Critical Failures VI (Caverns and Creatures Book 6)

by Robert Bevan

  This was going to be an even longer journey if Chaz allowed Cooper to keep talking down to him the whole time. He was determined to prove his value somehow, to put them more on even footing with regard to mutual respect. But first, he really had to pee.

  Figuring there wasn't much chance of losing a half-orc in a meadow in the time it took to take a leak, Chaz sheathed his rapier, started to unlace his pants, and turned around.

  A massive bird monster, as tall as he was, stood in front of him, staring at him with the cold don't-fuck-with-me expression of an eagle. In fact, all of it looked like an eagle, except for its legs. Though covered with feathers and ending with giant face-shredding talons, they didn't look like bird legs. Proportion-wise to the rest of the creature, they looked more human than birdlike. And something was off about its wings as well. Chaz had never stood face-to-face with an eagle before, but he was pretty sure something was off about its wings.

  Leaning slightly sideways, Chaz saw the answer to his confusion. This was no bird. At least, not the back half of it. Golden feathers gave way to golden fur about halfway down its great catlike rear, including the you're-so-fucked hind legs of a lion.

  The beast screeched, and Chaz's morning pee issue resolved itself down both pant legs.

  Keep it together, Chaz. If it wanted to kill you, it would have attacked already. It's just stupid and curious. Just a big fucking bird with a tiny bird brain. One surprise slice across the throat, and breakfast would be on ol' Chaz this morning.

  He grabbed the hilt of his rapier, but the beast grabbed his upper arm. It felt like a bear trap that was on fire.

  “Yeaaaaoooooowww!” cried Chaz.

  Instead of killing him outright, which Chaz now appreciated that this thing could probably do with very little effort, it began flapping its wings.

  “No!” squealed Chaz, not relishing the idea of being suspended a mile in the air by one arm that felt likely on the verge of breaking. “Just kill me. Please!” His arm rose as the beast began to lift off the ground. “No! I don't want to –”

  The eagle head jerked sideways as the flat of Cooper's axe smacked into it. Chaz fell to the ground, relieved to still have two arms, even if the top of his right one was a shredded bleeding mess.

  “Back off!” said Cooper, turning the axe in his hands. “Don't make me use the blade.”

  The creature screeched at him, but flapped up out of his reach.

  “Go on. Find something else to eat.” Cooper closed his eyes in concentration, then let out a long, slow-burning fart, filling the air around him like an aura of ass.

  The lion-eagle creature gave one last screech as it flew higher, convinced that better food would likely be found elsewhere.

  Chaz sat up, unable to bring himself to look at Cooper. He sighed. “Thank you for saving my –”

  A deluge of white, bitter-tasting goop landed on Chaz's head.

  Cooper laughed harder than Chaz had heard anyone laugh in quite a while.

  Chaz spat and wiped shit out of his eyes with his good hand. When he could see, he looked up at the creature as it flew away. “Fuck you! You stupid... whatever the fuck you are!”

  “It's a griffon,” said Cooper. “And what the fuck did you expect it to do after you tried to attack it?”

  “What was I supposed to do?”

  Cooper shrugged. “I don't know. Maybe not attack it?”

  “I was supposed to just wait around for it to tear me apart?”

  “It would have left you alone if you'd taken the time to talk to it.”

  “Excuse me,” said Chaz, standing up. “I didn't think it could speak English.”

  “It can't speak the common tongue, but it can understand it.”

  “How the hell do you know so much about griffons?”

  “I don't know shit about griffons,” said Cooper. “Nabi told me.”

  “Your axe?”

  “She said it's a gentle creature until it's provoked, but it has a nest full of chicks that need to be fed. They're not too smart, so when it comes to people they sometimes get confused. You made the decision easy when you tried to attack it.” Cooper paused a moment, nodding to himself as he received further telepathic communication from his axe. “She says you've probably doomed all future humans who wander into this territory as well.” He paused again, then grinned. “Yeah, I think he knows that.”

  “Knows what?” said Chaz.

  “She says you pissed yourself.”

  Chaz stomped past Cooper and his axe, rapier drawn, shirt soaked with blood and pants soaked with piss, ready to stab something.

  Hearing a sudden avian screech behind him, he dropped his sword, fell to the ground, and curled up in a ball of bard.

  “I beg your pardon, sir,” said Ravenus. “I didn't mean to frighten you.”

  Chaz uncovered his eyes and found Ravenus sitting on a branch of the tree he'd walked past. “Where the hell have you been? We were just attacked by a griffon, you know.”

  “Oh dear. That sounds dreadful. Did you try talking to it? I hear they're very reasonable creatures.”

  “Oh, shut up,” said Chaz. “How much further is it to Glittersprinkles Grove?”

  “You've still got quite a walk ahead of you. I expect you'll arrive there before nightfall though.”

  Chaz got to his feet and started walking again. “Why don't you make yourself useful and keep an eye out for dangerous monsters?”

  “I can do that.”

  Ravenus flew off and began flying in a wide perimeter around Chaz and Cooper as they continued southwestward on foot. Every so often, he spotted some prey in the tall grass and swooped down like a dive bomber. He killed rats, rabbits, and the occasional squirrel or chipmunk.

  Since Ravenus was only interested in eating the eyes, Chaz started going after his kills and picking up the rabbit carcasses.

  As morning turned to afternoon, Chaz's arm stopped bleeding, and he was actually feeling pretty good, gripping five dead rabbits by the ears. He felt like a frontiersman, living off the fat of the land. This is how his ancestors had lived, except without a talking bird doing most of the work. All this walking built up quite an appetite, and he couldn't wait to see what roasted wild rabbit tasted like.

  It was only when lunchtime came around that it occurred to Chaz that there was nothing around here even remotely flammable. As he grew hungrier, and the rabbit corpses grew heavier in his hand, he thought more and more about tossing them away. The gaping bloody eye sockets were beginning to attract flies. Also, he considered that at some point he might get hungry enough to try to eat one of them raw, and he didn't want to have them around if it came to that. Who knew what kind of worms or E. coli or whatever they might be infested with.

  “I'm hungry,” he moaned, not caring what kind of grief Cooper would give him for whining.

  “There'll be wood in the forest. We'll roast those rabbits.”

  By the time they finally spotted a significant density of trees on the horizon, there was barely enough light to see them. He was so hungry that he was more excited about finding firewood than he was apprehensive about running into ghosts.

  As they neared the trees, Chaz thought he could already smell smoke in the evening air, but there was no sign of a fire. Probably just the hunger fucking with his brain. Walking between the sparser, outermost trees, nothing struck him as being especially spooky about these woods.

  “I wouldn't go much further in there, if I were you,” said a high-pitched man's voice behind them.

  Chaz and Cooper turned around. Some kind of man goat hybrid was standing on its hooved and furry hind legs, sizing them up. He was mostly man from the waist up, except for the curved horns on his head. His beard struck Chaz as goatlike as well, but that might have just been a personal style choice. Chaz had never seen a goat dick, but he now assumed they must be huge. This guy's dick hung down nearly to his fucked up backward goat knees.

  “What the fuck are you?” said Cooper. “Satan?”

  �
�I am a satyr. Do my legs not give it away?”

  “I'm not interested in what your legs are giving away.”

  “What brings you two fine gentlemen to this stretch of wilderness? Are you lost? Might I be of –”

  Cooper pulled off his axe and brandished it at the massive-dicked goat man, or satyr as he preferred to be called, who froze like a statue of a confused Satan.

  “Whoa!” said Chaz. “What the fuck, man? Put the axe down!”

  “Touch those pipes,” said Cooper, his eyes locked on the satyr's, “and you'll be playing them with your asshole.”

  “What pipes?” asked Chaz.

  “I don't know. It's just what Nabi told me to say.”

  “She told you to tell him he'd be playing them with his asshole?”

  Cooper shook his head. “I improvised that part. She told me not to let him play his pipes.”

  “I beg your pardon,” said the satyr. “Did you say Nabi?”

  “Yes.”

  “The Fae Queen of Glittersprinkles Grove?”

  Cooper pursed his lips. “Maybe.” After a brief pause, he nodded. “I mean, yes.”

  “But she has been missing since the Dark Ones invaded our land.”

  “Blame it on the Dark Ones. The perfect scapegoat.”

  The satyr drew a dagger. “What did you call me, half-breed?”

  “What the fuck?”

  “I am not a goat.”

  “I didn't... That was... Hang on, you're going to get all racially offended right after you blame all your neighborhood's problems on the darkies moving in?”

  “The Dark Ones.”

  “Whatever. And now you're going to lecture me on nomenclature when you –” Cooper stopped talking and squinted at his axe for a moment, then looked at the satyr. “Lower your dagger, Zanzi, for I have returned.”

  The satyr's eyes widened. “Nabi?”

  Cooper nodded.

  After resheathing his dagger, the satyr knelt before Cooper and took his left hand in both of his. “What have they done to you?” He kissed Cooper's hand.

  Cooper jerked his hand free and wiped it on his loincloth. “Dude, what the fuck? It's not me. It's the axe.”

  The satyr took the axe and kissed the shaft between the blades. It was more than a polite token of reverence. It was all slobbery, with a lot of lips and tongue.

  “Um,” said Chaz. “Would she be comfortable with you doing that if she wasn't an axe?”

  “Of course she would,” said the satyr, and resumed molesting the axe with his face.

  Cooper yanked his axe away. “She says otherwise, and it's uncomfortable to watch. Now who the fuck are you?”

  The satyr got to his hooves. “My name is Zanzifurl Worblestomper.”

  “Fuck all that,” said Cooper. “Can we just call you Satan for short?”

  Chapter 17

  Rather than struggle to break free from Julian's magical webbing, Stacy suggested they let it deteriorate on its own, lowering them to the ground slowly, and use that time to catch their breath and gather their thoughts.

  “We've got one die and no Mordreds,” said Stacy, turning her head toward Julian as much as the web would allow. He was upside down relative to her, and his serape's broad surface area had caught a lot more web than she had. “Where do we go from here?”

  “Some place where I can wash my hands,” said Julian. “I can still feel dwarf dick in my right palm.”

  Stacy laughed, but she'd asked the question for more than something to pass the time with. “And after that?”

  “I don't know. Should we bring it back to the Whore's Head?”

  “That's the obvious answer. But if Mordred's out there gathering power and armies or whatever he's doing, maybe this little hiccup was a blessing in disguise. Maybe everyone is safer the fewer people there are who know the location of the dice.”

  “Is that really our decision to make?” asked Julian.

  “Who else's would it be?”

  “Shouldn't it be the collective decision of everyone who could potentially be effected by it?”

  “You mean like a democracy?”

  Julian shrugged. “Sure.”

  “That's fine under most circumstances,” said Stacy. “But when the decision is about whether or not to withhold information from a group of people, inviting those people to be part of the decision making process kind of undermines the whole point of making the decision in the first place, doesn't it?”

  Julian took a few moments to run that through his mind. “Not necessarily,” he finally said.

  “Oh?”

  “Let's say we take the die back to the Whore's Head and give them a full report on what happened here. We tell them we have a die, but we propose just what you said, that it might be safer for everyone if the dice were hidden somewhere and only one or two people knew the location.”

  Stacy laughed.

  “What?” said Julian.

  “You've seen that group try to make a decision before, haven't you? They're a mess. And what's more, they don't trust each other. Do you honestly think they'd be able to come to any kind of agreement on who gets to know where the dice are hidden? There will be a bunch of noisy arguing and bickering, and it will only lead to them deciding that, since they can't decide who to trust with the dice, that the dice should stay there at the Whore's Head, which I think you can understand is an extremely unwise decision.”

  “It just seems... I don't know... unethical?”

  “It's practical. You get a bunch of scared, not-terribly-bright people together, and they'll make decisions undermining their own best interests, knowing that they're doing so, if it means making sure that no individual or faction among them appears to benefit disproportionately. Look at the American south.”

  Julian frowned. “You make a good point there.”

  “Sometimes people need to be protected from themselves.”

  “I just don't know if I'm ready to take on that kind of responsibility.”

  The last few tendrils of web holding Stacy up stretched to the point of snapping and released her safely on the ground. She looked up at Julian who, being lighter than her, was still about fifteen feet up.

  “I don't know if we're going to have much choice. Do you have any idea how to get off this island?”

  Julian shook his head.

  Stacy tried to tuck the pendant between her boobs, but the silver dragon claw gripping the die was clunky and uncomfortable. Instead, she took off the whole chain and tucked it into one of her rogue outfit's many hidden interior pockets.

  From her bag, she pulled out the rope she'd used on her cage before they were rescued by that random gnome guy.

  “Catch!” she said, tossing up the coil of rope to Julian. When he caught it, she gave it a good yank, snapping the web strings still holding him up.

  “Shit!” cried Julian.

  Stacy dropped the rope and braced herself. The impact was less than she was prepared for. He really was a waif of a man.

  “It's been a long day,” said Stacy, putting a still-startled Julian down on his feet. “We should get some sleep.”

  Julian looked around at the small grove of trees they were standing in. “Here?”

  “Where else? I'm tired.”

  “Do you think it's safe?”

  “This island is pretty small. The uninhabited part of it is tiny. I don't think it can support a population of bears or lions or dinosaurs or whatever.”

  Julian found a cranny of tree roots to sit comfortably in. “Get some sleep, then. We'll figure out tomorrow when it comes.”

  Stacy lay down with her head in Julian's lap. “You mind?”

  Julian shook his head.

  Stacy took his hand and closed her eyes. “Are you thinking about Ravenus?”

  “Yeah.”

  Of course he was. She could tell he'd been making an effort not to bring up his familiar, but he was never far from his mind.

  “Don't worry. I'm sure he's okay. We'll find him.”<
br />
  Julian gave her hand a squeeze. “Thanks.”

  “In the meantime, think about what I said before. All I ask is that you don't tell anyone about the dice until we've made a decision between the two of us.”

  “But if I agree to that, and we never make a decision between us, doesn't that amount to the same as if we agree not to tell anyone?”

  Stacy smiled to herself. She'd been hoping Julian would be too tired to catch that. “Good night, Julian.” She let herself fall asleep.

  Chapter 18

  “This must be the storm drain Captain Longfellow was talking about,” said Katherine. She, Butterbean, Randy, and Basil stood before a barred gate at the base of the southern city wall, not far from where it met the sea. The iron bars were coated with rust, and the stone holding them in place was worn smooth from centuries of water running over them, but it still didn't look like an accessible point of entry for anyone who hadn't thought to bring a bulldozer with them. Even if they were able to remove a couple of loose bars, it would be difficult to squeeze Basil through. Fortunately, Katherine had anticipated that the captain, having never seen a basilisk in person before, might have underestimated its size, and had prepared a spell for just such a contingency.

  Having a limited number of spells per day, it seemed foolish to waste one to accommodate Randy's pet. The big lizard was also responsible for them having to waste all this time sneaking around storm drains in the middle of the night when they could have much more easily booked passage on a ship without it. But Katherine needed all the help she could get, and she didn't want to force Randy to choose between her and the lizard.

  “I've been giving it some thought,” said Denise from up on Basil's back.

  Katherine was ahead of her, holding the basilisk's right guide rope. With its head between her and Randy, she was pretty confident that nobody could see her rolling her eyes.

  “Maybe I shouldn't go on this quest with you, on account of I'm pregnant 'n all. I gotta do what's right by my unborn children, right?”

  “The ones you want to abort?”

  “I am still undecided on that particular issue. It's a very personal decision which will take much time, introspection, and alcohol to resolve.”