by Thomas Head
Cullfor did too. He wore a slight grin, feeling faint, flinging the rope off by dint of his magic—which caused a tearing, bling pain all down his arms. As he passed out, he noticed the rope bunching around the monk’s raised blade, which only softened the blow to his skull.
Bewildered, he came up from a kneeling faint, and he cracked he monk’s chin with his knuckles.
Grunts issued from both halfling and dwelf. Cullfor punched again. The blow excised a few teeth and pulled the flesh away from his pinky knuckle.
Friar Basil swayed, blood drooping now in sticky strings.
From above he heard, “Oh thank God!”
The old halfling reached for him, then stumbled backward, crashing through the fire, only to splash down with his feet in the flame.
Cullfor sucked air for a moment. He wiped some blood from his eye. He picked up the monk’s sword, letting the feet roast a moment longer. Then, leaning under the naked figure twisting over him, he sneered and kicked the monk’s legs away from the fire.
“Damn stupid idiotic ball-sniffing bastard.”
“Oh, thanks be to God!” the figure repeated over him.
Sawing with just a few strokes, he cut a stone counterweight free from the pulley’s riggings.
“Thanks be to—.”
Her large, bulbous arse crashed onto his head.
Chapter 77
“Gratitude is measured in blood and time. Never in gold. Though, occasionally, in bed.”
—Uncle Fie Wyrmkiller
__________
Cullfor lurched awake.
Instantly he froze.
He began wondering at what sort of hell he had landed himself in. Everything was black. Unseen hands pinned him and covered his mouth. The shuffle of foreign battle hymns were echoing in his head. And there was a smell in the air, a wet blend of piney aromas and something more feral.
Two female hands let go of his mouth.
“Everything’s okay, my sweetness.”
He sat up. Dizzy. A drop of water fell on his nose.
He whispered, “Am I blind?”
“No. You are in a troll barrow.”
Never before had the plain and absurd mixed quite like that.
Before he could ask anything else, he hushed himself and sat very still. Odd glimpses of roasting flesh assaulted his memory. He recalled the uniquely learned sounds of the screams. There was something of a brawl with a monk, the memories of which more or less perfectly failed to explain anything.
The need to get out and straighten things up overcame him. But he breathed. He began to relax a little, unsure why. A thin gauze of logic maybe. Or the feel of the feminine hands. He patted them thankfully
“Bunn,” she said.
“And Ghelli,” Cullfor said.
Itchy frustration warmed across his eyebrows. But he sat, grimacing. A button of some sort was pressed against his eye. He succeeded in ignoring it, partially, before he realized it was, in fact, a nipple.
__________
He was led outside, the dim apricot light of evening flooding his eyes. He shielded them and looked around.
The hole they climbed from was little more than a horizontal crack, narrow and tucked low under a leaning boulder. They had not gone far. The river was still near, and the tree that was rigged with the crude machinations of torture was just downstream. When his eyes had adjusted, he stared at this odd-looking creature before him. Bunn. Being square-jawed and double-chinned gave her a pugnacious beauty. She was mean and smart, he could tell just by looking. She wore mannish trousers and a torn cloak over a pack of some sort.
He kissed her on the crown of her head.
Bunn kissed him back between the eyes.
He looked away, his eyes wide and his mouth suddenly full of dry fiber. Every muscle in his body felt as though it had been braided back into a set of knots.
Then Ghelli emerged from the cave. The halfling boy seemed burdened with thought as Cullfor approached him. He kissed his forehead, feeling a monstrous joy at seeing him so glum.
For a moment, there was silence, odd and deep as the sky as it rolled into deeper hues over their heads.
Suddenly Bunn stepped between them. She felt his face and neck and began tracing a finger over the welts. His cheeks and forehead were abraded with troughs of spongy flesh. His stomach had several punctures. The top of his head was going to have a vicious score.
He had no idea how to explain what he had seen.
“A nasty bout,” he said.
She looked at him.
He looked her in the ironically bright gray eyes. How does a monk come to roast the likes of you?
Cullfor approached her slowly. Closer, she grabbed him and tugged him closer yet.
“Ghelli says you’re going to get your aunt. You’ll need me.”
Cullfor froze, wide-eyed. In time, he shook his head, slowly. Maybe he was not so aghast as he should have been, or maybe there just was not enough in him to give the issue the pressure it deserved.
“Mind your damned gripping and tugging,” he said. “Why were we in the earth?”
“A long tale,” Ghelli said.
He looked at him. Then Bunn. Again she pulled him close. This time, she pulled him right-ways against her. She turned his head with smart fingers, her round, soft cheek pressed against his. Her other arm was outstretched, pointing toward a distant and southerly meadow.
Cullfor attempted to follow the line of her finger. But he was too exhausted to focus.
Then there was something moving. Far off... A pair of deer. They were bouncing through the grass.
“Flushed by rangers of some sort,” she said. “Maybe human scouts.”
Cullfor cocked an eye. “Hell’s blistering cold,” he whispered.
“An invasion,” Ghelli said. “Large. And growing larger. As I say and as I sit, master, it is a long tale,” Ghelli told him.
Cullfor lifted his head and stared at him.
“Then you better start telling it.”
Chapter 78
__________
King Jorigaer knew this well: The halfling warriors of Arway had long since made an art out of the ambush.
In fact he knew this better than any of his men. The only reason he was alive was their strange reluctance to kill children.
He was nine. They were in the king’s forest outside the Dellish capital of Armborough, nowhere near Arway. It was a very clear morning, very blue. His father, King Yaor was tracking pigs with a livery of guards. These were not boars, though; they had mysteriously rooted all at once from the keep of the king’s pigger. Which raised a few brows, but not enough suspicions. They were making their way up a short, steep hill. The next thing he knew the pigs were running toward them from the crest. There must have been fifty of them. They were wrapped in colorful rags. He remembered laughing at the pigs. Laughing as his father fell from his horse. The guards scampered, encircling their fallen king only to be knocked from their mounts by lances he had not seen. Then other men on ponies came, little men, dragging the guards off, pulling them across the rough ground. And the king was taken. Ransomed for half the worth of Armborough.
Masterful, he thought. Gorgeous in its simplicity.
Presently the sky was the same as it was that morning. Bright. Soft. The smoke from the remains of Gintypool was still visible, high in the clear sky behind them. He was atop one of his Dellish warhorses, clopping around the outskirts Muttondon through the hilly woods. The Dwarf in the Black Thistle Helm was beside him, and they were flanked on all side by his Thistle Knights of Delmark. The line of soldiers behind them snaked for a half a mile, but three thousand men at his disposal did little to quash odd winds of invasions. There was quality to the meandering, woody paths. It was in the silence of the sunken roads, and you could not wash it with beer and wine.
“You will recall,” he said to the Dwarf in the Black Thistle Helm, “that the last Dellish march on Arwegian soil ended in rather stirring style.”
“I would
rather not, my lord.”
The king was speaking of the men of Delmark that survived a blitz on Arway’s Bracon Bridge. Five hundred men, hung by their necks. All at once. The Dwarf in the Black Thistle Helm, at fourteen, had seen ten dwarves hang simultaneously, and the tilt of his head suggested his ponderance at the sheer logistics of hanging five hundred souls at once.
“My God...” the king said. “The calculated menace.”
The battle-levies surrounding Muttondon came into view, ramparts flattened by cart wheels and rainwater.
The king grinned, pleased with the disrepair. The pits were caved in, mostly. They looked more like plow-furrows these days, more ready to be sown with seed than Dellish bones.
“Say what you might of the halflings’ wit,” the Dwarf in the Black Thistle Helm said. He looked up at the sky, concern weighing at the corners of his mouth. “There are no words for a people that would sit for days amongst its prisoners, working through the logistics of hanging them simultaneously.”
The king looked at the Dwarf in the Black Thistle Helm. He thought he saw fear in his eyes, but there was something else. Anticipation, maybe.
The king winked at him. “Well, master Dwarf, we can take at least one lesson from their cold acts at Bracon....”
The Dwarf in the Black Thistle Helm squinted. “A lesson, my liege?”
“Yes indeed, Master Dwarf. And the lesson is simple: You must love the work.”
__________
At length, Jorigaer’s raised fist halted the army behind them. He turned to The Dwarf in the Black Thistle Helm, smiling.
“Call the men, my dear. Call them to gather!”
The dwarf nodded. He tugged the reigns and rode up onto the banks of the sunken road, forced by the narrow lane to call down to the men at intervals. It took time, so that the king had climbed on a wagon and was drinking well before they were spilled away in the wide arc around him. They were still forming ranks, stretching far out into the pitted fields.
The silence was complete.
The king let the stillness float, waiting a long and winkish breath. Then he motioned behind him.
“Lords of Delmark, princes of the Uplands, and you lions of the dell, it was told to me in my youth that Arway would never be taken by Dellish sword. Tonight, at least, that much will hold true. In the carts behind is more silver than the worth of Armborough twice again. Take the money, spread it like crumbs before geese. If it is there is to be blood shed tonight, let it be in the beds of the virgins who greet us ...”
__________
Ghelli stood.
Cullfor sat.
As he listened to Ghelli talk, his impression was quick to form. The grim afternoon when they had met was an ill day for Ghelli as well. A thousand bowman from Delmark, rising from the crags behind the fellows. Savages. They were pouring out of the rock like water, tracing down to his dying halfling-fellows with pikes and swords. Then the barrage of hellish instants. Pikes ripping into the writhing piles. Halflings crying or screaming. Some yelling for their mothers.
And he had seen the savages paying silver to the traveling monk.
But this invasion…
Why?
Chapter 79
“Our hunger? Our thirst? Our appetites fuel those who would destroy us. Make full on that beer, my feisty nephew.”
—Lord Uncle Fie Wyrmkiller
__________
Cullfor squinted.
Ghelli sat for a moment, and then he rose from Cullfor’s side. He began to walk away. He was looking around, a wild uncertainty in his eyes.
“That night I decided to follow the monk,” he said. “Last night I tried to kill him. I failed.”
He was still looking around.
“Wizard, the monk will not fail. Basil will kill your name. Yours and mine and Bunn’s too. I will do what a can to counter it. But God knows the bastard will pour sin and hatred into our names until our own countrymen will kill us as soon as they see us.”
Cullfor understood all too fully. As soon as an audience was found, the monk was going to work at his ruin. Hell—he had no choice now. After confirming the fact in his head, Cullie nodded. He looked at the ground and rubbed his temples—he was as much of a hood now as Bunn and Ghelli.
“Do you what you can, Mister Ghelli. But you know what you have to do first.”
“I do, wizard. I will go to Brickelby and tell King Findhorn of the invasion.”
Cullfor tsked thoughtfully, nodding. Findhorn had only just recently taken the throne from his father Alberik. He hoped desperately the young king was eager to empress his fairness and wisdom upon the halfling. But that was unlikely, he knew. Young kings, be they halfling, dwarven, or human, prove themselves with but one means. War. He turned to Bunn.
“Maybe I do need you.”
“Need me or not,” she said with a shudder. “I’m coming with you.”
Cullfor looked at her. He wanted to ask what this had to do with her. But that it had anything at all to do with her was enough. The monk was deadly. He already understood that, and he understood that she would tell him when she was ready.
He looked up at the sky.
He took a few breaths. Tamping down a swell of aggravation, he crossed himself and looked at her. There were flushes of something mean inside him, something that wanted some control.
“I don’t like you,” he said.
She stopped suddenly. She looked at him, her head tilting.
“You will,” she said.
Suddenly there was a rustle. It came from up a small hill before them.
The noise still pressing through a maze of trees, they hunkered together and curled around the riverside’s large rocks. As they looked up at the trees, they witnessed the enormous destrier peering down at them from the birches. It was chewing on something.
He and the horse shared a look.
The tail swished a bit.
Cullfor scampered up the rise, frantic but trying to act calmly. Staring at the horse, he knew only to wall it in behind it with magic that it would not run. He grabbed the reigns. But he managed only to pull away with the saddle as the horse ripped itself from his grip, knocked him down, then bounded over him with easy trounces over the creekside brush and disappeared.
Again he was looking at the blackening sky.
“Not a word,” he warned.
__________
Cullfor scanned off in the direction Ghelli had left. He saw nothing. Just the low roll of hills. The grassy low ground beneath them. And the river. Back downhill, Bunn sat with her back to him. She was whispering a little prayer for Ghelli’s success. He stood and listened, and soon discovered the prayer was like a song, and the sound of it was like the waves of a heated conversation. The fact that she was still there struck him as odd too. But for the moment that was not a terrible feeling.
He looked back toward the rigged tree. The ashes of several large logs still glowed, sand Cullfor understood that his fire must have taken some time to build. He wondered what drove the monk to build such a fire. It was like a roasting fire. Was he going to eat her? Deep inside, he knew he might have been using their torment to conjure a demon, and he might have been unsuccessful for all he knew. But he did not want to think about that. Instead, briefly, he wondered what she would taste like. Beef or ham.
“A pork chop,” he decided.
She glanced up at him.
Embarrassed, he felt a small surge of wanting to be rid of her. He looked at his feet, then her. He understood the growing aggravation, though, realizing that it was little more than once again having something to lose.
As he stood looking at her, he could not decide what bringing her with him was.
Decency.
Stupidity.
Or murder.
__________
Bunn knelt before her satchel. She had a frying pan and some oat-flour. Some sort of berries. The sight of it made him almost dizzy. He rubbed his stomach. He had forgotten his hunger.
He was al
so incredibly sleepy.
He watched Bunn fetch a little water for the pan. She sat the watered pan in the grass while gathered a bit of grass and leaves, then she struck her tinderbox against over them.
His lids were becoming thicker and lower. His forehead felt heavy.
__________
Cullfor’s dreams are crisp. He is lying atop a pile of rubble paralyzed and half-dead atop some windswept peak. The silence of this place is enormous. Even the wind is small and hushed as it passes over his face.
He breathes, looks around.
Someone has cut off his legs. He can see them downhill.
Now Bunn is standing over him. There are creatures like he has never seen in this life behind her. Suddenly her lips are drawn back or cut away, and as she looks down at him, her teeth stretch, and each of them are sharp as canines. Cullfor feels his stomach lurch with anger. Bunn mounts him, grabbing him by the tunic as she begins yanking him in rhythm back and forth across his ruined pelvis. There are naked, but everything about the act fails to arouse him.
Then he wakes, thinking: Our appetites fuel those who would destroy us.
Bunn pecked him on the cheek.
“Come along,” she said.
In the cold setting of the sun, he yawned, and they walked together toward the smell of cakes.
__________
Cullfor’s right half ached horribly. His right hip was numb. The teeth on the right side of his head.
As he sat, a strange fear hit him. He feared a little food and rest would leave him feeling worse. If the prepping of food had been a physical lullaby, getting off his feet and eating something might assuage all of his madness and damage his resolve.
But that was utterly stupid, he realized.
