“Elementals have birthdays?” asked Troy.
“No, but I’m trying to put it in terms you understand. I’ve got better things to do than a twelve-hour commute across the cosmic void just so you can see if your magic sword works.”
“Aren’t elementals timeless?”
The elemental shut its glowing eyes and rubbed its face. “Human terms. Again.”
Pollux stepped between Troy and the creature. “You can yell at the kid later. We’re in the middle of something.”
The elemental stalked away, grumbling to itself.
“What’s the wand do?” asked Helen.
“Nothing right now,” replied Pollux. “It’s an unharnessed battery of magic. Technically it can do almost anything, with one caveat. It can’t harm or heal any living thing. Not even indirectly. So don’t think you can beat the system by opening a pit beneath someone or conjuring a safe to drop on their head because that won’t work.”
“How do you turn it on?” She shook it. “I tried using it earlier, and it didn’t do anything.”
“Did you have anything in mind? You can’t just point it at something, shout some magic words, and expect it to know what you want. You don’t pick up a phone and just expect it to dial the number for you, do you?”
When he put it like that, it made her feel silly.
“You have to program it,” he said. “Teach it to do things. However, and here’s the other caveat, you have to be absolutely focused when you do. If you aren’t, it’s just as likely to screw up as get it right. Like if you wanted to conjure some ketchup for those fries. You have to have the amount of ketchup in your head when you do the conjuring. And if you want a bottle, you should probably decide if you want an old-fashioned glass one or squeeze. It wouldn’t hurt to know the brand. When you’ve got all that figured out and clear in your mind’s eye, only then would it be safe to try and summon your ketchup. Even then, you’d probably screw something up, end up with ketchup that’s expired or making a giant ketchup monster that would only slither around and growl at people.
“If I were you, I’d put the wand back in the box and just forget about it.”
Helen dropped the wand in its box. “Want to trade?”
Troy said, “No thanks. Think I’ll stick with the magic sword of invincibility.”
Pollux bent down and petted the dog. “You’re going to want to head east down the interstate and drive until you reach the land of the setting sun. That’ll be your first stop. Hopefully not your last. After that…” He pulled a paper placemat from his back pocket. He put it on the hood, smoothed it with his thick fingers. The wrinkled mat had a simple child’s maze on it with a grinning knight at the entrance and a princess at the exit. The maze was already solved. “It’ll just be easier if I draw you a map.”
He scribbled some crude doodles on the maze, then handed it to Helen.
“What kind of map is this?” She pointed to a stick figure of a monster. “And is that supposed to be a giant?”
“Cyclops.”
“That’s its eye?” she asked. “I thought that was its mouth.”
“I flunked out of art school. What do you want from me? And it’s the best map you’re going to get on this journey. You don’t quest by following conventional landmarks. Your road is shown by a different method.”
He paused, chewed on his pen.
“And don’t think just because I’m drawing this that I’m guaranteeing anything. There are no guarantees. This is only the path you’ll take if things go smoothly. And even then, there will be bumps. Lots of them. But keep moving, and you might just make it to the end in one piece.”
“And what’s this?” asked Helen. “Like a swamp or something?”
“Just a grease stain. Hazard of my secondary profession.”
He wiped his hands on his dirty apron, shook their hands. Helen hated getting grease in her fur, but she didn’t want to risk offending the oracle.
“Good luck.” He waddled his way back to his truck.
“Hey, so do you know what’s going to happen to us?” called Helen.
“Kid, there are things I know and things I don’t know. Things I think I don’t know that I do. Things I think I know that I don’t. And then there are things that nobody knows. Not me. Not nobody.”
“Which thing are we?” she asked.
“Doesn’t really matter, does it?” he replied. “Because even if I know, or even if I think I know, I’m not allowed to tell you. That’s the rules. Anyway, you don’t really want to know. Nobody does. Trust me on that. It’s one of the things I know. I think.”
“Mr. Castor,” said Troy.
“Yeah?”
“You do know that meat wagon is slang for a vehicle that carries away dead bodies, right?”
“I’m not an idiot,” said Pollux. “It’s supposed to be kitschy.”
“I’m not sure associating your food with corpses is good marketing.”
Pollux nodded to himself. “Think so, eh? Truth be told, I’ve been thinking about changing it. Thanks, kid. For that, I’ll throw in a little extra advice. Take the dog with you. Might come in handy. All I’m saying.”
The mutt’s ears perked up, and it barked once.
Troy looked into the dog’s big brown eyes. The canine wagged its tail.
“Absolutely not,” he said.
The dog’s tail fell flat.
Troy jumped into the Chimera. The lumbering earth elemental stepped in front of the car. “Aren’t you forgetting something? I don’t go home until I complete my command.”
“Sorry. Can I just give you one order? Go home.”
The elemental shrugged. “It’s your dime.” It fell apart into a mound of stone.
“You ready, Hel?”
She narrowed her eyes. Her ears pushed forward. “We have to take the dog.”
“It’ll shed all over the car,” said Troy.
“So will I.”
“C’mon. That’s different.” He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. “It’s dangerous for animals to ride in an open convertible.”
“We’ll put the roof up then.”
He drew in a long breath.
“Don’t you like dogs?” asked Helen.
Troy neither nodded nor shook his head, but instead kind of waggled it loosely. “I like dogs fine. I mean, I’ve got nothing against them.”
“What’s that mean?”
“It means that I respect dogs as living creatures, but I don’t see the appeal.”
Helen scooped up the mutt in her arms. “Our spirit guide told us to take the dog, so we should probably take it. And if you get the super invincible sword, I get this.”
“Might come in handy,” shouted Pollux from the Meat Wagon.
Helen dropped the dog in the backseat. It promptly curled up in a ball and yipped.
Troy glared at their new passenger.
“Whatever.”
9
The Wild Hunt motorcycle club met at Dan’s Donut Delights, a small store set in a failing strip mall. The doughnuts weren’t as delightful as advertised, but the coffee wasn’t bad and there was plenty of room in the parking lot for all the club’s cycles.
The Wild Hunt motorcycle club wasn’t an orcs-only organization. It just had worked out that way. Originally there had been an elf and several humans. But they’d gradually stopped coming to weekend gatherings, and eventually the orcs were the mainstay. They still had one human among their membership, and while Franklin was tall and skinny and stood out among the orange-, green-, and blue-skinned club members, most everyone had to give him points for enthusiasm.
A thousand years of civilization hadn’t knocked out the orcish tendency to be thick-limbed and hardy. Even though none of the members held jobs more dangerous than sous-chef, they tended to intimidate decked out in their leathers.
Franklin, though, even wearing his leather jacket and with his pierced ears and traditional orc haircut (which orcs didn’t even wear anymore), still looked a
s if he belonged behind a desk, sniffling and being vaguely passive-aggressive to his coworkers.
Nigel assumed that while his own orc ancestors were sacking and pillaging, Franklin’s forerunners had been sitting behind civil servant counters, directing farmers to Line B because that was where the licenses to grow carrots were issued while Line A was for paying wagon parking tickets and while Franklin’s great-great-great-grandfather could empathize with the inconvenience, he couldn’t really do anything about it even though the farmer had just wasted three hours standing in the wrong line because he’d missed a small sign under a larger sign where the line began. And even if Franklin’s nameless ancestor wanted to help, his hands were tied, so there was no use in complaining to him.
Perhaps it was those countless generations of middle management encoded in Franklin’s DNA that finally pushed him over the edge, because Franklin might not have been an orc, but he really, really, really wanted to be one. Apparently he’d succeeded too, because he’d gotten the call from Grog like the rest of them.
The only difference was that he was excited about it.
“Hey, Nigel!” said Franklin in his faux-gruff voice. “Check this out!”
He pulled a flail from his bike’s saddlebag. The weapon was old-school, complete with a heavy iron ball at the chain’s end.
“Sweet, right?”
He fixed Nigel with an eager puppy stare. For some reason Franklin thought of Nigel as the orc to look up to. Perhaps because Nigel was tall and stout. Or perhaps because Nigel had been a touch rude to Franklin when the human first joined the club, and Franklin had mistaken this gruff dismissal as a challenge to win Nigel over.
“What the hell are you going to do with that?” asked Nigel.
Franklin appeared perplexed by the question. “I thought I’d smash in some heads with it.”
“You do know that murder is illegal, right?”
“But we’ve got divine orders. That means it’s not murder.”
“You try telling that to the judge when the time comes,” said Nigel.
Franklin whirled the flail around lightly, though he was obviously afraid of the weapon. For good reason. He didn’t appear to have any idea how to use it.
“You really think we’ll go to prison for this?” asked Franklin.
Nigel nodded.
“Cool.” The flail smacked him in the thigh, and he yelped. “Do you think I can join an orc gang in jail?”
Nigel took a bite of his jelly-filled powdered doughnut and shrugged. “If you kill someone for our gods, you’re a lock.”
Franklin grinned, envisioning prowling the halls of a penitentiary like a warrior chieftain. Nigel grinned, envisioning Franklin getting shanked before even getting off the prison bus.
“Where did you get that anyway?” asked Nigel.
“Oh this?” Franklin rattled the flail. “I bought it. The guy said it has stopping power.”
“Nobody ever used those things in real life,” said Nigel. “Too unpredictable. Too clumsy. You’re more likely to take your own head off than your opponent’s.”
“I’ve been practicing.”
Franklin whipped the weapon forward. The iron ball at the end of the chain rushed at Nigel’s skull, but he caught it in one hand.
“Cute.” Nigel frowned. “Now put it away before you hurt yourself.”
Grumbling, Franklin did so. Nigel walked away and checked on Peggy Truthstalker, the seer appointed by Grog. She stood hunched over a pool of spilled motor oil.
Peggy was a tough old orc. Orc skin tightened with age rather than wrinkling, and either darkened to a deep black or paled to a ghostly white. Peggy’s had gone pale and in the right light she could’ve been mistaken for a ghostly revenant risen from her grave. Her eyes were two yellow slits, and her face was stretched in a permanent grimace.
“Surprised you didn’t hurt your hand,” she said.
“I think I broke a bone or two,” he replied. “But they’re little ones, so I choose to ignore them.” He bent down and looked into the black pool. “See anything yet?”
Peggy shook her head.
“Are you sure you’re doing it right?” he asked.
“I didn’t become the most feared trader on Wall Street by not knowing how to read omens,” she replied.
“Can I get you anything to speed this up? If this takes longer than the weekend, my wife is going to kill me.”
Peggy said, “In the old days, a little blood could help.”
They glanced to Franklin.
“We should probably save him for an emergency,” said Peggy.
Nigel grunted. He ran his knife across his hand and let the blood drip into the oil. She mixed it with her fingers and leaned down to give the puddle a deep sniff. Her eyes rolled back in her head, and she spit out a string of unintelligible syllables.
He sipped his coffee and waited for her to finish. The rest of the club milled about paying her little mind as she swayed and chanted to herself.
A crash drew Nigel’s attention. Franklin stood over his bike, having knocked it over with one of his careless flail practice swings.
Peggy snapped out of her trance. “Grog damn it, Franklin. Now I have to start over.”
Nigel snatched away the weapon.
“Hey, that’s mine!” Franklin protested.
“You can have it back when you’re ready for it.”
“But I’m going to need a weapon, aren’t I?”
“Someone arm him with something he can make less noise with,” said Nigel.
Franklin accepted a short sword offered him, but he wasn’t happy about it. “It’s kind of small, isn’t it?”
“I’m sure you can still manage to find a way to poke your eye out with it,” replied Nigel.
Peggy started the ritual again. She was nearly ready to say something useful when another crash broke her trance.
“Sorry.” Franklin struggled to right his motorcycle, having knocked it over with his new sword. The blade had drawn a long scratch across its paint job. “Ah, man.”
Nigel nodded to Harold Marrowmaw, fattest orc in the club. “Sit on him until we’re done with this.”
Harold smiled. He was a dentist in Pasadena, so his teeth were perfectly aligned, his tusks sharpened in a way normally only seen in movies.
“That really isn’t necessary,” said Franklin.
Harold pointed to the ground, and Franklin reluctantly lay down. Then Harold plopped down on top of him. Franklin’s expression of discomfort was mixed with a half-smile. He liked being mistreated, usually mistaking it for orcish camaraderie. It made him difficult to discourage.
Peggy started her third attempt. This time no clatter disturbed her, and she completed her ritual. The motor oil and blood exploded in a small ball of fire, engulfing her face. Fortunately she didn’t have any eyebrows to burn, having lost them to years of soothsaying. She tried to wipe the smudge from her pale face, though she succeeded only in smearing it around.
“South,” she said.
“That’s it?” asked Nigel.
“What do you want from me? I go where the spirits tell me. And the spirits say south.”
“Can I get up now?” wheezed Franklin.
Harold stood, though it took several rocking attempts and some help from others.
The club climbed onto their motorcycles, and their engines rumbled and roared. The Wild Hunt left behind only the smell of burning grease and exhaust at Dan’s Donut Delights.
10
The electric-blue Chimera skimmed across the highway with the relentless pace of a beast on a mission. The ride was smooth, but Helen still felt as if she held a wild animal by the steering wheel. She didn’t fear losing control of the Chimera. She didn’t have much control to begin with. The car had a will of her own, a desire to prowl imbued in her four tons of classic Detroit steel.
It was surely the car’s own will that caused Helen to push a few miles above the speed limit when she normally abhorred speeding. She might have
been envisioning the Chimera as a hungry monster, eager to devour as many miles as she could before sunset. The thrill that surged through Helen when she passed a slower vehicle surely came from her own primitive impulses, not some overpowering alluring spirit originating within the engine.
Try as she might, she couldn’t shake the feeling that the Chimera was driving her.
She hadn’t wanted to get behind the wheel at first, but Troy had convinced her to give it a try. If they were going to be on the road for a while, she might as well get used to the idea. Troy was bound to need a break every now and then.
“Maybe fifteen minutes,” she’d said.
That had been five hours ago.
They’d left the urban sprawl behind a while before, and now drove through an endless desert. Civilization was ever present in the form of billboards, rest stops, truck stops, and a string of small towns that came with the miles. The Chimera barely noticed, and she was mostly annoyed whenever her passengers had to stop for a bathroom break or to grab a snack.
The dog in the backseat put his head on the seat and whined.
“I think he needs to relieve himself,” said Helen.
“Again?” Troy groaned. “You didn’t even eat or drink anything since the last time.”
The dog whimpered.
Helen forced her hoof off the accelerator, though she couldn’t make herself hit the brakes. The Chimera rolled to a slow stop, and she was honestly surprised by that.
The dog jumped out of the car and sniffed the dirt.
“I told you he’d slow us down.” Troy frowned. “Just do it already, dog. It’s all the same. Not like you’re going to run into anyone you know here.”
The dog raised his head and yawned.
“By all means, take your time,” said Troy.
The dog returned to his search for the ideal spot.
“I still can’t believe you don’t like dogs,” said Helen.
“I’m allowed, aren’t I?”
“No,” she said. “Actually, you aren’t.”
The sun hung low in the red desert sky, only twenty or thirty minutes from dipping below the horizon.
Troy said, “Guess we’re almost there. Land of the setting sun, right?”
Helen and Troy's Epic Road Quest Page 7
