by Thomas Head
“Thundering hell,” Halvgar wheezed.
My uncle drew me under his arm. “What in the frozen depths is this, my lad?”
“I… cannot say, Uncle Jickie. Truly I cannot.”
As they stood without words to either side of me, I resisted a shiver. Each of us soaked it in, and we could only do so in our own way, in the odd solitude of our minds, silent and pale as corpses.
Halvgar alone stepped forward.
He looked at the castle walls and studied the sturdiness of the high stones. These higher stones were darker, a less weighty sandstone than the limestone and granite walls.
Then we heard bony steps, coming to us from the gloom.
We held up our weapons, then shield our eyes as some hundred yards away, blue light formed in a ring around a blackened hand—that of Gilli. Old Gilli. Indeed, the charred corpse of old Gilli Redhorn emerged from the gloom, but the voice that cackled out from his unhinged jaw was like that of a beast.
“What fools! What witless little fools! How dare you breech the sanctity of my domain?”
Now, all down the enormously deep hall, blue fire emerged from the small vats of oil that were recessed into the walls. But the fire that glowed around Gilli’s eyes had no source that was of this world.
Halvgar’s fists clenched around the bow, not yet drawn, and his eyes moved back and forth between the arrow and the being guised in the flesh of our old friend. He stood a mere fifty yards off now. Halvgar began to shake. I poured myself into concentration, and at the word of my uncle beside me, drew ahead of Halvgar and said. “We are the Merry Cutters of Goback. And we have come for those whom were taken from us.”
“Who is this? Who is this who dares speak to the Heir of This World with such comfort, such foolish familiarity?”
Behind me, I could hear them readying their stances for battle.
“I am called Fie Wyrmkiller!”
“Wyrmkiller?” it mocked, and it began cackling, it laughter as deep as an echo in a bottomless well. “I assure you, Master Wyrmkiller, that my girl will recover quite fully from the scratches you and your little companions put on her—just soon as she has… eaten.”
At that, Halvgar’s arrow whipped through the air, striking the creature between the eyes. But it merely pulled the missile from the course, blackened skin and threw it aside.
The ease of it made my skin crawl. My heart rose up into the roof of my mouth. The creature approached, smirking.
And we all charged.
There was a strange crackle in the air as the creature raised its arms out to either side. But it managed no magic before I reached it. Roaring, I hacked into the creature, but it pulled the blade out of its chest with a slow, audible breath, waving its hand before us. Thunderous noise ripped through my skull, and all of us were sent splashing back away from it. Dinga fired another arrow, hitting it in the groin. But again, the strange thunder splashed across our minds, and we were sent aloft, thrown back another ten feet. There were the sounds of groaning now, and Bik’s arm appeared broken. The creature was smiling with Gilli’s ruined head as it waved its arm yet again. We were knocked into the walls and against each other.
It happened again, and as I was sent tumbling toward the mouth of the tunnel, I clipped my back against Dinga’s bald head, sending us both into awkward sprawls. Everyone was facing different directions. She managed, somehow to shoot her bow again. Her next shot was quicker, lower. It nearly decapitated him before it roared out a deafening boom, and pinned us against the roof with its unnatural force.
“Now…” It said. “You will look upon the rocks that will end you!”
And it flipped us upside down.
“Shiri!” Halvgar cried out.
“What is this!” it roared. “This is how you meet your doom?”
“Shiri!” Halvgar shouted again. He began shrieking hysterically, utterly outside of his own mind. “Shiri!”
Dangling there, I thought for a moment to shut him up. But then I called out for her too, for I could only hope that there was some reason to his mad outcries beyond sheer heartache. I motioned for the others to join me in the odd cry, and no sooner had we begun than a doorway at the far, far end of the long, cavernous hall exploded.
We were dropped on our heads.
The walls were trembling as the enormous dragon emerged, running. The ground shook with every thundering, reptilian gallop.
The being in the guise of Gilli turned to it.
“Nooo, my lovely!”
Yet the beast came. We kept calling for Shiri, louder now. It roared toward us in thunderous crashes, Bik and Dinga scampering to hide themselves over the ledge while Halvgar, Uncle Jickie, and I stood to face it.
The Gilli-creature ran to it, but the body was flattened in a single trounce, dropping without a sound.
Halvgar grunted. The beast came, ripping straight at us as quickly as ever. The floor was collapsing in like a web of black before us. I thought I heard a lion, but it was my Uncle Jickie. He dug a small knife in my thigh and pushed me into Halvgar, just before the beast would have flattened us both. As I spilled to the floor beside it, the feet made a large whomp whomp to either side of my body, and it launched itself after my uncle. There was a great thud overhead as its teeth clacked against falling stone, and just as it went over, I saw the edge of the mountain collapse. I saw my uncle mounting the neck like a stallion. I looked down again. The floor, cracking right in front of me, brought so close to the edge that I saw over it: My uncle was falling, tumbling with the beast.
Time seemed to slow.
I saw him hacking at its head, laughing as the armor-like flesh finally split under his blows. Then the two of them exploded in a great bony splash of muscle and guts on the rocks, far below.
Chapter 34
I just looked away, shaking my head slowly. Then I breathed. I had thought about this moment a long time, about life without my old uncle. But I had no idea that I would feel nothing. There was nothing in my heart, or my head, but exhaustion. The ache and the fatigue were so utterly complete that for a moment I could do nothing but continue to lie there, breathing. In fact I had no idea how much time passed before I could move at all. I was raked with thirst, and I couldn’t even stretch out to my water.
But in time, I could move my head. Then my body. Struggling not to pass out, I turned to find Halvgar reaching over to me with wheezing grunts. As a cold wind blasted in on us, steam swirled from his exposed gut—he had been mangled by a large falling stone, and he was cut nearly in two. As he pulled off his helmet, blood sheeted from his mouth in rusty splatters. He dropped his eyes, looking out at nothing.
I pulled myself to his side, openly tearful.
“I will find them, my old friend. I swear it. I will find them. And I will bring them home.”
But Halvgar only breathed. He was otherwise as motionless as the dead, staring off at nothing, or perhaps at the winged warmaids of legend, swooping down from the Heavenly Halls to swoop him up.
In the end, he made no gesture to signify that he had heard me. He just became still and stopped breathing. There was only the wind. At even that, I flinched and looked again to Halvgar and apologized to him.
He had not understood my words, of course, but I think his spirit was laughing at me. There was a benevolent flash of noise above me, a chuckle so faint I could scarcely tell if it was not just in my head. Across his face was his old jolly expression, the very countenance of the merry dwarf he was.
* * *
Deep into the silence of the mountain I descended, slowly. It was harder going than I had expected. The inner halls and caverns of the mountain were hand-hewn, and awkwardly angled, and what should have been steps were worn slick the effects of time and poor drainage.
I dragged myself down what felt like a quarter mile, guided by the blackish glint of magic lighting. Then, in a sinister nest of webs, spun from the very arse of the old thunderwyrm, I found the two I had come for.
The mother, Shiri, was no
more. She was long dead in fact. I put my helmet back on and looked around the great stone room.
I walked slowly, rimming the edge of large, evil-looking hole. They were all dead in here. Some three hundred corpses stared into the nothingness before them, their sightless eyes either black or else no longer in their sockets. Their bodies had been drained as if by vampires. Now the three nearest me were elvish women, and I wondered for a moment at how they seemed less emaciated than the rest.
Then I heard a whimper.
I turned.
Little Cullfor looked up at me. The lad was a shadow of his old chubby self. He still wore his own little Cutter's helm. Immediately, I knelt, hugged him, and could feel the bones in his precious little back. Tenderly, I unclasped the babe from the tangle of sticky fibers that held him fast to the wall. He was alongside yet another elvish woman. She had managed to free herself just enough to offer the lad her breast, and either she or he had gotten him loose enough to take it.
When I freed him completely, I had to hold him up. I gave him my flask. As he drank water from my goatskin, finishing it off before he nibbled on some jerked pork I had in my shirt, I could do little for him but pat his skinny back and stroke his silky hair.
He coughed. And only then did he squall and start crying.
I just held him, looking around. The three nearest us, the she-elves, were the very ones who had made such a fuss over him when he was born. They were the only reason he was still alive. I vowed that someday, I would come back and take them to their burial grounds. I would give these people the respect I had not given them in life.
Today, though, I would pull Cullfor’s little helmet down over his eyes. And I would lose all sense of who I was before that moment: Whatever they would one day say of me, it was of little concern, for pride was no longer a luxury. My concern was the lad in my arms, and the maid to whom I hoped to return.
I looked again at the elves, the females who had bared their breasts to him so that he might feed. When I looked at the way the webbing had been cut, I had sudden, horrifying realization—they had not freed themselves…
It was the work of teeth.
The dragon had done it.
Chapter 35
“The worth of a heart is not measured in its tenderness, nor again in its depth of feeling. There is no measure for it.”
—Dwarven saying
We left out of the thunderwyrm’s lair by way of an old flake-stone causeway, which was small and hidden. Like the return of an unruly child, the thin light outside was both welcoming and painful to the lad’s eyes.
Just a few miles outside, not far from the sea, we came to a spring. It rolled up from the blackened weeds and broken stone with undulating dollops of cool, clean water.
I think I should have tested it first, but little Cullfor was so slaked with thirst that he dropped to his knees and plunged his cracked lips into it, drinking for far longer than seemed possible. As he gulped it down, I walked up a small rocky knoll and stood, looking. Far beyond the lair was the ruins of the little seaside castle we had sheltered in before the attack. I should call it the ruins of the ruins, as it hardly been standing beforehand. Now as I looked it seemed hardly more than just another rocky knoll, or a pile of rubble.
There was something else. The air was somehow different. Lighter. I have never been one gifted with the sight, as they call it, but it seemed that the evil that had infected this place had lifted.
When I looked back to the north, however, back to the goblin-infected hills through which I knew Cullfor and I must somehow pass, you could again sense the stagnate blackness. It was as difficult to describe as it was easy to sense. The best I can say is this—it as if the clouds were somehow slower and more morose, not unlike ghosts, or the souls of mothers, searching for lost children.
Whatever evil had transformed this place into this black desert had not been vanquished by our merry band. It had only been uprooted. And now it was making its way northward, making its way precisely where the lad and I needed to make our way.
Chapter 36
For an hour after Cullfor drank, we just rested.
I was looking for some trail amid the stones, but I finally I had to admit there was no clear way home but through the impossible reaches that we, grown dwarves all of us, had not all survived. I wished desperately there was some way to get him home by boat. He could sleep while I rowed. But that, of course, was impossible. I reached down and patted his head, and this was enough to warrant a small cry from the lad. He could hardly keep his feet under him.
“Stop your nonsense, there!” I wanted to say, just as my father used to whenever I felt weak or sick. “What’s wrong?”
But of course I said nothing of the sort to the lad. Instead we sat again.
“Hullo, there,” I whispered, rubbing his back more tenderly.
“Uncle Fie,” he whispered back.
I nodded
“Bring me home,” he said.
I nodded again. I turned and looked north. It seemed impossible. I could almost hear Uncle Jickie calling: “Now, Fie, what do you mean by this ‘impossible’ nonsense!”
His words recalled the real reason of my presence in this southerly stretch of Yrkland. My quest been eclipsed, at times, by the fearful events of the trek here. But my quest wasn’t to kill a dragon, or even to reach Cullfor.
My quest was to bring him home.
“Okay then, Cullie. Let us get going,” I told him.
Chapter 37
Later, as Cullfor napped that afternoon, I gathered some supplies from the corpses of my fellows, and, all in all, managed to gather much of what we needed: a bow, a half a quiver of arrows, one great axe, one lesser axe, three skins of water, and maybe four pounds of jerked pork and venison.
“How old are you, Cullie?”
I was terribly surprised when he said, “Ten winters.”
Thundering hell, but he was small. I would have bet my very blade that he had seen no more than six. If he were human, I’d reckon him a toddler. Then suddenly I realized he was lying. He was, at most, seven.
“One day, we’ll return here, my lad. We’ll call these hills the Tenwinters Scree. But for now, we should get moving. Can you carry the meat?”
“Aye, Uncle Fie. And I can carry the arrows if you like.”
That would be preposterously dangerous for reasons I would teach him from the safety of home, should we ever reach it. “No, Cullie, my lad. The meat will do. But do you want to keep one of the water skins?”
“Aye.”
“Very good then.”
I placed one of the skins on his bony shoulders, and almost thought better of it, but he tugged back when I made to return it to my waist. I laughed. By Thunder, I grunted to myself, little Cullie Stonebreaker would carry the meat and one water then!
I almost laughed, but as I looked at him and once more at the trail ahead, the whole scene was repugnant beyond endurance. My mind’s ears were so filled with the death cries heard in the afternoons before that I had to focus on his little face to keep from weeping. It was a strange wonder that such acts as killing dragons merit the crude recitals of what seems to the listener as a glorious conquest. I could not rid my mind of the Cutters’ dying faces.
But just then, I saw something that made my heart soar.
A horse.
It was one of the pack horses, and it was still laden with supplies! My legs freshened with the very sight of it, and the tumult in my head dissipated. It was unsafe to leave the lad to go chasing after it, so I called to it in the whistling grunts the elves used. The beast pricked its ears, and almost immediately made a detour of the rocky fields in order to reach us. It disappeared down a slope , then came trotted spiritedly up yet another toward us, slowing as I made clucking sounds for it to halt.
I might have saved myself the trouble, though; every object lashed to the creature—from the water skins to the primitive axes—had been put there by a monster. These were goblin supplies. And they stunk of the
beasts. The reigns were made of bark-string, and I could not recall if these were elvish or goblin. Yet the horse was comely enough. But whether the horse itself was used by them, or just stolen by a group of goblin marauders, I did not know.
But I couldn’t pass up the opportunity.
Unburdening the creature of its vile cargo, I reigned him parallel to a small hill and let Cullie climb atop its bare back.
It was unsafe to let the lad ride alone with me walking so I climbed in front of him and told him to not to let go of the remnants of my armor.
We set off. And nearing night went rode along what looked like the remains of a wooded river trail. Posts, or stumps, jutted at regular intervals alongside a flat, road-like way of flat stone that wound like a serpent. After dark, I struck out a bit more briskly and still followed the path parallel to the stumps or posts.
When we reached the old goblin camps, I was first apprised of our whereabouts by my horse pricking forward his ears and sniffing the air uncannily. I tightened rein and touched him with my heel, but he snorted and jumped sideways with a suddenness that almost unseated us, then came to a stand, shaking as if with chill. This was definitely an elvish horse, I decided.
Something skulked across the trail and gained cover in the stones. With a reassuring pat, I urged my horse back towards the dry creek bed, for the camps were pitted with festering holes. But the beast was stubborn; it reared, baulked and absolutely refused to be either driven or coaxed.
“Wise where men are fools,” I whispered, dismounting.
Bringing the reins over his head, I tried to pull him forward to get Cullie; but he planted all fours and jerked back, almost dragging me off my feet.
“Are you possessed?” I whispered. If ever horror were plainly expressed by an animal, it was by that horse. Legs rigid, head bent down, eyes starting forward and nostrils blowing in and out, he was a picture of terror.
