by Kevin Hearne
“Remind me never to dress like that guy,” he whispered to Grinda.
“You need all your regal dignity and confidence now,” she replied, “like we’ve practiced. No bleating. Let’s go.”
For approximately thirty seconds things went spectacularly well. They detached from the tour group circling around to the south and approached the throne. The halfling guards perked up and moved to intercept. Gustave announced that he was, in fact, the king and here to speak to the kanssa-jaarli, and the guards moved aside. He even spoke several entire sentences unhindered!
“Jaarl Porkkala, Jaarl Chundertoe, I am King Gustave of Songlen, to whom you owe your fealty. I have come to see you on matters of grave importance to the Skyr and to Pell as a whole. I would like to know specifically what you are doing to quell the violence rampaging through your gnomeric cities at the hands of halfling rogues.”
Both jaarli blinked at him twice and Chundertoe chewed once, then their heads swiveled in concert to look at the vomit-green halfling and Gustave knew that the easy part was over.
“Violence? What violence? This is nonsense,” the vulgarly clad halfling said with a sneer. Though Gustave was still somewhat new to the whole governing thing, even he knew that the avocado fop should not have spoken to him out of turn like that.
“Who are you, sir, that you answer for the kanssa-jaarli? I asked them the question, not you. Hold your tongue!”
“I will not! I am Marquant Dique of the Bigly-Wicke Diques, adviser to the jaarl, and I have serious doubts that you are the king.” He hooked a thumb at the automaatti perched on his shoulder. “A little bird from Lord Ergot told me an impostor might show up here, making baseless claims. I think we should postpone your audience until we can confirm your identity.”
Grinda cursed and Gustave suddenly understood why it was so important that Parnalle Peatbog was no longer jaarl. Neither of these jaarli had been to his coronation and so had no idea if he was truly king or just someone wearing costume jewelry. And both of the jaarli clearly deferred to Marquant Dique, the leader of the drubs, which meant that they were definitely corrupt as a three-day-old corpse, and Lord Ergot’s alliance with the drubs was confirmed by that messenger bird. Of course, all this information was useless, considering that Gustave and Grinda, for all their bona fides, were actually just two scrawny bags of meat among enemies. But Gustave wouldn’t let that stop him from attempting to right the wrong in his kingdom.
“I think the infamous leader of a criminal organization shouldn’t be advising the kanssa-jaarli,” Gustave said, holding in a bleat. “Remove yourself before I have you arrested.”
“No, I think it is you who needs to be arrested,” the chartreuse horror said. “Guards, take these impostors!”
The kanssa-jaarli said nothing, but Gustave saw Gasparde grin with relish and take another bite of his sushi roll as the guards hastened to obey. Gustave was unarmed and absolutely incapable of fighting, so he bleated in despair as tiny, hairy-backed hands latched onto his arm and yanked him to the right. A spear pointing at his chest backed him up toward the halfling side of the Toot Suite, and the tour group made little cries of alarm and dismay that held an undeniable edge of OMG, something is going down, and won’t my neighbor be impressed that I saw it.
Grinda was more than capable of fighting, however, and her status as a sand witch was quickly confirmed as she whipped out her wand and went to work on the guards trying to seize her, directing the soil on their clothes into their eyes and noses so that they staggered back, coughing and blinking.
“Unhand the king!” she cried, but no one obeyed. In fact, Marquant Dique sent his bird flying out of the room to fetch more guards, and a gaggle of drubs barreled in shortly thereafter, brandishing swords and half-eaten chicken wings, golden medallions gleaming on their chests. In a desperate bid to win Gustave free before the drubs could overwhelm her, Grinda directed her wand at the two guards holding him, and for a second it looked like he might escape. But they had no sooner stepped back and he stepped forward than a weight landed on his back and a line of cold steel at his throat made him stop. It was the dagger of Marquant Dique.
“Stay awhile,” he cooed. His moist breath stank of olives and evil, and Gustave loathed him like no other halfling in the world. “I’m most eager to talk at length with a man who thinks he can walk in here and order me about.”
The drubs were spreading out to surround Grinda, and she lifted all the foul sediment buried in that luxurious carpet into the air, blinding everyone with their own shed skin cells and castaway boogies.
“Drop your wand, witch!” Marquant shouted. “Or I will cut this impostor’s throat.”
Grinda ignored the halfling but quickly read the room, judged it unfavorable, and found Gustave’s eyes through the vile cloud of debris she’d flung into the air. “I’ll come back for you,” she said, and twirled inside her cloak, flinging airborne crud at the eyes of the drubs at the same time.
They cursed, and someone in the tour group loudly announced he wanted his money back, and Gustave saw Grinda’s cloak fall empty to the floor. Past that, he saw the retreating form of an opossum scampering for the exit on the gnomeric side of the Toot Suite, wand wrapped tightly in her tail. She’d pulled that trick once before; Gustave hoped she would remember how to change herself back this time. Unless she forgot him or otherwise failed to save his skinny neck, in which case he hoped she was trapped in that trash-eating body forever with a wicked case of mange.
“Where’d she go?” one of the drubs shouted.
Confusion reigned as the blinded halflings searched for Grinda and poked at her cloak, and once the sediment in the air settled back down into the carpet, Marquant ordered his Dastardly Rogues to get the tour group out of there, apply an excitement tax to their ticket fees, then secure the room and let no one in or out. He slid off Gustave’s back and walked around to face him, dagger pointed in his direction. The rogue’s hideous green outfit looked no better up close, and the mechanical bird that came back to perch on his shoulder did not improve it. Gustave savored that rare feeling of humanity: hopelessness. As a goat, at least, he’d felt rather more invincible, especially when divesting himself of emergency pellets, an act he’d been trained by Hurlga to never ever perform as a human, as much as he might currently wish to do so.
“Are you really him? The so-called Gustave the Great, the Goat King?”
“Yes. Are you really him? The so-called Big Dick of the Dastardly Rogues Under Bigly-Wicke? Because you’re a bit smaller and more wrinkled than I expected.”
Marquant’s face purpled. “That is not my name!” He relaxed and chuckled, wiggling the knife point at Gustave. “Oh, how arrogant you are—not just you, all humans!—coming in here practically alone and thinking you can order us around. It is not merely arrogant; no, it is disrespectful.”
Gustave snorted. “You’re in this for respect? Being a criminal is the wrong career path to choose if you want that. Especially when you’re involved in shady land deals with treasonous lords.”
Marquant’s eyes bugged. “Eh? What’s that? What do you know?”
“I know you’re plotting with Lord Ergot against me.”
The halfling laughed, his cheeks growing rosy in his merriment. “Oh, you think you’ve discovered a plot, eh? And so you rushed over here to deliver yourself to us?”
“I wouldn’t call this a delivery, no. I didn’t know you’d be here. I came to see if the kanssa-jaarli were aware of what you’ve been doing.”
Jaarl Gasparde Chundertoe belched and grinned at him before tossing the remainder of his sushi roll over his shoulder and calling for a stoup of wine. Jaarl Jarmo Porkkala blinked and said nothing.
“Oh, they’re quite aware and very much in my pocket. Lord Ergot will arrive soon and we’ll determine how best to move forward. You have definitely saved us plenty of time and effort by walking right into my d
emesne.” He laughed again and shook his head in disbelief. “I really think you may have committed one of the greatest blunders in all history. They’ll be calling you Gustave the Gormless soon.”
“Well, that’s probably true. I don’t believe I have any gorms.” He looked to Grinda’s cloak, asking, “Do I?” before recalling that she was gone.
Ah, well. Gustave didn’t care very much what people called him as long as he got to continue breathing. His window of opportunity to keep doing that would close soon after Lord Ergot stomped in, he felt sure.
He hoped Grinda came back before Lord Ergot could catch up. Not because he wanted someone pleasantly familiar to die with, but because he knew that the possum was his only hope.
“Anyone can throw together some oats, fruits, and nuts and call it muesli, but gnomeric chefs employ methods that can elevate a dry collection of fibres into sublime dining experiences that not only provide explosive adventures in the boom-boom room but delight the tongue and palate as well.”
—ALMONT BREWNE, in Deeply Moved by Cereals
In recent times, Båggi Biins had walked on many roads. Some were beautiful and neat, like the carefully cobbled avenues of Okesvaa. Others were magical and strange, like the path through the Misree Hills, or worrisome, like the trail leading to Dr. Murkimer’s ghostel and dental office. But none was so sad as the road that led away from the valiant kobold’s grave and toward what the dwarf suspected would be an unwinnable fight. For although he’d been waiting to unleash his violence, he began to see what their small group was truly up against, and it made him feel tinier than a gnome toe. They’d bested the wyrm and the witch, two independent evils, but they’d suffered major losses that went eons beyond proper beard hygiene. Handily trouncing trolls was one thing, but government was rather bigger and harder to bash in the knee.
The Toot Towers were so tall, so majestic, that they were visible the moment the Pruneshute Forest dribbled away to pasture. The firmly packed wagon ruts Faucon had been so excited about merged into an altogether muckier road that had seen better days. No gnomes had been this way recently, judging by the garbage tossed carelessly aside and the definitive lack of neat rows of carrots and turnips. Nor were any dwarves in evidence, as neither bees nor thoughtfully tapped hives were visible; nary an inn could be seen. No, only the dross of halflings punctuated that dour brown ribbon, from soggy Dinny’s to-go bags to discarded foot brushes bedangled with sad brown curls, and Båggi had never felt farther from home or further from the dwarf he hoped to be.
The entire party was listless as they entered the city, led by Kirsi. Since her…well, Båggi tried to think of it as a fresh hemoglobin infusion rather than an instance of cannibalism, the gnome had been even more chipper and confident than before. So perhaps she wasn’t listless—she definitely seemed listy—but a palpable pall gloomed over the rest of them. The city’s disgraceful ambience didn’t help. As colorful and bohemian as Caskcooper had seemed, with warm lanterns and pennants and artwork everywhere, the city around the Toot Towers seemed ramshackle, older than its years, and utterly overrun with halflings in military garb with almost identical mustard stains. If Båggi remembered correctly, this area should’ve been a happy mix of halflings and gnomes working together for the good of their government and land, but it looked more like a military base that lacked a detergent allowance or a sense of pride. The only things that didn’t droop were the weapons festooning the belts of the halflings, which was not a comforting thought.
“This cannot be. This city. It is egregious!” Faucon declared, noting the prevalence of drub medallions and piles of refuse. “And the laws against unkempt statuary are being wholly ignored!” He pointed at a bronze sculpture of a house-sized gnome and halfling holding hands, noting that it was leaning heavily and scrawled with offensive graffiti.
“Yeah, it wasn’t like this the last time I was here,” Agape agreed. “That was maybe a year and a half ago. It was bright and well kept then, but now it’s awful. And where are all the gnomes?”
All that is quite important for the two-legged, I suppose, but personally I find the poor condition of the roads disturbing, Gerd said, fussily lifting her talons a little higher out of the muck. Icke. I like my claws to be clean.
“Well, at least we know where we’re headed, and we’re almost to our goal.” Kirsi turned to face them, her tiny wand nestled in her neat cardigan. “So let’s put on our smiles for the final mile. As we gnomes always say: Brush your hair, be sweet and fair, don’t overshare or rudely stare!”
“I hate that one,” Onni said. He seemed, Båggi thought, the most down in the dumps of all, decidedly not Onni-ish. His cardigan wasn’t straight, and every time he looked at Kirsi, his face kind of fell apart.
“You know what they say, Onni: Hate is just another way to love something.”
Onni’s mouth fell open, and everyone watched him to see what he had to say about that. But he just snapped his mouth closed, shook his head, and kept walking toward the large, decorative door at the base of one of the Toot Towers, beside which a sign proclaimed that tours happened on the toot.
Behind them, the sudden slap of halfling feet on the road was accompanied by a call of “Move it or lose it, tourists!” and then three humans in the military-green cloaks of Bruding shoved past, which he recognized from his time at the Ping-Pong Palace. They marched through the very door Kirsi was aiming for, making her mutter, “Well, that’s odd. And rude.”
But she didn’t stop slogging her way up the street, even if it took her five steps for every one a human might’ve taken. The road had hardened everyone’s feet and bodies, their calf muscles truly tight and their blisters gone as hard and callused as a goat’s knees. It must be nice, Båggi thought, to be as sure of oneself as Kirsi was. Did the magic come from the confidence, or did the confidence come from the magic?
Oh, but wait. He remembered: The magic came from eating an old woman’s atria and ventricles. He hoped, for Kirsi, that it was worth it. The confidence had been there from the moment they’d met, and it didn’t look like that well would ever run dry.
When Kirsi put a hand against the door, however, a giant form moved to intercept her. At first, it was as if the wall did a shimmy, but then the creature’s camouflage shifted to reveal a moist, lizard-like beast too big to fit through the door. It sinuously skittered to block their passage, opening a wide, toothless maw to hiss at them. Although it had originally matched the tower’s wall perfectly, it now went a sickly pinkish-white with crimson frills around its face and tiny beady eyes, like cranberries stuck in a bun. To Båggi, it looked a little like an intestine come to life and given frog appendages and a long tail, or like an angry albino sausage. Kirsi drew back, her hand on her wand.
“Sorry, miss, but the tour is closed for the day due to, uh, unforeseen circumstances,” a halfling woman said. She stood a few feet away in military gear and held a long chain attached to the monster’s collar.
Båggi would’ve been glad to find the nicest inn available and try again when circumstances were more foreseen, but Kirsi wasn’t about to leave.
“What sort of unforeseen circumstances?” she said, hands on her hips.
“Um. Well. Er. The elevator is broken. Gnomeric machines are always doing that, you know.” She raised an imperious eyebrow.
Båggi thought that was unnecessarily provocative and unpleasant. Gnomeric machines rarely broke. But Kirsi did not take the bait and instead responded with positivity. “Excellent! It just so happens my friend Onni is an expert in all gnomeric mechanicals and can get it running again in a jiffy. Right, Onni?”
Onni did not look so sure, especially after the tree-sized monster lizard hissed at him.
“Oh. Maybe.”
“Only trained halfling personnel are allowed to tinker with official business,” the woman said, throwing off that certain air that suggested she knew she was caught in an obvious
lie but wasn’t going to budge. “So you’d best be off.”
Kirsi took another step toward the door. “I can hear the lift coming down. It’s obviously not broken. So why don’t you just let us in? As citizens of the Skyr, we have the right to address the kanssa-jaarli with grievances.”
“Not without an appointment!”
“I don’t need an appointment to register my grievance, and it says so in the rare copy of the Elder Annals we’re carrying. That’s kind of why we’re here. So if you’ll call off your frilled lizard, we can get on with it.”
As if the halfling had already backed off, Kirsi again strode forward. A halberd slammed down, blocking her path, and the monster drooled on Kirsi’s cardigan.
“Listen up, tadpole. I’ll make it easy so you can understand. One, the answer is no, because you don’t have an appointment. Two, the Elder Annals were lost; everybody knows that. And three, he’s not a frilled lizard. He’s a Pruneshute Two-Toed Tooting Newt, and he’s been trained to protect the Toot Flutes at all costs, so you can’t get past him. Oh, and four: Your attempted assault on the towers means you’ve been identified as an enemy of the state.” The halfling dropped the chain, and the newt stood on its hind legs, towering against the tower. “Sic ’em, Glute!”
Kirsi waited too long to pull out her wand and had no choice but to launch herself backward as the newt’s soft, pudgy lips slapped together right where she’d been. Faucon drew his sword and started for the newt, but the halfling retainer engaged him with her halberd, keeping him at a distance with the length of her weapon. Onni was digging through his backpack as if looking for snacks, and Gerd slashed the newt with her talons, producing little apparent effect. The wounds closed up immediately, but on the positive side, Gerd’s claws came away completely scoured of muck and grime. She hootled in approval.
