Fistandantilus Reborn - Douglas Niles [12]
Of course, there was always the hope of revenge… Someday Cantor Blacksword would find a way to make all his enemies suffer!
For a time, here under the horrifying, endless sky, the exiled Theiwar had failed to let reality dissuade him. He had spent the first days of his banishment in picturing the many vengeances he would inflict: his treacherous wife, slow-roasted on a spit over the family hearth. His son, skinned alive, but only over the course of many months. Indeed, perhaps the wronged patriarch could exact a whole year’s worth of diversion before the wretched wastrel was at last put out of his suffering.
And Thane Realgar, too, would suffer the wrath of Cantor Blacksword, though not so mercifully as wife and son. No, the thane could only be sufficiently punished in the same fashion as he had sentenced Cantor Blacksword: He would be condemned to wander under the sun, banished from the comforts of stony Thorbardin for the rest of his days.
But over the initial weeks of his wandering exile, Cantor had at last realized that thoughts of revenge took him down a useless road. Without any real hope of returning to Thorbardin, he had no practical prospects of harming any of his enemies. And though the hatred, the desire for death and mayhem, never faded far from the forefront of the Theiwar’s awareness, he had gradually realized that those urges would remain mere fantasies, unrealized by acts of truly gratifying bloodshed.
Instead, Cantor was reduced to this, to shaking his fist at the distant mountain, crying out his frustration and rage, then turning away in defeat to continue shambling over the trackless, dusty plain.
The dwarves of Thorbardin had equipped him with a meager pack full of provisions before they had summarily pushed him out of the South Gate of the great under-mountain fortress. Cantor was given a small hand axe and a bone-handled knife with a blade of black steel that served as a mocking reminder of his once-honorable namesake. In addition, he had several skins full of drinking water, a blanket, a net, and many cakes of the hard, nourishing bread that was the major foodstuff of the mountain dwarves. As a final insult, Thane Realgar had taken Cantor’s sword of black steel and snapped off the blade at the hilt, a further symbol of the disgraceful state to which he had fallen.
For a long time Cantor Blacksword had been sustained by little more than his rage. He had plodded through the Kharolis foothills during the nights and sought whatever shelter he could find during the day. When the sun was high, the Theiwar’s eyes burned from the painful light, and when no cave or shady grove offered itself, he had been forced to pull his cloak over his head and lie, a huddled ball of misery, on the open ground until sunset.
The early days of his exile had carried him through lands of plentiful water, and during the nights he had been able to find fungus in the deep, wooded groves. Sometimes he had caught fish, using the fine webbing of the net to pull trout and sunfish from shallow streams. He ate the scaly creatures whole and raw, as was Theiwar custom, and the meager feasts had provided the few bright memories of his recent existence. Cantor’s dwarf-cake bread had lasted him for several weeks, thus augmented by the food that he could gather for himself. And he had been sustained.
But then his rambling course had progressed, coming all the way around the mountain dwarf kingdom until he had found himself on this trackless plain. There were no streams here, no groves wherein he could find the tender mushrooms. Worst of all, there were not even any caves, nor any tall features that would offer even minimal shade from the lethal sun. Day by day he had weakened, until his water was gone, and he shambled blindly onward,