Witch Clan: Warriors! by John Stormm (good book club books txt) 📕

Waves of pain and nausea rolled over him as Mordred awoke to find himself on a stone outcropping far below the ledge he tumbled from. It was daylight now, though overcast and bleak. Aside from possibly a concussion and some cracked ribs, he was certain that his right hip was fractured. Peering over the edge of his perch, he couldn’t see the bottom of this vast chasm as the muted light of day couldn’t travel that far into those shadowed depths. He had been tricked by the boy. The brat hadn’t simply dropped his stick when they were set upon by wild animals, he lost it over the edge as he was probing through the fog for it hoping for him to make a false step and send him to his doom. The stick was within easy reach of him on the ledge he now occupied. He had no idea of how long he had lain there. A few hours, at least as the moon had just risen when he had fallen.

Wincing from the pain, he grabbed the stick and set himself upright to take stock of what he might have to alleviate the situation. The stinger he had trained on the boy was gone. It probably fell over the edge and was falling still for all he knew. He had a broken force lash in his cloak pocket. Luckily, it didn’t break in such a way as to discharge or he would be crisped as well as injured. Perhaps that could be repaired or altered in some way to be of use. His flashlight was gone too. He had a jeweled athame, a ceremonial long knife on his belt that would prove quite useful. He wasn’t sure how he might splint a broken hip. He would simply have to try to keep as much weight off his right side as possible and just tough out the pain as best he could.

He looked about on the ledge he was for anything he might use. It looked like it went on for about thirty or forty feet and anywhere from five to fifteen feet wide, but he was quite alone on the bare stone ledge. The wall above him was quite sheer, and even if he wasn’t so injured, he doubted he could find enough hand and toe holds to climb to the top. Unless he learned how to fly or levitate, he would likely die of starvation or thirst on this ledge.

The clouds began clearing towards the evening and even with the sunlight showing from the west, he still could not see the bottom of the chasm. He had no idea of the scale of things to even begin to judge how far it might be to the other side. Certainly, it was much too far for any human being to jump with any hope at all of making it. The stars began to shine and the moon peeked over the edge at him, when he thought he might go mad from thirst. He lay back and tried to lose himself and his pain in the sleep of the exhausted.

Sometime in the night, between fever dreams of terrors and darkness, he heard a snuffling sound and felt the stiff whiskers and cold nose of a large rodent on his cheek. Slashing quickly with his athame, he managed to cut the hapless creature’s throat on the first stroke. Licking the warm blood that had spurted in his face, he felt better revived and an edge taken off his thirst. Picking up the over large, twitching rodent he satiated his thirst in draining it of its remaining life’s blood. But how did it get here and uninjured by any fall? It didn’t have any wings, so it had to get here by some promising route. There had to be a burrow somewhere nearby. A creature of this size, just might make a hole big enough for him to crawl through to the land above. The moon was gone for the night and the stars made a weak light at best. He cut some strips of raw meat from the carcass and chewed thoughtfully as he considered a wait until morning to try and find how this creature had found him on this ledge.

His hip ached like he had been walloped by a sledge hammer. A breakfast of raw meat strips and he felt well enough to drag himself to his good leg, as he used the walking stick to make his way along the ledge. He leaned heavily with his left shoulder up to the wall and hobbled along examining for holes that he might have missed due to the irregularities of the rock wall. Towards the far end of his ledge, he was rewarded not with a burrow, but a doorway cut into the cliff side. There was no door attached. Who would anyone fear entering from this unlikely direction? A few feet inside and he could make out steps carved into the bedrock of the cliff face reaching upwards into the darkness. This would likely be going up into the Black Tower that he and the boy were traveling to, when he was led too near the edge in the fog.

Twice, he had to rest on the landings and fight off the waves of pain and nausea in the darkness as he methodically felt his way up the stairs. On one landing, the wall was made up of a bit more broken stone and he felt a large burrow the rodent must have came through. He decided to pass on this option in favor of where ever the steps led him. Making it to the top, he was barred from any further progress by a jammed, heavy wooden door. Leaning back on the wall he felt a fixture and leaned on it to give some relief to his throbbing hip. The fixture pulled out and down like a lever, causing him to fall into the door that opened into a dimly lit circular room. The pain of the impact nearly caused him to black out again but he fought it off with singular determination.

The lights came from high, slit windows and some odd vials of phosphorescent matter of unknown origin on the manifold shelves. Silvery glyphs gleamed though the dust of ages on the black stone floor and in their center was a couple pieces of furniture. The most welcomed of these was a dusty, ragged cot. He didn’t care how filthy it might be or who might live here. In spite of the lying brat’s claims, it was clear that nobody had been in this tower in many years. He lay down on the cot and mercifully lost consciousness once again. He knew he would live to hound the Atlanteans to their very graves.

Over the distant mountains, the dark dragon stretched against the starry sky and writhed in its pain. It was hurt, but the battle was far from over for that one. In the meadow before her, lit to nearly daytime brightness by the full moon, her unicorn colt danced and kicked up his heels in unbounded joy and gratitude for another day of life. A red haired boy watched for a moment or so, smiled and then turned his back to walk out of sight.

“His friend begins his spirit walk,” Coyote observed.

“At first glance,” Emma said, “you wouldn’t think that Johnny noticed or even cared but that he could dance.”

“That would be a mistake,” Coyote pointed out, “he has nothing to take for granted. He has no mother or father who care for him, but he has you and he knows that is only because of your good will and not anything contingent on himself. He knows his friend sacrificed his life for what he believed in and that it could well have been his own life that was forfeit. He was always aware of this, even as he also knows his friend is not really dead or lost, but has moved on to yet another stage of living. He has a dance for everything he feels inside of himself and whether in dance or in his day to day actions, those things inside himself, come to the outside and affect everyone around him.”

“I still worry about him,” she said. “He is only eleven years old and has killed an Otherworld hag and another five or six men in Logres. Is killing so easy for him?”

“You worry well, wise woman,” Coyote replied, watching the colt chasing its tail in the meadow below them. “The mad woman of Annwn had every intention of killing you all and he could not permit that. For him it was a choice of good or evil prevailing and he made his choice that you all should live. That it caused her death was an unfortunate side effect to him. As for the deaths in Logres, he is directly accountable for only three of them. Of the five warriors on that roof, one survived his fall and the last one was killed by Windwalker. The sixth casualty, Mordred, still lives, though in great pain, but who really forced those decisions?”

“He chose to attack those guards on that rooftop,” she said.

“He chose to help rescue his friend who was taken, imprisoned and about to have her spirit broken, against her