Blood Of The Wizard (Book 1) (49 page)

The woman’s neck is askew.  The eyes still bulge under the force.  They stay open as the blood sheets down the side of the neck.  Even killing her, she cannot believe the absolute
lack
of authority she commands.  The woman is hurting her with her pretty face.  The freckles make her see her cousin in her forehead.  Her hair is up high atop her head.  She has a plump tummy, and that she has sired anything to the creature on the ground on the other side of the meadow is another thing that amazes her as she stands, naked, looking at the boys.

She glances at the biggest, who is gathering their packs.  Eagerly. 

And she get back on the horse, and a week later arrives at the nunnery, naked, dried fleck of rust-colored blood about her wrists.

She would tell the nuns she was raped. 

And it feels like the most honest words she has ever spoken.

Until she tells Cullfor she loves him

Cullfor is her home.  And suckles love from her, and looks up at her, suckling as three halfling are burning their dead horses in a nearby brushpile.  Neither she nor her husband lord will ever have this moment again.  Ever.  Never even mention it. 

The three halflings secretly watch Cullfor’s masterful mouth at work with their graceless, secretive gazes.

How odd that some are born with the skin of a frog, but none are born with hooves.

_______________

The moon was rising over the trees as Bunn looked down and smiled.  He liked the way her neck looked so chubby, and he wanted to fall asleep beside it.  But the mechanisms of his mind were too far in motion for him to cease his thinking.  He leaned back, his eyes closing as his mind gripped the mane of a wild rush of her memories, and he dreamt of the frog.

_______________

When Cullfor woke up alongside Bunn, he was still a bit drunk.  His arm was damp with sweat where they had held each other.  He pulled his arm free, then let her sleep.

He yawned, trying to focus. 

The moon was high but veiled in a cold, thin haze.  Through the trees below was a great sluggishness.  The king’s caravan appeared ready to depart, and yet again it was difficult to judge. 

Cullfor stood, leaning against a tree.  Even the two or three priest he saw wore tunics of mail and open-faced helms.  He watched as they guilted a few younger folk into submission, showing them how to pack the Holy Implementia properly, how to place them in consecrated blankets, and how to roll them, setting them gingerly into reliquary chests.  Then the boys were chased off toward eight drafthorses.  The mounts were carted and sloppily laden with the king’s cargo, which was manhandled by three dozen more scurrying boys who had piled everything hog-wild.  Hundreds of things were all bundled and lashed on with some several lengths of rope.  And hundreds more.  Smaller bits of luggage:  eating tools, some oil and whet stones for the swords, some cloth from wives are whatever those women who had wondered here and there throughout the camp were.  He saw the long war bow here and there.  Together under the high gray afternoon, the thousands gathered and organized a half a million small things, then began either walking southeasterly along a tail that wound away from the river.

Most, however, were still folding sparse packs.

It was wonder, Cullfor thought, that a king ever makes it to battle.

In all, fifty horses would come.  Maybe half of them were knights, the rest were archers, scooting along now out of the far end of the valley. 

There was a growing calm in Cullfor’s mind.  In watching the horses, a beast worth five acres and a cottage these days, and all the rest of the nonsensical, he felt the same decadent sense of abundance he had felt spanking the witch who trained him.  It was difficult to describe the bizarre happiness that it brought. 

_______________

Before the carts of the king’s wagons started moving, there was another hour spent redoing packing and barking orders, but eventually the carts squeaked across the fields through winding ways that stretched upward through the boulder-strewn slopes and onto the road above them.

Cullfor looked back down at Bunn, then again at the meadow.  He felt as if a great snake had come and tried to swallow him and was slithering away now.

She was still sleeping.

He crawled next to her.  And he began drinking again.

They were leaving, but there was no sense telling them to turn around.  No one would believe him if he were to say that, in less than hour, they would be rushing toward the river . 

_______________

Cullfor cocked an eye, steadying himself. 

After a moment he lifted Bunn with one arm to wake her.  Behind them, the morning’s sun was brilliant but unseen, burning from under the horizon’s crisp edge.  Smart greens of the forest along the either side of the road began to come alive.  The king’s caravan had only just pointed itself south east when they heard, somewhere near the water, deepening, smokehouse horns of Dwarven damnation.

The army of halfling halted.

And for the moment, the hardy Watershed Folk, so good at war they rarely had to engage in it, smiled.

Chapter 98

“Dragons may or may not exist.  I have only seen two of them.”

—Lord Uncle Fie Wyrmkiller.

_______________

The castle was not the most austere in Arway, nor were its defenses the sturdiest.  But as Cullfor passed its safety, past its defenses, moving toward the dark river beach, he felt an uncomfortable buzz in his soul.  It felt like standing before the Gates of an ancient afterlife. 

It was hard to say how much time had passed before he stood ankle deep in the river, but it was still sometime in the thin and grayish pale of the morning light. 

He heard the sound of dwarves barking in the distance.  Then a clap of thunder underscored a distant commotion:  the sound of marching warhorses, and the subdued echo of voices.

Narrowing eyes scanned back down the beach, at the enormous stones of a road that crumbled against the water.  From here, a half a mile away, the road was beautiful the way a rock garden is beautiful.  At a riverward bend of rocks, succumbing to more and more waves, the road congested around some cliffs, then thinned again into fields, which rolled distantly and softly across the southern sweeps of stone.  The whole of the scene was full of his countrymen, capped by the morning’s thin fog, which was sprawling thinly, blowing away against the greening and gray light of the sea.  

Then he heard distant horses again. 

He looked back at the beach, at a scattering of borderland men who were climbing atop rocks and ramps to look off into the distance.

And he looked again at the king’s halflings. 

This time, they seemed panicked, and they were pulling great, crude catapults down to the beach. 

. 

Chapter 99

_______________

The morning was still was gray, and living fog crawled low across the bottom of the sky, swirling with high river fog.

Along the rock-strewn beach, an army came.  The army of Bhiers, Dwarf-King of Yrkland.   They halted at a wide, riverside field beyond the Broken Road.  There were perhaps five thousand dwarven nights behind him.  They stretched a half mile, four deep, and there were, all of them, as damp, cold, and silent as snow.

For a long, brutal moment, the men and halflings nearby said nothing.  There was just the silence, save the break of the pewter-colored ocean. 

Then, distant fat splashes began to envelope the sounds of thin screams. 

Suddenly, arrows whisked over their heads. 

Every man and halfling looked in the direction of the dwarven company of archers, unseen across the river, then looked again at the arrows, watching them fall harmlessly in the fields past the beach.

Then a roar from the catapults behind them resounded, the machines groaning free of their burdens.  When the death-freight was launched, there was only lethargic vapors, creeping and rising like ghosts of the shore and sky.  Then, splashes, some of mud, some of river water.  And the distant yelps atop a great, watery noise. 

Two more flights of arrows came from across the river, flying overhead, less accurate than the first. 

The archers behind him let their enormous bolts fly, this time down the beach, toward Bhiers’ Main Army.  But as the arrows landed, his stomach lurched, and a
wind came like the howling of giants.  A strafe of wind bit into his face.  The cape began whipping audibly.  Soaked hair snaked across his chest as he raised a raw hand and watched at the dwarven army began to approach
. 
His hand stayed raised as more arrows from the fog  of the river. 

A screaming, collapsing house noise roared as the catapults launched again.  The stones hurled, ferociously quick.  The noise as they left, again and again, was like a banner in fierce wind.

Ahead, mud already barked.  Water roared, rising in great plumes.  Dwarves flew in pieces out into the frigid water.

The halflings beside him were smiling.

The catapults launched again.  The spittle of giants soared, raining in every direction.  Life extinguishing in gruesome squalls, the dwarves flopped sideways, or they exploded in great bursts of blood and armor.  The jarring splashes sent up massive sheets of water. 

A great flock of missiles swooped again from the river, but before he could send up a shield, the thin shafts fell and dropped Arwegians everywhere along the shore. 

And now, dwarves yet splashing in the air, the army of Bhiers’ came and began to encircle them, running at them from all sides. There was only three thousand halfling and borderland men, and he and they form a circle their on the wet rocks.

And now the dwarves had come.

Cullfor cut at the tips of two pikes the weaponless, wet enemy had taken from the fallen.  A third thrust glanced his neck.  He ducked.  He grabbed the weapon and pulled it from the dwarf’s grip.  The first two dwarves stuck again, missing him as he charged them with his sword high. 

With a ripping plunge, he split one dwarf’s forehead.  The second dwarf swung.  He caught the tip, but the force sent his own pummel into his face.  Twisting under the force, he whirled his weapon under the arc of the third dwarf’s sword, and he swiped down at his belly, still spinning.  He heard him fall, and stepped back, controlling his lunge until he ripped the second dwarf’s throat.  There were more coming. Many, many more. Another flung some manner of ax.  It hit near the left shoulder.  It was a fierce bite, and it knocked him back a step.  But now he had a weapon he was familiar with. The same dwarf drew another sword.  Before he could raise the blade, Cullfor lunged from the one leg, with unsure footing.  Most of the lips were ripped from the dwarf’s mouth.  More came, fast.  They were roaring.  Just in the moment he splayed open the face of another, someone else’s stomach ripped across his steel.  A third was brought to his knees on the backswing, his head butterflied.  Cullfor was pulling it out when a second wave of dwarves rushed him.  The first wore strange crimson armor.  He was the only one among them with a sword instead of the long pole axe.  The armor fit him horribly, but he was a rough and swift bastard.  He could not remove the blade from the ripened head before the dwarf swiped his sword high atop Cullfor’s helmet, twisting his neck.  The second dwarf chopped as if cleaving wood, and it raked Cullfor’s armor to the skin.  When he freed it and swung the blood-soaked blade, Cullfor swung at a head that had already fallen away. 

The gore of it was slowing now, bringing to his strange sight the growing blanket of corpses around him. 

And now a great wave of the dwarven army crashed upon the circle of Arwegians.

All around him men and halflings screamed.  They were running in no certain direction holding onto things that should have been hurled down atop heads.

There was no sense anymore; sense had abounded this beach.  He could feel it leaving him.  Boulders cascaded down, dropping with thunderous crashes.  Soldiery, everywhere, was flattened or roaring.  A dwarf crawled next to him.  One of his feet askew.  Cullfor removed them with a thrust of his ax.

And now the bodies of Arwegians piled.

Cullfor grunted and crawled, ducking flakes stones and his own insane trolls, mad with battle-fever.  He thought he heard a lion.  There was great thud overhead.  Thunder.  And another noise like a lion.  A small growling of noise, rising in his mind to get his attention.

It was Blackthistle himself.

He had joined the dwarves.

The strength of some ancient and wicked force was surging in him.  Guards rushing to his side, men and halflings went flying by clusters from the mighty blows of his sword, but they kept coming.  And coming.   The clanks and growls of men and mutilation rolled up like a smell. 

Soon, it was all just a hive of fools, killing and chopping, every being for themselves.  There was only the shrill bellow of clashing warriors. 

Suddenly, a single moment hovered in view:  it was the lengthy shadow of Blackthistle as he grabbed a shield that hung across his horse’s rear.  He wrapped its leather straps around his forearm, his movements slow and meticulous. 

As the warriors tore into each other, he raised the shield.  Three long arrows bit into it. 

Blackthistle was watching the waterfall of men, washing down the beach into the river. Guards folded and groaned around him, pierced by another shower of arrows, even as another rush of men stormed ahead. 

Cullfor swung now under a stream of dwarves and wood and steel, and hurling stones.  Below him, a great charge of dwarves rushed.  They chopped with long weapons, like pole-swords, an ancient weapon called the dragonblade. 

In the middle of chaotic line, the Blackthistle plunged himself into the mayhem.  Cullfor watched him, even as his own hands burned, his blade biting against a cascade of spears that came.

He was like some troll-berserker, swinging and crushing men below him, and so many were in his path they soon formed a ramp of flesh.  Suddenly someone stepped on his head.  His spine torqued.  As he crumpled, his flesh pulled him to one side.  Cullfor gritted his teeth, muting his screams as, all around, hands and feet gripped, straining to hold as the Arwegians were getting pushed toward the river.  He could not so much as hope to form any type of shield, for the wrench of metal on metal came like a wave.  A few spears launched toward him.  Blackthistle was just behind the dwarves who threw them.  Climbing down a wall of dead Arwegians, Blackthistle took off his helmet, smiling.

His head was well-coifed, and handsome, and fierce.  Blackthistle’s shield went swiftly as his sword, countering a blow from a dragonblade. 

Men and halflings buckled under his hits, jerking. 

The fight was carrying itself more and more toward him.  Dwarves jumped to defend him.

Crushing skulls underfoot, ribbons of blood spewed across Cullfor’s head as he swung.  He looked.  His helmet had come off, and his hair was dripping with blood.   Twenty feet over an ocean of tangled and flattened bodies he fought toward Blackthistle, but the nightmare of all the chaos of hell was too packed. 

Metal sang over the noise.  Bones popped.  The fold of knights on either side collapsed in a break of axes and bodies.  Men on either side of him twisted, falling.  They screamed atop the sloping pile of gore.  Cullfor growled.  He shrieked and fought to get back to Blackthistle.  He put his shield up.  Chopping, peering over it as the sea of metal and flesh surged.  The ground swelled and collapsed.  He felt things rip under his armor, bite into his flesh.  He could only groan and hope not to fall.  Swinging and thrusting, he bobbed in a storm of blades, slipping his blade into dwarven necks and chests.  Cullfor stomped and swung.  Very soon, he and the Arwegians were utterly bloodied.  They were soaked in gore, from hair to ankles.

And now they were pressed against a rise of boulders. 

And the dwarven enemy rushed now without end. 

Less air came with each breath.  Cullfor’s sword could ax fifty or five hundred pounds.  He could not feel it in his hand.  Squashed in the macabre feeding frenzy, he felt the tide relent.  But it was only a break in a current.  A half a breath.  Cullfor was too compressed.  The fatal push would come.  They were too many.  They swarmed now.  They came over the five hundred or so Arwegians that were still alive.  They created a tide, pushing harder and harder against the stone, and Cullfor killed two of his own countrymen in the rush and crunched mayhem. 

Then deluge began carrying him. 

Roaring as his back scraped on the stone, the great surge lifted him in a sideways thrust atop helmeted men, out from the wall and back again. 

Cullfor was buried in a distorted pile of halflings, straining to look beyond a mangled torso. Everything began to redden.  The rocks, the river.  The grass.  The air itself was a mist of blood, floating like a fog. 

Deep in the gore, he roared, then fell deeper in the pile of dead. 

Suddenly he could not see.  Everything was black.  He might drown in these guts, he feared.  And as, finally, he emerged, he ran, knowing he had to get to Bunn, and get her out of here.

It was hopeless.

All was lost.

He formed a shield of magic and around himself and ran, scrambling with blood-slick feet and hands over blood-slick rocks.