by Thomas Head
He was blearily aware of doubling over, tumbling.
__________
Sometime after, the king was staring at a gray light. There were the scuffs of a hoof in the ash beside his head. Through the fog, King Jorigaer sensed himself being rolled over sideways.
The Dwarf in the Black Thistle Helm was bent over him.
“Your ear, my lord! Your throat. What the devil happened to you?”
King Jorigaer shook his head. He touched his ear and motioned for the wax and thread, and for the first time since he had watched his father die, he smiled.
__________
Cullfor felt whirls of terrible pain prancing on his injured leg as he ran up hillside after hillside away from the marsh.
But as he looked back, he was suddenly disgusted. The creature was padding along in effortless pursuit. It came trotting along his wake of woody debris, stepping over the tangles.
Cullfor turned again, began running. But now he was exhausting fast. His legs felt heavy. He tripped, and began rolling down the hillside, before limping up yet another.
Then the world ended, abruptly.
A cliff dipped before him. The land slopped a few feet, and beyond was a deep gouge, the river crashing along the bottom. It went as far as he could see to his left. To his right, the hill was an easy slope, into the marsh, then the swift river.
He was almost too terrified to look back. But he could not help himself. The beast had noticed, too. It had angled its run, coming at him now from the bottom. The realization hit him like a warm fist inside his ribs.
Could he make it to the water first?
Cullfor caught his breath a moment. He leaned on the tree that had just saved him from tumbling over. He prayed it was only being playful.
The thing approached, a hundred feet behind now. The sight of it hit him like a warm fist inside his ribs. It was coming faster, now at the bottom of the hill. A massive animal-man, the woodtroll’s teeth were sticky with moss and blood. It was gripping a disembodied deer hoof. Scars rippled under the bodily hair, and it had an obscenely human face. The salty hairs around the mouth gave it the look of a shadowy grin.
He glanced down the cliff. It was too steep. It was thirty feet away now. He climbed the trunk, wrestling his way up to the last suitable nook. He was almost too high. Some twenty feet up.
As he looked down, he shuddered: it was the strangest beast he’d ever seen, far stranger the memories he had of them as a child. It was unlike anything he had even heard of.
And he had left his lord’s sword. He still had the adaranth axe, though. Reluctant to use it, he prepared himself to form a wall of air before. He looked down again to discover it came slower now. It was merely walking. Huge but nimble, it was snapping slobbery jaws. The tongue was spotted and long, lapping wildly as if trying to free something stuck in its mouth.
Closer, the animal appeared scarred and maimed. There was a hole in its cheek. It seemed it was more...human now. Terribly old. As it reached the base of the trunk, Cullfor marveled at the bizarre white eyes. It panted as it stared up at him.
Then it dug its claw-like fingers into bark.
He reached down with an open palm, bending his thumb behind his hand as it began to climb. The wall did not work! The action was sickening, even more hideous to behold as it wrapped the forelimbs around the trunk. It looked up at him, mouthing odd noises as it ascended.
He looked down at the axe. Did it do more than penetrate his walls? Did it prevent him from making them entirely?
“Stop that! Go. Go away.”
Its haunch-muscles were rippling from its own weight as it ambled further up.
Cullfor was shaking. Utterly panicked, he began climbing higher. He flinched at the snapping noises of jaws and branches. Everything was getting too flimsy. Too high. He was struggling to breathe. It touched his foot. The branches were bending now under his shaking feet and hands.
Everything in the world was scrunched into slowing, molten shadows. His thoughts were the only quick things, and they came across his mind in frantic swoops: It is strong. It is real, and this thing is born of sin. Bile courses through its veins. Venom.
Should I throw the axe into the river?
It was too close. Then he had another thought: Just kill it, ye damn fool.
He turned to it and dropped, plunging the blade into the collarbone and down through the chest.
The creature paused, just under him. It just looked down at the mortal wound, then looked back up at him, the perversely human eyes squinting in confusion. It actually seemed to give its mortality some thought. But then it flashed that unbearable grin.
And it grabbed him by the throat, angrily throwing him over the edge.
Chapter 68
“The worth of a mind is not measured in its dexterity. Nor again its depth. There is no measure for it.”
—Axiom of the Delmark warrior
__________
Ghelli was close to the rear of the line, marching with his father’s warband to ambush Whogg’s Lodge. The Jolly Arms of Bedew were two hundred strong, each helmed, and most fitted with thick, calf-leather jerkins. Every halfling seemed fixed in the knowledge that God on their side.
He had his doubts. Worse than that, gazing from under his helm, he felt alone in his unease. In the cool of the bay’s winds, its water still not visible, the air felt like deepening shadows of evil as he looked ahead. The road was lighter, the forest’s haze stripping the moving glow of afternoon.
His reservations seemed to clot in his throat. When they had returned from Gintypool to Nobody’s Sleigh, they had gathered at a pub called The Long Bishop. It was supposed to be little more than beer and a little mid-afternoon breakfast. A chance to catch his father up on what they had seen. It turned into a slow, odd feast. The kind of conversation that had floated across the benches was so small and strange he could not decide if he was getting sick or everyone there was just a little out of their minds. Then what happened was so simple and unstoppable it was maddening: People began talking of Yrkland, then more specifically of the caravan of the Dellish king. It had been seen near Whogg’s Lodge.
The Dellish king himself, a week’s march from where they drank.
A child mentioned gold.
Someone squalled that the men of Delmark would pay a barge of silver for their king. For a long time, the halfling lord’s eyes merely reflected the madness before him, then finally he raised his mug.
“My jolly arms! Let us go! And let us ransom that queer ol’ dog.”
And Ghelli swallowed, and the long hall exploded.
Now Grimhold Bay spilled away to the south, its water long and black under the haze that crowned it. The hushed rises and falls of conversation had long ceased. There was the lone rattle of chain mail. The shuffle of feet along the soot.
Occasionally there was a cough, or sniff. Otherwise the silence that hung over them on that hazy, forested seaside road was heavy and complete.
How colossally stupid it all seemed. It was suffocating him. He shook his head at no one as they gathered themselves, nestling near the base of a perforated limestone slope. His eyes and feet hurt. He looked around. This, he believed, was the first of long rim of knolls and hillocks, known collectively as the Battle-hills of Begotten. They were a mere five arrows’ flight from Whogg’s Lodge.
His helmet still squeezed over his over-thinking head, he checked his belt of chain mail. His cod piece was pinched and twisted. His arse was raw. He began to feed his resolve with memories of border skirmishes he had won, but the memories were dull and spotty. He focused.
He flipped his axe in his hands. It felt good, the way it does with inexperienced warriors. It seemed sturdier than the sword, more treacherous. He would be an expert axe man. He would be Ghelli Bloodwine, the Grim Chopper. Men will fear him. Know his name.
Just as suddenly, his confidence melted. He looked at his father’s smiling head. It was grim and ashen.
The heads of several of his halflings turn
ed. They were silent. The silence spread, until the entire world was utterly noiseless.
Lord Bedew and several of his closest knights were staring uphill.
“Hold the fox,” the father whispered.
The fox was the retreat. Why would that be the call? Sweet God, what do they see?
Ghelli followed their gaze. He saw nothing. Breathless moments passed. He thought he heard something. Above him, atop the limestone rise.
A halfling drew his sword. Then others. Soon most were drawing their weapons.
Someone put his hand on his back.
Abrupt plucking washed over the battle-hill. The hand shoved him to the road. A sheet of wooden rain whirred over his head. Arrows pinged off the rocky grounds behind him. A couple of his fellows grunted and fell, clutching at arrows. Ghelli’s face was flushed. His heart thudded.
Another round of arrowfire fell, closer this time. It was spitting from higher in the hills now. He stood to run, only to find himself dizzy and exhausted. There were tiny lines of light squiggling across his vision.
“God’s sake, stay down, my Jollies! Ghelli, hold the fox!”
He dropped, then scampered off the road on all fours. The arrow-fire came next in a downpour. He was still crawling as it halted again. There was a fearsome clamor of groans behind him.
He kept moving.
When the hail came again, it never stopped. All around him the arrows were standing like tall white flowers. They were sprouting constantly. The dust whirled up around him a like a fog. He kept moving, lower now, writhing on his belly through a wall of gray.
Loud whisks cracked by his head, studding the trees with great hollow cracks and shaking the ground as they thudded around him. He could see nothing now. He went to his belly and began slithering. An arrow bit the skin between this thumb and forefinger.
Then there was a gruesome thwack in his skull.
Stunned, motionless, he felt his head. By some miracle he was alive. He had only bumped a rock. He crawled again, his ear bleeding. He was grunting now, gasping wildly. Choking, he vomited ashy snot. The thump of blood and fear surged. He went through blackened stumps and boulders, crossing a clear patch of air before he met with stony rise.
Still the arrows came.
Ghelli was utterly consumed by his trembling breath as he rolled down the far side of the hill to look back.
How far he had gone...It was a shock, but the novelty oozed into a biting cold. A thousand archers from Delmark rose from the crags behind the Jollies. The Dellish human savages began pouring out of the rock like water, tracing down to his dying fellows with pikes and swords.
He screamed at them to run, but all that escaped was a wheeze, lost in the roar of his vomit.
He looked again.
A barrage of hellish instants assaulted his eyes: Pikes were ripping into writhing piles of halflings, people he had known his entire life, neighbors who were crying or screaming for their mothers.
Then there was no noise to underpin the wild yelps of the Dellish.
It was beyond reckoning. There was just crazed laughter as they stabbed at halflings who were already dead. There were puddles of blood in the road, and blood began dripping from the Dellish hands and forearms.
Covered in soot, Ghelli was white-eyed as he slunk into the stone like a salamander and pulled a crucifix from his shirt. He kissed the bearded face of God repeatedly, then slithered further away.
Chapter 69
“Be wary of those who speak of rebirth, that the priestly bastards don’t bring the death comes before.”
—The handmaiden Aural Allbright
__________
Cullfor was in the sky, the wind cold against his neck and eyes. All of the world seemed to stretch before him, until the river heaved upward to kill him.
His face was scrunched in anticipation.
There was a red blackness…
Then white.
Then the world hit with a hellish pop. Something cracked between his shoulder blades, and every inch of him hurt. Underwater, he wailed. But he was alive. And there was something impossible staring back at him. Something more laughably frightening than the creature atop the cliff. It was his purse of coins, inches from his eye.
He was beyond stunned, beyond astonished. There was a giddy, audacious terror in being able to reach out and actually grab it before he surfaced.
But in the shallower water he roared in a simpler, far more morbid horror.
His legs did not work.
They were floating behind him, bobbing. It felt as if they were merely following him as he struggled ashore, the flaccid limbs dragging powerlessly across the pebbles.
__________
King Jorigaer was mounted atop his polished warhorse, well away from the slaughter below.
As the anguished screams of the halflings slipped away, he ran his fingers through his black hair. The sun was reddening, low against the battle hills. There was a small, hot itch on his foot.
He uncorked a bottle of wine, smiling.
Ambushing an ambush, he mused. Life can be deliciously ironic at times.
__________
Cullfor was in shock, and some corner of his mind knew this. Nonetheless he mistook his dejection for resolve. He struggled to move his foot. But it only shook, and even this was just the water moving it.
He huffed.
Then he looked at his feet again.
He groaned in horror, watching the way his feet rolled with the current as he pulled himself onto a flat stone. They were angled to the side.
__________
Lady Dhal saw a pinprick of light, so warm and welcoming that she became part of it. Then she was growing with it, returning to something she had been a long, long time ago, before she was born. In time she could see it was just the evening sun.
Her face was on the cold deck. The blurry forms of legs were moving about in front an enormous dragon head that was sleeping. She struggled to sit upright, but immediately she collapsed, so nauseous she could throw up her bones. The handmaiden’s struggling form roared through her head. She recalled the gargled sounds of her screaming, her eyes.
A dwarf’s voice said something, then a fish skidded into her cheek. Laughter erupted, rippling through her as the man bent beside her.
He unbound her and put the ropes in her lap.
Chapter 70
Cullfor scanned the top of the cliff for the creature but saw nothing. Then he heard a noise, a noise he had never heard. It was like a roar, but more high-pitched, feral, and menacing. It would be a half a mile further north, if he judged correctly.
Mentally, he tried to imagine himself as a small, hidden-away little mammal. But as he looked down, he understood that he was on awkward lump on the pebbled shore—frozen hell, but he was in practically the one place in the forest he could not hide away. Still. he allowed himself to relax and focus, thought this was y because there was something worse growing in him. It was the feeling of something worse than the eyes of the woodtroll. It felt like a swarm of the devil’s wasps, crawling over his skin—it was the gaze of a dragon wraith. He knew it. Sure as shit on the devil’s hooves, he knew it. Its shadowflyer soul was somewhere nearby, and by damn he could feel it looking at him.
He could even feel it in his ruined legs.
Chapter 71
“Before your eyes are plucked, learn to see.”
—Axiom of the Delmark warrior
__________
Ghelli put the crucifix back under his armor, weeping. He was unable to leave for fear of being seen, so he simply crouched in terror, stuck in some devil’s dreamscape of ash between two black boulders, which jutted like ebony breasts from the base a twisted, charred walnut tree.
There was a maniacal, cleansing insanity to the celebrations of the Dellishmen. He studied their noise, their chants and growls, now resounding by dint of the many jigs and raucous pipe-playing. A few had worked to loosen Arwegian heads and set them atop pikes. He had heard this about them, that they
spent a night outside camps after a battle, twelve sweaty hours of desperate reverie and reflection, which served as a sort of spiritual cleansing. But it also gave at least some assurance that they were not bringing some new plague into camp.
Ghelli looked away. There was a passing nausea. He felt his dull anger returning, underpinning the macabre comprehension that halflings he had talked to a half a day ago, friends, were macabre decorations.
He cringed, then looked again. Soon the King of Delmark himself joined the revelry. Ghelli had never seen him, but he was unmistakable. The fox pelt over his tartan. The extensive blonde hair. The matronly voice. He was staring, either pensively or proudly, up at the piked heads. And suddenly the dream-quality left him. Ghelli’s eyes widened as he watched the approach a familiar figure—beside King Jorigaer was Friar Basil. The traveling monk from Muttondon Abbey. The speckled little imp. What the devil was he doing?
The monk strode behind the king with a… ,yes, a dwarf. A dwarf in a dark helmet. ng. They were talking to each other, nodding, when they reached a pack of drunken pipe players. The pipers halted. When they saw the king nod to them, they grabbed him. The monk worked forceful smiles, forced into jig after jig. He reddened quickly, his robes slipping up freckled arms.
Behind him, the king and the other warrior, the dwarf with the black helmet, which had some kind of black flower or something, were whispering to each other.
The dances continued.
Friar Basil waved at the pipers and patted their backs, trying to get away. But it took the king to fend the dancers off. As Friar Basil turned, winded, the other man retrieved a satchel from the saddle of a destrier. The monk was very still a moment, then knelt before it. He was still breathing heavily as he plunged his hands into reels and reels of silver. It dripped between his fingers.
