Strife & Valor: Book II of The Rorke Burningsoul Saga Read online

  Though I was concerned the fallen branch I collected from the base of that micro-grove was perhaps too damp to serve as a torch, the magical light of Valeria’s fire took to it generously. While the torch burned in my hand, I told the companions who paused mid-lecture, “I’m going to go down a ways and see if the path holds up. If it looks bad, I’ll come back—if it’s fine, I’ll call up.”

  “You should let someone come with you,” Branwen told me, looking ready to volunteer. I shook my head, gesturing with the torch toward the tunnel.

  “Even with the wisp lights, it’s too cold for us to be standing around unprotected unless we’re going to be on the way from one place to another. Stay by the mouth of the cave and let me determine whether it’s safe.”

  Valeria touched my hand. “Be careful, Rorke.”

  After a returned squeeze of her soft knuckles, I made my way down the side of the mountain with my blue torch lifted high.

  My first note was that the path from the mountainside cave was well-trod, indeed. In fact, the more I thought on it, the more I found it odd that an entrance so treacherous and so far from the city of El’ryh would be a popular means of merchants bringing wares into the Nightlands. With all the cliffs we had been forced to scale, or all the claustrophobic passages through which Adonisius navigated us, how could a merchant burdened by goods possibly make their way to the city by such a route?

  I tried to imagine doing it with just that burden Odile and Indra had forced me to haul from the spirit-thieves’ so-called temple. Any way I thought of it, the task was impossible. But who would be using a path in and out of the Nightlands enough to tamp it down—and perhaps even deliberately maintain it—to such a degree as this?

  Soon enough, I had my answer.

  To my surprise, I found a juncture. It gave me pause and I considered using this marker to call up to the women, who were quite far away by now but surely still within calling distance thanks to their sensitive elf ears. Then, however, I found myself alerted by a curious sound: a yelp like that of an animal. Unfamiliar with what beasts might be found on the mountainside aside from rams, I thought perhaps we could have a meal to restore some energy to our weary bones. Making my way along the right path, the path of the juncture winding around in the direction of that noise, I drew Strife and journeyed on.

  And around a tight corner, I was surprised by a meeting with my first gimlet.

  The little lizard man let out a yelp identical to the first I’d heard and backpedaled a few steps. All the time it looked rapidly at me and then, with more surprise, at my torch. I was quite surprised, myself. Despite Branwen’s imagery, I had not expected a kind of small bipedal dragon. Nor one so—well, oddly charming. It did, somehow, bear some resemblance to a dog, and not just in voice. I could not put my finger on it—perhaps its muzzle’s general shape, or the little tuft of tawny fur between its horns—before the whelp sprang up and, quite unexpectedly, snatched the torch out of my unready hand.

  “Hey,” I called, dashing after the thief who literally turned tail and ran. “Get back here!”

  The gimlet giggled maniacally at that, knowing I had no leverage to make it turn around. It was quick, darting at an angle just when I managed to find myself in grabbing distance. The hyperventilation of its tiny lungs was clear, and I almost thought that I might outrun it based on sheer endurance. Then, to my frustration, it darted off the path entirely and scaled down the rocks

  It was not my best decision, but I needed that torch: without it, I was going to be stranded on the mountainside until my party found me, or until the coming of the dawn. Therefore, I hurried to keep up with the gimlet, trying to gauge its path before the light disappeared. This quickly proved treacherous, with smaller stones slipping out from beneath my feet and larger ones seeming as though to spring from the dark. Even when the terrain leveled out, I was amazed to discover just how rocky the area was—and how ornamented.

  When I realized the gimlet had come to a stop, I also skidded to a halt. Cautious, Strife still raised, I made my slow way toward the little beast. The plateau where it had led me was very strange, indeed. A pit lay in its center, and around this pit had been arranged all manner of precious objects. Dead flowers and fruits stood vigil with little statues carved of bones and even small piles of golden objects. There was a nearly limitless selection of items arranged around the mouth of the pit beside which the gimlet stood, and it seemed the fellow intended to add the torch to this assortment. He barked, pushing the base of the torch into the gravelly terrain and propping it upright with a nearby golden bowl of fruit that had been frozen by the altitude.

  “Now, I know a sacred site when I see one…” Slowly, carefully, I lowered Strife, my grip on the blade nonetheless tight after seeing the surprising strength that had allowed the gimlet to wrench my torch from my hand. “I don’t wish to disturb anything here, friend…but I need that light if I’m to leave you alone, eh?”

  The gimlet barked, its scaled tail lashing back and forth. I took a step closer and did not hear the rocks beneath my feet groaning in protest.

  “Now,” I was too busy saying, “let’s have the torch…”

  Strong enough for a gimlet’s small size, the rocks making up the hallow plateau were not strong enough for a human man. With a cataclysmic, certainly panicking rumble, the rocks gave way beneath my feet. I cursed, attempting to catch myself on the edge of the stone before me and instead simply knocking it out of place. The gimlet gasped, then laughed madly to see my dilemma. Even as the stars rang in my head and my body rattled with the pain of the landing, the little cretin leaned over the edge of the hole to enjoy the sight of my suffering.

  “Weltyr’s beard, you little rat—come down here and see how long you laugh.”

  Uncomprehending or uncaring, the gimlet’s giggling head disappeared and its light footfalls knocked away enough rocks to let me know it was on its way back to the path.

  Groaning, head aching, I wondered to myself if the fall would have been worse or better with armor on. I was going to have to figure out how to get my hands on a new set when we were in Soot…once I had gotten out of that pit.

  And once I had done something about the exquisite woman I found unconscious within it.

  ROUSING THE MOUNTAIN WITCH

  SHE WAS THE first thing I noticed when I sat up: the only thing there was to notice, aside from the dessicated skeletons of a few unfortunate gimlets.

  I had fallen into some kind of sepulcher. An apparently fresh body had been lain upon a bed of stone, and I was quite amazed to see it in one piece. It were as if this woman had died that very day, yet such thing was impossible. The offerings circling the tomb’s rotunda had been so vast in number that I was certain they’d gathered for years. All the same, she for whom the offerings were apparently meant surely had to be a recent addition. Perhaps an offering herself. I kept a hand upon Strife and was aware at all times of my surroundings, but the pit was enclosed and bore no signs of animal life.

  Alert, I edged nearer. The blue light of the torch at the lip of the sepulcher illuminated the darkness. By virtue of this friendly flame I absorbed, in awe, the stern features of a deathly goddess. Her pale face was artfully decorated in smudges of kohl as black as raven’s feathers—as black as the hair that plumed around her pallid features to form pillow and shroud in one. The body, interned beneath what I now realized was not a natural plateau but a deliberate cairn, was without the least hint of breath, yet I swore she still possessed the tension of life and the strength of a woman as healthy as my companions. Animal furs enfolded her flesh, but the muscles of one slender, spry leg left exposed by the position of the furs made her good health on death clear enough.

  And oh, what pain! What terrible pain swept over my heart to see such a beautiful woman left dead. Had the gimlets committed this crime against one of Weltyr’s finest creations? Perhaps Branwen had been right to chastise me for my love of women, but my love of women was really only my love of Weltyr and the fine world he
had made for all of us to live in. When I saw that sacred creation profaned, it wounded me—and there was nothing more profane than the annihilation of life from a creature so sacred that I almost feared looking up her face. The dark lines arcing around her orbitals and over her lips, this latter the tip of an arrow pointing up from her delicate chin, somehow only made her more exquisite. I averted my eyes, unable to bear my own mournful thoughts, intending to find a way out of the pit by climbing a wall or some such.

  To my surprise, my investigation yielded not a way out, but a sort of instruction manual. I might have been almost grateful to the gimlet, had its theft of the torch that lit the images not been the reason I’d become trapped in the first place. In such incidents lie Weltyr’s higher plans. I saw evidence of this in the rudimentary pictures painted on the wall beside the sleeping demi-goddess.

  How old these images were! I could not have guessed, but I was sure the depictions were well and truly ancient. The shapes were so rudimentary it took several minutes in the dimly lit darkness before I could fully discern what they were intended to represent. A feminine figure, distinguished by long hair: doing battle, I thought, or perhaps hunting. At any rate, a great deal of creatures surrounded her, some of them—little lizard-like humanoids included—being grabbed or otherwise poised before her hands. Another of the same figure with some kind of power emanating from her. The figure arranged in her mausoleum.

  Two faces pressed together, followed by an illustration that looked like a blossomed flower.

  This last image gave me pause. I looked at it for a few long moments, along with all the others, and tried to discern a clearer meaning. There was none.

  Slowly, still as uncertain as I have ever been, I turned back to the unconscious woman and reached down to touch her cheek. I have seen ghouls and zombies and heard terrible tales of undead magicians who had spent eternity as immortal sorcerers called “dirges;” I had even had my share of encounters with skeletons by that time in my short adventuring career. Among all these undead, not one of them produced any body heat when close enough to touch.

  Yet the woman, unconscious, unbreathing, was warm to the touch. Warm and soft as any I had known.

  With one more reluctant glance at the images upon the wall, I leaned down and pressed my tenderest kiss to the woman’s soft mouth. The mark on her underlip trailing down her jaw, I was amazed to find, was a tattoo; and her lively mouth was soon as awake as mine. As the flower petals concealing her tongue parted, I was beset by the urge to recoil in fear. At her soft, sleepy moan, however, I urged myself onward. Soon my tongue was invited in to slide against her cool one, and another, longer sigh of pleasure rattled up from the base of her unpracticed lungs. When at last I lifted my head she had begun to nuzzle eagerly against me, her hand lifting to caress my chest.

  “Sweet moon,” she gasped, sitting up beyond me, her senses sliding into full awareness from the thickness of her enchanted sleep, “good shadows! What sacred night to look upon again—who is this hero who disturbed my slumber? Let me look upon your face—”

  She turned to see me. As her hibernating eyes found focus, they widened with a kind of shock. I told her, “I am Rorke Burningsoul, Paladin of Weltyr. And I get the feeling that you have been here, asleep in the mountains, for a very long time.”

  The woman laughed heartily in the way of warriors and witches. “Somehow I do get the sense that King Hundil of Iltraxia has no more qualm with me…I’ll travel the world freely again, how good it’ll be!”

  Her accent was thick with a brogue I’d not heard, and neither the monarch nor the nation were familiar to me. I made a mental note of it all and asked, “So, you can remember names of cities and monarchs—I assume that you remember your own?”

  “What a pity that Gundrygia the Sorceress should go unrecognized by sight! One look at me once inspired cold fear deep in the hearts of the bravest men.”

  “I assure you, Madame, that fear is still among the plethora of feelings you inspire…but only by the humbling point of your poison-tipped beauty, rather than any reputation.”

  The wild woman threw back her head in another mighty laugh, her lips peeling back from teeth that seemed somehow fanglike. “What a thing to say to me, hero! What god sent you? “Weltyr,” you called him?” She thought for but a second, then looked at me with fiendish eyes that glowed in the darkness. I wanted to make love to her then and there, her petulant sneer somehow leaving me all the more eager to feel her body in my arms.

  “Yes,” said the barbarous witch, shimmying off her slab and twirling away from me, “I know that god…he was called something different in my time, and something else long before that. Praise be to you, wanderer! It feels so good to move about and stretch…and awful, too.”

  Gundrygia doubled over to touch her toes and shake out her hair, her body dancing through her furs: bright white shimmers of light glowing through the ink of night to reveal strange dreams like the shapes of the dwarvish toy sometimes called “a magic lantern.” A funny thing, with moving pictures that often told a story. What a story, Gundrygia’s body!

  I tried not to be too distracted…or not to sound as such, at any rate. “What was my Father called before his name was Weltyr?”

  “It’s secret, wanderer. Secret as the place to which his other eye flew when he tore it from his own skull in sacrifice.”

  “So you do know my god. A sorceress, you called yourself?”

  “The very chieftess of all who would call themselves magicians, rest assured.” Her movements, at first stretching, slowly became literal dancing. That body of hers swayed within her primitive garb in what I assumed to be some celebration…or, perhaps, invitation. “But I am not interested in myself just this moment…who are you that awoke me? Rorke Burningsoul, this is your name, but whence hail you?”

  “The city of Skythorn is my home,” I answered her, allowing myself to openly appreciate the roving of her hands over her splendid breasts. “And I go now to pursue the Scepter of Weltyr—a precious relic stolen by my old companions, Grimalkin and Hildolfr. My being here is but by the grace of my Lord.”

  A smile crossed her face. When I asked her the matter, the sensual woman shook her head and turned her swaying, arching back to me, her hips rolling within the artfully split confines of her furs to show sometimes this leg, sometimes that one, now a bright and beautiful flash of lunar skin that vanished as quickly as it extended. “You are a man of few words, and yet in those words you say very much. Rorke Burningsoul, Rorke, Rorke…”

  The words rolled from her in the growl of a big cat, each iteration another ten degrees of temperature in my blood. I almost had to clutch the slab to keep myself seated upon its edge. Around this time, it occurred to me that her dance might not be meaningless after all—neither meant to celebrate, nor seduce, but instead to cast a literal spell. I also realized in that moment that I did not care. I basked in the slide of a hand down the long white column of an arm.

  “You are a man of god, Burningsoul. That much is clear.”

  “Before anything, I am Weltyr’s son. All other things in the world that are sweet to me—for instance, being private audience to a dancing enchantress—are gifts from my god for performing his will.”

  “Enchantress! What a flirt you are…”

  While she uttered that high, wild laugh, I my heart raced with delight and dread. Struck with the immense craving to know more about her, I begged, “Whence do you hail, Gundrygia, and how came you to find yourself here?”

  “You really did find your way here by accident, eh? I suppose most have forgotten me by now. I’ll find my father—he’ll tell me the time.”

  “And where is your father?”

  “Across the sea from here,” she told me. “Far away, north of Rhineland.”

  Ah! Now that was a country I knew. “That’s where Grimalkin hails! Rhineland—but how is it that you’re here, Gundrygia?”

  “I won’t tell you that easily. I’d just as soon not think about it at all
.”

  The music of her presence was overwhelming to me, and I could not discern what enchantment she had put upon my person. Perhaps it was simply an assurance that my love for her would burn wildly, savagely, from those first moments of our meeting—even once everything was said and done.

  “What will it take to get you to tell me?” I asked, still poised upon the edge of the slab and barely containing myself. “A woman like you is the sort that a man has to know everything about.”

  As her bright teeth flashed with her laughter, Gundrygia lowered her furs from her shoulders and let them gather at her bare feet. “Then fight me for it, warrior…let’s wrestle awhile and see who pins whom.”

  Exhaling, I considered her nude state and the shining glory of her exposed body, the high globes of her swollen breasts round like the wonderful flesh of her backside. The dark thicket upon the delta of her womanhood drew my eye as I said, “To wrestle a woman is a different matter entirely. I might upset you if I prove too rough.”

  The arrowhead tattooed upon her chin and lower lip produced the effect of a constant pout that was, in that moment, accentuated by a real one. Her hands ran back up her waist and over her breasts again, the lovely pink peaks of her nipples stiff with my attention. “You think you’d need to take it easy on me, do you? I assure you, Paladin, I’m a worthier foe than all that.”

  “If you are to prove a worthier foe than I would suppose without the assistance of your magic, then I would demand worthier prizes. What is the name of your father?”

  “That fee is simpler, because his name will mean so little to you…I’ll give it for another kiss, Paladin.”

  Somehow, I still found myself frozen beneath the fixating power of her gorgeous face and body. The witch closed the distance between us, lean muscles rippling beneath her soft white flesh. Gundrygia poured herself against me, her white arms enfolding my neck, her graceful mouth offered to mine like the mouth of a flower.