by Thomas Head
More attackers were circling around him. Nine, maybe a dozen. And the monger began withdrawing into the shadows.
Cullfor shook his head. He grabbed the fat man by the wrist, pulling down with his natural forward lean. Watching him splash down, Cullfor stepped on his wrist and stood ready. Frozen, he saw Bunn, wide-eyed and breathing across the alley.
He turned toward the smallest two. Then he paused, sharply aware of three options. The knife in his boot. Magic. Or the delicate silver ring on his pinky. Puffed up, he balled his fist, thinking.
All around, they were slower.
But they were still coming.
Cullfor spat. He pulled the ring from his finger. Charging the smallest of them, he showed them the ring and tossed it over their heads and across the alleyway, away from Bunn. The ring flew toward a carted ass. The dozen or so muggers followed the arc of the delicate ring, running at it like a prized, wingless bird that had taken unexpected flight, and the ass turned to the sudden rush. Laden with barrels, it was both stuck and lurching away. It whined and bucked with the load, louder and crazed until buckets of eels launched. People screamed. The crowd dispersed in all directions at once. Cullfor was dodging, punching as the great riptide of the villagers shifted in a swath toward him. Elbowing anyone in his path, he ran and grabbed Bunn’s open hand. Running, he was surprised to find her laughing. More surprising, he found it contagious. Cullfor pulled against the impossible tow of people, snorting with unwanted chortles. Leaping over some, knocking others down, it was hard to breathe, seeing people’s face as they were waylaid by his sloppy foxing.
As the north winds collected between the hedges, he looked back for the muggers and saw that they were gone.
They had cleared the crowds. And the town itself. Breathing, laughing like Mad Hamm himself, he heard something rustle behind him.
Cullfor started to turn but stopped. His soul quivered.
Bunn looked at him, and he looked at her. He understood without looking that something bleak and wicked stood behind him.
He took a pull of air and turned.
At first he saw only a lightening-scarred tree. Then a thick blue shadow rose before him. A seven-foot tall dragon stared at him. It was fifteen feet long with sallow eyes and a rattling white tongue. Pale feathers bristled atop its head and back, cascading in shivers down its body. Its eyes narrowed, the glare so stony it seemed knifing the thin orbs would not make it blink. And yet for all the details he could see it was just a shimmer of a thing. A ghost clad with all the fear and wonder of hell.
Now it was rustling in and out of the world—never fully there nor fully gone.
A thin stream of piss trickling down his leg, Cullfor stood, wondering not at the reality of the shadowflyer—it was too real to dismiss—but at why it was suddenly more vivid. sort of world lets a thing so outlandish loose in the sober light of day?
Then the beast lunged toward him.
Cullfor crouched, and fast as a sneeze he held his knife, growling as his gathered his fear into his arms.
The shadow-beast halted and coiled. Between its eyes was a high, lonesome cackle
Then Cullfor could see his aunt through it. She was thin, grim and solemn, standing in a meadow among dragons. He had not thought of her in some while.
“Auntie Dhal?”
The creature responded with a terrible noise. It roared, and the sound of it was like a thousand-foot root, ripping from hot clay soil. It was unbearable. It was coming from his own bones.
And the world blinked out.
__________
In the twilight of consciousness, Cullfor allowed his eyes to open. The blurry image of an angel was bent over him with a spoon. She was smiling.
“Eat another bite, sweetness.”
She was always beautiful. Her beauty existed before she did.
He took a bite.
The warm and fluffy chunks of goat meat felt good against his teeth.
“Mmm.”
Another blurry swirl of her image was more secular as her breast rolled, bulging, white and plump, from her shirt as she bent. That magnificent woman, he thought.
Suddenly she was not smiling.
No time for smiling, her face spoke.
“How did I get on the ground and where did we get that soup?”
Bunn laughed pitifully, but quickly. She looked down at him and pulled his hair back from his forehead.
“Oh,” she said. “I should have known you were something special.”
“Pah! What am I that’s special?”
“A lunatic or mandragon,” she said, pointing to the nothingness he had just been staring at.
He breathed. He tried a look that suggested he had no idea what she was talking about.
She laughed.
He shrugged. Then he ate more stew. It did little to restore his energy, but there was enough life in him now to get moving. Barely. He stood and, instantly, became dizzy. And confused again. At first, he was unsure what all the hurry was about. He found himself vaguely panicked, darting westward through hedges. But he was soon reassured by her smile, so they settled into a rhythm, and they walked hurriedly and with an unexpected and offbeat happiness clinging about their conversations. He supposed it the bliss of much-needed silliness. Amazing, he mused, what the mind can demand of a body. But there was a part of him all through the trek across those farmsteads that knew his sturdy feeling was temporary.
They met with forested roads again, and with the gathering murk beginning and the crazy gladness gone, Cullfor realized he needed sleep. Real sleep. Not a nap. Nor the kind of sleep you get in a creek. He needed walls. He needed a roof. And by God he need some beer and fire, and then to get his feet in front of those flames and drink and curl up next to Bunn, all soft and naked, and just sleep, snoring in her neck.
As they held hands, she stroked his arm.
It was near the back end of the day when she kissed him on the mouth and grabbed both of his bearded cheeks, then kissed him again.
“The way you fought back there,” she said. “I sensed it. Let me ask you: Do you ever lose?”
“Ever lose?”
“In single combat.”
“Porkchop, I’ve been knocked flat, knocked airless, knocked in the arse, knocked in the knackersack, and had every bone splintered thrice.”
She folded her arms playfully, a look of deep consideration contrasting the grin on her face. She looked up at the sky then, at length, in his eyes.
“Porkchop?”
Chapter 86
“Ears, pointed or blunt, do their labors for free. Use them.”
—Elvish saying
__________
Out past the village, beyond meadows and farmsteads, Cullfor and Bunn went into a rare quiet. In the wooded reaches, the silence reverberated. Here it possessed the land, choked it. Even the thunder was subdued as it dropped into the silent woods, and the forest seemed darken in response.
For three more days, there was only their breath, the breath of world, and the muffled strike of their booted feet on the moss-carpeted forest floor. There was only the movement of her body. The way everything tossed and rolled so splendidly.
So roundly.
So perfectly.
As they arrived at thick brake of oak, the world became suddenly alive with sound. They heard intermittent caws. Chirps. Several thin waterfalls beginning to roar. Then the baying of hounds. The sound grew more plaintiff, closer. They turned and walked up a steep, sudden hill, which seemed to appear from nowhere. Together they crouched through a dank cathedral of trees, stepping a cautious path with timber reaching over their heads, soaring to the belly of clouds. Cullfor thought more than once she had lost all sense of things. Why she was here. What they were journeying to. She seemed pleased at the sound of the dogs. The ruined paths. Walking.
He feared this adventure had become mere sport to her. He feared and loved her happiness.
Then they got off the trail, onto the needle-covered ground. They walked ba
ck downhill, through a ridge torn agape with released of a great burden of towering trees. Here, they were at the edge of the great wood. The world almost seemed to slam shut before them. Back into silence, back into darkness.
Smiling, she seemed to wonder at the wild around her. The great, consuming presence of it. The forest was vast and old, gouged here and there with thin, deep streams. The trees seemed study and somehow wise. Ancient by even the standards of such an old and untouched wood.
A great place for an adventure, she seemed to think.
They stepped into the blackness.
Then he heard dim, icy laughter tracing through the canopy.
__________
King Jorigaer rode his mount deeper into the borderlands between Delmark and Arway than any Dellish king had been in a score of generations, halting atop the treeless hill outside Bonny Fumbling. Here he wore a thin smile, watching the company of runners that had seen them coming. They had retreated, disappearing into the fog below, long before the full size of his army had revealed itself.
He looked across the line at his winded warriors. They had marched for two days without pause across the watershed. Each was adorne d with simple but thick straps of studded armor. Most had smallish shields of Arwegian make and design, stolen from the armory at Muttondon. The tallest of his men stood in the middle, a line of eight hundred men stretching to either side. The man was holding his ram’s horn, waiting.
King Jorigaer gathered his Thistle Knights around him.
As the preparations of battle rose from the fog below, he closed his eyes a moment. The daunting, muffled clank of Bonny Fumbling’s warband could be counted without seeing them. A liberal estimate put them at four hundred, at most.
They were larger by five-fold.
Jorigaer breathed, thinking of the great Dellish Horde, gathering in the Nunnery Uplands. History spurns the Dellishman to battle, he mused. History and gold. There would be plenty of both made in the next weeks; in months, he would be turning warriors away.
He opened his eyes.
Below, the pathetic defense of hedges and mazes had been thinned from neglect. Huge tracks had been worn flat by wagons or erosion. The hill that faded into the ruined town was utterly open, its only defense the lifting fog.
Jorigaer took another large breath. He nodded, then made a throwing motion.
A horn blast filled the hillside, and his men rushed, plunging down into the fog, roaring.
As they faded, there was a brief moment of silence.
Of perfect stillness.
A breath.
Then unseen, hellish bellowing swelled. Bone-splintering thuds rang. Horrendous growls followed the great clanging song of metal and shrieks. Screams rose with the ghosts.
Then there were only grunts.
Another breath.
Jorigaer gathered his guards closer, and traced slowly downhill, the dim forms beginning to appear now. Intermittent sparks erupted, the clang of clashing weapons. He descended further, soaking in the fury. Blood was dripping from swords, from the necks, from the severed stumps of crawling Arwegians, and as the maniacal cries faded to groans, he thought: There is something uniquely compelling about a gnome’s death. The sound of their gargling and roars... it was a strangely gorgeous noise.
He paused at the hedges.
At the limits of his Arwegian contacts here in the borderlands, he was forced to make a scout out of Friar Basil.
As the monk was brought to him, he was huddled and bent, whimpering. He looked at the monk, by far the most treacherous, the most cowardly bastard he’d ever had the pleasure of knowing. There had been no need to wrap him in an oil-suit, threatening to burn him alive if he ran off. He bowed before the king like a beaten dog.
“Have you ever seen a man burn to death?” the king asked.
The monk looked up. From the corner of his eye, a fat tear balled.
“No, liege.”
“This day, you will.”
Together with a company of guards, they rode through the Bonny Fumbling’s market past a ruined monastery. Great throngs of villagers scattered, fleeing. The sounds of battle were drowned by the noises of crying, of panic. The quickening creak of carts. Approaching the Castle Bonny, they paused. Here there was the remnant of an old church, attached to the brickwork of newer constructions. A smith shop of some sort. Several homes. And there was a tower. Called Diverloft, he believed. An armored human exploded from the base, a monk flanking him on either side. The fellow was a robust sixty, a lord, or a soldier of some higher rank than the other humans and the scores of halflings that watched from behind him. He walked briskly to meet him, wearing a short scarf around his neck.
“My liege,” the man said, bowing on one knee.
“Who is that man, Basil?” Jorigaer asked, bringing himself and the guards toward them.
“Lord Copperhill. A Borderland Examplar. They say he defeated an entire chevron of the old guard of Brickelby Knights to King Alberik before Findhorn took the throne. Then he beat his sword against a stone and said ‘peace.’ Or some such.”
Jorigaer and his guards rode out to meet them, and they met at an underway, a beamed junction of the fortress and the church. It was dark. Beside them, a cluster of tombstones spilled away in rows, curling behind what was left of the church.
“Come for terms, old boy?” Jorigaer asked, then laughed.
“Terms, my lord?”
Torches sputtered and waved. Shadows danced over the gathering. The man neither shook nor looked away from the king’s eyes, pointing the king the way back out of town.
Jorigaer stopped laughing and looked him over. The wind scooted his ringlets of hair off his chest, streaming out beside him like a black flag. When the growing throng of guard along the castle parapets reached an acceptable number, Jorigaer tsked. He turned to his own guard, and nodded.
A Thistle Knight approached with a soaked barrel.
The king produced the sword Urth and pointed toward the castle. “As for you, you are dead. Their fate is yours to decide. Surrender them as farm-muscle in the uplands of Delmark, or surrender them to God.”
With a curious lack of hesitation, Lord Copperhill turned his back to the king. He removed the scarf and began waving it.
When he turned back around, the king walloped his nose with the sword, crunching it nearly in half. The lord screamed through rapid breath, falling on all fours. The monks were wailing. The king raised his sword again, and chopped just over the heels of the lord’s boots, slicing tendons with audible snaps.
Jorigaer’s laughter, high-pitched and icy, sliced though the screaming, through the cries of the monks.
He turned to his knights. “Stuff him in the barrel. Set it out for the guards to see as they surrender. Then kill them all.”
Chapter 87
__________
Night was completing its work in the forest, seeming to pull its shadows into the sky when Cullfor and Bunn saw a little inn in it gloom, right at the road’s edge. It hardly seemed there, as if it were as much memory as edifice. And even as they neared it, it seemed somehow more like a sleepy little fairy tale than anything real.
Cullfor halted himself, staring at it, which halted Bunn.
There was something here.
Beyond the inn, the road split. Crossing it, a pair of foxes scurried and leapt into the spiky undergrowth. One of them looked back at him, and growled.
Cullfor harrumphed, feeling a presence.
He and Bunn clung to a scant warren of firs, and they stared with the moonlight in their eyes. There was still something humored in them, something weird, a feeling Arwegians called “drunk on weasel soup”, which was always as odd as it was temporary—in looking, Cullfor felt a shift and was surprised to find that he did not want to go any nearer. The barren old place had aged poorly. Its sagging windows were like choking eyes. The front door was a disfigured mouth.
There was an upside down star mounted on it, under the word STARDROP.
He recalled
thinking about being hatched from moonstuff. Something cold slithered down into his lungs, scuttling around in them like the icy ghosts of ants.
Bunn dissolved his anxiety pulling her belted shirt open at the neck. Then she pulled it down over her shoulders. From the very side of his vision he traced the snake of vertebrae down the neck to the dimples over her collar bones. He had forgotten how exotic the bottom of a neck could seem. It occurred to him he had grown to like the way she smelled. Her woodsy flavors. The curve of the neck. The nose. As her breasts spilled form her undergarments, she began rubbing something from a small leather pouch under her arms, and he once again caught a whiff of some pleasant jasmine-like scent that had greeted his nose whenever he dreamed about her. Strangely, he reminded himself these things were hers.
With an unusual amount of effort, he set his gaze back on the inn.
He vocalized nothing, but he knew: There was something in there. Something… old.
To its side was an ancient man. He stared off into the sky. The fellow was a wisp of a gnome on the fairy tale ground. His clothes were regal but ancient. The cold gray bars of moonlight were casting him in odd stripes as Bunn backed up to him and asked him to scratch her back.
The corpse doesss not ask how it came to be sooo cold, a voice hissed.
“What?” he said.
“Hmm?” Bunn asked.
The man in the distance was shaking his head as Cullfor scratched and her back and scalp and kissed her on the earlobe. He reached around to turn her, kissing her bottom lip.
She placed some money in his hand.
Cullfor kissed her between the eyes. As she pulled her clothes back up, she kissed him back, adjusting her breasts within the garments.
They kissed again, and they approached the inn.
__________
“What’s up there, old man?” Cullfor asked.
The ancient fellow did not look down from the sky. He put his arm in the air and swept it across the black.
