by L. S. Kyles
Chapter 20
Reets squinted in the direction of Easpost, his face wrinkling at the movement in the distance. He couldn’t say what it had been, but based upon its position in the camp he guessed it had been a center post from one of the larger tents. He also couldn’t say what had happened, but it sure looked as though the post had fallen over on its side.
He held his breath and waited, thinking about the processes necessary to knock a center post on its side. Those beams were three hands thick and driven deep in the hard prairie soil. On six different sides, they were secured with ropes as big around as his wrist.
Without taking his eyes from camp, Reets cocked his head to one side and said, “Hey, uh…Mums? Musmy?”
From the direction of the corral, he heard the trampling of hooves and shrieking of horses. He opened his crooked mouth to try again, but the darkness of camp rippled again and he turned to look.
In front of the place where the canvas pinnacle had fallen—or not fallen, depending on the accuracy of his eyes—a section of squares as long and thick as a castle parapet shook like a stack of children’s blocks.
Although he couldn’t be sure, he thought the section of squares was a stack of wooden crates bearing military goods and food stores. They weren’t walls of stone and mortar like those at Castle Arn, but they weren’t walls of Paper Mache either.
As Reets watched, the rectangles of wood and nails leaned towards him in the gloom, hesitated as though to recover, then fell to the ground and spilled into camp.
Over the distant crackle of splintered wood, Reets turned his head sideways and said, “Yeh seein this, Mumsy?”
From the direction of the corral, he heard only the whinnying of horses and the shushing of his colleagues.
“Ah’right,” he said, turning back to camp and squaring his shoulders. In the scheme of things, it was probably for the best that Mums wasn’t involved. If that shaggy know-it-all came over, she’d only muck things up. It was too much to ask that she simply confirm what he was seeing and then go back to the horses. Oh, no. If that silly cow got wind of this, she’d be over here trying to save him.
Watching the last of the crates as they toppled to the ground, Reets strained his eyes and watched a pyramid of black tremble against the darker hue of the horizon. A moment more and the triangular structure crumpled to the ground, filling the night with the sound of shattered struts and cascading water.
Tearing his eyes from camp, Reets checked the activity behind him. He saw his comrades still wrestling with the steeds, their hands up and their voices low, the horses galloping around them and trying to kick them as they passed.
He turned back to camp and grinned. He had warned the titan that this would happen. He had told her he would get even with her for handling like that…An’ yeh know what they say bout payback, Mums.
Still grinning, he set the saddle on the ground and draped the blanket on the saddle. Then, laying the reigns across the blanket, and making sure the bit didn’t rattle in the process, he grabbed up his axe and made for camp. Halfway there, he crept upon a pile of campfire logs and nestled in against them.
On the other side of the logs, another beam splintered in the gloom, the sound accompanied by rumpling canvas and snapping lines. It was much louder than before, even for the seashell ears of a halfling, and Reets listened for sounds of the beast as it moved beneath the ruckus.
He heard only the snapping of slats and whipping of lines.
He frowned at the gloom and let his eyes lose focus. How could the destruction of camp grow louder, but not the movements of the creature causing the destruction? How could he hear the thrumming of horse hooves from the corral, but not the trampling of whatever it was that tore its way through camp?
He rolled his head to the corral and checked the progress of his companions. He saw Mums holding one bucking steed by the halter and Janu’ery sprinting after the other two. He huffed disapprovingly and turned his attention towards camp. He was sure those two would have heard by now, but apparently not.
In the midst of Eastpost, another tent post shuddered with impact and went gliding through the murk.
Reets slid both hands to the base of Old Friendly and took a grip on the weapon where he could gain the greatest amount of momentum. He and the old hunters tenderly referred to this position as the kill-grip, a grip capable of slicing a normal beast in half and bringing a larger one to its knees.
An’ from the sound’a this thing, he thought, it might take two.
He was beginning to entertain the prospect of a three swing attack—three tops, though; it ain’t never taken more’n three—when from out of the screaming equines and thrumming hooves, the titan began to shout.
Reets couldn’t be certain, not with his eyes pointed east, but he heard the word Iman and hurry and assumed Mums was yelling for Janusery to either hasten his effort with the remaining horses or to abandon his efforts and make a run for the hills. In either event, she had obviously taken noticed of the chaos moving steadily towards them.
Unable to bear the suspense any longer, Reets peaked around the side of his cover and caught sight of the latest disaster; a dome of feed sacks kicking sidewise in the gloom and tumbling through the air; Each smooth oval weighing at least ten stones—or as much as Reetsle, in other words—and whipping through the air with no more effort than a child slinging a handful of pebbles.
Reets watched the last of the sacks disappearing from sight and realized there was only one more pavilion separating him from the killer. After that, the hulking brute would have a clear view of the woodpile at the edge of camp and the halfling peaking around its side.
He leaned hard into the pile, his blue and brown eye fixed on the pavilion and his body taut against the logs. It was going to happen—it was going to happen soon. The lines snapping, the posts cracking, the whole of the canopy pitching sideways in the murk, an immense shape barreling through the middle…
Only that didn’t happen.
Instead of coming through the pavilion, the thing tearing a path through the middle of Eastpost came around the pavilion, a huge black shape undulating around the side and rolling his direction.
Reets’ chest froze in mid-breath. He would never admit it to the know-it-all cow, not even on his death bed, but Mums had been right. The thing moving towards him was three times larger than her titan steed, Barge. It was also moving like nothing he’d ever seen.
Many seasons of battle training were telling the halfling to tilt forward on his legs and prepare to swing with the arms, but unfortunately for Reets, his legs were no longer listening to his formal battle training. They were listening to a much older form of training ingrained in the deepest part of the brain.
Don’t move, the training told him. Don’t move a muscle and don’t bat any eye. Hold real still and maybe it won’t see you.
Reetsle did just that. He stood frozen against the woodpile and gawked in horror at the thing rolling out of camp—And it was rolling. There was no other word to describe the locomotion he observed, no other word for the way that boneless mass went bobbing through the shadows.
Blood puddin, Reets thought, speaking the first word that came to mind. Looks like blood puddin from back home, the way it goes rollin down a plate with the top half floppin over the bottom, over an’ over again.
The creature rolled nearer still and Reets saw the top half of the pudding-monster was separated into three heaving lumps. They were resting where the thing’s head should be, one in the center and two on the sides. The one in the center was swaying slightly and the two on the sides were bobbing violently.
Reets’ terrified gaze went instantly to the outer humps, his mind’s eye traveling to an image he had not seen in many ages. The image was of the coastal villages where his people used to trade. He’d been a boy at the time, maybe six or seven ages (if that), but he remembered clearly the sounds of bartering, the smell of the salt, the movement of the wharf as it battered the pi
er.
There were gulls overhead, and clouds way out over the sea, but he was paying them no mind. His brown and blue eyes were fixed on the barrels tied to the wharf, watching as they bobbed in the surf and thudded on the beams.
…thump…thump…thump…
It was the thudding that had originally drawn his eyes, but it was the undulation of the barrels that held them. Reets had no idea what these barrels contained, but he didn’t really care. It was their movement that fascinated him, the constant rise and fall of their bodies in the greenish gray surf.
UP…and down. UP…and down. UP…and—
Behind him, Mums screamed something unintelligible at the captain and the captain screamed something back. Then it sounded as though the side of the corral buckled against the weight of something heavy. The fence posts groaned like timbers caught in a gale, then cracked in two as whatever it was came crashing on through.
It might have been Mums or it might have been one of the steeds, but Reets wasn’t about to turn his head and look. His eyes were fixed on the slithering monster as it came rolling out of camp and skirted him on the right. He followed it with his eyes, his misshapen head never moving as the creature undulated into the prairie and became backlit by the sky.
Against the ruddy red of sunset, Reets saw the hump in the middle rested over the trunk of the creature’s body. He saw, as well, that the two outer humps rested over a pair of beam-like pillars swinging along the ground.
A part of him thought the beam-like pillars looked like arms, only they couldn’t be arms. They were much too thick to be arms. They were like a pair of oak trees that had decided to uproot themselves and go swinging through the forest.
And yet…
Reets watched with bug-eyed terror as the trunk-like appendages took turns reaching out from the bobbing lumps he now saw were shoulders. As one beam stayed levered in place, the other swung out from the body, slammed down in the ground, and dragged the torso a little closer to the corral.
They were arms, a pair of gargantuan arms, and if he had any lingering doubts, he need only look at the pair of gargantuan hands rising from the pasture and pressing finger-holes in the soil.
Without knowing he was doing so, Reets ran his eyes the length of the creature’s frame and searched it for a matching set of hind legs. He found nothing on his first go, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there.
With the creature facing away from him, he could see only the abdomen trailed behind the shoulders, the tall grasses rising up and swallowing everything below the waist. He could see an elongated protrusion trailing out of the torso, hugging the ground like that of a bug’s thorax, but again he couldn’t say with any accuracy what it might be.
But I reckon whatever it is, he thought to himself, his nerve beginning to return, tha’s where the vitals is.
He pressed himself from the logs and stood up straight. His legs still felt like dead things beneath his hips, and he would be lying if he said he wasn’t just a little bit rattled by what he’d seen, but the paralysis had left.
He kicked off the log pile and charged the prairie, watching as the lumpy outline of his prey veered north at the empty pen. Reets darted north as well, hitting the grasses of the Sway at a dead run and seeking to cut the beast off. He made it five or six strides before a sea of jagged black rose up and blinded him.
Skidding to a halt, he stood on tiptoe and searched the prairie. He caught a flicker of movement here and there, a glimmer of light to the east, but nothing definitive. It could have been the creature or it could have been one of the horses running for its—
From out of the shadows in the west, the blood pudding beast came rolling through the grass and nearly trampled him under. Reets leap out of the way, but before he could find his feet and retaliate, the thing had dragged itself out of range. He trotted after it, making to intercept once more, but it was already changing its trajectory, lumbering after something to his right…something distinctly horse-shaped.
Reets veered after it, stopping periodically to stand on his tiptoes and peek over the grass. He did this several more times before the outline of horse and rider streaked directly to his left, this time accompanied by the unmistakable ffffp of streaking arrows. He stopped and listened, then went hot with rage.
Fancy!
It had to be him. Mums didn’t have a bow and the Eastpost sentries had left. Dropping to his heels, he plowed through the grass in the direction of the monster, the distinct fffp of arrows tearing at the air, a few of them ending with a dull thud in vicinity of the beast.
Oh, Fancy, if’n you take this thing down ‘fore I can…
The outline of horse and rider smeared passed again and Reets glared at it, almost missing the blood pudding creature as it lumbered after the steed and nearly crushed him in the Sway. He rolled to the side, rolled back to his feet, and took a swing for the creature.
He felt the blade parting the reeds and then sink within the ground.
Rendel’s Beard!
He jerked on the handle until the blade tore free and hoisted it over his head, making ready for the beast’s hoary retaliation…
He blinked at the darkness, at the weeds. He had expected a hand like a battering ram to swat him out of his skin, but instead there was nothing. The creature either could not see him below the sedge or it was too engrossed by the fancyman to pay him any mind.
Reets stood on his toes and spun in a circle, spotting the dark forms of monster and rider to the south. What in the Bloody Name of Rendal was Fancy doing? It was bad enough he’d stolen the halfling’s kill, but he didn’t even know how to finish it. From the look of him, he was just riding in circles and trying not to—
Something hit Reets from the side, something big and hairy and smelling a good deal like horse sweat.
“Hold on, Reetsle,” a voice told him, speaking over the trampling of hooves. “Blood Hair’s just over here.”
Still dazed by the vicious impact—battle axe gripped loosely in one hand, other hand feeling around the side of Barge’s enormous chest—Reets was aware of heather grass and milk weed whipping passed his legs.
“Mums…?” he mumbled, his lips smashed to a horse’s flank. “Mums, what’d…,” he trialed off, “…how’d I…?”
“Almost there,” she replied.
Reets began to jostle up and down as the mighty Barge trotted to a stop, he felt wind on his face as he glided through the air, suspended by the back of his tunic and chain mail, then a hairy spine slipped between his legs and the thing at his back released his tunic.
He sat there for a moment, blinking at the titan, at his horse. He was still dazed for the most part, still unsure of what he’d been doing or what had just happened. Then his eyes narrowed and he glared at the titan.
“Mums!” he bellowed. “Mums, did you jus—!”
Mums reached over and swatted Blood Hair on the rump.
