That Frigid Fargin Witch (The Legend of Vanx Malic) (15 page)

So it was when the little glittering sprite came spiraling in and found Captain Moonseed’s ear.

The captain listened intently, then found Chelda and hurried over to her. The big turtle-headed monster, Skryker, was warily keeping the tree between it and the bright blue sword, but it could rage into another attack at any moment. Moonsy spoke quickly and purposefully, knowing that the respite might end in a split second.

“There is a beastling called Gallarael. Do you know such a person?”

Chelda’s shoulders fell, but she waggled the blue blade at her foe.

“She fell from the cliffs and died when the serpent set upon us.”

Chelda assumed that some fairy patrol had found the body after Vanx had told them where to look. It didn’t register that the captain had asked her if she
knew
Gallarael.

Chelda’s response was all the confirmation that Streak needed. The little finger-sized man began chirping and squeaking anxiously into the captain’s ear.

“Keep Skryker busy!” Moonsy gave the redundant order and charged off to give other orders while rounding up every healthy elf and pixie she spotted.

Chelda thought she heard Gallarael’s name spoken, but her attention was soon redirected back to the long-bodied, grey-skinned monster as it lunged at the tree, feigned its attack there, and at the last moment came around it to lash at her with a three-clawed paw.

Skryker had apparently thought her lapse in movement and her slack-jawed expression meant she was worn out and had let down her guard. He was only half right.

Chelda had let down her guard, but she was far from exhausted. Her recent snack of adrenalseed loaf and battle berries had her muscles humming. Now that she had air back in her lungs, she was ready for more.

Her lapse of focus resulted in a gashed bicep and a hard tumble. She recovered well enough, though, and darted in to give the big, awkwardly moving creature a jab in the inner foreleg with her searing blade.

Skryker roared out but didn’t retreat this time. His mother was in his head now. The Hoar Witch was urging him from afar; her giddy cackling gave him strength, and her fetid presence gave him the courage he needed to brave the touch of that painful sword.

Chelda spun and tried to roll under the thing’s body so she could test those softer-looking shell plates underneath, but Skryker rose up on his hind legs so that her upthrust met only air. When he came back down, he reached with his large forelimbs for the trunk of the Heart Tree, but fell short. As his long, heavy upper limbs came crashing down, they sheared limbs and branches with large, crackling pops. Several of the falling limbs came down on Chelda as she was rolling to her feet at the base of the Heart Tree. Skryker saw this, and his next pouncing leap was directly where she had been smashed by the falling debris.

By all rights Chelda knew she should have been crushed, or skewered, or both. The downward-facing limb that stopped the heavy branch from crushing her body had speared the bloody earth between her arm and her ribs. It scraped some flesh away, but it stopped the main bulk a few feet off the ground above her.

Wincing at the pull of her skin from the bark, she rolled away just as Skryker’s foreclaws came crashing down into the whole mess.

In a whirling move that she’d seen Ramaton Tytak use during Vanx’s battle for passage into the gargan lands, she dropped and spun on a knee and made a deep, hacking chop into Skryker’s lower leg. Unlike the Rammaton, she didn’t pull the blade in at the last moment.

To her great surprise the momentum of her swing sent the sword deeply into Skryker’s gristly ankle joint. When he jerked away, the wound geysered forth thick, black blood. Part of the appendage hung at an awkward angle with what little muscle and tendon remained attached.

The beast roared out in pain and rage and hobbled back away from Chelda and the Heart Tree. The paw was all but severed from its forelimb and he couldn’t put weight on it lest he push the stump into the ground. Skryker snapped his head down on his long turtle neck to keep Chelda at bay while he made his retreat out over the thorn wall and into the woods, but he couldn’t keep her from nearly ruining his other forelimb. As the freakish beast backed out of the Shadowmane, a heavy squishing thing smacked Chelda’s shoulder and sent hot, fizzing liquid splashing across her face.

Rot melon! She cursed herself for letting the retreating monster draw her back into range of the melon-hurling trollamonks. It was all she could do to stumble over to a group of medika huddled very near the gateway that lead into the Underland.

The rats forced the hulking great wolf hyena hybrid called Vrooch off of Gallarael. Had they not had the power of Pwca behind them, Vrooch would have been snapping them up and crunching them in his jaws to keep them from the meal he had just run down, but all of the Hoar Witch’s beasts were wary of the little devil. It wouldn’t do to anger him, for that would anger the Hoar Witch. It wounded his pride to let Gallarael’s leg go and leave her to the filthy vermin, especially since most of his pack was out in the woods, watching, waiting to seek vengeance for the pack mates she had killed.

Gallarael felt the rats scurrying all over her. She felt them scratching and biting at her thick, armored hide, but it didn’t hurt. They couldn’t seem to puncture it with their tiny claws and teeth. What hurt was her leg. The big, wolfen beast had gotten its fangs in good, and those first few violent shakes of his humongous head had twisted her knee joint and laid open the wounds. There the rats were going into a blood frenzy trying to get the rends in her changeling skin to open further. They were having a hard time of it, though, and Gallarael was lying face down fighting the pain while still heaving in the breath she’d exhausted from her flight. She could handle the needling little gnaws on her calf a few moments more, for she had no choice. She doubted she could run, but she was sure she could hobble and hop to a nearby tree.

“Yes, Vrooch,” the Hoar Witch cackled gleefully. She was leaning over her viewing pool clutching the crystal at her neck as if it were a lifeline. “Go to the Heart Tree, take your pack and overrun the barbarian bitch while she is down. Murkurl and his trollamonk goons will keep the changeling from fleeing until Pwca arrives.”

Her pack leader’s frustration wasn’t lost on her. “You and your mates can feed on the barbarian bitch, my child. She’s twice as big and far meatier than the changeling girl.”

Aserica studied the heaving body under the writhing mass of Pwca’s rats. They couldn’t puncture her hide, and Aserica decided she had to know what the elemental composition of such a skin was. The leg could have been chugged down Vrooch’s gullet by now, but by the way the rats were thrashing and flinging around it, it was barely bleeding.

Movement at the edge of the pool’s vision gave her a moment of pause. That little elven bitch that the pixie queen had blessed was coming to save the changeling girl. This sent a tendril of fear snaking up Aserica Rime’s back, but her concern evaporated like a wisp of smoke when she saw Pwca and the rest of his tiny hoard bearing down on them.

For a frantic moment the Hoar Witch searched the table and shelves to find a device she could use to communicate with the little devil. He wasn’t one of her blood-bonded beasts, and the crystal was useless for talking to him, but she did use it to order her pack of trollamonks to go right to the Heart Tree and strip it bare of leaf and limb while Vrooch and his mates feasted on the gargan.

Finding her device, she called to Pwca, who quite unnervingly crawled from the back of his rat mount in the scene on the surface of her reflecting pool. He moved right to the edge of it, climbed up and stood there dripping before her.

“Bring the changeling girl to me, Pwca, before your squeakers devour her. I need her as whole as possible, not chewed to the bone.”

“That will be our last bargain, Aserica Rime,”

The devil hissed through a dark grin that was entirely too large for his little slimy head. He went to cast the spell that would consummate the deal, but before he could finish, Clytun’s bellowing roar came echoing up from the dungeons.

Panic-stricken, for the minotaur’s yell had sounded more of a cry of pain and surprise than a battle call, Aserica shooed Pwca to the side and made to shift the scene on the surface of the pool to her favorite.

Pwca snorted and dove into the liquid’s shimmering surface, leaving only the slightest of ripples. The image was frozen except for the little devil that swam down to the rat mount with a little grin. Suddenly the image jerked back into motion.

He would protect the changeling girl for Aserica, but not deliver her. The deal hadn’t been struck. The spell had been left incomplete.

Aserica Rime cursed the little devil as she shifted the images on the surface of the pool to show what was happening with Clytun below. Pwca’s rat lashed its tail up to stir the water as it turned away. Now the well-illuminated image of Sissy bearing down on the warlock with her wicked stinger while Clytun dived wildly toward him was fractured and distorted and almost impossible to make out. Why had Clytun cried out so? Why was he diving to save the warlock if Sissy already had him in her grips? The Hoar Witch let out an angry hiss and willed the pool’s surface to still its wavering, but by the time it had, the cavern had gone dark.

Chapter
Eighteen
Chapter
Eighteen

It’s nights like these that make me feel

like I’m the king of this whole world.

You could be my queen and I would

cover you in diamonds, gold, and pearls.

– A Zythian bard’s song

T
he stinger thumped hard into Vanx’s sternum and he knew he was done. He heaved for a breath that wasn’t coming while he waited to feel the hot poison pulsing into his chest. He rolled his head to the side in hopes of seeing that Thorn and Poops had gotten away. In that brief glimpse, what he saw instead was defeat. Poops was nowhere to be seen, and the hulking bovine fighter had his heavy, steel-shod boot on Thorn’s chest and one of his black blades was coming swiftly down to end it.

Vanx also saw a pair of glittering demon eyes, low to the floor and jostling up and down. Whatever they belonged to was charging out of the tunnel behind the monitor, but before he could see what it was the lack of air caused him to fade from consciousness.