With a wave of his arm, Hebraun motioned for his men to dismount. They set to work to bury everyone, murmuring in hushed voices amongst the scuffle and ring of shovels and spades.
***
Spitemorta smiled with satisfaction at the wreckage the trolls had made of Dúradán Deannaigh. The air was alive with the scent of roasting flesh which she found enticing. “Must be what comes with looking like a troll,” she said with a chuckle, as she set out to find a quiet place where she could take out her skinweler in order to contact Captain Brutus.
Soon she found a nice stump next to a clothes line at the edge of the woods and sat down, laying the Great Staff in front of her. She took out her skinweler and ran her hands lovingly over its polished form as she thought of how near she must be to her first goal. She concentrated on Captain Brutus. His face took shape after a spell, but something was very wrong. His fogged-over eyes stared up from his frozen face in the weeds. He had no body. She threw the skinweler away from her into a thicket of briars as though it were a pit viper in her lap, jerking her hands to her face as she gave a wail of horror.
At once she was on her hands and knees going after it. “Where's my army?” she cried. “My army!” She reached out for the ball through the thorny canes, tugging at it with her fingertips until it rolled into her grasp. She reached for a briar that had her by the hair and yanked, painfully ripping at her scalp and hand. She gave a furious squeal as she stood up, jerking back away from the briars.
She sat back onto the stump at once, gripping the skinweler, shaking it in frustration as though that would make her soldiers come more quickly into view. At last they did, littered all across the valley in the southern Ash Mountains. The only soldiers standing were soldiers of Niarg, picking over the corpses. With a grating screech of fury she heaved the skinweler away from her like a shot-put, bouncing it off the trunk of a maple to go bounding away into the briars. She sprang up and down with two fisted rage as the ball rolled out of sight.
She grabbed the Staff and flew over the spot and gingerly let herself down to retrieve it. She picked it up, flew out of the briars and tramped away to find Demonica.
She found her sitting primly on an intricate white wrought iron settee being entertained by the spectacle of the carousing Marooderyn Imshee, riotously scampering about a good dozen large cooking fires, grease running down their chins and bare bellies.
“They get so very enthused,” said Demonica, looking up at Spitemorta with a dancing sparkle in her eyes as though she had been standing there all evening.
Spitemorta stepped in front of her, deliberately blocking her view.
“So what's your problem now?” said Demonica disdainfully, as she tried to peer around her.
Spitemorta squatted and plunged into a complete account of what she had just seen in the skinweler.
“You know I told you so, dear,” said Demonica, shifting on her seat to look her in the eye. “I told you about how it was with Hebraun and his people practicing every month. But you just rolled your eyes like some long-suffering child spiting the grown-ups and went right about sending out your army without consulting with me.”
“They're my army, Grandmother.”
“No, they were your army, dear.”
“Then just what do you advise?”
“I'm not sure that you can be. I mean, haven't I been trying to advise you all along?”
“What do we do now, Grandmother?” she said through her teeth. “What do we do this minute?”
Demonica calmly stood and brushed off the skirts of her kirtle, as if the small amount of ash on them mattered. “Why do you reckon I kept telling you to prepare your trolls to go get Hebraun in case your puny army failed?” she said sweetly, as she fixed a one eyed gaze on her.
“Well fine,” said Spitemorta with a rumble as she stood up. “Send forth the beasts then, Demonica. And make sure that they utterly annihilate the Niarg army.”
“My dear Fnadi-yaphn,” said Demonica with a laugh. “You're troll goddess, not me. You lead them. I'm merely your lowly winged servant, remember?”
“You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?”
“Oh, my land yes,” said Demonica with dancing eyes. “Quite a bit, actually. With the ugly expressions you bear, dear, you've the most emphatic need for abrasive things to be rubbed in your face.”
“Wonderful! Now how am I to get their attention? Well look at them!”
“Well, obviously you’ll have to wait until they’ve finished their supper,” said Demonica, hiking her eyebrows. “After all, you've been promising them a feast of Elf flesh the entire voyage here. You’ll simply have to be patient. Besides, with all your troops dead, what's the hurry? Hebraun and company will be picking over their bodies and burying the dead for quite some time yet.”
Spitemorta stamped away, wishing she could throttle Demonica. She growled between her teeth as she thought of how badly she still needed her. At last she plopped down onto the same stump which she'd sat on earlier.
***
The feast did not wind down until just before dawn when the trolls were ready to find a place out of the sunlight to sleep. Spitemorta called them together in the ruined square of Duradan Deannaigh to address them before they found places to sleep in the empty buildings.
“My loyal and deserving people!” she boomed with a smile. “You have enjoyed the very first of endless great feasts here in your new land! And now you know that Fnadi-yaphyn does indeed keep her promises to you!”
The trolls clapped and stamped and hooted, patting their distended bellies.
Spitemorta smiled benevolently as they quieted. “I have just learnt that the Humans who deny your right to this paradise are indeed nearby and will do what they can to stop you!”
A rumbling murmur broke out.
Spitemorta raised her arms and quieted them. “Fear not, my people! We will not allow these Humans to interfere! We will show them our wrath! We will not merely throttle them, my people, we will wipe out their whole army!”
The trolls clapped, whistled and stamped in furious agreement. She waited for them get quiet. “Go rest! When you awake, we will seek out these Humans and destroy every one of them, so that they will never again trouble us as we enjoy our new land of Gnyr-jan ntu Afajoy!”
The trolls cheered again and fell quiet as they wandered off to seek the shadows as the east grew light.
***
The full moon rose cold yellow in the east, closing like an angry eye, as it vanished for the night behind the thick snow clouds. Spitemorta rallied her Marooderyn
Imshee about the cold ashes of the fires of the feast in Dúradán Deannaigh. She was only taking two hundred trolls to attack Hebraun and his army, since Demonica forbade her taking all of them.
She chose Gnophn as her captain. She would fly into the Niarg camp and take out Hebraun, and Gnophn would lead a charge into the resulting confusion. They marched for the ford of the Loxmere River. As they crossed, Spitemorta took to the air on the Staff and led them to the ford of the Gold River, where she saw them across. From here they made straight across country to Ash Fork.
Near midnight, Spitemorta could see campfires on the ground ahead. “Good. They're still here,” she said. She swooped below at once to alert Gnophn before shooting aloft again to fly over the camp.
“Only four guards on duty, otherwise the entire camp is fast asleep,” she said as she flew overhead unseen, straining her eyes for some sign of Hebraun. Again and again she flew by without seeing him. “Isn't he here?” she thought. She was beginning to consider the possibility that he was in the Ash Mountains where her army met its doom, when she thought she might have seen him. She circled and passed by closer to the ground. “Yes. That's him.”
There he lay, sleeping the sleep of a truly exhausted man. She shot far up into the heavens to hover for a moment. “This won't do at all,” she hissed. “If I just toast him, he'll never know who did it. He needs to pay. He needs to know that I'm getting even. He needs
to cower and beg.”
Quickly she cast a glamour upon herself to appear as Spitemorta instead of Fnadi-yaphn. “Still won't do,” she said. “But this will.” And she lit herself with a brilliant aura. “Now it's time for you to die, King Hebraun.” She swooped down and shot a lavender bolt from the Staff, blowing a bushel of dirt out of the ground, right by his hip.
He flew from his blankets, drawing his claymore at the sight of her looping back through the cold black air. “I love you Minuet!” he said as he stood calmly ready for battle.
Spitemorta sent out a blast that blew him apart with a concussion that resounded across the countryside for miles, but the sight of his serene face at the last instant sent her on her way in a livid fury of disappointment as she raced to send in her trolls on her way back to Dúradán Deannaigh.
***
Minuet gasped and jerked upright in bed. “Hebraun,” she said in a strangled whisper as tears streamed down her cheeks. There was a horrible void in her breast and in its emptiness she knew: he was gone.
She stumbled out of her sheets onto the floor and ran sobbing barefoot through the big lazy flakes of snow to Razzmorten’s tower. At the top of the steps she quietly opened his door and rushed inside. She had no strength for pounding on doors.
“Hey Queen,” said Hubba Hubba, snapping to from his perch just outside the nest box full of baby parrots and Pebbles. “What ye sneakin' for? Somethin' wrong?”
Minuet nodded and sniffled as she went by. “Father!” she wailed as she collapsed with great whooping sobs at the side of his bed.
“Oh dear! Oh dear me!” he said as he rolled to the floor beside the bed and scooped her into his arms. He knew.
***
The Marooderyn Imshee suddenly appeared like silent phantoms in the camp at Ash Fork brandishing their clubs. What they hadn’t counted on was that Spitemorta's aerial display and explosion had awakened the entire Niargian camp. A few were even awake in time to see their beloved king blown to bits.
Captain Bernard was stunned with grief and despair, but when the first troll raised his club and bellowed, he had every man ready with his claymore. The moon peeped through the clouds in time to see the entire camp rise up with the glint of furiously swinging blades. By the time it slipped back behind the clouds, not a troll was left alive.
***
The soldiers finished the somber burial in the flying snow without their king. Since Hebraun had insisted that each soldier and villager have a decent burial and could not have one himself, they carved a tall menhir stone with his name and set it in the ground on the spot where he vanished, ringed by a circle of twenty-one stone posts.
THE BURGEONING
Book 4
Chapter 102
The full moon, hard and white, lit the stark countryside of Gollmoor from within its icy ring high in the south, as the silhouettes of two hags astride a stick sank behind the naked twigs of a spreading burr oak. The frozen grass crushed flat under their feet as they stepped off their staff, breathing out frosty plumes of moonlit breath as they stiffly found their balance. Screech owls hither and yon shivered and wailed. Far away, dogs barked.
“Well there's Castle Goll, yonder.”
“Yea. A right good piece to walk, Grandmother. It's frigid out. And we should've been here a month ago.”
“You know good and well that had you not overseen the trolls mourning as Great Goddess Fnadi-yaphn, we'd 'ave had an uprising on our hands, Spitemorta, particularly since they died following you. Good thing I only let you have two hundred of 'em...”
“Yea? Well, it still wasted nearly a month,” she said as she glanced up at the moon with a shudder from between her clouds of breath. “I miss Abaddon...”
“You're quite something,” said Demonica as she gathered her shawl under her chin with her gnarled hand and looked all about her, “I've been going to great lengths to cooperate with your whims, dear. You wanted to fly the Staff to avoid being bounced around in your condition, and that meant not being recognized, so we landed out here, and I haven't seen a soul, have you?”
“No, but it's a long way to walk in the freezing cold, crippled up with your glamouries,” said Spitemorta as she steadied herself with the Staff. “We not only look like dried up old hags, we move like them. You expect me to stumble along as a hunchback for a good half mile, keeping my balance with this belly? Look, we're off the Staff now, so why can't we change back? Who has ever seen a pregnant dowager?
Wouldn't that attract unwanted attention?”
Demonica threw back her head with a volley of laughter, puffing out clouds of breath like a tea kettle as she braced herself on her knees. “Very well,” she said as she rubbed her eyes and sobered, “I'll change you back as soon as we cut across that frozen pond, yonder...”
“You're wanting to see me fall.”
“Hey, that would be fun! It's not like you don't deserve it, or anything,” she said, erupting with laughter all over again. Her laughter stopped at once as she turned without warning and put her hands on Spitemorta's belly. “There ye be. You're back. All lovely, except for that oversized belly you're haulin' around. Are you sure you want that handsome man of yours to see you so out of shape?”
“I'm not out of shape. I'm pregnant.”
“Yeap. And twins will stretch you out of shape, right smart, Rouanez Pouezus,” said Demonica as her shawl slid back to reveal her resumed beauty.
“What?”
“You mean you need me to tell you? Why else would you be this huge this soon? Just be happy it's not from overindulging.”
“Of course I've not been overindulging, Grandmother. Now, do you mind if we just go? It's the middle of the night, and I could be enjoying a wonderfully warm bath by now.”
“Can you handle the pond, dear? It would be far quicker,” said Demonica as she stepped through the cattails, holding out her arms to keep her balance as she lunged forth into a tentative slide across the ice. Well across the pond, the outer curtain of Castle Goll rose up before them, just beyond the frozen moat.
“Hey, cwn hithau!” hollered out the guard from above the portcullis as he stifled a yawn. “Know what time it is? It's time to get out o' here and come back in the morning!”
“No!” barked Spitemorta as her voice rang out in echoes along the wall. “It's time for you to recognize your queen and let her in while she still allows you to live, fool!”
The guard immediately leant out from the embrasure and began wailing out a frantic apology.
“What kind of death are you begging for?” she shouted. “I want in now!”
He wheeled aside at once and called out in a squeaking falsetto for the raising of the portcullis.
***
Spitemorta summoned servants and had her bath first thing. At last she dried off, slipped into her favorite silk robe and headed straight for the nursery to peek in at her beloved Abaddon before going to bed. She carefully opened the nursery door to find the heavy velvet drapes pulled back, flooding Abaddon's empty and neatly made bed with pale white moonlight. She threw open the door in alarm to see that he was nowhere at all in the nursery. She flew to the nanny's door. When there was no response, she rushed in to find her gone as well. Dark thoughts of abduction and foul play set her heart to pounding as she steadied herself against one of the nanny's bedposts and caught her breath.
“James!” she cried, as she rushed out to find him. She stormed into his apartment, through his sitting room and into his bedroom where she viciously jerked back the curtain of his bed.
James immediately grabbed her by the wrist out of the shadows and yanked her toward him across the bed, wrenching her arm behind her back.
“Let go of me, you idiot!” she screamed out from the rumples of his quilt. “It's me! Spitemorta!”
James let go at once and sprang out of bed to begin lighting candles. “Idiot might apply to you, Spitemorta,” he said between his teeth. “How about some kind of warning like calling out or knocking? If I'd had a knife under
my bolster, I'd have stuck you before we ever got around to speaking. I wasn't expecting you.”
“Abaddon's missing!” she screeched. “Call the guard! I want him found now!”
“Get hold of yourself. I know quite well that he's gone.”
“And you've done nothing about it?” she said, throwing her feet off the side of the bed in preparation to stand.
“I sent him away, sweetheart.”
“What?” she cried, springing up.
“Sit!” he shouted. “You heard me perfectly well,” he said in a suddenly calmed tone as he ran his hand through his tousled hair. “Please have a seat.”
Spitemorta sat down with a stiff bounce and stared hatefully at him.
James drug up a chair to the bed with a screech and hesitated, studying her before turning aside to pace the room instead of sitting. “Spitemorta,” he said, turning to her with a resigned sigh, “what utter evil have you been teaching our son?”
“What you are talking about, James?” she snarled. “This is madness! Where's my son? Tell me this instant!”
“Our son...!” he said, speaking up peevishly.
“Our son then if you must,” she said, making a face. “Where is he? Where's Abaddon?”
“Somewhere safe, Spitemorta. Rest assured,” he said, crossing his arms and glaring at her. “And there he shall stay until I get some answers from you.”
“James, I don't think you really want to play this game with me,” she said with a polite chuckle as she suddenly assumed a calm demeanor. “I thought that you'd finally realized right before I left that I'm a truly powerful sorceress, yet you seem not to grasp what kind of fire you're playing with. So James, I'm out of patience with you. Now, tell me where my son is before I make you regret it.”
“Sorry,” he said with a calm shake of his head. “If you do anything at all to me, Spitemorta, you'll never see Abaddon again.”
“You'd harm your own son?” she said with a flash of her eyes.
“You certainly have, so why would you object?”
Heart of the Staff - Complete Series Page 113