The Legend of Vanx Malic Books I-IV Bundle: To Kill a Witch

by M. R. Mathias

  Darl only made it a few steps before a rough bark-covered lash wrapped his ankle and tripped him.

  When Gallarael realized that Darl wasn’t behind her this time, she turned to see him dangling upside down over the wide-open knothole of a witchwood tree.

  Chapter Thirteen

  There are many ways to skin a cat,

  or so the saying’s said.

  But it takes a witch to kill a witch,

  or at least to keep one dead.

  – Frosted Soul

  Chelda hadn’t known what to expect when she was led up a winding tunnel by a pair of pixie men clad in garish plate mail. There were smudges of brownish-red blood dried on the pixies’ armor, and they were carrying silvery swords that would have seemed like table dirks, at best, in her hands. Her escorts didn’t say much about what waited above, other than to tell her that the Shadowmane extended beyond the protective ring of lasher vine shrubs and blood thorns, but not by much.

  “The presence of your spell-forged steel will be a great boon against the larger foes. But you will have to mind your footing ‘round the brownies and gnomes. They are quick with their needles but most are untrained. They fight in packs and you could crush them three at a time with one misstep.”

  “Then warn them to stay clear of me,” Chelda snorted, “for I will be cleaving meat and bone, not poking pinholes.”

  “I like her,” the other pixie warrior chuckled, and they continued up in silence.

  The lift stopped and they stepped into a short passage that ended in a stone arc similar to the one they had entered in the fairy mound. This arch was sizably bigger and the stonework was of a far higher quality, with leafy, eye-blurring magic symbols carved all around the opening. The opening itself was an opaque sheen of sparkling quicksilver and when the first pixie walked through, it was as if he were walking into a liquid wall and disappearing as he went.

  “It’s alright,” said the other pixie, noticing the look on her face. “Just remember, if the way is not open, you have to go around the Heart Tree five times to your right as you face the trunk, for it to reveal itself.”

  He went through then, and with a great sigh of resignation, Chelda followed.

  An explosive sensation greeted her. The tunnel had been silent and dim. She hadn’t expected such an abrupt change. Her eyes were suddenly filled with dazzling sights and more shades of green than she thought possible. Her ears, however, were filled with the shouts, screams and clanging of battle. There was a gibbering, high-pitched cackle; deep, rumbling snarls; and the plinking thrum of tiny bows. There was also the heat. It hit her like a wet blanket and forced her to shrug out of her coat, leaving her upper half clad in naught but a thin undershirt and a padded vest.

  As she glanced around the glade-like oval of open ground surrounding the Heart Tree, she wished she had some plated gauntlets and thicker, knee-high boots. The battle berries were still working on her, though, so she started out toward a bearish monstrosity that was getting the better of a trio of pike-wielding elves. From overhead and behind her an arrow streaked down into the creature’s shoulder. It reared up and one of the elves darted in, stabbing deeply into its belly. Chelda looked back as she drew her ancient sword. Craning her head, she saw that the Heart Tree towered above the rest of the forest. Among the branches were elven archers, pixies, fairies and sprites; they were fluttering and buzzing around it, some with arms full of arrows and sling stones and others with bows and slings of their own. From the base of the tree’s massive trunk there were twenty paces of open ground in any direction, and it was sparsely littered with the bodies of the dead. A few were creatures of scale and fur, but most were tiny, jewel-winged fairies and sprites, or child-sized corpses still clad in brightly enameled armor.

  At the edge of the clearing was a thirty-foot-high fortification of growth: trees, shrubs and thorny vines all woven together to form a wall around the area. It was at the barrier, and presumably beyond it, where most of the fighting was taking place.

  Chelda heard a savage growl and a high-pitched yell, and she spun around to see that the bear-beast had gotten its teeth into the elf who had stabbed it. It shook him violently and crunched his chest as it kept the other elves at bay with a huge claw.

  The battle lust filled Chelda then, and she was off, her bright blade glowing the same color as the sky.

  The thing never saw her coming, and her enchanted steel cleaved down through its thick skull, splitting through half of its snout. The other elves screamed out in surprised horror when the blood and flecks of gray matter went splattering across them.

  Chelda kicked an elf out of harm’s away just as a long, thin-clawed arm, covered in yellowish gray scales, shot out of the bramble to snatch him.

  Chelda brought the blade down as if she were chopping wood with an ax. But the unseen creature withdrew its limb just ahead of her sword.

  “Duck,” she heard a thin voice call out.

  She turned to see who was yelling at whom and slightly dropped down as she stepped back from the forest wall. She saw the elf she’d booted pointing just above her head and realized the warning was for her. It was too late to comply when something hard, yet squishy, hit her in the temple and sent an explosion of pain and bright, blinding liquid across the backside of her head. Then she knew she was looking up at sky and the worried face of a blueberry-haired female the size of a doll.

  “You have to watch out for them rot melon singing trollamonks,” the gnomish medika chided sharply. Her plum-sized head and wild blue hair, along with her luminous amber eyes, gave her an alien look that sent a shiver down Chelda’s spine. “They get high up in the trees and throw them terrible witch-made fruits right at you.”

  Chelda blinked and felt a raw, stinging sensation across her cheek and forehead. Her skin was burning as if it had been dashed with boiling hot molasses. She reached to touch it, but the gnomish girl stopped her. “Don’t touch the salve,” she chirped. “Let it be. Just be more careful.” And with that the little gnome was gone.

  Chelda rose up just in time to see Gloryvine Moonseed. Chelda recognized her from the pixie queen’s dying vision. The brave elven warrior stepped into the archway that led back into the Underland. Her bright yellow armor had been covered in gore. She didn’t look pleased to be going into the arch and Chelda suddenly hoped that the brave little fighter hadn’t been injured.

  With that thought, Chelda sat up and picked up her sword, and charged toward a brown-and-green-striped wolfen who had just managed to get into the clearing.

  The creature’s back was lined with several parallel slices where the thorny undergrowth had sought to contain it. Shifting its orange eyes, it searched for something to crush or claw, but gave no sign that the wounds were painful.

  The beast faltered for a beat when it saw Chelda’s size and the bright blue flash of her weapon, but it didn’t flee. Instead it dodged to the side of her first stroke and proceeded to dart in and sink its teeth just above her knee. The beast jerked once, ripping skin and muscle, and then it darted away before her sword came down in a two-handed overhead stab.

  Chelda ignored the pain. The rush of the battle berries helped. This time when she went in, she swung clumsily and left some leg open just like before. When the beast went in for the trap, her other foot caught it full in the gut and lifted it off of the grass in a lung-emptying “Oomph.”

  While the creature flailed trying to get its paws back underneath it, Chelda’s blade jutted out in three rapid thrusts, each of them sinking deeply into its vitals.

  It went on like that, Chelda dodging the acidy rot melons and using her blade wherever it was needed most. She couldn’t go out into the forest and face the enemy, but plenty of the malformed beasts made it to her and met their end for it.

  The sun finally started to disappear beyond the peaks. Chelda gained respect for the little folk’s ability to fight. She killed some more of the larger creatures that entered the Shadowmane, but in the forest and shrubs beyond that area
there was a war raging. She could do very little about it.

  The crazed trollamonks lobbed the melons on troops of brownies and gnomes, while bright scarlet and green snakes, and crow-winged lizards, snapped sprites from the sky with their beaks. Chelda was dragged out of a futile battle with an owl-headed fiend that kept hopping out of her sword’s reach on its rabbit-legged haunches. It soon lured her within range of the acidic fruit-throwing trollamonks. Luckily, an elf and a sprite kept her from going too far.

  During a brief respite, she drank deeply of battle berry juice and ate freshly baked manna. She also shed her clothing and let a pair of gnomish girls wrap her torn, festering thigh.

  She rejoined the battle at dusk wearing only her thick-leathered shin guards and knee-high climbing boots over her doeskin pants.

  She savagely attacked some wild, antlered beast when it broke through, but the radiant glow of her blade kept anything else from coming close enough for her to engage.

  “Chelda Flar,” a small, commanding female voice called through the evening.

  “Chelda Flar, come to the tree and sheathe your sword.”

  “Who commands me?” Chelda asked.

  “It is I, Captain Moonseed. Reinforcements are coming up, and the glow of your weapon is hindering our night vision. Go down and have your wound tended below.”

  Chelda backed toward the tree and slowly slid her blade into its scabbard. Suddenly she couldn’t see anything except the dark, jagged treetops and the deepening, star-spattered sky. But as her eyes adjusted, she made out hundreds of pairs of eyes gleaming in the darkness. The silhouette of First Captain Moonseed standing in the dark blue archway beckoned her.

  “You fought well,” said Moonsy. “Come, while the passage is still open.”

  Chelda started to comply, but a roar and a thunder of breaking branches split the night. She whirled to see a milky, slick shape reflecting the starlight. It was taller than Chelda at its shoulder, and it loped into the darkened clearing toward the Heart Tree itself.

  Chelda’s blade came back out then, it’s bright blue brilliance shining just in time to see the creature. It had four limbs that were easily ten feet long and multi-jointed. Its body was oddly humanoid, but its head was all beady eyes and snapping like a turtle.

  It raised up on its hind legs and grabbed the tree nearly fifteen feet from the ground, shaking it violently. On the limbs of the tree, little folk screamed as the wingless went tumbling. It was in those following seconds, just before Chelda made to engage this new foe that an undulating carpet of glittering ruby eyes swarmed through the barrier. There were thousands of them, all whispering and squeaking. Sitting on the largest of the rats was a little critter that resembled a tadpole.

  At the sight of it, several fairies gasped and cried out. Chelda heard the name Pwca, or Puck, and in seconds, rats were everywhere, and the night was filled with the screams of the fae.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Master Wiggins went a twirling,

  and the twirling did go on.

  When his spin reached its end

  He found his hair was gone..

  – A Parydon street ditty

  Gallarael was shocked. She had no idea how to save Darl from the dark knothole that was about to consume him. She was too far ahead of them to get back in time and she had no weapons of range. As the dangling gargan was lowered face first into the horrible orifice, Gallarael scanned the ground for something to throw. It was all she could think to do.

  A long-dead branch overgrown with toadstools and tiny white blooms lay at the base of the ridge off to one side. But it was too big, and she didn’t think hitting a living tree with a dead branch would do much good anyway. There were some thorny scrubs, and a head-sized boulder that she doubted she could lift and hurl more than two or three feet.

  Starting to panic, she took two steps toward the rock to give it a try, and as Darl began to scream in earnest, she saw exactly what she needed.

  She reached past the partially buried rock and snatched up a saucer-sized chip that had long ago flaked from it. Then with a spinning whirl she sent the chunk flying at the tree like a discus. It hit with a thump and fell away.

  Darl let out what sounded more like a scream of determination than of panic, and he drew his sword. Gallarael’s stone bounced off the tree with a solid thump but did little more than chip away some of the beast’s barkish hide. This sent it further into its feeding frenzy, but Darl, as calmly as a terrified man could manage, simply put the length of his blade in the creature’s foul hole and shoved.

  He was rewarded with the whiplash jerk of his entire body and then a flight into the harsh, leafy branches. He hit something high across his chest and shoulders and was spun, ass over ankle, until both of his shins erupted into knots of fire the size of goose eggs. All of this happened just before his head hit the soft dirt, ear to shoulder, and his knee smashed into his face.

  He lay there trying to get air back into his lungs, feeling pain in so many places that none of them stood out any more than the other. As his vision went blurry and began to swim, he decided that his head was broken. Why else would he be seeing a swarm of colorful, tiny men and women, some with wings and as small as hummingbirds, swarming over the hill beyond Gallarael?

  Several arrows went whizzing past Gallarael’s head from behind, some with tiny flames flickering at their tips. Then a stoppered clay bottle the size of a cherry exploded into flames against the tree just below where Darl’s sword hilt still jutted up from its gurgling hole.

  A long, whip-like branch came snapping by and Gallarael had to jump back to avoid it. Her foot landed on something soft and wiggly and she took a tumble to avoid smashing it with her full weight. Within a heartbeat she was swarmed by foot-tall beings wielding barbed needles as pikes.

  The tree beast was retreating now, being driven back by the flames and the fire-wielding fairy folk. It thrashed its long limbs about as it went, swatting sprites and pixies from the air. It snapped across a line of little men with slings and identical beards, but then it was gone, just a rustle in the distant leaves.

  “You were fighting a witch tree?” a tiny boy–no, a man, but child-sized–with pumpkin-colored hair, pointed ears and bright amber eyes, asked. “Are you not one of her beasts, too?”

  “NOOO,” Gallarael hissed in her rough changeling voice.

  “THOOORN!” Darl’s voice called from the bushes. “We are with Posy-Thorn.”

  “The changeling too?” the elf asked the unseen voice.

  “She’s a… she is a…”

  “I’m a shapeshifter.” Gallarael spoke even as her body was resuming its natural form. “Come to aid my friends, Vanx and Chelda.”

  The astonished fairies gasped as her slick, dark outer skin broke up into pools of oily liquid and drew into the pores of her pale white human flesh. Her eyes and the shape of her face changed as well. Her red, oval pupils devolved into chocolate-colored human irises flecked with gold. Her long, ebony claws retracted into her bare feet and hands.

  The elf before her was nervous, even though he had a heavy horn bow, fully drawn, with its arrow pointed directly at her heart.

  “How did you get separated from your companions?” he asked Gallarael, then turned to a fairy who was half his knee-high size, but hovering near his head on gossamer wings.

  “Ask the other one the same question out of earshot.”

  “My companions thought I died when I was knocked from the frozen falls by some great serpent,” Gallarael said.

  Trying her best to look harmless, she added a bat of her long lashes for effect then chanced to rise up onto her elbow. The elf took an involuntary step backward.

  “His eyes are emerald green and he travels with a knighted dog named Sir Poopsalot. The hilt of his sword is encrusted with jewels and he is usually uncomfortably quiet.”

  She paused for a breath.

  “There was another with us, a mage, but he was taken by one of those tree creatures.”

  �
��The one that barked at the Troika wasn’t none too quiet,” a small, fluff-bearded woman growled.

  “Now, now, Merla, she got the rest of it right,” an even smaller winged fairy man chirped. “She even knew the proper name of Death Bringer’s beast.”

  “Did she now?”

  The brownie woman turned to face the fluttering fairy who zipped out of reach of the forked garden implement she was carrying.

  “Did you know its name now? Couldn’t she have just made that up?”

  “She was fighting a witch tree, Merla, and her friend is hurt.” This came from a gangly humanoid creature who looked like a puppeteer’s toy. “We’re not a mob. We’re under Sergeant Smilie’s command. What he says…”

  “It’s Sergeant Smilax, blast you,” the pumpkin-haired elf said.

  “Now those of you not chasing the witch tree; form up behind me and remain silent.”

  “We were being chased,” Gallarael told Sergeant Smilax. “Not too far back you will find what’s left of some other foul witch-made beast.”

  “We will check it,” Smilax nodded. The gossamer-winged fairy returned from its questioning with Darl and conferred with him in mousy whispers. Then the sergeant nodded again.

  “Your companion has confirmed your tale, but he is wounded severely. After what happened with your other friend, mighty Chelda Flar, I cannot take either of you into the Underland. We will bring medikas up to give him aid.” He shooed away the fae folk who were still standing guard over her and helped her to her feet. Oddly, she found that she was not the slightest bit ashamed of her barely dressed body.

  “The gnomish have the ability to repair almost anything. Hopefully he will be alright.”

  Gallarael knew that Darl was as tough as they come. It was something else the elf had said that ate at her.

  “What happened to Chelda?” she asked, fearing the worst. “Is she dead?”

  “No… no, she’s still alive and well, I hope, and fighting to defend the Heart Tree in the Shadowmane,” the elf said.