Critical Failures V (Caverns and Creatures Book 5)

by Robert Bevan

  The dwarf shook his head. “After bumraping it? Are you folks in some sort of cult?”

  “There was no bumraping!” said Julian, perhaps a little too loudly. A few passersby took a couple of steps to the side as they passed. Even their new dwarf friend seemed to be looking for an escape route.

  Julian took a deep breath. “At no point did anyone, besides you, mention sexual intercourse, consensual or otherwise, with an animal. We were attacked by a dire boar in the Great Forest. After killing it, we tried to roast and eat one of its hind legs. My friend Cooper here is not exactly a surgeon when it comes to butchering animals. He missed the mark a few times, and it was kind of a grisly sight.”

  The dwarf thought for a moment, then nodded. “My name’s Ollie.”

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Ollie. I’m Julian, and this is Cooper and Stacy.”

  “We’re really nice people,” said Stacy.

  Cooper put his thumbs up. “Heeeyyyyyy!” Julian wasn’t sure that a Fonzie impression was appropriate here, but it was better than continuing to speak, he supposed.

  Ollie continued walking. “I’m willing to give you the benefit of the doubt. If my time in Minswater has given me anything, it’s renewed faith in the inherent good of most races.”

  Julian smiled. “Oh? That’s... loaded.”

  “But know this. If you betray my faith and lay so much as a finger on one of my children, pray that the elves of this town take you before I do.”

  “We’re totally not like that,” Stacy reassured him.

  “That’s true,” said Cooper. “I don’t give a fuck about your kids.”

  “Nice!” said Julian. Time to change the subject. “So, how much farther to the citrus orchards?”

  “Just beyond these beanstalks. We’re at the tail end of Minswater. Beyond the orchards is vast, bone dry desert as far as the eye can see.”

  They were walking through an arbor covered in vines. Fat juicy blackberries grew up the sides, and plump bean pods hung from above.

  “Is it cool if we pick stuff off and eat it?”

  “Help yourselves!” said the dwarf. He was back to his old jovial self. “That’s the best part of living here. Behave yourselves, and you’ll want for nothing.”

  Julian tasted a blackberry. It was very sweet, almost too much so, and practically exploded with juice in his mouth. Next he tried a bean pod. It was crunchy on the outside and juicy on the inside, with just the right amount of sweetness. It was a different kind of delicious than the blackberry. More subtle. Julian couldn’t remember ever having enjoyed the taste and texture of raw beans before. Maybe it was an elf thing.

  He plucked off handfuls of pods and stuffed them into his pockets to snack on while he worked.

  “And here we are!” said the dwarf once they’d passed through the arbor and reentered the sunlight. “The citrus orchards.”

  The trees were lined up and cultivated like modern orchards, but they were much bigger, and different-looking than citrus trees that Julian had seen back home. The branches hung low to the ground, weighed down with ridiculous amounts of oranges, lemons, limes, grapefruits, as well as several other fruits that, while certainly citrusy, Julian couldn’t readily identify.

  Between the bean trellises and the citrus orchard stood a line of tables with folded sacks lying on top.

  Ollie grabbed a sack and smiled at Julian. “Best get started. You’ve got fifty thousand of these to fill. I find it best to work as a team. Good luck. I’ve got to run along and find my children.”

  With the trees bursting with fruit as they were, maybe fifty thousand sacks wasn’t such a tall order.

  “How long do you think it would take to fill that many sacks?” Julian asked Stacy.

  “More time than we’ve got. But we’ll need to fill a few before I can make any calculations.”

  “We can fill more sacks faster if we use our heads,” said Julian. He grabbed a few sacks. “Ravenus, I’m going to hold the bag open, and you fly up into the tree and cut oranges loose.”

  “As you command, sir.”

  Julian followed Ravenus to a tree and the process began. Ravenus clipped oranges loose with his beak, and Julian caught them in the sack.

  Julian smiled at Stacy. “Not bad, eh?”

  Stacy, who’d been examining the fruit-laden branches, shrugged. “I might have a better idea.” She wrapped both hands around the tree trunk, took a deep breath, then shook the shit out of the tree.

  Oranges rained down, littering the ground densely in a wide circumference at the base of the tree. Ravenus squawked and flew off his branch, and Julian thought he might have heard some giggling through the noise of falling fruit and rustling leaves.

  “Let me try,” said Cooper. Stacy let go of the tree and Cooper took her place. “I’m really angry!”

  His muscles expanded until he was fifty percent larger.

  “Hold on!” said a child’s voice high up in the branches. “This is going to be a good one!”

  Shit! Ollie’s kids! “Cooper, don’t –”

  “FUCK YOU TREE!” Cooper shook the tree so hard that Julian thought he might either uproot it or snap the trunk. But miraculously, the tree held together as oranges piled up on the ground.

  “Aaaahhhhh!” cried a small voice which stopped suddenly as a dwarven child smashed into a fruit pile. Then another, and still another. It was now raining oranges and dwarf kids.

  “Cooper!” cried Julian. “Stop shaking the –”

  *

  Julian awoke some time later on a bed of squashed oranges. His head hurt, and he was wet and sticky with orange juice, but he was able to wiggle his fingers and toes. Stacy, Cooper, Ollie, and six dwarven children stood over him.

  “What happened?”

  Ollie grinned. “You found Ollie Jr.” He nodded at one of the kids, the largest one by a wide margin. Ollie Jr. was nearly as large as Ollie Sr., his fat oily face showing the humble beginning of what was sure to be a big bushy beard someday.

  “Sorry,” said Ollie Jr.

  “Don’t be,” said Julian. “It wasn’t your fault.” He looked up at Ollie Sr. “I’m sorry about Cooper shaking your kids out of the tree. Are they all okay?”

  “Elia sprained her wrist, but that’s nothing to worry about. It’ll put hair on her chest.”

  The littlest of the dwarf children, presumably Elia judging by the sling holding up her left arm, picked up an orange and put it in her father’s sack.

  “You put that back right now!” Ollie scolded her. “We don’t take what’s not ours.”

  “Please,” said Stacy. “Take all you want.”

  Cooper’s fatigued eyes widened. “What the fuck? I just used up one of my goddamn –”

  Stacy grabbed Cooper by the arm. “I’d like to talk to my friends alone. Please feel free to collect as many oranges as you can. It’s the least we can do.” With her other arm, she helped Julian to his feet, then led them deeper into the orchard.

  “My arm hurts,” said Cooper. “Loosen it up a little.”

  Stacy stopped walking and turned to face Cooper and Julian. “I had a little chat with Ollie while you were out. I noticed that Ravenus could come and go from this town as he pleased, so I figured the place isn’t as completely escape-proof as I thought.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Julian. “I’m still a little groggy after having a fat adolescent dwarf kid fall on my head. You realize that none of us can fly, don’t you?”

  “Yes. But I kept digging. I asked him if he knew of anyone ever having escaped before, and he said it happens occasionally. Every now and then a wizard or sorcerer will fly or teleport out of here.”

  Julian shook his head. “I’m nowhere near high enough level to –”

  “I wasn’t finished.” Stacy’s expression suggested she was about to get to the good part. “He also mentioned that some desperate souls just wander off to die in the desert.”

  “You look far too pleased about... Hang on. You mean there’s nothing
preventing us from just walking into the desert?”

  Stacy smiled now that Julian was finally catching on. “Ollie says the desert is barrier enough to keep all but the most desperate or foolhardy folks from trying to escape that way. He said that even on horseback, taking all the fruit you can carry, you’ll only be putting off the inevitable.”

  Julian felt a renewed sense of hope. “Not inevitable if you’re carrying your own endless supply of water.”

  Cooper grinned stupidly and tapped on the side of his bag. His claws clinked against something metallic inside, the Decanter of Endless Water. “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

  Chapter 30

  Katherine woke up with a splitting headache, a stiff neck, and a faceful of wolf slobber. It was morning, and she was in a forest.

  “Butterbean? Where are we? How did we –” Her first clue was a headless horse lying on the ground next to her. Memories started creeping back. “Dyril!”

  She crawled over and pulled the Bag of Holding off Dyril’s torso. His blue face and bulging eyes suggested he’d been dead for quite some time.

  “Shit!” What had happened? How did she get so drunk from that one cup of wine? No. She hadn’t just been drunk. She was whacked out of her mind. The memory was mostly a blur, but the bits and pieces she recalled couldn’t be attributed to mere alcohol. She didn’t remember putting the bag over his head, or why she’d want to. She really hoped she’d had a good reason.

  With little to go on, she looked inside the dead centaur’s saddlebag. She found four bottles of Windex booze, several locks of hair, and a row of small corked test tubes. It was all very organized. The bottles had their own compartment. There was a place for the silver cup, though it appeared they’d left that behind.

  The test tubes were lined up along the side, held in place by leather holders stitched into the inner lining of the bag. All but one of them were filled with a red liquid. Katherine remembered the purple tint of the drink in her cup.

  Had he spiked her drink? Impossible. She saw him pour it. Unless he spiked the cup beforehand.

  Katherine opened the half-empty bottle of blue booze and took a small sip. It tasted like gin, with not even a hint of Robitussin.

  She looked down at Dyril’s rigor mortis stiffened arms, then at his pre rigor mortis stiffened dick. That thing would have been coming out of her mouth. “You sick motherfucker.” She was tempted to kick him, but decided against it. No point in beating a dead horse. Ha!

  Katherine also saw no point in letting good booze go to waste, so she started putting the bottles into her Bag of Holding. The sleeping potions might have applications outside of date rape as well. Hell, saddlebags are probably worth something. She would have taken the corpse too if the lip of the bag had been wide enough to accommodate the horse half. No time for chopping up bodies today. She had somewhere to be.

  Unfortunately, she had no idea how far, or even in which direction, Dyril had taken her. But she was still in a forest, so it stood to reason that she should keep heading west.

  She and Butterbean ran past the massive pine trees, jumping over roots and staying alert for falling pine cones.

  After half an hour of running, their path was blocked by what appeared to be a solid wall of tangled vines running as far north and south as she could see. Her recently discovered druid power of being able to pass through thick underbrush should apply here as well, but there must be some sort of structure holding the vines up. There was probably a fence or wall under all that vegetation. That still wasn’t a problem. Katherine laughed to herself and felt some pride in recently beginning to give a shit about nature. The irony of going to all that effort to build a wall, only for nature to come along and provide an easy means to climb over it.

  The wall was too high for her to throw Butterbean over it, but she’d figure something out. First she wanted to see what was on the other side. She was supposed to be heading toward some kind of desert, and hoped to see some cacti or sand dunes or something, but she expected the change in environment wouldn’t be as sudden and severe as all that.

  She grabbed the two sturdiest looking vines she could find, and started seeking a foothold when she felt a piercing pain in her hands.

  “FUCK!” Katherine cried as she jerked her hands away, lost her balance, and fell on her ass. Her hands were bleeding profusely from the palms. She looked up at the blood prints on the vines where she’d taken hold and found the vines to be covered in sharp thorns. Those hadn’t been there before, she was sure of it. Those vines had just purposely attacked her. She felt so betrayed. She was a druid, after all. Why was nature being an asshole to her?

  Instinctively, her mind tried to summon a swarm of rats for her to bite the heads off of. But she was no longer a vampire. She couldn’t summon rats, and biting their heads off wouldn’t do her any good anyway. Now that she thought about it, it was actually kind of gross.

  As a poor substitute, she used up one of her first-level spells to heal her hands, then wiped the blood off as best she could against the trunk of one of the massive pine trees.

  Remembering the road she’d purposely avoided, Katherine followed the wall northward, hoping that no one was stupid enough to build a road leading to nothing but an impenetrable wall of vines.

  There was nothing but big stupid wall to her left and big stupid trees to her right for miles until she and Butterbean finally came to the last two people she wanted to see.

  “Goddammit,” said Katherine.

  Bingam looked obnoxiously smug. Captain Righteous looked stern, but professional. Both of them were wearing their uniforms and looked to be very well rested. They stood in front of a large iron gate with a loose curtain of vines hanging over it, and were accompanied by two elves with strange silver beards jutting out of the bottoms of their chins.

  “We thought you might show up here eventually,” said Captain Righteous.

  “Dear child,” said one of the elves. “What’s happened to your skin?”

  The other one smiled. “I nearly mistook her for a Drow.” Their shared laugh at that made Katherine feel even dumber.

  “It’s medicinal,” said Captain Righteous. “She has a skin affliction.”

  The two elves took a step back. “My apologies, Miss,” said the one who’d made the joke.

  Katherine appreciated Captain Righteous’s attempt to spare her dignity, even if it did involve telling people she was a leper. She glared at the stupid-bearded elf.

  “Your little Drow comment. Not funny. And frankly, I found it a little bit offensive.”

  As long as the captain was feeling uncharacteristically empathetic, Katherine thought it was worth making a token attempt at reasoning with him.

  “We’ve just been through a lot together. I know you’re a hard-ass for the law and all that, but we’ve saved each others’ lives. I need to get to the Crescent Shadow and find my brother before he gets himself hurt or killed.”

  Captain Righteous’s eyes betrayed what Katherine hoped was a hint of sympathy for her. “Even if I were to let you go, how do you propose to locate the Crescent Shadow? It flies erratically over the Fertile Desert. A well-equipped traveler might wander for months without seeing it. You won’t last two days. And even if, by some miracle, you were able to find it, it floats five hundred feet in the air. Have you wings under that cloak of yours?”

  Katherine frowned. “No.”

  “Without a guide, you and your wolf will die in the desert without ever catching a glimpse of the Crescent Shadow.”

  Katherine tried to summon some tears to milk that little bit of sympathy. She found it wasn’t difficult, given how travel-weary and worried she was, especially now that the captain had laid out just how hopeless her quest was. “He’s my little brother. I’ve got to try.”

  “Careful,” said Bingam. “Your medicine is running.”

  Katherine wanted so badly to kick him in the dick, but Captain Righteous was stroking his mustache thoughtfully. Was he actually thinking about
letting her go?

  “I’m sorry,” the captain finally said. “I know not what trouble your brother is in, but it makes no sense to betray my oath and let you wander off into the desert to die on a fool’s errand. I’m afraid I’ll have to take you back to Cardinia.”

  Shit. He was actually on the fence for a second there. And he mentioned a guide before. He knew of a way to get her to the Crescent Shadow. He just needed a nudge in the right direction.

  “My brother,” said Katherine. “He’s the one you were looking for when you found me, the one on the poster that your nephew was looking at.”

  Bingam laughed.

  Captain Righteous even smiled a bit. “I appreciate the effort you’re going to, but your sneaky little halfling friend is the fugitive on the poster.”

  “He’s not my friend. He’s my brother.”

  “Impossible.”

  “I know it sounds strange,” said Katherine. “And I don’t have time to explain it right now, but I need you to believe me.”

  Captain Righteous looked at her with now nakedly sympathetic eyes. “Against all logic and reason, I nearly do believe you. But your claim is preposterous.”

  “I also sense no falsehood,” said one of the bearded elves. “There is a way to verify the truth of the young half-elf’s claim.”

  After a twenty minute walk through a quaint little village, past gardens practically bursting at the seams with fruit and vegetables, they came to a pleasant little cottage. The elf who’d led them there guided them through the door, then followed them inside and shut the door behind him. Butterbean and Bingam remained outside.

  The elf looked at Katherine, his wizened eyes stern and serious. “What do you think of my beard?”

  “It looks like your face is trying to shit out a squirrel tail.” Katherine gasped in horror at what she’d just said. “What the fuck is wrong with me? I’m so sorry! I didn’t...” The words slurred in her mouth until she finally spat out, “I meant every single word of that. It truly gives me the creeps, and I totally want to reach over right now and rip it off your chin.” She clapped both hands over her mouth.