Blood Of The Wizard (Book 1) (3 page)

Chapter 4

“
It will snow more,” I said, already feeling a few flakes driven through the darkness against my face.  “The wind’s veered north.  After the sleet, it will come thick as feathers.  We need to get out to the elves’ old camp before all the traces are covered.  How far by the High Dog Road?”

“
Five miles,” he said, and I knew by the sudden scream and plunge of his horse that spurs were dug into its raw sides. 

We turned down that steep, tortuous street leading from
Goback to the Valley of the Leaf.  The wet thaw of midday had frozen and the road was slippery.  We reined our horses in tightly, and by zagging and zigging from side to side, we managed to reach the foot of the hill without a single fall. 

Here, we again gave them the bit, thundering across the bridge without stopping, which brought the keeper out, cursing and yelling for his toll. 

I tossed a coin over my shoulder and we galloped up the elm-lined avenue leading to that Frostetch Forest retreat that Kenzo called home.  Turning suddenly to the right, we followed a seldom frequented road, where snow was drifted heavily.  Finally, our beasts sinking to their haunches and snorting through the white billows, we had to slacken pace.

Halvgar had not spoken a word
.  Clouds were still massing on the north.  Overhead, a few stars glittered against the black, but the wind had the most mournful wail I have ever heard. 

“
Fie—listen!  Do you hear anything?  Do you hear someone calling for help?  Is that a child?”

“
No, Halvgar.  I hear nothing but the wind.”

But my hesitancy belied the truth
.  We both heard sounds that could have easily been wailing.  It was impossible to discern anything in the gathering storm.  And the wind burst upon us again, catching my empty denial in a mean sound, like the howling of a woman. 

Then there was a lull, and I discerned the noise:  It was Halvgar. 

I looked away. 

The stout dwarf by my side, who had held iron grip of himself before other eyes, was now giving in fully to grief.

Yet we pushed on.

At last, a red light gleamed from the window of Gilli’s low-slung cottage.  That was the signal for us to turn abruptly to the left, entering the forest by a narrow bridle
path that twisted among the cedars.  The moon shone for a moment above the ragged edge of a storm cloud, and in that same moment all the snow-laden evergreens stood out, spectral and still, like mourners.  I shuddered, looking.  Snow was beginning to fall in great flakes that obscured the air.  Here, the road again took us right.  At a sharp angle to the road was Halvgar’s Hall.  It suddenly loomed up in the center of a forest clearing on the mountain side.  Just beyond, the path to the garden came near the road, followed it a bit, then crossed a frozen stream to a small open space. 

Here, the small band of
elves had been encamped.

We rounded back for his hall and hallooed for servants.

With the lanterns they brought us, we examined every square inch of the smoke-scarred rocks and snowy rubbish heaps
.  Bits of hide or bone were scattered here and there, along with stones for the fire, and ends of ropes and tattered rags lay everywhere over the black patch. 

In the end, we found nothing, not one single thing to indicate any trace of the lost woman and child, until I caught sight of a tiny, blue string beneath a piece of rusty metal
.  Kicking it aside, I picked it up. 

On the lower end was a child’s shoe.
I confess it took me a moment to reveal it.  I would have rather had felt the point of a dagger, shoved in my ear, than have shown that simple thing to Halvgar. 

But I did.

He nodded, grimaced maniacally, then just nodded again.

Then the sky fell out.  The snow broke upon us in white billows, blotting out everything.  We spread a sheet on the ground to preserve any marks of the campers, but the drifting wind drove us indoors and we were compelled to cease searching. 

All night long, Halvgar and I sat before the roaring fire of his hunting room.  Both of us were at a loss for what to do. 

He just leaned forward with his chin in his palms, saying few words.  I could only offer futile suggestions, uttering mad threats about Killroot.  But we knew enough of
elf character to know what
not
to do—which was raise an outcry, because that would surely bring on Killroot’s cruelty.

Chapter 5

We spent a long, melancholy night
, waiting.  Amid the roaring of the northern gale, driving through any gap it could find in the hall, Halvgar roared back.  But the wind only grew stronger.  It seemed as if it would wrench all the eaves from the roof.  It shrieked across the garden like malignant spirits.  And all the while poor Halvgar kept rushing into the blinding whirl. 

Outside, though, he could not see twice the length of his own arm, and the servants and I begged him to come back. 

As long as the storm raged, he would pace back and forward the full length of the hunting-room.  It was a hellish eternity.  His face would wrench in a seizure of fury, until his eye would be caught by some object the boy had played with.  The stout dwarf would freeze, then swallow.  He would bend, slowly, and pick it up.  He would put this carefully away, as one lays aside the belongings of the dead. 

Then he would set himself down, gazing at the leaping flames of the log fire.  I felt nothing but the agony of our utter helplessness. 

Afterwards, the lanterns that we had placed on the oak center table began to smoke and give out a pungent, burning smell.  Morning revealed an ocean of billowy drifts, crusted over by the frozen sleet, which reflected the white dazzle.  The whole scene burned the eyes shut as great icicles hung from the naked branches of the sheeted pines, and snow was wreathed among the cedars.

After lifting the canvas from the camping ground, we sought in vain for more trace of the fugitives. 

There was none.

We dispatched a dozen different search parties that morning, Halvgar leading those who were to go on the river-side of the hall.  I took some well-trained rangers picked from the elvish servants, who could track the forest to every elf haunt within a week’s march of Goback. 

A few of Addly’s guards came.  We both knew they showed up more out of curiosity than to help, but we needed help.  I put them on a trail with instructions to report back that night.

As soon as they left out, I hunted up an old, wrinkled elf.  Batt was a hunting guide I used now and again.  Grizzled, stunted and chunky, he was not at all the picturesque figure that was typical of elves.  He was more like a dwarf—which might explain why we got along so well, as these days I had more in common with those little fellows than my own countrymen.  Instead of the blue face paint, he wore a dwarven stocking cap with earflaps tied under his chin.  His longshirt was an ill-fitting garment, the cast-off coat of some well-to-do human, and his trousers slouched in ample folds above the beaded skin shoes favored by the elves.  The old Yrklander was as silent as an animal, and the dwarves hereabouts had nicknamed him The Mute.  Or perhaps his name was Mute, and they called him The Bat.  I can’t recall which.  I just knew that what he lacked in speech, he made up in an almost animal-like acuteness of the senses.  It was commonly believed that Batt possessed some nameless sense that big game possess, by which he and they could actually
feel
the presence of an enemy or a predator before any man or dwarf, or even the other elves. 

For my part, I would be willing to pit that
“feel” of Batt’s against the nose of any wolfhound.

“
Batt, old fellow.  Good to see you,” I said.  I was puffing the long stem of a clay pipe to calm my nerves.  “I wish I could say I called you for one of our hunts.”

The old
elf nodded.

“
Listen, let us get right to it.  There’s an elf, a bad elf, a half-human cur…”  I was particular in describing him as half human, because Batt was full elvish Yrklander.  “The filthy son of a whore stole a dwarf maiden and a little lad from Halvgar Hall a day ago, sometime in the morning.”

As Batt digested the information, he began
to lick the air as if tasting it for an answer.  I raised by eyes imploringly, hoping he had something. 

Batt just fixed his eyes on an invisible spot in the snow and ruminated even more
.  My lesson learned, I just watched.  In time, he hitched the baggy trousers up, pulled the red scarf that held them to his waist tighter, and, taking his eyes off the snow, looked up for me to go on.

“
Um… well, yes.  Let’s see.  That elf, Killroot, he guides for the Dellish—”

“
Keelroot tuh weetch?”
Batt asked, speaking for the first time I’d ever heard.

“
Yes!  He and his little band disappeared with the woman and the child.”

The Mute’s eyes went back to the snow.

“Listen, Batt, I’ll make you a rich man if you take me straight to the place where he’s hiding.”

Batt’s eyes looked up with the question of how much.

“Five reels of silver a day,” I said.  This was four more than we paid for the hunts, and those could last for a
week
.

No sooner were the words out of my lips than he darted off into the forest like a rabbit.

“Well, damn it, elf.” 

I did not
even begin to follow before I lost sight of him, but knew his strange, silent ways, and I confidently awaited his return. 

How he could get two pair of snow-shoes and two poles inside of five minutes, I do not attempt to explain, unless some of his numerous half-breed youngsters were at hand in the woods.  At any rate, he was back again, equipped now for a long hike.  S
o I laced on the racquets, having to watch and imitate him, and before long we were skimming over the drifts like a boat on water. 

In the maze-like confusion of snow and underbrush, no one but Batt would have found and kept that tangled path.  At places
, there were great trunks that had fallen across the way, but Batt planted his pole and took the obstacles in a leap.  Then he raced on at a gait which was neither a run nor a walk, but an easy trot, which was common to the elvish natives of this wilderness.  Again, though, I had been schooled to his ways, and his pace, and I kept up with him at every step.  However, to be honest, we were going so fast I lost all track of my bearings.  We might have been in some crystal-walled cavern as we pressed over the brushwood, now packed with snow and crusted ice.  Branches snapped like glass when we brushed past.  I tried to discern a trail by the broken thicket on either side, but that was in vain. 

Then I noticed that my guide was keeping his course by marks, which were cut into the trees.  At one place, we came to a steep, clear slope.  The earth had fallen away from the sheer hillside and snow had filled the incline. 

Prodding forward to feel if the snow-bank were solid, Batt promptly sat down on the rear end of his snowshoes and slid quick as a hiccup down to the valley. 

I came leaping
downhill behind him, clumsily, from point to point with my pole, risking my neck at every bound.  Then we coursed along the valley, the elf’s eyes still on the trees.  Once, he stopped to emit a gurgling laugh at a badly hacked trunk, beneath which was a snowed-up sap trough.

I looked at it too, but I had no idea
what Batt’s mirth was about.

“
Where to, Batt?” I asked with a suspicion that we were heading for the elvish “village” at Leafy Lore. 

“
To Leafy Lore?”

Batt agreed with a grunt. 

Then he whisked suddenly around a headland, then up a narrow gorge, which seemed to lead to the very heart of the mountains.  It was a lonely place somehow, and it might have sheltered any number of fugitives. 

In the gorge, we stopped to take a light meal of dried herrings and biscuits.  By the sun, I knew it was long past noon and that we had been traveling northwest.  I also vaguely guessed that Batt’s object was to intercept the
human merchants form Delmark, if they had planned to slip away from the Trollwater River through the bush, where they could meet eastbound longboats.  But not one syllable got spoken on the matter. 

Or any other matter.

Clambering up the steep, snowy banks of the gorge, we found ourselves in the upper reaches of a mountain.  The trees fell away in scraggy clumps, and the snow stretched up clear and unbroken to the crest.  Batt paused and grunted.  He licked his pipe-stem significantly and pointed his pole to the hilltop. 

The dark peak of a solitary skin tent appeared above the snow.  He pointed again to the fringe of woods below us.  A dozen s
kin tents were visible among the trees and smoke curled up from a central camp-fire.

“
There,” he said, which made four words for the day.

The Mute fell back behind me as we approached the camp. 

The campers were evidently thieves as well as hunters—frozen pork hung with venison from the branches of several trees.  The sap trough might also have belonged to them, which would explain Batt’s laugh earlier.  There was another rig for sugaring-off on the outskirts of the encampment.

As usual, a pack of savage dogs flew out to announce our coming with furious barking.  I would swear the creatures recognized him as one of their own, because on seeing him, they left off with vicious snarls.

Then my heart sank, noting the signs of permanency—rock wall shelters, pits dug out for latrines, et cetera.  .

“
Not the elves we’re after,” I said

Batt shoved me forward with the end of his pole and a curious expression showed on the dull, pock-pitted face. 

“What?”

He nodded forward, urging me along.

It was a strange thing, approaching these folk.  Though they saw us plainly, they sat stolid and unflappable, after the manner of their race, waiting for us to announce ourselves.  Only the shrill-voiced children, who rushed from the skin tents, showed surprise or interest in our arrival.  Elves, both male and female, were hunched about the fire, above which simmered several pots with the savory odor of cooking meat.  I don’t think a soul so much as turned a head on our approach.

Some of the women and half-breeds
were heaping bark on the fire.  Elves sat straight-backed round the circle.  Vagabond Dellishmen lay in their kilts in all variety of lazy poses amid the hides and skins.

Then I saw a curio
us sight.  A dwarf sat among them. 

I had known, as everyone familiar with Dwarven family histories must know, that the sons of old cutters sometimes inherited the adventurous spirit.  It is what lead
some of them, namely my friends, from the pleasantries of Yrklandic life for the wild life of the no man’s highland between our two countries.  The same happened to men from my homeland too.  I was aware this spirit frequently transformed Dellish earls into rangers and descendants of preistly blood into common woodcutters.  But it is one thing to know a fact, another to
realize
it. 

In this case, the living embodiment was Delthal, a
dwarf from Goback.  He had shaved all but a few years’ growth of beard.  The son of a bastard was clad in elvish skins, lying at full length on his back among that villainous band of nondescript elves. 

Something of my surprise must have shown, because as Delthal recognized me, he uttered a shout of laughter.

“Hullo!” he called with the saucy nonchalance that made him both a favorite and a torment at Goback Pub.  “Are you hear about the taxes?” he asked, and he sat up making room for me on his fur robe.

I said nothing, shaking his hand heartily and accepting the proffered seat.

“No, but I’ll wager it’s dodging money troubles of some sort that brings you here,” I said.  The young dwarf had been one of the most notorious borrowers I had ever known or even heard of.

“
Clever human!” he laughed, giving my shoulder a clap.  “I see your time was not wasted with me.  Now, what the devil,” he asked as I surveyed the motley throng of angular, coarse-faced she-elves and hard-looking males who surrounded him, “has brought you here?”

“
What’s done the same to you, Delthal?”

He laughed the merry, heedless laugh that had been the distraction of the pub
.  Then he looked with the assurance of privilege across the fire into the hideous, angry face of a big she-elf, who was glaring at me.  She must have only just emerged from a warm tent, because she was all but naked.  Neither cold nor shame kept her from sitting in the snow across from me.  She had pointy ears, of course, but this one had pointy teeth as well.  Her bare nipples were pierced with agates, and her loin cloth, sagging and agape, was leaving nothing for my inquisitive eyes to imagine.  In all, she might have been a great, blue statue of some ancient goddess, a symbol of fury, or cruelty.

“
Do you need to ask with such a bevy of naked, blue-faced maidens?” asked Delthal.

“
Indeed…. Yes, well, this one evidently objects to having her camp invaded,” I said, as there was something like a duel between the elf’s questioning eyes and mine.