by Thomas Head
1
BLOOD OF THE WIZARD
THE RANGER MAGE, BOOK ONE
THOMAS HEAD
Copyright 2013 by THOMAS HEAD
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce any portions thereof.
This is a work of fiction. The places and characters it depicts are the product of the author’s imagination and used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons or places, dead or alive, is purely coincidental.
This e-book is licensed for your entertainment only. It may not be re-sold, in part or in whole.
FOREWARNING
Take a moment, my king. Hear a secret. It is known by few, and scoffed away by most who hear it. I bid you listen, and hear truth, because I hope to clarify who among your warriors are most lethal.
The secret to deciding is simple. It lay in how the warrior readies himself. As you have seen, they will prepare themselves for battle in many ways—in as many ways, in fact, as there are those who would fight. To the learned eye, however, there are but three means. Primary among them is bluster and drink. Be it the drink of the word, the vine, or the hop, discount these warriors as worthless. They are as gusts against stone. It is essential that you send warriors who needn’t suppress the will to preserve life. Nor again would it serve you to send those who must build upon that primal part of themselves that seeks to end it. Those who seek blindness for what they are about to do will be the first to die. There is another, rarer sort. In your wisdom, you will doubtless recognize them, those whose lips are muted with rage. But alas, sending these warriors will be no less foolhardy than the drunken blades. For these warriors only seek the memories that haunt them. They busy their minds with a list of wrongs done unto them, and they seek a vengeance they cannot win. So know, prudent one, that these warriors will be ghosts all the same, and their muted roars will crash against the stones.
I bid you, seek those who are rarer yet. Find the few who smile, those who seek serenity. Watch, and you will find among your brave fellows certain warriors who go about the fields with a small knife and a bit of leather. They pursue the wild flowers of the valley, to cut and bind some artful way. Others of their deadly ilk seek parchment, to craftily fold in the likeness of some beast of the wood. Or they seek ink and quill, to put letters to their thoughts.
This, my liege, is the way I’ve chosen.
Hereby, my king, consider yourself forewarned, for you know my secret. And I bid you trust that I now know yours as well. Therefore send your best when you strive for the blood of the wizard, for your gruesome trophy will cost you many.
And if they fail…
PART ONE
CHAPTER I
“Doubt makes monsters out of choice. It makes demons out of any decision.”
—Axiom of the Delmark warrior
The door opened, and the cold wind pelted the torches, bringing the mountainside tavern to life in odd angles of light
A pair of dwarves left, battered and limping. The first brawl of the night was over. For now. The victor stood at the bar, just as bloody, just as battered. He was half again as muscular as most dwarves. But so were half the dwarves up here in the borderlands between Yrkland and my country. Their push into the wilds of our jolly Delmark had attracted every manner of roughneck and scumbag that country had to offer, one of which I was waiting for.
For an hour, I had been waiting on my friend, lounging about in the sitting room of Goback Pub. The sorry little sac of bastard had promised to join me for dinner.
“Has any one seen Halvgar?” I asked.
I pocketed my clay pipe, a habit I had picked up from the little fellows hereabouts, and strolled across to a group of old Cutters. These fellows were retired warrior-workers, pavers of the great “Dwarven Way” through the mountains. None of the old pint-sized buggers intended to return to their homeland, nor push any further into ours. They were engaged in a heated discussion with some guards from our borderland militia, armored men from the nearby fortifications.
“Has any one seen Halvgar?” I repeated, uninterested in their dispute.
“That’s the tenth time you’ve asked that question,” Uncle Jickie barked, looking up. He wasn’t my uncle, of course. I have no idea if declaring me his “nephew” was some odd Dwarven custom, or if that particular idiosyncrasy was his own. Whichever, he was as stormy and sour as my real uncle back in Delmark. “The tenth damned time, Fie. And you’ve got no more information than the ninth!”
In the silence, he raised a brow.
I shrugged as if I were some dwarf-lad on his knee and had busted up one of his war stories.
“Wait. Hold on,” drawled Old Addly. He was a man, and a tall, wiry old guard at that. Even by the standards of our folk, he was a nimble old dog. He had friendly eyes and purple-red cheeks under frizzy blonde hair. “You don’t expect Halvgar? There’s a small chance we might see a bit of drizzle and a slight breeze. That dwarf-lass of his isn’t going to let him out on a treacherous night like this!”
I laughed. Almost. Well, what can you do? Addly was insufferably honest. However, I could tell his goal was more to get away from the dwarves’ arguments than to answer me. And when he yawned, unconcealed, in the faces of those little old guys, I knew I could get them all riled up. I drew up a chair to the esteemed company of stout dwarfs: Uncle Jickie, Frobhur, Gilli, and Kenzo.
“I beg your pardon, master dwarves,” I said, “what were you saying to Old Addly?”
“Talk of conquest, my lad,” Uncle Jickie said.
“Oh?”
“Why indeed, young Mister Fie, our fellows have transformed a wilderness into an empire. We have chopped a path from the northern shores all the way south to Heir’s Sea Peak, where my esteemed kinsman, Master Kenzo, left his runes of discovery. Mark my words, nephew, the day will come when the names of Frobhur, Jickie, Gilli and Kenzo will rank higher in the Dwarven Annals than even Bardo Blood—”
“Here we go with this again!” Addly laughed.
He was, of course, amused at Jickie. And you had to hand it to him for that humor: Anyone could smile at an old dwarf calling the bits of iron and timber that were brought down from the mountains an “empire”. But it took a special sort of wit, the kind unique to my clans, to laugh at the dwarven claims of discovery of a mountain my countrymen had lived on for generations.
That was dwarves for you. Their tales were tall enough to compensate for their stature. And Uncle Jickie, who had been a leading spirit in the Dwarf-King’s Merry Cutter Company, had a verbal … enthusiasm that knew no bounds.
And why shouldn’t it? We all, after all, quietly encouraged it. Even my countrymen. Life was a short, nasty, magical thing, especially in this part of the world. Merriment rarely knocked. When it did, you damn well found it a comfortable seat.
“By damnation and thunder, but you merry adventurers wouldn’t need to have accomplished much to eclipse Bardo Bloodhelm!” Addly said. He paused, then winked at me with a supercilious smile. “Discovering a land by getting blown off course. Pah!”
Jickie flushed. That reference to merry adventurers, with just a perceptible, slighting emphasis on the merry part, wasn’t to his taste; not when the tales of their savagery had staved off the need for real savagery.
That was another thing about dwarves. People think it is unwise to underestimate them. Which is true. Very true. But they think that, because dwarves want them to think that. They’re not nearly so prone to violence as most men suspect.
“Pardon me, Mister Addly,” Uncle Jickie said, furrowing his brows at the lanky human officer. “You forget that by the time Master Bloodhelm came ashore, he had stood waist-deep in the ocean and felled all but one of the man-village that stood in his way!”
/> Addly’s eyes widened. His cheeks took on a deeper purplish shade. But I’ll say this of him, he returned the charge good-humoredly enough.
“Nonsense, Jickie, my good friend,” he laughed. “It was only knee-deep, as I hear it. And if the Right Mighty Bardo Bloodhelm were such a berserker, why the frozen hell did leave one alive— ”
“To tell his tale!” interrupted Uncle Jickie. “And I’d thank you not to ‘good friend’ me. Master Bloodhelm erred, Mister Addly, only through too great a respect for men to weave a tale!”
“I don’t object to Bloodhelm’s posterity. I don’t dispute the ponies he called warhorses, or the simple wood axes he called magical weapons. What I disagree with is you folk holding merchants and traders aloft as heroes! It’s bad enough to share a mountain range with you fellows, but to have to hear—”
“Bad? Just listen to this,” cried Uncle Jickie. The old dwarf pulled out a copy of the epic poem that chronicled Bloodhelm’s “axing down the wilds of these mountains into livable space”.
“Where can Halvgar be?” I said, losing interest.
“Damn won’t you listen!” sneered one of the guards behind Addly. “Home with his wee wifey.” The young human turned to me with a challenging glare. This fellow, I can’t recall his name, was at least three inches taller than me. But he had the sort of scars that are brought on by a clumsy tongue, not real war. “Good little fellow, Halvgar, but since marriage, the old dwarf’s utterly gone to the teats like a babe.”
“To the what?” I asked.
“Huh?”
“To the what, did you say Halvgar had gone?”
He acted as though he could not remember what he had just said. Then he leaned in to listen to Uncle Jickie, suddenly interested in every word written on the poem. It was just enough, along with the fact that my dwarven “uncle” seemed to relish the rapt attention, to keep him from having to puke his front teeth.
I decided to leave and let the cool air tamp down my aggravation. But then they all rose as well. I feared for a moment they were going to follow me out. Fortunately, it was only to get nearer the bar and sort it all out with beer.
Behind me, I heard Uncle Jickie flinging more verbal fists.
“Oh, sure! Clever rascals, you menfolk are, always going on with tales of war till you stumble on one you don’t like.”
“Now see here, my little old friend…”
Chapter 2
Outside, the night air moved briskly. It was cold as a corpse’s nipples. A foot of snow covered the ground while a few lonely clouds scooted atop the black fir trees. It smelled of even more snow, or perhaps sleet, despite the great splash of stars mid-heaven.
I looked up the side of Colli Mountain to the light of Uncle Jickie’s hall. It was a grand old lodge, built in the old dwarven style, with wooden rails, embellishments, and antlers galore. It was there that I met the redheaded dwarf who was to be such a strange part in my life, the reason that I’ve bothered to pen my tale….
* * *
I had only just arrived, a boy of fourteen, still wiping my mother’s tears from my sleeves. She had, of course, begged me to stay in Delmark. But there were brothers aplenty to work the farm—two older, one younger. I had three sisters too, each pretty enough to earn a lordship in dowries.
It was a cold autumn morning when I left, just before the Feast of Fall’s Nigh. I was poaching hind deer in the vast meadow near our farm. It was just before dawn. A thick fog hung in the air. I had tied my monstrous draft horse to a creekside stump. As subdued birdcalls reverberated in the gray distance, they echoed from the deep corners of the hollows. At places, the air was so thick the fog seemed like the work of dragons or wizards. Only when I had passed over the river’s headwater did it lessen. But here the going was slower. The small rivulets and mossy stones were slick enough to put a goat on his arse.
In the end, three hours’ journey seemed to have taken a day.
Finally, I had climbed into an old walnut tree with my bow. I had a quiver of gray-fledged arrows. The fog was thinner, but it moved on the wind, so that if I stared into it, it almost seemed the tree was moving sideways with me.
Then there was a form in the gray.
It was my father.
Another petite figure emerged. They were approaching each other through the blurred air. The other was a woman. She had a donkey. She was younger than my mother, though not by much, perhaps thirty. She was plump and ruddy-faced, and blonde as snow. I recognized her from the neighboring clan.
He approached her slowly.
What happened next, I dare not think of it any further. I knew only that I could never face my mother again. Yet as I sat by my campfire that first night here in the mountains, I feared I had erred. After traveling so many weeks northwest, alone, the first living thing to meet my eye was a great bear. It was dragging a stout little fellow, a dwarf. It was the first one I’d seen of either. There they went, right by me. By damn, a real bear. A real dwarf. One was screaming. One was growling. I could not decide which was doing which. Then, just as suddenly, they disappeared into the black woods. When the shock left me, I loosed an arrow. Then another. Then all of them. And when I had loosed them all, I saw a dead bear that looked like a seven hundred pound porcupine. Some ten feet behind was the old fellow, half-crazed with shock. He was looking up at me from a large puddle of his own blood. When the gruff little bastard stood, he just dusted himself and told me, ‘well done, young man!’ He invited me to his lodge, where I met Halvgar, who asked how things had gone with the bear. And when they laughed, talking it over, I knew I had made the right choice. Hell, but I could no more conceal my awe-struck admiration for their hearty ways than a young maid on first discovering her own charms. Halvgar must have noticed my boyish reverence, because he deigned to ask me about my cutter’s longshirt, a thick leather jacket imbedded with thin plates of steel, which was still lighter than the dwarven chainmail. In less than a moment, I was talking to him as if he were the lad, and I, the magnificent old dwarf.
“He makes me feel quite like a lad again,” he had said, resuming conversation with Uncle Jickie. “Thundering hell, master! I can hardly believe I came into this high country a lad of fifteen. And now, here I am an old fellow like you, Jick!”
At that information, my heart gave a curious, jubilant thud. He came here at my age? Was I like these dwarves? Could I, one day, laugh at being mauled by a bear?
My new uncle mentally measured me with that stern look I would later learn he was so expert at, interrupting my reverie.
Then, seemingly undecided, he turned to Halvgar.
“Hmph! Save that sharp tongue for pork and beer, Master Halvgar. You’ll be finding a plump wife one of these days, and she’ll be renewing your damn youth… all over your hall, I’ll wager!”
At which master Halvgar nodded agreeably.
Once the lively redhead had stepped out that night, Uncle Jickie looked at me again. He seemed to recognize the wanderlust in me. “You’ll have your chance to prove yourself, young human. And pray Heaven you’ve got have half as much of the heart in you when you are thirty as that fellow did at fifteen!”
I did not even hope for that much, but I no longer looked upon the dwarves as some unreachable icon of ferocity—a fact that had been pounded into my head since my earliest youth. There were real beings, people, you might even say, and the things they did were not just the lyrics of epic poems.
Before that year had passed, Halvgar and I were as good companions as dwarf and a man could be. However, Halvgar spoiled it by fulfilling my new uncle’s prediction and finding a big, ripe, fair-haired wife. That meant an end to our rides, to our sailing down the river, and our long evening talks. But second place was fine. By sixteen, I discovered that the rowdy mountain maids didn’t have to be hunted and chased like they did back home.
My uncle, on catching me with a pair of them in his study, remarked that it may be time to begin construction on my own hall.
I apologized, telling him som
ething about this place had propelled me from boyhood to manhood
“Indeed, young Mister Fie. Like a tadpole into a damned eagle!” he chuffed.
And so he helped me build a grand hall. It was larger than his own, but lower on the mountain, which was something else that I could never quite figure if it were important in dwarfdom as a rule, or to Old Jickie in particular.
Meanwhile, a son came to my friend’s home and I had to be thankful for a humble third place.
* * *
So, here I was, stepping outside Goback Pub, waiting for Halvgar’s arrival. A decade had passed before my very eyes, and save for the occasional rowdy mountain girl, there had been no conquests with which to prove myself.
Which was fine by me, frankly.
Peering from the porch for some sign of him, I was surprised by the form of a horse beneath the lantern of the arched gateway. As I walked up, the creature gave a whinny. Then I recognized it was Halvgar’s pony, lathered with sweat. It was shivering, but he had given it no blanket. The reins had been slung over the hitching post, and I heard steps hurrying to the side door of the pub.
“Halvgar?”
There was no answer.
I led the horse to the stable-lad and hurried back to see if Halvgar was inside.
The sitting room was deserted, but Halvgar’s well-known red-topped figure was entering the dining room. He must have seemed a curious figure to the questioning looks of old dwarves and men, who were still arguing: in one hand was his riding whip, in the other, his gloves. He wore the dwarven chainmail tunic of his kind. In his belt were two axes. One sleeve was torn from wrist to elbow, and his boots looked like something had clawed them. His helm was still on, slouched down over his eyes.
“Frozen hell, Halvgar!” Uncle Jickie thundered, facing him as I came up behind. “Have you been in a fight or in bed with that Shiri?”
