The Sorcerer's Ascension (9 page)

Azerick paused for a few moments as the man slumped forward onto his face, thinking about what he has just done. As Azerick stood over the body, bloody knife in hand, he processed the fact that not only had he just killed a man but somehow knew that it would not be the last life he would likely take in the years to come.

Azerick shook off these thoughts, stripped the belt and knife scabbard from the body, grabbed his bag, and ran from the alley. It was unlikely anyone would bother calling the Watch in this section of the city, but he wanted to put as much distance between himself and the dead man as he could just in case the Watch may have heard the man’s scream and felt either duty bound or simply bored enough to investigate.

As Azerick once again moved through the city, he planned his next move. He needed a place to stay; somewhere that would offer him some sort of shelter from the weather, the opportunists, and the predators of the city’s darkened streets and alleys. First, he would get his books back.

Azerick knew that if was going to survive he would have to contain the despair that that threatened to overwhelm him. The adrenaline and fury brought on by the recent attack helped him compress the pain of his recent loss and the renewed anguish that tried to rise as he thought of his father.

All these emotions burned inside him hotter than the fires of blacksmith’s forge. The flames would have consumed a lesser man, but Azerick’s resolve to avenge his family turned that searing heat into a tool that he would use to temper himself like a finely crafted sword, a sword he would thrust into the bowels of his enemies.

He made his way back to the common quarter of the city and the not so respectable inn that was his home just several hours ago. It looked like the place where his mother was alive and trying so desperately hard to take care of him and make a life for them just earlier that same day. Now she was gone he thought, as a familiar fluttering once again entered his belly.

Azerick pushed those thoughts aside and focused on the problem at hand. He buried his emotions, pain, and loss so he could focus and survive the days ahead of him. Here these emotions would remain buried for a long time, perhaps forever.

He had to take care of himself now in a world that cared not one bit if he lived or died. But he would live, he vowed, and when he found those responsible for all his loss and pain he would make them pay. He would make them wish to the gods that he had not survived his life in the streets. He would never be a victim again and anyone that tried to make him one would pay dearly some day, one way or another.

He knew that the fat, heartless innkeeper would have barred the door this late at night. Any resident of the inn caught outside when he closed up would have to find another place to spend the remainder of the night or just sleep on the stoop.

He pulled the clothes out of his bag to make room for his books and slung the satchel over his shoulders. He then went around back and climbed the small, slanting porch roof that hung over the door that led straight into the kitchen. From there, he pulled himself up onto a small ledge that separated the second floor from the first. Pressing himself face first against the wall, he sidestepped and edged around the tiny ledge until he reached the window to his former room.

He slipped the blade of the bloody knife he had taken from the man in the alley between the two sides of the window shutters and lifted the latch that held them closed. He quickly stepped from his narrow perch into the room and froze, listening for any sounds of disturbance. He heard nothing but could smell the blood that had seeped into the old floorboards that the soap and water used to clean it up with could not reach.

Azerick looked around the room and saw nothing but blood stains. Everywhere there were the remnants of what had happened in this room. Dark stains were visible, even in the low moonlight, on the floors, walls, and ceiling. This room would have to be completely repainted before it could ever be rented out again, probably in a dark shade of paint at that.

He pushed all these thoughts from his mind and his cursory glance showed that his books were no longer here. He thought they would not be. In fact, anything that may have held any value had been stripped from the room. Azerick knew where he would likely find his books. He silently crept across the floor to the room’s single door and pressed an ear to it. He heard no sounds in the hall and quietly opened the door. With equal stealth, he slipped down the hall to the door at the far end where the innkeeper lived in the best room the inn had to offer.

Again, he pressed an ear to the door and listened. Sounds of snoring lightly reverberated through the door. He tried the handle but it was locked. This did not surprise him at all. The innkeeper, being an untrustworthy man, never trusted anyone else. Azerick assumed everyone lived by the same greedy standards that he did. Once again, Azerick pulled his knife out and slipped it in the doorjamb to see if he could pry open the latch. He moved the knife around with a light scratching and scraping of the knife tip on metal and wood but he was unable to trip the lock.

Azerick made his way back to his old room and back out the window and onto to the small ledge. Once again, he hugged the wall and slowly sidestepped his way around the building until he reached the window that opened to the innkeeper’s room. The window was open to let in the cool evening air during these hot summer months. He slipped his legs over the sill and silently dropped to the floor where paused and surveyed the room.

In the center of the room against the wall immediately on Azerick’s left, just a few feet from him, was the occupied bed of the innkeeper. The middle of the large lump in the bed rose and fell with the rasping snoring sounds that reverberated through the room. In the far right corner, he spied a stack of uniformly dark objects. He carefully crept across the room and saw that it was indeed his beloved books. He slipped the bag from his shoulder, set it on the floor, and began to pack his books away. It took only a few seconds to stow away his last book and begin to make his way across the floor to exit the door on the opposite wall.

As his foot set lightly down upon the aged wood floor, there came a loud creek of a floorboard giving slightly under his weight. Azerick froze in mid step and listened as the snoring suddenly ceased to fill the room. The innkeeper came awake with surprising suddenness. He turned the wheel on an oil lamp on a nightstand next to his bed and cried out as he saw the intruder in his room.

“You, what are you doing here, boy!” he demanded as recognition dawned on his face. “Thief, you came back to rob me! I’ll thrash the hide off you, boy!”

With that promise, the innkeeper rolled from his bed onto his feet, his nightshirt flapping in the flickering light of the oil lamp.

“They’re mine, you stole them first, you fat bastard!” Azerick challenged.

Rage filled the eyes of the portly innkeeper as he lunged, his arms outstretched, hands grasping for the throat of the boy who not only broke into his home to rob him but also cursed and insulted him!

However, equal rage filled the young boy he intended to throttle. Azerick swung the heavy bag of books at the innkeeper’s head, clipping him hard in the temple. Delbert dropped in a heap as the laden bag continued its barely-controlled arc and hit the corner of the nightstand, upsetting the oil lamp, and its flammable contents. The pool of rapidly expanding oil almost instantly burst into flames, licked at the floor, and the overturned table. Azerick ran for the door, turned the lock from the inside and threw it open.

He paused a second to consider the unconscious man in the room that was now well on fire, wondering if he should do something. Did the evil man deserve any help?

Not from him, Azerick decided and ran for the stairs. His only effort at helping the innkeeper and anyone else unfortunate enough to live in the inn was his shouting “fire!” at the top of his lungs. He raced down the stairs, lifted the simple bar that held the front door closed after hours, and raced back into the night. He paused long enough to scoop the clothes he left next to the door back into his bag before darting around the corner.

Azerick peered around the edge of a distant building and looked back to the inn he had just fled, the roof now nearly engulfed in flames. He spied the cook, a barmaid, and the woman who had told him of his mother’s death now standing outside in their night shifts looking on at the burning building along with a few citizens who lived nearby and had come out to see what the commotion was.

Of the innkeeper, he saw nothing and was far beyond caring at this point. The accidental arsonist ran off into the darkness of the early morning and pondered his next move.

CHAPTER 5

“Why do they always hide treasure in the foulest places they can find?” Borik Deepstone complained bitterly for what seemed to be the hundredth time in as many minutes.

Borik Deepstone was, at first appearance, your typically squat, dour, strong-armed, hardheaded dwarf. He kept his long, reddish brown beard tucked into his broad belt from which hung a large assortment of weapons and smaller tools. He had only two facial expressions that even his closest companions ever saw: thoughtful and contemplative or perturbed and grumpy. Right now, as was
his favorite, he was perturbed and grumpy.

“Where would you hide priceless family heirlooms that you wanted to bury with your dearly departed loved ones, in your beard?” Malek replied.

Malek Barthalis was a cleric of Solarian, god of morning, bringer of light, destroyer of shadows. His shoulder-length blond hair, fair skin, and deep blue eyes had been the primary factor in the nearly sixty percent increase in attendance of services by female parishioners while he attended seminary. As much as the elder priests appreciated the renewed interest in their churchgoers during the religious services, they did not appreciate the increased attendance of private services the young novitiate gave in the evenings and often throughout the day as well.

This led to his elder brethren to send him on sabbatical upon completion of his seminary schooling with the primary assignment of ridding Valeria’s alleged plague of undead and the secondary job of bringing the word of Solarian to the masses. And bring word to the masses he did, particularly the female masses.

“I’m just saying that burying your most prized possessions under tons of stone filled with dust and the rotting remains of some uncle or such ain’t the best way to invest your assets,” Borik shot back as his axe cleaved through the skull of the skeleton that was trying to rip his innards out with its sharp finger bones.

“I didn’t know that you were so frightened of our life-challenged company, Borik. I thought your kind were fearless in the face of all enemies,” the handsome cleric taunted.

He bashed the skull of another skeleton to dust with his war hammer, glowing with the feint aura of the blessing he had cast on it for just this purpose. The god of morning hated undead and demanded that his priests share in his loathing of the unnatural creatures.

The dwarf shouted indignantly as his axe split the spine of another skeleton. “I’m not afraid of no stinking walking corpses!”

Malek grinned at the surly dwarf, knowing just how to get Borik’s goat. “So is it the thought of the tons of carved stone blocks over our heads, precariously perched just above, waiting for the slightest tremor to come crashing down to squeeze our inside out of our bodily openings like a skin of soft cheese being crushed in one’s hand? I thought your kind were most at home under stone. Is that is why you left your clan? Imagine my luck in knowing the world’s only dwarf with claustrophobia.”

“I ain’t claustrophobic!” Borik shouted back as he looked up uneasily at the massive stone blocks that formed the ceiling over their heads.

That moment of distraction got him rewarded with a wallop to his steel helm from a club-wielding skeleton. “I just don’t like
man
-made stone over my head. Only dwarves know how to shape and set proper stone,” he said in his defense and promptly split the offending skeleton’s skull in twain with a vicious overhead swing of his battle-axe.

“Will you two stop your thrice-damned bickering long enough to deal with these skeletons?” a large, armored figure in full plate shouted at the arguing pair in a coarse but unmistakably feminine voice while swinging a two-handed sword in long powerful arcs that cleaved two and three skeletons in half at a time.

Maude was an unusual woman. She drank, fought, and cursed as well as any man, often going to great lengths to surpass them in these pursuits. When not encased in her armor, she had a plain face, thick neck, broad shoulders from which sprouted lean but very strong arms, a surprisingly narrow waist that quickly expanded into broad hips and muscular thighs.