The Wizard And The Dragon

by Joseph Anderson

  Kate seemed satisfied enough to start moving again after a few moments. She turned and, instead of moving along the wall, started to climb it. She had meant that we would follow the top of the wall. I was suddenly grateful for all the climbing I had done as a boy. I was stronger now and easily kept up with her.

  On top of the wall she moved in a crouched position, far faster than I could move in the same way. Her footsteps were silent despite how quick they were and I bitterly reasoned that I could have moved faster if I crawled rather than matching her crouch. Still, she waited for me every few paces as she stared down into the village below. I wondered if she really was scanning that often for trolls or if she was being kind to me.

  When she reached the southeast corner of the wall she held up a hand to me and I halted in place. She pointed down over the wall and I leaned out over the edge to see the troll below her. It was sprawled out with its back into the corner of the wall. Without whatever it was that Kate put into my eyes I would have seen only a deep shadow. Now I could see clearly that its eyes were closed and its chest was rising and falling slowly. It was asleep.

  She pulled her hood and looked down the length of the eastern wall. There were no other trolls there or any others that we had seen so far. She turned to me and made some movements with her hands in my direction that completely baffled me. I shrugged and shook my head and she puffed her cheeks out at me. She waved me back and jabbed a finger down through the air. She then mimed slitting her own throat with the same finger. That was simple enough for me to understand and I nodded at her.

  She moved several meters along the wall before climbing down. I watched as she drew her sword at the bottom of the wall, not risking the noise of it when she was near the troll. She did a final check in between the ruined buildings to make sure the troll was isolated and then moved toward it.

  The troll never woke up. Kate moved faster on the ground than she did on the wall and made no noise that I could hear. Her sword was small enough for one hand but she held it in two as she brought it down on the troll’s neck. The blade cut cleanly through its flesh and spine and the monster didn’t have a chance to cry or scream. There was a faint gurgling sound of blood flowing from the exposed neck as Kate climbed back up onto the wall.

  There was blood on her boots and I was surprised to see that it wasn’t a uniform color. It was a mess of red and green like the colors never mixed together. She looked down at them and shook her head.

  “Such a waste,” she muttered.

  “We can clean them,” I whispered back.

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  We continued around the wall and saw two more trolls sleeping amidst the ruined buildings. One of them had made a clearing in the bottom of a house and slept in a circle of rubble. On the north wall we finally got a clear view of the village center and the fire that was burning there. There was a massive bonfire where the marketplace had once stood. There were two trolls sleeping around it.

  “There’s one more,” Kate whispered. “There was another one I saw last night, too big to miss. It must be in the large building next to the fire.”

  “That was the tavern,” I said.

  The stone walls of it were still standing but the tavern roof had not been added back. Seeing it again, at almost the same vantage point that I had the last time I was here, hit me harder than I expected. I started to recall things I had done as a boy.

  The blacksmith’s house was opposite the tavern. I had spent many afternoons watching the work being done there, fascinated by the transformation of ingots into tools and, rarely, weapons. The hiss of steaming water as hot iron was submerged into it always made me grin. The memory of the heat made me think of Candle and I instinctively felt for him in my pocket. His core was safely with me.

  The tavern owner had always been kind to me and I sometimes did little jobs for him for small bits of food between meals. I remembered how my father would sometimes sneak me a sip of his drink on the rare times I was allowed to go with him, usually as a detour when my mother had given him too much time to complete an errand.

  I remembered sneaking around the marketplace. It was barely recognizable now. I used to steal pieces of fruit from the farmer’s stalls and I wondered now if they had turned a blind eye to it. Sneaking around now, making twice as much noise as Kate, I was certain that they had.

  She started moving again and I followed her to the east wall. We climbed down near where I had fallen from the wall after the dragon attacked. I looked at the ground and remembered the corpses that had softened my landing. They were gone now. Buried by the survivors, I suspected, although I hadn’t seen the graves yet. Part of me hoped that they had been buried separately. Another part hoped it had been a mass grave. That way I would at least know I was paying my respects to my family in the right place

  We crept between the houses, never risking the noise of stepping through the broken interiors. The troll we were moving toward was one of the smaller ones. I wondered if the stronger ones bullied it away from the fire and whatever food they had there. It was sleeping in the middle of a street adjacent to the marketplace.

  When we neared the troll, Kate signaled me to stop and moved forward without me. I was closer to the creature this time and was able to see the resemblance to the farren. Its facial structure was the same, as was the proportions of its body. Its skin was more green than the farren’s, although it wasn’t far off the pale gray that I was used to.

  She drew both her sword and knife this time. She held the sword in her right hand, above her head, poised to drive it downward into the troll’s torso. The knife she held close to the troll’s neck, keeping the blade vertical and ready to swipe. I envied her ability to move so precisely without being heard.

  A moment passed where she seemed to collect herself. I saw her hand tighten around the hilt of her sword and then she struck faster than anyone I had ever seen. The sword went first, plunging through troll’s chest and skewering into the ground. Its eyes snapped open but Kate’s knife was already tearing open the troll’s throat, piercing its windpipe and muffling the scream of pain to low a gurgle.

  She took one step back and kept turning her head in the darkness. She barely noticed the dying troll in front of her, too busy looking to see if the noise had woken any of the others up. The sword was left in the creature’s chest as she looked, trapping it as it writhed out its final moments. Blood pooled around the blade and then dribbled thickly down its skin.

  Nothing came for us. Kate stood up, held the troll’s corpse down with her foot, and pulled the sword out. I moved closer to the body and saw the wound she had left in it. It was too low to have punctured the heart. I wondered why she aimed for that area or if she had made a mistake. I turned to her and found her frowning at the blood coating a third of her blade. She didn’t sheathe it.

  “One more for me,” she whispered. “The one that was sleeping in the ruins. After that the ones next to the fire are yours.”

  We moved once again through the village and toward our first mistake. I should have offered to kill the next troll when we reached the piles of rubble around it. Kate stepped forward gingerly and was too far away for a whisper when I saw the danger. She hesitated as she stepped onto the mess of wood and stone. She must have seen the problem too but decided to risk it.

  To her credit, she came close. She was one step away from striking distance when something cracked under her boot. In the day it would have been a small sound, but next to a sleeping monster it sounded like thunder. The troll woke up.

  Kate stabbed at it as it sat up. The knife was going for its throat but instead sunk into its head and was lodged firmly into it. The troll roared and slashed wildly in her direction. She let go of the knife and leaped from the monster’s claws. She landed at the edge of the rubble and already the troll had turned onto its stomach and dived at her.

  I connected to power in the harness as the monster soared through the air. The knife was still protruding out of its sku
ll. Kate was already rolling out of the way as my focus gathered around the troll. It was about to hit the ground when the energy was linked with the focus and I caught it. There was no resistance. The troll hung in the air as easily as I could have held up a rock.

  The power in the harness was incredible. I felt it flowing through me and I tightened it around the troll. The force of it surprised me and the monster. It thrashed in the air as if it was held up by chains that it could break but just not see. For all of its larger size the troll was no better than a farren against magic.

  Kate was gawking at me, staring at me like I was more of a monster than the troll. The two of us seemed frozen for a moment before we both took action. She charged at me instead of the troll and I frantically tried to concentrate the energy on the troll’s body so I could shift it to her if necessary. Why was she running at me?

  I drew more magic around the troll and it was like holding up a rag doll. The fire came so easily, spreading down both of my arms and blasting from my hands. I centered all of it around the troll’s head, a swirling inferno that boiled away its eyes and roasted its brain. When I released my hold on the creature it fell to the ground in a heap. I turned, prepared to set the same fire on Kate if she was really charging at me. She rushed passed me instead, thrusting her sword at something behind me.

  I whipped around and watched as she pushed the blade all the way through another troll’s side, sliding it between its ribs. It had snuck up on me while I was lost in the strength of the magic from the harness. The monster turned its claws onto her now instead of me and she ducked away from the attack, leaving the sword instead of wasting time pulling it out.

  It looked like she danced as she moved, hopping just out of the troll’s range and waiting for the right opening. She lunged when it came: the troll was becoming unsteady from blood loss and swung its arms too hard. Kate grabbed the hilt of her sword—twisted it, and the monster screeched—and pulled it out. She hopped once more to the side and then brought the blade down on the troll’s head, cleaving through its skull and smacking its head onto the ground from the force of it.

  Her hood had fallen back in the fight and I could see her face as she wrested her sword free. There was sweat on her forehead and she looked angry, even when she looked up at me. She opened her mouth to say something when a duo of roars came from behind her.

  We had counted six. We had killed four and now the other two were awake. I saw them coming, stepping out in front of the bonfire. These two were larger than the others and knew exactly where we were. They couldn’t be taken by surprise and they were angry.

  “We should run,” Kate said as she backed away from the trolls. “Come back in a few hours when they’ve let their guard down.”

  I was about to nod but the largest troll was closer now. I could see what it was a holding. A bone, what looked to be a human bone, a femur it had been gnawing on. He held it like a club and I felt a hot rush of anger fill my entire body. That was likely the bone of someone I had known all those years ago, reduced now to below food: a toy, a plaything for this monster that had forced itself on people that had endured having their homes destroyed.

  I stepped forward and pulled the dagger from under my shirt. The magic I felt within it dwarfed that of the harness, but it wasn’t enough. I drew from them both, weaving multiple threads of lightning that sparked and jolted down my arms. They joined together in seconds but, for me, the energy I was manipulating was so immense that it was an intoxicating agony that elongated the spell.

  The bolt of lightning streaked forward and collided into the smaller of the trolls. The spell punched into its chest so hard that it flew backwards, moving too fast to see any more than a blur. The flash of the lightning dazzled my eyes that were primed for darkness. I ignored it. I could still see well enough to make out the last troll lumbering toward me.

  My muscles burned from the strain of all the energy. The lightning had been too detached and quick. I focused with kinetic power now. I flung shackle after shackle, such a wild and dangerous thing amplified to that extent, no longer the gentle prison that I had used to trap the spider’s legs. The troll was caught in them and stuck in place. I could feel the energy around its arms and legs, pulsating to the same rhythm as the magic coursed through my arms. It was physical and magical at the same time, as if my hands were those of a giant and I was crushing the troll.

  It was like pulling apart an insect. The monster’s limbs popped free of its torso. The bones snapped and organs ruptured and rained blood down onto the ground. When I released the shackles the body parts splattered to the ground. It was dead and in pieces yet its claw still clutched the bone.

  My focus was still in place even though the troll was dead. I realized that I had started shaking. I had channeled too much power and I couldn’t direct it all back into the sollite that I held. It had nowhere to go but to seethe through my body as it slowly radiated out from my skin. I felt like I had set fire to my insides.

  “What are you?” I heard Kate whisper behind me.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Hours passed before I could move without the urge to vomit. I spent most of them on the ground, sweating and unable to cool down. I felt like I had been running for days in an endless summer heat. Toward the end I managed to divert some of the magic back into the harness and dagger but I was too enfeebled to master the process.

  Kate left and I thought she had decided to move on without me. As I sat immobile on the ground I couldn’t blame her. I must have looked like a fool that didn’t know what he was doing; a reckless boy that had once again played too dangerously with something he didn’t understand. A smarter man would have tested the sollite first and amplified his spells gradually. I had saturated myself with the magic without caution and nearly killed myself.

  I was proven wrong, however, when Kate came back within the hour. She led her horse and tied it up on the tavern wall. All of her bags were strapped to the horse and she removed them quickly. It looked like she had moved her entire camp into the village.

  She walked toward me when she was finished. I saw that she had taken off her armor while she was gone. She wore a plain tunic and trousers now. The sleeves of her tunic had been rolled up near to her shoulders. She put a bottle down in front of me.

  “Drink,” she said. “It’s just water.”

  I shook my head. The thought of drinking anything made my stomach churn. She placed a hand on my forehead and then jerked it back away from me.

  “Shit,” she muttered. “You should go in the river. The water will take the heat better than the air.”

  I shook my head again. She shrugged and then picked up the bottle. She opened it, dumped the water over my head, and then walked away. It did make me feel better for a few minutes but after it dried up I felt worse. The brief cooling made the heat feel stronger when it returned.

  I watched Kate work in the hours that I recovered. She went back through the village and dragged all the corpses of the trolls near the tavern. I wondered at her strength as I watched her. She was nearly my height but her arms were slim. Yet she had been able to hack her way through the trolls we fought and now easily pulled their bodies around. I doubted that I could have moved them as quickly as she did without resorting to magic.

  She unpacked empty jars and bottles from her bags when all the trolls had been gathered. She took other instruments that I didn’t recognize. Some looked like knives and scissors. Others were made of glass and looked like hollow arrows, pointed at one end but dull on the other. She laid everything out and then went to work.

  Her early comments made sense as she opened up the trolls and harvested their organs. There was blood coating her arms passed her elbows in no time but she didn’t seem to care. She carved open their chests and plunged her hands right in, pulling out seemingly never ending intestines and discarding them on the ground.

  She broke through ribs with her hands and sliced out the troll’s lungs. They joined the intestines in a growing pi
le of unwanted organs. Her face was neutral as she worked, as if she was scooping out the insides of a pumpkin. When she checked on me I would see spots of blood on her face.

  “Trolls are amazing, you know,” she said as she held a knife above the largest troll’s torso. “You probably know this already. They can regrow limbs and recover from obscene amounts of damage. Except for the ones that lost their heads, these weren’t really dead dead until now.

  “Even this one,” she waved the knife in a circle above the troll’s head. “Even though you, ah, removed its arms and legs, it would have survived if it was given food and water. More likely its friends would have eaten it but it’s still amazing.”

  She placed the tip of the knife delicately in the troll’s neck and sliced it vertically open. Another set of lungs and intestines went on the pile before she pulled out the troll’s heart and liver. The heart was larger than I expected and was the same red and green mix of its blood. The liver was massive and Kate draped it over both of her forearms. It was dark green and shiny, catching the light with a gleam that reminded me of an oversized raw chicken breast.

  “You’re lucky you didn’t ruin this,” she said with a smile on her face. She looked like she had just found a treasure. “I told you to only burn their heads for a reason.”

  The liver was stuffed and coiled into the largest jar she had. The heart was put into a jar with the others she collected. It was so much larger than the others that they looked like they came from different creatures. She left the livers in the other three trolls that she cut open.

  The final two trolls were the ones that I had killed with fire and lightning. She dragged the mutilated corpses of the others away so the last two were side by side. The one I hit with lightning had a black smear across its chest and face but was still intact. The head of the other was a charred wreck.