The sun behind the mountains spread glory up into the sky; cool winds stole out of the forest; and Manninglore held a knife to the cleft in back of his ear, pushed, and drew. Blood welled in thick gouts from the great vein of his throat, pulsing in heavy glutinous masses down to his breastbone.
Then he measured the fields with his tread, stooping forward to water the earth with his blood.
But when he leaned, drained, on the trunk of an oak, the blood still stood, thick and heavy, over the furrows. It failed to sink into the earth through all that long night, and the sun, in the morning, baked it to glaze.
"Now spirit, how is this?" sighed the wizard. "I have given the blood of my life, but the earth will not take it."
"You have waited too long," mourned the spirit. "Sage, your blood has grown thick with the centuries. It will not yield to the earth."
Then Manninglore slumped to his knees and leaned to strike, rolling full length on the earth. The old folk of the clan saw the fall of their sage and, moaning, slipped one by one to measure their lengths on the earth under the glare of the sun.
The afternoon light burned red through his eyelids; the last labored breathing ceased near him. Only the rustle of Demouach's wings by his shoulder, and the calling Wind over the lip of the beaker, were left him.
Then, slowly, the red of the light slipped from his sight. A cool breeze touched his cheek. Forcing his eyelids open, Manninglore saw the tip of a spruce standing between his face and the sun.
And there in the shadow, by Manninglore's elbow, a shoot of green corn speared through the glaze.
"Too late," the sage murmured. "Too late."
Then he rose up on his elbow screaming, his free, shaking arm pointing up at the spruce. "Go, Demouach! And hang this sounding bell to the top of that tree, that men may know there was once a clan here!"
And Demouach leaped into the air with the beaker, bound it to the top spike of the spruce with a ribbon of cornhusk. Crying, then, he swooped to the side of his master and friend.
But the wizard's eyelids were closed, sunken in, the skin of his face become ashen, the last fate-spiting breath expired.
Then Demouach swirled into the air with one last screaming wail, and ceased.
The forest has reclaimed the valley, filling it from hill to hill. But high above the restless green of hickory and oak towers the skeleton of a spruce, bleak against the annealed sky. From its scaling, brittle tip there hangs a bell, an iron bell without a clapper, alien in the Wind's demesne. And the cataracting gale exacts a tribute from it, a tribute paid in moans, a growling coronach caught from the mouth of the bell and flung out over the forest, to break against the mountains and be funneled down into the mountain pass.
There, in the notch between the peaks, the coronach collects again, feeding in upon itself, slapping into the baffled granite and rebounding, rolling in its torment until it echoes up into a banshee wail, an eternal keening coronach, despair.
And far below, a patch of forest floor is bare, fused into obsidian. At its center stands a mummied cornstalk, paper wrapped around a hollow core, sole testimony to the clan of Mannin.
THE END
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Christopher Stasheff spent his early childhood in Mount Vernon, New York, but spent the rest of his formative years in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He has always had difficulty distinguishing fantasy from reality and has tried to compensate by teaching college. When teaching proved too real, he gave it up in favor of writing full time. He tends to pre-script his life, but can't understand why other people never get their lines right. This causes a fair amount of misunderstanding with his wife and four children. He writes novels because it's the only way he can be the director, the designer, and all the actors too.
More Kobo eBooks by Christopher Stasheff...
Escape Velocity
The Warlock's Grandfather
The Warlock in Spite of Himself
King Kobold Revived
The Warlock Unlocked
The Warlock Enraged
The Warlock Wandering
The Warlock Is Missing
The Warlock Heretical
Here Be Monsters
A Wizard in Mind
A Wizard in Bedlam
A Wizard in War
Her Majesty's Wizard
The Oathbound Wizard
The Witch Doctor
The Secular Wizard
My Son, the Wizard
The Haunted Wizard
The Feline Wizard
Saint Vidicon to the Rescue
Mind Out of Time
The Crafters (volume 1)
The Crafters (volume 2)
Coronach of the Bell (short story) Page 2