EPIC: Fourteen Books of Fantasy (216 page)

And so the two shared their brief visit. It would not be the last. Terrilius and Jade’s reign was a long and honored one. Knowledge and learning spread. An old era receded, a new one began. With each generation, the world crawled a little further from the fog of its past and into the bright day of its future. And with each generation Halfax watched, waiting for next time he would be needed. Waiting, and remembering the one little girl who had truly been his.

Afterword

J
OSEPH
R. L
ALLO
IS
A
former IT Specialist from New Jersey who now makes his living as an independent author of fantasy, sci-fi, and related genres.

www.bookofdeacon.com

http://www.bookofdeacon.com/contact/

The Book of Deacon

The Great Convergence

The Battle of Verril

Jade

The Rise of the Red Shadow

W
ITCH
H
UNT
: A G
RYPHONPIKE
C
HRONICLES
N
OVELLA

Annie Bellet

Story

W
E
ALL
KNOW
THIS
TALE
. There once was a beautiful elven princess who lived in a crystal forest in a hidden kingdom far beyond the common worlds. Her voice was unparalleled among the World-singers and her power brought her all she desired.

Until Wrath and Pride wound their way around her heart, turning songs of beauty and creation into songs of death and violence. For her crimes, she was cast out and cursed to live among the lesser creatures, among the elves and men who had forgotten those who sang into existence the earth they squabbled over. Her voice was stolen, her words taken like ember-waves melt footprints from the glowing sands.

Her banishment and silence will end when she has purged her crime by doing one thousand good deeds. So she joined with a ragtag band of adventurers who call themselves the Gryphonpike Companions.

I am that foolish Singer. These are the chronicles of my path home.

By the time we’d climbed up the Ragged Hills and come through the pass, the five of us had short tempers, worse body odor, and only three days until our Adventuring Guild charter expired and the fines would start piling up. The High Road is a remarkable feat of engineering and while my companions stopped to argue about our course, I wandered a short distance away to admire the clean stone-paved path twisting away into the misty hills beyond. The road, which started at the base of the mountain pass we had just come through and snaked a hundred leagues to the Verdant Coast and the city of Ramsport, was wide enough for two wagons to go side by side, built slightly elevated from the surrounding ground with culverts to let rainwater drain away. It was almost as functional as something my people would have sung into being. Almost.

“I am not the one who got tangled up with a baron’s daughter, forcing us to flee from the only city with a Guild chapter between Salvat and Ramsport,” said Rahiel. The pixie-goblin shook her wand in Drake’s face, then flapped her butterfly-like wings furiously, blowing more of Drake’s human sweat stink in my direction.

Drake smoothed his black curls with an exaggerated hand motion and blinked the dust out of his eyes before replying. “Oi. And I’m not the one who detoured us for a fortnight to find a pearl in a bleeding lake.”

“The lake wasn’t bleeding,” Rahiel said. “And it is a very beautiful pearl with qualities your feeble man-mind cannot grasp.” She stroked the black pearl in question where it hung suspended in silver wire around her scrawny green neck.

“It’s an expression, oh, curse you.” Drake raised his hands in throttling motion.

Azyrin, our half-orc shaman, intervened before Rahiel’s familiar, the mini-unicorn Bill, could stick his diminutive but sharp horn into Drake’s thigh.

“Enough. Makha and I consulted maps, we have solution.” He folded his blue-skinned arms, managing to look calm and reasonable despite the summer heat, the angry glares directed at him, and the sweat stains darkening the edges of his thick leather jerkin.

Splinters! I want to examine that road
.

I took one last look over my shoulder at the open road in the distance, then repressed a sigh and shifted my full attention to the conversation. Makha, Azyrin’s wife and our heavy hitter was crouched next to her pack, finishing the elaborate process of buckling on her armor. She finished messing with her knee-buckles and leaned her chin on her shield before returning my look with a small shrug of her mountain-like shoulders. Of course, even a small motion is impressive when the shrugger wears plate armor.

Azyrin waited for the clinking of his wife’s armor to die down and then pointed off toward the north. “Strongwater Barrow has chapterhouse. The Barrows are little out of our way, but if we push pace, we can reach the town in three days, pay our fee, and take road through the lowlands until we find High Road again. Minor detour.”

I snorted at that, which started a headache as the curse clamped on. Apparently snorting counts as communication. Fortunately smiling, eyebrow wiggling, and very casual shrugs don’t seem to trigger the same nausea and headaches that gestures like nodding or shaking my head will.

“What now, elf?” Makha glared at me. I considered myself special in that she had no pejorative or plain baffling nickname for me.

“Our silent friend seems skeptical and bloody rightly,” Drake said. He tugged at the neck of his shirt, loosening the laces as a hint of welcome breeze wandered over us. “Forgetting something, are we? The Barrows. Infamous for being full of undead and other nasties?”

I wanted to shake my head, but the creeping headache was bad enough to stop me. It was already looking to be a hot, tiring day. Drake was wrong, however. I wasn’t skeptical about the idea of going into the Barrows and paying our dues. That was a sound plan that would avoid fines. I was skeptical that we would only suffer a short detour. One of the reasons I put up with my companions was their charming quirk of getting into trouble. All it took was someone offering coin or a sad story, preferably both, and they would go haring off to right a wrong or slay a dragon or what have you. A boggy land full of undead sounded exactly like the place for us to get into trouble.

I rubbed my thumb along the smooth wood of my bow, Thorn. Undead sounded good to me. Put enough arrows into a critter, even the undead turn back into just dead.

“I have to agree with the annoying human,” Rahiel said. “The Barrows sound not very nice at all.”

“Fines sound not nice at all. Companion funds are running low. We have barely enough on us to cover charter fee. Many fines make longer winter,” Azyrin said.

“And we can get the Guild news; find out if those meatknuckles have any jobs posted.” Makha hefted her shield and stepped up to Azyrin’s shoulder.

“Undead jobs,” Drake muttered.

“So, we vote?” Azyrin ignored him.

“I will follow you. Avoiding fines does make the most sense.” Rahiel folded her arms into the sleeves of her dress, which today was a frothy pink gown embroidered with pale blue birds. Hers were the only clothes that seemed to stay clean on the road. Magic use has its perks. Bill whinnied his agreement.

“Drake?”

“All right. Long as this town has a decent tavern and a hot bath, I’ll survive.” Drake picked up his pack and pulled the straps tight. I was glad he agreed he needed that bath. His smell was definitely rank enough to offend even an insensitive human nose.
 

“Killer?” Azyrin turned to me.
 

I raised my bow in a casual motion toward the north as my answer. The headache didn’t worsen. Good. I scanned the hills. Fade, my mist-lynx companion, had left us sometime around dawn to hunt, but I knew he would catch up.

“Lead on then, lover,” Makha said as she re-slung her shield with another ear-pinching screech of metal on metal.

We picked up our gear and turned to the north, heading down from the hill where we had camped and toward the shadows of the bog lands.

“Oi, Rahiel. How come you always call me ‘the human’? Makha’s human, too,” Drake said.

“Ah, yes, but Makha carries a bigger sword.” Rahiel jumped onto Bill’s back and settled her skirts. The pixie-goblin might be no taller than my arm is long, but she didn’t lack for verbal courage, baiting Drake this early into the start of a long, hot walk.

I moved too far ahead to hear the rogue’s response but I smiled at the sound of hooves beating a retreat. I hoped that somewhere ahead would be a sob story and a pile of coin. I could explore the High Road and its elegant simplicity another time. Tiny red-throated larks started singing and the breeze picked up, bringing with it the scent of fresh water, ripe summer grasses, and the promise of a beautiful day.

By the morning of the third day, we had found the muddy track that was generously referred to on Azyrin’s maps as the Barrowroad. The hills gave way to marshland teeming with tasty redfish and stinging clouds of midges. The shaman had an unguent that helped keep the tiny bugs off our skin that smelled of bear musk and pine sap. A slight improvement over the stench of human sweat, I suppose.

We passed the first signs of human habitation just after dawn, when the summer moon still hugged the horizon like a plum resting at the edge of a giant basket. The main staple of this land was rice, a peculiar purple variety that grew well in the boggy lowlands. Fields of the grey-purple plants spread out around us, the horizon broken by clusters of bog cypress and man-made earthen field-boundaries. We saw no one working and the lean-to shelters we passed were empty of gossiping farmers, lunch pails, or any other sign that these lands were worked and claimed.

The sense of foreboding grew as we neared our destination and the cypress groves became more numerous, turning to light woodland. Ranging ahead, I smelled the town, wood smoke and human waste carried on the faint summer breeze, the stink intensified by the wavering heat. Fade padded up beside me, his black-tipped ears twitching. When the mist-lynx started to growl, I stopped in my tracks.
 

The leaves on the trees ahead of us were withered and falling, the road and the area around it covered in desiccated corpses of birds and hundreds of insects as though a line had been drawn between life and death and everything on the wrong side had perished. Not even the normal buzzing of the marshland was still here; only the breeze rattling the dead leaves disturbed the creeping silence.

“Killer, what is, oh. . .” Makha clanked up behind me and took in the strange scape ahead. “Azy, love?”

Azyrin and the others caught up to us. He bent and dug up a handful of the gritty mud from the dead side of the road, murmuring words too low even for my keen hearing to make out as his other hand gripped his amulet. After a long moment where his ice-blue eyes seemed to stare off into nothingness, he shuddered and refocused on us.

“Curse magic. Dark ritual of some kind.” He wiped his muddy hands on a patch of reeds growing along the healthy side of the path.

“When we show up in town and everyone is dead, that would count as extenuating circumstances for the Guild, yes?” Drake had pulled a square of embroidered cloth from one of his many belt pouches and held it daintily over his face.

“Town? Ashes, no. Bill and I are not going a single step further. My kind are too prone to illness to risk it,” Rahiel said with a look of horror on her delicate green face. Bill supported her statement by pawing at the mud with one gold hoof.

“What’cha talking about, dipwing?” Makha used her favorite nickname for the pixie-goblin but her tone was strained.

“If you all would cease staring at the ground for a moment?” Rahiel pointed with her wand to something waving from the nearest stand of dying trees.

Crude banners were tied into the branches, yellow and indigo. We all knew what that meant. Yellow for plague. Indigo for mourning. Ahead of us, people were sick and whatever the illness, it was deadly. I didn’t even have to turn my head and look at Azyrin to know that despite what Rahiel had stated, we were going ahead.