Blood Of The Wizard (Book 1)

by Thomas Head

  “It is a small matter,” she said, “the life of one person.”

  Once she was secured, Talent took a swig of beer. Her face was placid. Neither she nor the others exuded any obvious thoughts of mercy. They just began toting her outside.

  _______________

  In time, Cullfor nodded.

  Yes, he thought, but merely working his mind toward that beast-man again was the most difficult and terrifying thing he had ever done. But once his thoughts were there, he could almost admit: Ivorlas was dead.

  I did it.

  But he could not the words form in his head. Not yet.

  The confession brought the beginning of a terrible sleepiness. It was as if there were not enough nutrition in the blood and too much blood in the joints to move. So he and Bunn did nothing. They merely lay in the field, neither moving nor resting.

  _______________

  As night muted Bunn’s figure beside him, Cullfor felt half-conscious. It was a strange feeling, almost as if some part of his chest had slipped into the ground with the beast’s body. Some part of him was aware of her doting about him and still he could feel her attention as she left to gather firewood. He was glad for her hardiness as he rolled onto his back, staring at the sky.

  He stared over at her vanishing form, then up a million wintry-feeling bits of starlight, and some while after she disappeared into the black woods behind the inn, he turned. A speckled foal stumbled out of the night. A tiny frail thing. It was days old probably. He rose a bit, turned again to better look at it. A large doe was coming into the field behind her. Her head rocked in that delicate upside-down pendulum way of deer. Each step, the neck ticked back. The tailed flicked. And the eyes honed in on him again and again with cautious strides.

  Instinctively, she shunted her body between him and her wobbly baby.

  Deer do not insist upon their presence in the world, he thought. They whisper it. It is as if they barely dare to exist. If not for Bunn one might forget such a gorgeous state is real.

  _______________

  Bunn emerged to find deer stomping at her. She startled back into the woods a step. Then she laughed and reemerged with a puzzled look, the deer trouncing away into the nothingness.

  Grinning, she pointed at him as if he had put it up to it.

  He smiled back, unable keep the predator’s glint from it.

  When she approached, she began stacking the wood. He would have rather she done nothing of the sort but throughout the expanding night he watched her work. Her movement as pleasant as her stillness. She walked well, bent well.

  She labored until a misty moon thinly shone thinly on a pile of wood that would make a better funeral pyre than it would a campfire. And perhaps that’s what she meant it to be.

  She lit a small bit of tinder at its base and nestled next to him. Closer still, he still felt her watching him differently. She was thin-eyed and he still felt bloodlessly cold. She rubbed his back.

  “Dragonhood suits you, my beautiful.”

  He shook his head, grunting.

  Then she was working to get a fire started again, insisting that he let her do it herself.

  “But as such,” she said, winking, “I’d rather you not ever call me Porkchop.”

  _______________

  Once the pile of wood and kindle was solidly aflame, she tore strips from the edge of her old pack and worked them around Cullfor’s hand. And while she worked the flame grew. Jumping. Spreading its light around them. As the glow rose, a certain sense of significance saturated the air with the warmth.

  She sat.

  After a battle, there comes a point where your look at you comrades anew. Sometimes a week later. Sometimes right away. Cullfor could feel Bunn doing it now. Strength is that most worrisome commodity among friends. But it is stranger among lovers. When one fights well, there is pride, firstly, but with that comes the worried wonder. It always did. It was in the mind like a flu and would stay as long any fever.

  It was a stayed consternation at the savagery itself.

  Cullfor grinned at the irony of it. But it cannot be helped, that feeling. He knew. The man next to her was no longer on a fool’s quest.

  He was an angel, or a demon, the case being decided by whether you fought with him or against him

  Yet even as his ally, there was a terrifying level of war in his bones.

  “Is there anything you want to know?” he asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  He looked into the woods. The scenery. It went way, way out. The trees still stretched in every direction away from the road without end.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  The marshy wood soaking their bottoms, he felt his invisible wounds sting and flame in irritating sparks of cold. His forehead felt chilled. He leaned against her. He was hungry. Staring bleary-eyed out into trees for a moment, he thought he noticed a small change in her breathing and thought she wanted to say something. He tried to will it from her, and he focused with all the energy that would come of his tired mind. But no amount of concentration would pull any stories from her.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know,” he repeated.

  “Is there anything you want me to know?”

  “I want you to know that I can do this.”

  “Do what?”

  “I can get her back.”

  “I know. I knew that. When you did not ask about how I came to be roasted by the priest, I knew a lot about you.”

  “Did you? Did you know about us?”

  “Do I?”

  “I think you should,” he said.

  “Then tell me.”

  “Wherever it ends, it ends. But it won’t be because your use to me ends.”

  “Are you saying that we are not done when this is over?”

  “If you’ll have it.”

  “I will,” she said.

  “Then marry me,” he said. “I’d kill a king. Or a king’s horde.” He found he was shaking, and he could not stop the nonsense that kept coming. “I’d burn kingdoms for you. Wreck ships. And I’d even burn a monk.”

  She laughed at that. “If you did nothing, I’d be your queen. Your bitch. Your mother, your whore, and the teats for your children’s supper.”

  “Then be my wife.”

  “I will, my beautiful. I’ll be your wife.”

  Now, he thought: I did it.

  _______________

  In some lightless time between twilight and midnight Cullfor tried to lift himself but a bitter welt of pain wrapped him. He was still cold and could do little but try to breathe. Some sort of lifelessness in his sternum grew all across his back. He turned his head and vomited. The chill of it could kill him, he swore. It was unreal. Crackling up from his heels. He took a huge, halting breath.

  Inaction, he once heard, is the father of all evils or else the sire of all that is good.

  They were wrong.

  Sometime in the night, he thought he heard the voices of Ghelli and his cousin, Aural.

  _______________

  In the foggy morning, Cullfor rose. He sheathed the old fiend’s sword. As morning landed on them by degrees, it seemed to burn away the fog.

  And more than that, the sun seemed to burn away the unseen darkness of this place

  Under the soggy and low branches at its edge of the hole, he leaned wearily on a new cudgel, one she had broken from rugged piece of applewood. They went slowly back onto a road. Then he and Bunn paused, turning without words toward the hole.

  It was Ghelli, bent over, pulling Aural up from the hole where the inn once stood.

  “Pull, ye fat bastard,” she was telling him. “Who are ye? Eh? Who are ye, fat boy?”

  “Have my eyes gone mad?” Cullfor whispered to Bunn.

  “I don’t… know,” she whispered slowly. “Have mine? Who are those two?”

  _______________

  For the better part of the morning, the sun still rising, they stared down into a pit of a thousand corp
ses. By all counts, it was a hell no one soul should ever witness, thousands of humans, halflings, elves, and dwarves, emaciated and zombie-like husks. And yet Aural looked at him with a peculiar grin. It was, at first, difficult to place the look. Then he understood: it’s the look that is given to those you want to be happy. Her carriage was bent and restless, and she kept glaring at him with bright eyes. He stood erect against her smiles, but when he could see her eyes start to moisten he reached out and clasped her hand. And he looked away from the pit. And he felt better.

  He truly did.

  They hugged.

  Cullfor looked at her closely. New creases traced from the outside of her lids, but her eyes were getting prettier, somehow. He wanted to kiss her forehead, but Ghelli was too busy kissing her mouth.

  Only when she was still did he realize every second he looked at her sent sending dull aches of happiness crashing through his body. He was sick.

  Or sleepy.

  They found a log alongside the trail, and they sat, smiling.

  She told him of how she had washed ashore in Dhal, how the accident of her falling overboard had been no accident at all. And after a day of rest and hugs, she explained that she and her new fat beau were going to Brickelby to alert the King.

  Later, watching them take the eastward fork in the road, he smiled, shaking his head. It was like a dream, like a moment so happy, so odd and yet so unusually quick, that his waking mind could not have imagined it.

  And, in time, he turned.

  Bunn asked him if he was ready to go. He shook his head no, and grinned. He grabbed the side of her face, softly, and he kissed her, laying her down amid pine needles and moss and her happy giggles.

  Chapter 90

  _______________

  Cullfor dropped to his knees then mauled the wet ground with the big scoops of a digging hound to clear away a spot.

  Bunn grabbed him, then lay beside him. Frantically she coiled around him, rolling in the muddy peat until they found a place that was soft and flat. Then they pulled together on boots and capes and trousers and tightly-wrapped garments. For the briefest moment, just a glance, they stared at each other. Cullfor had come to expect a certain subdued undercurrent to Bunn’s exuberance; the joyous look in her eyes was pleasantly unnerving. She wasn’t just humming, she was alive in untellable ways. She was occupying the universe.

  He swallowed.

  They shared their looks another moment. Everything was anew, and everything felt so fresh on that cloudy afternoon that neither understood what they were feeling. Then came a tiny but eager breath, and spittle popped when she opened her mouth.

  Then they slithered against each other, their forms softly rubbing. They kissed gently, sucking knots of flesh. He felt her long, broken shudder as he lurched into her. Her feet cupped his ankles. Immersed in the warmth of the other, he found himself merging into her gorgeous figure, her joy. Cullfor nudged his weight gently deeper. Her mouth was open, and he took the lobe of her ear in his teeth and pulled himself back, only to return more fully. The sea-going rhythms rose, and he put a hand on the side of her face. Her teeth shining starkly around her tongue, she opened her eyes. Her look was so inviting he was weightless. Kissing her forehead, he tasted her elation. Sweat dripped off his chin. He pulled her closer, and she began to writhe and smother him in playful and buoyant snarling. Perfectly exuberant in the absurd joy, the stretching moments decorated his mind with all the noise and joy of life. Then the insane, wonderful surge arced across his mind, flooding his senses. Cullfor grunted. He seized her, kissing her mouth as she breathed. As she fluttered, she looked up at him. Cullfor looked down at her and kissed her naked, rounded mouth. And as she closed her eyes once more, she seemed to elongate, stretching like a faded bolt of cloud as he thought of swallowing her soul. Instead he pressed into her with a last kiss before she scooted against him, nuzzling him with her nose. A ribbon of lightness appeared in his forehead, and the light washed through him.

  As he lay beside her, he knew something had cleared from his mind. There were no words for it. It felt like tiny bad things popping, like warm fluid draining down his spine, but nothing could better describe than their slow and deep breathing, perfectly matched now.

  Everything was changing. A perfect sleepiness was swallowing the homogenous forest. He felt lighter now.

  Warmer.

  They were wide-eyed and silent.

  _______________

  It was an hour before nightfall, the bruised pink of daytime, when Cullfor woke. The ground was drier, and the air was still different in some untellable way.

  He stood naked.

  She was perfect. As a child in her content. He allowed himself some ridiculous credit in it, then he shook his head, smiling, as she smacked him playfully across the backside.

  _______________

  He laughed as they dressed.

  His senses once again his own, he saw they had been making their love near the outskirts of a small town, maybe a quarter mile ahead. The road underfoot had seemed to widen. The trees grew less and less oppressive, cleared just ahead to some ten feet off road.

  He studied the town itself. It was a small place, still a borderland burg. A hundred or so roofs gathered atop two hills between which ran a small, slow river. In the fields beyond, Cullfor could see a great carpet of sheep sleeping on the hillside.

  It was Balturshot.

  He watched her dress, as happy as he had ever been.

  _______________

  Balturshot seemed like a town that had been dropped from the sky. There were some fields north of town—but mostly it seemed to have been plopped right down into the forest. Walking out of its gloom into town, they trekked over a masterfully-hewn stone bridge. The river passed loudly beneath them.

  After the silence of the wood, it was a welcoming noise. They paused where the river angled. He walked down under it, and he began to wash the mud from his boots and face. It was a thorough affair. Trying to get that stale muck from the warp and weave of their tunics, he stood.

  With a pleasant sigh, he began scrubbing again, looking up at Bunn, who stared at the pub. The revelry inside seemed to rise and drop in chorus with some melody from within. The welcoming glow drew a smile from her.

  “We need our strength,” he reminded her. “Another good meal. Some good sleep.”

  She nodded and joined him, patting the wetness from his clothes. She coifed his hair a bit.

  “I love you,” he ventured.

  She straightened his collar and cape.

  “And I love you, my beautiful,” she said matter-of-factly.

  _______________

  It was a sturdy building with two chimneys that exhaled strait beams of smoke. An eyebrow of stone jutted over the entrance. There was a longish and tall inn attached to its back, so that the roofs shared the same thatch.

  Cullfor held the door, nodded.

  Then he smiled, sufferably, at the pleasant little world of the pub: the pungent, beery smell and the warmth of the door-side fireplace, the rumble of conversation, it was all punctuated with laughter and the clinking of steins.

  Sudden music wailed from atop the bar.

  Cullfor turned slowly to find three fiddlers, whooping and stomping with a terrier jumping through ankles and around on the bar, and suddenly, however genuine his ease, he hunkered through with some effort. It was a bit too crowded for his liking. And way too loud. Then he noticed something odd.

  Something new.

  As they budged deeper, too many people were willing to move from his path. He grunted past a band of roughnecks who silenced themselves. His scars and carriage had always made men unsure of his station in life and not terribly keen to figure it out. But now they moved as if there were no question. Others were snapping alert at the sight of him. Too many, in fact. Fully immersed now, Cullfor found some that were offering him their seats. Not the way you do when unkempt strangers pass through your watershed. But the way you do for a lord. He shook his head and waved the
m off as they submerged further into the merrymaking. The barkeep looked over with a wary smirk. He pointed them to an empty table in a far corner. It was all Cullfor wanted.

  They delved past the first room to the far-side chimney. He could still sense the looks as he sat. And it didn’t matter. He was utterly at rest. He’d almost forgotten the joy of a proper chair. The warmth of a fire behind him.

  Nothing was said for several long but not entirely uncomfortable moments.

  The two of them just sat.

  Cullfor plucked a leaf from a dusty bouquet that hung on the bricked wall just behind him. He picked his teeth with the stem. With his other hand, he motioned for beer.

  Cullfor shifted in his chair. The pub was silencing by degrees. Bunn allowed some mental space, letting him relax. It felt like a wedding present.

  People behind him were talking amongst themselves about childhood and motherhood. The dimming noise floated easily. He could hear the sounds of a girl too young for her business. Belching and giggling behind him, someone slapping their boots as they laughed, two barmaids arguing about someone that grabbed one of their backsides, someone too excited about God and two others telling him to save it, and even a rat chattering as it scuttled across a roof beam.

  He opened his eyes to discover one of the serving maids staring at him.

  “Master?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  She plopped a key down alongside two tall beers. “Yours for a night,” she said. “I’ve a certain business away tonight. A grabby little lord and his fairy stepbrothers.”

  Cullfor smiled a sort of smile that only a confused old man can muster. He harrumphed and picked up the key. It was intricately carved. The details were small enough to give him that odd sense of wonder. For a long strange minute, he was just holding it. Staring at it. He felt a little drunken just for comfort of the place.