Maverick

by Curtis, Greg

  Gone perhaps was the simplicity of the cottage, but in its place had come just a little elegance and he liked that. In terms of its form the cottage had grown from a small rectangular box with a steep roofline and pretty dormers to a cross-shaped structure that was maybe twice as large and more imposing with it, and he should have been happy with that. But naturally he wasn’t. Once he’d begun the project he’d discovered that he didn’t want to stop until it was completely done.

  The instant he’d finished the basic structure he’d decided that what it needed was full laboratory, and yet another extension to the side had given him a full heighted open ceiling annex, with more dormers, for aesthetics rather than anything else, which now housed not just his library, shelves and desk, but also a full workbench where he could play with potions and work on his enchantments. Internal folding doors, he’d had to ask for a little help from the towns artisans to design them, could close the laboratory off from the rest of the house, so the smells, smoke and noise from his work wouldn’t bother anyone else, while a new, double door with glass inserts at the side meant he could receive visitors, maybe even clients one day, without them disturbing the rest of the household. It also meant the cottage now had three upstairs bedchambers, easily enough for Essaline’s family’s concerns about space for future children.

  Of course once the basic structure had been completed, he’d decided that the thatching had to go, and though he was already pushing deadlines by then, he’d pulled it all off and started laying large slates which he’d purchased from the stone masons for several ounces of silver, and which despite his worries, looked completely in keeping with the structure and the forest behind it. The dark grey slates and the almost equally dark logs, tied together well, and set against the tall trees of the forest they somehow seemed to merge perfectly together.

  He’d finished off the re-roofing of the entire structure with slates only the night before they’d left, and that only with the help of his fellow rangers with him who’d given up their last afternoon of freedom to help him with the laying, and now his house was Essaline’s to do with as she wished.

  While they journeyed so he understood, Essaline and her family, and he suspected the children and a small army of carpenters, he’d left a good sized canister of silver to pay for the work, would be busy turning his demesnes into a proper elven home, even if it was sitting on the ground and built out of logs and straight lines instead of grown out of a tree. As such he imagined that she would be busy polishing down the wooden floors and walls, especially the new ones which he’d only had time to give a single coat of oil before they’d left, hanging curtains and laying down mats, restuffing furniture and perhaps getting some more to fill the new spaces. She might even be working on the gardens, and to an elf a garden was every bit as much a part of the house as the rooms.

  He was also certain she would be putting in a small shrine to the Goddess, probably just in front of the house by the entrance, but then since his small scrying pond doubled as a small shrine to Ephesus as well he wouldn’t exactly complain. Besides the Lord of Magic and the Goddess were supposed to be close allies and friends in the endless fight for the heavens and the land, so it was probably appropriate. Least ways he wouldn’t complain.

  Of course each evening when he spoke with her via the fire, Essaline told him nothing, only that all was well and that he’d be very pleased with it when he returned, before bursting into peals of merry laughter. That too he suspected was a part of the tradition, keeping the soon to be husband in the dark, though he wasn’t too sure about the laughter.

  It was a strange thing for him to come to terms with. He’d lived alone for so long, his house was more than just a home, it was a fortress against the outside world, and yet somehow not only did he have people in his home, changing things to suit themselves, he felt comfortable with it. Once, not that long ago, it would not have been so.

  Besides, at least he had an idea of what she liked. They’d been shopping together several times for odds and ends, wandering through the various crafts halls and emporia, the elves had a surprisingly large trading sector, and he had to admit that she had an eye when it came to style. Essaline liked colour and he couldn’t fault her for that. Perhaps his home had always been a little too brown, and a little too dull, but as a priestess of the Goddess she liked the vibrant colours of life, and though it surprised him she had won him over to her point of view on many occasions. He leant naturally towards straight lines, earthen colours and solid, substantial furniture, Essaline preferred living colours and more ornate, smooth flowing and better crafted items, yet somehow when he was with her, he could see their beauty too.

  Then too he had shared evening meals with her family many times, as they had with him, and he knew her family home well, and though it wasn’t what he would have made for himself, it was still a place he could feel comfortable in, a place where even a rough, uncultured human like himself could feel himself at home. Besides, the goal of the rebuild, as much as he kept having to pinch himself to make sure he wasn’t simply dreaming it, was to make a home where they could live as husband and wife, and one day perhaps, even raise a family.

  Even if what she created was appalling, he could live with it for that. He could live with anything for the honour of Essaline’s hand, and despite all his doubts as to his suitability, her parents had given their permission for their courtship to proceed and never changed their minds. They wouldn’t be building their new home together if it hadn’t been. As Felesily had said, even if he was a little rough around the edges, he had a good heart and they could polish him smooth in time. He wasn’t completely sure if she’d been joking when she said it, though she had smiled a lot.

  When they returned he understood, he and Essaline would be making their betrothal official, with a celebratory feast for all her family, and his if he had had any, though he understood many of his new comrades in arms might be expected to attend as well as Master Argus if he was in the region. Marjan was quietly hoping he wouldn’t be. He had enough to worry about with the poetry recitations, formal dances and vows, without having to fear another all out magic war with the sylph.

  After that so he understood, it was a relatively smooth road to marriage, with more dinners, more dances, more poetry, more speeches and of course plenty of singing, the growing of various ornamental flowers, the weaving of their wedding robes, prayers to the Goddess and a traditional dip in the nearby river, naked of course. The main problem with it as far as he was concerned, was the length of time it might take. Essaline’s parents had suggested a year, and he was almost certain he couldn’t last that long. He was sure Essaline was of the same mind.

  These days when they were able to be together, it was pure pleasure as they simply seemed to melt together, as they let their lips and tongues join in a pale imitation of the true joining they were both so hungry for. It was agony when they parted too, though her aunt was always close to make sure that they did, and he would never allow his base desires to demean her in any way. But still in his arms she was an absolute delight and he knew he was a blessed man, the more so because he knew she felt the same.

  That still amazed him, as did the fact that her family seemed so accepting of the courtship, and yet he knew they did. Several times he’d caught Essaline and her mother discussing the details of the wedding as if it was already decided, and he could never have imagined the strange pleasure that gave him, or the unexpected feelings of terror and excitement that burned through his blood when he overheard them talking about children.

  Essaline wanted children, her mother wanted grandchildren, and it seemed that both of them had decided he would make a good choice for the father. That shocked him and pleased him and terrified him in equal measures, and yet he knew that no matter how difficult the obstacles were that he needed to get through to become that man, he would do them. It wasn’t a choice. Besides, he wanted children too.

  He never had before, in truth he had never thought about it, simply a
ssumed it wasn’t to be and lived his life in peace having had the decision made for him by fate. But when he was with Essaline, when she held his hand or even simply smiled, he knew he wanted everything that a husband and wife should have together, and sometimes, in his quieter moments when he let his thoughts wander, he could almost see her holding the hands of a couple of little ones on their porch and feel the sense of joy the image gave him.

  He wanted that. And now there was something else, something new and dangerous standing between him and that dream.

  Suddenly he knew a very real feeling of anger towards whatever lay ahead of them. That vanished quickly enough though when they finally broke their way through enough of the forest to see what lay ahead. Then it was shock and fear that gripped them.

  “What is it?” The captain whispered it to him, hopeful of an answer that made sense. Unfortunately staring at the terrible beast, Marjan didn’t have one. What he had was a guess, and if it made sense it was of the very worst kind. But then so was everything else of late.

  The expedition north into the southern tip of Gunderland was proving to be far more difficult than they’d imagined, not because they were encountering vast enemy forces, they weren’t, but because what they were discovering was a crime of unimaginable proportions.

  The forests and fields were dead. There was simply no other way to put it. The creatures that had once lived in them, whether fish or foul or beast, were missing, and the silence all around them was terrible. It got under your skin too quickly and then it wouldn’t go away. So for six days they’d ridden, killing the odd enemy as they came across them, though for the most part they too seemed to be dying, apparently of starvation, and trying to pretend that they could deal with what had happened, and failing.

  But as well as the creatures, vast swathes of grassland, whole forests and hills, were dead or dying as well. Trees had become withered brown stumps. Grasses hadn’t just been consumed down to the ground, the ground itself seemed to have been poisoned, and a little work with a hoe quickly revealed that even the worms that should once have called the soil home, were gone. Eaten or poisoned, it didn’t matter which. What did matter was that without them, without even the seeds, the land was destined to remain a desert for many thousands of years. This was damage that could not easily be undone.

  They tried naturally. Each evening he and Harvas and the rest of the druids would spend hours summoning rain, trying to encourage growth where it simply didn’t want to begin. Marjan had sent message after message to the other wizards, telling them what they’d found and asking, in truth demanding, help while the druids had asked the same of their own. But the worst of it was that even if they got it, even if the wizards and the mages brought life back to the lands, the enemy would simply come and take it away again eventually. The wards they were laying everywhere they travelled, would only prove so effective for so long.

  And now, in front of them, in the valley below them, they could see one of the monstrosities that had created this nightmare, and he knew that the beast was far too powerful to be deflected by a minor ward. The only thing keeping it from devouring everything already was ironically its vast size, and the necessarily slow speed at which it moved because of it.

  “I think it was once a drake.” It was an answer but not a good one. In truth it was like saying a mammoth had once been a small pig, and naturally enough the others stared at him, questions in their eyes. He hurried on with his explanation.

  “One of the wyrmlings took over a drake’s body, perhaps right at the beginning, and as with all the other creatures, it began changing it.”

  “The horses grew great talons on their feet and some started breathing fire. The men grew tusks like the boars. Wolves became dire wolves, boars became hell boars and bears became sabre bears. All of them changed, all grew larger and all of them seemed to become something far more savage. Yet that was all after only a few days and tendays. This one has had nearly a year to twist and shape the drake’s body to its insane whim.”

  “Ever since then its been growing, eating, feeding on everything around it, and with every morsel it swallows it gains more strength to distort its body. So it began by growing it.” Yet that was an understatement and then some. It was fully thrice as long as a drake, its wingspan thrice as great, though he doubted it would ever take to the skies again, simply because the long sinuous body of the drake had swollen up into something more like that of a whale. It was just too heavy to fly. It was almost too heavy to walk, and it really just waddled slowly on its pathetically short legs, almost reduced to slithering on its belly. But there was more than that keeping it land bound.

  The strange transformation of the drake’s body had not stopped with just its sheer size, the creature had grown a spiny coat of bone like projections extending from its entire body, strange, bent and twisted horn like weapons that covered it from head to tail and wingtip to wingtip, and while they looked suitably terrifying, somehow he couldn’t imagine that even if those deformed wings could still provide the beast with lift, that they could flap without them hooking and tearing themselves apart on its own body.

  Yet there was still one more thing preventing it from taking to the skies. He knew that as he watched the creature making strange head movements left and right, knocking over several tall trees with its impossibly long neck as it did so. It was blind. Why? He didn’t know, except that as he slowly realised, maybe it was because the wyrmling itself was blind. There was no light in the void, as far as anyone knew. And did a blind creature have any real use for eyes?

  “But what about the forest?” Harvas was right of course, the creature had long since gone on from destroying people to destroying the forest around it. His how made some sense, but it was the why the elves truly wanted to know, why anything would create such terrible damage to the world. Unfortunately Marjan could guess the answer.

  “It was hungry, and it ran out of food. It couldn’t catch any more animals, maybe there aren’t any more nearby, it ate them all, and so it started eating the trees themselves.” That should have been a good thing, vegetarians were almost always better neighbours than carnivores, but it wasn’t, not when he could see the trail of devastation the beast had left in its wake, league after league of dead, broken trees, their greenery consumed and then their wooden remains simply crushed under the gargantuan body, until what was left was a brown river of death two hundred paces wide, disappearing into the distance.

  Then the beast did one more thing that shocked him, though by then nothing should have any longer, it spat green fire at the land in front of him, a blast of pure acid, and he suddenly knew how the forest had truly died, burnt to death with its caustic fire and then the greenery of the trees simply stripped off them with its mouth. This drake might never be a dragon, but it had discovered its own twisted versions of their undeniable warrior capabilities, sheer size, armour skin, fire breathing. What else had it learned? More important, had it guessed their weakness?

  “What do we do about it?” The captain was right of course Marjan knew, they had to kill it, he had to kill it. The alternative was to let it continue to eat, to grow and to destroy everything in its path until there was nothing left and that could not be permitted. He just wished he hadn’t asked him as there was only one way and it was risky. Against something this bad, everything was risky.

  “We do nothing. Captain, you and the others should head back to the troop, stay down and the hill will protect you, keep everyone quiet, steady the horses, and watch the land and the skies for any of its kin. I’ll summon a lightning storm and hope it still has its kin’s vulnerabilities, or that if it doesn’t, it can’t trace the storm back to us.” It was of course the only plan there was, even if he didn’t like it. But at least he felt confident enough in his magic now to give the beast a really good blast, because he knew his arrows simply didn’t have the strength to kill it. Even his axe would barely have scratched it.

  Once the two of them had disappeared back down the sma
ll incline to the troop, Marjan began summoning his magic, beginning with the air itself, moving it in alternate circles, one above the other, as he had been taught long ago. It had been a long time since he had created a storm, there was little point for such magic, and normally if he needed lightning he just summoned what he needed directly. But this time he needed more, much more than he could hold within himself, and he had to use the land itself to generate it.