Blood Of The Wizard (Book 1) (43 page)

Chapter 90

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Cullfor dropped to his knees then mauled the wet ground with the big scoops of a digging hound to clear away a spot. 

Bunn grabbed him, then lay beside him.  Frantically she coiled around him, rolling in the muddy peat until they found a place that was soft and flat.  Then they pulled together on boots and capes and trousers and tightly-wrapped garments.  For the briefest moment, just a glance, they stared at each other.  Cullfor had come to expect a certain subdued undercurrent to Bunn’s exuberance; the joyous look in her eyes was pleasantly unnerving.  She wasn’t just humming, she was alive in untellable ways.  She was occupying the universe.

He swallowed. 

They shared their looks another moment.  Everything was anew, and everything felt so fresh on that cloudy afternoon that neither understood what they were feeling.  Then came a tiny but eager breath, and spittle popped when she opened her mouth. 

Then they slithered against each other, their forms softly rubbing.  They kissed gently, sucking knots of flesh.  He felt her long, broken shudder as he lurched into her.  Her feet cupped his ankles.  Immersed in the warmth of the other, he found himself merging into her gorgeous figure, her joy.  Cullfor nudged his weight gently deeper.  Her mouth was open, and he took the lobe of her ear in his teeth and pulled himself back, only to return more fully.  The sea-going rhythms rose, and he put a hand on the side of her face.  Her teeth shining starkly around her tongue, she opened her eyes.  Her look was so inviting he was weightless.  Kissing her forehead, he tasted her elation.  Sweat dripped off his chin.  He pulled her closer, and she began to writhe and smother him in playful and buoyant snarling.  Perfectly exuberant in the absurd joy, the stretching moments decorated his mind with all the noise and joy of life.  Then the insane, wonderful surge arced across his mind, flooding his senses.  Cullfor grunted.  He seized her, kissing her mouth as she breathed.  As she fluttered, she looked up at him.  Cullfor looked down at her and kissed her naked, rounded mouth.   And as she closed her eyes once more, she seemed to elongate, stretching like a faded bolt of cloud as he thought of swallowing her soul.  Instead he pressed into her with a last kiss before she scooted against him, nuzzling him with her nose.  A ribbon of lightness appeared in his forehead, and the light washed through him. 

As he lay beside her, he knew something had cleared from his mind.  There were no words for it.  It felt like tiny bad things popping, like warm fluid draining down his spine, but nothing could better describe than their slow and deep breathing, perfectly matched now.

Everything was changing.  A perfect sleepiness was swallowing the homogenous forest.  He felt lighter now.

Warmer.

They were wide-eyed and silent.

_______________

It was an hour before nightfall, the bruised pink of daytime, when Cullfor woke.  The ground was drier, and the air was still different in some untellable way.

He stood naked.

She was perfect.  As a child in her content.  He allowed himself some ridiculous credit in it, then he shook his head, smiling, as she smacked him playfully across the backside.

_______________

He laughed as they dressed. 

His senses once again his own, he saw they had been making their love near the outskirts of a small town, maybe a quarter mile ahead.  The road underfoot had seemed to widen.  The trees grew less and less oppressive, cleared just ahead to some ten feet off road. 

He studied the town itself.  It was a small place, still a borderland burg.  A hundred or so roofs gathered atop two hills between which ran a small, slow river.  In the fields beyond, Cullfor could see a great carpet of sheep sleeping on the hillside.

It was Balturshot.

He watched her dress, as happy as he had ever been.

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Balturshot seemed like a town that had been dropped from the sky.  There were some fields north of town—but mostly it seemed to have been plopped right down into the forest.  Walking out of its gloom into town, they trekked over a masterfully-hewn stone bridge.  The river passed loudly beneath them. 

After the silence of the wood, it was a welcoming noise.  They paused where the river angled.  He walked down under it, and he began to wash the mud from his boots and face.  It was a thorough affair.  Trying to get that stale muck from the warp and weave of their tunics, he stood. 

With a pleasant sigh, he began scrubbing again, looking up at Bunn, who stared at the pub.  The revelry inside seemed to rise and drop in chorus with some melody from within.  The welcoming glow drew a smile from her.

“We need our strength,” he reminded her.  “Another good meal.  Some good sleep.”

She nodded and joined him, patting the wetness from his clothes.  She coifed his hair a bit.

“I love you,” he ventured.

She straightened his collar and cape.

“And I love you, my beautiful,” she said matter-of-factly.

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It was a sturdy building with two chimneys that exhaled strait beams of smoke.  An eyebrow of stone jutted over the entrance.  There was a longish and tall inn attached to its back, so that the roofs shared the same thatch.

Cullfor held the door, nodded. 

Then he smiled, sufferably, at the pleasant little world of the pub:  the pungent, beery smell and the warmth of the door-side fireplace, the rumble of conversation, it was all punctuated with laughter and the clinking of steins. 

Sudden music wailed from atop the bar. 

Cullfor turned slowly to find three fiddlers, whooping and stomping with a terrier jumping through ankles and around on the bar, and suddenly, however genuine his ease, he hunkered through with some effort.  It was a bit too crowded for his liking.  And
way
too loud.  Then he noticed something odd. 

Something new. 

As they budged deeper, too many people were willing to move from his path.  He grunted past a band of roughnecks who silenced themselves.  His scars and carriage had always made men unsure of his station in life and not terribly keen to figure it out.  But now they moved as if there were no question.  Others were snapping alert at the sight of him.  Too many, in fact.  Fully immersed now, Cullfor found some that were offering him their seats.  Not the way you do when unkempt strangers pass through your watershed.  But the way you do for a lord.  He shook his head and waved them off as they submerged further into the merrymaking.  The barkeep looked over with a wary smirk.  He pointed them to an empty table in a far corner.  It was all Cullfor wanted.

They delved past the first room to the far-side chimney.  He could still sense the looks as he sat.  And it didn’t matter.  He was utterly at rest.  He’d almost forgotten the joy of a proper chair.  The warmth of a fire behind him.

Nothing was said for several long but not entirely uncomfortable moments. 

The two of them just sat.

Cullfor plucked a leaf from a dusty bouquet that hung on the bricked wall just behind him.  He picked his teeth with the stem.  With his other hand, he motioned for beer.

Cullfor shifted in his chair.  The pub was silencing by degrees.  Bunn allowed some mental space, letting him relax.  It felt like a wedding present.

People behind him were talking amongst themselves about childhood and motherhood.  The dimming noise floated easily.  He could hear the sounds of a girl too young for her business.  Belching and giggling behind him, someone slapping their boots as they laughed, two barmaids arguing about someone that grabbed one of their backsides, someone too excited about God and two others telling him to save it, and even a rat chattering as it scuttled across a roof beam.

He opened his eyes to discover one of the serving maids staring at him.

“Master?”

“Yes,” he said.

She plopped a key down alongside two tall beers.  “Yours for a night,” she said.  “I’ve a certain
business
away tonight.  A grabby little lord and his fairy stepbrothers.”

Cullfor smiled a sort of smile that only a confused old man can muster.  He harrumphed and picked up the key.  It was intricately carved.  The details were small enough to give him that odd sense of wonder.  For a long strange minute, he was just holding it.  Staring at it.  He felt a little drunken just for comfort of the place.   

He leaned forward and, holding Bunn’s hand, kissed the woman on the forehead.

“Thank you,” he said.

The barmaid watched them, happily, as he kissed Bunn.  It seemed to enliven her night.  The woman winked at Bunn.

She brought them a small cask of brandy.

Bunn smiled, shaking her head. 

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When the drinking was done, Cullfor rose and playfully gathered Bunn by the waist.  In each other’s arms they nudged past the lingering crowds, kissing.  Joined at the hands and mouth, they passed down a narrow hall under a few low beams, still clutching as they almost fell but rose again.  He was pulling on her cloaks, and she was helping him until she was naked above the waist, writhing their mouths into each other’s necks while they paused near another of the serving maids, who gave him a candle.  He thanked her with a kiss, then kissed Bunn.  He kissed her again, and she tore at him lovingly.  She curled around him and released him to kiss him elsewhere.  She clung to him down a second another hall, awashing it in a cacophony of moans to underscore the rush and bang others making love behind the doors.  Her neck was scarlet as her chest, and she offered it to him while they paused at the door.  For all the dank lamplight and beery vision, Cullfor made efficient work of lifting her pale, welcoming body into an arched enclave.  It was just a confessional of a room, really, but a happy space.  It was warm.  He placed the candle in a small food closet opposite a cold roast turkey.  There were also three loaves of fried sweetbreads and a cask of beer.  As Cullfor slithered down onto her, he smiled without opening his wolfish mouth while she curled around him.  Drawing him in atop thick pillows and clean quilts, she reached down and guided him into her while he chewed lightly on her eyebrow.

She grabbed his face and kissed it.

And for the next hour he felt so wonderful he could swear at times he was leaving his body and had to suck on her chin and chest and earlobes to keep from floating away.

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The room’s window was small. 

Cullfor, sweaty and depleted, and smiling, was staring into the blackening sky over the moon outside.

A hundred feet away, a witch was in flames.  Her hair and her back and her legs engulfed.  He could hear popping and sizzling over the grizzly screams.  Guards in finery and shoulder-armor looked at her screaming form as if it were merely an unusual animal.  Some interesting fold in the landscape.

Bunn was snoring behind him.

A section of the horde was still gathering while others were beginning to leave into the forest roads.  They went gliding silently into the woods, the rest of them gathering near the captain of them.

The witch screamed her last breath.

The captain simply stood before her slumped form a long moment.

The corpse rolled to the right, reddening to black and drawing into a cat-like pose.

The captain looked up at him, and it raised Cullfor’s brow to see that face.  The man was a leper.  His snarl was permanent.  The exposed teeth were cruelly perfect.  He reminded Cullfor of an angel that had angered God.  But even from down there, a primitive malfeasance seemed to overcome the man as he looked at Cullfor. 

Cullfor curled his lip, backing the man up a step. 

His single, milky eye returned to the corpse that dripped flesh before him. 

Chapter 91

“
Between beer and women, too stupefied to move, there pray my enemies find me
.”

—Uncle Fie, misquoting a dwarven phrase

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Cullfor’s eyelids had felt like they weighed ten pounds.  But after only an hour’s sleep, there was no hope continuing his slumber.

He forced down a sweet piece of bread, almost choking on the surprising flavor of some sweet spice from the East.  For a moment, catching his breath, he thought Bunn woke up on the bed beside him. 

She was glistening and naked, grabbing food with shut eyes and tearing at it, shoving fistfuls into her mouth. 

All while asleep. 

Cullfor had never seen anything quite like it.  Grunts issued with the labor and passion of her chewing.  Crumbs popped from her mouth with her breath as if jumping for their lives.  He grinned.  Nibbling on the sweetbread, he realized found gluttony in women endearing, fascinating; he wanted to wake her and watch her eat, but it was the nature of that want that made him smile even wider.

He broke from his humored wonder long enough to wrest another sweetbread from her subliminal tussle.

“I believe I’ll go for a bath,” he said, patting her tummy.

She waved him off, nodding and chewing.

He woke her up with a little soft pinch. 

“I’m going to get a bath.”

She looked down at the crumbs on her lips and breasts, and she grinned.  He grinned too, following the bread trail along a single blue vein, which traced under her gorgeous topography like a small hypodermic stream. 

Once more, she waved him off, nodding and chewing.

He breathed her in another moment.

Oh, hell’s depths, he loved her.