5d6 (Caverns and Creatures)

by Robert Bevan

  “I was only following his lead,” said the similarly equipped elf sitting next to him.

  Julian stumbled across the threshold and looked at Ravenus, who was perched on the headboard. “Who the hell are these people?”

  Ravenus squawked something. Tim shook his head.

  The elf on the bed glared at Ravenus. “He neglected to mention that it involved a group of men and a horse.”

  “Why would you tell them that?” asked Julian.

  Ravenus flapped his wings and squawked defensively.

  Tim harrumphed. “That figures. What a bunch of assholes. Tell them your friends are in danger and nobody gives a shit. But tell them there's a free sex show, and you might snag a couple of gullible fuckwits.”

  “Hey!” said the gnome.

  Cooper picked up one of the crossbow bolts, darkened and slick with horse blood. “If you were expecting a parade of hookers to walk out the door, why the fuck was your first instinct to shoot us?”

  “I did apologize for that,” said the elf. “We are not, after all,” He looked down at Tim. “How did you put it, a couple of gullible fuckwits? In this day and age, you can't go around trusting everything a talking bird in a tavern tells you. When we couldn't get the door open, we wondered if he might be luring us into some kind of trap.”

  “We did that poor creature a favor,” said the gnome. “Look at you! All sweaty and wobbly-kneed, covered in bites and scratches. It's disgusting!”

  Julian gasped. “We weren't –”

  “Save it, elf.” The gnome raised his hands, palms out to Julian. “Whatever you want to do with each other is your own business, but don't involve innocent animals in your twisted erotic rituals.”

  “Screw you, fuckface,” said Tim. “You followed a bird to a stranger's inn room to watch a free sex show, and you're going to judge us? I see what's happening here. It's called deflection. You're ashamed of yourselves for being creepy-ass perverts, and cheap ones at that. So you project your own insecurities onto us, making up stories about us fucking a horse, a horse that you murdered, without a scrap of evidence.”

  “Hold the door, guys!” called Dave from inside Kristanya's chamber. “I had to get my pants.” He waddled through the doorway with hoofprints on his breastplate and a drop of nut sauce still hanging from his limp dwarf schlong.

  The gnome smiled expectantly at Tim. “You were saying?”

  Julian started to say something, but Cooper put a hand on his shoulder. “Let them have this one. Let's go get a drink.”

  The End.

  Fistin’ the Furious

  (Original Publication Date: August 21, 2017)

  For Ula Wilmott.

  Thank you for your amazing generosity.

  “So why us?” asked Tim, still bitter over his swollen hand. He downed a shot of stonepiss, then set the empty shot glass upside down beside two others, forming the beginning of a pyramid. Other patrons, sipping fancier drinks from ornately decorated tankards, occasionally frowned disapprovingly at their table. The Golden Goblet wasn’t the sort of place Tim and his friends usually frequented, but they served a decent stonepiss. As long as someone else was paying, that’s all that really mattered.

  The young woman buying them drinks smiled sympathetically at him. She might be pretty if she didn’t insist on dressing like a Puritan and wearing her hair tied up in a grandma bun.

  “I have a task which requires your various talents, and which I will pay you handsomely for.”

  “Bullshit, lady. This isn't my first day in the game. We've been sent on enough quests from strangers in taverns to know that what you need is a group of expendable drunks to run off and do something that's too stupid or too dangerous for you to do yourself.”

  “Perhaps I should do the talking?” said Julian. The tips of his long elf ears were already pink from the half a glass of beer he'd drunk.

  Tim necked back another shot, then set the glass down atop the row of empties to start the next tier of his pyramid. “We don't need your Diplomacy skill right now. She came to us.” He turned back to the woman. “You've got until I pass out and piss my pants to make your pitch, so start pitching.”

  “You need not fear any risk that I would not be willing to face alongside you, halfling. For it is my intention to accompany you on this quest. And not one of you is expendable. Like I said, it is your individual talents which led me to request your assistance. I have been watching you from a distance since early in the evening when you tried to pick my pocket.”

  Tim held up his bandaged hand, unable to give her the finger because they were all too puffy and full of venom. “That's my unique talent you need? The one you personally witnessed me fucking up?”

  “That wasn't your fault.” She placed her hand on the table, and a small black snake slithered out of her sleeve. “How were you to know that little Simon here was in my pocket? I didn't feel your hand at all. Until you screamed, I hadn't the slightest idea you were there.”

  Tim grimaced at the snake. “Just keep Simon the fuck away from me.”

  Ula clicked her tongue, and Simon slithered back up her sleeve.

  “Are you a sorcerer?” asked Julian.

  “Sorceress,” the woman corrected him. “My name is Ula Wilmott. I am touched with the gift of sorcery, but I have yet to develop my powers as you have yours.”

  “Ha!” said Dave. “Julian, a powerful sorcerer? She really is blowing smoke up our asses.”

  “Let's cut to the chase,” said Tim. “You need Cooper's Strength, Julian's Charisma and sorcery, Dave's healing magic –”

  “And Wisdom,” said Dave.

  “Whatever. And my superior Intelligence and Dexterity.” Tim downed another shot. “This sounds like it has the potential to be a dangerous mission. What kind of crazy scheme do you need us to help you pull off?”

  “Crazy?” Ula's left eye twitched. Her teacup rattled as she placed it on the saucer. She rested her trembling hand on her fork. “Would a crazy person do this?” Quick as a viper, she grabbed the fork and pinned Tim's already wounded hand to the table.

  “YEOWWW!” cried Tim.

  Cooper and Julian gawked uselessly while Dave yanked the fork out, then touched Tim's bleeding hand. “I heal thee!”

  Tim shuddered with relief, cradling his re-abused hand and looking into Ula's calm eyes as she sipped her tea. “Yes, as a matter of fact. That's precisely the sort of thing a crazy person would do.” He was ready to jump out of the way of a second attack, but she quietly set her teacup down again, making no move for any cutlery.

  “Then if one suspects another of being crazy, it would make sense for one to not insult that person to their face.”

  Tim was still a little too freaked out to try and make sense of that logic without another shot of stonepiss to settle his nerves.

  “Back to the question,” said Julian. “What exactly do you need us to do?”

  Ula looked up from her tea and smiled sweetly at him. “I need you to take the lives of my brothers.”

  Dave choked on his beer.

  Tim spat out his stonepiss. “Are you fucking ins–” He stopped himself just short of getting stabbed again, but Ula was looking at him expectantly, daring him to finish his sentence. “–urance salesmen?”

  Ula raised her eyebrows. “I beg your pardon?”

  “Never mind. I was thinking of something else.”

  “I'm sorry, ma'am,” said Julian. “But I don't think we're the guys you're looking for.”

  “On the contrary. You're perfect.”

  “We're not murderers for hire.”

  “Oh, my.” Ula looked aghast at the suggestion. “I would never ask you to murder anyone.”

  “But you said –”

  “In fact, I'll be doing all of the work. I'm not asking you to do very much at all, apart from just being there.”

  “I don't get it,” said Dave. “If you're going to 'do all the work',” he accentuated the phrase with air quotes, “then what do you need us for? To
move the bodies or something?”

  Ula thought for a moment, then smiled at Dave. “In a manner of speaking.”

  Money. Not a lot of work. Watching this crazy bitch attack her brothers with a fork might even count for entertainment.

  “How much money are we talking about here?” asked Tim.

  Julian glared at Tim.

  “Two hundred gold pieces.”

  Dave let out a long low whistle.

  Julian glared at Dave.

  “Each.”

  Cooper let out a long low fart.

  Everyone glared at Cooper.

  “If you could excuse us for a moment,” Tim said to Ula. “My friends and I would like a moment to speak privately.”

  “Of course,” said Ula, quickly rising from the table. “Take all the time you need.” She walked briskly toward the exit like she'd just started the timer on a bomb inside the place.

  Under normal circumstances, it would have been more polite for the rest of them to leave her at the table, but Tim could tell that she was eager to get out of Cooper's fart cloud.

  “What's there to talk about?” Julian demanded as soon as Ula was out of sight. “We're not doing this.”

  “Let's not be hasty,” said Tim. “We should at least discuss it.”

  “This is accessory to murder!”

  “Save it for Law & Order, Dick Wolf. This is Caverns & Creatures. People murder each other all the time. They don't have CSI shit. The odds of us getting caught are infinitesimal.”

  “That's not the only reason to not assist murderers.”

  “We're not assisting shit. We're just moving bodies. If we don't do it, that money’s just going to go to the next lowlife pieces of shit she approaches.”

  “But our consciences, at least my conscience, will be clean.”

  That was just the in Tim needed. “Will it? Knowing that you let this woman get away with murder when you could have stopped it, or at least brought her to justice?”

  Julian frowned, clearly suspicious. “What are you getting at?”

  “We go with her and check out the situation. Maybe her brothers deserve to die. Maybe they beat her, or abuse her in some other way.”

  “It's not our place to –”

  “Hear me out. Maybe it's a money thing, and she's just a greedy bitch. We don't know, which is why we should go with her and see what's going on. She thinks we're a bunch of lowlifes.”

  “I can't fault her for that.”

  “Exactly. We don't come off as very heroic or virtuous, so she thinks we'll do anything for a buck. She won't be expecting us to interfere.”

  Julian narrowed his eyes at Tim. “So you're in this strictly as a matter of altruism.”

  “Not necessarily. There's also the possibility that we are either unwilling or unable to interfere, in which case we collect our money and do what we were hired to do.”

  “That's precisely what I don't –”

  Tim raised a finger. “But after that's done, we send an anonymous letter to the authorities with her address and the exact location of where the bodies are dumped. She goes to prison, or gets hanged, or burnt at the stake, or whatever the fuck they do here, her dead brothers are avenged, and we get paid. You think any of the other assholes in this tavern would go to that kind of trouble?”

  Julian was clearly trying to think of a counter-argument, but coming up short. He needed a little bit more of a nudge.

  “Think about us, and the rest of the folks at the Whore's Head Inn,” said Tim. “Eight hundred gold pieces could go a long way toward the kind of magical research that could get us out of this shitty world and back in our real bodies.”

  An hour later, they were in a hired carriage passing through North Gate. Ula paid the driver a gold piece in advance, which was likely well more than the standard fare. The purse she’d taken the coin from was weighty in her hand, like there was plenty more where that had come from.

  The ride was awkward and mostly silent. Ula tried to make light conversation a few times, but everyone answered her questions briefly and succinctly.

  Only Ravenus seemed to be enjoying the trip, flying in wide circles high above the carriage, occasionally diving down to murder a rabbit or field mouse, no doubt just gobbling up their eyes and leaving the rest of the body to rot.

  Finally, the carriage stopped. Once everyone had gotten out, the driver tipped his hat to Ula, turned his carriage around, and headed back for the city. Tim wondered if Ula had a cart handy for them to put the bodies in. Julian could summon some horses if they needed to, but did she know that?

  As was fashionable among these older houses on the bank of the Bluerun River on the northern side of Cardinia, the property the carriage stopped in front of was surrounded by a wrought-iron gate crawling with rose bushes. The bars of this fence, however, pointed in different directions and odd angles, as if the rose bushes were all that was holding them up, rather than vice-versa.

  Even the roses looked off somehow. Most of the houses they'd passed sported healthy and robust bushes, bursting with shiny green vines and flowers of vibrant reds, oranges, purples, and pinks, filling the air with their sweet perfume. The leaves here were a much darker shade of green, and the vines were studded with long sharp thorns. The flowers' sepals were disproportionately large compared to the petals, which were an ugly shade of nicotine yellow. They smelled faintly of spoiled milk.

  Ula stopped at the gate and turned to face them. A sagging rose touched her shoulder gently, and she swatted it away like it was an annoying horsefly.

  “I beg you'll pardon the state of the house. I'm not the tidiest of homemakers.”

  They were going to watch a multiple homicide. Tim didn't give a fuck about the state of her house, but he smiled politely. “I can assure you, we've all seen much worse.”

  As if to strengthen Tim's claim, Cooper chose that precise moment to fart out a blob of greenish-brown shit on the ground. “Excuse me.”

  “Are you ill, Mr. Cooper?” asked Ula. She swatted a little more violently at the rose which the breeze had caused to graze her shoulder again.

  Cooper shook his head and panted, holding his eyes shut until a healthier and drier fart escaped. “No, it's cool. Just my Charisma acting up.”

  Ula gave him a pleasant smile and a slight bow. “Very well. And thank you for being so under– FOR THE LOVE OF –” She grabbed the sagging vice supporting the rose which had dared touch her a third time, and pulled it with both hands, not even seeming to notice the thorns tearing into her skin. “WHAT'S WRONG WITH YOU? YOU MADE ME DO THIS!” She wrapped the vine around both hands, then pulled upward like she was trying to pull a loved one out of quicksand. “DIE! DIE! DIE!”

  The ground finally let go of a large clump of dirt and root, which Ula used as a flail to beat the ground with. When she was satisfied that the offending plant was dead enough, she let the vine drop to the ground. It was soaked in her blood, which was dripping profusely from her hands.

  Regaining her composure, she blew at a lock of hair that had fallen out of place and was touching her forehead. It fell back down on her forehead, and Tim feared she was going to start ripping her hair out.

  Instead, she brushed it back with her hand. The smear of blood kept it in place, which was at least as horrifying.

  Dave cleared his throat. “Would you like a healing spell?”

  Ula looked down at her hands. “I suppose the house is enough of a mess. That would be lovely, thank you.” She extended her hands toward him, and he touched the least bloody part of her wrist.

  “I heal thee.”

  Ula's chest heaved as she closed her eyes and inhaled ecstatically. When the blood stopped dripping from her hands, she opened her eyes and looked down at Dave. “You have quite the magical touch.” She ran a finger along the leopard fur on Dave's forearm. “I wonder what it would feel like... inside.”

  Tim couldn't think of a reason Dave's Cure Light Wounds spell might feel better indoors, but he hoped there was some ex
planation to what she said other than the only one he could come up with. What kind of person, on the day they've picked to murder their family in cold blood, gets distracted by fantasizing about getting fisted by a dwarf? Also, what kind of vag was she packing if it could accommodate Dave's whole forearm? Tim's little halfling dick wouldn't stand a chance of touching the sides, not that she'd shown any interest.

  “Shall we go inside now?” asked Ula.

  Everyone glanced at each other before giving reluctant nods, then followed her toward the front door.

  “Do you still feel like this was a good idea?” Julian whispered to Tim as they trailed behind Dave and Cooper.

  “Hang on.” Tim pulled out his flask and gulped back some stonepiss. “Yeah. Let's go.”

  The front lawn had a distinct redneck vibe to it, with its tall grass, overgrown hedges, and random junk strewn about. All it was missing was a rusty old pickup truck.

  Just before reaching the porch, Ula stopped to dip her blood-covered hands in a stone birdbath which looked like it might fall over any minute. The algae-green water turned brown as she rubbed the blood from her hands.

  “Please,” said Dave. “Allow me.” He dipped a finger in the water, touching her hand gently. “I purify thee.” The water instantly turned crystal clear, with not a trace of algae or blood.

  Tim couldn't believe what he was seeing. Dave had obviously picked up on the same fisting innuendo as he had and was actually trying to keep that door open. Was he hoping to squeeze that in before or after the murders? Was he hoping that it would lead to a long term relationship? Was he that starved for a woman's affection? Whatever his motivations, if there was anything more stomach-turning than that rose bush incident, it was watching Dave trying to act suave.

  Ula smiled at him. “Oh, my!”

  Again, Tim was bewildered. She was genuinely eating this shit up. What could she possibly see in Dave? Or maybe she was just into dwarves. Maybe they're known to give good fist. He'd have to ask some locals next time he was in a tavern.