Blood Of The Wizard (Book 1) (45 page)

Maybe that’s the ultimate irony of love.

“Hoo,” he whispered.

She looked at him and winked.

As they began to trek the slope of a meadow, he found himself looking sideways at her and feeling happier.  The long field was lined with a single high brake of evergreens, shaking in the breeze and dotted at their feet with a dull blaze of young yellow flowers.  Beyond it, the hills were less grassy and some grassless altogether. 

An unfamiliar horse was running free across a low side of the hill.

Cullfor paused.  His forehead throbbed.  The sudden sight of tracks, hooves of a dozen more horses that had meandered into the odd hills.  They were overtrodden by the tracks of men.

Cullfor rubbed his neck.  He pinched the bridge of his nose and knew that it can’t bode very damned well that the men tracking them had somehow follow them by staying ahead.

He looked at her. 

She looked at the track, then at him.  She folded her hands around his jaw. 

“If this is all there is to be all of our life, then it is to be all,” she said.  “I would not trade a minute of it for a lifetime with another.”

“I love you,” he said.

“I love you, and I love all of this.  Whatever this is to be.”

Tiny hairs rose.  A forceful moon hung still very low over a riding of hills, shining vaguely through a new rain in the west.

He wondered if all men were offered such a woman in life.

“Then to whatever awaits us, mage-guard,” he said.

Chapter 94

“
Mushrooms may be poison or gold.
”

—written, however unambiguously, on the doors of the Truffliers’ Keep, the Palace of White Oak. 

_______________

They set out across the high hills laden with weapons but carrying nothing in the way of supplies, nothing to slow them down.  Their movements in the wind and dark were hunkered and slow, but certain. 

When they reached the last of the grasses, they meandered into stony cliffs.  Blue and cold, the wrinkled landscape was sharp with loose and flaky shale.  It was oddly reflective, and under a sky that grew yellow and gray by degrees, it undulated away to the north like a glacier of rock.  Ever widening, it was consumed by the dreamscape of that bleak day.  The difference was so stark that the land hardly seemed an extension of the same country he knew.  It was more like something from a bedtime story, on that had more than a kernel of truth in it:  this mad place was supposedly home to hobgoblins. 

They were not far from the wilds of Dragonfell, home of the fiercest, but most peace-loving Elvish warriors in in the known realm, so fierce they had maintained something near sovereignty; it was almost its own land, and indeed it could have been—if they wanted to be.  But fortunately for the king and the country of Arway, the elves were fiercely agrarian.  In fact they considered themselves the First People.

Maybe three days north.  Three days, and he would see these legendary warriors first hand.   

He cupped Bunn’s heels and eased with her down below the cliffs into the stony waste.  The blue-gray land was already a nightmare of knolls and pits as they labored down from the first slope.  Here, the horizon closed around them.  The blanket of cloud was thinning, the night sky creeping into a clearer silver, but it was only to offer a view of the hellish terrain before them.  The ground rose or fell only.  There were no trails to shoulder.  Not a single regular feature for the eyes or mind.

_______________

As they descended further into the vast and stony way, it was difficult maintain any real sense of direction.  Eerie squirts of sunlight made the sheer piles seem to lean, an illusion of motion that was sometimes real.  Towers of rock sent pebbles scrabbling down beside them while they picked their through gap after winding gap. 

They had traveled but some five hours in before Cullfor began to feel lost.  Noise moved strangely.  Butterflies of light landing on him, fluttering until looking at them made them vanish.  Voices proved to be nothing more than their own steps, making him jerk his head.

Bunn sometimes moved ahead of him, ever cautiously.  He thought of unseen voyeurs out there in the scree, perhaps laughing the way small humanoid things will do.  Perhaps waiting to kill him.

_______________

He paused often, looked around.  Now the vertical rolls of loose shale were less steep.  But it was as if they only offered a better view of things to show they were endless.  A hill that cast them in shadow looked like a wave of it jagged stone. 

Slap my arse, but you could drown in this place. 

The hillocks became steeper again, more numerous.  They began to hear the distant yelp of some dog or wolf.  The occasional crumble of stone.  Always, the angled shadows did not seem to line up properly.  More than once, he felt disoriented and dizzy.  They were always leaning, always trying to avoid the deep and scattered cavities that may or may not have led straight to hell. 

In time they were looking behind them as much as they were looking ahead.  All day they could never see far off, not until they crested a rise.  And by then there would be no sound or movement.

Just an endless undulating ocean of stone.

And now a rising fog.

_______________

Night came in a shroud of bleak mist, a shower of low comets flashing across the sky.  In this awful place, Cullfor almost felt that they were aiming for him.  He had kept panic in some corner of his belly, but now he could not always hold it down.  He had once heard these incredible wrinkles were haunted.  That carts even rolled uphill by themselves out here.

It is horrible thing, discover truth in horrors stories.

“I think we may one day return here to build a home,” Bunn said, tumbling down an impossible trail.

She was sweaty and exhausted.

“It is lovely,” he told her.

As they tended to, her words settled his mind.  He took stock:  Stillness underscored the moving fog.  Soon they would arrive at the beach.  Soon they could follow it to the slave bays.

No
.  Listen. 

The distant lap of water.  Familiar water.  Anyone who has grown up on a river knows that river’s voice… They were back near the Gardenwater River.

A thump.

“Ooh,” Bunn said.

He looked around.

An arrow was jutting from her stomach.

Chapter 95

“Perspective is as much a vice as it is a tool.  But then, a vice
is
a tool.  Ask One Eye Bev, who I took in the dark.”

—Lord Uncle Fie Wyrmkiller.

_______________

Bunn bent, her face frozen in a silent howl.  Cullfor leapt toward her, holding her upright as she went to her knees.  Her face was a snarl.  There was a noise like a hint of laughter squeaking out.  She rocked back and forth as she leaned forward on all fours.

“Don’t dream me from this,” she said. 

And he had no idea what she meant.

The bloody steel arrowhead protruded out of her back, just over her buttock.  Her kidney perhaps.  But there was no perhaps.

“Good,” he whispered.  “Love, I need you to stay exactly like that.”

She was shaking.

Cullfor knelt opposite her.  He was shaking too.  There was a score of men coming, holding taut bows.  He could see their small line of rowboats now, tied together down the hill at the beach of a foggy river.

He growled out a low rumble that halted them a step.

Bunn’s breath was making a strange mewling sound like a kitten.  Briefly, he kissed the top of her head.  Then he spat in his hand and grabbed the feathered end of the arrow under her.  With the other he gripped the bloody head.

“I want you to breathe, love,” he said. 

He was unable to look at her as he snapped the shaft just in front of her stomach.

And he heard the crunch of her fall.

His face bunched.  Still he did not look directly at her or the archers.  Under him, she started to vibrate, as if Death was pulling at her.  If it did not stop soon she would let go.  He forced her still and pulled the arrow from her back, blood squirting upward into his teeth.

She rolled onto her back, mumbling in shock.  Cullfor nodded a little to let her know that was okay.  He pulled off his cape and held it to the wound.  It was wettening quickly.

Then he was grabbed by each arm.

Two large knights pulled at him, told him to rise.

And rise he did.

There were ten more beyond them.  Armored.  Thirty more were flanking them.  Encircling him now, then hundred or perhaps thousands more, and he looked and trusted that the notion of a fight was ludicrous...

But the notion did nothing to stop him.

Shocked, they merely crouched as he bit the face of the first.  The man fell back, roaring like a wound pig as the second man chopped at his ankles with a broadsword.  Cullfor leapt as high the man’s head and landed atop him, sliding down him until he could bite out his throat.  The man was dragging himself away along a new pool of blood as the others rushed.  They fell on him like sharks, but he exploded from the black gravel of the beach like a nightmare.  Everything blurred. 
Chaos exploded.  Arms, fists, and steel were whirling in every direction.  The swords and arrows flashed in impossible sweeps; it was impossible to distinguish the bite of one from the sting of another.  Cullfor bore his teeth, biting as many as he felled with the sword.  The fearsome thwacks and pings were chorusing death-grunts now.  Animalistic wailing rose.  Dozens lay dead.  Then hundreds.  Cullfor was tearing his way through the tumult, chopping swords in half, his sword shooting like arrowfire, popping any skull too close. 
He could only vaguely sense the surreal gravity of the moment, but he crunched a man’s face into the gravel, then another, and he could not free his soul with his growling—his mind was being eaten by the image of Bunn’s bleached-out pallor.  His eyes bloody, he bit another man, wrenching from him another tremendous sword, swirling even as his body seemed to swell a foot taller than he was.  One of the men, shocked, pulled away, retreating into a pile of corpses

The sight of a second wave of attackers sent a pained pressure through Cullfor’s head.  It was beyond a headache.  The pressure in his temples threatened to explode, send blood misting all around him.  It rocked through his body, as he turned, ripping toward the first man, who was the largest.  And life gushed into him with every man that fell, and it rinsed away the pains of his wounds, growing now across his chest and arms.  It was little matter.  He had perforated the edge of the black madness, burning with the perverse high of it, when he noticed two arrows protruding from his right thigh and third just under his left arm.  But it only reminded him of the arrow in Bunn. 

Suddenly, a demon appeared to him, fighting alongside him.  It asked him: 
W
ould they shudder, the unfallen angels?   Jot something in record of her smile?  Would they make you this offer of strength?

He told the fiend: 
One would think there is something to measure her against.  Something.  But in this entire world, there is only this woman.  So fuck off.

And the demon fled.

Cullfor turned, laughing now, baring the red teeth.

Lunging
back toward the fury and bedlam,
Cullfor watched the rest of them fall back.  Defensive and low, they went crouching, their backs to their boats.  Some crawled in the gravel as they stared into his seething eyes.  For a moment, there was stillness.  The only noise was his raspy breath. 

Then there was movement in the distant fog. 

Out in the gray, two hundred Dellish barges were coming toward the shore.

Then with the abruptness of an animal one of the knights ran.  A blur of fog whisked.  An arrow shot from the fog, up the beach.  Falling to the ground, the knight turned with a stark slash of red dripping from the top of his nose.  The arrow-pierced socket was cracked across the bridge.  The eye dripped clear liquid.  The fog whirred again, toward the rest of them.  Then another.  Another.  As the fourth or fifth arrow flashed through the fog a thwack resounded and red mist popped from the skull of a horse he had not seen.  It reared and rolled backward, galloping ten feet with that terrible stick in its brain.  More arrows dropped as the foremost barge unleashed it human cargo. 

The Dellish leapt from their boats onto the gravel, but went scampering backward.  Someone was roaring orders out in the fog.  Scooting behind dead mare, the man wore a black thistle in his helm, growling in an accent so thick it seemed loud rubbish.  The army was running now onto the beach, but another army came from the same direction. 

Arrows were zipping now down like a torrent.  In every direction.  Cullfor crawled toward Bunn, both of his legs completely soaked with blood.  There was yet another arrow in his left, and still a fifth one in his foot. 

He saw her running crookedly up the beach under a storm of arrows.  He screamed for her to stop but all that escaped was a fizz of groaning as pain ripped from his groin to his head.  She faltered and crashed.  Staring at him.

He motioned with his head for her to hide, for her to bury herself if she had to.

Her eyes rolled upward.

In the next instant a thousand warriors were all around them.  And he recognized them.  Bloody madmen.  His own damned gorgeous countrymen, at last, pouring in from up the beach and down from the wrinkled hills.  Thousand more running up the beach to meet them.  He felt himself starting to feel faint.

He looked down at the arrow sticking through his foot.  The other was sideways through his hand and thumb.  He leaned his head against a broken abutment of rock felt himself fading, watching Bunn stare lifelessly beyond him to the water.

Cullfor tried to scoot toward her.  He felt only cold stone pressed against his cheek. 

He was numb, shaking.

Leaving.  Leaving without really going anywhere.