“I thought you said his name was Phillius?”
“It was. In truth, Princess, he was my friend and my mentor.” He looked down at his hands as he laced his fingers before speaking again. “He was a wizard.”
“A wizard?” she exclaimed. “That ghastly thing? No wizard ever looked like that. It’s impossible.” She was quite surprised that he was being so forthcoming with his answers. She knew he would not even have considered speaking to her of this if she had not been of endowed blood. The wizards of the Directorate, those six who had the greatest responsibility for victory in the Sorceresses’ War, preferred never to speak of their wartime experiences. Coming to the conclusion that she was about to hear a rare wizard’s story of the war, she schooled herself to look more respectful.
He took another draft of the ale, cognizant of the subtle change in her demeanor.
“During the war, many wizards died,” he began. “At that time we actually were fearful that male endowed blood would become extinct. We never knew how many of us there were because then, unlike now, no birth records were ever kept. A child was simply known as either ‘endowed’ or ‘common.’ He or she could either be trained in the craft, or not. There was as yet no Directorate, and as far as we knew, the jewel called the Paragon did not exist. Wizards helped to train each other in the craft, but we were widely dispersed across the countryside, with no real sense of organization except for those of us living in the palace at Tammerland. Training was haphazard at best, and the craft itself was in only a rudimentary form of development. This is one of the reasons why the sorceresses almost won. They were better organized and had succeeded in pushing the boundaries of magic farther than we had, and were thus more powerful than we were. But because of the discovery of the Paragon, their advantage was not to last.” He paused once again to take another swallow of ale.
He frowned at his next thoughts. “It is not widely known today, but the sorceresses tried, whenever possible, not to kill wizards—they preferred to take them alive.”
Before he continued he once again looked at his hands, the same hands that had just killed his one-time friend. “Captives of unendowed, or ‘common’ blood, often were pressed into service in the sorceresses’ armies. But the various fates that the endowed ones suffered were far beyond description. Some were killed outright, some tortured for the sorceresses’ pleasure, and some turned into blood stalkers like poor Phillius. Others were left alive for yet different purposes.” He turned his attention toward the crushed skull of the corpse in the field, and to the strange fog that had surrounded it. It had been over three hundred years since he had seen such a haze, and it brought him no pleasure to have seen one again today.
“What other purposes?” she asked gently.
He looked back at her with tired aquamarine eyes.
“Breeding. Because the union of two endowed people is the most likely to produce an endowed child, they raped the wizards repeatedly, hoping for a pregnancy that would yield a special girl child to raise as a sorceress. The male babies were simply killed outright. We never understood the importance of such a child to them. Had they not spent so much of their power and their time trying to achieve this birth, we may never have prevailed. Inadvertently, they gave us the one thing we needed most: time.” Again he paused, as though not wishing to relive the painful memories.
The princess looked at the corpse lying in the hot afternoon sun. The fog around the body had dissipated, and hungry flies had begun to gather around the exposed brain to settle in dark clumps upon the yellow fluid. Feeling sick again, she returned her gaze to the old one, still feeling full of questions. This time it was she who wished to change the subject.
“Surely Phillius, if he was a wizard, did not always look like that?” she asked. She put the root back into her mouth.
Wigg shook his head. “No. At one time he was a strong, handsome man. The change in his appearance was part of the mutation process forced upon him by the sorceresses. During the war, it was said that the process was so painful and happened so quickly that many of the wizards simply went insane. In that case, they had no use and they were killed. Only the strongest of them could withstand the transformation. Phillius was one of those, and his capture was a sad day for all of us.”
Wigg closed his eyes. He knew that had Phillius survived he would have been an invaluable member of the Directorate, and his wisdom was sorely missed.
“Then how did you know it was him?” she queried. She was becoming more interested with every word.
Wigg took another swallow of the ale, replacing the cork. He stood without speaking and walked to the dead blood stalker. Carefully avoiding the yellow fluid in the grass, he lifted up the inside of the thing’s left forearm so Shailiha could see it from where she was. He pointed with his other hand to an odd, bright red birthmark, then gently laid the forearm back upon the ground before returning to the princess.
“I had known Phillius since I was a child,” he explained as he sat down again. “That birthmark had always been a part of him. I saw it when he first raised his ax.”
She carefully considered her next words.
“Is that why you hesitated?” She regretted the question the moment it left her lips, but she had to know.
He drew himself up and looked into her questioning face. “Do you doubt me because you yourself might have been killed? I am fully aware of my responsibilities, Princess, and I have successfully protected many others who came into this world long before you.”
She looked down at the blanket. He smiled and put a finger beneath her chin, raising her eyes up to his. As long as he had known this one, he had admired her spirit. Clearly, she and her brother were twins in more ways than one.
“The truth is, you were never in any danger. To answer your question, yes, that is why I hesitated. But he was only after me. Once I was dead, he would have totally ignored you. Blood stalkers pursued only males of endowed blood, and of them only those who had already been trained in the craft. Their entire existence was to serve solely as the sorceresses’ assassins, with only wizards as their prey. Clever, when you think about it.”
“If I was not in danger, then what would it have done after it had killed you?”
Wigg looked briefly over Shailiha’s shoulder as he pursed his lips. “Eaten the dead horse. Raw.”
She thought she was going to be sick again. She sucked once more at the root.
“Is that why you named them blood stalkers?” she asked.
“We did not name them—their creators did. The sorceresses stripped them of all their powers except sensing us, and then gave them inordinate strength, supplying each one with the rather creative battle ax that you saw him carry. It is said that the skull atop each of the battle axes is the skull of the blood stalker’s first victim. That is why it had such a discernible crack in its top.”
“There was a smell.” She wrinkled up her nose. “When you killed him, there was an awful smell, and steam came up from around him. I saw it. It was terrible.”
Wigg looked out again at the remains of what had once been his friend, noticing that the grass all around the smashed skull’s perimeter had turned black. He looked away. The only way to remember this, he knew, was to hold tight to the knowledge that had Phillius been able to choose, he would have chosen death. Ultimately, Wigg had been able to give him at least that much. He knew it was this realization that would help both him and the Directorate deal with some of the pain.