he began pressing through the walls of flesh.  Then he felt it again.  This time it was more of a wiggle.

He rolled his neck, groaning at what had to be done.

When he turned, he again was surprised to wrest his gaze on a less-than-menacing figure.

But the fellow staring up at him was no boy.  He was old.  And he was hunchbacked.  But it was the face that arrested his focus:  It was too simple, too round to be so wrinkled.  The eyes were pale as madness itself.

“The slumber is ended,” the figure said.

Cullfor blinked.  It took another breath to soak in the crazy words.

“What?”

“The cold beauty of his attention stirs.”

Slowly, Cullfor placed the worn tip of his walking cudgel into the halfling’s hump and backed him up a step.

“What the devil are you talking about?”

“I say, he is woke from the smothering abyss,” the hunchback explained.

“Well there you have it.  Smothering abyss.  That, sir, is a terrible spot for a nap.”

“Ah, yes.”  The figure clapped his hands, laughing like a snake, then scuttling crab-like in front of him.  “Such is why he seeks you.  Even now, I smell him,” the man said.

“Oh, come on then!  Mind yourself.  What are you getting at?”

“Oh, dwelf.  You would do better to mind what
he
is getting at.  You’ve felt his shadow in the trails.”

With that, Cullfor felt his forehead chill.  It was a powerfully odd thing to say, to
know
...  Yet it was an equally strange thing that the halfling recognized him as a dwelf, as not only were his ears covered by his cowl, but his height most often left him mistaken for a short human.

The hunchback rolled his hand, as if telling Cullfor it was his turn to speak.  Instead, Cullfor swatted the crooked palm.  He looked up, noticing the young halflings from in front of the pub.  They were neither watching nor moving in.  Their looks were different now, as if the curiosity they had feigned in front of the pub was now genuine.

Suddenly he found himself with a legitimate question, but one that felt odd in the asking.  “Are you talking about a wraith… a shadowflyer?”

“I am talking about you,” the man said.

Cullfor grunted.  At a loss for why he had even asked, he raised his walking cudgel to clear a way around him.  But with his wounded leg, he found him hard to escape.

“He awaits your bloom, sweet wizard,” the halfling whispered.  “He breathes for the moment he can lure you to his call and feed you until you are as bottomless as his own heart.”

Cullfor felt a jolt, something like anger.  Still he kept walking, the strange halfling following behind.

“He breathes to help you escape your ignorance.  You will not escape his attentions, wizard.  I didn’t, not for nearly a thousand years.”

Eyebrows raised, Cullfor growled.  Briefly, he wondered if this winter’s hoof blight had not somehow affected people’s brains.  The depressing truth was, probably not.

“Well,” he said flatly.  He stopped and turned.  “What’s his damned name, then?”

The halfling was gone.  Cullfor dismissed a sudden, rolling wave of panic.  A mixed sense of relief fell through him.

In time, he grunted.

Chapter 63

__________

Whogg’s Hall, just east of the Trollwood Peaks, was an enormous hunting lodge, somehow as grand as it was simple.  It rose some two hundred feet at its peak, sloping to either side with a mossy roof so low that a man could easily climb atop it.  The hall had been a gift to the men of Delmark, built long ago by halfling craftsmen in an age when peace still seemed possible.  Time, neglect, and the ceaseless, borderland warring of late between men and halflings had done little to diminish its sturdy splendor.

Perched high in the hall was a thought-filled, kilted Man-king.  His thoughts were drifting to local conjecture, that those old halflings had built this place more out of hubris than generosity—a monument, as it were, to the human inability to reproduce it.  He was inclined to believe it.  It is the halflings’ wit that compromises their might, his father once said.  Not their backs, son.  Not even their swords.  He wished the races said that of men, and he was in a mood to spend hours thinking of how, precisely, to make this true.

But there was too much commotion.

The king centered himself.  He ran his fingers through ringlets of blonde hair, which cascaded down his chest like sun-bleached rose petals.  Beneath him were lines of spinning, dancing maidens—a gift to his guard of four hundred warriors, who hemmed the walls.  Everyone, save a score, was drunk, and they all laughed wildly as the traveling troupe kicked their gowns up to flash their backsides.

“Good thundering hell!” he whispered.

For such svelte maidens, the king thought glumly, it was a quite a display of ripple.  All those shivering thighs and the great confusion of breasts and whipping ponytails was making him dizzy.  Frankly, he was a little nauseous too, and looking beyond them only made it worse, for the flickering lamps made their shadows recoil and gyrate.  He felt very much ready leave the lodge for a breath of night air, but here, so far south, they were too close to Arway, land of the Watershed Folk.  Halflings.  The oversized buggers were dangerous enough by day.  Out here on a foggy night like this, a man could wander into a whole camp of them.  Instead, he thought of airy fields and breezy hilltops.  In his mind, he could feel the wind caressing him with a buffeting of cold, aromatic meadow air.  The thought of a clean, babbling brook had almost assuaged his mind when a cough made him jump.

Another kilted fellow was kneeling at his feet, only this one was a dwarf.

It was a closer enemy, an old friend, which meant he was watched closer than any enemy could have hoped.  He was known, simply as the Dwarf in the Black Thistle Helm.  Like all of the king’s knights, the man wore plate armor on his arms and torso only, his emblazoned with the crest of the Nunnery Uplands.  A black thistle jutted from his helmet.

“My liege, I must have a word.”

A solitary finger motioned for the dwarf to come and sit.

“A nun, sire, has been spotted the traveling east out of the Watershed borderlands.  She is a halfling, of course, and she is traveling this way.”

“The good little sister was alone?”

“Yes.  I have ordered her unharmed until you were informed.”

“Yours is a nimble mind, warrior.”

“Yes, my liege.  My thanks.”

“Before you go, I shall need you to make ready my livery.  And fetch a trunk.  Fill it with a hundred-thrice reels of silver.  Then wrap a meal of chicken and potatoes. ”

The same finger sent the Dwarf in the Black Thistle Helm along, and the Man-king began stroking his beard thoughtfully.  He thought about the nun, about what she might look like.  If she were pretty enough, he might even let her finish the meal before he raped her.

Such, he liked to think, was the virtue and quality of King Jorigaer, Lord of all Delmark.

__________

Cullfor set himself northwesterly again, back down on Butcher’s Line.  The smells of filth were gone, replaced now by the smells of rot and butchery.  People were emerging from their shops and homes. 

A fat butcher-woman stared at him as he turned more northward out of town.  Thumbing the coins in his pocket, he nodded to her, and his stomach felt more at ease.  It was the normalcy of her earthy, halfling grin, he supposed.  He didn’t smile back, but he scowled less, until he found himself traversing the tricky ocean of battle-levies that surrounded north side of town. 

The young wizard looked up at the stone-lay ramparts.  Hoof-holes, they call them.  Just beyond them were mini-towers for archers.  He glanced down at the smaller holes behind them.  The pitted pastureland was once used to cripple a heavy cavalry charge from the warriors of Delmark.  Now they served primarily as a pain in the rear.  The tiny cavities were forever filling with water that somehow stagnated instantly.  And once, long ago, a very deep one had trapped a particularly drunken uncle who was running from a pair of unpaid prostitutes.

A few mental skips left him shaking his head.  That had been some kind of morning.  Maybe his best birthday ever.

Cullfor was hobbling toward the oak forest at the far end of levy-field when an awkward smile began to dimple his cheeks.

__________

While the particularly ancient dragon’s body was leagues northwest, its soul was sitting on the low, thick rungs of an oak, watching as Cullfor approached.  The dwelf came under a flat and low sky, which the young wizard’s spirits did not seem to mirror.  It hardly seemed to matter to him that the enormity of his quest was setting in.  He has even allowed himself to flirt with the more dreadful truths.

But young Cullfor Stonebreaker was grinning.

The face of the dragon, though long dead, grinned too.  More than anything, the beast admired
self,
true and essential self.  Short of that, it was endlessly fond someone with balls enough to laugh in spite of life, rather than because of it. 

Pleased, it just watched.

It would relish torturing this one, and even as it kept him alive for centuries, this one would put up a fight—which was exactly what he needed, frankly.

For you see, sometimes even a living devil can lose its faith.

__________

Cullfor edged the last of the field’s cavities, still grinning, but puzzling now over how the hell he was ever going to get a horse. 

Slowly and awkwardly, he climbed over the last rampart wall.  When he dropped over, he almost fell, his leg thumping with pain.  Here, he paused.  He let his eyes adjust.  He was in a murky oak forest.  It smelled vaguely like a shadowflyer again, its scent like a glowing piece of iron that had been extinguished in beer. 

Another sniff confirmed the presence of something...

Cullfor shook his head at himself.  Focused.  The rotund trunks supported a tangled ceiling of branches.  The August Company of Truffle Farmers called these woods home and workplace, he recalled.  As he started down a well-tread path, he thought about a particular Trufflier called Golden Walt.  Its tight-knit and cultish members could be a prickly lot, and Golden Walt, if anything, embodied that axiom.  Yet he knew it might be worthwhile to the old halfling merchant a visit.  He would likely know where to find a black market horse seller, and he himself might even have one hidden away somewhere.

Suddenly he stopped.  He turned to the right.

Nothing.

Just two frosty nooks in a tree.  But they resembled eyes, and despite the overcast morning, they seemed to reflect the sunlight.

__________

The feeling of eyes was still with him an hour later, when Golden Walt’s place appeared.

Cullfor scanned the place, trying to gain a sense of how Golden Walt was doing these days.  He saw nothing that would indicate anything for certain.  The sturdy little cottage was as blunt and uninteresting as a naked man, no doubt belying the fortune stuffed under the floorboards.  A few freckly chickens pecked around the door. 

He was looking at pair of bovine-looking gargoyles, which stood half-buried in the mud at either front corner, when the chickens suddenly scattered.  As he stepped back, the door opened with a sharp groan.

In the next breath there was an enormous hog looking at him.  Cullfor stifled an apology to it, then stepped nearer.

The beast’s single, pink eye scanned him from the folds of its face.

“Walt?  Golden Walt?  Hey.  Walt Goldleaf!  It’s Cullfor.”

“Who is out there, Silly?”

He glanced at the pig again, the tusks jutting like middle fingers.

“I already said.  It’s Cullfor.”

“Cullfor who?”

“Cullfor who indeed, ye dull coot.  Cullfor!  Cullfor Stonebreaker.  Wizard.  Dwelf.  Nephew Fie Wyrmkiller.”

“From over a’ Gintypool?”

“Holy Lord,” he snorted.  “Yes. 
That
one.”

“Well then!  Tell him to wipe his boots and come in.”

Cullfor groaned, then entered.  As he looked around, the hog sniffed his ankles, far too interested in the smell of his boots.  It began licking at them until Golden Walt dropped from a rafter.

“Whoa!”

“Do you know how long it’s been, Cullfor?  Do you!”

Cullfor shook his head, unclenching his fist.

Golden Walt grabbed him by the arm and kissed his forehead.  Along with the pig, the two delved deep into the cottage, far deeper than seemed possible.  Cullfor looked back, then around, realizing they were actually underground now.  An enormous hearth towered before them.  Cullfor eyed it, wishing it was roaring with a warmth too thaw out the odd feeling of this place.  But they sat before a pair of muddy logs.

“So ha’s Cullfor?”

Cullfor nodded, looking down.  “Things have been better, I’m afraid.”

“Had heard you been made to be something of a hood lately.”

“Say again.”

“Skulking around Muttondon for God knows what.”

Cullfor cocked an eye, but said nothing.

Golden Walt said nothing either.  He kept staring, however, as if demanding some reply.

“Yes, God
does
know what,” Cullfor conceded.

After a moment the merchant-farmer harrumphed.  “Well then!”  He began sifting through a pile of the best-smelling truffles Cullfor had ever encountered.  “Here, man.  Try this one.  Say it is not worth twice what your lord was paying Big Bib.”

“That is not why—”

“I know your precious Bib Bladderwrack died this morning.  Young boys.  Cutthroats, right outside his own pub.   Now I said try it!”

Cullfor gathered himself, breathing deeply.  His eyebrows raised, he bit down.  The taste was enough almost enough to dissolve the sudden rush in his chest.  To dissolve his questions. 
Almost
.  He could not help but wonder if Walt had gone insane.  Probably not, he thought.  The nonsense was likely just some trick of the mind, used to distract his buyers, because as he chewed, he could sense him searching his face for interest.

Suddenly, Cullfor was struck by an idea.  He lowered his eyebrows with some effort and relaxed.  He thought of nothing, until his countenance was a calm sheet of ambiguity.  But Golden Walt left, waving off his obvious attempt at nonchalance. 

Cullfor grunted as he watched him go.  Sort of stupefied, he felt less like he was looking at an old business acquaintance.  It was more like someone you see and wonder where you’ve seen them before.

Golden Walt came back with a tiny, almost thimble-sized, wooden stein.  He was filling it from a metal keg, hardly larger than the stein.  Dark liquid dripped like syrup, a drop at a time.

“Big Bib could never beat Goldy.  Not at the more delicate crafts.”

Cullfor recognized the smell.  Dragon’s Brew.  The liquor was nothing less than the essence of the truffle, condensed over a great length of time.  Flecks of gold-grounds were added, then mixed with the blood of sea turtles, salamanders, and beasts known only to half dozen men on the isle.

Supposedly, it was once used during the Ringby Wizard Trials to test for presence of the unseen verve of the world, the force that most men call
magic
.

He brought it over and handed it to Cullfor, slowly.

Cullfor took the minute little stein, handling it as one might a wasp.  He looked down at it, then Walt.  He had heard strange tales of its power.  He had never dreamed he’d get a taste.

When he sipped, the flavor tickled the sides of his tongue a moment.  It practically danced in his mouth.  Then it then swept straight to a spot in his heart reserved for only the most joyous moments from deep in his youth.  His face bunched in ecstasy.  There was nothing with which to compare the taste, not even truffles themselves.  It filled his senses like a pleasant fever.

There was slow rumbling hum between his eyes, so that when he closed them, he melted.  The wheel of cheese in his pack did likewise.  He did not care.