“Your prattle will impress not the agents of the Almighty, creature of the deeps.”
I sat up. “Actually, Barry’s the one who’s apparently got the backing of the Gods. And he’s a lot more passionate about things than we are. Maybe he’s the real hero.”
Meryl blinked a few times. “Are you serious?”
“Of course not. You started an absolutely retarded conversation and I’m making fun of you. Do try to keep up.”
The debate ended when someone ran down the street outside, loudly ringing a handbell, and every adventurer in the room immediately bolted for the door. Within seconds the three of us and the innkeeper were the only people left in the inn. All was silent but for the sound of abandoned chairs and barstools gently rocking on their back legs for a moment before falling over with a clatter.
“What was that all about?” wondered Meryl aloud.
“Gnolls are attacking,” said the innkeeper, as nonchalantly as one would announce that the buns were being delivered.
It was my chair’s turn to fall as I leapt to my feet in alarm. “Gnolls?”
“Mm, yes,” the innkeeper nodded. “Whole tribe of the things live just outside town. This happens every few nights. Good thing all these stalwart adventurers are around, hmm?” He winked. The eyepatch spoiled the effect somewhat.
“Let’s get out of here,” I suggested.
“Scared of gnolls, are we, champ?”
“They’re gnolls!” was the best argument I could come up with. This was the second time I’d been asked to justify being afraid of gnolls, and I still couldn’t fathom why. It was like being asked to explain why old people should wear clothing.
“Maybe you should watch tonight’s battle,” suggested the innkeeper. “You can get a good view from the window.”
I crossed over and peered around the shutter, preparing to slam it closed at the first sign of tusks. A crowd of around forty adventurers were gathered around the tasteless fountain, near a couple of opportunistic refreshment stands and some spectators with less sense of self-preservation than I.
An overweight man with a preposterously huge mustache and a massive, jewel-encrusted mayor’s medallion strode confidently into the center of the plaza. He stepped onto a wooden platform and addressed the crowd. “O noble warriors of fortune,” he boomed, his grand country accent clearly audible even from this distance. “The vile Hairybum tribe are on their way to do all manner o’ indescribably awful things to our village. We beseech you . . .”
“Skip the intro.” A dwarf pushed his way to the front of the crowd. It was the blonde fellow who had accosted me earlier. “We’ve all heard it a million times. What’s the reward?”
The mustache wobbled back and forth in irritation for a moment. “Twenty points for every dead gnoll. The usual arrangement. Hang onto yer receipts and hand ‘em in at the town hall to get your logs signed . . . what’s the matter? Why all the consternation, sirs?”
“There was this beggar earlier on,” continued the dwarf over the displeased muttering of his fellows. “Handing out hundred-point rewards for lowest-level quests. There hasn’t been some kind of boost in the town budget, has there?”
“Of course not! That individual was most certainly not sanctioned by the town Quest Committee! We cannot afford to hand points out like that!”
“Come off it, Dubbly,” said the dwarf. He gestured suggestively at the mayor’s glittering accoutrements, then the fountain, then the gaudy shop fronts that were lit up with multicolored glowing signs and advertising boards now that night had fallen. “You’ve been raking it in with both hands since the Trail started. Now I’m thinking our patronage has got to be worth a bit more to you than twenty points a gnoll.” This provoked a chorus of “yeah”s and “preach on”s from the assembly.
At that point a chorus of roars like the angry moos of a herd of demon cows echoed through the town. From the other end of the Street of Inns I saw a stormcloud of activity rise up, moonlight reflecting off many crudely-fashioned axes and hand blades.
The gnolls were charging towards the village square, an army of snarling monsters in unmatching piecemeal armor. Like the one we’d encountered earlier, these were a formidable bunch: hardened desert scavengers, black of fur and a good foot taller than Garethy’s forest gnolls. The leader of this pack could probably have crushed a Garethy gnoll to death between his pectoral muscles.
“Now wait one minute!” bellowed the mayor. “We ain’t quite ready yet!”
The gnoll charge slowed and stopped, lowering their weapons and scaling back their war cries into mildly perturbed grumbling.
“You’ve got to understand,” said the mayor, turning back to the adventurers. “Guild tax is climbin’ up again. We’ve already moseyed our way through most of the town plannin’ budget for the year.”
“So how do you explain that beggar?”
“I ain’t got no explanation for that, sirs, I told you, that fella musta been some kinda independent operator. Now, are all these gnolls gonna have to kill themselves or are you gonna be adventurers tonight?”
His passionate appeal utterly failed to do the trick. Many of the adventurers were already drifting away, along with most of the bored spectators.
“Now hold on!” yelled Mayor Dubbly as more and more of his audience deserted him. “I could be persuaded to go up to twenty-three points a head?”
“It’s too late for that now,” said the dwarf spokesman, following his colleagues. “You waste our time, we lose the spark.”
All Dubbly and the gnoll horde could do was stand, open-mouthed and crestfallen, impotently watching the stars of the evening’s entertainment wander off into the night.
“Gruffug khakhaf gafflekaff?” rumbled the head gnoll, having difficulty pushing his words through the hideous forest of pointy teeth that filled his mouth.
“Yes, I suppose you can still have your free meal coupons,” sighed Dubbly. “Collect ’em from the town hall.”
“Groff.”
Excitement rejuvenated, the gnolls dispersed. I suddenly noticed that I’d unconsciously ducked when they’d arrived, and was now watching the street with my non-existent nose hooked over the windowsill. I stood, attempting to gather my dignity.
“What was that all about?” asked Meryl, as we rejoined the priest. Several adventurers had already returned to the bar to resume drinking.
“I dunno,” I said, “but I have a horrible feeling that it was my fault. We should probably get out of here and back on the road. We can meet Slippery John on his way back.”
“What, right now?” She clicked her tongue. “Look, I know a lot of people have been trying to destroy you lately but that’s no reason to be paranoid.”
As if to punctuate her sentence, the entrance door suddenly broke off its hinges and flew horizontally across the room, erupting into bits against the body of a poorly-placed rogue. Two of the invading gnolls entered, squeezing themselves uncomfortably through the human-sized doorway like hairy, murderous toothpaste.
“What the hell, guys?!” shouted the innkeeper, furious. “You know you’re not supposed to damage property! This was covered at the meeting!”
“Gruffuk,” went one of the gnolls apologetically. He was the slimmer of the two, which meant he could probably only bench-press two or three horses at once. “Groffty grukkuffug,” he added, pointing a filthy black claw directly at me.
“Oh, balls,” I retorted, not the slightest bit surprised.
The only way out was through the advancing wall of fur and muscle that was now dividing the bar and reception area. Choices and consequences raced through my head. Every single one of them ended with at least one part of me getting chewed on. A particularly large dollop of foamy spittle landed next to my foot and my brain desperately accelerated.
“New quest!” I heard myself yell. “Save me from gnolls! Big rewards!”
“Ugh,” muttered Thaddeus, still calmly sitting. “At least accept fate with a little dignity, child of damnation.�
�
It had done the trick, though. The monsters froze. At some point between my utterance of the words “big” and “rewards,” every adventurer in the bar had finished their drinks, stood up and begun fondling their weapon hilts.
There passed a significant moment of stillness. Nobody in the room wanted to be the first to make a rash movement that could snowball into large amounts of property damage.
“Gruk,” went the slimmer gnoll, no doubt also the more erudite of the pair. “Graffogok koggogok roffgroff.”
“What was that?” I hissed.
Meryl’s mouth materialized next to my ear. “I think he said, ‘new quest, help us capture undead, even bigger rewards.’”
“You speak gnoll?”
“No, but the gist was pretty obvious.” She gestured to the adventurers, who had all turned from the gnolls to us like heavily-armed weathervanes. “What now? Offer even more rewards than that?”
I sighed. “We’ll be back and forth all bloody night. No, I think I’m just going to go with the flow.” I folded my arms and bowed my head as a shiny new elven mace slammed across the back of my skull.
—
It was the first time I’d been killed since my dalliance with the Deleter realm, and as my spirit was pushed out into the dead world I realized that I hadn’t escaped from that bizarre place unscathed. Something had changed.
I could still see the washed-out physical world around me. I saw my body, along with Meryl’s and Thaddeus’s, being slung over a gnoll’s bulging shoulder. I could see my companions’ souls being cast out to join me in the dead world.
But everything else was different. My mind felt sluggish and dull. My astral form was slanted at a strange angle, and one of my arms was hanging uselessly.
“J-m?” said Meryl’s ghost, concerned. “W-a-’s –h- m-t-e-? Y-u-e f-i-k-r-n- i- a-d –u- . . .”
The dead world was flickering in and out like a broken light. It was like two worlds were trying to occupy the same space. One was the standard ghostly dead realm, and the other . . .
Physically it was the exact same place, but everything was formed from glowing lines against a black void, like thin brushstrokes on black velvet. The terrain beneath my feet was a network of green triangles, as were the walls and fittings of the Cronenburg buildings. My corpse was a body-shaped yellow cage, while the gnolls and adventurers tormenting it were a vibrant red.
The souls of Meryl and the priest were white. No, I realized —they were gray. They only looked white because of the millions of tiny Deleters that swarmed over their astral forms like ants.
I looked down at my hands. They were all over me, too, scurrying all over my ghostly flesh with skinny white arms and legs. Like the other Deleters, they were white humanoids with blank white heads, wings and robes, but these were the size of cockroaches, and scrabbled insanely about with none of the emotionless deliberation of their larger fellows. They were all over my limbs, my torso, even my face, teasing my eyelids and climbing down my nose hole. I opened my mouth to scream, and felt hundreds more of them pouring out of my throat . . .
XxSuperSimonxX signed in at 9:44AM
XxSuperSimonxX: whats cooking cool cats
XxSuperSimonxX: its cool that im working from home 2day right
sunderwonder: yes
sunderwonder: please work from home as often as you like
XxSuperSimonxX: sweet
XxSuperSimonxX: what are we on top of today
doublebill: populatoin numbers thing again
XxSuperSimonxX: I took care of that already
XxSuperSimonxX: do keep up son
sunderwonder: yes I remember you saying
sunderwonder: but there are still three resurrected npcs unaccounted for
XxSuperSimonxX: pff
XxSuperSimonxX: just three wont matter
doublebill: they kind of will actually
sunderwonder: anything that doesn’t belong in the world can corrupt the build
XxSuperSimonxX: okay fine
XxSuperSimonxX: ill get barry onto it
sunderwonder: barry who
XxSuperSimonxX: hes the npc I put on top of the yawnbore job
XxSuperSimonxX: ive been talking to him a bit
XxSuperSimonxX: its amazzing how intelligent the npcs are. I think we should all be very proud of what weve done on this project
doublebill: you only just joined
XxSuperSimonxX: anyway gotta run
XxSuperSimonxX: got important work to get on top of, cant sit around chatting like you two slackers
XxSuperSimonxX signed out at 9:58AM
doublebill: do you think hes actually going to do any work
sunderwonder: god I hope not
sunderwonder: that’s the only reason I suggested it
sunderwonder: with any luck hes wanking himself raw as we speak
THREE
I woke to find myself back inside the body for which I was developing a deep antipathy. Particularly for my eyes, because a heavily laden gnoll loincloth was bouncing and swaying directly in front of my face.
Blood was beginning to ooze into my head so I had probably been upside-down for some time. My wrists and ankles were lashed to a gnoll spear, carried between the well-endowed gentleman behind me and presumably another gnoll outside my field of vision.
The air had the hot and stifling quality of midday. Looking up, or down, I saw a sandy desert trail rolling along. A few old stories I had heard regarding desert gnolls and their customs chose that moment to start haunting me.
“I feel I should mention I taste absolutely bloody awful.” I croaked. It was almost certainly true, but my captor’s thundering thighs weren’t convinced. “Seriously. If you’ve ever poured really old milk on your breakfast cereal by mistake, multiply that by a few million.”
“Jim? Is that you?”
I tried to look around, but only succeeded in rocking myself back and forth sickeningly. “Meryl? Where are you?”
“I . . . don’t know.” The voice was coming from my right. “I’m looking at a gnoll’s bottom.”
“You got lucky.”
“Take your suffering in silence,” came a voice from my left. “For it is the meek who will inherit the LORD’s bounty.”
“Grokkuf,” snapped a gnoll. I assumed the word meant “Silence!” because there are certain traditions between captors and captives. I complied; talking wasn’t easy from this angle anyway.
As the gnolls carried us God-knows-where I tried to digest what I’d seen in the dead world, but those thoughts were all being supplanted by thoughts on what it would be like to be stuck inside an undying body as it was split into mouthfuls and frogmarched single file through a monster’s digestive tract. Spending eternity as a dollop by the side of the road was not an appealing prospect.
Eventually whichever gnoll was taking the leadership role went “Grok!” The procession halted, and I was treated to the hypnotic sight of a gnoll’s posing pouch quivering to a halt.
“Are these the ones we discussed?” said a new voice. It didn’t belong to a gnoll, but I took very little comfort in that. There was a strict headmaster-y tone to the voice that only gets used when someone is about to get in serious trouble.
“Gruff.”
“Cut them free but leave their wrists bound.”
“Kaffagraff?”
“No, reimbursement of combat materials will not be authorized until total completion of this assignment.”
The gnolls did as they were bid. The nearest one to me swung its massive makeshift blade at my bonds, freeing me from the spear and very nearly some of my fingers. I collapsed into the dust.
I took the opportunity to sit up and determine where we were. A vast desert continued endlessly and unhelpfully in every direction. We were on a wide stone road that I guessed was part of the Adventure Trail, but there wasn’t a single sign of civilization on the horizon. I realized with some distress that this was the kind of place you’d go to dispose of a corpse.<
br />
Our rescuers, for want of a better word, were an elf and a dwarf. Their neatly-pressed black suits and ties really didn’t seem like practical desert wear, but if they were in any way uncomfortable they were hiding it incredibly well.
The elf was painfully skinny—not unusual for elves—and seemed incapable of standing still for even a second. He was constantly pacing, flicking his head around, and twirling a large butterfly knife between his bony fingers. His perpetual grin was wider than any I’d ever seen, and that included several guys I’d known at Dreadgrave’s with no skin on their faces.
The dwarf could be called stout, but not the same way you’d call an innkeeper “stout” because you’re too polite to call him “fat”; he was like a broad barrel full of pure, rigid muscle. He stood, meaty little arms folded, copious black mustache creased into a businesslike frown with the merest sneer of contempt. He was wearing a battered iron helmet that didn’t go very well with his suit, but then neither did the rest of him.
Meryl, Thaddeus, and I were arranged in a row before the black-suited couple, then forced to kneel by way of deft kicks to the backs of our knees. The elf sauntered over to me, nearly hypnotizing me with the endless circling of his knife. His eyes were two harsh white marbles in dark, sunken sockets. “So, my little pickled eggs,” he said in a wheedling voice, lifting my chin with a finger like an ice pick. “Expect you’re wondering why URGH HURRAAARRGLAB.”
I winced. “Yeah, I get this a lot.”
Somehow, vomiting only served to heighten his maniacal glee. With an excited giggle, he slowly stood back upright, gangly limbs audibly cracking, then re-acquired his grin, now a little stained with bile and bits of food. The dwarf hadn’t moved. “Expect you’re wondering why you’re here, aren’t you, my three little pigs?”
“It matters not,” exclaimed Thaddeus suddenly. “I answer not to your crude pagan threats, only to the perfect enlightenment of—”
“Grokkuf!” snapped the lead gnoll, shoving the back of Thaddeus’s head with the shaft of an axe. Something snapped audibly and the priest fell face-down into the sand, limp.
Mogworld Page 17
