by Eric Ugland
Smoke swirled up, and the creature looked down, alarmed.
It made a noise, a bit like a caw, in my general direction, and then let go.
I shot my arm out and grabbed hold of its leg.
“Not yet, buddy,” I shouted into the wind, “I need a ride down.”
The creature did not agree.
It screeched at me and shook its leg, but I had a good handhold. Plus, my spoon was still deep inside. The shaking hit a new level as the big part of the spoon poked out the other side of the leg.
I had to dodge an incoming bite, but it wasn’t that hard. The fiend’s colossal head wasn’t made for quick chomps.
Moving it horizontally, like a styrofoam cutter, I sliced through a good chunk of the leg, and the foot hung loose by a singular flap of skin and a teensy bit of tendon.
The creature screamed in pain and anger.
I shoved the spoon in my mouth, pirate style, and I pulled myself up the fiend’s body, crawling around by grabbing big handfuls of loose skin and climbing up to the top of the creature.
It folded its wings in and executed a pretty decent barrel roll.
I clamped my legs on tight, and grabbed on with my hands, riding upside down.
Then the fucker went into a loop and I fought to keep my snack down.
I chanced taking one hand off, snatched the spoon from my mouth and jammed it deep into the head of the creature, right between its eyes. The celestial spoon burned the flesh, smoke rising. The creature made an entirely unfamiliar noise, a horrific screeching sound mixed with a keening wail.
Its efforts doubled, flopping and flapping and twisting and turning to get me to fall off, but I wasn’t about to let go. Not this close to obvious victory. Unless, you know, the creature went closer to the ground, where I might have a chance at jumping. I’d asked — the thing just hadn’t listened.
As soon as the spoon was through bone, I shoved my entire hand in there and did some stirring of the pot.
Immediately, the damn thing went limp.
Dead instantly.
GG! You’ve killed a Stink-Eye Grabber Devil (lvl 25 Fiend).
You’ve earned 1250 xp! What a mighty hero you are.
Lovely, I thought while riding the body plummeting quickly groundward. I made a mental note to thank my personal god for the literal deus ex machina.
I’d like to imagine what Captain Czubakowski and company saw was something on the order of a body slamming into the ground right in front of the door, followed quickly by a second body slamming into the first in an explosion of putrefaction and viscera. But I’ll never know for sure, because I was the second body slamming into the first.
The devil’s big rotund body served as my landing pad. It was incredibly squishy, giving me a reasonably comfortable landing. I mean, all things considered. I dropped quite low in the hitpoints, and definitely would have broken more than one bone had that been possible. As it was, I laid in the foul entrails for a moment while my body healed itself back up.
Slowly, I stood up, my whole form steaming what with me being slathered in the devil’s fiery blood.
Captain Czubakowski gave me a look like I had just risen from the dead.
I wiped the blood and guts from my face, spit out a bit that I’d gotten in my mouth, and gave my spoon a twirl before sticking it in my belt.
“Captain,” I said.
“Your grace,” he replied, almost by instinct.
“Mind getting this mess inside, maybe clean it up? See if there’s any use to it?”
“Certainly, your grace.”
I gave him a nod and then walked off along the trail of mostly filled footprints.
65
It took me a moment to get my bearings, because we were reasonably high on something of a plateau. It wasn’t huge, or completely flat, but it looked to be over a hundred feet down to the bottom of the valley. The mountains continued on for thousands of feet on the south side of me. I was heading east, going up a small rise amidst a copse of shorter trees, bent over from a lifetime of wind and snow.
Snow still fell, though not heavily, from the bizarre red and black clouds roiling above. Every few seconds, I would see something flitting through the sky. Sometimes it was just a spot of darkness, sometimes there were things glowing with the beings. There were things up high, and, when I paused to look in the valley, I could see swarms of creatures moving across our wall and through our tunnel. It made me feel disgusting, and I seriously considered figuring out a way to halt them. It was the noise that hit me the hardest. There were howls and screams coming from damn near everywhere, echoing off the mountain walls, floating down from the clouds. I heard babies crying, cats mewling, bloodcurdling screeching, and even soft murmurs that were just soft enough I couldn’t understand the words being said. The noises and sounds layered on top of each other, and it hurt my brain trying to process it all.
Instead, I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, tried to center myself, and focused on what I was there to do.
Once in the trees, it was easier to see the tracks. I guessed somewhere in the neighborhood of four people pulling a sled. It made me doubt I was on a rescue mission — this had more the look of a kidnapping.
I slipped through the trees quietly, wishing I’d remembered to grab another sword. I had my trusty spoon. It’d have to be enough.
Ahead, I heard soft talking.
I stopped moving behind a tree and closed my eyes, feeling around with tremorsense.
Not much moved, then something stamped their feet. Another. People trying to stay warm. People with heavy boots on, I’d wager.
I dropped to a crouch and moved at an angle to the stompers, keeping low and moving fast.
“Are we early or is he late?” a gravely voice asked.
“I have no idea what an infernal being considers time to be,” came a feminine reply.
“This was a mistake,” a shrill male voice said.
There was a silence that made me think people were frowning. It just had that air.
Torchlight flickered between tightly packed trees.
I leaned out, nice and low, to see what I could see.
Four stout figures stood around a sled, each holding a vibrant orange torch. The sled was piled with heavy wooden crates. The wind blew, and I could barely make out faces under their heavy hoods.
Dwarves.
And those crates... they looked an awful lot like the ones I’d hauled all the way from WarWaters.
Infernium.
These motherfuckers were planning on making a deal with the devil.
That made me angry, which made me a bit dumb. Or dumber.
I stood up and I walked into the clearing.
“What the actual fuck is this?” I asked.
All the torches lifted up. The figures turned towards me, and their faces fell.
“Oh fuck,” said Narfin.
66
“Anyone care to explain what I’m looking at?” I asked.
The four dwarves looked at each other and then at me. No one answered.
“What’s in the box?” I asked.
No answer. Just more nervous glances between the four. There were two men and two women, though calling Narfin a woman was not exactly fair — she was more a girl. Barely an adult. At least, as far as I could tell.
One of the men had a long black beard with streaks of white. I felt like it would have been something I’d recognized had I seen it around Coggeshall, what with beards not exactly being common and my own predilection for beards. The other male dwarf had red hair and a patchy beard. A heavy-looking flask pulled his belt low. The other woman appeared middle-aged and had that sort of face that was always poised to frown.
“Narfin?” I asked. “You want to say anything?”
“Not especially,” she replied. I was again reminded of her youth.
I sighed and walked over to the crates on the sled. I ripped the wooden top free, and found what I’d expected: ingots of infernium.
�
��Making a deal, huh?” I asked.
“What of it, eh?” said stripe beard. “Are we not free? Ain’t that what you say?”
“Free is one thing,” I said. “But you’re stealing, so that’s doesn’t exactly count.”
“Who says this is your metal?”
“Me. I do. I carried this shit on my back all the way from WarWaters, so it’s mine. Looks like all you did was take it from our holding and slide it across a few hundred yards of snow.”
“And carried it up the stairs,” the redhead said, punctuating his statement with a poorly contained burp.
“Okay, fine. Carried it up the stairs too,” I said.
“Heavy,” the redhead said. “Seems as should count some.”
“Quiet there, Thendan,” Stripe said. “And what we do, Duke of Coggeshall, is our business.”
“I’m not sure I follow your logic here,” I said.
“Nor are you required to. Be best if you just went back into your hole and forgot you saw us.”
I frowned, and looked over at Narfin. “Is he threatening me?”
“You speak to me, uppity lord,” stripe snapped. “You have no place being part of a dwarven clan—”
“You’re not Harmut’s brother, are you?” I asked.
“Ah, so all dwarves look alike to you?”
“No, but assholes have a certain tendency to blend together. And I seem to remember Harmut’s brother being a grade-A asshole. And didn’t he commit patricide or something? Regicide? Some specific—”
“Speak no more of a great dwarf like—”
“So you’re part of that clan?”
“There is only one clan at question. This traitorous off-shoot will soon see why—”
I waved my hand. “No, they won’t. And you know they won’t. Unless you’re new here. Is he new here?”
“Why do you continue to speak—” he started.
“Hush up already.”
“I will not be spoken down to! Not when I am a being of power.”
“Being of power? What does that mean?”
Stripe held out his hand, and deep red bands of light wrapped around his arm, like they were growing out of his shoulder. The bands coalesced into his hand, then grew into a glowing red axe.
“Umibog,” Narfin said. “This is unwise—”
But Umibog didn’t seem to care. He charged for me, swinging hard.
It wasn’t the worst move, considering I was unarmed and wearing no armor.
But the few steps I saw from Umibog showed me he had no actual fighting experience. He stepped off on the wrong foot; he placed them poorly in the snow; he was moving really slowly for a charge. Worst of all, he was going to have to shuffle his steps in order to get a good chop down on me. I shifted my stance one way, and he immediately changed his direction, biting on my feint.
I took a step the other way, but left my leg outstretched.
Umibog tripped and went flying into the snow.
I walked over and picked him up by his collar. Then I rammed his head into a tree a few times and dropped him onto the ground.
Turning around, I crossed my arms.
“That was not a wise course of action,” the female dwarf said.
Narfin looked at her, eyes wide.
“I mean,” I replied, “neither was this.”
“You have taken in traitors and enemies, named them friends. Family,” the older woman continued, taking a few relaxed steps to her right so that the crates and sled were no longer between the two of us. “Your actions are a mockery of our traditions. Beliefs. You are a poor excuse for a leader—”
“Hey, I’m new at this—”
“There are no excuses that can cover your failings in this regard.”
There was something predatory in the way the dwarven woman walked, and a glint in her eye that gave me pause. For no quantifiable reason, I was more wary of her attack than I had been of Stripe.
“I thought, perhaps,” she continued, “that you were merely a buffoon. When I first read the reports on you, you certainly seemed like a fool. A dunce. My Eyes indicated you had lucked into the position. A stumble upward through the actions of a dying and befuddled man. I imagined you might be reasoned with. You might learn what you were doing wrong and rectify your dangerous ways. But no. You are the worst breed: stubborn and stupid. I see no reason, now, to think you at all intelligent. Instead, you are willfully ignorant. You are dangerous, then, because you think nothing of tradition. Of why traditions and rules have grown in Vuldranni and become accepted by so many cultures. Instead, you come in and—”
“You want to take a quick pause and maybe clue this fool in on these vaunted traditions I’ve shat all over?” I interrupted.
She gritted her teeth, and I knew immediately she’d held the sort of privileged position in life where people had rarely, if ever, interrupted her.
“The mere fact you must ask shows me how dangerous you are,” she said. “Look at your holdings. They are barren! There is one road. One set of poorly built structures you have already torn down in favor of following a traitorous dwarf—”
“You’re part of that clan as well? Fuck. I can’t remember the name,” I said, snapping my fingers. “What was it?”
“He has no idea what he is doing,” she snapped. “And there is a reason he was not chosen for leadership.”
“You mean because Harmut’s brother killed their father and stole the crown? That’s not really choosing, is it?”
“That is an oversimplification of what happened! Twisted and—”
“So his brother didn’t kill the king?”
“No,” Thendan, the redhead, said with a burp, “that happened.”
“Thank you, Thendan,” I said.
“Yup,” he said, and took another long pull from his flask.
“The man is so drunk he knows nothing of what happened,” the woman said. “There is—”
“Mother,” Narfin snapped quietly. “At least tell the truth of it.”
“You dare interrupt me—” Narfin’s mother said. She hauled off and backhanded her daughter so hard Narfin spun a little before falling into the snow.
“Easy there,” I said. “She’s sworn to me, which means I am duty-bound to protect her.”
Narfin’s mother snarled at me. Her face was all of a sudden scary. Her wrinkles in her skin seemed to deepen and darken, her eyes shifted color to a vibrant purple that glowed faintly, and her teeth seemed to elongate.
“That any dwarf could have sworn to you is a travesty,” she said, her voice dropping an octave. “You are but a stain on this land, and one I intend to erase.”
The power she massed was palpable. A thrum of arcane energy pumped out and around her. Both hands raised up, and then her eyes flashed and turned milky white. She uttered phrases of some language I didn’t know, but not enough to learn. Motes of light and illuminated runes swirled around her. She leaned over, her arms stretching out straight, and a great gout of power shot forth, slamming directly into Thendan.
A little surprised, I looked over at Thendan, and saw he was floating off the ground. All his muscles seemed to contract at once, and his face was a rictus of pain. He couldn’t even make a sound. But then a sound came — a snapping of bones. Tearing of flesh. Thendan dropped into a lump on the ground, very much appearing dead and ruined, although his remains were still bubbling and moving about ever so much.
“Um,” I said, “you missed?”
Narfin’s mother grinned at me, wiping some of her sweaty hair back into her hood. Steam rose from her, and she breathed heavily, like she’d just finished a really rigorous spin class.
“Did I?” she asked.
An arm shot out of the pulpy Thendan remains. An arm longer than both of Thendan’s put together, with burnished purple skin wrapped around incredible muscles, ending in a hand with three thick fingers and one thumb, each tipped in a wide claw.
The new hand stretched out, as if feeling the air for the first time. Then the arm
slammed onto the snow and grabbed at the earth. More body emerged from the ruined remains of the drunk dwarf.
As soon as I saw a head, I decided it would not be good. Mainly because the head was gross and scary and weird as fuck. The forehead was bulbous, with armored bumps along the edges. Small eyes sat very wide on the face, glowing with a purple intensity, followed by a very wide mouth filled with a mass of tiny spiked teeth. I didn’t see a tongue — the mouth was just teeth all the way, top and bottom.
The creature was still trying to pull itself through. I thought I’d take a chance to work through my missed opportunities to be a place kicker.
I measured my steps like Jason Hanson, then stepped forward and powered through like I was finally going to get the Lions to the playoffs.
The creature opened its mouth to bite down on my foot.
Worked for me.
My foot connected with the top of its mouth, and while teeth definitely bit right through my posh boots, my foot had a lot of momentum behind it. And I had a strength over 100. AND that fool was still stuck in the ground.
It wasn’t a fair fight in the least. But there was a short loud noise, and then the head of the thing emerging from the ground went flying off into the distance.
Followed shortly thereafter by my shoe.
A jet of really thick purple ichor fountained out of the neck of the creature.
The hot gunk showered down on me, covering me in a bonus layer of nastiness. Which was, to be fair, also warm. So that was nice. It somewhat evened out.
“What did you—” the woman said, but then she stopped talking and just opened her mouth a time or two, trying to process things.
I did a quick check of the notification:
GG! You’ve killed a Gristling Three-Toed Demon (lvl 38 Demon).
You’ve earned 2900 xp! What a mighty hero you are.
A demon. Huh.
While I was reading over the information, I caught a blur of movement coming from the direction of the dwarven lady.
A spell of some sort was coming my way. A flashing bolt of arcane energy twisted around itself as it streaked across the small space between us, moving faster than I had time to think.
