by Greg Curtis
“Fine!” she replied after a few despairing moments, realising that she'd just been outwitted by Peaches. A woman with no magic at all. That wasn't supposed to happen!
“Thank you my dear.” Peaches managed a smile of gratitude. “I know my son will of course pay you back as soon as he's finished with …” Peaches didn't finished her sentence as they all heard the pig squealing angrily and Chy shouting back at the animal as he tried to struggle to his feet.
“And maybe if you could spare a little for the physician as well. Chy's good for it. And he would never want to see his niece and nephew suffer.”
She was doomed, Elodie realised as she walked back to the house with Peaches! She was completely without hope. The woman would twist her around her little finger with ease. And meanwhile her defender, her man who was supposed to defend her from this rapacious and manipulative woman, couldn't even command a pig! In fact he was now up against the wooden fence, trapped between it and Bacon, covered in mud and desperately yelling at the beast as he tried to push her away. But the pig wasn't leaving. Not until she got her way. In fact she'd found a new tactic – sitting on him!
“He's a wizard, you know?!” Soot called out from where she was busy with the kettle and trying to keep from laughing. “We're so proud of him!”
Chapter Fifty Four
Elodie was a sage! Fylarne couldn't believe how well her sending of five days before had worked. In fact at the time he hadn't even known why she'd sent it at all. But now he knew. It was a gift from the gods! All of the Ladies and Gentlemen of the heavens must have been with her when she'd come up with it.
Because now, whenever they come across a village or a mining camp or anything else, there was no resistance. He didn't fully understand it – save that a number of those digging and pushing wagons loaded down with rocks had fully developed wings. But even they didn't fight. They just kept working. It seemed that they had become as all the others. Slaves completely incapable of doing anything but what they had been enchanted to do.
In five days they had freed five more villages and ore pits and taken not a single injury doing it. And the others were doing the same. Because their attacks had grown so easy, their groups had shrunk in size too. Now each group was about twenty five strong – that was all they needed to be – which meant that they were freeing twice as many camps every day. At this rate, Fylarne thought, they would be on the volcano and at the N'Diel temple in months!
Of course that was only one problem they faced he remembered anew as a damned dragonfly stung him. The world was still falling apart – or rather reuniting itself – and now in the middle of a frozen wasteland filled with giant trees, he was staring at a swamp. They were going to have to go around it. That would slow them down.
Or not, he realised when he suddenly heard someone shout out a warning. And when he turned around to find out what was happening, it was to see Magnus Archer striding towards the foetid water with his arms extended and sleeves of fire extending from them.
“Dung!” He got down hurriedly as the dwarf walked by, expecting that things were going to get hot. And hoping that Magnis wasn't so drunk that he'd burn them all alive! He looked more than a little unsteady on his feet. Others did the same.
“Careful flat head!” Dah yelled at him as she did her best to get behind the dwarf before he launched his flames.
“Quiet rock licker!” He called back. “It's time for a real man to work!”
Then things did get hot. Drunk or not, the dwarf simply summoned his gift and the fiery fury surrounding his arms flew out in a raging torrent, incinerating everything in sight. Not just the damned dragonflies, but the trees as well. He sprayed the fire like water from a hose, but the stream of fire was fifty or a hundred yards long. The diminutive warrior had a devastatingly powerful gift in his fire – and he had a temper to go with it. It had been a frightening day when the dwarf had joined up with them.
Fylarne kept his head down as the swamp filled with flame, and celebrated the death of all those dragonflies. And the frogs and snakes too. He wasn't so keen when the water started boiling – the steam it gave off smelled like disease – but it surely meant that whatever might be in it wasn't going to come after them. It would become soup instead.
“In all my hunts I've never seen anything like the dwarf!” Gris commented as he too took cover. “That Temple of yours really does grant some the strength of the gods!” He announced as the burning continued.
“And the wits of pebbles!” Dah retorted. She was in a poor mood.
“Say what you will Dah, Magnus Archer could become a true hunter! I wouldn't have thought it so. But with a weapon like that!”
“Actually, I don't think Magnus has been to the Temple,” Fylarne replied to them both. “Not many dwarves come to the Temple. Came to the Temple,” he corrected himself. “This is all self taught.” He wasn't completely sure of that, but he didn't recognise the dwarf from his time as a guardian, and he knew most of their worshippers, at least by sight. And he would have known if someone had had a gift like his.
Of course now there were no more worshippers. That pain returned to him once more as it so often did. There was no more Temple. There were no thrones either if what he had been told was right. Everything was gone. And that was at least in part because of him. He truly had failed in his duties. All of them. That saddened him. But not as greatly as the loss of his fellow guardians. Some days the weight of that failure all but crushed him. The weight would sit with him forever he imagined. Or at least until he passed from the living world. But he did his best to push it aside again as he watched the swamp burn.
“Self taught?” The wood elf stared at him strangely. “If this is what he can teach himself, imagine what he could do if someone took him in hand! He could burn down the entire world!”
“It's unfortunate,” Dah threw in. “There is so much that can be done with fire, but all he knows how to do is to burn things.”
“And drink!” Allide contributed. “I had to pull him out of a mud puddle the other day. He was sleeping in it – face down!”
“He's a dwarf.” Fylarne shrugged. And that was what dwarves did as they all knew. They fought and they drank. They gambled and wenched. And often enough they killed themselves off at an early age by doing something incredibly stupid while drunk. It was simply who they were.
He turned his attention back to the fiery hell in front of them, watching as clouds of foul smelling steam rose into the air and wondering how long it would take before this new swamp turned to ash.
But then between one heartbeat and the next, something changed. He felt it, like a whole new world of people all around him. People in fear for their lives!
“Stop!” He screamed at the dwarf in alarm. “Stop, stop, stop! There's people there!”
“What?” Magnus stared at him through unfocused looking eyes. “There's no one there, only swamp!” But at least he had stopped burning everything in front of them.
“There was,” Fylarne told him shakily. “Now there's people there.” He didn't understand it himself. But he knew he was right.
And little by little as the flames cleared, it became obvious that there were more than just people there. There was a village. In the middle of a small swamp. Except that it hadn't been part of the swamp at all. Not when it had orchards and gardens and great archways of perfectly carved marble everywhere. Another piece of another world had just arrived. And it had turned up right in the middle of another recently arrived piece of another world!
“I don't believe it!” Dah exclaimed quietly. “What are the chances?”
And she was right, Fylarne realised. What were the chances that pieces of worlds should suddenly appear right in front of them as they travelled? Or that they should arrive right in the middle of other pieces of other worlds? It had to be minute. Unless of course there were so many worlds out there slowly coalescing into one that it was going to happen a thousand or a million more times! It might not be so unusual after al
l.
“Where'd they come from?!” Magnus suddenly asked loudly, his voice slurring badly and looking more than a little unsteady on his feet. “They weren't there before!” But at least he wasn't setting anything ablaze any more.
Fylarne ignored the dwarf as he stared at the village – or rather the piece of a city – in front of him. Others could handle the dwarf. He was more concerned with the people he could suddenly see emerging from the shelter they'd hidden behind. Strange people who looked most like humans, but with their hair somehow tied together into little black palm trees on the tops of their heads while everything else was shaved. He hadn't seen people like them before.
A whole new world? A whole new people? They all stared at them in disbelief. And the new people with the palm trees of hair on the tops of their heads, stared back at them, no doubt with the same thoughts on their minds.
Meanwhile the fires all around them were dying down. The swamp and everything in it had been saturated with water, and without Magnus' magic to keep it burning, the fire couldn't last. But there was still plenty steam and black smoke, not to mention hundreds or thousands of charred tree skeletons. The dwarf had truly burned a massive expanse of swamp.
“So what do we do now?” Someone finally asked.
“Say hello,” Dah replied. “And apologise for burning their crops.”
“It's not my fault!” Magnus protested drunkenly. “They weren't there before!”
For the first time in his life, Fylarne thought, the dwarf might actually be right. Not that it would be seen as any sort of reasonable excuse for burning people alive. He just had to hope that no one had been killed. And that these people were the forgiving type.
But as he stood up, brushed off his robes, and began making his way through the blackened remains of the swamp, he guessed he'd find out.
It wasn't an easy trip. The swamp, at least the hundred or so yards of it between them and these new people, was no longer a mass of deep foul smelling water, and slush, not to mention biting insects. Now it was slush and soot, full of blackened trees and ash. But it still smelled, and the mud stuck to his boots, sucking his feet down with every step he took. But he pulled his feet out of the mud, one after the other, and continued on his way. And eventually he found firmer ground. The village's ground.
“Hello?” He greeted the nearer of the villagers with the funny looking black hair sticking up in the air. And he couldn't help but notice that they had other oddities about them. Six fingers on each hand for a start. And chins and noses that seemed too long and pointed.
“Do you understand me?” he asked when he didn't get a reply. And then when he still didn't get a reply he cast his spell of ancient to make sure that they could.
“Now do you understand me?”
“I do,” a woman with a stack of black hair on the top of her head that was at least a foot high, answered him. “Even if I don't know what tongue I'm speaking.”
“It's ancient,” he answered her, wondering idly if the height of the hair on the top of her head meant that she was someone of importance. “Or at least it's the tongue were used to think of as ancient – before we met the even older ancients.”
“I'm Fylarne by the way,” he added.
“And we're very sorry for what happened. But you, your village, arrived right in the middle of a swamp just as we were clearing it.” And they could surely see that for themselves. “I pray that no one was hurt?” He suspected that they weren't. Luckily the village had been just out of reach of Magnus' fire and it looked as though only a few of the nearest gardens had been scorched.
“Just badly frightened. We have never seen a fire storm like that before.”
“Magnus' gift is powerful,” he agreed. “But again, it was an accident. You arrived in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“You said that?” she replied. “But where are we? Where did this blackened mud pit come from? And where is the rest of our city? And why do your ears stick out from your head like that?”
Fylarne groaned quietly. These people knew nothing of what was happening in the world – worlds. Which made sense when he knew nothing of them. No doubt the world they were from had never had much to do with any others. Maybe they didn't even have portals.
“I'm afraid that that's going to take a lot of explaining,” he told the woman even as he heard the sound of others wading through the blackened mud, following him. And he couldn't help but notice the way her eyes widened as she saw so many people of different races all heading her way.
“Unfortunately the worlds are changing. Reforming. And there is a lot of danger all around. Things you might not be aware of. But which you need to know about. All of you.” He paused for a moment to look around.
“Is there a place where we can sit and speak?”
This was going to be a long day, Fylarne thought. And right in the middle of a war and a chaotic merging of worlds. But he supposed it was just life as it was becoming these days. And with a little luck it would get better. Of course that was until he heard Magnus arrive in the village.
“What the schist have you got on your heads?!”
Fylarne groaned a little louder. This was going to be a very long day!
Chapter Fifty Five
It was late and Chy was half asleep. Lying in bed, his arm around Elodie, feeling happy and warm. Comfortable beyond measure. A soft mattress, good sheets, a thick blanket, a decent bear skin over the top and a woman to wrap yourself around – how much more comfortable could a man be. But Elodie was still awake, talking about curtains and runners for the dining table for some reason. Discussing colours. Thinking he was listening to her. He wasn't. He heard the occasional word and made the occasional noise of agreement, but he wasn't really listening at all.
But it wasn't his fault, Chy thought. After all he'd spent the entire day digging out a road in the Carnas realm. The dwarven clanhold of Titanite – or at least their main city had arrived in the realm, and somehow managed to wedge their main entrance against a hill. The city was an underground cavern with only one proper entrance so the dwarves had been trapped inside, slowly running out of air. It was a simple task he supposed. And for once there hadn't been anything trying to eat him. But using his magic to shift so much earth for hour after hour, had left him exhausted. All he wanted to do was sleep.
“So deep blue curtains to go with the rugs?” Elodie asked him happily. “It'd look so good against the dark polished floors.”
“Mmm,” he murmured, doing his best to sound interested. But he wasn't really. He was just happy for her to do whatever she wanted if it meant she would be staying. Though sometimes, when he was awake, he wondered at the cost. The coin jar was getting low.
“Orange!” A deep voice called out from the other room, accompanied by the sound of a small dragon hissing. “I told you, you can't do better than orange!” Ogres had good hearing to go with their bad taste.
Nga Roth had turned up some time in the morning just after he'd left, apparently having been driven out of Stonely by her fellow ogres. It was something to do with her having bedded the new man in town who she described as gargantuan and gorgeous. Apparently all the other women though now described her as a slut and a hussy. It was all jealousy so Nga Roth claimed. They all wanted Con Dar for themselves. But ogre jealousy apparently was a powerful thing. It had resulted in a brawl in the streets, lots of screaming and yelling at volumes loud enough to deafen anyone nearby, pummelling one another with small trees they called staffs, more than a few injuries and several buildings being damaged.
But even though she was one of the ones who had been injured, Nga Roth claimed it was worth it – with a disturbing smile on her face. The bed had given its life for a worthy cause as the pair had enjoyed themselves. Chy considered himself too young to want to know any more about it than that! So they had a house guest for a few days. And he actually didn't mind. Once you got past the fact that she had to duck to get through doorways, the horrid small of her teas and a tiny
dragon that liked to set things on fire, she was good company. And it was only for a few days. She'd promised!
“Orange is an outside colour!” Elodie called back. “And you should be working on your apologies to the town's leaders!”
“Apologise! It wasn't my fault! It was all those jealous cows who attacked me! It's not my fault if they can't get a man!”
“You mean keep a man!” Elodie replied with a smile on her face.
“Get, keep, what's the difference?! As long as he's mine! And he was mine! Many times! I didn't even need the chains!”
“No!” Chy groaned softly. He was definitely too young to listen to that! The very thought would give him nightmares! And though his head was nestled in her neck and so he couldn't see her face, he imagined that Elodie would be wearing the same expression he was.
