Blood Of The Wizard (Book 1) Read Online Free Page B

could only offer futile suggestions, uttering mad threats about Killroot.  But we knew enough of elf character to know what not to do—which was raise an outcry, because that would surely bring on Killroot’s cruelty.

 
     
     
     
    Chapter 5
     
     
     
    We spent a long, melancholy night , waiting.  Amid the roaring of the northern gale, driving through any gap it could find in the hall, Halvgar roared back.  But the wind only grew stronger.  It seemed as if it would wrench all the eaves from the roof.  It shrieked across the garden like malignant spirits.  And all the while poor Halvgar kept rushing into the blinding whirl. 
    Outside, though, he could not see twice the length of his own arm, and the servants and I begged him to come back. 
    As long as the storm raged, he would pace back and forward the full length of the hunting-room.  It was a hellish eternity.  His face would wrench in a seizure of fury, until his eye would be caught by some object the boy had played with.  The stout dwarf would freeze, then swallow.  He would bend, slowly, and pick it up.  He would put this carefully away, as one lays aside the belongings of the dead. 
    Then he would set himself down, gazing at the leaping flames of the log fire.  I felt nothing but the agony of our utter helplessness. 
    Afterwards, the lanterns that we had placed on the oak center table began to smoke and give out a pungent, burning smell.  Morning revealed an ocean of billowy drifts, crusted over by the frozen sleet, which reflected the white dazzle.  The whole scene burned the eyes shut as great icicles hung from the naked branches of the sheeted pines, and snow was wreathed among the cedars.
     
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    After lifting the canvas from the camping ground, we sought in vain for more trace of the fugitives. 
    There was none.
    We dispatched a dozen different search parties that morning, Halvgar leading those who were to go on the river-side of the hall.  I took some well-trained rangers picked from the elvish servants, who could track the forest to every elf haunt within a week’s march of Goback. 
    A few of Addly’s guards came.  We both knew they showed up more out of curiosity than to help, but we needed help.  I put them on a trail with instructions to report back that night.
    As soon as they left out, I hunted up an old, wrinkled elf.  Batt was a hunting guide I used now and again.  Grizzled, stunted and chunky, he was not at all the picturesque figure that was typical of elves.  He was more like a dwarf—which might explain why we got along so well, as these days I had more in common with those little fellows than my own countrymen.  Instead of the blue face paint, he wore a dwarven stocking cap with earflaps tied under his chin.  His longshirt was an ill-fitting garment, the cast-off coat of some well-to-do human, and his trousers slouched in ample folds above the beaded skin shoes favored by the elves.  The old Yrklander was as silent as an animal, and the dwarves hereabouts had nicknamed him The Mute.  Or perhaps his name was Mute, and they called him The Bat.  I can’t recall which.  I just knew that what he lacked in speech, he made up in an almost animal-like acuteness of the senses.  It was commonly believed that Batt possessed some nameless sense that big game possess, by which he and they could actually feel the presence of an enemy or a predator before any man or dwarf, or even the other elves. 
    For my part, I would be willing to pit that “feel” of Batt’s against the nose of any wolfhound.
    “ Batt, old fellow.  Good to see you,” I said.  I was puffing the long stem of a clay pipe to calm my nerves.  “I wish I could say I called you for one of our hunts.”
    The old elf nodded.
    “ Listen, let us get right to it.  There’s an elf, a bad elf, a half-human cur…”  I was particular in describing him as half human, because Batt was full elvish Yrklander.  “The filthy son of a whore stole a