Disenchanted

by Kroese, Robert

  Then suddenly the monster’s grip slackened. Boric filled his lungs with air and pushed the ogre’s arms away. He tumbled to the ground and skittered away from the unconscious creature. Brakslaagt, still clutched in his right hand, was at rest: the danger had passed. The Ogre of Chathain was dead.

  Getting shakily to his feet, covered with slimy, smelly ogre blood, Boric saw a blade protruding from the monster’s chest. Behind the prone creature stood Daman the blacksmith. He had skewered the ogre with Boric’s sword. Padmos stood next to him, smiling grimly.

  “Thanks,” said Boric.

  “Don’t mention it,” said the blacksmith. “Now, about the three gold coin you owe each of us…”

  “One gold,” said Boric.

  “Fairly certain it was three,” said Daman.

  “Two,” offered Boric.

  “Deal,” said the blacksmith.

  Exhausted, the three men made their way back to town.

  NINE

  It was a sign of how disconcerting his whole predicament was that it wasn’t until the dim gray light of predawn began to gather over the Kalvan Mountains that it occurred to Boric he had no idea who was now King of Ytrisk.

  Boric had no sons, and in any case his father had established that it was the king’s prerogative to select his own successor. Understandably paranoid, Boric had developed a habit of altering his selection every few weeks, entrusting various advisors with different versions of his last will and testament, each supplanting the previous version. This made it virtually impossible for anyone to guess who the rightful successor was and correspondingly reduced the incentive for anyone to assassinate Boric. The plan had been so successful — right up to his actual assassination — that Boric himself could not say with any certainty who he had picked to be his heir. One of his nephews, he thought. Or maybe that cousin with the clubfoot. He wracked his brain, but couldn’t remember whom he had settled on most recently.

  Had whoever it was somehow figured out that he was the heir and plotted to have Boric killed? (For there could hardly be any doubt that someone had bribed Captain Randor to stab him; the gold coins in his purse could only have come from someone who had wanted Boric dead.) It seemed unlikely that the heir could have found out about his selection, and even if he had, how could he be certain that Boric’s choice wouldn’t change between the hatching of the plot and its execution? No, whoever had bribed Randor had been waiting for that opportunity for some time. But who would want Boric dead regardless of his successor?

  Brand. Of course. Brand had given him the sword, knowing that Boric would become his slave upon death. Monarchs of the Six Kingdoms didn’t have much of a life expectancy; Brand probably never figured Boric would live another twenty years. He had grown impatient and had Boric killed. Boric swore once again to have his vengeance on Brand, whatever that required him to do.

  But that left the question: who reigned in Brobdingdon? There was no way of knowing for sure without returning to Ytrisk, a course of action that was out of the question. Dead kings were honored in the Six Kingdoms only insofar as they had the good sense to stop walking around above ground. By the same token, Boric realized, he should be beyond concerns about political intrigues. What was it to him who the new King of Ytrisk was? No matter who it was, he would be no ally of Boric’s at this point. All of the living were his enemies; his only allies were the dead. Perhaps he should have gone with the other wraiths when they had come for him at the witch’s house. What was he trying to accomplish by wandering through the hinterlands alone, a dead man disowning his own?

  Peering into the distance, Boric saw what looked like a small grove of trees. Shelter. And he might just be able to make it there before dawn.

  “Who are you?” asked a small voice, startling Boric. He looked around, but couldn’t find the source of it. Drawing his sword, he demanded, “Who speaks? Show yourself!”

  But there was no one to be seen. Boric peered into the gloom, his uncanny vision revealing a stark gray landscape of grasses and shrubs.

  “Where are you going?” asked the voice again, now behind him.

  Boric whirled to face the intruder, but still there was no one to be found. “I command you to show yourself!” Boric growled. “I am Boric, King — ” He broke off, remembering that he was no longer king of anything, and that it probably would not be in his interests to reveal that he once had been.

  “Where are you going, Boricking?” asked the voice, now on his left. Boric turned and charged, thrusting with Brakslaagt. But his sword pierced only air, and his right foot struck something, sending him sprawling into the shrubbery. He scrambled to his feet, taking a defensive crouch — not that it would help against an enemy who was apparently invisible and could move like lightning and in complete silence. He spun wildly in a vain hope to catch the interloper darting from one bush to another, but still he saw nothing. To his left, the streaks of pink began to dart across the horizon. The only visible shelter from the sun was the small grove of trees a few hundred yards down the path. Already the light was piercing Boric’s skull. As much as he hated running from a fight, he didn’t dare remain in the open any longer. He sheathed his sword and ran, reaching the grove just as the sun broke the horizon. Boric sat down with his back against the trunk of the tree, wrapping his cape around him to ward off the light filtering through the thick canopy of leaves.

  Boric found himself again wishing he were capable of sleep, but the corollary of being immune to exhaustion was the inability to escape his condition in the blessed embrace of sleep. For Boric, there was no longer any day and night, just an endless waking nightmare punctuated with periods of intolerable, burning glare. So he sat and waited in the little grove for nightfall.

  “What are you doing, Boricking?” asked the voice from behind him, causing Boric to quite literally jump nearly out of his skin.

  Helpless to do much of anything besides cower in shadow, Boric found his anger turning to resigned desperation. “It’s just Boric, not Boricking,” he said. “Please, who are you?”

  “Chad,” said the voice.

  Boric wasn’t sure he had heard correctly. “Did you say Chad? What kind of name is Chad?”

  “What kind of name is Boricking? What are you hiding from?”

  “Boric,” said Boric again. “I’m not hiding. I’m seeking shelter from the light. What are you hiding from?”

  A small person stepped out from behind a bush to Boric’s left. He wore brown trousers, a green cotton shirt, and a leather jerkin. His head and feet were bare. From his size, Boric would have thought him a child, but he had the face of a young adult and he was built like a middle-aged man. He stood roughly half the height of an average human male.

  Boric was stunned. He had of course heard stories about the diminutive people who lived to the east of Skaal, but he had never believed them. “Why,” he exclaimed, “you’re a halfling!”

  The little man snorted in disgust, standing as tall as he could. “I’m a threfeling!” he said.

  “A threfeling?”

  “Three-fifths the height of a man. Threfeling. Why are you afraid of the light?”

  “I’m not afraid of it,” said Boric. “I…have a condition.”

  “A condition?” asked Chad.

  “I have…” Boric stopped to think. The most obvious explanation for his behavior and the bandages covering his body was some sort of skin disease, but lepers were about half a notch above wraiths on the social acceptability scale. He doubted threfelings tolerated lepers any better than humans did. “…burns,” he said.

  “All over your body?” asked Chad. “How’d you do that?”

  “I, uh, fell,” said Boric. “Into a volcano. It’s complicated. How did you do that, moving without me seeing you?”

  Chad shrugged. “Threfelings can ought to move much more quietly than you lumbering onetutherlings.”

  “One…?” started Boric.

  “One and two-thirds the size of a threfeling. Onetutherling.”


  “That makes no sense,” said Boric. “You can’t give us a name using a measurement that’s relative to your size, when we’ve already named you with a measurement relative to our size. One of us has to be the standard.”

  “Well, then,” said Chad. “I can should nominate us. Henceforth and from now on, we will can be known as men, and you as onetutherlings. Unless you prefer ‘stomplers,’ ‘loudlings,’ or ‘thudscufflers.’”

  “Ha!” cried Boric. “You’re hardly in a position to make such pronouncements. You’re vastly outnumbered.”

  “Are we?” asked Chad. As he spoke, a score of small men stepped out from behind trees and bushes.

  “Well,” said Boric, peering through his fingers at the diminutive figures surrounding him, “I’ll be a thudscuffler.”

  Episode Three

  TEN

  The sun was just coming up when the three ogre-killers returned to town. The trio’s tale was at first met with skepticism, but the skepticism diminished somewhat when Daman produced a pancake-sized ear from his satchel, and evaporated completely when an expedition returned from the miller’s house confirming that it now contained a handless ogre corpse. News spread quickly throughout the town, and Boric was all but certain that news of the ogre’s death would reach Brobdingdon before he did. He worried that his brothers would hear the news and conspire to disqualify him from the throne on a technicality, claiming that he hadn’t been the one to deliver the fatal blow. If he could get back to Brobdingdon before the news reached them, he was confident he’d be able to prevail upon his father to make the just decision. Unfortunately he was in no shape to travel. Exhausted and covered in grime and crusty greenish-yellow ogre blood, he badly needed a bath and a good night’s sleep. The bath he managed, but there would be no chance of sleep while the town was abuzz with the news of the ogre’s death. Every resident of Plik seemed to be crammed into the Velvet Gosling, clamoring for details of the trio’s adventure. Fortunately, Daman and Padmos were happy to take center stage while Boric sneaked off to a relatively quiet corner of the tavern to rest his eyes and lubricate his throat. He planned to weather the storm in the tavern and then spend the night in Plik, leaving early in the morning to return to Brobdingdon.

  Boric had just nodded off in his chair when he realized someone was talking to him.

  “…brains behind the operation?” the voice was saying. He opened his mouth to see a young man — just a boy, really — sitting across from him. The lad was slightly built, with soft, boyish features and neatly trimmed beard. He wore a dark green cloak with a bronze pin depicting a pigeon in flight — the uniform of the Peraltian Messenger Corps.

  “I’m sorry?” asked Boric drowsily.

  “The reason I ask is that it seems strange for a messenger to get involved in such an adventure. Makes me think you are more than you appear to be.”

  “Hmm,” grunted Boric. He had sworn Padmos and Daman to secrecy; if one of them had spoken a word about who Boric really was, he’d take more than his gold back from them. But this visitor seemed to be doing no more than fishing for information. Sometimes messengers — whether of Ytriskian, Skaal, or some foreign stripe — sought out information that could be sold to kings or merchants, supplementing their meager crown wages. Each kingdom’s messenger corps was the local remnant of the old Imperial Messenger Corps, and although the messengers liked to claim lineage from that ancient order, the truth was that these days messengers were often little more than transients, subsisting on borrowed goodwill and stray morsels of information.

  “What can I do for you, brother?” asked Boric warily.

  “I thought we could travel together for safety,” said the boy. “My name is Milo, by the way. Which direction are you headed?”

  “Derek,” grunted Boric, giving the false name he had been traveling under. “Heading north. But I have no need for company.”

  “Companionship, then,” said the boy. “The road can be lonely.”

  Boric raised his eyebrow at the boy, uncertain of what he was proposing. Milo was a good-looking and delicately built lad, and Boric wondered how he managed to travel through dangerous territories such as this without being attacked by bandits — or worse. Probably by making friends with other travelers, such as Boric. “I have no need for that either,” said Boric.

  Milo held up his hands. “Please, don’t misunderstand me. I’m not suggesting anything untoward. Merely a traveling partnership on the way to Brobdingdon, assuming that’s where you’re headed.”

  Boric shrugged. “I can’t prevent you from traveling to Brobdingdon,” he said, “but offer no partnership.”

  “When do you leave for Brobdingdon?” asked Milo.

  Boric said nothing.

  “Perhaps you didn’t hear me,” Milo said, leaning over the table, allowing his cloak to fall open. “I said, ‘when do you leave?’”

  But Boric wasn’t listening. He was transfixed by the sight before him: the tops of two perfect white orbs straining to escape from a tightly drawn bodice.

  “You’re not…” he started, forcing his eyes back to Milo’s face. Now that he focused more intently, he could see that the border of Milo’s beard was a little too neat, his skin too smooth, his eyes too much like two azure pools in whose waters Boric would gladly drown if only for a momentary touch of those —

  “Boric!” barked the stranger, whom Boric was strongly beginning to expect was also traveling under an assumed name. She wrapped the cloak tightly about herself, breaking the spell.

  “Sunrise,” Boric managed to mumble.

  The woman smiled behind the beard and stood up from the table. “Then I will see you at sunrise, Derek.”

  ELEVEN

  The most noteworthy thing about threfelings, other than the fact that they are indeed three-fifths the size of humans, is their utter lack of noteworthiness. This, along with their natural stealthy and secretive nature, explains how their existence has gone virtually unnoticed by the entire civilized world of Dis. Threfelings do not engage in wars or other noteworthy happenings. The most pivotal event in recorded threfeling history occurred some three hundred years before the fall of the Old Realm and is known as the Great Imposition. Legend has it that scouts of the Realm arrived one day in the center of the threfeling capital, Threfelton, and, not realizing the various mounds and burrows surrounding them represented the pinnacle of threfeling architecture, declared the area “Uninhabited and Suitable for Settlement.” Upon the arrival of several hundred human settlers in the area, the threfelings picked up and moved nearly a hundred miles away, leaving nary a trace of their existence. Threfelings still remember the Great Imposition each year with a parade culminating in sack lunches and bouts of competitive grumbling.

  Thus the arrival of Boric the Implacable in New Threfelton caused quite a stir. Who was this hulking onetutherling, stumbling into town draped with burlap sacks? (Boric had promised to go quietly if the threfelings would conceal him from the sun, and as Chad and his cohorts had been on their way to a mumbleberry patch, they had plenty of burlap sacks with them.)

  “What have you done, Chad? Who is this?” Boric heard a voice demand.

  “He’s a onetutherling, Mister Mayor,” said Chad, a note of pride in his voice. “We caught him skulking.”[6]

  “Skulking!” cried the mayor. “And covered with burlap sacks, too. That’s aggravated skulking, if my memory of threfeling law serves me. Explain yourself, stranger.”

  “Sir, I didn’t mean to skulk,” said Boric. “I am only passing through on my way to — ”

  “Passing through!” exclaimed the mayor. “Impossible.”

  “Surely travelers pass through your fine country on occasion…”

  There were doubtful murmurs. Apparently a crowd had gathered.

  “No one passes through here,” said the mayor. “We aren’t on the way to anything. That’s why we live here. Now, remove those sacks and let’s have a look at you.”

  “No!” cried Boric, drawing back and clutchi
ng the fabric around him.

  “He’s afraid of sunlight,” offered Chad.

  “I’m sensitive to sunlight,” said Boric. “I have a condition.”

  “The condition of being a dirty rotten skulker,” muttered someone in the crowd.

  “Enough of that!” snapped the mayor. “What’s your name, stranger?”

  “I am called Boric,” said Boric. A pseudonym would have been safer, but he had already given his true name to Chad and changing it now would raise suspicion. In any case, the threfelings were so isolated from the Six Kingdoms that they had probably never heard of Boric the Implacable.

  “All right, Boric,” said the mayor. “Let’s get you inside.”

  Boric was led into a nearby building, where he had to stoop almost to his knees to get inside. The burlap sacks were removed and a sudden glare blinded him. Making matters worse, his eyelids seemed to be stuck open. He held up his hands in an attempt to ward off the light. “Please, the windows!” he yelped.

  The window shutters were closed and Boric sighed with relief. Boric found himself in a domed room that might have served as a pantry in Kra’al Brobdingdon, but appeared to be a sort of town hall. Small round windows, now shuttered, dotted the walls about halfway to the dome’s apex, and several narrow tunnels ran out of the room, presumably leading to similar areas. Boric had the sense that threfeling architecture consisted mainly of digging out beneath hills and then shoring up the walls with twigs and stucco. Standing in the middle of the room, the ceiling was out of arm’s reach. The mayor and several other New Threfelton functionaries were regarding him soberly.

  “Now, if you would please hand your sword to the bailiff,” said the mayor.

  “Um,” said Boric. “That’s going to be a problem.”

  “Listen here, stranger!” snapped the mayor. “You are a guest in New Threfelton, and as such you are not permitted to carry a weapon. I don’t know how they doing things in Stomplerville or wherever you’re from, but…”