by Jon Hollins
“Shut up and start looking for the purse,” said the woman. She wheeled round suddenly, stabbed a finger out at Will. “You,” she said. “Have you seen a purse?”
Will stared at her. His life did not make sense to him anymore. He remembered a metaphor his father’s old lost farmhand Firkin had said to him, in one of his increasingly rare sober moments. He said it was as if the narrator of his fate had needed to step away for a moment and handed the reins to an angry toddler—a god’s hand sweeping through the bricks of his life and knocking everything to the floor.
“Me?” Will said, to the woman pointing to his chest.
“No,” said the woman, shaking her head, “the other helpful bystander standing just behind you.”
Caught off guard, Will looked over his shoulder. There was no one there. Then his mind processed. He looked back to the woman embarrassed.
He could see her better now. The goblins’ torches littered the floor. Her face was angular, hard, flat planes coming to abrupt angles at her cheekbones and jaw. She was dressed in boiled leathers studded with steel. A hodgepodge of plate mail was strapped to her shoulders, arms, and shins. The sharpness of her features carried through to her eyes, bright and alive in this field of death.
Behind her, the massive lizard man was holding two dead goblins aloft by their ankles and shaking them. A few scraps of leather and dirt fell from them, along with a fairly large quantity of blood. There was no purse, though. The lizard man grunted and slung both bodies toward one corner of the cave. They landed with a crack of breaking bone that made Will wince.
A hint of sympathy entered the woman’s face. “Not how you spend your typical evening?” she asked.
Will shrugged helplessly. “Not even a typical day.”
The woman cracked a smile at that. The hard planes of her face transformed, curves appearing out of nowhere at her cheeks, and even a small dimple revealing its presence.
“I’m Lette,” she said. “That’s Balur.”
Will stared at the lizard man. Balur. The word sounded foreign. He had the feeling that this was a moment when curiosity might equate to a feline fatality, but he couldn’t quite help himself. “What is he?” he asked.
“An obstinate idiot,” Lette said without a pause.
Balur shook out two more goblins and flung them at the corner. “You being flirting is not helping us find our purse any faster,” he said without looking up.
“At least,” she spat back, “my version of flirting is a little more sophisticated than whipping my britches off and proffering some coin.” Without pausing for breath she turned to Will and said, “Get any ideas and I shall feed you your own testicles.”
Will was still watching events through a thin haze of confusion. His head still hurt from running into the tree. He wanted to sit down and ignore everything in the hopes that it would go away. Except Lette. He thought Lette could stay.
He realized he had not introduced himself. “I’m Will,” he said. “I’m a farmer.”
Lette nodded. She looked back at Balur. “How about farming?” she asked the lizard man, apropos—as far as Will could tell—of nothing. “Working with your hands. Very physically demanding, farmwork can be.”
Balur grunted. “Bad for reflexes. Ruin muscle memory,” he said, leaving Will none the wiser.
Lette sighed, sank to her knees, and started rummaging through the possessions of the nearest corpse. Behind her, Balur had moved on to a different part of the cave. He shook out two more goblins, then, disappointed, flung them away to start a new pile.
As they landed there was a muffled yell.
Balur hesitated, arm still outstretched from his throw. “Got a live one,” he said.
Will’s stomach tightened, a sharp knot lodging near his kidneys. He looked back at the entrance to the cave. He could slip away. They wouldn’t notice. He could…
He could what? Run into more trouble? It was unlikely he would come across any other well-armed strangers to brutally slaughter all of his problems. Given the many and various ways the world had tried to screw him over this night, staying with Lette and Balur actually seemed the safer option.
Lette had her short sword out once more and was advancing on the source of the sound, Balur by her side. They slowed as they came close. Then with a speed that surprised Will, Balur darted forward and grabbed something. It wriggled and writhed in the lizard man’s massive hand as he held it aloft.
It was bigger than the goblin corpses littering the ground. And it was wrapped in ropes. Balur had it by its ankles, but it still took Will a moment to realize the massive scruff of hair at the bottom was a man’s hair and beard.
“That’s not a goblin,” Will said, just in case stating the obvious would help.
“Might be in league with them,” Balur said, eyes narrowed at the struggling form. Grunts and squeaks emerged, and Will realized that one of the ropes had firmly gagged the man. “Maybe be killing it just in case.”
“In league?” Will said incredulously. “He’s tied hand and foot.”
Lette nodded. “Farm boy makes a compelling case.”
“I am still thinking I should perhaps be squishing it. Just in—”
“I’m still thinking about spaying you,” Lette cut in. “Put the poor bugger down.”
Grudgingly, Balur lowered the man to the ground. Lette’s knife appeared in her hand, apparently without having traveled through the intervening space between it and the sheath at her waist. The knife flashed in a single stroke, and the bonds fell away.
A dirty, disheveled man emerged from the looping mass of rope, shouting as he came. He was naked except for a pair of discolored undershorts, and a fairly thick coating of mud. He was rail thin, but with a small potbelly sticking out, as if he had at some point in the past swallowed a child’s ball and it had obstinately stuck in his system. His arms too were more muscular than his frame might suggest, and his hands were disproportionately large. His face was almost entirely lost in a shock of hair and beard, long, tightly curled bristles standing out in wild clumps.
“Varmagants!” he was screaming. “Barph-cursed wotsits! Menagerie! Cursed and hexed vermin! Thy cannot prevent me. I am the inevitable! I am the word of the future that shall come! I am the inescapable odor!”
Both Lette and Balur took a step away from the man. Lette’s sword was up once more.
It was rather a shock to Will that he recognized the man.
“Firkin?” he said.
Lette glanced at Will, quick and darting. “You know him?” she said fixing her attention back on the raving, half-naked man.
Will took a step toward him. And, yes. Yes he did. It was indeed his father’s old farmhand, Firkin.
Memories flooded Will. Sitting with his father and the farmhands on a summer’s day, all of them laughing at Firkin’s tall tale. Up on Firkin’s shoulders, his mouth full of stolen apple flesh, racing across a field, his father chasing and cursing. Watching Firkin tell jokes as his father branded the pigs. Passing bread out of a kitchen window while his mother’s back was turned, Firkin gathering the rolls up in a fold of his shirt. Sitting and talking about dragons and dreaming of revolution. Watching Firkin tickle the cow’s backside with a porcupine quill and then watching as the cow’s kick sent him halfway across the yard. Laughing so hard he thought some part of him might rupture. Firkin and his father standing in the yard, yelling at each other, red-faced. Will and Firkin sitting slouched beneath a tree, daydreaming about stealing a dragon’s gold from beneath his nose. Firkin drinking so much he fell off the table, and his father, not far behind him, laughing so hard he joined him on the floor. His mother slapping Firkin full across the face, the red handprint standing out stark on his pale skin. Firkin telling him that he didn’t want company right now, and the first feeling of utter rejection in his life. Then riding a cow, madcap down a hill, Firkin running behind full tilt, switching its behind. His mother holding him, sobbing and shouting at the same time. Asking his father where Firkin was. Da
ys spent listless and wandering. Then a meal interrupted by a knock at the door, his father rising, words exchanged with an unseen man, voices rising, the scuffle of violence, and then Firkin framed in the doorway, his father on the floor, lip bloody, horror in Firkin’s eyes. Then Firkin from a distance, a shadow shape that haunted distant fences. Riding with his father into town and seeing a man shouting at people who weren’t there—he only recognized him as Firkin as they passed him on the way home. The moment when he realized he was used to that sight, not bothered by it anymore. His father’s funeral—seeing that familiar shadow that used to haunt the fences. Watching Firkin being thrown out of the tavern again. Again. Again.
And now here. Firkin. The village drunk. The village crazy. A man who seemed to be waiting for everyone to forget why they gave him the dregs from their plates, the spare copper sheks they couldn’t spare.
Firkin chose that moment to vomit noisily and messily over the floor. It was a practiced movement—tip and pour. He straightened, wiping his mouth. “Darn varmints,” he said. “Gone went fed me some of the pootin’.”
Nobody seemed up to the task of asking him what “pootin’” was.
Balur regarded the filthy, scrawny man and then shrugged. “Is looking goblin-y to me.” He hefted his hammer.
“No!” Will yelled, darting toward the old farmhand. “No, he’s not. He’s a friend.”
Firkin narrowed his eyes at Will. “I don’t like you and your bunk,” he said with surprising clarity.
“I am saving you from poor taste in friends,” Balur said, not relaxing his grip on the hammer.
Firkin assessed the massive lizard man, stuck out his lower lip, and squinted with one eye. “You’s a biggun,” he said. “I like the bigguns. Carry more of the ale for me. Down to the merry lands, and we all drown happy like.” He smacked his lips twice.
“We can’t kill him, Balur,” said Lette from behind Will and Firkin, sounding slightly exasperated. Will felt a wave of gratitude flood through him.
“We can be,” said Balur matter-of-factly, causing the wave to break. “Be being simple. I be bringing down this hammer with speed of a certain amount. His head is going crump, and we are having a dead man there.”
“Well, I know literally you can kill him…”
“Thank you,” said Balur, readying himself once more.
“No!” Will shouted again. “He’s my friend. He helped raise me.”
Balur gave Will a skeptical look. “Maybe I should be killing him to be saving you from your poor taste in friends, then I should be killing you to be saving Lette from her poor taste in men. Everybody be being happier then.”
“No!” Will said, starting to feel repetitive, but not sure what other words might save him from a homicidal lizard man at this point in the proceedings.
“If we’re saving me from my taste in friends,” said Lette to Balur, “maybe I should be killing you then.”
The hammer blow continued to fail to fall.
“Look,” said Will, reaching out to Balur, imploring, “he’s just an old drunk, who the goblins found and tied up. Who knows how long he’s been captive? He needs some kindness, not death threats.” That, at least, seemed obvious to him. A little piece of the world he could have make sense.
“Was all part of my plan,” said Firkin, tapping the side of his nose. “Right where I wanted them.”
“You’re not being where I want you,” Balur groused, but he finally put down the hammer. The head rung as it struck the stone ground, a sonorous bass note. Will had no idea how he’d been able to hold the weight of it for so long.
“Let Firkin just stay for the night,” Will said, turning to Lette, now that yet another threat had been averted. “He’ll catch his death out in the rain, and you only just saved his life from the goblins.”
Lette nodded. “Be a shame to put good work to waste. He sleeps downwind of me and there’ll be no complaints.”
Balur grunted. Possibly in agreement.
“Hey,” Lette said as if struck by a sudden thought, putting a hand on Firkin’s shoulder. “Don’t happen to have seen a purse, have you?”
“I seen the world,” said Firkin, eyes fixing on some far-off point. “I seen the plans. I seen the writing on a turtle’s back. I seen the insides of a cow.” He nodded, self-satisfied. “It was warm in there,” he added.
“Right,” said Lette. “I’ll just look over here then.”
As the search continued, Firkin drifted away toward the cave entrance. Will was worried he might wander into the rain, but he stayed standing there, half-sketched in moonlight, staring out into the night, muttering obscenities to himself.
Behind him, Lette and Balur seemed to be losing what little good temper they’d had.
“Where in the name of Cois’s cursed cock is it?” Lette spat. “Where did that little fucker put it?”
“Maybe you were tracking him wrong. Maybe this is being the wrong cave.”
“Oh, it’s insulting my professional skill set is it now? That’s how you’re going to fix this situation? By pissing me off so much that I gut and skin you and sell your hide. Except, oh wait.” She struck the side of her head with the heel of her palm. “It’s fucking worthless. If I just hung a ball sack from a stick and carried it about with me it would be very little different from having you around.”
Balur shrugged. “Be being a better conversation starter too.”
Joining the conversation, Will realized, would be a little bit like holding his hand in a flame to see how it felt. Lette captivated him, but the piles of corpses around the room were a useful reminder that she could back up her threats if she wanted to. And then, despite all this sensible thinking, he found his jaw starting to move
“Could he be right?” he said, pointing to Balur. “Could there be another cave?”
Lette rolled her eyes and set her jaw. “Look around you,” she said. “There are sixty-four corpses here. We left eighteen others back up at the mountain pass. That means they need to scavenge enough wildlife to support eighty-two souls. That means a range of twenty or more miles in any direction from here. That means that if any other tribe came within that distance they’d fight until the others were dead and their eyes boiled down to surprisingly tasty after-dinner snacks. Which means that unless I’m a complete fucking idiot who couldn’t track her own grandmother from the bedroom to the privy, then this is the only fucking place the goblin that stole my purse could have gone. And yet that fucking purse is not fucking here.”
Another dagger appeared as if by magic in her hand, and she flung it at one of the piles of corpses. It buried itself up to the hilt in a dead goblin’s back. She spat after it.
There was, Will thought, something very sexy about Lette’s competence. The area of expertise was utterly terrifying, but, on the other hand, it was significantly more exciting than butter churning, or animal husbandry, or any of the other interests the Village girls usually pursued.
“Could the thief have dropped it?” he said somewhat against his better judgment. He was trying to keep in mind that the moth tended to come out of confrontations with the flame rather the worse for wear, but it wasn’t helping much.
Lette closed her eyes.
Balur grunted again. “Running pretty hard, it was,” he said. “And it was being focused on not dying more than it was on being rich.”
Lette groaned.
“It was being easy enough for us to miss,” Balur continued. “We were being focused on the beast instead.”
Lette clawed her hands down her face.
“Might be a drop even,” Balur went on. “Someplace special hidden like. Be dumping the stuff there and be returning for it later when the coast has been cleared. Be throwing it up in a tree even. Makeshift drop.”
“Shut up,” said Lette. “Just shut up.” She sank to her knees. “Gods’ hex on it all.”
Will almost reached out to her, to put a hand on her shoulder, but he saw Balur shaking his head.
“I had
a coin once,” Firkin commented from the front of the room. “But she left me. Cantankerous bitch.”
It happened so fast, Will almost missed it. A roar of rage from Lette. The blur of her limbs. And then she was across the room, knife in hand, holding Firkin’s collar by the other, pressing him up against the wall.
“You fucking—” she started to snarl.
“Excuse me?”
A new voice—the tone deep but feminine—brought Lette to an abrupt halt.
They all stared at the newcomer standing in the entrance of the cave. She wore a gray traveling robe, hood pulled up to obscure her features. Dark-skinned, long-fingered hands were clasped in front of her. Looking at them, Will found himself thinking of small blackbirds.
For a moment everything was very still.
“By Barph’s ball sack,” Lette said, not letting go of the squirming Firkin. “How many people are going to wander into this cursed cave tonight? Is there some gods-hexed sign I missed?”
“Like you were missing a goblin tossing all our gold,” Balur murmured.
Lette whirled, pointed the dagger. “Don’t you even fucking start.”
“You know,” said the figure, “I think this is the wrong cave after all.” There was a tone of refinement to her voice that made Will straighten up a little, and run his hands down his shirt to smooth it. The action mostly served to spread the bloodstains out.
“I’ll j-just be going,” said the robed woman, and stepped away, back toward the sheets of rain that blanketed the night.
The tremor in her voice caught Will’s attention, though. He saw water dripping from the front of her hood in an almost steady stream. Her robe swung heavily. She was soaked to the bone.
“Wait,” he said. “You can’t go out.”
The others looked at him. Even Firkin, still pressed up against the wall.
“She’s soaked to the bone.” He pointed out to the room at large. “She’ll catch her death.”
“You be saying that a lot, I think,” Balur said. “Unhealthy obsession.”
