by Greg Curtis
“I'm Chy,” he introduced himself, hoping a few manners would help to dissuade her from doing anything violent to him.
“And I am Nga Roth,” the massive green woman replied. “It is a fine day.”
“It is.” He didn't know quite what she meant by that. Perhaps it was simply her way of saying that she was pleased to meet him. But it was a fine day and he didn't want to ask and risk causing offence. Besides there were other things he was more curious about. “You're from Prima, aren't you? An ogre? One of the ancients in the endless forest?”
“You know me, boy?”
“I've seen your kind from a distance in the days before I could portal to the Heartfire Temple and walked the road. But no, I don't know you.” He guessed that sticking to the truth would be the clever thing.
“You walked the road that weaves through worlds?”
“Many times,” he agreed.
“But you never stepped off it?”
“No.” Chy shook his head. “Everyone knows that to step off the road is to be lost. Never to return. And not many of those who wander into the endless forest around the Heartfire, are seen again either. Those who live within its embrace are said not to like our kind.”
“We don't dislike your kind.” She smiled at him, a gesture that would make brave men swoon and others run in terror. “Though we don't like you either. But mostly we just like our privacy.”
“And now you're here,” Chy pointed out.
“Not by choice.”
“I figured.” Chy nodded, understanding. She'd been caught up in things like everyone else. “There was a heard of mammoths that arrived a while ago. I don't think they came by choice either. But they're from your world. And there are probably more. The gods know there are plenty of others from the other worlds arriving and vanishing. The boundaries between the worlds are breaking down, and creatures and people and whole pieces of the worlds themselves, are crossing over. There's an entire ice mountain that appeared in grazing lands maybe ten leagues from here.”
“And there's a desert right beside my home,” the ogre replied. “It wasn't there before. It's arrival shocked the people of Imbris no end.”
“Imbris?”
“A city. My home.”
“I didn't know you had cities in the endless forest. All I've ever seen from the road or the Temple are trees.”
“And you thought we lived in the trees. Boy?” Unexpectedly she laughed at him, a sound that boomed out like a horn and set peoples' nerves on edge. “You think I would be comfortable swinging around in the branches like a monkey?”
“I suppose not,” he agreed.
“We have a great many cities and towns, though none so … dead as this small village.”
“Dead?” He didn't understand that. But he did understand that if she imagined that Broken Gully was a small village, her cities must be enormous. The town of Broken Gulley was home to more than twenty thousand people.
“Barren maybe. There is so little life here. And the air is so dry. So dust filled. How can you little people live in such a place?!”
“So you were brought here by accident?” Chy decided that he didn't want to find out any more about her home. Not now anyway. And he wasn't sure he liked being called a little person either. It sounded like a slur. “And now you can't get back?”
“It is irksome,” she agreed. “One moment I was out in the garden with Dulcie, and the next I was here, still with the weeds I'd pulled in my hand. And I cannot find Imbris, or even Staal.”
“Staal?”
“The world you just called Prima – or the endless forest.”
“It has been happening a lot lately. And many of our people have been disappearing too, probably to end up in other worlds like Prima. But this world is Althern, home to humans like me. And you will find very few with any gift of magic here, and none with portals to send you back. I'm sorry.” A thought abruptly occurred to him. “There is another of your people here? You mentioned Dulcie?”
“Dulcie is my pet. A companion on the long cold nights. But she is not here. I arrived here and called for her immediately, but she did not come.”
“Oh!” An obvious thought struck Chy. “Would Dulcie be a small black dragon with an unfortunate habit of spitting fire?”
“Yes.” The ogre looked at him strangely. “You've seen her?”
“I have. But she's in town. The guards shot at her and she fled.”
“They shot –!” The ogre's voice began to rise.
“At her! Only at her! They didn't hit her! She's unharmed and they were frightened. There are no dragons, not even baby ones in this land, and she spat fire at them.” He took a deep breath. “But lets go and find her. She will come when you call?”
“She will.”
“Good. Then we should take a walk.” He wasn't completely sure she was up to walking any large distance. The woman was hugely fat. But there didn't seem to be a lot of choice in the matter. So he gestured at the guards, told them to hurry off and clear the streets and under absolutely no circumstances to pull a weapon on either of them, and then they were off. The guards, he noticed, were only too pleased to do as he asked. Or at least they ran as if it was their heart's desire!
“You are in charge here? These ones with the smoke sticks seem to obey you.”
“I'm not in charge. I was simply called here because they had a dragon on the loose and I was the only one they knew of who had the gift. Mostly I make my living by polishing stones.”
“You polish stones? There is worth in that among you small ones?”
“Some,” he replied. And then as they walked he told her a little of his life and what had been happening. But a lot of it he suspected she didn't understand. She clearly didn't know anything about technology. Guns she called smoke sticks, presumably because when they fired they shot out a great cloud of smoke. The dirigible she saw in the sky above the town she thought was some sort of floating jellyfish which had been tethered to the ground. She wanted to free it. And she had no idea what coin was either.
That disappointed him. Everyone referred to the people of the endless forests as ancients. And maybe they were an ancient race. But for all that they were old they didn't seem to have any advanced knowledge. At least not of the things he was familiar with. It was a pity. He'd hoped that having an ancient among their number would help. Maybe it would even be someone who could tell them what was happening and what to do. How to fix it. But that, it seemed, wasn't to be within her wheelhouse.
On the other hand her work surprised him in an altogether different way. She grew tea. Her garden it turned out, was a field where the small bushes grew and she plucked the leaves to make the teas that she supplied. But she didn't sell them. She bartered her teas in the markets. That seemed a surprisingly peaceful trade for an ogre. At least to him. Then again, the teas she told him about didn't sound like anything he would want to try. Blackroot tea?! Surely that had to be poisonous?!
Things were going well he thought. Until he turned a corner and was met with a hail of bullets.
“Piss!” He leapt back hurriedly and Nga Roth did the same despite her girth. She was quicker than she looked.
“You alright?” He yelled at her, worried. She was a big target.
“Fine,” she answered him, patting herself down. “But what are these little metal pieces?” She brushed a couple of them out of her clothes. Somehow the leather and mouldy fabric had stopped them from going into her flesh. What were her clothes made out of – stone?!
“Bullets,” he stared at the two completely flat bits of metal lying on the cobbles. “They're what get shot out of the smoking sticks!”
“Well they don't look like smoke!” she muttered as she worked on neatening out her clothes. “And why would they shoot them at me? It doesn't seem friendly! Shouldn't you tell them off for throwing these stones?”
“I don't know. But I'll get to the bottom of it.”
Throwing stones? Chy shook his head in disbelief. She
really imagined that that was all they were doing? But maybe she really did think of them as children. Then things would make more sense. But satisfied that she was alright he turned his attention to the soldiers around the corner.
“By the Great Beast just what do you think your doing?” he yelled at them.
“Cleaning the streets!” A man yelled back.
Chy was about to yell back that Nga Roth was no rubbish to be cleaned away when something clicked. He knew that voice.
“Inquisitor?” He poked his head around the corner of a building, to see that it was in fact the very man who'd come to ask him questions about Stonely. “What are you doing here?” He didn't understand at all.
“I told you.” Another hail of bullets came flying down the street, straight at Chy's head. “Cleaning up!”
Chy ducked back behind the corner of the building, glad his head was a small target and the soldiers were a good distance away, but worried too. Because he realised that the soldiers hadn't been aiming at his green companion – originally. They might have started shooting her once they'd seen her in front of them – instinct taking over. But they'd been aiming for him.
“Have your wits taken leave?!” He called back once the soldiers had set about reloading. And they were soldiers he realised, in the King's black uniforms. They weren't the town guards. That probably meant they were better shots at least.
“You lied to me!” the Inquisitor yelled back. “Deceived me! Pretended to be just a dirt grubbing peasant!”
“Balls!” Chy muttered quietly to the air. That was always the trouble with manipulating peoples' thoughts. Eventually whatever you did wore off – and then often enough people grew angry. People were difficult to magic. And it seemed that the Inquisitor was going to be one of those people. But for a different reason. Because he wasn't angry that he'd been lied to. Lots of people probably tried lying to him. Somewhere deep inside, perhaps too deep for him to even realise what it was, he had the fear that Chy had done something to him. That was where the anger was coming from. And it would not be easily contained. He wasn't going to try that again.
“I am a simple man,” he called back. “Like everyone else. But I also have a gift that you couldn't possibly understand. And now I'm what stands between the people of all these towns and chaos.” And if the man had found him here he had to know why he was here after all.
“By Alder, you're just one of them! Evil! In league with the Great Beast!”
“Balls!” There was no reasoning with the man, Chy realised. He could hear the hysteria in the man's voice. Probably his soldiers could too – but that didn't matter. They had to obey him regardless. So reason was gone. It was time to try a new weapon. Intimidation. Damn it! This was likely to get him in more trouble. But it had to be done.
He started with the wind – it was always one of the quickest of the elements to answer to his command. And only twenty or thirty seconds later he had a small gale blasting the dust off the street straight into their faces. The inquisitor and his soldiers. Which was good as when he looked around the corner he could see them all covering their eyes with their arms. They couldn't shoot like that.
Then he brought the darkness to them, literally stealing the light from their eyes. It was a simple magic, but incredibly effective. In only a few more seconds twenty men at arms and their leader were all blind, crying out in the wind storm, desperately trying to work out what was happening and panicking. But what mattered was that none of them were shooting at him. None of them could.
It was then that he felt brave enough to walk out into the middle of the street in front of them. They couldn't see him after all. They didn't even know he was there. And soon after that they didn't care.
Chy brought them the sound of wolves, howling on the wind, and in a heartbeat he could hear the terror in their screams. They were helpless, blind, and there were wolves. Naturally they did what anyone would do. They ran. They ran screaming in every direction, while all around them the townsfolk stared at them from their windows and wondered what was happening. They couldn't hear the wolves and they could see perfectly.
Naturally running while blind was a bad idea, and the soldiers crashed into things in their terror. They hurt themselves smashing into windows and bouncing off walls. They got turned around and ran into one another. And soon enough they were on their hands and knees, begging for help and crying. Most of them had lost their weapons by that stage. They'd dropped them in their panic. Or thrown them away. What use was a rifle to a blind man?
The Inquisitor was with them, just as confused and frightened as the others. But as he crawled along the street heading for a trough which he couldn't see, Chy decided to add to his misery. He cast the magic of rot on his uniform and watched as it began to fall off him.
First it was the leather straps across his chest that failed. And his belt and boots. But the man didn't seem to care about that. He probably didn't even know they were gone. Or that his brace of pistols were lying in the street for anyone to pick up.
Then the buttons on his uniform including those on his pants failed, and he was undone. He noticed that. At least enough to scream Chy's name out in rage and threaten to do all sorts of horrible things to him.
Chy let him yell. It was good for the people of Broken Gully to see an Inquisitor on his knees, naked and screaming in terror now and again. It would give them something to laugh about – later. More importantly it would give the bards something to sing about, and there would be songs sung about this day. His family might well sing some of them.
Eventually the Inquisitor was completely naked and it was time Chy thought to, completely destroy him. Which was why he had the sound of the wolves come from immediately behind the man.
It worked perfectly and soon the Inquisitor was on his feet, running straight down the street, completely uncaring that he was naked, and guided only by the sounds of the wolves in his head. He fell a few times, but each time he got up hurriedly and ran, a little blood trickling down from his hands and knees where he'd scraped them.
Chy watched as the man vanished from sight, pleased that it was over. And he knew it was. The Inquisitor was never going to be able to return to his post. Not when the bards would be singing for weeks about his naked backside flapping in the wind. The humiliation would be terrible. And when word got back to the Court, he imagined the man would be promptly dismissed from his post for cowardice. He might even be hung. The King took a dim view of such things. Regardless the chances were that the man would not return.
He turned back to his companion to see that she was standing there staring at where the man had been, while a small black dragon had wrapped itself around her neck.
“That seemed harsh,” she commented as she petted the dragon's head. “They're only little you know. Surely a little spanking would have been enough?”
“He was trying to kill me,” Chy replied, realising she was still thinking of them as children because of their small size. Maybe she couldn't see so well? “And you have your Dulcie back I see.”
“Yes. Poor thing! She must have been terrified!”
Chy wasn't quite so sure about that. There was absolutely nothing in the tiny dragon's demeanour that spoke of fear. But she did seem happy to be back with her mistress. Still that wasn't his concern. It was simply time to bring things to a conclusion here in Broken Gully.
“Well Nga Roth, I think if it's alright with you, I'm going to bring you to some friends of mine in a town called Stonely. They're starting to build a system of portals – none back to Prima I'm afraid – unless you can build a portal back there – but they're gifted like me and from other worlds like you. They can help to find a place for you to stay while you're stuck here.”
“Stonely.” She tried out the name on her tongue a few times. “It sounds like a good name. Is it far?”
“Eight or ten leagues I think. But that's only a couple of hours travel on a steam wagon.” Of course he was going to have to hire the services of one he rea
lised, and that would not be cheap. But at least it was another crisis solved and without recourse to bloodshed. That was a good thing.
“A steam wagon?”
“I'll tell you about it as we head to the station.” And with that he was off heading in the direction he thought the station was, while a few blind soldiers hid behind anything they could find, not knowing what was happening. Maybe he could have released them from the cast, he thought.
