Blood Of The Wizard (Book 1) (13 page)

Chapter 23

The path the beast had left curled north, falling away to blackened, bald earth.
  Gilli’s burnt frame was not far off, maybe two miles. 

I could see eternity in his smile
.  His hearty face was broken against the rock that had killed him.  Beyond that, the sullen murk of the wide, grim marsh flattened, butting up against the forested hillside where we had hid ourselves upon first seeing the drake.

I
again looked at Gilli, wincing this time at his flame-cracked skin.  From the small grove of trees past the marsh spilled the mournful wails of the elves.  The strange noise was rising and falling out of tune with the wind.  There was something happy and tiresome about it at the same time, something that let me know that the people singing it felt something of our pain. The wind blew the grass around my horse’s hooves as it whinnied, as if in mourning.  Then I once more smelled the unpleasant stink of burnt flesh on the wind, and I heard the bittersweet clamor of the elves’ wailing cease. 

I smiled, wishing Gilli farewell. 

With quick, thirsty carelessness I went about burying him.  Then, without words, I nodded.

I
turned to find that our pack horses had already been strung together.  A pair of thin gray figures stood outside the trees, staring at me.

It was the chief and his
dwarven shaman.  There was an odd stillness in their silence.  And there was something lonely and menacing in their frozen, small eyes, that contrasted the eager horses behind them.  I shivered and thought to nod, but instead rode to them wordlessly.  I gathered our supplies, and left before they told us we were no longer welcome there.

It was a shock to see the fellows ready to travel on so soon.  Such hardiness
, I thought.  It was amazing.  It could only have come with the hardships the Wild Wars had blunted them to, or perhaps it was solely because this place reminded them of Gilli. 

In either case, Halvgar spat.  He pulled some silver pennies from his shirt
and threw them over his shoulder.

“
For ye whores and beer, Master Gilli!”

Chapter 24

So we rode out, making our way south as hurriedly as possible.  There was, to my surprise, often an unexpected happiness in our conversations.  In my youth, it was oftentimes amazing to me what the dwarven heart can endure.  Frankly it was still a stunning thing to see in person.  The way they laughed and cajoled when talking about Gilli, it was as if he’d been dead for years, and someone had brought his name in conversation.  But there was a part of me all through the week-long trek across those grasslands that began to see the wisdom of this.  Poets and bards often compare sorrow or grief to a heavy heart, and anyone who has been amidst unfriendly enemies knows the danger of this.

Suddenly,
a shocked silence rippled through our party as we once again met with rolling hills. My uncle made a motion with his hand for us to stop.

We had reached the Fell-Riding.
  It was unnerving, both the change in the landscape and the change in my fellows.  Each dwarf, stout as stone, sat atop their mounts at the last of the grasses, and looked without words into the vast and stony way before us. 

Mighty Kenzo harrumphed. 
“The elves that first guided us here would not go in this place.”

“
Aye,” Frobhur agreed.  “But it cost us a month to go around.”

Blue and cold, the wrinkled landscape was sharp with loose and flaky shale.  It was oddly reflective, and under a sky that grew gray by degrees,
the rocky earth undulated away to the south like a glacier made of steel and rock.  Ever widening, it was consumed by the dreamscape of that bleak night that fell on us.  The difference in the land and the fellows was so stark that neither seemed like the ones I had known before.  It was like something from a bedtime story, or going to sleep in your own bed and waking up in a home for goblins or trolls.  And it seemed this place could easily house either… 

We were not far from
old Thunderwyrm’s Lair, either, maybe a week.  There was just six or seven days left to see if all the trek and trouble had been just for the recovery of their corpses, or to make corpses out of our hearty bodies.

“
We know what we need to do, my Cutters,” Frobhur said glumly, at which he dismounted and unburdened his pack horse of its dwindling load. 

“
Here, here indeed, Master Frobhur,” said Uncle Jickie.  “Hooves won’t do!  They’ll prove the death of us on this slippery shit!”

On foot now, our backs laden with gear, food, and weapons, we meandered cautiously downs into the stony hills before us.  The blue-gray land was already a nightmar
e of knolls and pits, and here it seemed the horizon closed around us. 

As we labored down the first slope, our movements in the dark were hunkered and slow. 
The blanket of cloud was thinning, and the night sky swept itself clean to offer a better view of the hellish terrain before us.  We padded quickly together down through a long finger of forest that reached up almost to the grassy slopes.  To travel the hillsides in these reaches, one would do better to have walked for days beforehand.  The plunging, loose stone was already taxing the strength in my legs.

I must confess, though, that after so much riding, I found walking oddly pleasurable.  It was always strange to me how much less tiring it is than riding.

But I was far from comfortable.  Fortunately, I was not alone.  By morning, we had to stop.  Under the fabric of low clouds, we halted.  There was a thin grove of cedar at the edge of a wild stream, which spilled from the earth near the pinnacle of two hilltops.  The water falling wildly past our feet, we edged alongside a cool blue wall of rock, and we drank.

We were each exhausted, and as a vigorous rain began to fall, I heard snoring
.

I
turned to find every one of my little fellows asleep, sitting up. 

As the morning passed away to a cold, dim afternoon, I let the lads continue to sleep.  I cooked them a breakfast of our last smoked sausages, surprised to find that Halvgar had woken up to help me. 

“
Fie, old boy.  You should rest.  This land…” he said.  “This land, it… it has a toll.”

“
Halvgar my old friend, a wise old dwarf once advised on the day of his wedding that for everything there is cost.”

“
Yes,” he conceded with a small grunt of a laugh.  “Words slip out easier under the pleasant sunshine of home.” 

He
grunted again, but this time it was a sadder sound. 

“
Do you know that ol’ Frobhur, Jick, Gill, Kenzo and myself were in a company of fifty when we left out from Goback.”

I cocked an eyebrow.  My uncle never mentioned having lost so many.  I looked at Halvgar with a look that told him I wanted to know if he was being honest.
  He looked at me and clasped my shoulder, a tear forming, then curving down his sweaty cheek. 

“
Dangerous business, adventuring south.  Not in score of lifetimes could I thank you for all this.  You have no idea what you have done for this old dwarf.”

“
Perhaps, soon enough, some wayward whore of a maid will have me for good, and I
will
have an idea, old boy,” I said and clasped his shoulder back.  “The meat is done,” I added, seeing him smile.  It was a sturdier smile than I had seen him wear in some months now.  It seemed, too, as if it might stay there for more than a moment. 

But it did not.

He nodded.

I asked him
: “Won’t you wake those cantankerous little bastards up for me?”

After we ate, it
quickly became dark.  The moon hung low over the distant hills, shining vaguely through a new rain in the west. We began to trek once again up the slope of a long, low meadow of stone and grass.  The sloping field was lined with a single brake of high evergreens.  The trees were shaking in the breeze and dotted at their feet were dull yellow flowers.  Beyond it, the hills were less grassy, and some were grassless altogether, just bald hilltops of blunt and rounded rock. 

A wounded horse was running, three-legged, across a low side of the hill.
  It was not my old horse, the one that I had seen lose a leg to the dragon.  That one had bled out and died within minutes, and it seemed the cruelest sort of magic that this one was still alive.  My forehead throbbed as a swath of tracks appeared, the hooves of a dozen more horses that had meandered into the odd hills ahead of us.  They had been walked over by the tracks of dwarf-like creatures.

The tiny hairs on the back of my neck rose.  Halvgar rubbed his neck.  He pinched the bridge of his nose, and we all knew not that these were the prints of goblins, creatures so strong, fast, and vile that they could down the horses they chased without any weapon but the bony shards that were their teeth. 

The fact that a horse was left alive meant it was likely left alive on purpose, as a trap.  The beasts that had done were out there.  Somewhere.  They doubtless already knew that we were here.

“
Kill them as you would a man or a dwarf,” Frobhur whispered to me. 

“
Just make certain, lad,” Uncle Jickie added, “that you kill them twice as much!”

Chapter 25

As we descended further into the vast and stony way, it more difficult to maintain any real sense of direction.  The high, rolling thunderclouds overhead let eerie squirts of sunlight play across the scree.  The moving shadows made the sheer piles seem to lean, an illusion of motion that was sometimes real as towers of rock sent pebbles scrabbling down beside.  All the while, we picked our way through gap after winding gap. 

Noises like snaps and whistles could be heard echoing in the distance as we crept along, ever cautiously.  We all thought of the unseen voyeurs, perhaps waiting in ambush already, perhaps salivating at the sight of us.

We had traveled only some six hours more before Halvgar paused.  He made a motion for us to halt.  He pointed silently to a distant ridge, which was some three hundred yards to the south. 

There we witnessed a pair of goats, moving swiftly across the stones.

“Flushed from the east,” he whispered.

We moved more slowly, more silently
, after that.

We paused often, looking around.  Now the vertical rolls of loose shale were less steep.  But it was as if they only offered a better view of things merely to show that
we were in an endless sea of these desperate, nightmarish pits.  It seemed you could drown in this place.  More than once, I felt disoriented and dizzy.  All day, we could never see far off, not until we crested a rise, and by then there would be no sound or movement, just the undulating ocean of stone.

We were was always leaning, always trying to avoid the deep and scattered cavities that may or may not have led straight to frozen depths of hell. 
A hill before us, which cast us all in shadow, looked like a wave of it jagged stone.  Beyond it the hillocks became steeper again, and more numerous. 

Then it happened. 

We began to hear the distant, unmistakable yelp of the goblin.  It was both wolfish and owl-like at once, and three times louder than either.

“
Take care, sirs!” My uncle whispered to us.  “We’re not long for a fight!”

“
And not long for another after,” Frobhur added.  The goblins stay near the Thunderwyrm, near any dragon for that matter, for not even the black ones will eat the disgusting beasts!”

Neither piece of information soothed our nerves.  Always, we took draw
of our blades at the sound of the crumble of stone.  In time, we were looking behind us as much as we were looking ahead. 

And now there was a fog
, thick and peculiar, rising from the valleys and troughs.

Night came shrouded in the mists of the fog, and in this unpleasant habitat I could not always hold my panic at bay.  We stood back to back in a circle, forming a shield wedge.  We all gripped our axes, holding the old oaken shields aloft.  Stillness underscored the moving fog.  Soon, we again heard the distant yelping of goblins.

There was a nearby thump, then a crumble of stone.

“Ooh, thundering hell…” Jickie whispered. 

He looked around.

Then I saw his eyes widen.

“Run!” he squalled.

Hairs rose on my arm, and before I could make out what he had seen, my feet were
moving, carrying me in mad darts across the stones.  Yelps were rising throughout the stony way.  Goblins were emerging from everywhere, from every nook and pit, as if the earth was spitting them at us.

I followed the fellows as they darted across the rocks.  All the while, forms scurried in the dark and the fog, following us with a mad chorus of yelping
.

T
he bleak landscape alive with motion and horrifying noise, I ran to catch up with the fellows.  They allowed me the central position, and no sooner had I gained my spot than I finally saw some of them.  Five goblin warriors stared at us, unmoving as we scampered towards them.  Feral, covered with mangy hair even though they looked vaguely reptilian, their terrible heads were sullen with the deep gazes of predators.  But, deep inside me, I sensed something in them that I calculated as more than a predatory danger.  I could feel the ancient blackness of their hate.  They were just standing there. 

Then they squatted, readying themselves.  Each was strapped about the ankles and wrists with thongs of horse hide.  They were
the dwarves’ equal in height, but they were lithe and sinewy.  They flashed terrible, growling mouths and brandished primitive clubs of bone and rock.

We ran toward them, crying out the crazed,
dwarven bellows of war.

Then fear hoisted us.  We each leapt, crashing down on their skulls and upheld arms with mighty chops.  And no sooner had we cut through them than we swung back, splitting their jaws or ripping the gray leathery hide of their bellies
.  Even as we ran past them, battered and ripped though they were, they followed, hobbling like gruesome dogs along the rocks, squalling. 

With each step closer, they yelped and growled. 

We dashed onto a massive, high stone that was encircled by a stream.  When we halted, the goblins were coming still.  Halvgar fell behind us.  He pulled the small tartan he wore at his waist around a large bite the back of his arm, growling in pain as the goblins scampered up the rock.

The first of them fell on
its own broken legs, tripping the next two.  Then one leapt over them all.  I chopped sideways, bringing my blade across its scar-pocked chest. 

Halvgar emerged
in the same instant and ripped it across the throat.  The body rocked back and forth, clutching crazily for a head that was no longer attached.  Then it collapsed.

Another
leapt. 

Roaring, I rolled around on and came down hard enough on the first one to shave off
one of its arms.  Back on its heels, the next bit at Mighty Kenzo, only to go flying away from us in two halves.  Uncle Jickie cut with surprising strength too, sending the other two without their hands, then rattled at us to run as he split one of their faces on the rocks with the pummel of his axe.

Quick as that, we ran again for higher ground. 

They were coming from everywhere now. 

With help from Halvgar, we scalped two, even as we ran together, zigging up the crumbling stones of a steep landslide.  One stabbed at me with a pointy shard of stone fixed to a horse’s thigh bone, and I landed my axe in the back of its neck.  Then I ripped the blade in a deep awkward gouge across the spine.  The goblin’s body seized and fell away.  It was jerking as it rolled downhill.

Still others came, rising toward us in leaps.

Before Halvgar could turn, one leapt on him.  As Halvgar ducked, rolling with the beast, he planted his foot and grabbed it by the arm, then flung it even as he grabbed his axe and swiped across the creature’s arse as it flew.  The move was off and weak.  It bounded back in the next instant, and it came down on top of Frobhur.  As he fell backwards, Frobhur’s lips curled in pain, he had to chop toward his own body, which he did deftly enough to cleave the goblin without chopping himself too deeply.  He scrambled to stand, the goblin’s blood smeared and dripping down his longshirt.  The beast was still grabbing at him, and Halvgar turned, hacking it nearly in half.

As it dropped, we ran again, chopping backwards.  We were severing goblin spines and heads before we turned at the summit to gut and behead more of them from high vantage. 

One gripped my hair, sending me crashing down.  Delthal was down too, holding his split cheek.  And we both saw an army of goblins approaching, even as one clamped down on my foot and shook terribly, undulating as he grabbed my wrist and tried to snap it.  Delthal growled as the body flopped and started fish-rolling like mad. 

It finally ceased, and I saw Delthal rise from its headless body, the very goblin he had slain from the ground.

I stood again, and winced with the viscous pain. 

A brute of a goblin bounded ahead of the others.  It was gigantic, a monster, taller than me and twice as wide.  It was crushing several of the other as it rushed up the hill.  The others halted and fell to their bellies, groveling before it as it passed.

It roared.

As did I.

It kept running. 

Fear gripped me, thrusting me into the insane action of running right at it.  I barreled sideways into it, my knees slamming its face before it tossed me some ten feet behind my fellows. 

Delthal hacked into its shins, only to find his axe kicked away. 

Uncle Jickie and Frobhur slashed wildly, cleaving into its ribs and belly.  But it flung them aside like dolls before biting at Mighty Kenzo, who recoiled, but came up from a squat.  He split its jaw before he spun and chopped once more, lopping of the top of its skull, which fell to the ground like some gruesome cup.

The massive horde was still groveling, whimpering now like beaten dogs
.  A they sunk into the black crags or scampered away, the enormous beast seemed to heave a moment, then the great mass of it fell backward, landing on its back with a gravelly crunch.

The brain rolled out with a fleshy bounce.

All of us were panting, impossibly exhausted.

K
enzo clasped Frobhur on the shoulder and sheathed his bloody axe.  He shook his head, and wiped the blood from his gloved on his shirt. 

“
I’ll be damned, Frobbie old boy!  That big one wanted me worse than your sister!”

Frobhur made a disgusted noise, then the desolate hills exploded with our wild hoots of laughter.