Blood Of The Wizard (Book 1) (32 page)

Chapter 66

__________

Cullfor tromped through uncertain wilds, running northward all night.  Even as morning dried away the mist, he was gripped by a formless sense of failure.  It was a unique depression—almost a desire to be disappointed.  He wished he could say that, dammit, the ass being struck by lightning was just a monstrous setback.  But he understood it was worse.  Whoever was seeking him was able to steer that bolt close enough to nearly kill him.  Some might find stupidity in thinking that.  But he knew better.  The ugly, real fact was that he was up against powers he was only beginning to comprehend.

With downcast eyes, he paused. 

Damn it, he wished he had learned more, sooner.  He had to get it in his head:  This is a battlefield.  In a battle, any battle, pity will kill you.  Even self pity.  But he couldn’t escape it.  He studied the ground, staring at nothing in particular for a moment.  Feeling like he just wanted to go home and get in his own bed, he breathed,  and just let his thoughts drift.  He recalled once looking up at the moon and feeling like he was made of its odd stuff, as if a chunk had fallen to earth, and he had been hatched from it.

Walking now, he thumbed the money in his pocket.  Hours of this bleak battle-mood saw him to a break in the forest, where a field sprawled before him.  It was inexplicably green, and it rolled like water under a morning sky that was as pink and gold as his bleary eyes could take.

He squinted upward.  The sun was refreshing, if only for the sight of it.  But its warmth was gauzy.  Between the last two trees of the forest, at a spot where two white slaps of birch jutted at odd angles, he noticed a crudely painted sign.

‘Be Wary’, it said. ‘You enter a haunted glen.’

As he stepped through, he scoffed. 

But he scoffed too quickly, and he knew it.  Almost instantly, there was an awareness of something wrong and wicked.  The feeling floated in from the sides of his neck.  It squeezed warmly around the inside of his skull.

He halted.

Suddenly, there was something claustrophobic about the meadow.  The way it swept up and out.  He wanted to call out, but a bizarre feeling said that if he did, his voice would get sucked into the fairy-holes that lined the pasture.

Then he thought he heard the scratchy pad of clawed feet tracing across stone.  He jerked his head.

There was nothing.

Whispers began tracing.  They rose and scattered from the fairy-holes like scooting leaves, and as he listened, he found they were fading.  He stared.  The more he concentrated, the more indistinguishable the rustles became, but when he relaxed, their clarity grew in froths of understanding, until there were almost words amid the hisses.

Cullfor straightened his posture, gripping his sword, certain this would help nothing and was disappointed to be right.  Dim laughter rippled and gurgled as if through an underground stream.

He stared at the holes, trying to dismiss the voices—no, noises.

“Toss the hell off,” he whispered.

For a moment in the stillness he forgot why he had shouted.  Something lifeless coiled around his spine.

He shook his foot. 

“What’s happening to me?”

“
Gooood,”
a whisper said.

Cullfor breathed deeply, letting his reflective humor fill him, the sense of irony he once believed all men were born with, and looked toward the fairy holes.  Thinking of Uncle Fie, he recalled talking with him one drunken evening about his aunt.  The son of a bastard, God bless him, said she liked to bite his face while she writhed atop him.

Cullfor was nodding, feeling somehow victorious—until a giant hawk-screech rang out from nowhere.  The noise, echoing and slight, might as well been ice water down his neck.  He ducked, gritted his teeth.  While it faded by unnatural degrees, it resounded back with a distorted crackle.

He looked up, grimacing.

Then he looked behind him. 

But he never saw the hawk.

“Preposterous damn noise for a bird,” he said.

And he resigned himself to his anxiety.

He continued to sit, until a new silence made his fear less crisp.  The air lightened.  Then another feeling grew in him, the welcome normalcy of hunger.  In an imposing, very immediate way, he was hungry.

Hungry, he thought happily.

Just hungry.

Okay, food.  Where is the food in an empty glen?  It was, for damn certain, not on the flat rock in front of him.

He recalled that rations often ran thin on their longer campaigns into Yrkland.  Sometimes his lord’s men boiled down acorns into mush.  But it was awful.  He had also seen his men eat grass.  But they always vomited soon after.  Or that was dogs?  Yes.  He believed it was dogs.

Either way, neither option would cut it.  He was looking around when he decided there was probably not anything to eat in this dragon’s glen at all.

Cullfor stood and walked out, the sky beginning to brighten.  He felt a bit more clear-headed.  He walked for an hour, then another. 

He continued until the meadows crumbled into long fingers that stretched between wooded hills.  The path he chose bore a slow stream at its rim.  It bent out of the woods behind him.  As he traced the water’s edge, it began to fatten and slow, widening to something of a marsh before it collected again, far ahead of him.  Beyond that the water seemed to merge with a distant, sparkling river, contrasting the dull flow of the stream.

His feet became wetter.  There was no way to avoid sloshing now, startling the small things of the water.  Fish and birds scattering before him, he scanned the water for something slow enough to catch.  But the water was too weedy.  In fact it was so muddy and dark he doubted that what he was even seeing was fish, but he crept to the filmy edge.  He was more careful now, treading upward toward the hills alongside the meadow.  He kept moving, following the current until the water was swift enough to see through.

Just ahead, he could see the spring that fed the marsh.  The soft bottomland had worn away to rocks.  There was a slower spot in the water that formed a series of pools.

He stepped across some rung-like roots, back downward a bit.

Cullfor froze.  Instantly he recognized the outlines of three fish.  He stared with controlled enthusiasm.  Brookies.  They looked fat and slow, waddling against the lazy current.  He sat and began scraping what was left of the cheese from his pack.  He fingered at the corners and threads, collecting bits under his nails.  There was more in there than he realized, and soon he rolled the paste between his fingers.  Then he removed the pack and placed the cheese back inside.  A few steps downstream of the fish, he set the pack down in the water.

Next he hurried uphill, a ways past the fish.  When he stepped down into the creek, he discovered the springs had made it far, far colder

A conniption of shivering overcame him.  He stepped out, rubbing his arms, watching his ridiculous trap tumble useless until it caught in a cluster of grass.

Well then.

__________

Still shivering, Cullfor decided a fire might help him think.

He collected some dead wood, which he found in scattered in abundance along the bottom of the hill.  Along with some dried leaves, he dumped the bundle in a bare circle.  His pile was haphazard, so he reshaped it, seeming to recall that it would work better if it were shaped like a pyramid.

Then he remembered that his tinderbox was in his tool tray at home.

Hoo. 

He looked over at the fish, which hadn’t moved.  He finished his work on the pile and began thinking about another man at arms, stronglaw to Lord Bedew.  There was an instance...he started a fire with nothing more than a stick and a board.  He held the memory another moment.  This particular stronglaw was vicious.  What a creature.  Tormented people about whatever frailty availed itself.

Cullfor snorted, then searched and found a sturdy piece of hickory.  It was about the width of a worm, which was just about right, according to memory.

He tried to bore an equally small hole with the sword and threw the ridiculous result aside.

In the next instant the world gifted him.  At eye level was a dead branch with a woodpecker hole.  He worked to loosen the branch without ruining the hole.  Then he laid the resulting curved board amid the dry grasses and got down on his buttocks.  He held the stick between his palms, flat against one another.  Then he rubbed.  And rubbed.

It took very little time to determine what he was up against.  As the afternoon sky wore to a grainy cobalt, Cullfor continued.  Another hour later, the fire remained a cold promise.  The only burn was in his shoulders, but he continued to rub.  He was straining now to recall the man’s technique.  He could not think of a significant difference.  Except...of course.  There was a string involved.  It had been shaped like a tiny bow with...

To hell with this, he thought, and held his open palm over the leafy debris.

Cullfor bared his teeth.  He focused.  He focused with all the muster of a man whose life depended on this.

Then he reached a state of stretched mental silence, the sound that rings through one’s ears when they listen to snow beginning to pile on a fallen log.

Finally, deep within the debris, there was real smoke.

When it lit with the sheerest lick of flame, the tiny sizzle was like a choir.  Then, poof, it decided to exist.  Smoke poured from his efforts, low across the wet grass.  It was a fire, crackling with a kind of self-assurance.

He got up, dancing excitedly in the smell of it.  He began adding larger and larger pieces.

Then he froze.

There was a hint of a smell.  Then a splash.  He turned.  Back in the direction he came, he saw a glimpse of brown.  It was far off, but it was a glimpse of
fur
, and it was big.  Chest-deep in the marshy water, it looked like a bear.

Then it stood, like a man.

Oh, he thought. 
Alright
.  He rummaged slowly through his mind for what to do, intuiting that loud or quick thoughts might gain the thing’s attention:  Just.  Be.  Still.

No matter what.

The beast rose from the water, dripping as it stepped atop a fallen log.  Fully revealed, it was massive.  Though it had the shape of a man, it was larger.  The arms were long.  Wildly huge muscles rippled under a frame that must have weighed seven or eight hundred pounds.

It was a troll.  A woodtroll.

Cullfor watched.  He was breathing deeply.  He became perfectly still.  Calm.   Listening once again to the snow piling up in his mind’s forest.

It stepped back in the water, bent again on all fours again like a bear.

Then the thing froze.  It turned, the entire body moving with the head, and looked at him.

He repeated to himself:  Just.  Be.  Still.

No matter what
.

Then Cullfor pounded uphill, roaring, cussing, shimmying through the thickening trees.

Chapter 67

“They say the sheep there will sometimes growl.”

—Dwarven rumor, concerning Delmark

__________

The blistered remains of a once old and mossy wood spread before King Jorigaer like some vast meadow of black totems.  It was just before dawn, and a vaporous grit filled the air between him and his guard.  As subdued thumps reverberated in the gray distance, they echoed from the deep corners of the hollows or from high in bald hilltops.  Hands were quick to jerk toward swords.  The monstrous warhorses were in no mood, either.  Each shuffled at their own speed.  They refused certain passes, and hurried through others.  Every creak or groan was the forest itself, emoting an ancient displeasure.

King Jorigaer cupped his mouth.  “Bunn!” he bellowed.  “Bunn Red!”

At places, the air was so thick it seemed the smoke of last year’s fires had never left.  Only when they passed over the bay’s headwater did it relent.  But here the going was slower.  The small rivulets of gray sluiced under the hooves of their horses, causing the beast to slid with sudden snorts and neighs.

In the end, an hour’s ride seemed to have taken day.

Finally, King Jorigaer’s raised fist halted the party.  An ashy wind swirled toward them, and a sheet of dust rose from a tangle of scorched undergrowth.

There was form in the gray.

“Sister Bunn!”

A petite figure emerged.  She began approaching through the blurred air.  Her pony was so small it resembled a dog.

Closer, the king could see that she was older than he thought, perhaps thirty.  She was plump and ruddy-faced, blonde as snow.  She was wrapped in the shabby brown habit of Arwegian nuns.  Past an endearing mist of freckles, she wore her clerical focus over a mean, arctic-looking glint.  Hers was a fragile gorgeous, he ventured.  As if a single alteration could send her crashing into ugliness.

Closer still, she was stayed with the tips of a dozen swords.

The nun tsked, staring past the blades. 

“You are Jorigaer, King of Yrkland?” she asked

King Jorigaer gave a small couch.  Something like respect or disdain passed between them. 

He felt a bit humored, which he found surprising.  He shook it off, then turned and motioned for The Dwarf in the Black Thistle Helm to produce the chest.

The Dwarf in the Black Thistle Helm lowered his blade, watching her.  When he dismounted, he unknotted the leather-strapped wood from his mount.  It was heavy, plunking on the ground with a great jangle of coin that made ash scatter and rise.

The nun bent over and opened it, waving the air.  Inside she discovered a meal of boiled cereal and chicken, wrapped in parchment.  One hand scooped handfuls of food into her mouth while the other fingered the pile of silver.

Suddenly, she stopped chewing.  She looked up.

“This is only half,” she said, swallowing. 

Naively, she was thinking that she had merely handed the king a land deed to the ruined burg of Gintypool, and that her mission had been one of diplomacy, not treachery.

“Indeed,” the king said.  “It is only half.”  He was watching her neck as she chewed again.  Special attention was given to the tip of her nose.  It lowered slightly with every bite.  Her chin was soft and yet squared, almost doubling whenever she swallowed.  “And in the stead of that silver, your interesting little head could be stuffed into that chest.”

Sister Bunn glowered, flustered and flattered.  She was already chewing the last bite of the meal.

“He shall receive the rest soon enough,” King Jorigaer said.  “Now, the deed, if you please.”

The halfling nun stood and wiped her mouth, her tongue working the last bits of food down.  She nodded, handing him rolled up length of cloth.  Inside was the best map the king had ever seen in his life, along with a note, which read:

A single warband from Nobody’s Sleigh.  Lord Bedew has asked my blessing on a surprise march on Whogg’s Lodge by way of the Battle-hills of Begotten.  A simple ambush.  There will be no archers.  No cavalry.  And of course King Bhiers the Sober will send none of his Brickelby Guard to help with so small a matter as a border raid.  Officially, he knows nothing of it.  In number they will be a standard, hundred-twice.  Probably some armed porters and few men at arms.

The Dwarf in the Black Thistle Helm, along with two knights, began hemming her into a brushy corner.  They looked at the king, pressing their sword tips against her head and neck.

“Shall we kill her, my lord?”

King Jorigaer could almost feel himself in the blades, touching her.

“Oh, no.  That won’t be necessary.  Or prudent, for that matter.  No doubt Friar Basil will see that these plans change if his pet viper is not returned safely.”

The Dwarf in the Black Thistle Helm nodded, seeming to disagree at the same time.  Dutifully, he loaded the chest onto her dog-like pony and strapped it down.

The nun was grinning, nodding to him.  Her look suggested he was a good boy, or perhaps a good little pup.  She turned to the king.

“I suppose my indecencies here are complete?” she asked.

“Not entirely,” Jorigaer said.  He turned and gave his knights a look.  It was a familiar expression, meaning he needed some distance, and wen they were redoubled some distance back into the forest, he dismounted.

He approached her slowly.

She was smiling, forcibly.  Standing still, she seemed naively firm in her resolve.  Her pony was hoofing the ash.

As he stepped in front of her, looking down, he yanked her cowled habit off her chest and head.  Her hair was a plaited ocean, tied into a bun at the top.  Her head, sweaty and tilted, was defiantly offering her neck to him, but an eye was squinting, ticking, he mused, with some faint hope that this was as far as things would go.

“Such a rare-looking little thing,” he whispered.  He moved slowly closer.

“I am quite beautiful, aren’t I?”

“Ha, yes.  Indeed.  Zaftig.  Voluptuous…”

Their cheeks and chins brushed lightly across each other, and their mouths hovered corner to corner.

“The subtle, enigmatic smell of my skin.  It intoxicates the king.”

“Yes, yes, it does.”

“It uncoils the slow warmth of long-slept lusts, does it not?”

He tsked into her ear.  “It is a shame you married God.  Arway might not be such a miserable little corner of our realm with your babies to fill it.”

Then he bit her.

She fell back in shock, turning to run.  The king grabbed the back of her head.  He fisted the great coil of hair, straining, and brought her to the ashy ground.  He put a knee in her back.  With the other hand, he grabbed the belted garments under her habit.  He began yanking them downward in a series of rips over her hips.

She bore her teeth, grunting but not fighting.  Then she rolled to him.

She yanked off his fox pelt tartan.  She knotted his kilt in her fists, and pulled it up his back.  He was squirming wildly as she rolled onto him.  Grunting, she pulled at her own ripped undergarments until the ripped away, tossing them aside.  They were working up a rolling torrent of dust, already grinding against each other, as he rolled her yet again.  On her back now, she pulled open her robes, which he helped, ripping them away from her rounded hips, the pulling them away as she arched her back.  The pale flesh of her naked stomach was quaking as she spread her legs.  She groaned into the meat of his shoulder.  Then she slid her mouth up his neck to his ear—and clamped down.

“Good God!” he squalled.

She gritted teeth as he bucked backwards, tearing the lobe of his own ear with a muted snap.

Jorigaer rolled away, growling.

Holding what remained of the ear, he stood and reached for his sword.

The nun had jumped to her feet, grabbing her ripped undergarments.  She ran to him, jostling and pale, and naked as the day she was born, then she wrapped her underwear around his throat.  Then she dropped.

King Jorigaer was bent backwards.  She shoved her knees into his back, grabbing a tree trunk.  They fell with a muffled grunt.

He roared mutedly and began squalling silently for help, but she twisted the fabric tighter.  She watched him struggle, baring her red, bloody teeth.  In the crazed tumult, he failed to get any fingers between the fabric and his throat.  His eyes were bulging.  His neck reddened.  He felt his esophagus give, bruising from within.

Then she rolled him over and placed her foot in his back.  She was shaking now with exhaustion, pulling tighter and tighter on the underwear.  He held a hand against his neck.

With his other hand, he was struggling to get upright.  And he managed to get to a knee.  Then to stand.  He turned to her, understanding she had let him up.

But it was only give him over to a hoof, which flew at his waist.  It hit him atop his groin.

He was blearily aware of doubling over, tumbling.

__________

Sometime after, the king was staring at a gray light.  There were the scuffs of a hoof in the ash beside his head.  Through the fog, King Jorigaer sensed himself being rolled over sideways.

The Dwarf in the Black Thistle Helm was bent over him.

“Your ear, my lord!  Your throat.  What
the devil
happened to you?”

King Jorigaer shook his head.  He touched his ear and motioned for the wax and thread, and for the first time since he had watched his father die, he smiled.

__________

Cullfor felt whirls of terrible pain prancing on his injured leg as he ran up hillside after hillside away from the marsh.

But as he looked back, he was suddenly disgusted.  The creature was padding along in effortless pursuit.  It came trotting along his wake of woody debris, stepping over the tangles.

Cullfor turned again, began running.  But now he was exhausting fast.  His legs felt heavy.  He tripped, and began rolling down the hillside, before limping up yet another.

Then the world ended, abruptly.

A cliff dipped before him.  The land slopped a few feet, and beyond was a deep gouge, the river crashing along the bottom.  It went as far as he could see to his left.  To his right, the hill was an easy slope, into the marsh, then the swift river.

He was almost too terrified to look back.  But he could not help himself.  The beast had noticed, too.  It had angled its run, coming at him now from the bottom.  The realization hit him like a warm fist inside his ribs.

Could he make it to the water first?

Cullfor caught his breath a moment.  He leaned on the tree that had just saved him from tumbling over.  He prayed it was only being playful.

The thing approached, a hundred feet behind now. 
The sight of it hit him like a warm fist inside his ribs.  It was coming faster, now at the bottom of the hill.  A massive animal-man, the woodtroll’s teeth were sticky with moss and blood.  It was gripping a disembodied deer hoof.  Scars rippled under the bodily hair, and i
t had an obscenely human face.  The salty hairs around the mouth gave it the look of a shadowy grin.

He glanced down the cliff.  It was too steep.  It was thirty feet away now.  He climbed the trunk, wrestling his way up to the last suitable nook.  He was almost too high.  Some twenty feet up.

As he looked down, he shuddered:  it was the strangest beast he’d ever seen, far stranger the memories he had of them as a child.  It was unlike anything he had even heard of.

And he had left his lord’s sword.  He still had the adaranth axe, though.  Reluctant to use it, he prepared himself to form a wall of air before.  He looked down again to discover it came slower now.  It was merely walking.  Huge but nimble, it was snapping slobbery jaws.  The tongue was spotted and long, lapping wildly as if trying to free something stuck in its mouth.

Closer, the animal appeared scarred and maimed.  There was a hole in its cheek.  It seemed it was more...
human
now.  Terribly old.  As it reached the base of the trunk, Cullfor marveled at the bizarre white eyes.  It panted as it stared up at him.

Then it dug its claw-like fingers into bark.

He reached down with an open palm, bending his thumb behind his hand as it began to climb.  The wall did not work!  The action was sickening, even more hideous to behold as it wrapped the forelimbs around the trunk.  It looked up at him, mouthing odd noises as it ascended.

He looked down at the axe.  Did it do more than penetrate his walls?  Did it prevent him from making them entirely?

“Stop that!  Go.  Go away.”

Its haunch-muscles were rippling from its own weight as it ambled further up.

Cullfor was shaking.  Utterly panicked, he began climbing higher.  He flinched at the snapping noises of jaws and branches.  Everything was getting too flimsy.  Too high.  He was struggling to breathe.  It touched his foot.  The branches were bending now under his shaking feet and hands.