Fantasy For Good: A Charitable Anthology Page 10

  Rath sniffed the sweet wine, sipped, and felt the fruitiness explode on his tongue even as his mouth burned. He gulped more down, savoring it.

  The inn began to fill. Eager peasants had seen Rath’s dragon, Shofarun, and many gathered outside to admire it. They were shouting and gesticulating. In truth, as Shofarun squatted in the road, he didn’t seem to be much more than a large, sluggish green lizard with wings, basking in the afternoon sun.

  People marveled anyway. If he stretched his neck, he was fully as tall as the inn.

  Peasants soon came tumbling through the door, fresh from the field. It was spring, and they smelled of sheep from shearing, or rich barley from the field, or freshly turned soil. Green-bottle flies spun lazily behind the bar, drawn by the odor of ripe peasants. Soon, a pair of server wenches weaved among the patrons, never spilling a drop from the mugs on their wooden serving trays despite the occasional slap or pinch.

  A sad little band began playing—pipes too shrill, drums too eager. The inn became a madhouse, as busy as on Midwinter Feaste.

  So much for a quiet drink, Rath thought. He hefted his mug, tried to savor the Grimmsberry wine. But the putrid odor of ogre blood on his sleeve ruined the taste.

  Across the bar, a serving lad peered up, eyes shining in admiration, while the crowd pressed against his back.

  “Give a man some room!” Sir Bolgrum roared at Rath’s back. There is a saying, “The shorter the dwarf, the louder he grumbles.” It was certainly true in this case. The dwarven mercenary threw an elbow, which clubbed a merchant in the gut. Then Sir Bolgrum grasped the haft of his ancient dwarven ax and cast a baleful glare, as if daring any peasant to take a swing.

  “See that?” someone in the crowd whispered. “He just thumped the constable’s son!”

  The constable’s son stood holding his belly, more shocked than hurt, but Rath worried that this was only the beginning of trouble. Sir Bolgrum could be an angry drunk.

  The room went quiet as Sir Bolgrum wiped ale from his long brown beard. “He’s lucky I didn’t aim lower. I’d have gladly cracked his precious chestnuts!” The dwarf glared about, inviting a fight, as if he’d love to take on the whole town.

  “Peace, my friends,” Rath pleaded. This day I want nothing more than peace.

  At that moment, the outside door swung open on rusty hinges, and a small gasp ushered through the crowd, a sound like breakers in a distant surf.

  Rath glanced over his shoulder to see the cause: an old man with stringy gray hair and a beggar’s dirty robes was crawling across the threshold.

  Just a drunk, Rath thought, hoping to lick up any ale that spills.

  But the beggar’s appearance brought whispers of surprise from the crowd, and Rath felt hair begin to rise on the back of his neck, as if a cold wind suddenly slithered through the room.

  Rath recognized that sensation. Something else had entered the room with the old man: creatures from the spirit realm. What they wanted, Rath could not begin to know. He only knew that they were there, shadowy things that slipped into the room, sensed only as a chill that ran down the spine.

  Rath could feel their eyes upon him, as if a stare was a heavy thing.

  Sir Bolgrum peered down, tsk-ed at the beggar. “Everywhere you go, Rath, beggars appear—just like worms rising from the dirt.”

  It was a singular moment. Rath realized that this was no common beggar. It was a personage of great power, to have spirits surrounding him so, perhaps a sorcerer even.

  There was a loud gasp nearby, and people began to back away from the beggar.

  Rath did not mind the constant petitions. The world was full of need. But this one would be different, he could tell.

  Rath gulped his wine and turned to get a better view of the old man. The crowd began to part. The man’s gray hair was ratty, and he dressed in robes of sackcloth, but with each lurch of his hand, there was a small thudding upon the wooden floor, and Rath saw that he wore rings of gold and silver on every finger—rings too valuable for a beggar. Indeed, one fat ring was set with a small pixie’s skull, fangs protruding, and a fiery sprite inside made its eyes flame violet. The townsfolk were staring at the beggar in awe, and one maid dropped to her knee.

  The old man suddenly peered up at Rath, with eyes of clearest green, lush as sea jade. He was not old at all. He was an elf, with silver hair worn in dreadlocks. His skin was pale bluish-white, as is common among the fair folk. He had a red griffin tattooed at each temple, a sign of royalty.

  “Dragonrider,” the elf pleaded. “Though I am king of this realm, and your king in name, I come to you now as a beggar, seeking aid.”

  Rath had never met a king, and had never wanted to–especially this one. King Seloniss ty Valtur, it was whispered, leaned toward the philosophies of the Argent Elves, some of whom thought that humans were but animals, to be used as servants, or slaughtered when they were of no use.

  King Seloniss ty Valtur was the one who levied taxes, sent men to the gallows, or ordered them to war. Rath didn’t know whether to stand, or kneel, or piss his pants.

  “Wha, what do ya want?” he managed.

  “My daughter, Arriannis,” the king said. “She has been kidnapped. She is held in an orcs’ prison. Only you can save her.”

  “Surely you have better swordsmen,” Rath objected, picking the king up from the floor. “I’m no hero.”

  “Oh, I have men who can dance with a blade as if it were a lover,” the king said, “but none have a dragon. I need it. My daughter is held in a prison that flies…”

  The peasants in the room had been jubilant only moments before. Now their faces grew pale. The music died completely; the laughter ceased. Even the simplest farmer realized the import of this.

  In the past ten days, the earthquakes had broken the Lightwall, and orcs had finally breached it for the first time in four hundred years, taking three of Shandrual’s northern kingdoms.

  The realm needed more defenders and weapons than ever. But their elven blades were forged by Argent Elves in the north. Their leader, Prince Gavar of Glamdower, was betrothed to the princess. The two had taken sacred vows, binding the kingdoms, almost as if they were married, for it was said that they were bound at the spirit.

  But if Rath could not return the princess, the alliance would become void. Gavar would be forced to make another alliance, and the weapons Rath’s people needed would be lost.

  If Rath failed to rescue Arriannis, everyone in the village of Monkshood, perhaps everyone in all of Shandrual, might well be doomed.

  “You say she’s on a prison that flies?” Rath asked, wondering how much had changed since the dark god’s fist had slammed into the world. “How can that be? Does it have wings?”

  The king’s eyes lost color, as happened when elves shielded their feelings, and he answered hesitantly, as if he did not want to discuss such matters in public. He peered at the peasants, then shrugged, as if he realized that secrecy could no longer be maintained. “There was a great storm in the southern reaches, my rangers tell me, just two days after the god’s fist struck the land. It was a storm like no other.”

  The king raised both hands, palms facing Rath, thumbs spread, and nearly cupped Rath’s face. Then the king “sent” him a vision, in the way of elven mages. The things that Rath saw could not have come from just one witness, but had to have been seen by dozens of elves.

  Rath saw a storm roiling toward him. It came like a towering wall of blackness, four thousand feet high, with colored lightning blasting through its midst in shades of green and purple, flickering like serpents tongues. It roared as if in rage at the world.

  Sandstorms in the desert were said to sometimes appear like this, but there were no black sands within this storm. The blackness was something else, some other “substance” that had no name.

  The winds howled like beasts, beating at Rath, and he saw the storm bear down upon the dwarven kingdom at Cor Wurm, and upon the human habitations near the Ondruil Sea. The storm tore through the
land, bowling over trees, sweeping houses away like so much dust, flattening strong fortresses.

  Those caught above ground were simply swept away, like straw in the wind, never to be seen again. Some managed to hide beneath the ground, yet even they did not escape. For Rath saw as if from the keen eyes of an elven ranger, as a family took refuge in an underground fruit cellar. The vision shifted, and after the storm a ranger leaned down to open the cellar door, after the house had been swept away.

  Upon pulling the door upward, he saw frightened human children huddling with their mother. Their skin was ragged, yellow, and blotched with rot. Their eyes had turned a dull green, as if infected.

  The children growled at the light, baring pointed fangs.

  The vision ended abruptly, and Rath blinked in surprise to find himself back in the inn.

  The peasants stared at the king, dread plain on their faces, and no one spoke, though some shifted uneasily.

  Sir Bolgrum gave a derisive snort. He had not seen the vision. “Changed how? No little storm could frighten a dwarf. I should like to see one of these storms. I’d piss into its winds!”

  “Dwarves have stout hearts,” the king admitted, “but this was not a storm from this world. My rangers call it a ‘chaos storm’.”

  The king reached into a fold of his robe, pulled out a small vial made of cut quartz that seemed to be filled with an inky liquid. “Here is some air from that storm,” King Seloniss whispered. “It is like no substance we have ever seen. It seems thicker than any mist. It is the very essence of corruption. Watch!”

  He lowered the vial to the bar, and pulled off its crystalline stopper. Black air flowed down like a fog, then began to surround a stoneware mug. But it did not spread as a fog would. Instead, the inky darkness moved like an animal, coiling like a snake, filled with unknowable purpose. As soon as it touched the mug, the ink rushed around it, gripped it, and then began to seep into the stoneware as if it were a sponge.

  The mug suddenly…shifted. The stoneware turned into a crablike creature with three claws, seven legs, and a single great eye upon its back.

  “By my father’s beard!” Sir Bolgrum shouted. He pulled his ax from its sheath, and swung at the tiny monster.

  It leapt sideways, fast as a jumping spider, and then scuttled across the table. It leapt onto a peasant’s arm, ripped with a claw, and tore open the peasant’s hand. Blood flooded out of a ragged wound, and the man screamed. He hurled the monster back onto the bar, and it landed with a sound like a mug thumping down.

  The innkeeper’s tabby cat had been sitting upon an ale keg behind the bar, apparently napping, but now like any fine mouser upon seeing something small scuttling about, it pounced upon the creature.

  The strange crab grabbed the cat’s legs with three separate claws, and bones snapped. The cat yowled, and tried to bite down upon the creature’s head, but the stoneware crab was too hard to pierce.

  The crab’s claws kept working, snipping into the cat’s flesh like shears, crunching through bone.

  Sir Bolgrum slammed a fist on the crab, and it shattered into several pieces that skittered across the table and went still.

  The crab lay dead, broken, in two dozen pieces.

  Rath could see no proper guts or innards or muscles in the monster. Instead the thing’s broken limbs were white inside, like baked clay, covered with a brown glaze, like mere crockery.

  The innkeeper’s wife grabbed her cat, and instantly wrapped it with her apron, trying to staunch its bleeding wounds.

  “I’m sorry,” the king told the innkeeper’s wife. “I had no idea what that damned air would do. Ever it is thus: that which it does not destroy, it alters. There are new things in the world, new races of creatures, new plants. From the far north to the distant south, these storms have begun to rage. What news I have is as sparse as it is grim. If we do not find the source of this evil, I fear what might become of us.”

  Rath pondered what the king had told him, and what he hadn’t. Saving the princess was one thing, but the people of this realm needed so much more. He would need to solve this mystery—discover the source of the chaos storms.

  Rath was hardly more than a boy. Solving such mysteries seemed beyond him. This was a worthy work for the king’s wizards, and even they might not be equal to the task. Yet he longed to find an answer.

  “You said that the orcs have your daughter in a flying prison. But how did she get there? Did the orcs that take her sprout wings?” He asked the question half as a joke. With what he’d just seen, flying orcs sounded quite…possible.

  “The creature that took her was no orc,” the king said, as he held his palms out, a sign that he was giving all the answer that he could. “Her guards heard her scream two nights ago. They burst in and saw… something—a creature of shadow, bearing her away. It wore armor beneath robes of black, and it held Arriannis in its arms as it floated out an open window, and into the clouds. That was two nights ago, in the dark of the moon.

  “We have searched the bestiaries to learn the creature’s name, but have done so in vain. This is nothing from our world.”

  Rath pondered. A shadow, like the black ether that the king had freed from the jar? Could it be that the substance in that storm really did have a consciousness, a will?

  “Mystery piled on enigma,” Sir Bolgrum mused. “There is some deep sorcery here…”

  The king eyed Rath, clutched his hands together in supplication. “Please, Dragon Rider, the prison has floated into the canyons above Griffinal.”

  Rath glanced about at the peasants in the inn, wishing that he could take someone to support him. But none of them would be of help. He felt that chill creep down his spine again, and felt of a surety that he was stepping into a larger world, one more dangerous and terrifying than he’d ever dreamt.

  A god had made him a Dragon Rider, stepped in after his death, granted him a new body. Rath suspected that the god had his reasons, that Rath had been called to fight some foe that was beyond the understanding of mortal men.

  But this inky darkness unnerved him. Could even a Dragon Rider hope to face it?

  Legend said that ancient Dragon Riders were immortal. Right, Rath thought, that’s why they’ve all been dead for more than a thousand years.

  Fear knotted his guts.

  The king raised his hands, once again, and sent an image forcefully: an elven girl with skin of bluish white, and hair the color of spun silver. She was a tiny thing. If she’d been human, she might not look more than thirteen. She peered up from the floor of a dark cell, while shadows surrounded her. There was a light coming from her, as insubstantial as starlight. Outside her barred room, True Orcs paced—monsters eight feet tall, even hunched as they were, with yellowed tusks protruding from their lower lips.

  Rath’s heart pounded. He had never seen a girl so beautiful. In the sending, the king also sent his love for Arriannis, as pure and hot as the heat from a forge. In that instant, Rath loved her, too.

  He grabbed a small loaf of brown bread from a basket on the table, and a hunk of goat cheese, so that he could eat as he flew.

  “I’m on my way,” he announced. Without another word he raced out to the street, leapt onto Shofarun’s back, and urged the beast into the air.

  People poured out of the inn behind him, shouting in surprise, some begging to come with him, others crying “Fare thee well.” Loudest of all he heard Sir Bolgrum, in his gruff voice, demanding, “Come back, you fool! You can’t do this without me.”

  He did not need them. His heart was pounding too hard. This was not a job that a common mortal could handle. He would return for the dwarf later. He dared not keep Arriannis waiting.

  JAMES ENGE is the author of Blood of Ambrose (which was nominated for the World Fantasy Award), This Crooked Way, and The Wolf Age. His current project is the trilogy A Tournament of Shadows, which is about to see completion with the forthcoming publication of The Wide World’s End (slated to appear in winter 2015). His short fiction has appea
red in Black Gate, at Every Day Fiction, in Swords and Dark Magic, and elsewhere. He is a lecturer in classical languages and literature at a medium-sized public university in northwest Ohio. He’s on Facebook as james.enge and on Twitter as @jamesenge.

  Snow Wolf and Evening Wolf

  James Enge

  There was a man called Evening Wolf. No one knew his parents. He came out of the east and settled at Ulfstad in Iceland. Iceland was newly discovered then and there was plenty of good land. Evening Wolf worked hard, dealt shrewdly and became rich. He would rise early each morning to go out and direct his workers. He worked all day himself. Toward evening when people began to grow sleepy, he would become bad-tempered and snarled at anyone who spoke to him, his eyes red as blood. People left him alone and he would go to bed. Some said this was why he was called Evening Wolf; some said there were other reasons.

  *~*~*~*

  There was a man called Snow Wolf. His father was Iron-Grim Hvitason, who farmed at Hvitaness in Westfarthing. Iron-Grim is not named in The Book of Land-Taking, and the reason is this: men say that the Hvitasons were already settled in Iceland when the first people from Norway arrived.

  Snow Wolf was illegitimate; his mother was a concubine that Iron-Grim brought back from a viking-raid into Ireland. Iron-Grim had no other children, and when he and his ship were lost at sea Snow Wolf took Hvitaness as the only heir.

  Snow Wolf was a capable and friendly man, well-respected by his neighbors. He was something below average height; he had a round head and dark hair, as the Irish do. There was one strange thing about him: toward winter, his hair would turn white. Then he would leave his stead in the hands of his wife and a steward and go away. Men said he travelled in southern lands, for when asked he would say he had been “chasing the sun.” Otherwise he never discussed his travels, but he often returned from them with gold.