That Frigid Fargin Witch (The Legend of Vanx Malic) (7 page)

Most of the other expressions Vanx spotted weren’t so hopeful, especially those of the rabbit-sized brownie men who were huddling behind Thorn. They were trying to be polite, yet doing everything they could to keep the elf between them and Sir Poopsalot. They kept looking from Poops, up to Chelda, to Vanx, and back to Thorn.

Poops was up and quivering with curious energy. He wasn’t trying to defy the gentle grasp Chelda had on the leather strap harness he still wore, but it was plain he wanted to go sniff them. Vanx sent out a mental command for the dog to sit still and calm down. To his great surprise Poops sat, then looked at him and whined out his plea. Even more amazing was that the little things fluttering all about the cavern felt it when Vanx used the familiar link between the two.

As he stood, Vanx remembered the white gold trinket at his neck was glowing cherry. But when he looked around he forgot about it because the wonder of the cavern they were in suddenly revealed itself. Scores of terraced step-rows, each about half the height of a normal human stair, and three times as deep, spread up and away. The flat of each riser was covered by a bed of some spongy turquoise moss or mold. From this stuff sprouted all shapes of mushroom caps from tall, phallic-looking spikes to stubby oversized toadstools. These were as brilliantly colored and patterned as the wings of the tiny sprites that tended them and he paused to wonder if that wasn’t some sort of intended natural design in order to help the little buzzers hide.

The mossy stuff was the source of the blue-green illumination. The terraced rows extended forty or fifty yards alongside the path before ending against a rough-hewn wall. The path itself ran through the cavern and kept on going through an arch that was similarly shaped, but a little larger than the one they’d come through in the fairy mound. Along the pathway’s edge, and along the lower terrace steps, there were small, rectangular, hut-like dwellings that had dark, moss-covered roofs. Through coin-sized window holes, Vanx saw several faces peeking out curiously. He noticed that either the majority of these folks were hiding, or they were away somewhere, because there were far too many dwellings to house the meager number of little folk he’d seen so far.

A young brownie girl, her silken beard looking like a tuft of golden dandelion fluff under a tired smile and bright blue eyes, shyly approached. She gave Thorn a covered basket. Thorn peeked inside the little offering and smiled through his gloom, before thanking her kindly. He spoke some more to the brownie men in a language that was more musical whistling and chirping than it was words. A few of the buzzy sprites literally chimed in comments, and then finally Thorn gave a sad, slow, nod that was followed by a long, reverent silence.

The pinky-toe-sized boy returned to buzz and dart about Vanx’s head and did so until he had Vanx’s full attention. Vanx squinted and narrowed his gaze to focus on the boy, and he stopped in a relatively still hover. He was offering something to Vanx, something the size of a pea that was a dark purple color and so heavy that the sprite seemed to be struggling to hold onto it.

Seeing the strain on the little sprite’s face, Vanx opened his palm so the little guy could lay down his burden and rest his wings for a moment. A dozen other tiny, winged folk were cautiously flitting about Vanx’s heartleaf medallion.

Glancing at Chelda, Vanx saw that she was being offered not one but two of the bead-like objects. Then the miniature boy dropped the thing into Vanx’s palm and began putting his hand to his mouth as if he were eating.

Vanx nodded his understanding and ate the thing. It was a berry of some sort. It tasted both sweet and sour and was full of far more flavor than seemed possible. Almost immediately he felt an exhilarating rush course through his body, all the sadness and sorrow of Gallarael’s death, and the guilt he felt for getting Chelda imprisoned in the Underland, was suddenly washed away. Another sprite, a larger one who looked to be an adolescent girl, shooed the boy away and dropped three more berries into Vanx’s palm. No sooner did he put them in his mouth than another sprite came.

“Mmm,” Chelda said.

Poops yipped and snapped out as a berry fell from the grasp of an overburdened sprite. The dog caught the tiny fruit from the air and munched it. He began yipping and barking at the swarming sprites then, and they began dropping berries on purpose.

“Enough!” Thorn scolded the sprites. “Enough I say. You’ll have them addicted.” Then to Vanx and Chelda, “Don’t eat too many of these or you’ll go mad.”

“But they are so good,” said Chelda. “So much flavor.”

Thorn nodded and made a silly grin. “If your constitution is anything like the last human who ate too many of them then you’ll be blowing chunks out of both ends before too long, and we’ve got no time for it. I’ve just learned the call to arms went out only moments after Queen Corydalis sent us her dying wish. Only those too old, or too young, to fight are staying behind; everyone else is converging at the nexus to make war.”

Vanx shooed a pair of young sprites away from Poops, who had now eaten a dozen of the berries. Vanx had eaten a few of them too and was feeling as strong and confident as he ever had.

“Let’s be off then,” he offered. “They’ll want to include mighty Chelda and her trigon blade in their planning.”

“I feel like I could take on all of that witch’s beasts by myself,” said Chelda. “Let’s go before the feeling wears off.”

“Oh, it’s not likely to wear off soon,” said Thorn as he started them back along the path. “You’ll feel invincible for several days. Most of the fae are meek and peaceful. Without the battle berries they’d never be able to muster the courage to go to war against the Hoar Witch’s horde.”

“But it’s a false sense of might,” said Vanx, as he concentrated on his footing to avoid squishing any brownies.

“We need any sort of might we can get, Vanx Saint Elm.” Thorn waved one of the sprites away and spoke over his shoulder to them.

“If the Hoar Witch gains control of the Heart Tree then we will all die anyway. We might as well all die fighting. Our young and our old will eat them too, if it comes to that. This is no human war, over a territory, or a tariff; this is a battle for the future existence of each and every one of the Lurr Forest fae.”

Chapter
Eight
Chapter
Eight

They’ve eyes like cats and skin that sheds

and golden hair upon their heads.

They live forever I swear it’s true,

no telling what they’ll do to you.

– A sailor’s song

“A
serica,” Clytun came hurrying into the Hoar Witch’s crystal-formed parlor room, where she sat in the moon’s jaundiced glow upon a throne-like pedestal made from the gnarled roots of one of her augmented witchwood trees. “The elves and sylphs and some brownies came up out of the other fairy mounds and flanked Vrooch and his pack. They are pinned in.”

A green-tinted fire burned without the crackle and hiss of a typical wood blaze in a hearth made of dark brimstone. A certain stench, the smell of pig shit, permeated the room and mingled with the odd combination of incenses and herbs that she had added to the kettle hanging over it.

“He’s a stupid mutt,” she replied, pulling a silver carving knife away from the small bone into which she’d been etching symbols. It was Queen Corydalis’s thighbone, still warm from the rendering pot. It was tedious work carving in something so small and delicate, but a wand made from the bones of a true fairy queen would be more powerful if properly enchanted.

“Rouse the blood birds and the trollamonks. Sic them on the other fairy mounds, then go call Slither home.” The Hoar Witch stopped and touched a crooked finger to one of the larger moles on the side of her nose. “Tell him mother wants to see him immediately,” she cackled.

“Yes, mistress,” Clytun bowed his bovine head. “But what of Vrooch?”

“I’ll see to Vrooch,” her cackle turned to a laugh. “Or rather Skryker will.” The Hoar Witch rose and laid her knife and the thighbone in the witchwood throne. “Fetch me the key to his cage before you worry with the others. Oh, and bring me Pwca’s whistle while you’re at it.”

If the bullheaded minotaur could have looked nervous, Clytun would have. Skryker was a long-limbed, goblin beast that was almost impossible to control once he was frenzied. Skryker would kill everything he could sink his teeth and claws into, friend or foe. Clytun knew this all too well, for he had several scars from the last time the thing had gotten loose. It had taken Clytun several days and cost him several gallons of blood just to get Skryker out of the dungeons and back in his cage. And Pwca, that rat-riding little devil and his freakish red-eyed horde, was possibly worse, for Pwca wasn’t a creation of the Hoar Witch, but a devil in his own right.

Aserica had tricked Pwca into her service long ago. The black-skinned, egg-headed beast was only a hand span tall and looked like a flipper-legged tadpole to Clytun, but Pwca commanded legions of burrow rats that loved eating fairy flesh almost as much as he did. The devil owed the Hoar Witch two more favors before he would be released from her service, so there was no doubt he would relish this call.

Clytun bowed out of the chamber and shivered as he did so. This little war was about to get nasty. He decided to fetch his weapons and plate armor just as soon as he finished his current chores.

As the Hoar Witch moved to the doorway, the throne on which she had been sitting folded in on itself and over the items she’d left there. It shifted forms into a gnarled, spidery thing and scrabbled over to the corner farthest from the green-tinted hearth fire. There it resumed a chair shape, with the pixie bone and carving knife sitting just as the Hoar Witch had left them. The Hoar Witch cackled gleefully as she exited the chamber, but if her mirth was over the witchwood’s natural aversion to open flame, or some other oddity, no one could say.

On her way down to her lookout she felt a warm radiance coming from the crystal at her neck. Stopping to grasp it and concentrate, she was both surprised and angered by the message one of her sneaks was sending her. She ordered Gat, the owl-winged lemuracat who’d called to her, to hold his position, then continued in a more hurried pace out of her crystal palace and down the spiraling steps to the lookout.

Angry snarls and pain-filled howls came to her from the barred doors of the many cages she passed on her way down. Few of these hybrid experiments gone awry were releasable. Malformed and twisted beyond any sort of functionality, they would either starve to death or be killed by other creatures. A legless tiger beast, an obese tuskabor with scaled skin that never formed completely, a half dozen wyvern-winged trolls that were so feral they couldn’t be controlled—these were but a few of the things she’d locked away. There was a three-headed hippogriff, a series of shark-mouthed toads, and some gill-necked, flipper-footed goblin kin, too.

She kept them alive as best as she could and she helped them breed even more atrocious things, and when one of them died, she fed it to the others.

Her masterpiece of creation, though, dwelled in the watery caverns that spread out from below her stronghold’s foundation. It was from down there that the insistent mannish creature called ceaselessly for the release of death. Sissy, the Hoar Witch’s massive albino octoarachnoidal nightmare had cocooned the man years ago, and was keeping him alive. Sissy injected him with gelatinous poison. The stuff roiled and festered inside the man’s body and swelled him until he was to the point of bursting, then Sissy would come and suck the foul stuff out of him and inject him again.

Over and over this had gone on, for decades.

Aserica might have granted the man his wish of death long ago, for his pleading annoyed Clytun to no end, but she’d grown curious as to just how long Sissy could keep him alive. The great white-furred octoped had other creatures cocooned down in the depths as well, but neither she nor Clytun had braved all of the caverns to find them, lest they become one of its meals.

The Hoar Witch tuned out the anguished begging as she pushed her way past the heavy witchwood door into the lookout. She sent several torches flaring to life with the flick of her wrist. It took her a moment to find her bag of ground hawk eyes, but once she did, a pinch of the stuff was quickly tossed across the reflecting pool and the taste of the foul powder was tipped on her tongue.

Her hand went to the crystal at her neck, and the image that Gat was seeing wavered into existence on its liquid surface. It was naught but snow-caked pine limbs and deep moon shadows. This wasn’t the Deep she was seeing. Her valley wasn’t susceptible to the seasons as directly as the other valleys of the Lurr. That was part of the reason she had chosen the place so long ago. Only in the high-altitudes of the Bitterpeaks, and protected from the powerful wind by the depth of the valley, and further protected from the seasonal elements by fairy magic, could the plasmatic shard she’d shaped into her great stronghold be grown.

What she was seeing was beyond the extent of her immediate reach. Both her power and the power of the fae were stretched to the limit, that far away.

“What is it?” she hissed as she moved around the pool and sought out that which the sneak had reported to her. With another flick of her wrist she sent the wavering torches sputtering out, making the image in the pool seem much clearer.

“How much farther is it to the forest?” a man asked.

Aserica Rime heard the voices clearly and skittered around the pool again, searching for a better viewing angle.

“Another day to the ridge,” another man responded. She didn’t think either voice was that of the warlock.

“Are you going to wait for us there, Darl?” a woman asked. “Or are you coming into the forest with us to find Vanx?” This voice was female. The Hoar Witch found her then, huddled in dark blankets under the skirt of a great snow-laden tree.

She touched the crystal at her neck and urged Gat to find a perch that offered a better view for them. The thumping sound of his owl wings caused a nearby beast to bleat and stomp about. Gat landed on a long-dead branch and Aserica saw the face of the girl who had spoken.