The Azure Wizard (16 page)

As she pondered that troubling thought, a snapping twig diverted her attention whole-heartedly into the ominous woodland darkness that surrounded them. For some reason she knew that it was the wood-wise Kraegovich, who had luckily found them before May got her and Ethan lost deep on the sparsely-populated southern half of the Forests of Greenwell. Unfortunately May was wrong.

From the darker shadows around them stepped a Deep Wolf. May had seen Deep Wolves once, as two took down a mighty stag in a fit of yips and snarls. This was completely different. The attention of the animal was focused entirely on her and it was a lot bigger up close. To make matters ultimately worse two more of the Greenwellian beasts crept from the darkness on different sides of the small break in the trees in which the Foresters found themselves so that the dangerous wild beasts formed a triangle around the humans that was quickly getting smaller. Clouds racing in the hot summer wind dispersed from the sky above the break in the canopy, and as pure pale blue moonlight hauntingly shimmered into the imminent battleground May gasped at the true nature of the creatures around her.

These were not the ordinary Deep Wolves that she had seen the year before. In fact, these beasts were unlike anything in the wilds of the Three Baronies she had ever heard of. The beasts were the same size as Deep Wolves, nearly the size of a healthy mare, and they were covered in shaggy coarse black fur, blacker than the night. What marked them as different were their grotesque faces.

Their eyes were a pure sickly greenish-yellow color and were completely without a pupil, and their muzzles were rotted or scalded away to the bone with thin wiry strands of tissue holding the bottom jaw to the top. Flowing from the mouths of the horrid faces of the Deep Wolves, between razor-sharp corroded fangs, was a deluge of putrid yellow runny liquid. As strands of it dripped from the terrifying maws of the beasts and plopped into the vegetation of the forest floor there arose popping and sizzling noises accompanied by lines of swirling smoke that rose into the still stuffy forest air beneath the canopy of the trees. It was acid that was slobbered from the awful jaws, and May was sure that a single bite would be the last of her, if not from the deadly teeth that lined the powerful jaws than the potent scalding acid that was sure to enter any open wounds caused by a bite, and hungrily dissolve her flesh and bones.

May swallowed bile that arose in her throat, with a thick lump of horror and terror, and she stoically resolved to go down fighting against these terrible beasts. She would protect Ethan, maybe the only man she had ever kissed out of what might be love, as he laid in a trouble sleep. She would protect him until the monsters left her ripped open and boiling on the smoking detritus of the forest floor. To do that, she needed an edge.

She eased her own silver hand axe from her belt, and also bent down and used her shaky fingers to pry Ethan’s hand axe from his own waist. An axe in each firm gauntleted grip, May stared into the vacant eyes of the nearest Deep Wolf, the first that entered the clearing, and she twirled the hand axes, radiant in the moonlight. “Let’s do this, you bastards.”

May charged forward swinging her right axe in a brilliant vertical downward chop. The beast jerked its atrocious head back just in time to avoid the chop but an instant later the silver hand axe in May’s left hand raced in horizontally and chopped into the right side of the Wolf’s skull with a splintering crunch. It let out a yelp that almost made May smile for she knew finally that these Deep Wolves could feel pain. The successful attack forced the beast to recoil in sudden pain and the weapon was jerked from her left hand. Still the blade stayed embedded in the creature’s head, though it shook its head furiously to dislodge it. May then noticed smoke snaking from the axe wound. Great, she thought, acid for blood as well.

As it reeled in shock from that first devastating attack, May came forward with her remaining hand axe and hacked it as hard as she could into the skull of the beast, right between its terrible eyes. She knew that the attack would cost the Forester her other axe as well for the acid would eventually eat the silver blade away, but before that happened she would make some more use of it. She placed her foot on the back of its neck to provide her leverage as she finally jerked the smoldering weapon from its head, and she immediately brought it down in another downward chop that hacked deep into its neck, straight through its spinal column.

The large body of the Deep Wolf jerked spasmodically and shuddered as its nerves made their last attempt at animating the body, and then the horrible beast collapsed loosely to the ground like a puppet with its strings cut. May helped it along the way to the ground as she stomped her foot furiously into the back of its neck.

The Forester whirled around to see that the other two Deep Wolves were bounding at her, only about ten feet from her. She smiled at her predicament. She gripped a single smoking hand axe, the acid having turned it into more of bludgeoning weapon than an axe. She was alone against two extremely bizarre and dangerous beasts. “I’ll go down fighting,” she assured herself in whisper as they closed the distance to her.

Suddenly the head of the one to her left was cleaved from its sinewy neck by the wide steel blade of a sword. The corpse of the Deep Wolf smashed into May, knocking her out of the way of the snapping scalding jaws of the other beast, and she was pinned onto her back on the ground with this hulking monster atop her. In horror she watched helplessly as acid flowed from the gaping wound where its head was once attached and poured onto her leather breastplate. She tried to lift the Deep Wolf from her, but it was to no avail. The headless corpse of the monster had to weigh nearly six-hundred pounds. So May began to scream for help.

Kraegovich stood tall in the moonlit little clearing and stared confusedly at the smoldering blade of his longsword as it began to corrode before his eyes. “What in the name of the Ancestors?” he began but he was interrupted when the remaining Deep Wolf turned on its heel and sprinted towards him growling and snarling. May also began screaming from her position on the ground with the dead beast. Other matters took precedence.

The aged Forester gripped his soon-to-be-ruined sword in a taut two-handed grip that caused his huge arms and chest to bulge in tense strain awaiting release in a violent sudden attack. The Deep Wolf struck first as it leapt at the Forester. Kraegovich whirled to the side and the beast’s sizzling jaws smashed shut on his cloak where it was pinned beneath his chin. As it tore the cloak from Kraegovich’s hulking form with its acid-drenched maw he could feel its coarse hair brush across his face and he smelt the putrid bile-reeking stench of the acid.

It landed with a growl and began violently shaking the cloak in its jaws, whipping it back and forth in frenzied rage. Kraegovich stalked up behind the creature and let loose a horrific horizontal two-handed slash from right to left. The swipe of the ragged blade cut through the right back leg of the Wolf and continued on to cleave through the left back leg as well. Before it could cry out or attempt to escape Kraegovich used the momentum of that tremendous attack to spin himself an agile counter-clockwise rotation. As he came back around in a flourish to face the hindquarters of his wounded foe, it began to collapse, due to the severing of its back legs. He plunged his sword of melting steel into the beast’s abdomen with a tremendous two-handed lunge. It managed a feeble whine from its corroded muzzle as it collapsed into death on the forest floor.

Kraegovich left the ruined blade buried in the acid-filled corpse of the Deep Wolf and he stood tall and tense awaiting further violence with small dangerous eyes and flexed muscles. His silvery-grey hair and the scar on the left side of his face gleamed in the moonlight. As he began to control his breathing and relax he realized that May was screeching in terror beneath the corpse of the first Deep Wolf that Kraegovich had felled. He rushed over to her to see her head and shoulders protruding beneath the lifeless black mass atop her, and her eyes were wide and panicked. “Kraegovich!” she cried.

It was then that the older Forester noticed that the wound from the severed head of the beast was leaking acid onto May. His own eyes grew wide in alarm and he bent down, grabbing thick fistfuls of furry taut flesh, and began jerking the animal off of her. As soon as the slightest weight upon her had been alleviated May squirmed backward out from underneath the Deep Wolf and she sprang to her feet. Her cuirass was deluged with choking odorous smoke as it dissolved under the onslaught of the acid. Breathing heavily in fright she began unbuckling the armor with her shivering gauntleted hands. After a few clumsy slips of her fingers she finally undid the cuirass and tossed it to the side to corrode in the grass of the forest floor.

She ran her shaky hands over her torso that lay hidden beneath her sweat-soaked white tunic, and moaned in relief when she discovered the acid hadn’t yet made it through the armor to scald her flesh. She collapsed exhaustedly to her knees and hung her head so that her chin practically lay upon her chest, her wet hair hanging over her shoulder beside her face. Kraegovich rushed over to her after a quick kick into the corpse of the headless Deep Wolf that had trapped her, and he slid to his own knees beside the much smaller Forester.

“May, what are you doing here?” he barked in alarm as he put his hand on her shoulder. He then noticed that she was visibly shivering, and his grandfatherly-instincts took control.

“Are you okay, darling?”

May looked up into his rich brown eyes and responded in a voice about to break into sobs, “Kraegovich, we found you.”

He furrowed his bushy brow in confusion and replied with a quick smirk, “It would seem that I found you, May. Not the other way.”

She lowered her head and tears began to trickle from her lowered face. These didn’t escape Kraegovich’s attention and he began to get worried. “What are you doing here? Before I left I heard you had got into a mess with some brigands outside Greenwell City. I figured your mother wouldn’t let you out of the Compound till autumn.”

“Ethan, he …” she began but broke into exhausted sobs.

May’s hand, though, extended outward to point to Ethan’s still form in the grass of the clearing in the midst of the corpses of the Deep Wolves. Kraegovich’s worried gaze went to where she pointed and he gasped. He hadn’t noticed the fellow Vharian during the combat. Then he noticed the blue snaking runes that ran up the storyteller’s arms.

As he stood, never taking his eyes from the young man, he whispered, “What is wrong with him?”

May rose behind the old man and followed him over to Ethan. Kraegovich bent down and warily traced his hand along the blue tattoo-like symbols that flowed up Ethan’s thin arms, the whole time his brow tensed low shadowing his eyes. “He used Wizardcraft, Kraegovich,” May finally answered.

“What?”

“Ethan used Wizardcraft, twice tonight.”

Kraegovich at first looked up into May’s tear-streaked dirty face incredulously, but upon seeing the very dread seriousness in her visage, his too changed to mirror her own. “What do you mean he used Wizardcraft, May?” he asked in a very serious stern manner.

“I mean just that. Ethan Skalderholt is a Wizard. He received a vision of you walking down the Three Baronies Road whistling a Vharian song this afternoon. He then used …,” May was forced to catch her breath and regain her composure, “very powerful Wizardcraft to transport us a little ways north of here. He apparently got us as close to you as he could.”
Kraegovich was slack-jawed and at a complete loss for words. He looked back down at the storyteller, a Vharian like him, but he saw him as something else. He was raised to show respect to storytellers where he was raised by his family in Palerock, a small bountiful village a little ways west of Lumberwall, but what he now viewed Ethan with was something beyond respect. He wasn’t sure if he saw Ethan as human anymore. Wizardcraft had returned to the Three Baronies, and it had come with this young skinny boy from up north. To Kraegovich, Ethan was something more akin to one of the Ancestors than human.

The older Forester looked back up into May’s face with another furrowed, concerned mask and he inquired, “But why would the two of you come to me? I’m just heading south to Woodend on a routine assignment.”

“O’Dell is after you, moving as fast he can through the woods to catch you as the Three Baronies Road snakes back to the west. The Troll is after you, Kraegovich. It obviously seeks your form to infiltrate our ranks in Greenwell City. You’re going back there after you’re done with your southern patrol anyway. It’s the perfect cover for the beast.”

Kraegovich took this information in, let it absorb, and he clenched his jaw. “Let it come then. I grow tired of that monster, like all of us Foresters do.”

“What about O’Dell? He could be anywhere.”

“The road is a couple hundred yards to the east of here. That westward bend you spoke of is just to the east of here, in fact. Let’s go there and wait for O’Dell to find us. He has the skill of a Woodfolk out in these woods. He won’t miss us.”

When a Wizard Awakens

It was nearing dawn, the sky showing a faint pinkish hue in the breaks in the trees to the east, when Kraegovich and May settled down at the side of the Three Baronies Road with Ethan. The storyteller was still unconscious but he was beginning to groan and stir in his sleep, and he seemed to have returned to regular temperature. The collage of old oak and birch that shrouded the roadsides seemed to sigh at the prospects of an even hotter day as Dawn Heralds began to lightly sing in the boughs of the trees.

Kraegovich had taken off his black shirt and placed it in a rolled-up bundle beneath Ethan’s head as he lay on the ground. Then the old Forester had buckled his cuirass back over his immense, shirtless, muscular torso. He sat cross-legged beside Ethan with his silver hand axe, the only weapon of all three Foresters that had survived the onslaught of the Deep Wolves, resting in his lap. May sat atop a moss-covered log by Ethan’s head hugging her knees. Her blond hair hung limply about her face.