Blood Of The Wizard (Book 1)

by Thomas Head

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  He grabbed an excellent sword and drew it from its sheath.

  With one cocked, he grunted. A fist-sized warmth began feeling spreading across his chest. Suddenly his sternum was a sort of snare drum and he could feel it pulling tighter as his heartbeat.

  He sheathed the sword and looked at her.

  She turned to look at the door, kicking it shut.

  As he stepped toward her, she was beaming and trembling. Keenly aware of her breath, he pulled the dress from her shoulders. She was an electric sort of beautiful, one he had never seen. He kissed her neck. Her chin rose, caressing his shoulders’ multitude of rips and purple gouges.

  He lifted the dress from the bottom, unlaced it and set it aside.

  He could feel her begin to flush, kissing her on the ears and jaw. When she was unclothed, he pulled her into the bed’s hay softly. She climbed atop him and she clasped both of his hands. And she kissed him on the forehead and the nose. She looked him over, then rubbed his head, combing his hair with her finger. A tiny wet thock sounded as their wet stomachs gripped. He put a hand under her head, and with the other, he gripped her behind the knee. She opened her mouth with a pleased noise. Her eyes closed. She turned her head. He slowed, and she nodded.

  He did not know what to say when she thanked him.

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  “I love you,” he said.

  She smiled and turned her back to him. Covering herself with the blankets, she laughed happily.

  “Even so, I love you too.”

  He laughed.

  He kissed her again, and with her help, he dressed himself in leather britches. The boots laced from behind. A thick leather shirt did likewise. Then she dressed him in new chainmail hauberk. He put a thin cotton wrap around his head, then pulled the helmet on hesitantly.

  It was a crowned, captain’s helmet.

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  Night.

  The moon shining full over the army below.

  In the darkness, Sir Alistair gathered his cape around him and joined Cullfor atop the parapet. They nodded to each other then watched as a fresh swarm of Dellish approached.

  They were coming slowly, making a great show of their noise. As they wound up the sheep-cropped orchard, the lines of men halted and crimped here and there like a great wyrm, swollen with vengeance. It had torches for breath. Armor was flashing here and there like scales. And the beast had choked off every retreat.

  Alistair spit beer in what sounded like a laugh.

  “Well damn,” he said. “I suppose we could shit ourselves in worry of over it.”

  Cullfor grinned in understanding.

  “Then throw ourselves on the mercy of the Dwarf in the Black Thistle Helm,” he said.

  “Delthal Blackthistle,” Alistair said. “Cunning. Twice the lion as his ne Man-king. Even among us there are some who left when they heard he would lead this assault.”

  “Delthal? I have heard that name before…”

  “I should say, boy! They say your uncle left him for dead after killing a dragon!”

  “Oh…”

  “I should say, oh. That type of scorn, it is not dealt with lightly.”

  Cullfor cocked an eye. The Brickelby Guard were the best of the best. It is said they would lock horns with the devil.

  “Then some were smarter than the rest of us.”

  Alistair laughed. “Smarter indeed! But dead is dead I guess, whether it’s tomorrow or the tomorrow after that. One might say our tombs were carved and signed as soon as the Dellish coffers ran dry.”

  Cullfor grunted.

  “Thinking like that, a man is dead the moment he plops from his mum’s bloody arse.”

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  Cullfor looked around at six hundred and fifty men. Men who had decided to stay on for this fight. They were lined atop the walls with carts that laden with sheaves of arrows. Some men held pikes at their side. Some held a sword. He turned to Alistair.

  “How many below?

  “Maybe a third of the bastard’s army.”

  “That many. I would have thought a thousand, maybe a thousand twice.”

  “Yes. To the eye. But three times again coming.”

  He pointed.

  A low, sideways roll of ships listed and plunged with the sweep of many oars, way downriver.

  It was like another great serpent, writhing.

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  Soon a long, low barking of orders, rising from the army below like a beast’s grunts. The sounds rolled atop the great tumult of a march that had begun far across the country, seen towns razed, and smelled human flesh made into oil. All of it, the great machined madness of it, was forming ranks on the shores below. And at long last of the army poured from longboats, and Cullfor cocked an eye to the rear gateway of the monastery.

  A gateway is any hold’s weak point, and therefore if a man has wits enough, its strongpoint. But Blackthistle’s bastards were too veteran for that. They were coming now with ladders.

  Breathy moments stretched as he looked beyond them. Just out of bow-shot, a figure emerged from a sheltron of knights. It was The Dwarf in the Black Thistle Helm. Beside him, on either side, were men of great stature. They wore horns at their waste, barking orders.

  The horns were raised, and their shrieking echoed over the ocean.

  In the next instant the shuffle and clank of war roared from below and men charged. Soon, the ladders began to rise.

  The line of men to each side of Cullfor began yelping unusual war cries. The horde below answered and blistered the air with a noise to cower a banshee. Sir Alistair was bellowing, shaking his penis at them.

  Cullfor whirled the war bow overhead, and the line of men nocked an arrow onto their weapons.

  Cullfor loaded his.

  “Hooold,” he bellowed.

  Cullfor breathed, peering down an ash shaft. In all the commotion and thunder of the quaking world it all seemed to hush. Cullfor became conscious of the strain of the men holding their fire. Aware of the ladders plunking against the walls.

  “Hold.”

  The horde was yelping like dogs, and there was growling and roaring to either side.

  “Hooold.”

  Thundering, crazed bits of death-hymns surged upward like an insane, warm air. Until a ladder split. Men were screaming as they spilled down on top of each other.

  Cullfor took it as wink from God.

  “Loose!”

  Arrows hissed, wrecking armor and flesh.

  As they pounded below, everywhere, Blackthistle’s men 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. Cullfor screamed wildly, launching missiles into closer and closer faces. The ground itself seemed to rise to bring them closer. Men to either side fired without cease. They were quicker than he was. More steady and less winded. Men dropped and thudded below them, but twice as many filled the rungs. Now they carried oaken battle-boards overhead. Cullfor grimaced, and he continued to shoot, and shoot again. He was already running low on arrows. But he could do nothing about it, except keep at it, firing arrow after precious arrow. He struck the men climbing below him haphazardly. His 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. He fired another into his shoulder. Then a third. As the man wheeled back to snap off the arrow in his back, he continued to yell orders. Cullfor loosed yet another into his chest. When the man fell, he cleared the ladder, shifting sideways, clinging at his men as he dropped. Then he dropped the bow.

  Cullfor reach out with the unseen verve of the world, and not only form a wall, but began pushing on it, sending hundreds of men screaming down the ladders. But no sooner had they 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.

&nbs
p; “Archers!” Cullfor barked. He had to let go of the invisible wall to form a shield fromt eh arrows, so that as the shielded men climbed, they were covered now by the bowmen with their long quick bolts. Wooden sheets of the missiles began thudding into green light of his barrier.

  That’s when a fourth surge of climbers reached the men atop the wall.

  The Brickelby Guard began to fall.

  He shoved at them with his mind’s hand, but this only allowed the arrows to drop in like hellish rain.

  “Watch those goddamn archers!” Alistair barked at him, as the arrows slammed into guts on either side of him. Cullfor ducked to discover Alistair 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 himself Cullfor rushed to help.

  “Goddammit back to ye spot! Forget the magic! Lead, man! Lead!”

  Everywhere along the parapets, men too slow to cover dropped on the stones. Shafts sprouted like branches from their eyes or necks. Their numbers halved. Now arrows zipped from the walls behind them, pounding them in the backs of their legs and head.

  Cullfor 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.

  “Your poles, fools!” he screamed.

  Cullfor and Alistair, his wounds less grave than they had first seemed, each grabbed a pole and a nearby knight.

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

  Cullfor and several more now were racing across the parapet, carrying shields aside their faces. They worked the poles two men a team. For insane moments, it was just so much macabre sport. They sent the ladders down with clusters of men.

  “Heave, heave!” Alistair shouted, laughing like a wild savage.

  Then their strength thinned, or forked poles began to brace from below. They could never tell. As more and more soldiers scampered atop the southern wall, they worked again with the bows. Now they were firing sideways as much as downward, downing men as they raced toward them.

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

  “Swords!”

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

  “Swords!” Alistair Roared. “Grab ye sword ‘for I shove mine up ye’ arses!”

  Soldiers near him screamed for sword. Others were almost singing as they filed over into ranks on the ramparts. Dozens at first. Then the last of them came rushing towards him and Alistair in a great living shield of men. In their running, some were fighting. Some were shot in the back or hacked down. Slips of blood streamed. And the ramparts began to slicken.

  Finally Alistair managed to form them up into something resembling ranks. They bent and stepped together, two groups, both directions.

  In the center Cullfor discovered Alistair hunched over an immense, iron ring set into a wooden block.

  “Here, boys!” Alistair roared at them. “Get ye’selves down here ‘fore I boil the bones out ye’ damned feet!”

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

  Both chevrons of men began stepping away from them along the wall. Cullfor breathed, then helped Alistair pull. Soon, they dropped into the door beneath them, alongside Bunn.

  In a hand-hewn tunnel they ran a careful path down through winding pits and traps.

  Soon they were under the high ceiling of the castle’s subterranean cathedral. Light and dust streamed from cisterns, open the courtyard above. Men ran amuck, plundering or chasing down the retreating knights. Before them rose the shrine to the legless warrior saint, Ivorlas, holding his spear aloft. Some Dellish had already managed to follow, and in the hellish hall behind them, they were screaming now, victims to the hidden pits or impaled on traps.

  “Here,” Alistair said, handing him another long bow. “Now we’ll we have ar’selves some sport!”

  Cullfor gripped the weapon, his fists quaking.

  They ran together across a rock bridge, the pits to either side of them seemingly bottomless.

  With a great pull, he and the Alistair fired into the crowd of men rushing his way, and a volley rose from behind them, sent from the men he and Alistair had thought had retreated. The arrows whisked by them to send the Dellish sliding or skidding into the pits to either side of the causeway.

  Alistair nocked his bow, his back to them. “Get behind a tooth, boy!” he roared, practically laughing with joy. “And don’t even think of putting up no shield!”

  Cullfor scampered with Bunn behind a stone column, carved with a slit so that a man could fire an arrow from behind

  Sir Alistair brought the arrow back, the feathers bent and oddly luminous in the cool light. He was staring off toward the sound of more approaching men. His lips were pressed as he said, “Ha ha! Pigs to the poke, my boys!”

  And so it began, a slaughter like Cullfor would have never thought possible. For ten more hours, they sent volley after volley into Dellish chests and head.

  And all the while the Dellishmen screamed in fear or agony, the big 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!”

  .

  Chapter 97

  “Honor? Honor is just so many pounds of sausage. Those willing to die as pigs will know honor!”

  —Lord Alistair Tenholly.

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  When his adrenaline settled, Cullfor was so mentally miserable that even his thoughts were stiffening. Crawling on his hands and knees back out into the light of the courtyard, he was shivering and exhausted, and he had a fever.

  With every step back up the castle walls, dull aches went crashing through his body, and a bone in his heel had somehow cracked. The sail barges were gone, which meant that the victory was not as complete as he had imagined, as it took a great many men just to pilot them.

  And the Dwarf in the Black Thistle Helm, the fearsome Blackthistle, had eluded capture.

  But Bunn was alive, he spoke to himself.

  And on the stone parapet, high above the river, he smiled as he fell asleep.

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  It was hard to say how much time had passed before he woke, but it was still sometime in the thin and grayish pale of morning light.

  And it was exceptionally quiet.

  He heard the sound of the river lulling in the distance. And he saw Bunn asleep nearby, then a clap of thunder underscored a distant commotion: the sound of marching warhorses, and the subdued echo of voices.

  Cullfor rose and kept to the edge, as ensconced in shadow as he could possibly remain, while he peered over the edge of the parapet’s merlon. As he woke, he was not surprised the town he had only just noticed, nor at the emptiness, nor the great, enormity of its silence, but at the biting flies that swarmed in tremendous, low clouds. A fog of them surrounded the wide, urban arm the stretched from the smallish castle at the north of town, down toward the grassy shores of the river. The only other leviathan was wooden, a massive church at the city’s heart. Some manner of borderland basilica, a monument to both the One Church and some Elvish deities, it rested atop one of mossy, meandering hillsides so common in this part of the country.

  The sun was an orange sliver, low over eastern hills beyond town, which were so thick with forests they were black.

  Narrowing eyes scanned back toward the town, at the enormous spire of the church. From here, a half a mile away, it was beautiful the way a mountain is beautiful. And just as foreboding: the town was emptied of all but the army he fought with. At a riverside bend of buildings, succumbing to more and more buildings, the town congested around the basilica, then thinned again into f
ields, which rolled distantly and softly across the southern sweeps of stone

  All of it was capped by the morning’s thin fog, which was sprawling thinly away against the greening and gray light of the river.

  Cullfor breathed.

  The sight struck him as if he were still in some sleepy dream. He looked back at the town, at a scattering of men who were shuffling toward the church at the town center.

  And he looked at Bunn, and he slept some more.

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  Cullfor woke again, and this time it was to the distant sound of horses and voices. He woke Bunn rushed to the edge of the parapet, panicked.

  But when he looked down, he again saw his own countrymen. This time, there were thousands of them.

  It was the personal army of Arway’s Halfling-King, Findhorn the Somber.

  There were gathering in the fields just east of town, and already the meadow was being transmogrified into something that resembled a hamlet. Bread or oatmeal was boiling in every pot across a thousand small fires, and the shadowy meadow was alive with those smells.

  Cullfor walked with Bunn, looking at forty or so more halflings marching toward the gathering. These were the last ranks of the some similar order. As they snaked down from atop a high ridge, there was a princely-looking man near, of all people, Oxus. He was flanked on all sides by a livery of men at arms, and as he wound alongside Cullfor and Bunn, he turned to them.

  He turned slowly, and he looked at Cullfor, then arched one brow high onto his head. Then, bowing, he introduced himself as Findhorn.

  The Sober. Not Somber, as Cullfor had once thought.

  But he was anything but sober.

  Cullfor just nodded to him, dumbstruck.

  The King of Arway managed a humored, beery smile, and he continued on.

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