Blood Of The Wizard (Book 1) (34 page)

Chapter 72

“No
steel, however well made, will ever kill so surely as silver.
”

—Axiom of the Delmark warrior

__________

As Ghelli scuttled slowly from behind his limestone rise, the monk was already leading his little pony into Baysend Forest.  Which was fine.  The moon was not fully veiled, and the lay of the rocky, burnt Dellish soil was distinct.  He could let him have some distance.

Making certain no one else followed, he dropped the armor that wrapped his belly, pulled the plated armor from his shoulders, and looked ahead.  The tiny form of the monk was disappearing now.  He looked at his axe and decided to leave it.  He drew a dirk from his boot, and the mere act of drawing it was a depressing thing.  He saw that his hands were shaking.  He wondered if it was fear.

Concentrate, he told himself,
before your head is on a pike over a bunch of dancing savages.

He followed, discarding the fell sensation of the Dellish behind him.  But nearer the forest, he was still utterly aware of them.  He looked back a last time, then shook it off.  Refocused.  Space was confusing in the burnt forest.  Trees seemed planted in a dizzying maze.  At places, alleys through the trunks were so narrow that a dagger could bridge them, and here and there the solid sheets of the ashy bark were like walls, so that he had to backtrack.

The confusion wore on him quickly.  It seemed the ruined forest was sapping his mind.  Deeper in, something struck him, coldly:  The monk moved with irregular speeds.  He was weaving in several directions.  This was intentional stealth.

Friar Basil
knew
he followed.

Ghelli moved to keep him in view.  He was losing track, panicking.  He failed to see a rock, which sat atop another stone, and a grating sound echoed through the forest.

Immediately, he dropped to his belly behind a burnt stump.  Chin-high in ash, he saw the monk crouching.  He was some sixty feet ahead, his freckled head darting.

Then a sound like shifting sand murmured through the trees.

Ghelli was still frozen as he watched a small form pass.  It was thick but nimble, hardly slowing through the chaotic wood.

Horrified and terribly curious, he noticed the form was female.  And nude.  The sight of her clean, ample flesh in all this burnt mess was unnerving, like seeing a goddess, or a wood nymph.  He rose a bit.

Then the form paused.

Short and plump, she had a presence that was somehow larger than her halfling frame.  He leaned behind a burnt tree, cringing with the cracking sound it made.

When she moved again, he saw that she moved like deer.  She had a cheerful gate, haunting and fluid.  When she met the forest’s edge, she stopped.  Her head was turned.  Gorgeous eyes, set atop a square jaw, scanned to either side of him, her gaze never falling on him.  Then she disappeared beyond a tree and reemerged nearer to the monk than seemed possible.

The monk bumbled on into the forest, the two of them quicker and more purposeful as a pair.

Ghelli grunted.  He breathed, feeling his mind adjust.  He glanced back into the woods, at nothing.  He turned to see the figures were gone.  And now every thought seemed like nonsense.  How simple, how foolish and stupidly romantic that thoughts of goddesses had stirred waters in his soul, had made him loose track of the bastard monk. 

His stomach plummeted.

Dizzy, he took another breath.

Then he traced out into the forest after them.

Chapter 73

“Our teeth are in our head so that we cannot see them, and others cannot help it.”

—Dwarvish saying

__________

Cullfor shook, watching the young creatures as they skulked in from the black forest.  Their arrival wet the air with a sort of dangerous odor, the musty smell of guts and fear.  Then they paused. 

One of them stared at him, and t first it merely regarded him curiously.  It threw stones on the rocky shore around him and disappeared into a hole he hadn’t seen. 

The other one dismissed him as if he were not there at all.

Then came the noise, the one he had heard before, the rumble coming from everywhere now, and he understood the noise was growling.  You could feel it.  Again, the larger female emerged from the forest nearby.  She was eyeing him with a pair of narrowing slits, and he suddenly understood that she had never left.  The lips curled, baring little yellowed blades of bone.  The hair on the back of her head was raised.

He clutched his adaranth axe.

She edged in toward him sideways.  He felt the goose bumps erupting over his skin.  Shrinking and shifting, he watched a fourth one, the largest, the one who had chased him emerge from the hole.

“Holy God in Heaven,” he whimpered. 

He had no idea what to do.  If he had claws, he would burrow.  If he had a warrior’s soul, he would chop the beasts into fillets.  Instead, he threw out his palm to wall them off and thrashed like a seal toward the river, but a large flash of black leapt over his head, pouncing in front of him.  It was a little one, a female.  He reached up to block her with his magic, but he was to slow.  She growled as she clasped her strong hand down on the back of his neck.  Cullfor squalled, feeling each rough, warm finger.  She pushed his face down into the rocks, and it felt like his cheeks would snap.

Then two more hands latched onto his ankles.  He was scooting and wiggling against being dragged.

He sensed they wanted to drag him into their hole.

He undulated again toward the river.  It was not working.  They grabbed each of his hands, just as he grabbed one of the rocks and flung it backwards, managing only to send it crashing on his own head.

They were in complete control.  As they pulled him toward the forest, he gnashed his teeth, screaming.  He dug in like a badger, working against the impossible gravity of his legs.  Still they drug him away from the water in easy jerks.  Then one tried to dislodge his boots.  He fought, but it pushed with its hand-like foot against his ankle until it freed the prize.

There was an instinctual corner of his mind that knew survival depended on the water.

And some luck.

Again they jerked him backwards.  Cullfor roared his anguish.  He knew could not survive their attention, and he began crying to the distant, civilized world that he loved God, he loved Arway, and he loved his aunt.  Struggling for purchase in the gravel and scree, he worked free from his cloak as they pulled on it.  And even this hurt.  It sounded like ripping fur from meat.

The creatures began rolling on the ground, screaming in delight as they pulled and tussled with the fabric away.

Another explosion of growls erupted behind him.  They all began fighting for control of the new prize.  Cullfor did not look up.  He crawled, fighting with strength he did not have.  The water was ten twenty away, but it seemed it was a mile off.

He began rolling sideways.  It was difficult without the use of his legs, but it was fast.  Briefly, he saw them.  Still rolling, he could tell the creatures seemed suddenly confused by the odd motion.  Then they mimicked it alongside him, just long enough for him to roll well into the water.

But the beasts were anything but afraid of it.

They were still all around him.  They were making barking noises now, even under the water.  But here, Cullfor could twist.  He could swim with one arm and lock them more or less in place.  The first one bucked, convulsing and rolling like he was possessed.  Cullfor crushed the smaller female, mashing its face by dint of his magic alone, right into the river stones.  He hated the noise she made.  There is something unforgivable about an animal’s pain, even an animal that would dine on you.  He pitied it as she kicked for the surface in pained yelps.

As he began to drift downstream, the noise brought the mother closer.  The enormous, ugly thing paused as he walled her off, curling his thumb downward to back her up a step.  Waist deep in the water, she screamed at him.

She silenced herself as they stood together, staring at him.

Cullfor grimaced, doubled over and shaking.  They were somehow more terrible as a group.  He could hardly look at them.  For twenty raw, grizzly seconds they had seemed to dine on something deep in his psyche.  They had addled him.  Completely.  Now suddenly the current seized him.  It launched and tumbled him.  They were still watching him, following him along the bank.  Faster now, he grunted, rolling downstream atop smoothed rocks, surging with the increasingly strong current.  He was rising and falling through the thick brakes of pine and boulder.  He was leaving them now.  He was going the wrong way, back the way he came, but leaving.

And then he saw the wet, large body of the male, the sword jutting from its chest—and he understood why they attacked.

He tried to swim for the weapon, but tumbling with the unstoppable surge, he could not grab it.

Chapter 74

“There is nothing in the world so mysterious, so unnatural, as success.”

—Arwegian saying

__________

Delmark’s King Jorigaer was sitting on a wooden footstool inside his tent, a map of the known realms spread before him.  The king kept shaking his head in disbelief as he stared down at it.  It was enormous, for one—three feet by five.  And it was stitched rather than drawn, so that it even displayed the isle’s topography, with raised warps of a type of twine that described the mountains and uplands, which were raised by half so much.

He traced his fingers over the azure, silky threads that demarked the Heir’s Sea.  It was the most intricate, wonderful thing he had ever seen. 

It was consuming in its beauty.

“One could lose themselves in its details,” he quipped to himself.

But he had just heard, for only a bit more silver, something even more incredible...  The monk had sworn on his very soul that a merchant just north of Muttondon had confirmed the presence of something from a bygone era.  A relic.  And the fact had been confirmed with a test from an ancient brew.  He had told him that there was, of all damn things, a
wizard
nearby.  He was traveling west, but he had not gone far.

The Dwarf in the Black Thistle Helm drew a large breath at the news. 

“If we should capture this fellow…we could turn him.  Trust, my lord, that we can,” he said.  “Our army would be unstoppable.”

“Yes,” he whispered slowly, “less we dump the indomitable bastard in a pit.”

The questions that were still in the king’s mind were obvious.  But so were the answers; they just needed to be spoken to make them real in his head:  The monk had nothing to lose in telling them this—and plenty of silver to gain.  He is, after all, a man of The Church, not of any country.  The winds of invasions do not stir a priest’s robes, as they say.

Yet there were still questions whirling in the king’s mind.

“Why have I not ever known about this fellow?  Why has he not conquered great tracts of land for himself?  Why, for the love of God, would someone who cannot be stopped in battle, live out his life in some backwater burg?”

“Precisely because it makes so little sense,” said the Dwarf in the Black Thistle Helm.  “It is the wit of Arway that comprises their might, my liege.  Not their backs.  Not even their swords.”

The king’s mood was eerily light, and viscerally thoughtful.  He harrumphed, then stood, pantomiming the pause and slow importance of a bard telling an old campfire tale.

“Yes.  I have heard that of them.  Now do me a favor, won’t you:  Gather the men.  Come dawn, we turn history on its ear.”

__________

Albatron Tower at the southern edges of Yrkland was a large, but crude edifice.  It might have been mistaken for a sheer hill or cliff, rising from the beach.  Bhiers, the dark wizard, the king and cruithne lord of all dwarves, stood atop its parapet, looking out to sea.  He was a bleak, pale-eyed warrior-king.  He was strangely handsome, but with a glint that was mean and steely enough to ward of even an animal. 

Well out to sea, some four miles, the vessel carrying Cullfor’s aunt slowed.  With great care, it slipped into a forest of stone pillars, greening columns of unnatural rock that rose from the shores near the Longmonger Fortifications.  The dwarves worked the oars now, guiding the vessel as it cruised deep into the maze of columns.  Deeper within, they stopped.  The pillars, thousands of them, gave way to a long, shallow bay whose darkening sea was calm.  The dusky, smallish city under king’s feet was smoky, and the haze of it seemed like low cloud going out to meet them.  Despite the much-anticipated arrival, King Bhiers focused his mediations, and soon there was only the noise of the water, and before long even that was gone.  His intellect, at once expanded and worn thin, reached with lost the faculties of dwarvenkind, his sight reached out to them, low atop the spray and curl, to the boat itself.

It had the dragon he sought, but more importantly, it had the human woman.

The bait.

__________

Cullfor gasped wildly, trying to swim ashore as he rolled with the water’s undulations. 

But the river had seized him. 

It was quickening, fast.  As it narrowed it became more powerful.  Great slaps of water were crashing across his face, and cold fingers of it sought his throat.  He had no choice but to try to remain afloat, grabbing at the rocks.  But it was useless.  Reality began to hyphenate with his breath, and then as he pounded a boulder, the current slipped him around it.  Then it pounded him against another.  This time, it was holding head just under.  He stared at the surface, which was three inches above.  Or a mile.  It did not matter.  He pushed off, shaking, but the current slammed him right back into the same smoothed stone.

Then he tried to kick, forgetting that his legs were useless, and the current folded him backward, further under the surface.  But he was moving again, still drifting of control.

Moving in the violent dark, he sucked a gobble of water.  And another.  The current tumbled him.  An acrid taste sifted beyond his mouth into his body, and his mind flashed to an engraving on a skull, which belonged to Saint Willibald of the Long Torches. 
Make your eyes full on the sight of me,
it says,
nothing human escapes this fate
.

His body was a weakening rag, moving now in all directions at once.  He began to understand the situation was inescapable. He grunted, closing his eyes.  Then he felt his body rubbing roughly across the bottom.  He began grabbing at the perfect smoothness of the rock.  It felt odd that it even slowed him.  Then, somehow, his head broke the surface.  He had stopped.

Air rushing into him like a howl, he held a smoothed stone.  He was turned backwards, holding himself against the current at the lip of a low waterfall.

He felt one hand giving.  He slipped, water rushing into his mouth, every fevered breath like a horrible drink.

Then the other hand gave.

“Well, roaring hell...”