Blood Of The Wizard (Book 1)

by Thomas Head

  “Loose!” he growled.

  The small arrows hissed, wrecking dwarven armor and flesh with astonishing power. As they pounded below, everywhere, the dwarves shrieked and stumbled down the ladders. But the dead were unable to meet the ground for the upward lunge. Hundreds began pitching forward onto the ladders. I screamed wildly, launching missiles into closer and closer bearded faces. The ground itself seemed to rise to bring them closer. Halflings to either side fired without cease. They were quicker than I was, more steady, and far less winded.

  But then a strange green light arced across the stones of the castle. It was the wizardry of the Dwarf-King at play, shielding his warriors.

  Dwarves still dropped and thudded below us, but with so many of our arrows frozen in the air, twice as many filled the rungs. Now they carried oaken battle-boards overhead. I grimaced, and I continued to shoot, and shoot again. I was already running low on arrows. But I could do nothing about it, except keep at it, firing arrow after precious arrow. I struck the dwarves climbing below me haphazardly. My arrows pinged off their backs or slammed into their glaring faces. One continued to climb with an arrow jutting from his helmet. A captain of some sort. I fired another into his shoulder. Then a third. As the dwarf wheeled back to snap off the arrow in his back, he continued to yell orders. I loosed yet another into his chest. When the dwarf fell, he cleared the ladder, shifting sideways, clinging at his warriors as he dropped. Then something in the massive stir beyond them caught his eye. At the very back was a wide scattering of archers. They rose atop wooden platforms, eighty yards away.

  Fulko noticed them too.

  “Archers!” he barked.

  As the shielded dwarves climbed, they were covered now by the bowmen with their longer, quicker bolts. Wooden sheets of the missiles began thudding into the halflings atop the wall.

  They began to fall.

  “Watch those damned archers!”

  The arrows slammed into guts on either side of me. I ducked to discover Fulko Fallwater lying on the parapet, an arrow’s goose feathers jutting from his chest. He was rolling in pain. Blood was flowing freely from the tear in his chest plate, and he was gasping for breath. He rose to remove the armor.

  Forgetting myself, I rushed to help.

  “Dammit backs to your spot, human! Lead, troll-king! Lead!”

  Everywhere along the parapets, halflings dropped on the stones. Shafts sprouted like branches from their eyes or necks. Our numbers halved.

  Now arrows zipped from the walls behind us, pounding them in the backs of their legs and heads. I spun to discover ladders swinging upward from a dozen more places. The entire army below the seemed to go aloft, rushing up the walls in great swarms.

  “Poles! Poles!” I roared.

  Too few left were alive. Perhaps four hundred.

  “Your poles, fools!”

  I and Fulko Fallwater, his wounds less grave than they had first seemed, each grabbed a pole and a nearby halfling .

  Fulko shook his head and roared, “Grab your poles, ye ball-biting, ignorant cod!”

  I and several more now were racing across the parapet, carrying shields aside our faces. We worked the poles like a game, and for insane moments, it was just so much macabre sport, sending the ladders down with clusters of dwarves.

  “Heaves, heave!” Fulko shouted, laughing like the jubilant warrior he was.

  Then our strength thinned, or forked poles began to brace from below. Then the green light arced across the stones once more, and we could no more shove at the ladders; it was as useless as trying to shove a wall down!

  As more and more dwarven soldiers scampered atop the southern wall, we worked again with the bows. Now they were firing sideways as much as downward, downing dwarves as they raced toward them.

  All around us now, hundreds were pushing onto the causeway that ran the ramparts.

  “Swords!”

  I waved my blade, but the halflings were still at their struggles against the braced ladders, or else fleeing flames that somehow leapt up the walls in watery streams.

  “Swords!” Fulko roared. “Grab your swords, my boys!”

  Soldiers near him screamed for swords. Others were almost singing as they filed over into ranks on the ramparts. It was merely dozens at first. Then at last the call resounded, the last of them came rushing towards me and Fulko in a great living shield of halflings. In their running, some were fighting. Some were shot in the back or hacked down. Slips of gore streamed, and the ramparts began to slicken with the blood of the watershed folk.

  Finally Fulko Fallwater managed to form them up into something resembling ranks. We bent and stepped together—two groups, both directions.

  In the center, I discovered Fulko Fallwater hunched over an immense, iron ring set into a wooden block.

  “Here, boys!” he roared at us. “Get yourselves down here!”

  I looked, and he was utterly taken at the sight of Dhal as the heavy block rose.

  Both chevrons of halflings began stepping away from us along the wall. I breathed, confused, then helped Fulko Fallwater pull. Soon, we dropped into a door beneath us, alongside Dhal.

  In a hand-hewn tunnel, I grabbed Dhal’s hand. We ran a careful path down through winding pits and traps. We were under the high ceiling of the castle’s subterranean belly. Morning’s new light and a granite-like dust streamed from cisterns, open the courtyard above. Dwarves ran amuck, plundering or chasing down the retreating halflings.

  Then, before us rose a shrine to a halfling queen of old, a great, curvy halfling with breasts the size of beer kegs. Some of the Dwarf-King’s men had already managed to follow, and in the hellish hall behind us, they were screaming now, victims to the hidden pits or impaled on traps.

  “Here,” Fulko said, handing me another bow. I gripped the weapon, my fists quaking. It was a silly-looking little thing, not even the length of my arm.

  “Thundering hell!” I quipped. “I’ve seen longer things dangling from between a troll’s legs!”

  But when I nocked it with a dart, it was tremendously difficult to pull back—this thing had all the power of my long bow.

  “Ya! See?” Fulko roared with amusement. “Now we’ll we have ourselves some sport!”

  Dhal behind us, we felled a score of dwarves, but now they came faster than we could fire.

  Dim torchlight flickered as air breezed in from the castle above. I grabbed Dhal’s hand again. With Fulko beside us, we ran together across a rock bridge, the pits to either side of us seemingly bottomless. With a great breath, I froze, nearly firing into a livery of halflings that were coming down from yet another entrance from above.

  Dhal crouched behind a great stone column. I nodded at Fulko, then turned. He and I then fired into the crowd of dwarves rushing our way, and a volley rose from behind, sending a wide sheet of darts into them. They fell or froze, or else went sliding and skidding into the pits to either side of the causeway.

  For a moment, the torrent of incoming dwarves ceased.

  Fulko Fallwater stepped ahead of me and nocked his bow, his back to us. “Get behind the stone tooth with your woman, Troll-King!” he roared, laughing with joy. “There’ll be plenty for all of us.”

  I scampered with Dhal behind a stone column, carved with a slit so that a man or a halfling could fire an arrow from behind. All around us, higher in the caverns, five dozen halfling bowmen were perched, bows taut, and nearly invisible. And suddenly I realized just how good these watershed folk really were at war. The castle walls, and indeed the castle itself, had all been a ruse.

  The whole point was to get the dwarves down here!

  Just ahead of us, Fulko Fallwater brought the arrow back, the feathers bent and oddly luminous in the cool light. He was staring off toward the sound of more approaching dwarves. His lips were pressed as he said, “Ya ya! Pigs to the poke, boys!”

  And so it began, a slaughter. It was a victory like I would have never thought possible. For two more hours, we sent volley after volley in
to chests and heads.

  And while the Dwarf-King’s warriors and berserkers screamed in fear or agony, the little captain roared obscenities and screamed things like, “Dip an oily eel in ginger and shove it up my arse if this ain’t a good time, ya!”

  Chapter 57

  When my adrenaline settled, I was so mentally and physically spent that I could not join the revelry as we made our way back up into the light of the courtyard. Crawling on our hands and knees, Dhal and I could not hope to keep up with the nimble halflings. With every step back up the castle walls, dull aches went crashing through my body, and a bone in my heel had somehow cracked. The sail barges were gone, which meant that the victory was not as complete as I had imagined, as it took a great many dwarves just to pilot them.

  And King Bhiers, dwarven Mage-Lord of all Yrkland, had eluded capture.

  But little Cullfor, smiling, high on a stone parapet above the sea, was alive.

  And on that small stone parapet, high above the sea, I smiled as I pulled him down into my arms.

  “I don’t suppose you could go for a nap?” I asked.

  Cullie hugged my neck.

  * * *

  It was hard to say how much time had passed before we actually slept, but it was sometime in the thin and grayish pale light of dusk before we all woke.

  Half-asleep, I heard the sound of the ocean breaking in the distance. And I pulled Dhal closer. I was surprised at the emptiness of my thoughts, and the great, enormity of the peace in my heart as I slept, breathing deeply, smiling, and warm under a pile of blankets.

  Then a clap of thunder underscored a what I thought was a distant commotion: the truth of it was that we were surrounded by smiling faces.

  My narrowing eyes scanned a pair of drafthorses, each pulling full carts. The king himself sat atop one.

  “Some essentials,” King Alberik said, pointing to the cart opposite him. “As few items to make your new farmhouse more comfortable… should you choose to stay.”

  Dhal woke up smiling, squeezing my arm in delight.

  “And in this one,” the king added patting a fourteen foot pile of goods behind him, “a few toys to keep that wonderful little lad entertained. His, should you choose to stay or not, ya!”

  As Cullfor rose, skipping victoriously to the back of his cart, my decision was made.

  I kissed Dhal and turned to the king.

  “We’ll stay, liege… so long as you will marry us first!”

  PART TWO

  FOREWARNING:

  Silence your mind, my king. Listen, and hear the quiet of your hardened rangers. Take note of the stillness of your veteran warriors, and the unease of your timeworn campaigners.

  Do you hear them now, those distant drums? They are the summons of a war that cannot be won.

  Aye, look at your men again. Watch as your cruelest Cutters pause. See them scan the distant rise. Realize that they refuse certain forest passages and speed through others. Such warriors do not protest lightly. Yet remonstration is there, my lord, silent and deep. It is between their words. In the drinks they refuse. In the lyrics of songs left unsung. For they know what the others do not: the powers that seek your army are terrible and strange, and they come from that which no living thing should face.

  They fear the shadowflyer, my king, the paling wraith.

  Aye, the battle that it is to come is such that even the old ones dare not fathom it. There are no legends they can tell to advise you toward victory. I bid you, lord, make ready your heart, and do not discard what you know of war. Burn it. Such a war would have men turn steel against their own flesh. Yet it is no wraith that brings it to your shores. It is no army, nor any beast known to men.

  It is I…

  Chapter 58

  “Rabbit tears: The notion that the rabbit sometimes craves the attention of the fox, else it would not cry in the snare.”

  —Axiom of the Delmark warrior.

  THE YOUNG WIZARD SMELLED HATRED. The odor was like glowing hot iron, extinguished in beer.

  Dirty Gig, the old halfling witch who trained him, had warned once that his hermitage and meditation might waken his demons. Forest road fidgets, my boy. They will wreck your bloody mind, turn your own senses against you. He wished that was it. But he knew better. He and his human “uncle” had ended hundreds of men. They had wrecked dwarven berserkers and torn apart would-be assassins in a manner befitting their trade. He knew fear. Fear was like a sneeze, brief and annoying. He could dull fear. He could edit fear into the true mathematics of a situation, by damn.

  Something followed out in the forest, just beyond sight.

  It was a presence he had never felt.

  Cullfor raised a brow, keenly aware of it, and just as aware of his own dual nature. As a dwelf, he had all the instinct of his cunning elvish blood, and his fiery dwarven heritage gave him all the gumption he needed to act on them. Yet he was frozen, staring into the dank column of trees. The quickening, invisible thud of his senses told him the presence was not only real, it was close. The living, black air of the late-winter night was alive with it.

  Still, he saw nothing. Ahead of him was just the cold dip and lee of the path. The stillness of the giant timbers. The presence had not left, but it had grown no closer. Cullfor grunted, shaking his head. At length, in wet boots and a pensive humor, he forced himself back down the forest road. Though he could feel it staring as he trekked, ever behind him, ever watching, he remained calm. He counted his breaths in the quiet, trying to keep his head from swiveling around to look up at it.

  It was in a tree now, just over his left shoulder. Then it was one the ground, scuttling. Something ancient, something wicked.

  Yet he trekked on.

  Nearing midnight, he halted once again at the ruins of an old tollhouse. The trail had narrowed to little more than a thin ridge. He stepped through the crumbling brickwork, the hillside plunging to either side of his steaming feet. Slowly, he peered down to his right, down into the noiseless black.

  He saw nothing. Just two dewy spots at the head of a twisted black log that seemed to stare back up at him. Then suddenly an aching, sticky sort of sobriety washed over him like a suit of wet grass—the thing was hovering atop him now, inches over his head. And as the fiend roared, like the high-pitched and icy cackle of a wyvern, Cullfor bared his teeth in fear and began to run.

  __________

  When the young wizard neared Gintypool, his modest home, dawn was graying all but the deepest pockets of forest. Thirteen hours of running had left him footsore and bleary-eyed.

  Very soon, the silence in his head and the ache in his feet would be memories. He would be feasting with his uncle, celebrating his Auntie Dhal’s birthday. He would be drunken and stuffed.

  Cullfor, at last, allowed himself a grin. Perhaps later he’d be stuffing ol’ Ma’am Mockingbird or Frieda Firestone, for these halfling women took to the novelty of him—some for his dwelvishness, others for his wizardry—like hummingbirds to morning glories. He half-laughed. Novelty might by even be understating the case. If his human aunt and uncle were unique to the land of halflings, he was more curious still—he was the only dwelf in all of Arway, and one of only three wizards in the known realms. At nineteen, it sometimes seemed the world was at his feet. At other times, he felt like a pup in a world full of wolves. He was blessed, either way, he conceded. But good thundering hell if today was something altogether stranger. Rot his eye if he wasn’t ready to get his feet in front of a good fire and drink away the strange feeling in his head.

  Growling large yawns, he trekked another mile to the crest of Nameless Hill. Leaning on his walking cudgel, half asleep, he swayed a bit, almost snoring. He righted himself in jerks.

  Rolling up to his feet were the Watershed’s prime river bottom fields. They were dotted with clusters of sheep and wrapped by a lazy bolt of the Gardenwater River. At the edge of it all was Gintypool, a jumble of thatched blonde cottages along the water with the audacity to call itself a village. From here, the pr
edawn blue made the homes and shops appear little different than a knot of sleepy cattle, jostling at the water’s edge for a drink.

  Easing down the long, wet slope, he could feel the soil beginning to soften. The itchy familiarity of home began to set in. He could see the open, slate roof of that incorrigible little oaf who called himself a blacksmith. Beyond it was his own little herb patch, where a beast named Laney Largo had been digging up his onions. He thought briefly about her, about how a child could be so obsessed with onions. It was a mystery to him. Truly, it just boggled his mind beyond damned boggling.

  Then he squinted, noting a peculiar fog. He traced its path to his own little corner of the grain field. It was strangely fast. He watched it flow downriver just as quickly.

  “What the shivering hell?”

  Even as he asked, he knew. It was not fog—and the bizarre fact of this wormed into his mind slowly.

  It was smoke.

  But damn it to the depths, it was coming from the water.

  The smoke rolled from Gardenwater River to curl through the scattered gardens. It made islands of the dung heaps, which stood as high as the two-story gristmill. A burnt-bread smell began filling his mouth. He glared past the village once more to the river. He understood the grain barges must be aflame, but they were docked across the river to prevent that.

  Cullfor sidled down the long slope, his stomach tightening. Sneering, he watched the distant forms of his halfling neighbors as they began to stream from their homes, scattering in uncertain directions. Shrieks carried across the fields. As he jostled further down, some of the forms were gathering along the river. A few were nude despite the chill, clutching robes or woolen blankets. Others carried swords or farm tools.

  He halted on a rocky outcrop. Here, he could see that he was right. The grain barges were half-sunk, rolling over as they burned. Sparks rose like hellish bugs from a year’s worth of taxes to swarm across the river onto the gristmill.