Chapter V:
Death, Scale and Yucca Tree
The men fell asleep under the shade of the Great Oak, their fatigue deathlike.
After a few restless hours under the oak, the Bodyguard jolted to his feet, cursing, manically enraged at his dozing.
He looked up to the purple mount of Mockwitch. “They're holding Verity there...it’s her last chance to be whole again...”
Kurt shook his head.
“Look, man, the Groomslayer is clearly waiting for us there too. We reach her and then he just as easily snatches her away again…we are powerless against him...it’s a full on trap...we’re better off going to the Sequoias first...”
Verity’s Bodyguard raised a trembling hand.
“Fool...fool!” He quieted his voice and said, “Geissler has underestimated us as much as you overestimate him.”
The Weever's voice rang in Kurt's ear. Behold! Upon his peak, the ettin-slayer, Deathbrand!
“Alright,” said Kurt, “Let's go.”
The men began their march, saying Kurt saying farewell to the graves of John and the horses.
After an hour, passing a ditch full of shrubs and eucalyptus, a clear running stream met them.
Drinking their full, a rustling of oak leaves trailed them.
“How long do we have before we reach the peak?” asked Kurt.
“Four days,” said the Bodyguard.
“Must be a quicker way...”said Kurt, realizing how inadequate his mobility was without Canute.
“Attention! Etzel Galvan and Kurt Eisenforst!”
Two skinny men in black and red uniforms emerged from the trees.
“We are not here to attack,” said the taller of the two, “put down your firearms. Compliments of the Groomslayer we have brought: lunch.”
The shorter one held up two full greasy paper bags.
“What's this?” said Kurt still holding up his arquebus.
“Burgers and fries!” said the taller commando. “And chocolate milkshakes…hey!”
The Bodyguard tossed the bags into the stream.
The heirs to the Weever's parts marched on, the commandos muttering about wasted food behind them.
By midday, the sky darkened.
Four bat-winged creatures the size of whales flew overhead, speaking audibly in Kurt’s pulver ear.
“We know you can hear us, ape. You killed our brother!”
The beasts swooped down in pairs dropping limbs of animals and men.
“We do not scavenge, but you need to eat! Our father wishes your bodies be well preserved...” said a two headed vaighling.
Kurt shot off the arquebus at the vaigling-pod.
The round ricocheted exploding far from its target.
“We are not so weak to be slain by a blunderbox” shouted a blue-skinned vaighling, as those cackling things flew off towards the mountains.
+++++
The stream veered west; the Bodyguard and Kurt keeping course through a dusty field marked with sentry towers. Two more commandos stepped out from their post, an obelisk close behind them. The commandos, dwarfs with South-Vargian accents, held out water jugs nearly as tall as they were. “Etzel Galvan and Kurt Eisenforst! Orders of ze Groomslayer…eet ees your teatime.”
“Tell the Groomslayer to choke on it,” said the Bodyguard.
“Wait…” Kurt went up to the dwarfs and took one of the jugs. “You boys mind to try a sip first?” asked Kurt to the commandos.
“Uh…sure,” they said in unison.
“See, Galvan? no problem,” said Kurt taking a swig.
“You will be the first they take to the hellfire,” said the Bodyguard, then starting a sprint down their long road.
Two days passed.
The Bodyguard had taken his sprint for nearly a hundred miles, refusing to sleep.
Kurt fell far back behind.
He kept track by listening to Etzel's footsteps with his pulver-ear, but as the Midsummer moon shone golden beams in that blue hour, Verity’s bodyguard had vanished from detection.
Then he heard it: the necklace, the Tooth.
Kurt called out for a response. “Galvan! Hey!!”
He had come upon a hollow of sparse blue shrubs, yellow flowers and Yucca trees. In the hollow, little quail darted off into their holes.
A coyote’s eyes flickered in the near dark, catching Kurt's own glare from a close distance.
A controlled fire flickered up ahead, its orange light writhing against a large slab of sandstone.
“Galvan!” he cried out again.
“We’re over here, dude,” answered a woman's voice.
He listened closely to the voice’s position.
He was hesitant to step forward.
Where was the Weever and his counsel?
It had been months now and that reptilian beast had not done so much as sneer at him, apart from the echoes of its grim admonitions and urgings.
“Weever...What should I do?…Hey, I know you’re watching! Where is Galvan? Where is…”
The woman's spoke again, “Over here, Kurt Eisenforst! We’re waiting for you.”
“Hellfire to it all…,” cursed Kurt.
He made his way to the fire.
Behind a pile of boulders leaned the Bodyguard, arms folded, scowling at Kurt's arrival.
The other in their midst, sat atop a house-sized jet-black metallic box, legs dangling.
Her hair and matching dress were wild and orange like a conflagration, and too were her wide hazel eyes wild, mad and eager:
It was Embla Duchess Von Herrenhausen-South.
“There you are, Kurt Eisenforst…you slowpoke.”
Kurt smirked.
“You were that wasteling trying to kill us earlier…you’re a servant of the Groomslayer.”
“Wasteling? Ouch. And I'm definitely not that cretin's servant...in Subohemia we are granted few exit passes to the Outland every year...on certain conditions...I took a job escorting one of his experiments...Adatmen and the rest of them wanted to have some fun at Carolusopolis but ended up at Jaguar Town instead. They dragged Sir Pork along as well, but as you could see, he was severely brain damaged. He was an old friend of mine back in the day...” said Embla, her tone somber.
“Alright...but are you doing here? You're still a Subohemian who was trying to kill us just days ago. ”
“Because...I saw something that I have been searching for…for more than a century. Your veiled friend here had quite the eye-catching necklace: The Weever’s Fang…See, I have something similar.”
She pulled a shimmering diamond shaped object tied to a necklace from her collar.
“What is that?" asked Kurt eyeing the object.
"The Scale was gifted to me by my father when I was in nursery school.
It's granted me strong skin figuratively and in the flesh. I have not aged, never needing that dirty pulver-stuff in all my 131 years…neither can firearms nor knives or any sort of vulgar weapon harm me. I learned from my father as well, though I thought it a silly story at the time, that my heirloom is part of a set, and once combined, the heirlooms freely given up by their beholders can resurrect the Weever, the ancient ettin slayer...and so: maybe I can finally get some peace and quiet in this world. I may be from Subohemia, but don't think I am any friend to ettins...after he gifted this to me an ettin killed my father. Erich von Herrenshausen Sr., the first Groomslayer.”
“So you want to resurrect the Weever to kill the Groomslayer?” said Kurt looking towards the fire.
“Don't you? Didn't he kill your adopted father? So Etzel tells me at least..."
Embla sparked a cigarette puffing a cloud mingling with the little fire's smoke.
“He must be killed. He took everything from me. Took her from me...” said the Bodyguard.
“That's right...you knew Verity very well apparently...before she disappeared seventy years ago...they found her body in a trance more recently though...apparently in a state of unceasing dreaming...thing is, Verity is the Tooth's true heir...she never passed it down, so we need her alive and awake...even the vaighlings and ettins are trying to lure us with her body into some trap...if we work together we have a chance to beat the bastards...get Verity back...but scattered apart we're better off in the Eldermark...,” said Embla glancing at the glowing fang around Etzel's neck.
Kurt nodded. “So, you wanna help us salvage Verity-her body-to bring all the Weever's parts together and finally kill the Groomslayer and all his ettins; but what do you propose we actually do to save her from this captivity? So far we are marching on faith alone…”
A terrifying voice clanged like the bells of an ancient temple.
“Alone and without a guide your brains and bones shall be a spread for Mockwitch’s bread.”
A tall shadow lengthened against the firelit slab.
Kurt feared he and everyone else might die at that instant, smelling John and Canute’s grave as if it had just been exhumed.
The fresh air of the Midsummer night stunk of damp decomposition.
The others smelled the rot as well.
Embla looked annoyed, coughing into a balled fist.
Verity’s Bodyguard’s eyes widened with the sudden rustle of reins and the clop of hooves.
There stood Blueboy on his hindlegs, smeared in red soil, his eyes rolled to the whites and awash in a foggy glow.
Atop Blueboy's neck, holding the horse's chopped head by the mane, sat a wizened corpse clad in segmented armor exposing sinew and bone.
His eyes were feline, yellow and furious under a tattered white hood.
Beside him and Blueboy stood another horse, shaking reins covered in wet earth, its eyes white against the black of long matted fur.
“…Canute,” said Kurt.
The corpse rider nodded. “Yes, living man. This was once your steed. A fine breed. Now its dead flesh is my sole property. I met its breeder once...granted him a gift that he could pass on, and in trade, I take his horse...”
Skeletal wings flexed from the back of the rider displaying an impressive breadth.
“You’re the one that gave John the Weever’s Eye,” said Kurt.
“Aye,” spoke the Deathly rider, "for an eye, he assented to bear the Weever’s ocular heirloom for one hundred years. Yet, living man, he passed it on to you. Thirty years on, you were granted seventy more years of life on a night that should have made your soul rightfully mine. Or did you ever wonder why the Prince did not slay you along with John Ormsvard?”
The Weever’s words repeated in his mind: “Because he gave me to you...”
Kurt looked to Canute again and sighed. “So, he is your property now…and I am yours as well, is it? Who are you, exactly? Enlighten us living men.”
“I live as much as you! I am the Errandghost named Todteld;Todteld for I am as old as Todt: Death Herself. And yes, you are mine to receive, to bring to the mark to be reckoned by the master.”
Embla was twirling her hair. “Chop-chop, dead head,” she said, sighing.
Todteld shook Blueboy’s reins and said, “So would I claim this living man, but the master commands me to hold.”
“By what master?” asked Kurt.
The errandghost craned his neck down to the living man below his steed.
“In your modern tongue you know him not; but only as a phantasm.
He was the first-man who slew many ettins. He and his mother, still alive, command all errandghosts.”
Todteld turned the phantom that once was Blueboy around, and said, “To the Mountain of Mockwitch you are headed. Before you enter his domain, know these three things: once you reach the peak you shall first meet the master of the mountain; then shall you lose; and finally shall you either gain or lose again if you are unwise…Before I depart, I may travel with only one steed. I will lend you this one you called Canute, Living Man.”
The black beast trotted forward to Kurt, breathless and silent.
“Thank you…but what about Blueboy? Galvan’s horse?”
“I ride him to war! Yea, all must prepare for that war.”
Todteld passed a glimmering ring of wound up string to Kurt.
“This is quickore-thread...it shall bind you together, even if you travel apart at great distances and between worlds...only an errandghost’s bite may sever it, or something mightier still. Farewell. We shall meet soon, Living Man.” Todteld gripped the dead creature’s reins and spurred it off into the moonlit sand, his galloping heard with another toll of a bell.
Following Embla, Kurt, the Bodyguard and the remains of Canute entered an invisible door beside the fire: “My ship. She’ll get us to Mockwitch in a few minutes...ready?” said Embla beckoning them inside.