The Azure Wizard (4 page)

With a deluge of hot blood cascading down his face and a chest that felt like some horrid construct of both fire and ice the young man somehow managed to swing his bone blade into the face of the Berserker with the club. It chopped into his open mouth, slicing through taut wiry tissue until it chipped into the base of his skull. The Berserker’s bottom jaw dangled from his sun burnt face by only a single side. But he was forced to leave the weapon in the man’s face as another bone club smashed into the side of his skull, splintering his vision and sanity. He staggered backward on legs suddenly made of clay, and his brown eyes rolled back into his head, the door shutting to wakefulness, and he fell into snow.

When he awoke it wasn’t in the Ancestor Lands like he had hoped, but it was instead on his stomach, and the sharp icy ground was moving beneath him! As his senses slowly returned he noticed that there was a horrid pain in his arms and shoulders. He slowly lifted his crimson-stained head to see that he was being dragged by leather rope tied around his bleeding wrists. He could hear and sense other captives around him, some being dragged and some struggling to keep up on foot with the quick-paced Berserkers who held them leashed like animals. Of his family there was no sign but he assumed the worst.

For six days he was a captive of the Berserkers. As a nomadic tribe they traversed the Ice Wilds with its searing freezing winds of ice and fog and ground of razor sharp ice, stone and snow. He could do nothing but attempt to stay conscious as, one by one, the fingers of his right hand began to blacken and abandon feeling. He constantly was racked with intense shaking as he struggled to retain a scrap of body heat with his bloody woolen garments amidst the glacial frigid environment that he was unfortunate enough to find himself in. For six days he sat there shivering and sobbing, dying, as the screams of his fellow villagers shrieked through the Berserker encampment as, one by one, they were chosen by the barbarians to be their meal, and were thus gutted and skinned alive. Their flesh was roasted before their fading teary gazes to be devoured by jagged rotten yellow teeth, and their hides were left unprotected in the dry bitter wind to be leathered into garments for the brutes. He survived for six days by only ingesting snow.

On the sixth day he was sure he couldn’t last another night, nor would the Berserkers allow him to remain uneaten. He would have assumed it the providence of the Ancestors, if he hadn’t already lost all of his faith in them, when the Ice Cats came. They arrived in a pack, instantly sowing pandemonium among the Berserkers. The Ice Cats, longtime foes and hunters of the men that inhabited the Ice Wilds, fell savagely upon the Berserkers shredding them in flurries of wicked fangs and claws. The Berserkers tried to defend themselves, but they were caught too unawares and the attacks of the Ice Cats were just too lethal.

One of the largest of the pack ambled up to the weary frail body of the man in his dilapidated and weakened state. The Ice Cat, a slightly above-average specimen some four feet tall at the shoulder and ten feet long, had a thick coat of white fur, with longer gray fur draped from his underside, a ridge of wiry black hair that ran from the base of his skull to about midway down his back. It had massive, powerful jaws from which a massive foot-long fang descended from each side. Piercing cerulean blue eyes gazed at the man with a fierce intensity and wisdom. The young man was glad to be ending his life on the fangs of an Ice Cat rather than those of his fellow man.

Yet the Ice Cat did not kill him. Rather it came forward with its toothy maw agape and bit down on the front of his sodden wool tunic. With a firm secure bite on his clothing it easily lifted the man from his back, and the Ice Cat took off at a furious gait southward towards the looming figures of the Vhar Mountains. By the end of the day the animal, panting and exerted, had brought him into the foothills of the Vhar Mountains. In another extremely rare act of human-like compassion the wild animal slept coiled around the feeble human using its thick fur and immense body heat to provide the man with whatever warmth that it could, which was no small amount. The man awoke in the late morning to a dead rabbit dangling from the fanged maw of the Ice Cat, and though forced to devour it raw, he still enjoyed it thoroughly.

The Ice Cat escorted the ravaged man beyond the ruins of Broken Stone and into the evergreen forests midway up the north flanks of the Vhar Mountains. There, as oddly as their union, they parted ways, the Ice Cat turning and bolting back to the north towards the Ice Wilds. The young man thanked his ancestors in the Ancestor Lands and continued southward. Arriving in the first village he came across, by the name of Whiteham it was known, he was fortunately granted with warm shelter and hot home-cooked food. His hosts tried in vain to save the ruin of his right hand, but all that remained were scars and two fingers, the pinky and ring finger. But he at least still possessed his life.

So when his strength and constitution were recovered the man departed Whiteham and traveled further southward, passing a few villages en route, until finally he reached the warmer forested country on the Barony of Vhar’s southern boundary. It was there were he entered the town of Lumberwall, safe behind its high walls and guards. Still enamored with storytellers, but knowing full well that he was too old now to train to become one, he instead would do all that he could to be around them. Eventually the young man grew into middle-age, his blond locks fading in hue and his once ever-present muscles became covered by age and mead-bestowed girth. Still he never once left Lumberwall. The wilds beyond the walls of a safe settlement were too fraught with horror and danger for the sensibilities of a person that had experienced such pain and misery that his time in the Ice Wilds and with the Berserkers had brought him.

He made a life for himself and managed to gear it around the tales, songs and legends he loved so much. Storytellers and minstrels flocked to his business and he was blessed with a very safe and enjoyable life.

Upon finishing his tale the audience raised a gleeful uproar of applause and hoorahs that smashed into the grinning Ethan like the fierce gust of a winter blizzard. He stumbled as he stood from his stool upon the stage and took a terse bow. He then stepped from the stage and was greeted by claps on his back and thanks for the great tale. Ethan thanked his audience warmly and walked back towards the bar. Just about everybody in the tavern put nary a thought into the identity of the hero of the story, but one individual in The House of Chronicles knew exactly whom the story portrayed. As Ethan strode forward his intense amber gaze was returned by a brown one even more intense.

“What do you think, Eikjard, good enough for supper and a bed?” inquired Ethan slapping his hand on the counter of the bar right next to where Eikjard’s gnarled right hand with its two fingers laid. Ethan smirked into the bushy worn face of the barkeep, and with a knowing smile he shrugged. Eikjard could only whisper, “How did you know? That story isn’t known around here, but for personal friends.”

“Well, Eikjard, I’m not from around here. The storytellers of the village of Whiteham have always traded tales with its closest neighboring village, North Ridge, my home.”

Eikjard could do nothing but shake his head at the resurgence of memories the night’s events had brought him. He then met Ethan’s level amber gaze and asked, “How does elk steak, wild potatoes, and fresh milk suit you?”

Ethan enjoyed not only his free meal but also the company of Eikjard and the patrons of The House of Chronicles, many of whom were storytellers themselves. Never before had he thought to ever find himself in the company of so many intellectual folk so similar to himself. Fresh milk soon turned into honey mead, which was thankfully granted to Ethan free of charge. After his hearty meal Eikjard shared with the storyteller a couple of slices of warm bread topped with golden honey and cinnamon.

When day turned into night many more patrons came in off of the streets of Lumberwall, including some additional performers. Ethan heard many more Vharian tales and songs with the enraptured audience, but he told no more himself on that summer night. Each and every patron appeared to be a hardy Vharian, and even the Wendlithian troubadour that had been performing upon his initial entry into The House of Chronicles had departed the common room at one point or another.

Most of the tales he already knew and the ones that he wasn’t familiar with were reflexively catalogued into his memory to be used later should the occasion arrive. But the more the young storyteller thought about his near future the more sure he was that his skills as a storyteller would become less important once he passed beyond the border of the Barony of Vhar and entered the Barony of Greenwell. As his grandmother had explained, the Barony of Greenwell was a land of books and texts and the rural storytellers of the Vhar Mountains were little more than curiosities of the rugged northern land. Despite that, Ethan still intended to venture into the warmer lands to the south where forests of birch and oak and maple blanketed the land from settlement to settlement on a ground shrouded in moss, grass, and ferns. Vhar held nothing more for him. It only held his past.

Later in the evening, likely close to midnight, Eikjard’s shift was relieved by a plump-bodied and rustic-voiced gal named Molly, whom Eikjard was known to bed with. The old barkeep and Ethan sat alone at a corner table near an open window looking over the dirt lane outside. A single candle illuminated their quiet conversation and both were well into a small cask of honey mead. In the waning conversation and crowd of the tavern Eikjard inquired, “What then, lad, do you intend once you cross over into Greenwell? Is it going to be adventures before you settle down and try to make storytelling popular thereabouts as it was in the Ancient Age?”

“I don’t know yet, Eikjard. All I know is that these high snowy crags and their copses of pine and aspen hold nothing more for me. My family is now completely vanished, departed into the Ancestor Lands with the rest of my kin, and to tell you the truth, my life as a storyteller in this barony has garnered me no respect to speak of.”

“Why not remain here in Lumberwall? I know as sure as myself that you would draw one beast of a crowd from one night and on to the next. You have a gift, Ethan. Myself, I’ve seen scores and scores of storytellers pass beneath that doorframe and naught a one in recent memory has enraptured an audience so with their first telling. You could easily make yourself a fine living here, at the foot of the Vhar Mountains. I’d even consider you an employee of The House of Chronicles. I’d give you a steady wage in addition to room and board. Beyond the boundary of this barony the skills that you’ve spent your whole life learning since you were a babe, the skills to become a storyteller, will become worthless.”

“I have no idea what will happen once I enter Greenwell, Eikjard. All I know is that’s where I’m going. And I’m going tomorrow.”

Ethan’s room was in the inn section of The House of Chronicles that was entered through a door in the stables attached to it, or, as was the case with Ethan, an individual could walk up a wooden staircase in the tavern’s common room. This staircase led to either the tables located on the balcony overlooking the taproom, or they led outside to a short, decorative, wooden bridge that stretched over the exterior side street to the three floors of chambers located in the inn section. He was located in one of the ten pleasant rooms that comprised the third floor.

He sat alone on the end of his bed, a moderately-sized affair draped in wool and linen blankets, and he admired the room he found himself in. Walled in aromatic timber the walls were broken only by a single window that looked down into Lumberwall’s main avenue. A single lantern that had obviously seen years of use burned atop a small square table aside the headboard of the bed. The room radiated a rustic, rural, but comfortable feel that so well summarized the attitude of the Barony of Vhar. He smirked and blushed at the sound of a couple, likely traveling performers, making love in the next room.

Ethan felt excited, yet at the same time anxious, for the morrow that would take him over the border and into the Barony of Greenwell. He peeled off his woolen shirt and trousers and tossed them in a pile before the heavy pine door of the room. He then unlatched the window and pushed it open, letting the cooler night air kiss his skin, damp from the thick wool clothing Ethan owned. A few riders and loud drunks traversed the quiet dirt roads of Lumberwall in the still late darkness, and Ethan’s view afforded him an astounding view of the town. Castle Lumberwall, home of the Baron of Vhar and his family, dominated the center of the circular walled town like the hub of a great wheel, but just slightly less in size was the Grand Chapel of Lumberwall. It was a church of the Ancestors in the form of a towering stone cathedral where priests and priestesses orated to the populace on the proper ideals to achieve the Ancestor Lands upon death as opposed to the lonely frightful Soul Wastes.

Ethan scratched the side of his head which brought him to notice his long hair that hung just past his shoulders was unkempt and soiled. His skin felt much the same and his red beard and mustache, an actual shade of red unlike his dirty-blond hair, were itchy and odd-feeling. Ethan had always trimmed his facial hair to the skin as he had been told it kept his boyish good looks, but on the wild stretches of trail that meandered through the Vhar Mountains he was afforded no opportunity to shave. It had been over two weeks since the village of Gredor where the storyteller had taken his last real bath, and he was in dire need of another. He just considered himself fortunate that none of the patrons of the tavern had noticed his filth, or if they had, they thankfully didn’t bring it to attention. “Maybe Eikjard wouldn’t mind letting me take a bath before I depart,” Ethan stated to himself after sneering in disgust at the appearance of his grubby reflection in the window.