“Still your tongue!” he shouted, voice booming such that all the orcs flinched. My threat-meter started to climb. “I am no mere hedge wizard!” Dracon roared. “I know a wristwatch from an enchanted treasure, and I know a boy from a man.” He tilted forward. “You will be put to use, Isaac—restoring that which you put wrong with your meddling. And if you cooperate, there may not have to be much torture.”
I remembered to breathe.
“Meanwhile,” Dracon told the captain, “ensure he arrives whole. It is not acceptable to snack on his arms or legs. The last prisoner you brought me had hardly enough flesh to whip. Now journey quickly! I want him in Sky Keep by dawn on Fifth Day.”
The fire winked out.
“You hear master,” growled the captain. “We go by boat tonight, meet dragons halfway. Is Second Day now, only two days till Fifth Day!”
I noted the orcish proficiency for math.
The orcs emptied my backpack and pockets, confiscating my meager belongings—my father’s watch, some pencils and a pen, and my wallet. One of the orcs stole money from my wallet and I wondered if it was worth something, until he later wiped himself with it after a short squat. Figured—an orc wiping its hindquarters with my last five dollars. What was that, a metaphor for my whole life?
***
I had anticipated a huge, three-mast sailing ship since there lay a hundred miles between Ipsus and Korvia. Instead, I sat in something rating slightly above a canoe. Eight orcs stabbed paddles into the water, attacking the ocean in time with barks from the captain, who sat in back just behind me and kept one fist on the boat’s rudder. Each wave heaved us into the air, then dropped us into its trough. Sometimes the prow chopped hard into a crest and the ocean soaked me through.
The wind stole my body heat and set my teeth to chattering while the boat rocked like a kiddy rollercoaster ride that never ended; I got to experience the unique sensation of being starved and nauseated at once. Throughout it, I tried to puzzle through what was happening.
The orcs rowed hard and I examined them. The boat lurched, the sea spray stung me, the sun burned my skin pink. This was no delusion, no dream. It was real. Rune was so real I could taste the air.
I’d fallen into my fantasy world.
But not entirely mine. These orcs were squat, bowlegged, and feral. Their ugly pig snouts and tusks reminded me of Gamorreans from Star Wars. The hideous little sparkplugs of war wielded axes and machete-type swords, wore cobbled metal armor, and smelled like wet dogs with open sores. I recognized them from the first artist’s work.
I’d painted orcs, inspired by Dak’s setting notes—in the process of painting Rune, I was also transforming it into a setting for both role-playing games and my ambitions as an amateur novelist and fan-fiction author. Dak’s orcs lived in the Mountains of Karok and the Northern Spine. They were big as bears, muscular, but with more humanity in their grim faces. Their skin tones ranged from nearly black to olive and hunter green. They were well bathed, and wore pristine furs and fine armor. Some of these details came out in my piece, The Wedding Ceremony, in which two orcs married in full warrior dress, but the rest was in Dak’s setting notes, which I’d compiled with my own.
Anyway, Dak’s orcs were cold-weather barbarians. Low-tech but civilized in their way. These orcs? I was half tempted to ask them how many hit points they had.
No matter who’d made this world, I needed out. I wasn’t cut out for an era before supermarkets, and Dracon had promised torture. I had a good imagination and was trying not to let it loose.
Maybe I could outsmart the orcs and flee. But the more I grinded my brain on that, the less it seemed likely. I figured those pig noses could track me, and I knew from the march they never ran out of breath. I’d run cross country in high school, but they’d chase me down like wolves. If their sense of smell was so good, I wondered why they didn’t bathe once in a while. Hm. Filthy. That was it. The idea came to me as most ideas do—fully formed, hitting me square in the face. I smiled.
“Hey, Captain. I’m about to pass out. How about lunch?”
The captain snarled. “No rowing, no food.”
I hacked and made my best show of weakness. “Wizards have to eat. If not, I’ll die. We pathetic human creatures can’t go more than a day without food, or our pitiful hearts just stop beating.”
The captain gnashed his teeth and regarded me with a combination of disdain and suspicion. “That true. Human heart is pitiful. And taste stringy.”
I filed that one in the same place I put horrifying images encountered on the Internet—in a special brain space labeled “Nightmare Fuel.” Then, licking my dry lips, I lifted my shirt and showed him my skinny chest. “You can almost see my ribs. Yesterday, I was fat.”
The orc was horrified at my chest, and they all gawped. One gasped, “How it still alive?”
The captain glared, but he dragged a sack from the boat and threw it into my stomach. I opened it and uncovered moldy bread and, thank God, no raw orc flesh. I choked down fistfuls of bread in spite of its dorm-room quality, until the captain jerked the bag away from me. “That enough! You eat like pregnant female!”
I briefly considered convincing them male humans could get pregnant, but decided against. I could feel my hunger receding from alarm-bell territory.
It took effort to hold the moldy bread down through choppy waves, but my strength returned. I assessed the boat: wide enough for orcs to sit two abreast. It rocked heavy when the waves plowed into it, so the captain endeavored to steer us prow-first into each wave.
I just waited.
By early evening, almost a day and a half since I’d arrived in Rune, an orc bellowed, “La-and!” I could see the relief in their beady eyes.
Relieved, because orcs obviously despised the water. I felt a cruel smile on my lips—the one I always get before slaying orcs. Except this time there were no respawn points.
Or are there?
“Land,” I said. “That’s great. But I’m hungry again, and I ate most of your food. Seeing as how I have to live to be tortured… who do we eat next?”
The captain growled. This was not a subject he wanted to discuss at sea, but the question perked up the head of every orc like a cat on hearing the vacuum cleaner. Their attention shifted to the captain in unison. “We… find food on land,” the captain muttered, unconvincingly.
“That’s not what you told me before. You promised sweet, tender orc fillets. C’mon, who are we eating next? The small one again?”
The smallest orc at front growled and I could tell I’d picked a mean one. He drew a stout axe and the captain snarled, “Put that away! He lies.” The captain grabbed my arm, trying to hold the boat steady with his free hand. But now his hands were full and he could do little more than shake me.
The shaking whipped me around, but I kept at it: “You promised! You said we’d roast it first, to a nice pink medium rare. You promised I could cook him using an elven recipe!”
Among the few things lurking in the dim vaults of my memory in relation to orcs was their hatred of all things elven.
“What!” hollered the small orc. He started to push past his compatriots toward the captain and two others also stood, iron hissing from their scabbards. “You not cook me with good orc recipe? This abomin—abomina-ration—abomination!”
“I know, I know,” I said. “It doesn’t seem like orc would be good with an au jus, but it was that or the truffle sauce, and I just think that would be too mellow.” At last, my home economics class paid dividends.
“Au jus!” the small orc wailed. “That final straw! You eat me with real gravy or not at all!”
Since the captain now faced an armed adversary, he let go of my shirt and drew his sharpened cleaver.
Waves lifted us into the air and the boat skewed somewhat without its captain. I let the scene unfold, every orc drawing, tensed, ready to kill. I tried not to think about how I had only one shot at this. We rode another wave up, then down. Just then I saw it—as th
e captain bellowed an order to stand down and every orc pondered whether to skewer or not to skewer, a wave—my wave, tall as a house—rose until we were in its shadow.
I seized the rudder and jammed it hard to one side. My muscles tensed, it nearly wrenched from my grip, but it worked. The boat swung to the side. The great black wave, full of spit and spray, rammed our side rather than back or prow. Our narrow vessel surged up the watery cliff, turning, turning, every orc hunkered to clutch the boat’s bottom—but “bottom” was no longer our boat, it was the foaming sea.
The swell tossed us into the trough and I smacked the water with a vague sense of green monsters plopping into the sea all around me.
Submerged, I kicked hard, surging to the surface and riding another tall wave. The sea had done its job—our boat capsized. True to stinking form, the orcs sputtered in the water, their armored bodies flailing. None was a proficient swimmer. Four, including the captain, fought to tread water but the remainder never surfaced.
“Right the boat!” ordered the captain. He lunged, arms flapping in the water as if he were trying to fly after being dropped from a cliff. I imagined his legs pumping twice as fast beneath. He and another orc slapped paws to the capsized vessel, struggling to climb atop it.
I dove under, opening my eyes in the salt water, and aimed for the boat. I rose beneath the vessel and grabbed hold of the rails. I noticed the captain’s stowed bag—not the one with rancid food, but the one they’d stuffed my backpack and art supplies into after searching me on the docks. The sack was beaten but looked watertight, so I snatched it.
Bag in hand, I heard shouts from the orcs on the capsized boat, hollering a “heave ho!” type of thing, trying to right it. If they did, I was screwed. When one side of the boat lurched upward, I snagged a railing by instinct and threw my weight onto the side flipping into the air.
The result couldn’t have been more perfect. The boat hoisted halfway out of the water, rather than all the way over—and the ocean surged into its half-tipped interior. Flooding, the boat sank into the murk of the sea, lost forever. Another wave seized me and tossed me up, then hurled me back down.
I surfaced to the sight of two orcs who had been trying to regain their boat, flailing about in shock as their last hope for survival disappeared beneath the waves. They set their furious stares on me and lunged with murderous howls, all of Dracon’s orders likely forgotten.
In all my life, no one had ever looked at me and then given chase with the full intention of ending me. It was a thousand degrees beyond what I had experienced with Murph. Some small part of me up to that point had probably wondered what I would do in that kind of situation, but my reaction was immediate and hardwired. Evolution had me covered. I even thought partway through my mad swimming frenzy to dive underwater and change directions. When I next broke the surface, the orcs were going the wrong way. Neither could do more than thrash around in the ocean. Perfect.
I left the orcs to drown. The equipment bag bobbed hard to the surface, buoyed by the air still inside what looked like stiff animal gut with fine stitching to seal it against the water. Importantly, it kept my sketchpad dry. Also, I was able to hug it to my chest and that helped in not drowning, which was pretty cool, too.
I started for the distant shoreline the orcs had spotted. I remembered how people sometimes drowned in placid lakes trying to swim out to islands, because they were unaware how distances across water could fool you, or how quickly the water drained one’s strength. But I pushed the thought aside. I can make it, I told myself. I can make it.
I repeated the mantra when my limbs grew leaden. I repeated it when I inflated my lungs and rode the waves on the animal-gut bag. In time, too, the waves grew shallow, the ocean less aggressive. The shore swelled in size, albeit slowly. The sky darkened and what strokes I could manage became sporadic, halfhearted. I willed my stiff legs to propel me a bit farther.
In time, despite the shore in sight and individual trees large enough to make out, I could swim no more. My limbs failed me. Even if I’d had more gas in the tank, I feared it would take until dawn to finish the final stretch at the pace I’d been going. Desperate, tired, and with a ragged thirst from having sucked in too many mouthfuls of seawater, I sank.
My feet touched sand. I stood, and the water lapped at my shoulders.
Never before had I felt such a strong combination of elation and stupidity. It gave my body the boost it needed to wade to shore and, once there, I collapsed onto soft sand, panting, my spent limbs immobile as boulders. I couldn’t stand, though if I could, I’d have used it to drag myself up the beach in search of drinkable water, my tongue parched dry even with my body sopping wet.
I flopped onto my back and stared into the brilliance of Runic stars. I had taken time to invent its constellations and named them in my head. Big Red shone foremost among the celestial bodies, so near to this planet I could appreciate its marble-smooth, orange and red surface. “Seven orcs soloed, plus a swimming skill challenge,” I croaked skyward. “Do I get a level yet?”
I laughed at my stupid joke and passed out.
Chapter Three: Call Me Grawflefox
“Dad! Look what I found!”
I winced at the voice, which woke me from a dream about orcs and the ocean that made no sense anymore. Who’d let the little kid into my dorm room? And who’d opened the curtains? I shielded my face from the sun and realized I could hear the ocean, smell the salt, and that someone was poking my ribs with a stick.
Not a dream.
A skinny brown-haired boy of late grade-school age stood barefoot in the sand, dressed in plain trousers and a tunic. He swished the stick he’d poked me with in the air, like he was cutting down foes. “Oh hey, you’re alive.”
“More or less,” I croaked from my spitless mouth. When I swallowed, it felt like there were fissures in my throat. Sitting up made me aware of sore muscles in my chest and stomach I normally ignored. Every motion in my legs was red-hot agony.
“In that case,” the boy announced, flicking the stick around so that the tip rested on my nose, “you are my prisoner.”
“Oh no,” I said, raising my hands. “I’m at your mercy.”
The boy tilted his jaw up. “Say I am the queen of the realm and you may live. I will keep you to groom horses and name you Grawflefox.”
“Queen?”
Her eyes narrowed and I realized my error. “I’m beginning to think you aren’t horse-grooming material, sirrah.”
“Oh no, queen, of course,” I said quickly. “I just thought ‘empress’ would be more appropriate.”
The stick swished down and the girl put both fists on her hips and examined me. “I like you, Grawflefox.”
“You got any water?” I asked, the words like needles against my arid vocal cords.
The girl flicked the stick under her armpit with drill-instructor precision and marched off. When she returned, she was dragging an enormous, definitely-male-this-time version of herself by the pinky finger. They had the same hair and eyes, though the girl was a twig and her father more of a redwood. He quickly produced a waterskin, though, and rushed it to my grateful hands.
The first crisp pull of water seared down my esophagus, and though it hurt, it felt like my whole body was singing, my flesh revivified as every cell drank its fill. I tried to stop, but couldn’t, until the big man’s hand closed around mine. “Easy, lad. Little at a time.”
“Right,” I said, focusing on the two of them now that my eyeballs had lubrication again. “Who are you?”
“Brettin,” said the man. “This is me child, Bretta. What are you doing all washed up on the shore?”
I clutched my skull. Now that my whole body wasn’t begging for water, smaller pains came to the fore, including a dull throb in the back of my head. “Sank my boat.”
Big Bret chuckled. “They don’t work so good when they’re underwater.”
“In my defense, it was full of orcs when I sank it.”
“Orcs!” Little Br
et growled. “My mortal enemies.” She leveled her stick. “Tell me you aren’t mixed up with orcs, else I’ll split you from face to fork.”
“Bretta!” her dad barked. “What’d I tell you?”
She sighed and rolled her eyes. “No splitting face to fork until I’m older.”
“No splitting face to fork at all! No more beating on boys, either. And I told you no cursing, not until you’re moved out.”
“ ‘Fork’ isn’t a curse!”
“It is.”
“We eat with them!”
“We best not eat with ’em when they’re the ones you’re talkin’ about! No curses, not until you’re thirteen and gone to take trials; then you see what those instructors have to say about your language.”
“That’s only 838 days off! I checked.” She glanced my way. “Queens are good at sums.” Her eyes slatted. “It’s from counting our enemies.”
I liked the Brets, but they aired their disagreements at full volume and it was awkward. When they seemed satisfied, their attention swiveled back to me while I was mid-sip on the water.
“How many orcs?” Big Bret asked.
“Nine got in the boat, I think.”
“Seven came ashore,” he said. “Their corpses at least. We’ve scavenged iron off the ones the sea saw fit to deposit. We got their gear in a cart over the dune. Seeing as we have you to thank for the scrap, how about we hitch you a ride and split some of the coin?”
I politely refused the money on Protestant instinct and immediately regretted it since I was penniless in the kind of world where no one was likely to take plastic. Worse still, Big Bret didn’t offer twice—he took my “no” as a “no,” and helped me over the hill to their cart. Every step was a labor because my body moved like a puppet manipulated by a drunkard.
On the way, Little Bret stabbed my sack with her stick. “I’ll need to inspect that for weapons. You might be an assassin.”
“It’s just a rucksack from the boat,” I said. “They put a bunch of my stuff in it.”
The Accidental God (A Pygmalion Fail Book 1) Page 3
