Blood Of The Wizard (Book 1) (37 page)

Chapter 79

“Our hunger?  Our thirst?  Our appetites fuel those who would destroy us.  Make full on that beer, my feisty nephew.”

—Lord Uncle Fie Wyrmkiller

__________

Cullfor squinted.

Ghelli sat for a moment, and then he rose from Cullfor’s side.  He began to walk away.  He was looking around, a wild uncertainty in his eyes.

“That night I decided to follow the monk,” he said.  “Last night I tried to kill him.  I failed.” 

He was still looking around. 

“Wizard, the monk will
not
fail.  Basil will kill your
name
.  Yours and mine and Bunn’s too.  I will do what a can to counter it.  But God knows the bastard will pour sin and hatred into our names until our own countrymen will kill us as soon as they see us.”

Cullfor understood all too fully.  As soon as an audience was found, the monk was going to work at his ruin
.  Hell—he had no choice now. 
After confirming the fact in his head, Cullie nodded.  He looked at the ground and rubbed his temples—he was as much of a hood now as Bunn and Ghelli.

“Do you what you can, Mister Ghelli.  But you know what you have to do first.”

“I do, wizard.  I will go to Brickelby and tell King Findhorn of the invasion.”

Cullfor tsked thoughtfully, nodding.   Findhorn had only just recently taken the throne from his father Alberik.  He hoped desperately the young king was eager to empress his fairness and wisdom upon the halfling.  But that was unlikely, he knew.  Young kings, be they halfling, dwarven, or human, prove themselves with but one means.  War.  He turned to Bunn. 

“Maybe I do need you.”

“Need me or not,” she said with a shudder.  “I’m coming with you.”

Cullfor looked at her.  He wanted to ask what this had to do with her.  But that it had anything at all to do with her was enough.  The monk was deadly.  He already understood that, and he understood that she would tell him when she was ready.

He looked up at the sky.

He took a few breaths.  Tamping down a swell of aggravation, he crossed himself and looked at her.  There were flushes of something mean inside him, something that wanted some control.

“I don’t like you,” he said.

She stopped suddenly.  She looked at him, her head tilting. 

“You will,” she said.

Suddenly there was a rustle.  It came from up a small hill before them.

The noise still pressing through a maze of trees, they hunkered together and curled around the riverside’s large rocks.  As they looked up at the trees, they witnessed the enormous destrier peering down at them from the birches.  It was chewing on something.

He and the horse shared a look.

The tail swished a bit.

Cullfor scampered up the rise, frantic but trying to act calmly.  Staring at the horse, he knew only to wall it in behind it with magic that it would not run.  He grabbed the reigns.  But he managed only to pull away with the saddle as the horse ripped itself from his grip, knocked him down, then bounded over him with easy trounces over the creekside brush and disappeared.

Again he was looking at the blackening sky. 

“Not a word,” he warned.

__________

Cullfor scanned off in the direction Ghelli had left.  He saw nothing.  Just the low roll of hills.  The grassy low ground beneath them.  And the river.  Back downhill, Bunn sat with her back to him.  She was whispering a little prayer for Ghelli’s success.  He stood and listened, and soon discovered the prayer was like a song, and the sound of it was like the waves of a heated conversation.  The fact that she was still there struck him as odd too.  But for the moment that was not a terrible feeling.

He looked back toward the rigged tree.  The ashes of several large logs still glowed, sand Cullfor understood that his fire must have taken some time to build.  He wondered what drove the monk to build such a fire.  It was like a roasting fire.  Was he going to eat her?  Deep inside, he knew he might have been using their torment to conjure a demon, and he might have been unsuccessful for all he knew.  But he did not want to think about that.  Instead, briefly, he wondered what she would taste like.  Beef or ham.

“A pork chop,” he decided.

She glanced up at him.

Embarrassed, he felt a small surge of wanting to be rid of her.  He looked at his feet, then her.  He understood the growing aggravation, though, realizing that it was little more than once again having something to lose.

As he stood looking at her, he could not decide what bringing her with him was.

Decency. 

Stupidity.

Or murder.

__________

Bunn knelt before her satchel.  She had a frying pan and some oat-flour.  Some sort of berries.  The sight of it made him almost dizzy.  He rubbed his stomach.  He had forgotten his hunger.

He was also incredibly sleepy.

He watched Bunn fetch a little water for the pan.  She sat the watered pan in the grass while gathered a bit of grass and leaves, then she struck her tinderbox against over them.

His lids were becoming thicker and lower.  His forehead felt heavy.

__________

Cullfor’s dreams are crisp.  He is lying atop a pile of rubble paralyzed and half-dead atop some windswept peak.  The silence of this place is enormous.  Even the wind is small and hushed as it passes over his face.

He breathes, looks around.

Someone has cut off his legs.  He can see them downhill.

Now Bunn is standing over him.  There are creatures like he has never seen in this life behind her.  Suddenly her lips are drawn back or cut away, and as she looks down at him, her teeth stretch, and each of them are sharp as canines.  Cullfor feels his stomach lurch with anger.  Bunn mounts him, grabbing him by the tunic as she begins yanking him in rhythm back and forth across his ruined pelvis.  There are naked, but everything about the act fails to arouse him.

Then he wakes, thinking:  Our appetites fuel those who would destroy us.

Bunn pecked him on the cheek.

“Come along,” she said.

In the cold setting of the sun, he yawned, and they walked together toward the smell of cakes.

__________

Cullfor’s right half ached horribly.  His right hip was numb.  The teeth on the right side of his head.

As he sat, a strange fear hit him.  He feared a little food and rest would leave him feeling worse.  If the prepping of food had been a physical lullaby, getting off his feet and eating something might assuage all of his madness and damage his resolve.

But that was utterly stupid, he realized. 

He sat and grabbed a cake.  As did Bunn.

Once the fear ceased, he nibbled.  With the next small bite, the food was passing more assuredly through his lips.  He watched Bunn’s mouth, noting the sturdier bones of her slightly cleft chin.  And very, very quickly he grew comfortable with the sight of her.  He was enthralled by the rhythm of her neck, the round smooth pulses of muscle in her cheeks.  The way the tip of her nose rose and fell as she chewed.

He found her…
interesting
.  Pinchable, yes.  Soft, indeed. 

But infinitely interesting.

.

__________

When he was fully done with his cakes he glanced again at Bunn and found that her gaze did not hold any trace of any need to thank her—which was fascinating in its own right.

He kept looking.

It was strange how food made everything look different.  It was as if in his little nap they had traveled some great distance.  The landscape was different, brighter, even in the gathering night.

For the first time in far too long, he smiled.

“Thank you,” he said.

“Thank
you
,” she told him.

Oh.

She was very interesting indeed.

Chapter 80

“Oh lord, we are open to so little that awes us.  Let this sausage shock us.”

—Uncle Fie, praying over a breakfast of sausages, followed by beer and more sausages

__________

The Dwarf-King approached Dhal slowly, staring up at her with ironically bright gray eyes, and he seemed to breathe her in another moment before he looked her up and down again. 

At length he asked her, “Human, have you no passion whatsoever?”

As far as the small stone mooring would allow, Dhal stepped back, as if more perspective might allow her to answer.

“Passion?” she finally asked.

“Love and war, woman!” the Mage King said in a thundering whisper that was somehow like both a lion and a snake.  Dragon-like.  “Have you never driven your lover to madness!  Have you never driven your enemies to their knees!”

“I have not.  And may God have mercy on those who done with the pleasure you would seem to take from it!”

“Nay, girl.  Shame on those who have
not
!  What manner of life is this?”

It took another moment for the words to register. 

“What?”

“Do you want to
live
, Dhal?”

“Well!  Isn’t that something, put simply, we
must
do?”

“
Hmm, quite
.  I suppose you felt quite safe tucked away in your mind.  You’ve probably wondered what I would do to you when you came here?  No doubt you’ve been waiting to be a slave, or to be eaten, or used as some manner of prey animal for my new pet on a morbid hunt.  But I don’t suppose you could even know how much you dishonor me with those thoughts…”

“Safe?”

The Dwarf-King harrumphed.  “Do you not ever feel the urge of the hunt, Dhal?  Do you not long for the fearsome terror that someone will knock the meat from your bones?”

Now, Dhal thought, she understood what he meant.  And what he was getting at….

Her pride.

She smiled.

The Dwarf-King returned the smile, and it was the unique smile of a dwarven sorcerer, a beam that involved little more than a tilt of the head and raising the eyebrows.

“Oh, such questions...” Dhal said.  “Perhaps it is not a question at all.  Perhaps we should slice down to the truth of
what it is
… We both know full well I would die before you turned me into bait for my nephew.”

“Oh, you know much.  And assume much.  Perhaps you expected the young wizard would come here!  That I would have that lad enslaved so that might be invincible through a thousand years of battle?”

Now Dhal understood nothing.   Nothing whatsoever.  Except that perhaps this Dwarf-King was insane.  He raised a brow under that crowned helmet and laughed at the confused look on her face.

Dhal laughed, too.  Nervously.  “I’m afraid you have me on a scale of disadvantage I cannot easily describe.  Why, exactly, have you brought me here?”

“When one lives in a cage…” the Dwarf-King began, but trailed off into silence.  “My apologies, lady.  I was called Bhiers at birth.  But I made myself more than a name. ”

“I’ll call you mad, if you prefer.”

“Aye, the Mad Cruithne, the Conjuring Dwarf, the King of Fools I’ll be, when I tell them what I’ve seen: Dhal the Great, shackled to her fears like a simple dog.”

Dhal said, “This particular
what
, is a
who
!”

“And who is this who?”

Dhal pulled the robes of her dress aside.  She put her hand on her heart, the wind from some unseen shaft in the cavernous castle pressing her under-dress against the understated curves of her body.  “I am Dhal.  And he who owns this heart was called Wyrmkiller.”

“Ha! 
Owns
!?  A monumental act of vulgarity, my lady!  Most egregious!”

“And just who the thundering hell do you think are you?”

“A dwarf who, for most of his life, has sought the dragons from the stories of his youth.  A dwarf who has sought barrow snakes and even the dark goddesses.  But no more.  I can see now in this age, a woman may not be the mysterious knights they once were.  You, dear lady, are just that.  A lady.  No longer a night creature.  No longer a knight, no longer to be feared.  And…”

But he said no more, and waved her off. 

“… And the road home is quite open, I can assure you.”

Bhiers seemed genuinely depressed, and began to walk away.

Dhal watched him go, utterly confused.

“Where are you going?”

“Ha!  What does that matter to you?  You are free to go as you please.”

Dhal made an exasperated sound.  She covered herself and looked down in the blackness of the hole the vessel had sunk into.  Then she looked at the Dwarf-King, walking away, seeming to wipe a tear from his eye.

“You’ll not feed me first?”

Bhiers stopped.  He looked at her, now smiling. 

“Ha!  Yes!  Most good!  Come, woman.  Let me introduce yourself to your own mind!”

__________

As they left the riverside, Cullfor and Bunn walked for a few hours in the dimming afternoon light.  Cullfor sensed that, in life, there were very few people comfortable with silence, and he was pleased to discover that Bunn was among them.  He found he was rapidly taking in her appearance as well, and just as rapidly growing fond of it, so nearing dusk, as they stepped upward through a tangle of maple toward the sound of water, it was almost a novel sound.  They traced uphill a bit, close to a smallish hilltop, where they discovered a spring.  The grass was cropped at the pool’s edge, the work of deer or wild goats or some such, and the spring sent a pair streams down a crevice of mossy wood and then back underground.  There was a smell in the air like jasmine.  They sat for moment, both of them resting their sore feet in the streams that trickled from it.  For a moment, they just stared.  And when his eyes were full of the beauty of it, he drank for a while. 

With his lips still fixed from the cold, clear water, he kissed her forehead.

Bunn unclasped her hooded cape from around her shoulders.  She slid it off, then extended it to him.

He grabbed the cape and looked down into the pool, at the wavery moon that was reflected in it.  The wind had picked up.  The slow-growing shadows gathered a shocking cool.  Tying the cape around his threadbare beltline, he felt less broken down.

He could still sleep for a month, but his hip felt better.  His leg was taking weight much more easily.

Bunn looked at him, then stood. 

Trekking deep into the small mossy hollow, she eyed him to follow.

Cullfor went, slowly.  He paused, and he looked at her while she strung the length of herself alongside a fallen log.  It was not like reclining, but more like she was
placing
herself there.   There was something curiously engaging about her stillness.  She had a certain dexterity in her lack of motion, folded and pleated as if tossed casually to the ground.  But from the confusion of angles something perfect had emerged. Like a piece of art.

He kept staring, unable to break from his look—besides, there was no energy left for the madness of decorum and decency.  He was so sleepy, and she was like the leafy edges of a dream, and it felt like a vial of arm liquid had cracked in his belly, leaking upwards against gravity into his chest.

After a moment, he lay beside her in the everyday practicality of rest

He put his arm around her.

And they slept.

__________

Cullfor stirred at some point in the night, trying to eke some meaning from a dream.

Very soon after, he gave up, and stared at Bunn, whose perfection had collapsed.  But it had only collapsed into something more endearing and soft.  Her face was bunched and snoring.  A portion of skin was exposed and red against the log in front of her.  But damn if he’d seen anything prettier in his life.

Shifting onto his side in the wombish cocoon of the cape, he detached himself from a tangle of her sweaty hair.  Then he nuzzled closely again.

He realized she smelled of new, white berries, and a little like jasmine, and he went back to sleep.

__________

Sometime in the night, Cullfor was wakened by a sound he mistook for a purr.  He opened an eye, slowly, to discover that beside him waves of flesh were rippling in a continuum of groaning motion.  Then there was a pause, a general, slow sigh, and then all the soft noise of sleep was punctured with a high scream.

He froze, arching a single brow.

“What the icy hell?”

His breath was pushing his heart back down when he was seized on the neck.  Bunn pulled his face toward hers and looked at him with a bulging, bloodshot eye.  And she smiled.

Cullfor stared.  Dawn’s air was a cold contrast the pleasant heat of her breath.  He pried loose of her grip. 

She shook her head.

He emerged from the doorway of sleep to kiss her mouth briefly.  He kissed her neck and the lobes of her cold ears.  When he felt himself needing to do more, he paused.

She kissed his nose.

He kissed her between the eyes, then stood.

__________

The forest floor had transformed into a placid ocean of sparkles.  It dazzled the eye in spite of the low morning light.

Cullfor stretched.

When Bunn emerged more fully into the waking world, she rose.  She was beaming, an elegant and sure expression on her.  Immediately she knelt and breathed a small prayer, thanking God.

Cullfor winced, then laughed, catching himself taking some credit for her thankfulness.  He secured the remarkable little gem in his inner pocket, looking at her.

Slap him to hell, but he was going to marry her one day.

That settled, they got moving.  And they moved swiftly, blanketed in her pleasant silence.