Assault in the Wizard Degree, page 16
That wasn’t completely unexpected news. The Valkir had lost their leader, Lance Captain Thundercrack, because of the machinations between Hollyhock and High Elder Belladonna. They had flat out refused to fight, walking out of the Lair of the Elders before the final battle commenced, as an act of defiance.
The fact that they were forming a brand new one was troubling news.
“I’ll need to ask you more about that later,” I said, before turning back to Angbor. The King had given out his last set of orders, so that only he and his offspring were left in the infirmary with us. I took advantage of that moment to speak up. “It is good to see you feeling ‘up and at ‘em’ again, Dread Liege.”
Angbor grunted, but not in a displeased manner. “I am up, that much is sure. Listing to one side a little, but up.”
“Just take it at a leisurely pace for a short while longer, father,” Galen cautioned.
“Enough with your fuss and foal-sitting!” Angbor grumped. “Dame Chrissie, my offspring have started to believe they are my bottle-feeders and caretakers. Do you have any advice as to what I should do?”
“Well…” I said diplomatically, “you could send them on a little vacation to get them out of your mane. A change of scenery might do them good.”
“Indeed, they have both suggested that.” The King’s face grew serious as he added, “They wish to return to the haunted hills of the Hinter Lands. That disturbs me more than you might expect.”
“I know that you almost lost them out there. When they were much younger, I might add.”
An equine snort. “They have already patronized me enough. Don’t you start as well, for my son’s treatment has restored my temper as well as my life!”
“All right, I’ll do my best not to,” I promised. “Look, regardless of what happened before, there’s a good chance we can track one of the ‘Creatures of the Dark’ back to its base.”
“Then you should know: I have had disturbing reports from the scouts of Braceward Holt. There are strange lights and sounds coming from deep within the hills. Some say that they have seen shadows in the sky, moving fast and against the wind.”
“It might be risky, but we’ve also got a lot to gain–”
The centaur king raised a hand, motioning me to silence. “They are right. You are right. My blessings are given to leave as soon as you are able.”
Galen’s hooves made a slight clatter as he turned, startled at his father’s pronouncement. Rikka looked similarly surprised.
“Angbor?” I breathed. “I didn’t expect…well, I didn’t expect your agreement to come so readily.”
“The news that Grimshaw the Drake brings from Andeluvia is bleak indeed.” Angbor crossed his massive arms under the hanging plaits of his beard with a sigh. “Fitzwilliam, Belladonna, and I each sit athwart our castles of sand. Around us, the tide comes in to separate us and wash each of us away. My instincts tell me that a blow is about to fall to shatter us. And we must strike first! To do so, I must know in what direction to swing my sword. Perhaps you three might be able to tell me.”
“We shall do our best, of course. But four might be better than three.”
“Agreed.” Angbor fixed a steely gaze on Grimshaw. The griffin sat up and at attention, looking every inch a proud warrior. “Drake, you have impressed me for the short time we have spoken. I trust you will not take offense if I tell you, warrior to warrior, that I have never felt much affection for griffins.”
“I shall not take offense,” Shaw replied. “We griffins harbor no ill feelings towards thy people. We have only fought thee as allies to the Good King Benedict.”
“You fought with honor, then. I have always respected those of the lion and the eagle as our fiercest foes. But now I must know: Is it true that you are a sworn friend to my son, Skallgrym Sturmgalen?”
“Aye, that I am. Sturmgalen and I have oft risked our lives for one another. We are as close as if we had shared a nest in mine own rookery.”
“Then I charge you,” Angbor said heavily, “with protecting both my son and daughter from all that would harm them from beyond the Hinter Lands.”
The drake puffed his chest out. “Upon the line and Pride of the Reyka, I so swear.”
“Go with them, then. I tire now.” Angbor put a hand to his head, folding his legs to sit next to the healing platform. His color remained good, but his expression was strained, as if he were a marathon runner entering the last five-mile stretch.
“You shall remain short of energy,” Galen cautioned, “and light-headed for the rest of the day before you feel normal. Food and rest in plenty is what you shall need.”
“Yes, and no more of that insipid mixture of oats and broth you prescribed, either! I want meat, roasted and falling off the bone!” Angbor paused, then waved his hand as if shooing us on. His words sounded harsh, but the King’s tone was surprisingly gentle. “Galen, Rikka, you have done well. Aid me in this time of my weakness, and I shall be grateful.”
Galen leaned in, whispered to his father, and squeezed his shoulder reassuringly. Rikka kissed his brow. Shaw bowed to him, and I followed suit. We left the infirmary, each trailing in Galen’s wake down the hallway.
“Dayna,” Galen said crisply, “I have two questions for you. How soon can you be ready to leave, and how much longer can you stay in our world?”
I considered for a moment. “I can be ready in a few minutes. However, I must leave for Los Angeles no later than this afternoon, and I won’t be able to return for two days.”
“It is imperative we use the time well, then. Rikka and I will join you shortly at your room. I need to consult one of our maps of Braceward Holt. With luck, I should be able to transport us to the Holt’s outskirts.”
I nodded as we parted ways temporarily at a fork in the hallway. Shaw followed me to my room, where he immediately went over to the centaur sleep line and tapped it with one sharp talon. He turned to me, puzzled, as I began rolling up my sleeping bag.
“I have oft seen humans using these types of lines to dry their clothing when it has been washed,” he remarked. “Methinks it is an oddity to have it strung up inside, but centaurs can be a strange folk.”
“No doubt,” I said, as I tucked away the last bits of gear in my bag. A thought struck me, so I added, “Did you run into Gorse, by any chance?”
“Aye, and he is doing well, after a fashion.”
“After a fashion?”
“Thou mayest recall that Gorse is the sole surviving drake of the Reyka clan. At least, the last who is still sworn to Belladonna’s service alone.”
“That I do.” Away from the aerie, Gorse had missed the event that had all but wiped out the rest of the Reyka males.
A low avian chuckle escaped Shaw’s beak. “The High Elder is still using him to repopulate the Reyka with new chicks. Apparently, the poor drake is wearing himself down, as he put it, to a ‘mere nub’.”
The knock of a hoof at the door echoed in the room. Shaw opened it, admitting the Wizard and his sister. They arrived weighed down, not with food or provisions, but weapons. Rikka had her usual complement of swords, archery equipment, svelgas, and spear. She’d added a wicked, hook-ended flail and another pair of swords that hung from an extra set of scabbards lower on her flanks. Galen brought his wizard’s staff, but he also sported a double set of swords and a nasty-looking mace with a spiky iron ball that hung menacingly from the end on a chain.
“Thou art uncommonly well-armed and armored!” Shaw noted approvingly. “Thou didst not have to dress up for me, friend!”
Rikka laughed. “I’m surprised. I didn’t know griffins had a sense of humor!”
“Oh, these are not for formal wear,” Galen protested. “These are gifts, of a sort.”
Gifts? I thought, incredulously. Was Galen planning to stop by and visit Vlad the Impaler on the way to give him a birthday present?
“Okay,” I said, as I pulled my pack on, “I’m ready to go.”
“Good.” Galen looked around as we moved to stand next to the Wizard. “And we depart…now!”
An eye-searing whiteness engulfed the four of us. The awful stench of ozone, and the stomach-turned sense of dislocation, surrounded me. Thankfully, it vanished after a count of three, and I stumbled against Shaw’s solid, furry side as we came out of the transport spell. Galen shook his head, Shaw wavered on his feet, and even Rikka let out a groan.
But I was too amazed at where we’d arrived to complain.
Stretched out before and below me was a sight right out of a John Ford epic western.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
We had arrived atop a high, rocky bluff. A pancake-flat prairie stretched out before us, all the way to the western horizon. The dry smells of trail dust, sage, and desiccated animal dung tickled my nose. A herd of cattle lowed anxiously as they crossed by left-to-right, heading north along a well-trodden dirt road. Eight or nine centaurs patrolled the edges of the herd, moving it along and keeping the animals in a manageable group.
I watched, amazed, as the centaurs did their version of an Old West cattle drive. Rather than armor and weaponry, each of the drovers wore light tan windbreaker jackets and a pair of saddlebags like Galen’s. I didn’t see anyone using lassos, but several wielded long-handled leather whips, which they cracked at the heels of any straying animals. And instead of the cowboys ten-gallon hat, the centaurs wore a copper-red sou’wester cap. This had a short brim in the front and a long, sloping one in the rear to protect the nape of the neck from the sun.
But even more interesting was the sight which approached from the left. Trailing a discrete distance behind the herds was an entire fleet of ‘prairie schooners’. Dozens of wood-and-metal contraptions that looked like scaled-up cousins to the Conestoga wagon creaked along, pulled not by teams of oxen but by the centaurs themselves. Still other teams of centaurs scouted far ahead on either flank, probably to roust out any waiting dangers like umbral cats.
Though I saw a mix of genders working different jobs, the vast majority of the herders were male, while the wagon-pullers and scouts were mostly female. Newly foaled centaurs, who looked just like nine or ten-year-old children from the waist up (and young colts or fillies from the waist down) ran laughing and playing amongst the slowly moving wagons, dutifully ignored or tolerated by the adults.
“This is part of the first migration of the year,” Rikka explained. “Most of our people are travelling north to seek new pasturage for the herds and to work the fields near Byredunn Holt.”
I turned to Galen in amazement. “Is this how you grew up?”
“That is a fair assessment,” Galen said, with a wistful smile. “Though, compared to the youngsters below, I spent more time with my nose in a book. Some of it was genuine magical study. Most of it was figuring out how to zap things with lightning.”
“And I spent more time trying to shoot things with arrows,” Rikka put in. “Or hack them to pieces with swords, now that I think of it.”
“Thou hast my approval,” Shaw said warmly. “Practicing for hunting or combat to the death is always a worthwhile pastime for the young.”
I decided to let that conversation thread go by without comment. Aside from failing to learn how to figure skate, I’d spent less time on swordplay or sorcery and more on bicycling or collecting fireflies in jars. Call it vanity, but I didn’t want to expose my relative lack of badassedness to my friends. Luckily, Galen helped me out by changing the subject.
“I brought us here first because it’s the most southerly place I recalled well from memory,” he said, as he turned and faced south. “But our ultimate destination lies beyond, at Braceward Holt.”
Shaw and I craned our necks around to gaze in the same direction. On the distant horizon, I could just make out the needle-like central projection of the Holt’s central watchtower. The Wizard pulled a short tube out of one jacket pocket and held it to his eye as he resumed his explanation.
“I decided to follow up on Dayna’s innovative idea from the Fayleene Woods,” he said. “Since I need a good visual or mental fix on where I transport us, I created a pocket magnifier to mimic Dayna’s ‘binoculars’. I should have just enough magic to carry us the rest of the way.”
We stepped close to Rikka’s brother as he gestured and spoke under his breath. Another flash of white and taste of bleach on my tongue from the ozone and we landed, hard, on the trodden-down expanse of grass just outside Braceward Holt. I stumbled a bit, but this time Rikka arrested my fall by grabbing my shoulder.
This time, we’d arrived amidst a number of wooden buildings in a similar boarded-up condition to the ‘ghost town’ outside of Bloodwine Holt. However, this time I caught a waft of someone’s baking on the breeze, followed by the darker smell of burning charcoal. Right next to us, just up the slope of a small hill, sprawled a ranch-style centaur house. Behind the house, in a fenced-in pasture, grazed a small herd of fluffy white sheep.
The entryway stood half-open, braced with a doorstop in the shape of a miniature dragon. While the house lacked any paint that I could see, color was provided by window boxes stuffed with scarlet-leafed plants like poinsettias. A tall chimney jutted from a semi-detached smaller building set to one side. The charcoal smell came from the puffs of black smoke curling up from the cone of red brick into the sky.
“Come on,” Rikka urged her brother, once we’d all steadied ourselves. “You know she’ll be happy to see you.”
“I know,” Galen said, distractedly. “It’s just been…such a long time.”
A gruff older woman’s voice came from just inside the half-open door.
“I know that voice!” it exclaimed happily. An equine leg extended from the inside and moved the doorstop aside with a kick of a hoof. The heavy-set centauress who shoved her way through the door hit Galen like a pinto-shaded cannonball and wrapped her arms around him. “My boy’s returned! What a glorious day this is!”
“It is good to see you as well,” Galen choked out, though I wasn’t sure if it was from overwhelming emotion or lack of air. “I…I must do introductions, mother!”
“Ever the stickler for detail,” she said, as she reluctantly let go and tousled his hair. “Oh, very well, if you must.”
Rikka put her hand to her mouth, stifling the laughter which threatened to bubble forth, while Galen cleared his throat. “Mother, allow me to introduce you to my good friend, Dayna Chrissie – now, Dame Chrissie.”
“It’s been a while since I’ve seen a human up close.” She eyed me critically. “Hmph. Never heard of you.”
“That’s because her origin lies elsewhere,” Galen inserted smoothly. “Dayna is formerly of the Land of the Angels. She has only recently been dubbed as a ‘Dame’ of the Kingdom of Andeluvia.”
Galen’s mother let that go by and instead turned her attention to Shaw. “And who is this creature?”
“Madam,” Grimshaw said proudly, “I am a griffin of the Reykajar Aerie, and my name is Grimshaw of the Reyka Pride.”
“Time hasn’t blinded me yet. I know what a griffin is!” Galen’s mother made a motion with her hand as she added, “Lift your wing up, I need to show you something.”
Puzzled, Shaw raised one snow-white wing. She bent at the waist and touched him at a spot on his flank. When she pulled back a step and Shaw lowered his wing, Galen resumed speaking.
“Ah, yes. That is Grimshaw, as has been stated,” the Wizard said awkwardly, while trying to figure out what his mother was up to. “Dayna, Shaw, this is my mother, Skallgrym Ingaline. Inga, for short.”
Inga held her thumb and index finger slightly apart. “That’s about two inches, Grimshaw. You know why that is important?”
Shaw shook his head. “I confess, thou hast me at a loss.”
“Because it’s the space between your ribs. I make weapons with points that are only an inch-and-a-half across.” She gave him a meaningful glance. “Do I still ‘have thee at a loss’?”
The look Shaw threw me could have been taken right off Liam’s face when the griffin joked about eating him. I wasn’t sure whether to be horrified, or burst out laughing.
“Mother,” Galen interjected, “Shaw is an honorable griffin warrior and a friend!”
“I suppose so,” she mused doubtfully. “Forgive me, drake. I’ve spent much of my life crafting weapons to aid my kind against yours. And the humans you serve.”
Shaw still looked a bit shell-shocked, so he kept quiet and simply bowed.
“And what have you been up to, daughter of mine?” Inga demanded, now turning to Rikka for the first time. “I heard that you tried to murder Caltrop the Bastard. Didn’t I teach you better than that? Why didn’t you finish what you started?”
I finally got a good look at Galen’s mom as Rikka filled her in on the latest events. Between the two siblings, Galen took after his father slightly more. The dark hair, eyes and chestnut coat were the main giveaways. In contrast, Rikka took heavily after her mom, at least from the neck up. They shared the same cinnamon-red hair, blue-gray eyes, and handsome cheekbones drizzled with chocolate-colored freckles.
From the neck down, it was a different story. Inga had a pinto’s coloration like Sir Jorvath, and a draft-horse frame like most centaurs. But her legs were as stout as Angbor’s, and her arms bulged with muscles the size of footballs both above and below the elbow. Her complexion was slightly darker than that of her kids, but her forearm veins were highly visible, in the way that bodybuilders would call someone ‘ripped’ after pumping iron.
And as it turned out, that’s exactly what she had been doing.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
“As you can see, Mother, we brought some samples of the gear we picked up at Bloodwine Holt,” Rikka said, as she handed over the flail. Galen passed her the spiky ball-on-a-chain thing as well. Inga weighted both in her hands, then turned the pieces over, examining the craftsmanship.
“Terrible, just terrible!” she pronounced. “Who’s turning out this garbage? Is my rival, Hephaestor, churning these out? I’ll have him hung up by his tail and beaten like a cheap rug!”
