Blood Of The Wizard (Book 1) (42 page)

Closer now, the man said, “Know the name of the man will end you, boy.  I am known by many names.  But in death you will recall me as the Ivorlas Finn.”

Here he was, the man who killed the founder of his homeland.  The antihero of every Arwegian boy’s youth, Ivorlas was the immortal founder of the Ivornon Empire who had killed his own father.  But physically, he was hardly less frail than the demons that had just crowded him. 

But pity will kill you, his mind spoke. 

Suddenly his breath was gone.  He stood awkwardly.  Everything went soot-colored and he felt himself choking on the blood in his sinuses.  And Finn grew, now hardly a man at all, but a thing, wardrobed in a likeness of a man.  It wore his skin like sinewy and terrible armor now.  It was like the dead flesh-plating of an ancient hell-thing, gray and thorny and dangling.  The eyes were windows into thick black galaxies.  It bore animal teeth.  Wolf teeth.  No.  They were longer.  They were more like the teeth of a dragon. 

The old man was more than a cruithne lord.  He was the King of the Dark Cruithne.  It smiled, and licking the elongated, bone-like teeth made the world vibrate with the noise of hellish harps. 

“Then know me as well, beast.  I am Cullfor.  And when I end you, they will call me a mandragon.  But when you are gone from this world, know you were sent from it by little more than a feisty little goat from Gintypool.”

The old dragon sneered.  “End me?  Your fear, boy, reeks the metallic scent of men who had been felled in dung heaps.  I sniff the air, but pull from it no strength.  No power.  I pull from it naught but the menstruation of the false whore you brought to defile my inn!”

Cullfor raised his blade, growling now.  He motioned for it to come and the ancient fiend looked at him.  It growled something like a word, the near-feminine noise of it as hideous as a wounded child. 

And the beast shivered in a reptilian explosion of screaming laughter.

Cullfor felt his life draining to his shins, and as Bunn collapsed, he charged the fiend.  Madness latched onto his thrusting sword, tearing into the dragon’s gut.  The long blade sank deep and his knuckles raked across its bristly teats. 

Cullfor roared, wrenching the steel back and forth inside it.

Finn howled savagely.  But no guts spilled.  No blood.  Just dripping globules of living fat rolling down the hilt as the old being licked the air in ecstasy. 

Cullfor felt his flesh prickle.  He began to tremble.  The fat plopping onto the floor undulated in living liquid, like worms.  He leapt backwards for Bunn, but stumbled.  He yelped and crawled with the hustle of a wounded animal, pulling her through the inn.  The ramshackle work of crabbing away was halted when he found Bunn wide awake, halting them by clinging to the bar.

“We can’t run from this!”

“Good,” he muttered.

Cullfor turned.  He raised his blade and strode to the mandragon.

Hunkering under the beamed doors, Ivorlas Finn hissed and emerged into the red light under the mural likeness. 

As he chopped downward at it, the fiend swung with a single, terrifying chop.  The unnatural strength of the blow sent him sprawling.  Finn was howling now, a noise like storm winds.  It reached down at him with an open hand, growling as Cullfor chopped at it—the grind of claw and steel rang as it caught the blade, clasping it.  Then it wrenched it with terrible force from his hand.

Cullfor knew his hand was broken from the force, and the beast’s sickening lack of effort was almost too much for his mind to accept. 

It squeezed the blade, and dropped the ruined steel beside him.

He shuddered as it stomped on his chest, pinning him.  He reached for the only weapon he could, the only hard thing on him, the dirk in his boot.  Even as he closed his eyes, he could still see the creature that called itself Ivorlas, Founder of Ivorthot.  He brought the dirk up in his broken, balled fist and cuffed the knee.  The creature roared in pain, its grip squeezing his skull, wrecking his mind with a deep gouge of demonic madness across his thoughts.  As it fell, two more swift strikes from his balled fist sent it rolling on the floor.  Thin strings of his blood splattered beside it like offensive, living gristle or moist red insects.  It had dropped its sword, and its voice again rolled across his brain, a laugh that bit into his mind in shivering, reptilian bursts. 

He bent.  Pain rushed over his body like hot burns.  There was the click of its teeth.  As he lifted the fiend’s sword, it was merely staring at him, seeming to consider something.

The taste of fear spread in Cullfor’s mouth as a viscous silence filled the air.  He closed his eyes again, and the blade went slowly, downward like the hands of clock, vibrating like a song as it tore apart the creature’s skull in a sizzling burst.

And half of Ivorlas’ head fell away.

Cullfor roared, baring his teeth, and while the ground under the partial head began erupting in a great ripping noise, Bunn rushed to him, pulling at him till they knocked into each other stumbling and crawling madly to get away from a sudden gnawing gape in the earth. 

The great maw stretched.  Teeth of stone erupted from the great black roll of mud, swallowing the inn.

Just as the earth ripped under their feet they fell and leapt from their knees to tumble and crawl some more.

Chapter 88

__________

Cullfor slunk away from the hole that was the inn, so weak he was nearly lifeless.  Bunn crawling beside him.  Neither was unable to get to their feet.  From deep, deep in the earth came a stench and a black, devilish clicking.  It was a noise to seize the heart and lock him solid.  Then a paused silence shivered through them, and a sudden deep cold rocked his mind.  It was more than an absence of heat.  It was a living chill with roots that spread through his blood.  He slumped over, covering his ears as he began to convulse. 

He began to vomit and he crawled further and stumbled further, only to roll over lifelessly again.

Bunn leaned over and whispered in his ear: 
You did it, my sweetness. 

He felt the heat of her words on his lobe.  And he smiled.

A knowing smile. 

The smile of a dragon.

A mandragon.

Chapter 89

_______________

Dhal sat naked and utterly alone in the world, crying, her head dropped, morbid thoughts singing through her head like a death march.  For mining silver and harvesting bog iron, she thought, a child is worth five men.  But the young are usually dead in a year.  How can a life mean so little?  Why is wisdom always wasted on the aged?  What was this new feeling of doom in her bones? 
A hellishly long time passed and so too did a myriad of hellish thoughts as she stared down into the water of her bath, and even as the water grew frigid, she just stared into the scummy surface, her tears no longer dropping before her, her life seeming to dissipate with the heat of the water.  And then, something… odd. 

Something truly bizarre happened. 

She stared down into the water and saw a vision beginning to unfold.  Jorigaer, Lord of Delmark, rode with an army in search of… her nephew.  

“Cullfor…” she whispered.  “Be careful my boy.  So much rides with you…”

He stared into a tree and seemed to form a response on hi lips.  Before the answer came, Talent’s helper’s, the girls in the room next to her, shocked her with the volume of their barks, “Get her!  Seize her!  She has seen him!”

As Bhiers’ girls folded around her, she instantly, and for reasons she could not name, understood she was going to die, and yet she wondered an odd thing. 
Do the things we learn in life die with us?

While they pulled a rope down over her wet body, she became more and more aware that some things in life, simply, just did not end well—her own death would be told with the odd curiosity of hunting tales about deer who had wondered into camp.  She was bound again, just as she had been before.  Only it was worse.  One of the girls brought into the room a large wooden pole.  They bound her arms behind her back to the timber with thin but strong rope.  They bound her at the waist as well.  Then she felt the warm clarity of her shock, of knowing this was it.  Biting her lip as she was hoisted over the shoulders of the women, she turned to Talent, who had just entered the room, and began pleading with her eyes.

“Help me, please.”

“Take her to the roof.”

“Please.”

“Give her only enough time to say what she has seen.”

“No…”

The fat woman just laughed.  “Throw her off if she does not speak.”

“You know I will not.”

“Then take her outside.  Give her to the men.  Then burn her on a wolf tree and give her ashes to the devil.”

Somehow, something in Dhal was further broken by those words.  No worry grew.  Instead she grinned, glimpsing for a moment the grand cosmic joke of it all.  She shrugged sardonically at the inescapability of her situation.

“It is a small matter,” she said, “the life of one person.”

Once she was secured, Talent took a swig of beer.  Her face was placid.  Neither she nor the others exuded any obvious thoughts of mercy.  They just began toting her outside.

_______________

In time, Cullfor nodded.

Yes
, he thought, but merely working his mind toward that beast-man again was the most difficult and terrifying thing he had ever done.  But once his thoughts were there, he could almost admit: Ivorlas was dead.

I did it.

But he could not the words form in his head.  Not yet.

The confession brought the beginning of a terrible sleepiness.  It was as if there were not enough nutrition in the blood and too much blood in the joints to move.  So he and Bunn did nothing.  They merely lay in the field, neither moving nor resting.

_______________

As night muted Bunn’s figure beside him, Cullfor felt half-conscious.  It was a strange feeling, almost as if some part of his chest had slipped into the ground with the beast’s body.  Some part of him was aware of her doting about him and still he could feel her attention as she left to gather firewood.  He was glad for her hardiness as he rolled onto his back, staring at the sky. 

He stared over at her vanishing form, then up a million wintry-feeling bits of starlight, and some while after she disappeared into the black woods behind the inn, he turned.  A speckled foal stumbled out of the night.  A tiny frail thing.  It was days old probably.  He rose a bit, turned again to better look at it.  A large doe was coming into the field behind her.  Her head rocked in that delicate upside-down pendulum way of deer.  Each step, the neck ticked back.  The tailed flicked.  And the eyes honed in on him again and again with cautious strides. 

Instinctively, she shunted her body between him and her wobbly baby.

Deer do not insist upon their presence in the world, he thought.  They whisper it.  It is as if they barely dare to exist.  If not for Bunn one might forget such a gorgeous state is real.

_______________

Bunn emerged to find deer stomping at her.  She startled back into the woods a step.  Then she laughed and reemerged with a puzzled look, the deer trouncing away into the nothingness. 

Grinning, she pointed at him as if he had put it up to it.

He smiled back, unable keep the predator’s glint from it.

When she approached, she began stacking the wood.  He would have rather she done nothing of the sort but throughout the expanding night he watched her work.  Her movement as pleasant as her stillness.  She walked well, bent well. 

She labored until a misty moon thinly shone thinly on a pile of wood that would make a better funeral pyre than it would a campfire.  And perhaps that’s what she meant it to be.

She lit a small bit of tinder at its base and nestled next to him.  Closer still, he still felt her watching him differently.  She was thin-eyed and he still felt bloodlessly cold.  She rubbed his back.

“Dragonhood suits you, my beautiful.”

He shook his head, grunting.

Then she was working to get a fire started again, insisting that he let her do it herself.

“But as such,” she said, winking, “I’d rather you not ever call me Porkchop.”

_______________

Once the pile of wood and kindle was solidly aflame, she tore strips from the edge of her old pack and worked them around Cullfor’s hand.  And while she worked the flame grew.  Jumping.  Spreading its light around them.  As the glow rose, a certain sense of significance saturated the air with the warmth. 

She sat. 

After a battle, there comes a point where your look at you comrades anew.  Sometimes a week later.  Sometimes right away.  Cullfor could feel Bunn doing it now.  Strength is that most worrisome commodity among friends.  But it is stranger among lovers.  When one fights well, there is pride, firstly, but with that comes the worried wonder.  It always did.  It was in the mind like a flu and would stay as long any fever. 

It was a stayed consternation at the savagery itself. 

Cullfor grinned at the irony of it.  But it cannot be helped, that feeling.  He knew.  The man next to her was no longer on a fool’s quest.

He was an angel, or a demon, the case being decided by whether you fought with him or against him

Yet even as his ally, there was a terrifying level of war in his bones.

“Is there anything you want to know?” he asked.

“What do you mean?”

He looked into the woods.  The scenery.  It went way, way out.  The trees still stretched in every direction away from the road without end.

“I don’t know,” he said.

The marshy wood soaking their bottoms, he felt his invisible wounds sting and flame in irritating sparks of cold.  His forehead felt chilled.  He leaned against her.  He was hungry.  Staring bleary-eyed out into trees for a moment, he thought he noticed a small change in her breathing and thought she wanted to say something.  He tried to will it from her, and he focused with all the energy that would come of his tired mind.  But no amount of concentration would pull any stories from her.

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know,” he repeated.

“Is there anything you want me to know?”

“I want you to know that I can do this.”

“Do what?”

“I can get her back.”

“I know.  I knew that.  When you did not ask about how I came to be roasted by the priest, I knew a lot about you.”

“Did you?  Did you know about us?”

“Do I?”

“I think you should,” he said.

“Then tell me.”

“Wherever it ends, it ends.  But it won’t be because your use to me ends.”

“Are you saying that we are not done when this is over?”

“If you’ll have it.”

“I will,” she said.

“Then marry me,” he said.  “I’d kill a king.  Or a king’s horde.”    He found he was shaking, and he could not stop the nonsense that kept coming.  “I’d burn kingdoms for you.  Wreck ships.  And I’d even burn a monk.”

She laughed at that.  “If you did nothing, I’d be your queen.  Your bitch.  Your mother, your whore, and the teats for your children’s supper.”

“Then be my wife.”

“I will, my beautiful.  I’ll be your wife.”

Now, he thought: 
I did it
.

_______________

In some lightless time between twilight and midnight Cullfor tried to lift himself but a bitter welt of pain wrapped him.  He was still cold and could do little but try to breathe.  Some sort of lifelessness in his sternum grew all across his back.  He turned his head and vomited.  The chill of it could kill him, he swore.  It was unreal.  Crackling up from his heels.  He took a huge, halting breath.

Inaction, he once heard, is the father of all evils or else the sire of all that is good.

They were wrong.

Sometime in the night, he thought he heard the voices of Ghelli and his cousin, Aural.

_______________

In the foggy morning, Cullfor rose.  He sheathed the old fiend’s sword.  As morning landed on them by degrees, it seemed to burn away the fog. 

And more than that, the sun seemed to burn away the unseen darkness of this place

Under the soggy and low branches at its edge of the hole, he leaned wearily on a new cudgel, one she had broken from rugged piece of applewood.  They went slowly back onto a road.  Then he and Bunn paused, turning without words toward the hole.

It was Ghelli, bent over, pulling Aural up from the hole where the inn once stood.

“Pull, ye fat bastard,” she was telling him.  “Who are ye?  Eh?  Who are ye, fat boy?”

“Have my eyes gone mad?” Cullfor whispered to Bunn.

“I don’t… know,” she whispered slowly.  “Have mine?  Who
are
those two?”

_______________

For the better part of the morning, the sun still rising, they stared down into a pit of a thousand corpses.  By all counts, it was a hell no one soul should ever witness, thousands of humans, halflings, elves, and dwarves, emaciated and zombie-like husks.  And yet Aural looked at him with a peculiar grin.  It was, at first, difficult to place the look.  Then he understood:  it’s the look that is given to those you want to be happy.  Her carriage was bent and restless, and she kept glaring at him with bright eyes.  He stood erect against her smiles, but when he could see her eyes start to moisten he reached out and clasped her hand.  And he looked away from the pit.  And he felt better. 

He truly did.

They hugged. 

Cullfor looked at her closely.  New creases traced from the outside of her lids, but her eyes were getting prettier, somehow.  He wanted to kiss her forehead, but Ghelli was too busy kissing her mouth.  

Only when she was still did he realize every second he looked at her sent sending dull aches of happiness crashing through his body.  He was sick. 

Or sleepy. 

They found a log alongside the trail, and they sat, smiling.

She told him of how she had washed ashore in Dhal, how the accident of her falling overboard had been no accident at all.  And after a day of rest and hugs, she explained that she and her new fat beau were going to Brickelby to alert the King.

Later, watching them take the eastward fork in the road, he smiled, shaking his head.  It was like a dream, like a moment so happy, so odd and yet so unusually quick, that his waking mind could not have imagined it.

And, in time, he turned. 

Bunn asked him if he was ready to go.  He shook his head no, and grinned.  He grabbed the side of her face, softly, and he kissed her, laying her down amid pine needles and moss and her happy giggles.