Blood Of The Wizard (Book 1) (4 page)

“
The dwarf wants to know if the lady objects to having your place invaded!” Delthal tole the she-elf.

At that, the woman flinched
.  She looked to Delthal.  She did not understand our words, of course, but I think she was suspicious we were laughing at her.  There was a vindictive flash across her face, then the usual impenetrable expression of the elf came over her features.  I noticed that her cheeks and forehead were scarred, and a cut had laid open her upper lip from nose to teeth.

“
You must know that the lady elf before you is the daughter of a shaman.  And she herself is a fighter,” Delthal whispered. “Quite a good one.”

I might have known she was above common rank from the extraordinary number of trinkets she wore.  Pendants hung from her ears
like white bats from a blue eave.  She had a double necklace of polished claws and around her waist was a girdle of agates, which told me that she was of a more southerly, wilder tribe.  In the girdle of the loin cloth was an ivory-handled knife, which had doubtless given as many scars as its owner displayed.

“
Now, Delthal, nonsense aside…” I began.

“
I’ll put it aside with all my soul, if I still have one,” he said, lying back.

I told him my errand, and that I wished to search every skin tent for trace of the lost woman and child. 

He shut his eyes, irritated.

“
It isn’t that we suspect these folk, you know.  But the kidnappers might have traded the clothing to them—”

“
Oh!  Go ahead!” he interjected impatiently.  “Don’t beat round the bush! What do you want of me?”

“
Could we possibly have a look around without this one drawing that blade?”

“
Yes, yes, I’ll do the tents with you.  Yargisi, get off with you,” he muttered.

But
the she-elf didn’t move so much as an eyebrow. 

A
s he led the way to the first of the little homes, she began grumbling under her breath.  The she-elf was not to be dismissed.  When I followed Delthal, she rose and closed in behind.  At times her great, pendulous breasts actually rested on my shoulders.  But as I searched, the Mute, fearing foul play, loyally brought up the rear of our strange procession with his walking pole at the ready. 

That search saw my hands groping through robes and skins and blankets and in foul-smelling, vermin-infested piles of refuse
.  In other words, it was fruitless.  And the big she-elf’s nipples were lurking over my shoulder at every turn, her gashed lips grinning an evil, malicious challenge down at me all the while.  I thought she kept her hands uncomfortably near the ivory handle in the agate belt, too.  But Batt, good fellow, never took his beady eyes off those same hands, and he kept a grip on the walking pole.

So we examined the tents and made a circuit of the
elves around the fire, but found nothing to reveal the whereabouts of Shiri and the child. 

“
And why is that tent apart from the rest?  And who is in it?” I asked Delthal, pointing to the lone tent on the crest of the hill.

The fire cracked so loudly I became aware there was ominous silence among the loungers of the camp.  They were listening as well as watching.  Up to this time, I had not thought they were paying the slightest attention to us.  Delthal was not answering, and when I faced him, I suddenly found the she-
elf’s eyes fastened on his, holding them to whether he would answer or not.

There was a nameless suspicion getting possession of me. 
“Why don’t you answer, dwarf?”

The spell was broken.  He turned to me nonchalantly, as he used to face debtors in the pub and spoke gently, with downcast eyes, and a quiet, deprecating smile.

“You know, Fie, we should have told you before.  But remember we didn’t invite you here.”

“
Well?” I demanded.

“
Well,” he replied in a voice too low for any of the listeners but the she-elf to hear, “there’s a very bad case of plague up in that tent and we’re keeping the man apart till he gets better.  It’s her father.  That, in fact, is why we’re all here instead of camping nearer the ships—the traders won’t let us.  You Dellishmen call the elves primitive, but they themselves think that the elf’s sickness would travel over Dagonfell’s frozen bays and infect the their whole crew!”

“
Nonsense,” I said.

“
Yes, it is.  At any rate, their fears are not completely unfounded, Mister Fie.  It is the plague, after all.  You must go.  It is not safe.”

“
Well then… thanks, Master Delthal.”

But he did not offer me his hand when I made to take leave.

“Come,” he said.  “I’ll go as far as the gorge with you.”

He stood on the embankment and waved as we passed into the lengthening shadows of the valley.

I hurried down the gorge as fast as my snowshoes would carry me.  Then I remembered that Uncle Jickie had said my countryman’s superstitious dread of this disease knew no bounds.  That recollection checked my sudden flight.  If the elves had no such fear, why did this band not have more sick among them?  It would be more like elf character to stay and die with the victim.  This man might, even though he was a shaman, be a Dellish mongrel, or some other type of trader, but I couldn’t afford to be tricked—I ordered Batt to lead me back to that hut.

The Mute, wise old bastard, seemed to understand I had no wish to be seen by the campers.  He skirted round the base of the hill until we were on the side opposite from the tribe.  Then he motioned me to remain in the gorge while he scrambled up the cliff. 

There, he paused.  I knew he received a surprise as soon as his head was on a level with the top of the bank because he froze. 

He curled himself up behind a snow and gave a low whistle for me. 

When I was beside him, we were not twenty pole-lengths from the tent.  There was no appearance of life.  The tent flaps had been laced up.  A solitary watchdog was tied to a stake before the entrance. 

I breathed, thinking. 
Down the valley, the setting sun shone through the naked trees and dyed all the glistening snowdrifts like they were streaked with blood.  The faintest breath of wind, a mere sigh of moving air, came up from the woods with faraway echoes of the Dellish traders’ voices.  Perhaps this was heard by the watchdog, or it may have felt the disturbing presence of my half-wild
guide
, because it sat back on its haunches, lifted its head, and let out the most miserable howl imaginable.

“
Oh! 
Master Fie
,” my guide said.  “He die, master.  Oh, he die now.  When dog cry lok dat, he dead!”

Then he scrambled down into the gorge, making silent, fear-fueled gestures for me to follow.

For a time—but not long—I lay there alone, watching and listening.  Batt’s ears might hear the moans of a sick man or dwarf, but mine could not.  And I sure as hell wasn’t about to return to the hall without ascertaining whether it was man or dwarf in that tent.  Slipping off the snowshoes, I rose and tip-toed over the snow with the full intention of silencing the dog with my pole.

Suddenly, I was stopped by the sound of pain-racked groaning.  Then the brute of a dog almost hung himself, trying to get me
. 

A voice shouted in perfect D
ellish.  “Go!  Go away!”

“
Who has the plague?” I bawled back.

“
I am Ullinarn the Red.  Of the venerable King’s Fur Company, ye wee cuttin’s bas-terd!” the voice said.

My own countryman had mistaken my voice for that of a dwarf.
 

“
I didn’t ask after you, Dellishman.  I said who has the plague?”

“
The damned shaman o’ the bunch downhill.  If ye have anything for him, lay it on the snow.  I’ll come for it.”

“Then why do you lie with him?”

“Because, Dwarf, I gave it to him!  I can no sooner go back than the elvish scum!”

I harrumphed, softly. 
Honor pledged me to serve Halvgar until he found his wife, but I was anxious, and in the end, I halted, then retraced my way to the gorge and hurried homeward with Batt. 

As I left, the look that passed between the big she-
elf and Delthal came back to me with a level of significance I had not felt when I first saw it.  It was hard to say what it was, exactly.  It was like the presence of an indefinite, unknown evil, which lay dormant in my own nature and had only just been aroused.  I
felt
, rather than knew, that Delthal had deceived me.  It was not hard to imagine the crafty little dwarf telling a lie, but then, a lie is the clumsy invention of the novice.  An expert accomplishes his deceit without anything as tangibly dishonest as a lie.

And Delthal was a
master. 

Though I hadn’t a
pint of proof, as they say, I could not help but think about how he and Addly were so close and chummy not so many years ago.

The significance of it would
not leave my head.

Chapter 6

“You should have hacked that damned quarantine’s head off!” Uncle Jickie thundered. 

I had been relating my experience with the campers, recounting how the
Dellishman in the tent had warned me of the plague.  But, being highly successful in all his own dealings, Jickie could not tolerate failure in other people.  Two days of vigilant searching had yielded not the slightest inkling of Shiri and the child, and the aggravation of it ignited all the fury of my dwarven uncle’s fiery temperament. 

“
Chopped his head off and cleaved him in two, nephew!” he continued.  “Make it a point to knock the ballocks off anything that stands in your way—”

“
Dangerous business, dealing with the plague.”

“
Danger
is
our business, Fie!  We are dwarven—
you
as much as any of my kin!”

“
But you don’t suppose …” 

“
Suppose!
” he roared.  “I make it a point never to
suppose
anything.  I act on facts, nephew! You wanted to go into that tent, didn’t you?”

“
Of course!”

“
Well then why the frozen hell didn’t you go and hack the head off anything that opposed you?”

“
You’ve said that several times already, Uncle Jickie,” I put in, having taken on a touch of his own peppery temper from my years with him.

But in truth, I hand no answer.

To anything.

We had felt so sure Killroot’s band of vagabonds would hang about till the brigades of the
traders from Delmark set out for the east, and all our efforts were spent in a vain search for some trace of the rascals in the vicinity of Goback. 

But it was as if they had disappeared with fewer signs than Halvgar’s family.

Jickie, Halvgar and I hired spies and dogged the footsteps of Dellish traders who were awaiting the breaking up of the ice.  But the shadowy, kilted voyageurs proved far less mysterious than we would have thought.  Somehow both violent and idle, they passed days in the little town of tents and cabins they had erected around their frozen-in vessels.  They had wild, open-field orgies with the she-elves and often fought among themselves to the death. 

And as we watched them, w
e scrutinized every blue-faced native who crossed our path, ever on the alert for a glimpse of Killroot, or his associates.  Diligently, we tracked all elvish trails through Frostetch Forest and examined every tent within a week’s march of the city. 

Watches were set along the
Trollwater River so no one could approach an opening before the ice broke up, or launch a canoe after the water had cleared without our knowledge. 

Even so, Killroot and his band had vanished as mysteriously as Shiri.  It seemed as impossible to learn where he had gone as to follow the wind. 

But it was the very fruitlessness of the search that redoubled our zeal.  Dark suspicions grew in our heads, the darkest being that the bastard had slain his captives.  But no one would speak these things.

The conviction that Delthal had, somehow or other
, played me, stuck in my mind like the depression that stays with you after a bad dream.  Again and again, I related the notion to my uncle; but he “pished” the very idea of any kidnappers remaining so near the city and giving me free run of their tents—besides, he noted, there was a reason Delthal and Addly kept contact.  The human guard bought wild game from the elves.

That relieved me, in a weird way. 
But it was all that I had to go on, and it’s hard to let a theory die, so hard that my reasonless persistence was beginning to irritate him.  On one occasion, he threatened to hamstring the “fool idiot mute” who led me such a wild-goose chase.

In spite of this, I once more donned snow-shoes and took off with Batt for a second visit to the campers of the gorge. 

And a second time, I was welcomed by Delthal.  The plague tent still sat on the crest of the hill.

When I asked about the patient, Delthal pointed without a word  to a rocky mound where a
n elf and kilted man lay, being eaten by crows.

“
That’s the Dellishman.  And the other one.  That’s… our shaman.  Killroot.”

“
What remains of him,” I sighed.

Soon after, I learned a fact I did not know about the elves, that their shaman rarely stays in their camps.  And they would certainly never take the life of a woman or a child.  So, in the end, it turned out that Killroot had simply put a curse on Halvgar, nothing more.  It had never been a threat at all.

Meanwhile, Halvgar
came to accept the unkind truth of this.  Which only made his search more frantic.  He rested neither night nor day.  In the morning, he would outline the plans for the day with a few hurried words.  At night, he rode back to the lodge with eager questions in his eyes, and I knew he had nothing better to report to me than I did to him. 

After a silent
and meager meal, he would ride through the dark forests on a fresh mount.  How he passed those sleepless nights, I do not know. 

When it seemed we had exhausted every possible venue,
my uncle and I actually began to discuss different things.

“What about Addly’s rage?”

“
Addly’s what!  What rage?  Your countrman’s been in fine form since.  Hell’s depths, but that scar has been a nothing but a boon to him since he earned it!”

I harrumphed.
  The thought of a scar made me think of Delthal’s wife.  Specifically her split lips.

“
That Delthal,” I said.  “Phew!  His wife!  She’s got a face to ward off demons.”

My uncle laughed. 

“Delthal… I still think he’s hiding something… or
was
.”

“
Oh!  That son-in-law of an inflated old shaman!  He was hiding something alright!  A lazy pig!  He whored that big she-elf out to the Dellish traders last spring.”

Just then, everything made sense.  Her look of suspicion.  Delthal’s coyness.  The reason he no longer had any financial troubles.
  Even the reason she followed me into the tents, and the confused look on her face when I left.

“
Damn funny way to treat a wife.”

“
Funny?  My lad, fun and funny are easy to come by for those with our kind of money.  Pray your wife, whoever you should find for the job, shows you half as much love and dedication of those blue-faced elvish whores.  Thundering shit, nephew, compared to them beasts, most dwarves don’t have enough balls in their sac to fill an acorn shell!”

At first, I thought that this might have been the first argument to pierce my uncle’s
view of elves as animals, for though he called them beasts, he seemed to reserve some corner of his heart for envy of them. 

“
At any rate, they were no help in finding Shiri.  It’s as if some giant bird scooped them up!”

My uncle froze, his back to me.

He turned, very slowly.  His keen eyes glanced up at me as if there might be some hope for my intelligence, and he took several turns around the room.  But apparently, I had only brought something else to mind.  Suddenly, he stood still.  Then he looked at me again with the first sign of worry I’d ever seen flash across that battered old face.

“
Come along, Fie my lad,” he said quietly.  “There is something we Cutters need to discuss.”