Maverick

by Curtis, Greg

  As he studied his aura more closely, let his magical senses spread out as far as they could he realised that a part of the enemy wizard was human, or at least from this side of the void, his magic at least was from this side though his thoughts, his soul were from the darkness, and somehow, strangely the two parts of the wizard were working as one. A dark other world soul, living in a mortal body much as the other wyrmlings did, but with magic, madness and evil savagery mixed all the way through the combined essence.

  It made no sense, if the wizard had been taken as he suspected, then his magic too should have been consumed by the wyrmling, but it was true and as he sat there studying his aura in more and more detail, he could feel something of the impossible chaos that the wyrmling was somehow ruling. Except that he wasn’t really ruling it. Instead it was as though a dark, hungry wyrmling soul had somehow found an equally evil wizard soul and the two of them had somehow become one. Yet there was still conflict between them. They worked as one, shared the same flesh, but somewhere, deep down in the essence of whatever the enemy was, he could feel the tension as the dark hunger, madness and the evil fought each other.

  That was something he’d never seen before, never heard of, and something he should probably tell the elders when he had the chance. More importantly though, it gave him his way in, and one his enemy could never have prepared for.

  Dissension.

  Magics of the mind weren’t his forte, not by any stretch of the imagination, but this enemy was even more poorly versed in them. Had he had any more training the darkness couldn’t have taken him. That was one of the things that Gallanar had discovered and written about in his battles so long ago. Those with the strongest wills, with the strongest sense of self were hardest for the wyrmlings to take. Those who went along with things normally, let others speak for them, think for them, they were easier. And animals, with very little understanding of self, they had no defence. But just because the enemy wizard’s soul had fallen to the wyrmling, or perhaps willingly joined as horrid as that thought was to believe, that didn’t mean his memory couldn’t still resist, and that resistance was everything. More then that, it was the key to weakening the enemy, before he killed him.

  Carefully, slowly, and with all the calmness he could muster, Marjan began summoning the magic, essentially nothing more than a bag of dark conflicting emotions, desires, needs and fears, all wrapped up in magical matrix of discord and confusion, and prepared himself, and then, when it was as perfect as it would ever be, he finally he let it go.

  It hit perfectly, as he’d known it would, and he heard the strange other worldly screams of rage and confusion immediately, as the wyrmling, if that’s what it was, suddenly discovered his host was resisting him. But more than that, for as long as his host fought him, he had no magic, no defences, no self-control, and that was what Marjan really wanted.

  The instant he heard the scream echoing through the vast cavern Marjan knew his work was done, perfectly. It was time to finish the job. Instantly he loaded a lightning arrow into his bow, the arrow already spelled to track down the enemy, stood up straight and launched it towards the light. It was a perfect shot, the arrow veering around the walls, through the open archway, and hitting the enemy perfectly between his shoulder blades, before unleashing a full lightning bolt deep into his flesh.

  The wizard screamed again, a single, strangled, unnatural sound that went well with the sudden blast of white light that seemed to come from the green glow, before he fell to the floor, either dead or deeply unconscious. Regardless of which was true, that was all Marjan needed and with a single joyous gesture he unleashed his own magic singing into the rock floor, underneath the goblins who in their hundreds and thousands were still staring up at the enemy wizards quarters, wondering what was happening. They had no idea they were under attack.

  It must have come as a shock then, when the stone suddenly tuned to liquid underneath them as he unleashed its bonds and all of them began swimming in liquid rock, hundreds and hundreds of goblins, splashing away frantically as they tried to keep their heads above the liquid, and too many of them failed.

  But drowning them all as pleasing a thought as it was, wasn’t his intent, he might need some questions answered in time, the first of course being where their captives were, and though they couldn’t speak any civilised tongue he was sure he could make them understand him if need be, and guide him to the prisoners. Fear was a good teacher. So a few heartbeats later he let the bonds be restored and the liquid stone became solid once again, trapping them in its unbreakable embrace. It would be difficult interrogating them he knew, but with sign language, a little magic and a lot of intimidation he figured he could make them understand him if he needed to.

  His work done Marjan took the time to walk up to the edge of the platform and peer down over the edge to see with his own eyes exactly what he’d hoped to see, hundreds and hundreds of goblins buried in the stone floor up to their necks. Of course some were better off than others, some had their shoulders and torso’s out of the floor and were struggling away furiously at the stone holding them prisoner, no doubt they’d been leaping up at the time the stone had set around them, others had only the bald grey pates of their heads showing and he knew that even now they were buried and suffocating unable to breath through the rock.

  He could live with that.

  It was a strange sight, somehow it reminded him most of a field of strange grey green mushrooms springing out of the perfectly smooth stone ground. But he didn’t have time to stare. It was simply what he’d needed and no more. The goblins, or most of them, were trapped, they would die quickly or slowly where they were embedded, all the while chattering madly, distracting anyone who might be listening, the enemy wizard was dead or nearly so, and either way they would furnish him with answers, and the location of the villagers. The battle was over.

  It was time to find and release the prisoners.

  With Bearabus by his side, Marjan wandered down the internal path that ringed the wall of the great cavern, taking time only to fry a few more goblins that had saved themselves by being elsewhere when the floor had trapped their kin, and they didn’t put up much of a battle. Hidden as he was behind his cloak of bent light, lost in the darkness of the cavern, they didn’t even see him, and most became burning embers before they even understood that he was there. They didn’t even have time to scream, though their trapped companions kept making their shrilling sounds each time another one died. Of course no one but another goblin might have a hope of understanding them so if the enemy was still alive he probably wouldn’t realise anything was amiss with them.

  On the cavern floor he discovered a new problem, he didn’t like the thought of standing on the goblins’ heads and outstretched arms, and so he and Bearabus had pick their way carefully through the field of enemies, always being careful not to stray too close to a goblin that had an arm free. They couldn’t do much, but they could reach out and grab at you, and for some reason in the darkened cavern that set his pulse racing each time it happened. So did the snapping teeth and those trapped heads were hungry. Even buried in stone goblins had only one set of priorities, and it was all about food.

  The bones underfoot were also a problem. The goblins had clearly been living in this particular lair for many years and the floor had been absolutely covered in dried, brittle dead bones, and for some reason, probably because they were light, when the floor had become liquid they had floated. The result was a floor that was covered in partially buried bones and bone dust, and his every step crunched more of them to dust and left footprints behind which others could track. Fortunately, anyone who might want to follow him was already either dead or trapped in stone.

  Marjan’s pulse though really started racing when he saw the cells, actually just small side caverns ringing the great central chamber, locked off from the rest by a series of crude wooden bars tied together with leather strips that someone had affixed into the floor and ceiling to make a prison, or in truth, a l
arder. Essaline he knew, he hoped, could be in one of them, and the hope gave him strength. A single thought was all it took for him to rip them free and fling them onto the ground, on top of many of their former captors’ heads, and he could finally see the prisoners. Hundreds of them.

  They looked bad, they looked shocked and confused, covered with dirt and grime, far too thin, and too many he saw had wounds over their bodies, but they were alive and they were free, and that was all that mattered, that and the fact that the noise might have attracted unwanted attention. Still he would deal with him, as long as Essaline was among the survivors. He only wished that he had the time to check. But there could still be a live enemy wizard up ahead, recovering from his blast and even now getting ready to strike back. His hopes would have to wait.

  “Good people grab your stuff and get out of here. You’re being rescued.” He let the cloak slip just enough that they could see him, and then sent a small orb of spinning white light into the ceiling itself, to show them the way out, probably a mistake in an enemy encampment, but a necessary one if they were to be able to see the exit and avoid the goblins. He wanted with all his heart to go with them, to help them, to find Essaline and her family, but he couldn’t, and as they began shuffling out, a beaten and bloodied group of prisoners, he raised his cloak once more in front of them and continued on his way over to the far side of the cavern, to find his enemy’s lair. He still had business to attend to. Deadly business.

  It was a surprisingly long journey, as he continued picking his way through the sea of goblin heads and bone fragments, and then had to scale the steep ramp at the far end, but well worth it once he had reached the terrace and could see inside with his own eyes what was surely a wizard’s lab.

  It was a strange one, he didn’t recognise the potions or the texts lying strewn all over the workplaces, nor the vast array of intricate glassware in which he was preparing his arcane potions, and the alter if it was that, was made of twisted stone bent into confused shapes that pulled at the eyes, but then that was only to be expected when he didn’t recognise the wizard either, nor anything about him.

  He was human, or he had once been, mostly, maybe, but then something had happened to him, something beyond his understanding. It looked for the entire world as though some mad healer had started cutting out bits and pieces of his flesh and replacing them with the flesh of undead corpses. There were huge rows of crude cross-stitching everywhere, many of them criss-crossing his body in seemingly random patterns, and the flesh they connected was mismatched.

  His body was grossly misshapen, almost as though the parts that it was made of didn’t match. Exactly, as he quickly realised, because they didn’t. One arm was longer than the other because the mad healer had stitched in a second elbow, wrongly so that the arm would have bent in a dozen different, impossible ways, one leg was shorter than the other because he suspected it had come from a dead dwarf, and neither eye matched either the human head in which they sat or each other. What skin he could see, which was entirely too much, was a strange assortment of hues, some the golden tan of the elves, some the ruddy red of the dwarves, and some the browns and blacks of the humans.

  Stranger still the enemy wizard had a third arm, sticking out from his chest underneath and in front of his right one, and he had no idea at all what sort of being, man or beast it might have come from. It looked mostly like an insect pincer, but far too large, and far too disturbing. He suspected that worse would be found if he ever found the nerve to undress the body, but he had no wish to find out. This was his enemy and that was enough.

  The true horror of the enemy wizard was revealed however, when he glanced around the room some more to see the bodies of so many elves neatly stacked on the shelves, like goods in a store, except that these were incomplete bodies, missing bits and pieces, while many of those missing pieces were sitting on the work benches with tubes and wires sticking out of them. They weren’t just elves either, there were humans and dwarves and even some gnomes among them, all dead and stacked like firewood, all those which still had faces or eyes, locked into a permanent expression of horror.

  Seeing the silent screaming faces, it was then that Marjan understood where this thing was getting its parts from, and why the goblins had taken the elves prisoner in the first place. They weren’t food for the goblins after all, this vile travesty of life and undeath needed parts and it apparently liked elves for that purpose. That explained the long stream of once straight blond hair falling down the left side of its head. The right side was bald and grey except for the rows of crude stitching.

  It was enough to make the gorge rise in his throat, and the rage and magic weren’t far behind, especially when he had to wonder if he knew who some of those body parts had once belonged to. This thing took the understanding of monster to a new level and he knew it should never have been allowed to walk the world. But then he realised, it never had. This thing, or at least what it had begun as, had come from the void.

  The only good thing about it was that it was dead, finally truly dead, the wisps of smoke coming from its mouth and ears told him that, and he was grateful for the creature’s death, even if it denied him the chance to kill it all over again. Yet he had the feeling that even when it had lived, it had been mostly dead anyway.

  Part human, elf and other mortal, part undead corpse of several different races, the soul of something from the abyss, all somehow sewn together in an insane travesty of the healer’s art, it was a monstrosity. Marjan had never seen anything like it, never even imagined anything like it, and he didn’t understand it. But he didn’t want to either. More than anything else he wanted to run away and forget that such a thing as this had ever breathed the good air. If it did breath.

  Instead though, he had his duty, and somehow he ignored the still smoking corpse lying on the floor, and gathered up whatever tomes of knowledge he could find, determined that the most learned of the wizards and elders should learn something of this nightmare. Yet even that disturbed him, not just because the tomes seemed to be made out of some sort of black bark that felt almost oily under his fingers and made the hairs on his arms stand on end, but because the writing in them was blood, old dead blood, and not necessarily human. The writing itself he didn’t understand either. The symbols and script were of no language he recognised, and none he had ever seen, and he was certain they were old, ancient, and from a time long before the wizard wars.

  These he suspected were thousands of years old, written for another people, unlike anything that walked the world any longer. In fact he had a dreadful feeling that they had never walked the world, that they had come out of the abyss along with the wyrmlings themselves and this monstrous wizard, as impossible as such a thing seemed.

  Yet it made sense too, in a way. No one knew what the abyss truly was, and most assumed that it was simply a void. But if wyrmlings could come out of it, even if they were just spirits of some sort, then surely things could go in. Maybe people. Gallanar in his later years had suspected as much. And if people had gone in there, physically, maybe their bodies had remained there, trapped eternally, and the only thing left in that void after the souls of their owners had perished into that nightmare, was the flesh. Flesh that had been transformed slowly into the void’s equivalent of pen and paper, leathered skin and blood.

  He had no evidence for the theory, no proof, not even genuine grounds for speculation, and yet feeling the evil pieces of parchment under his hands, seeing them, smelling them, he was sure that was exactly what they were, blood tattooed hide. Somehow he stacked them away in his knapsack knowing they might be important, when all he really wanted to do was cleanse them with fire.

  Bearabus didn’t like it either, her fur was standing on end and she was growling under her breath, and he couldn’t exactly blame her. She was a smart bear. But at least he could get her out of this.

  Once the tomes of knowledge were all safely stacked away in his knapsack, he began heading for the exit, wanting nothing more than
to be a long way from this evil place as soon as possible, when something unexpected happened. The corpse of the dead wizard began moving, writhing, and that he knew was impossible when its chest was a blackened mess of burnt flesh. He told himself that again when it opened its eyes, mismatched pus filled eyes, to stare at him, hating him, and soon to start summoning its magic. He couldn’t allow that. Quickly, before it could lock its gaze on to him, he struck with the full fury of a sunbeam, the brilliant light streaming from his fingers and straight into the head of the creature, burning its way all the way through and deep into the ground underneath. The magic was there already waiting for him even before he needed it, far too quick for the undead thing to counter. One thing Master Argus was right about, he suddenly realised, he was a war spell.