“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
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
“Aserica,” 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.
“It can’t be,” the Hoar Witch growled. “How can it be?”
It was the shapeshifting girl who Slither had slung from the cliff and she just said they were intending to go into the Lurr to look for the warlock.
“It’s one of her spies,” the first male voice said, but Aserica barely heard him. The reflecting pool flared white and the hot, crackling flash of pain that marked Gat’s death tore through the Hoar Witch and the rest of the brood. Above the howling chorus of pain and sorrow her bond-linked children sent up, the Hoar Witch’s scream carried a note of rage that made clear to all who heard—she was tired of being tricked at every turn.
Sometime later, with the moon still canting in the sky, Gallarael, Xavian and Darl sat in the dancing shadows beneath a fur tree and watched the old oak in which the sneak had landed crackle and burn. Xavian’s magic had caught the dry wood on fire when he’d blasted the creature and all they could do was huddle and wait for the ramma mounts to return.
“It’s leek a beacon,” Darl grumbled. “We’ve a great bonfire to shew the wetch’s mensters where to start their hent.”
“I’m sorry, Darl,” Xavian said for the tenth or eleventh time. “But the creature already knew where we were, so it doesn’t really matter.”
“It scared the ramma well away. They won’t come ‘til feeding time.”
“Well we need to rest anyway,” said Gallarael. “Get some rest.”
“I want to be well away from here when the wetch’s wolf pack arrives,” Darl grumbled. “Not sitting here waiting on them.”
Gallarael massaged her aching feet. The old rim rider boots Darl found in the locker were easily two sizes too large for her feet, but she relished them. No longer would she have to manage with claw slots torn through the toes of her footwear. In these larger boots, when she changed forms, her claws wouldn’t extend through the leather. It cramped her feet, but it was better this way, except that in her normal form the boots were wearing blisters on the backs of her heels.
“Don’t fret, Darl,” she told him as she took off the other boot. “That thing has probably been watching us a while. Its dead now, and I am about to go round up the ramma so we can be away before sunrise.”
“You can’t catch…” Darl stopped himself when he realized that she probably could catch the animals.
“Just be ready to get them harnessed up as I drive them in.” She said.
“And you, mister wizard, can’t you find a spell that will put out that blaze?” she punched Xavian in the arm. “Make rain or something.”
A few hours later the blazing tree was behind them. Xavian’s attempt to blow out the flames with a magical breeze had only fanned them to new heights. If it wasn’t for all of the snow, caked on the living trees around it, the whole forest might have caught fire.
Dawn found them not long after that. They moved with haste, constantly searching the sky and forest around them for more of the Hoar Witch’s creatures, but nothing revealed itself.
As the afternoon wore on, a false sense of security came over them. Then the sky bulked up and turned a deep shade of grey. Soon, thick, pillowy snowflakes were falling all around.
Chapter Nine
Old Master Wiggins
was dancing at the fair.
He did a flip, but then he slipped,
upon his homemade hair.
– A Parydon street ditty
Vanx and Chelda could walk, even jog, in a fully upright position now, so Thorn crawled back onto Poops’ back and rode. It was much easier for the elf to maintain himself since Poops wasn’t wearing his thick-furred vest. The regular strap harness Vanx had left on Poops provided a far better handhold than the tufts of fur from before, and after putting Edric-Outs behind them, they began moving much faster.
The exhilarating energy still surging from the battle berries allowed both Vanx and Chelda to maintain a steady trot. They stopped to walk for short stretches, usually in the villages and inhabited caves they came across. Their pauses were as much to keep from smashing anyone underfoot as to catch their breath. They stopped and sat by a pond for a little while and they ate the moss bread cookies that Thorn produced from the basket the brownie girl had given him to carry.
Vanx’s normally insistent curiosity was dampened by the berries’ effects, so he only made cursory observations of what he saw. If he and the Underland somehow survived this madness he would come back and take in all the splendor of the place. If they didn’t survive, it didn’t really matter.
Some things they came upon on as they moved down the Tinker’s Way passage were impossible for the curious young Zythian to ignore, though. Citadel Lake as it was called, was one such sight. More than a dozen acres of glassine water spread out under a high-domed roof that dripped wicked-looking stalactites. The area smelled of spring flowers and cool liquid. The smooth surface of the water was broken only by the occasional plop of mineral-rich seep water dripping from the sharp spikes above, as well as the rippling “V”-shaped wakes spreading out behind the blue and orange swans that were swimming along. Skinny, long-limbed gnome children were riding the aggravated water fowl to and from the half-dozen flower-covered islands Vanx could see spread across the lake.
The whole cavern was illuminated by chandelier-like beards of the same glowing green moss they had seen in the terrace, back before Edric-Outs. Up among the stalactites, in the gently wavering reflection the lake sent back up, Vanx saw several bright yellow hummingbirds, a few sprites, and their larger fae cousins, all darting about purposefully in the shadows.
Vanx found it hard to imagine that above the cavern roof somewhere, were granite-formed mountains and snowy forests. He pondered that idea and concluded that there possibly wasn’t any of that up there after all. They were in a different plane of existence, a reality inside another reality, held stable by the magic of the Heart Tree. Normally he would have asked a dozen questions and still been curious after they were answered, but the effect of the battle berries had him feeling the urgency to get on with the business at hand. Not only that, but he also felt the absence of the pixie queens’ beckoning and knowing that they were too late to save her only lent to his desire to end this.
Another sight he couldn’t completely ignore was the garden of crystals. The series of chambers where fairies—which appeared to Vanx to be only larger sprites called by a different name—and gnomes nurtured and helped grow the multi-colored shards. It was like passing through the heart of a gemstone, or roaming a forest of colorful crystalline trees. Here glittered ruby red; over there sapphire and even diamond ice. There were jutting towers of emerald, as long as a man is tall.
A cavern full of light-stealing black crystals was equally impressive, but Vanx could sense the potential for evil lurking under their multifaceted surfaces, just like he could sense the myriad of powers emanating from the others.
At one point, in that almost lifeless chamber, Vanx began to feel the heart leaf at his chest struggling to keep his way illuminated. It was as if the gleaming onyx shards were sapping the power from the medallion. Needless to say, they didn’t linger, and as soon as they were clear Vanx was overcome with a feeling of relief.
Citadel was the next place they came upon. Its very existence was a wonder to behold: an entire miniature city spread out across a massive cavern. At its farthest reaches Vanx could see part of the lake they’d passed earlier. It wound back around to touch the metropolis at an abandoned looking quay. Some parts of the city were tiny; others were sized for gnomes, and still others for brownies. There were even a few larger buildings, where elves or pixies might dwell or do business. Set back in wide, flat niches along the cavern walls, at various levels, and connec
ted by zigzagging lanes, was what appeared to be entire neighborhoods and farmsteads.
The place smelled like a city, too—wood smoke, forge fires, cooking, and the ever-present stench of offal that no metropolis could avoid.
There were several caveways, both large and small, leading away from the city, but apparently the road they were on was the only one they needed to take, for Thorn didn’t lead Poops down any other.
Vanx didn’t have to ask why the place looked deserted, and that particular observation only urged the group on, toward the nexus. A few of Citadel’s inhabitants paused to give Vanx and Chelda a look. Mostly children and matronly creatures who were too saddened by the murder of their queen, and worried for their loved ones, to garner much hope from the two huge beings. Vanx tried to ease their concerns with reassuring nods and grim smiles, but doubted that it did much good. The fathers and mothers, the sisters and husbands, of all these remaining people had gone on to battle evil. They were most likely under-equipped and unskilled against a rotten, vicious witch who had already killed their queen and Gallarael.
That thought made him wince.
Not long after leaving Citadel behind, they came upon a troop of all sorts of fae folk. The group was being led by an elf wearing silver chainmail and a battle helmet. On either side of him, two pixies hovered. They were similarly sized, carried wicked recurved bows and wore brightly painted, plated vests. Vanx noticed that the fiercest-looking of them was the female. The troupe was headed back to the Citadel, they learned, to take another passage to some other fairy mound entrance. The group seemed encouraged by the gargan-sized help that had arrived, but other than the three leading them, they had little in the way of armor or weapons and didn’t have the look of skilled fighters.
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