Blood Of The Wizard (Book 1) (41 page)

He took a bite.

The warm and fluffy chunks of goat meat felt good against his teeth.

“Mmm.”

Another blurry swirl of her image was more secular as her breast rolled, bulging, white and plump, from her shirt as she bent.  That magnificent woman, he thought.

Suddenly she was not smiling. 

No time for smiling
, her face spoke.

“How did I get on the ground and where did we get that soup?”

Bunn laughed pitifully, but quickly.  She looked down at him and pulled his hair back from his forehead.

“Oh,” she said.  “I should have known you were something special.”

“Pah!  What am I that’s special?”

“A lunatic or mandragon,” she said, pointing to the nothingness he had just been staring at.

He breathed.  He tried a look that suggested he had no idea what she was talking about.

She laughed.

He shrugged.  Then he ate more stew.  It did little to restore his energy, but there was enough life in him now to get moving.  Barely.  He stood and, instantly, became dizzy.  And confused again.  At first, he was unsure what all the hurry was about.  He found himself vaguely panicked, darting westward through hedges.  But he was soon reassured by her smile, so they settled into a rhythm, and they walked hurriedly and with an unexpected and offbeat happiness clinging about their conversations.  He supposed it the bliss of much-needed silliness.  Amazing, he mused, what the mind can demand of a body.  But there was a part of him all through the trek across those farmsteads that knew his sturdy feeling was temporary.

They met with forested roads again, and with the gathering murk beginning and the crazy gladness gone, Cullfor realized he needed sleep.  Real sleep.  Not a nap.  Nor the kind of sleep you get in a creek.  He needed walls.  He needed a roof.  And by God he need some beer and fire, and then to get his feet in front of those flames and drink and curl up next to Bunn, all soft and naked, and just sleep, snoring in her neck.

As they held hands, she stroked his arm. 

It was near the back end of the day when she kissed him on the mouth and grabbed both of his bearded cheeks, then kissed him again.

“The way you fought back there,” she said.  “I sensed it.  Let me ask you:  Do you ever lose?”

“Ever lose?”

“In single combat.”

“Porkchop, I’ve been knocked flat, knocked airless, knocked in the arse, knocked in the knackersack, and had every bone splintered thrice.”

She folded her arms playfully, a look of deep consideration contrasting the grin on her face.  She looked up at the sky then, at length, in his eyes.

“
Porkchop?
” 

Chapter 86

“Ears, pointed or blunt, do their labors for free.  Use them.”

—Elvish saying

__________

Out past the village, beyond meadows and farmsteads, Cullfor and Bunn went into a rare quiet.  In the wooded reaches, the silence reverberated.  Here it possessed the land, choked it.  Even the thunder was subdued as it dropped into the silent woods, and the forest seemed darken in response. 

For three more days, there was only their breath, the breath of world, and the muffled strike of their booted feet on the moss-carpeted forest floor.  There was only the movement of her body.  The way everything tossed and rolled so splendidly.

So roundly.

So perfectly.

As they arrived at thick brake of oak, the world became suddenly alive with sound.  They heard intermittent caws.  Chirps.  Several thin waterfalls beginning to roar.  Then the baying of hounds.  The sound grew more plaintiff, closer.  They turned and walked up a steep, sudden hill, which seemed to appear from nowhere.  Together they crouched through a dank cathedral of trees, stepping a cautious path with timber reaching over their heads, soaring to the belly of clouds.  Cullfor thought more than once she had lost all sense of things.  Why she was here.  What they were journeying to.  She seemed pleased at the sound of the dogs.  The ruined paths.  Walking.

He feared this adventure had become mere sport to her.  He feared and loved her happiness.

Then they got off the trail, onto the needle-covered ground.  They walked back downhill, through a ridge torn agape with released of a great burden of towering trees.  Here, they were at the edge of the great wood.  The world almost seemed to slam shut before them.  Back into silence, back into darkness.

Smiling, she seemed to wonder at the wild around her.  The great, consuming presence of it. The forest was vast and old, gouged here and there with thin, deep streams.  The trees seemed study and somehow wise.  Ancient by even the standards of such an old and untouched wood. 

A great place for an adventure, she seemed to think. 

They stepped into the blackness. 

Then he heard dim, icy laughter tracing through the canopy.

__________

King Jorigaer rode his mount deeper into the borderlands between Delmark and Arway than any Dellish king had been in a score of generations, halting atop the treeless hill outside Bonny Fumbling.  Here he wore a thin smile, watching the company of runners that had seen them coming.  They had retreated, disappearing into the fog below, long before the full size of his army had revealed itself.

He looked across the line at his winded warriors.  They had marched for two days without pause across the watershed.  Each was adorne d with simple but thick straps of studded armor.  Most had smallish shields of Arwegian make and design, stolen from the armory at Muttondon.  The tallest of his men stood in the middle, a line of eight hundred men stretching to either side.  The man was holding his ram’s horn, waiting.

King Jorigaer gathered his Thistle Knights around him.

As the preparations of battle rose from the fog below, he closed his eyes a moment.  The daunting, muffled clank of Bonny Fumbling’s warband could be counted without seeing them.  A liberal estimate put them at four hundred, at most. 

They were larger by five-fold.

Jorigaer breathed, thinking of the great Dellish Horde, gathering in the Nunnery Uplands.  History spurns the Dellishman to battle, he mused.  History and gold.  There would be plenty of both made in the next weeks; in months, he would be turning warriors away.

He opened his eyes.

Below, the pathetic defense of hedges and mazes had been thinned from neglect.  Huge tracks had been worn flat by wagons or erosion.  The hill that faded into the ruined town was utterly open, its only defense the lifting fog.

Jorigaer took another large breath.  He nodded, then made a throwing motion.

A horn blast filled the hillside, and his men rushed, plunging down into the fog, roaring.

As they faded, there was a brief moment of silence. 

Of perfect stillness.

A breath.

Then unseen, hellish bellowing swelled.  Bone-splintering thuds rang.  Horrendous growls followed the great clanging song of metal and shrieks.  Screams rose with the ghosts. 

Then there were only grunts.

Another breath.

Jorigaer gathered his guards closer, and traced slowly downhill, the dim forms beginning to appear now.  Intermittent sparks erupted, the clang of clashing weapons.  He descended further, soaking in the fury.  Blood was dripping from swords, from the necks, from the severed stumps of crawling Arwegians, and as the maniacal cries faded to groans, he thought:  There is something uniquely compelling about a gnome’s death.  The sound of their gargling and roars... it was a strangely gorgeous noise. 

He paused at the hedges.

At the limits of his Arwegian contacts here in the borderlands, he was forced to make a scout out of Friar Basil.

As the monk was brought to him, he was huddled and bent, whimpering.  He looked at the monk, by far the most treacherous, the most cowardly bastard he’d ever had the pleasure of knowing.  There had been no need to wrap him in an oil-suit, threatening to burn him alive if he ran off.  He bowed before the king like a beaten dog.

“Have you ever seen a man burn to death?” the king asked.

The monk looked up.  From the corner of his eye, a fat tear balled. 

“No, liege.”

“This day, you will.”

Together with a company of guards, they rode through the Bonny Fumbling’s market past a ruined monastery.  Great throngs of villagers scattered, fleeing.  The sounds of battle were drowned by the noises of crying, of panic.  The quickening creak of carts.  Approaching the Castle Bonny, they paused.  Here there was the remnant of an old church, attached to the brickwork of newer constructions.  A smith shop of some sort.  Several homes.  And there was a tower.  Called Diverloft, he believed.  An armored human exploded from the base, a monk flanking him on either side.  The fellow was a robust sixty, a lord, or a soldier of some higher rank than the other humans and the scores of halflings that watched from behind him.  He walked briskly to meet him, wearing a short scarf around his neck.

“My liege,” the man said, bowing on one knee.

“Who is that man, Basil?” Jorigaer asked, bringing himself and the guards toward them.

“Lord Copperhill.  A Borderland Examplar.  They say he defeated an entire chevron of the old guard of Brickelby Knights to King Alberik before Findhorn took the throne.  Then he beat his sword against a stone and said ‘peace.’ Or some such.”

Jorigaer and his guards rode out to meet them, and they met at an underway, a beamed junction of the fortress and the church.  It was dark.  Beside them, a cluster of tombstones spilled away in rows, curling behind what was left of the church.

“Come for terms, old boy?” Jorigaer asked, then laughed.

“Terms, my lord?”

Torches sputtered and waved.  Shadows danced over the gathering.  The man neither shook nor looked away from the king’s eyes, pointing the king the way back out of town.

Jorigaer stopped laughing and looked him over.  The wind scooted his ringlets of hair off his chest, streaming out beside him like a black flag.  When the growing throng of guard along the castle parapets reached an acceptable number, Jorigaer tsked.  He turned to his own guard, and nodded.

A Thistle Knight approached with a soaked barrel.

The king produced the sword Urth and pointed toward the castle.  “As for you, you are dead.  Their fate is yours to decide.  Surrender them as farm-muscle in the uplands of Delmark, or surrender them to God.”

With a curious lack of hesitation, Lord Copperhill turned his back to the king.  He removed the scarf and began waving it.

When he turned back around, the king walloped his nose with the sword, crunching it nearly in half.  The lord screamed through rapid breath, falling on all fours.  The monks were wailing.  The king raised his sword again, and chopped just over the heels of the lord’s boots, slicing tendons with audible snaps. 

Jorigaer’s laughter, high-pitched and icy, sliced though the screaming, through the cries of the monks.

He turned to his knights.  “Stuff him in the barrel.  Set it out for the guards to see as they surrender.  Then kill them all.”

Chapter 87

__________

Night was completing its work in the forest, seeming to pull its shadows into the sky when Cullfor and Bunn saw a little inn in it gloom, right at the road’s edge.  It hardly seemed there, as if it were as much memory as edifice.  And even as they neared it, it seemed somehow more like a sleepy little fairy tale than anything real.

Cullfor halted himself, staring at it, which halted Bunn.

There was something here.

Beyond the inn, the road split.  Crossing it, a pair of foxes scurried and leapt into the spiky undergrowth.  One of them looked back at him, and growled.

Cullfor harrumphed, feeling a presence. 

He and Bunn clung to a scant warren of firs, and they stared with the moonlight in their eyes.  There was still something humored in them, something weird, a feeling Arwegians called “drunk on weasel soup”, which was always as odd as it was temporary—in looking, Cullfor felt a shift and was surprised to find that he did not want to go any nearer.  The barren old place had aged poorly.  Its sagging windows were like choking eyes.  The front door was a disfigured mouth.

There was an upside down star mounted on it, under the word
STARDROP
.

He recalled thinking about being hatched from moonstuff.  Something cold slithered down into his lungs, scuttling around in them like the icy ghosts of ants.

Bunn dissolved his anxiety pulling her belted shirt open at the neck.  Then she pulled it down over her shoulders.  From the very side of his vision he traced the snake of vertebrae down the neck to the dimples over her collar bones.  He had forgotten how exotic the bottom of a neck could seem.  It occurred to him he had grown to like the way she smelled.  Her woodsy flavors.  The curve of the neck.  The nose.  As her breasts spilled form her undergarments, she began rubbing something from a small leather pouch under her arms, and he once again caught a whiff of some pleasant jasmine-like scent that had greeted his nose whenever he dreamed about her.  Strangely, he reminded himself these things were
hers
.

With an unusual amount of effort, he set his gaze back on the inn.

He vocalized nothing, but he knew:  There was something in there.  Something…
old
. 

To its side was an ancient man.  He stared off into the sky.  The fellow was a wisp of a gnome on the fairy tale ground.  His clothes were regal but ancient.  The cold gray bars of moonlight were casting him in odd stripes as Bunn backed up to him and asked him to scratch her back. 

The corpse doesss not ask how it came to be sooo cold
, a voice hissed.

“What?” he said.

“Hmm?” Bunn asked.

The man in the distance was shaking his head as Cullfor scratched and her back and scalp and kissed her on the earlobe.  He reached around to turn her, kissing her bottom lip. 

She placed some money in his hand.

Cullfor kissed her between the eyes.  As she pulled her clothes back up, she kissed him back, adjusting her breasts within the garments.

They kissed again, and they approached the inn.

__________

“What’s up there, old man?” Cullfor asked.

The ancient fellow did not look down from the sky.  He put his arm in the air and swept it across the black.

“All the ‘whats’ a man could imagine”

Cullfor looked up.  “Funny thing, gazing at stars.  A man might come to know the world, to know the very nature of the stars themselves, but it does not matter to their turning.”   

“No,” the ancient man conceded.  “It certainly does not.  This world and the ones next will not work the way they ought.  But the stars will.”

Cullfor was reaching for the door when a deep and metallic clang erupted under the inn.   It was not an uncommon sound.  Inns and pubs are often built over the deeper stone wells.  But this was loud.  Like a door. 

They paused.

The ancient man laughed. 

Bunn pulled her robes tighter, and in time, together, they stepped onto the porch.  Cullfor looked back at him.  He looked at the overgrown starweed crop, planted insanely in the forest’s black.  For a breath too long, they waited before stepping in.

__________

Inside, a smell like old milk, or a brothel, assaulted their face.  Their other senses were attacked more subtly; all over, things were never quite straight or crooked.  The beams and joists seemed warped by something other than water.  It was no surprise to discover a thin film of mold muting the once-lively cedar walls.

Further in, the inn was dark.  No one else was in here.

Cullfor rubbed his chest.

The ancient man rose from the window outside and walked in, waving them further in yet, against a far wall.  While he went, waddling askance from them toward the bar, Cullfor watched him, the dust stirring in the bleak air around him.

Cullfor sat and spoke across the deserted room, “Some of your stew, old master.”

The old man turned slowly to him and nodded.  He kept nodding, even as he climbed down some stairs behind the bar.

After a pleasantly short time, he reemerged.  There was a lantern in one hand and in the other he carried a new shirt and new trousers atop a new cloak.  There was also a long black cape that looked as rugged as it did comfortable.  He walked with the bundle, then spread it across their table to reveal a new riding cloak for Bunn as well. 

Cullfor glanced up.

The man said, “Hold it, feel it.”

“Old boy, I—”

The man put his finger to his lips, shaking his head.  “Traveler, I do not think you understand.  Now be patient, thank you, the both, while I gather the rest.”

His eyebrows raised, Cullfor watched him leave again. 

The man went in the same direction, leaving the gentle light of the lantern to glow under a ceiling mural.  It was a portrait of howling woodtroll.  The creature had breasts, but in its paw-like hands it held a long and spiky erection.

Bunn glanced up at the image, squinting in confusion.  Then she looked conspicuously to anything but.

Cullfor was averting his eyes too.  He felt embarrassed to view it front of her.  But if it hovered like a boulder tied by twine to the larger question in his head:  How an inn could think to hang such a thing.

“What the frozen hell
is
this?” he whispered.

There isss a curiosity in you that could only belong to the very wise.  Ooor the very foolish.

Cullfor’s head spun briefly.  He took Bunn’s hand across the table.

Returning with two pair of walking boots, thick-soled and black as the cape, the man halted before them.  “You’ll forgive me my honesty, travelers.  But I would rather you, the pair of you, be dressed properly—for a proper supper.” 

Cullfor looked at him, sneering, unsure what to think or say.

The ancient man looked up at the painting, and the sight of it seemed as though it summoned a peculiar recollection.  “I believe, if you please, you’ll find them handsome and comfortable enough.”

It seemed Bunn was about to stand and examine the clothes more closely, but she stopped as Cullfor reached out his hand. 

“How much money for the clothes?

The ancient man managed something that resembled a smile.

“The clothes?  Master, they would rot if you chose not to have them.  Stay for a meal, and you can spare them my fate.”

__________

When Cullfor returned, he felt afresh in the well-waxed, brilliantly-threaded feeling of the clothes.  They and the boots could have been the work of a tailor with a day’s worth of measurements.  The shirt fit in a way that both broadened and thinned him perfectly.  The gray britches did not need shin bindings, and the cape flowed behind his ankles as he approached the table. 

When Bunn looked up, he almost gasped.

She was radiant.  He had never seen anyone so luminous and yet so sultry in his life:  in the red light and new clothing she seemed a frilly as a young girl, but yet again utterly …
womanly
, like an impish being, a creature of myth to lure sailors to untimely deaths.

The man motioned for him to sit, gesturing to a simple, hearty meal.  There was a pot of stew, three clay bowls, and a half a loaf.  A leg of rare meat steamed beside it, along with cheeses and two bottles of wine.  While Cullfor ladled the soup for them, draining half the pot, the old man crumbled some of the bread and placed equal amounts in the bowls.  A draft of cold accentuated the warm feeling of the bowl as the old man sat. 

In a quiet as thick as the soup, they dined.

_________

The meal was as quick as it was delicious.  Savoring the last bite of what turned out to be lamb stew, another clang erupted from under the inn again, this time like the tolling of a bell.

Cullfor looked around, something inflating in his sternum. 

He looked around again.  The room was empty and silent except for them.  The high thin windows along the back were shuttered.  A wintry spring air turned the lantern in soft circles.  The air was charging the room.  Growing thick.

Now he stood up. 

Then the feeling of being watched hit them all at once.  Each in turn looked up at the mural above the table.

Something was different.  Something in the eyes.  Cullfor moved toward the front door, looking back at the mural.  A blunt ache was filling his head.  He suddenly found it difficult to move very fast.  His vision dimmed.

A metallic moan issued under their feet.  Cullfor sensed exactly what was about to happen.  He fisted the door and turned it. 

It was impossible to open. 

He jumped for an antique sword that lay atop the door jam.  It was covered in grit and uncomfortable to the palm for all the ancient gnarls that even the handle had gained in combat.  He banged the dust from it then stepped in front of the other two. 

“This thing,” he said to Bunn, “has haunted my trails for weeks.”

“No,” the old man said, standing.  He drew a sword from under the table.  “I have haunted your trails for
years
, boy.” 

Bunn stood, scampering to him.

“Well, my sweetness.  Now it has come.”

“Stay behind me.”

He stood very still, feeling almost naked somehow, knowing he could not leave even if the doors had opened.

Across the vast, cold interior of the inn, the man approached, changing before his eyes.  He was an ancient cold, an evil that quickened from a thousand miles away. 

Cullfor briefly stared up at God and hoped to Him he could do something in this that would please Him enough to spare Bunn.  This woman at his side. 
His
woman.  Cullfor gritted his teeth as he waited in a strange nightmare-smoke of memories, sudden visions that he could not dam.  Dozens of dead men were marching into the parlors of his mind.  He palmed his forehead. 

“What the?…,” he said.

The ghosts in his head paused.  They stared at him with tattered raiment dripping from their gaunt frames, their chain mail now just a mockery of armor.  He felt too aware of his grip and his sweat.  Too aware of Bunn and her want to help.  His heart thudded.  Then they came.  The old man was coming, his mind somehow making him more and more aware of the demons buried here.  The men
he
killed too, they came slowly, wrecking his mind with grief.  He pitied them as they came to his sight, their hideous bodies masticated by time.  They held scabbards with no swords.  Moving through his thoughts, they were not in control of themselves.  They showed no expression.  He had never considered the fact that his demons might be unarmed.

Cullfor dropped the tip of his blade. 

For the briefest of moments, he thought to place the tip of the blade under his sternum and fall on it.

Then he thought of flowers.  Of clear skies.  Anything.   The nearest demon began whispering some sort of incomprehensible dirge, urging him to take his own life,  as it reached at Cullfor’s neck.  His mouth was a gaunt snarl, the wilting grimace of a damned thing.  Cullfor stepped backwards, gripping the sword lightly now.  Still there were ghost hands reached for him on all sides.  And still, through their bodies, Cullfor could see the old man approach.  He grunted, surrounded by a mess of clutching arms and hand.  Ghost-fingers were swarming toward his face, begging at him, crowning him and knighting him with their hands, pulling his clothes, though it felt like his skin.  Anger flooded him, and it was an anger like he had never know—anger at himself.  He was growling as he stepped through a rake of muted flesh.  And the demons left, popping and ripping as he tore free of their clutches.  Hands fell to the floor like giant, scabrous spiders.