The Ogre Apprentice

by Trevor H. Cooley

  A girl? said Gwyrtha.

  Oh. Uh, that’s Maryanne. She’s your great grandmother’s bonded, remember? It’s . . . she . . . it was cold, that’s all. She’s sharing my robe.

  Justan laughed. Well the whole arrangement seems pretty cozy.

  It’s not funny, Justan. I don’t know how to feel about this, Fist said. All of his confused emotions spilled over. Maryanne likes me and I don’t know what I think about that, but Puj died yesterday and the last time I saw her alive she kissed me.

  Okay, I can see how that would be a lot to process at one time, Justan said and Fist could feel the depth of his sympathy through the bond. Look, the only thing I can suggest is to stop trying to figure it out for now. If you keep dwelling on these things, you’ll just make yourself crazy. Just push those questions aside and focus on the job in front of you. These kinds of things tend to sort themselves out.

  Thank you, Justan, Fist said. That does help.

  After that, Justan quickly caught Fist up on events in Malaroo. After they had said goodnight, Fist opened his eyes

  Maryanne sensed a change in his movements. “You back?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” he replied. “Justan sent me some energy from Gwyrtha. I feel much better now.”

  “That’s good,” said the gnome. “I told Sarine what happened. She’s going to let Wizard Beehn know where we are so that he can get the message passed along to Charz. What’s Squirrel up to?”

  “Beard fell asleep,” Fist said, tapping in to Squirrel’s thoughts through the bond. Unlike them, the ogre had been prepared for a long journey. He had his sleeping furs with him. “Squirrel is watching him trying to think of ways to make him miserable.” He shook his head. Squirrel was still so angry it was hard to tell exactly what he was planning. “I think Beard is going to have a hard night.”

  “Good,” Maryanne said. She yawned, “Then let’s get some sleep ourselves. I’ll wake you up at first light. Maybe we’ll get started first and catch him early.”

  “I hope so,” Fist said. He settled back against the wall, trying to get as comfortable as he could.

  Maryanne was asleep within seconds. Fist nearly laughed at how quickly she did it. How was that possible? Was it some kind of gnome warrior trick? He tried to focus on sleeping. He had been so tired before, but that infusion of Gwyrtha’s energy had left him wide awake. Or so he thought. Moments later, he was drifting off as well . . .

  “Wake up!”

  Fist blinked. He had been dreaming about a great arm, huge and black reaching for him. But he woke to a different hand, thin and pale, and it was pinching his cheek. Hard.

  “Ow!” he complained.

  “Come on!” Maryanne said, her face filled with frustration. She was standing in front of him, slightly bent over because of the cave’s low ceiling. “It’s light out. Blast it, we overslept! And I never oversleep. I have a sense about it. I always wake up at first light. Always!”

  Fist hurriedly began putting on his breastplate and reached through the bond. Squirrel was farther away than he had been the night before. Squirrel! Where are you?

  Not a squirrel. I am Deathclaw, Squirrel replied. The little creature was standing at the edge of a ravine, looking down as Beard climbed down a steep cliff face towards the bottom.

  You are not Deathclaw, Fist said. He was trying to gauge the exact distance between them but it was difficult.

  I’m Deathclaw! Squirrel insisted, grunting as he pushed a fist-sized rock towards the edge. Over it went, tumbling through the air to strike Beard on the shoulder. The ogre didn’t lose his grip, but he did look up and shout at Squirrel. Squirrel shook a tiny fist back at him and squeaked out a chittering threat.

  Fist caught a glimpse of Beard’s face. It was marred by scratches. Some of them were wide and long, likely Puj’s work. The others were tiny and jagged, proving that Squirrel had indeed been busy harassing his enemy.

  Fist found himself impressed by Squirrel’s ingenuity, though it terrified him how close Squirrel had to be to make all those attacks. All Beard had to do was catch him once.

  Just be careful until we can get to you, Fist begged.

  He will be dead, Squirrel promised. He selected another rock and began pushing it towards the edge.

  “Well?” Maryanne asked.

  “Beard was up early,” Fist said, letting go of Squirrel’s thoughts. He strapped his mace’s sheath onto his back and retrieved his shield.

  “How far behind are we?” Maryanne asked as they exited the cave.

  She handed Fist another strip of dried meat. He popped it into his mouth, wondering how much more of that stuff she had.

  He pointed to the northeast. “I don’t know for sure, but I think he’s several miles that way. Squirrel just watched him climb down into a ravine.”

  “That gives us something to look for.” She summoned an eager smile. “Let’s go.”

  They headed out of the cave and started off at a jog. Fist was relieved to find that all traces of the exhaustion he had felt the previous day were gone. In fact, he felt better than he had in a long while. He and Maryanne made great time, reaching the ravine by noontime.

  According to Squirrel, Beard had traveled along the bottom of the ravine for quite some time before finding a favorable place to climb up the far side. Fist and Maryanne walked westward along the edge, looking for a better way to cross, but could not find anything and finally had to make the climb down and up as Beard had.

  The rest of the day’s journey was spent racing up game trails in a desperate attempt to catch up with the rogue ogre. Beard, however, ran as if he knew how close they were. Even though he was wounded and had eaten very little, the ogre managed to keep a good lead on them. By the time night came again, he was still a good distance away.

  Fist and Maryanne spent that night under a rock overhang huddled inside Fist’s robe as a light snow began to fall. Part way through the night, Fist’s sleep was interrupted by a chorus of moonrat moans. He wondered if this was the same group they had come across days before. Or was it a different pack, also drawn to the mysterious power that was so similar to Mellinda’s?

  Maryanne was wakened by the sound as well. The gnome warrior grasped his arms and pulled them tightly around her. Together, they watched the trail of glowing green dots pass through the valley beneath them, visible even through the falling snow.

  “Why are they so angry?” she wondered.

  “Their mother is dead,” he replied.

  “How sad,” she said.

  Fist shook his head. “No. She was a terrible mother.”

  He didn’t fall back to sleep until the lights had faded from view.

  The next thing Fist was aware of was a feeling of complete comfort. He was lying on pillowy softness, the warmth of the sun on his body. But something within him knew that comfort was a lie. He had experienced this before. The comfort never lasted.

  As if he had bid it to come, a cold breeze blew across him. Fist forced his eyes open and turned to see Crag running towards him, a dark mass of clouds approaching on his heels. Fear and anger filled the chieftain’s voice as he shouted, “Fist! Fight!”

  Fist nodded in understanding. This was his dream. “I will fight.”

  Suddenly, Fist was standing, facing the cloud, his mace in one hand. Crag arrived and stood before him breathing heavily. His face was bruised and bloodied.

  This time Fist took charge. He reached out and grasped his father’s face, filling it with healing energies. Crag’s wounds disappeared. The ogre chieftain laughed and turned to face the cloud at Fist’s side.

  The cloud struck, passing over them. But it wasn’t truly a thundercloud. It was a swarm of flies with green glowing eyes and each one filled with hundreds of eggs. The flies coated him, laying their vile eggs. They tried to crawl up his nose, in his ears.

  Fist almost lost control right there, but this time he held onto his awareness of the dream. It wasn’t real. He sent an electric surge along his skin, frying the fli
es and bursting their eggs.

  Crag wasn’t as fortunate. He turned to Fist, his eyes red, maggots crawling in his mouth. “Toompa!”

  Crag shoved him off of the cloud and Fist fell. He held onto reality, forcing himself to analyze the dream. Sarine had told him that some things in the dream were unchangeable. No matter what he did, Crag threw him from the clouds. No matter what he did, Crag called him that name, just as he had the day Fist had fled his people.

  Was that the clue he was supposed to look for? Did that explain the nature of his dreams? Were they simply telling him the past? If so, he didn’t understand. Why show him that? He already knew that part.

  Fist turned his focus to the fact that he was still falling. That was right. There was still more to the dream.

  Fist twisted in mid air and looked down. The peaks of the Trafalgan mountains were coming up from below and in their midst was the tiny black dot that was the black lake. Fist thought on what this meant. In his dream, he always fell from the clouds, but the landing never killed him. Either he fell into the lake, or he appeared on the ground as if he hadn’t fallen at all. Why was that? If his dream was telling him the past, why were there two outcomes?

  The blackness grew larger beneath him, but Fist did not want to fall in the lake this time. He willed himself to stop falling. He willed the ground to appear under his feet.

  Suddenly, he was standing on solid ground. There was a purpose in his mind. He was there to fight. A faceless mass of enemies walked towards him. They approached steadily, hateful evil things.

  Fist almost lost himself, but was somehow able to take control once again. This was his dream. Where was he? He looked around and was surprised to see that he was standing on the shore of the black lake. It stretched out behind him, beckoning.

  He focused on the enemies. He willed their faces to appear. As he did so, he remembered who they were. These were humans and dwarves and ogres and elves. Good people. Many of their faces were familiar. But those faces were twisted with madness. Their eyes were red, their mouths open in soundless rage.

  Fist understood. These were the bodies of the dead, infested with larvae from the black lake. He turned and looked behind him. The Thunder People were at his back. The ogres were helping him fight the dead ones.

  What did this mean? This couldn’t be the past. Maybe he was wrong and the dreams were showing him the present. These could be the Thunder People that were fighting the evil right now. Maybe he was supposed to know of the urgent nature of their situation.

  Then his field of vision widened and he saw that his other friends were there. Locksher and Charz and Maryanne were fighting alongside the Thunder People. So were Darlan and Faldon and countless others. But the army of evil was much bigger. Their fight was hopeless.

  Fist felt a panic rise within him, but he reminded himself that this was his dream. He took charge, sending bolts of lightning down from the sky. Every time a bolt struck, dozens of the infested dead burst in a shower of gore. He battled on and on until he found himself surrounded. He looked around, but none of his friends were in sight. Then he saw the boulder.

  It was at least twice as tall as Fist was; a huge rock with a wide flat top, standing high above the evil army. Lying on top of the boulder was Squirrel’s pouch. The enemy was surrounding the boulder, trying to climb it. The bulge in the pouch told Fist that Squirrel was inside fast asleep.

  “Squirrel!” Fist shouted. He tried to hold onto the reality that this was his dream, but it was difficult. The enemy around him attacked. Fist was stabbed, bitten, beaten with clubs. He ignored the blows. What did this mean? Why was Squirrel alone? Was this the present? Was this the future?

  He cried out in rage and sent arcs of electricity around him in undulating waves, bursting enemies by the hundreds. He cut his way through them until he reached the boulder and climbed to the top.

  As he reached for the pouch, Fist remembered something else about this version of the dream. Squirrel wasn’t inside the pouch. Fist turned his head to see that Squirrel was sitting calmly on his shoulder, shelling a nut. The little creature cocked his head at the look on Fist’s face and held the nut out to him.

  Fist’s eyes widened and he looked down at the pouch. Against his will, he lifted the flap and looked inside. A huge black hand reached out, grasping Fist’s head.

  He woke, gasping just as the sound of a bloodcurdling scream filled the night.

  “What was that?” Maryanne said.

  She slipped out from under his robe and left the shelter of the overhang to look across the valley below. The snow had stopped falling and the overcast sky was dimly lit by the oncoming dawn. The landscape before them was blanketed in over an inch of whiteness.

  Fist edged out from the rock to join her as he buckled on his breastplate. The cry echoed out again, though not as loudly this time.

  “It came from the far side of the valley,” she said.

  Fist nodded. “Squirrel’s over there.” He reached out for his bonded. Squirrel, what happened? What was that sound?

  He received a note of grim satisfaction. Deathclaw, was all Squirrel said before closing off the bond.

  “I think that sound was Beard,” Fist said.

  “No,” said Maryanne in disbelief.

  Fist shook his head slowly. “I think Squirrel did something to him.”

  The gnome chuckled. “Let’s go find out.”

  They set off into the valley, heading in the direction the sounds had come from. A few hours later, they found the place where Beard had been sleeping. The snow all around the area was disturbed by the ogre’s heavy footprints.

  Fist found a half-eaten cheese roll lying on the ground. Beard must have taken it from the party’s rations. Fist picked it up and winced. It smelled like urine and had tiny Squirrel droppings embedded in it.

  “I found blood,” said Maryanne. She was crouched beside a long patch of ground that was bare of snow. This would have been where Beard was sleeping. A small puddle of blood was congealing among the pine needles. “What did Squirrel do to him?”

  Fist shrugged and held the roll out to her. She wrinkled her nose at it. “Alright, I might have screamed if I bit into that.”

  That roll hadn’t been the only food the ogre left behind. As they followed his tracks up the next slope, they found a lot more scattered along the way. Most of it was human food and all of it had been ruined in some way by Squirrel’s antics.

  They heard another scream as they crested that ridge. The pattern continued throughout the day and things seemed to grow worse for Beard. By mid-afternoon, tiny droplets of blood were interspersed with the ogre’s tracks. Every once in a while, they would hear a faint roar.

  They began to find odd patterns of destruction along the way. Trees were uprooted, branches broken. The patterns seemed random, but Fist was sure that Squirrel was involved. Beard was getting more desperate in his attempts to rid himself of the creature.

  Squirrel was unresponsive to Fist’s attempts to contact him. Fist feared for his bonded’s life, but he was grateful for one thing. Squirrel was slowing Beard down. They were making steady progress.

  By the time nightfall neared again, they were close. And whatever Squirrel had done to the ogre had gotten worse, because the droplets of blood around Beards tracks were larger and more frequent. So were the ogre’s shouts and fits of destruction. The sounds alternated from rage to pain to desperation.

  Once again, Fist and Maryanne debated whether or not to continue into the night. The sky had cleared and the remnants of the previous night’s snowfall were helpful, providing some illumination even before the moon had risen, but with the clear sky came a wind that was even colder than the night before. Maryanne was shivering and they couldn’t share Fist’s robe while on the move.

  They took shelter deep within the branches of a fallen conifer. They lay next to the trunk, warm within Fist’s robes and listened to the howling of the wind mixed with the roars of their quarry. His screaming was so frantic
and pained that Fist couldn’t help but feel sorry for him.

  Neither of them thought that they would be able to sleep with all that agony going on nearby. So Fist and Maryanne amused themselves speculating on what Beard was going through. Every scenario they could come up with was either comical or extremely morbid and none of it seemed actually possible.

  At some point late into the night, Fist’s eyes fluttered open. He hadn’t even realized that he had fallen asleep. The air was still. The sounds had stopped.

  He raised his head slightly to look past Maryanne’s hair and saw a small dark-eyed figure looking back at him. “Squirrel?”

  Tired, Squirrel replied.

  Fist held open the front flap of the robe and Squirrel darted in, climbing over Maryanne and settling his cold little body in against Fist’s neck. Fist reached up and petted his friend. Are you okay?

  Done, Squirrel said, and like that Fist knew that he was forgiven. All anger was gone from Squirrel’s mind. He was happy to be back.

  What about Beard?

  I am not a squirrel anymore, was the reply.

  Fist blinked. Are you still Deathclaw?

  No. I am Squirrel, the little creature mumbled before falling asleep.

  Fist lay there quietly, with Maryanne tight against him and feeling Squirrel’s little heart beat against his neck, and smiled. He was content to lie that way for quite some time.

  Finally, he could bear the suspense no longer. He had to know what had happened. He nudged Maryanne awake and whispered, “Squirrel’s back.”

  “Huh? Where?” she asked, turning her head to look back at him. Her eyes widened as she saw Squirrel’s sleeping form curled up on Fist’s neck behind her. “When?”

  “Not long ago,” he said.

  “What happened?”

  “He wouldn’t say,” Fist replied. “The wind has died down. Do you want to go find out?”

  She nodded and slid out of his robes. Fist gently transferred the sleeping squirrel into his pouch and stood. Together, they headed towards the spot they last knew Beard to be.