Blood Of The Wizard (Book 1) (36 page)

Chapter 76

__________

Cullfor rises in a slow dream.  He is standing.  He looks down at his legs—falling into water had taken their use: but something in his bizarre ride downstream has returned them.

He looks around before he tries a step. 

He halts.  Looks around numbly.  The night is tastefully draped in moonshine.

Finally he walks, bats swooping down in the water’s mist around him.  He does not venture far from the water before he pauses.

Cullfor smiles, then notices his clothes.  They are tattered.  His belt is still bloody despite the water, and the right side of his back is also sticky with blood.  His belted shirt has rips down the front.  The holes go all the way through his shirt, into his chest.  Finger holes.  He still wears his lord’s scabbard, and cannot remember where he lost his cloak.  The sword is gone, too.  It is nothing short of miraculous that the delicate ring is still on his pinky.

He begins smiling at that.  And he smiles thinking that a fire would feel nice, and there is an excellent one just downstream.

So nice.

He has to do something about his mouth, which feels as though he’s been chewing on wool.  He pauses and kneels for a drink.  For an age, he laps handfuls.  By the time he is satisfied, he already has to pee.

Now, standing, he sees that his reflection is blanched.  His eyes look back up from the river like a stranger that does not know quite what to say.  Unruly hair.  His beard could use a week of grooming.  He pees, the image scattering beneath him, then turns again to the fire.  There is some sort of flesh hanging over it.  Pork.  No, longer.  Venison maybe.

As he laces his trousers, a woozy feeling streaks through his core, then passes.

There is the smell of burning hair.  He looks again, this time at people roasting over an open flame.  And Friar Basil, looking up at them.  This, in his dream, seems appropriate  The smoke from the fire rolls his way.  It burns his eyes.  He crouches under it.  The ground is cold, feels so... Son of a pig-tickling bastard—this is no dream.

Have I damaged my head?

Cullfor crawled under a ragged tree.  He felt numb and slow, but he could also feel the river mist lisping across the back of his neck.  He looked, rubbing his eyes.  People were tied up over a fire, yes.  There were two, a women and a big male, hanging by their feet.  And that was Friar Basil.  He stood at the controls of a make shift pulley, frowning like a shark.

For another moment, Cullfor just crouched, morbidly fixated.  The matronly woman with a square jaw was babbling something about mercy, and it seemed to work.  The pulley brought her higher, ending the screams.  Her hair was shorter now, irregular where the flames had eaten it.  Her forehead and neck were scarlet with pooled blood. 

He thought to rush the monk, but suddenly he questioned this.  He was in the middle of nothingness.  He must be dreaming.  Or possessed by demons.

Hoo.
 

What the thundering hell else could leave a mind seeing this?

He looked at the thick woman once more.  She looked familiar, like someone he had seen in a neighboring town or traveling carnival.  Her impressive, smart head was starting to swell.

The young fellow seemed familiar, too.  He was not conscious at all.  All of their feet were stark white at the soles.

The monk lowered the woman this time.  She screamed and flailed like nothing he had ever witnessed, so that she started spinning.  Eventually she was vomiting with every turn.

He wondered how long they had been hanging like that.

He looked around for some sort of hidden ambush, and found nothing.  No hidden path, or easy launch.  And as the screams of agony rose once again, he cast his lot, rising from under the fallen tree.  In strange spirits he ran toward them.  He ran past a horse, which shocked him.  Then an ashy wind began blowing into his face.  He was all but blinded, pressing through the smoke.  Then he was stumbling with a twisted ankle.

The next thing he understood was that he was falling, and dizzy, but his momentum carried him from the edge of the fire.

Rolling away from the glowing ashes, he glimpsed a second horse.  This one was much larger, and it was bolting away.

“Oh thank merciful God!” someone said over him.

He stood and rubbed his eye.  The world was spinning.  Overhead they were saying thank God, thank God, then they screamed.

Suddenly something course blanketed him.  Cullfor looked at his arms and chest.  He recognized the material—starweed rope, woven with hemlock and venom on the barbs for stunning sturgeon.  He could see only well enough to know the barbs were burrowing into his skin.

The monk was utterly off his guard, grunting to catch his breath.  He drew a small sword from his robes and began to charge.

Cullfor did too.  He wore a slight grin, feeling faint, flinging the rope off by dint of his magic—which caused a tearing, bling pain all down his arms.  As he passed out, he noticed the rope bunching around the monk’s raised blade, which only softened the blow to his skull.

Bewildered, he came up from a kneeling faint, and he cracked he monk’s chin with his knuckles.

Grunts issued from both halfling and dwelf.  Cullfor punched again.  The blow excised a few teeth and pulled the flesh away from his pinky knuckle.

Friar Basil swayed, blood drooping now in sticky strings.

From above he heard, “Oh thank God!”

The old halfling reached for him, then stumbled backward, crashing through the fire, only to splash down with his feet in the flame.

Cullfor sucked air for a moment.  He wiped some blood from his eye.  He picked up the monk’s sword, letting the feet roast a moment longer.  Then, leaning under the naked figure twisting over him, he sneered and kicked the monk’s legs away from the fire.

“Damn stupid idiotic ball-sniffing bastard.”

“Oh, thanks be to God!” the figure repeated over him.

Sawing with just a few strokes, he cut a stone counterweight free from the pulley’s riggings.

“Thanks be to—.”

Her large, bulbous arse crashed onto his head.

Chapter 77

“Gratitude is measured in blood and time.  Never in gold.  Though, occasionally, in bed.”

—Uncle Fie Wyrmkiller

__________

Cullfor lurched awake.

Instantly he froze.

He began wondering at what sort of hell he had landed himself in.  Everything was black.  Unseen hands pinned him and covered his mouth.  The shuffle of foreign battle hymns were echoing in his head.  And there was a smell in the air, a wet blend of piney aromas and something more feral.

Two female hands let go of his mouth.

“Everything’s okay, my sweetness.”

He sat up.  Dizzy.  A drop of water fell on his nose.

He whispered, “Am I blind?”

“No.  You are in a troll barrow.”

Never before had the plain and absurd mixed quite like that.

Before he could ask anything else, he hushed himself and sat very still.  Odd glimpses of roasting flesh assaulted his memory.  He recalled the uniquely learned sounds of the screams.  There was something of a brawl with a monk, the memories of which more or less perfectly failed to explain anything.

The need to get out and straighten things up overcame him.  But he breathed.  He began to relax a little, unsure why.  A thin gauze of logic maybe.  Or the feel of the feminine hands.  He patted them thankfully

“Bunn,” she said.

“And Ghelli,” Cullfor said.

Itchy frustration warmed across his eyebrows.  But he sat, grimacing.  A button of some sort was pressed against his eye.  He succeeded in ignoring it, partially, before he realized it was, in fact, a nipple.

__________

He was led outside, the dim apricot light of evening flooding his eyes.  He shielded them and looked around.

The hole they climbed from was little more than a horizontal crack, narrow and tucked low under a leaning boulder.  They had not gone far.  The river was still near, and the tree that was rigged with the crude machinations of torture was just downstream.  When his eyes had adjusted, he stared at this odd-looking creature before him.  Bunn.  Being square-jawed and double-chinned gave her a pugnacious beauty.  She was mean and smart, he could tell just by looking.  She wore mannish trousers and a torn cloak over a pack of some sort.

He kissed her on the crown of her head.

Bunn kissed him back between the eyes.

He looked away, his eyes wide and his mouth suddenly full of dry fiber.  Every muscle in his body felt as though it had been braided back into a set of knots.

Then Ghelli emerged from the cave.  The halfling boy seemed burdened with thought as Cullfor approached him.  He kissed his forehead, feeling a monstrous joy at seeing him so glum.

For a moment, there was silence, odd and deep as the sky as it rolled into deeper hues over their heads.

Suddenly Bunn stepped between them.  She felt his face and neck and began tracing a finger over the welts.  His cheeks and forehead were abraded with troughs of spongy flesh.  His stomach had several punctures.  The top of his head was going to have a vicious score.

He had no idea how to explain what he had seen.

“A nasty bout,” he said. 

She looked at him.

He looked her in the ironically bright gray eyes. 
How does a monk come to roast the likes of you?

Cullfor approached her slowly.  Closer, she grabbed him and tugged him closer yet.

“Ghelli says you’re going to get your aunt.  You’ll need me.”

Cullfor froze, wide-eyed.  In time, he shook his head, slowly.  Maybe he was not so aghast as he should have been, or maybe there just was not enough in him to give the issue the pressure it deserved.

“Mind your damned gripping and tugging,” he said.  “Why were we in the earth?”

“A long tale,” Ghelli said.

He looked at him.  Then Bunn.  Again she pulled him close.  This time, she pulled him right-ways against her.  She turned his head with smart fingers, her round, soft cheek pressed against his.  Her other arm was outstretched, pointing toward a distant and southerly meadow.

Cullfor attempted to follow the line of her finger.  But he was too exhausted to focus.

Then there was something moving.  Far off... A pair of deer.  They were bouncing through the grass.

“Flushed by rangers of some sort,” she said.  “Maybe human scouts.”

Cullfor cocked an eye.   “Hell’s blistering cold,” he whispered.

“An invasion,” Ghelli said.  “Large.  And growing larger.  As I say and as I sit, master, it is a long tale,” Ghelli told him.

Cullfor lifted his head and stared at him.

“Then you better start telling it.”

Chapter 78

__________

King Jorigaer knew this well:  The halfling warriors of Arway had long since made an art out of the ambush.

In fact he knew this better than any of his men.  The only reason he was alive was their strange reluctance to kill children. 

He was nine.  They were in the king’s forest outside the Dellish capital of Armborough, nowhere near Arway.  It was a very clear morning, very blue.  His father, King Yaor was tracking pigs with a livery of guards.  These were not boars, though; they had mysteriously rooted all at once from the keep of the king’s pigger. Which raised a few brows, but not enough suspicions. They were making their way up a short, steep hill.  The next thing he knew the pigs were running toward them from the crest.  There must have been fifty of them.  They were wrapped in colorful rags.  He remembered laughing at the pigs.  Laughing as his father fell from his horse.  The guards scampered, encircling their fallen king only to be knocked from their mounts by lances he had not seen.  Then other men on ponies came, little men, dragging the guards off, pulling them across the rough ground.  And the king was taken.  Ransomed for half the worth of Armborough.

Masterful, he thought.  Gorgeous in its simplicity.

Presently the sky was the same as it was that morning.  Bright.  Soft.  The smoke from the remains of Gintypool was still visible, high in the clear sky behind them.  He was atop one of his Dellish warhorses, clopping around the outskirts Muttondon through the hilly woods.  The Dwarf in the Black Thistle Helm was beside him, and they were flanked on all side by his Thistle Knights of Delmark.  The line of soldiers behind them snaked for a half a mile, but three thousand men at his disposal did little to quash odd winds of invasions.  There was quality to the meandering, woody paths.  It was in the silence of the sunken roads, and you could not wash it with beer and wine.

“You will recall,” he said to the Dwarf in the Black Thistle Helm, “that the last Dellish march on Arwegian soil ended in rather stirring style.”

“I would rather not, my lord.”

The king was speaking of the men of Delmark that survived a blitz on Arway’s Bracon Bridge.  Five hundred men, hung by their necks.  All at once.  The Dwarf in the Black Thistle Helm, at fourteen, had seen ten dwarves hang simultaneously, and the tilt of his head suggested his ponderance at the sheer logistics of hanging five
hundred
souls at once.

“My God...” the king said.  “The calculated menace.”

The battle-levies surrounding Muttondon came into view, ramparts flattened by cart wheels and rainwater.

The king grinned, pleased with the disrepair.  The pits were caved in, mostly.  They looked more like plow-furrows these days, more ready to be sown with seed than Dellish bones.

“Say what you might of the halflings’ wit,” the Dwarf in the Black Thistle Helm said.  He looked up at the sky, concern weighing at the corners of his mouth.  “There are no words for a people that would sit for days amongst its prisoners, working through the logistics of hanging them simultaneously.”

The king looked at the Dwarf in the Black Thistle Helm.  He thought he saw fear in his eyes, but there was something else.  Anticipation, maybe.

The king winked at him.  “Well, master Dwarf, we can take at least one lesson from their cold acts at Bracon....”

The Dwarf in the Black Thistle Helm squinted.  “A lesson, my liege?”

“Yes indeed, Master Dwarf.  And the lesson is simple:  You must love the work.”

__________

At length, Jorigaer’s raised fist halted the army behind them.  He turned to The Dwarf in the Black Thistle Helm, smiling.

“Call the men, my dear.  Call them to gather!”

The dwarf nodded.  He tugged the reigns and rode up onto the banks of the sunken road, forced by the narrow lane to call down to the men at intervals.  It took time, so that the king had climbed on a wagon and was drinking well before they were spilled away in the wide arc around him.  They were still forming ranks, stretching far out into the pitted fields.

The silence was complete.

The king let the stillness float, waiting a long and winkish breath.  Then he motioned behind him.

“Lords of Delmark, princes of the Uplands, and you lions of the dell, it was told to me in my youth that Arway would never be taken by Dellish sword.  Tonight, at least, that much will hold true.  In the carts behind is more silver than the worth of Armborough twice again.  Take the money, spread it like crumbs before geese.  If it is there is to be blood shed tonight, let it be in the beds of the virgins who greet us ...”

__________

Ghelli stood.

Cullfor sat.

As he listened to Ghelli talk, his impression was quick to form.  The grim afternoon when they had met was an ill day for Ghelli as well.  A thousand bowman from Delmark, rising from the crags behind the fellows.  Savages.  They were pouring out of the rock like water, tracing down to his dying halfling-fellows with pikes and swords.  Then the barrage of hellish instants.  Pikes ripping into the writhing piles.  Halflings crying or screaming.  Some yelling for their mothers. 

And he had seen the savages paying silver to the traveling monk.

But this invasion…

Why?