An old human, of large but diminished build came out to the center of the ring. His hands rasped out against each of the fighter’s fists, crinkling like parchment as they rolled over their smooth and young skin. Yenrab had watched him do this same thing so many times already and knew well what would come next.
Well, here we go.
The old referee’s voice croaked out, “Fight!”
The massive behemoth that was Yenrab, the half-human and half-orc barbarian, made a show of berserk anger, biting into his lip and tasting copper. He growled and let his bloody saliva drip before beating his chest.
Showtime.
Yenrab danced a bit, popping left and right, making a great show of defensive caution and intelligent analysis. Then he moved in, with his opponent doing the same. Yenrab hopped in quickly, swinging out his massive ham-sized fists. Southpaw. Southpaw, cross to the north. Jab, jab. Gotta seem slow. Gotta be inaccurate.
Smash! The skinny guy moved quickly. He seemed to fly as he bounded here and there, slamming Yenrab in the stomach with an elbow and then kissing his face with a well-planted kick. The half-orc stumbled back in surprise. This guy is good!
He was sure that the blasts that hit him hurt, but the adrenaline coursed through him cool and powerful, locking it, and setting his mind straight. Fight, then hurt.
His opponent bludgeoned him twice more in the face with what seemed to be quick jabs but landed with the power of roundhouse swings. Yenrab wheeled, blood coming down from a cut over his eye. Sweat poured out as he struggled to keep himself in check. The stink of it burned his nostrils.
He reached out to grab the human’s leg, only to get kicked in the balls. Yenrab dropped to his knees and moaned.
“That’s just fricking wrong, man!” he complained in high-pitched agony.
His opponent, looking more and more proficient with every second, paused in front of the half-human figure before him and looked him over with a scornful eye. To all in observance that folk hero, Yenrab the Animal Chief, Flee-er from Trolls and False Hope to Villagers, seemed to be kneeling in obeisance to his lord and leader in combat.
The crowd booed him with glee, the smell of alcohol wafting from their breath.
With a malicious sneer, the human dropped his hands to the ground while delivering a tremendously powerful and vengeful strike with both of his feet. Yenrab’s head snapped back at an unnatural angle and his body flattened to the ground.
There was a pregnant pause as the crowd waited for the behemoth to rise. But they could smell it. Even those who had bet on the giant orc knew it. He was defeated.
And then the crowd went wild, excitement boiling over into that realm of underdogdom. No one had expected the village boy to win, and even those who had lost knew that this had been an upset well worth losing one’s shirt over.
***
Yenrab still wasn’t up.
Damn it, man, do something! Bern thought as he moved about, collecting his share of the winnings and chumming along with the men who tossed him their coins. He couldn’t help but keep casting his hooded head back to that ring where the half-human still lay, unmoving.
He threw a look to Carric, whose acting chops were on full display as he cheered and even pantomimed the fight with bettors as he raked in their dough. But Bern felt he knew him well enough to see the distressed creases at the corners of his eyes.
A distressing thought rose up within him—Tracy! How was Tracy?!
Godsbedamned, I better find him right now.
“Excuse me, mates, but I should duck out now and get the rest of my haul. Daddy’s gotta buy a new pair of slippers.”
“Yah, good luck to ya, mate. Next time, I’m letting you bet for me. Giant man-orcs be damned to hell. My wife is gonna kill me.” One of the men, with a ragged goatee, smiled as he bid farewell.
Bern moved away at a pace that he hoped was nonchalant. And he focused, listening, trying to hear if there was some strange sound different from the rest of the crowd. And there was.
King Nemed and his men! the thief cursed in his head, drawing back on one of his favorite swears from his childhood on the streets. Through the din of the drunken crowd, cursed with the smell of farts and pits, was the sound of open weeping.
He’s blowing our cover. He’s blowing our cover! He’s blowing our cover. He’s blowing our cover He’sblowingourcover!!!!
Just the single thought ran round and round through his brain as his expert ears led his way. He angled his body this way and that, shoving aside the occasional drunk bloke who couldn’t get his crap out of his ears and pay attention.
And there was Tracy, all forlorn and crying, facing a large array of confused debtors.
“I didn’t want him to fight. I wanted to tell him! I am such a bad friend,” Tracy was explaining through sobs.
“HE’SBLOWINGOURCOVER NRMPH!” Bern bellowed with fear and anger, squealching himself as he realized how dumb his brain had just gotten.
“’At the bloody burning hells is this then, ey?” asked one of the bettors, now looking a bit weirded out.
“Ha. Haha. It’s uhm, well, complicated,” the rogue said, desperately trying to think up something.
“Is complicated ‘e says. Tis what the wife says when she been out too late and come on home with ‘nother man,” another man, missing most of his teeth, added, nodding sagely.
“Tisss’ sssssssstrange,” a cowled lizardman noted. He pulled a small coin sack from his purse and tossed it to the feet of the crying half-elf. “I abhor ssssstrange.”
The lizardman walked away. Others, prompted by his act, followed suit.
A gray-haired crone in the fresh white clothes of a spring maiden spat black juice to her side.
“Well, I ain’t givin’ my bits ‘til I hear the ‘appenings.”
A story sprang to mind. Bern grabbed it and threw it forth.
“This is my brother, Tracy.”
“Boo! You isn’t no brother to ‘im. E’s an elf,” the man with the missing teeth interrupted, clearly a fan of heckling.
Bern didn’t miss a beat.
“Ah, yes, but he’s only half elf. Different father, same mother.”
“Whore!” the old crone added, but with a jealous grin.
“Bah, uh, sure. Anyways, so my brother here is a bit of a clinger on. He likes to make friends with everybody and gives his heart away the minute he meets them. Right, Tracy?”
Tracy nodded and looked at the ground.
“Right. So we talked to the big guy up there after we made our bets, and well, I guess Tracy felt like best friends. So seeing him fall like that, well, you can see what happened.”
The crone snickered.
“Best friends. Sure. Well, bad luck to you lovers because ee’s dead.”
The woman threw her sack of coins and left. Only the original bettor now remained. He was well-dressed and smelled of perfume.
Bern was getting annoyed, while Tracy simply wandered off to go check on Yenrab.
“Look, mate, I’ll collect all of this for him. Let’s say you pay your fair share, hey?”
The man looked at him confidently, a sure face that said it didn’t get suckered often.
He raised his sack of coins in front of him and spoke, “I don’t believe I have ever seen anything so karmic as the death of a man planning to take a fall. The gods don’t look favorably on cheats.”
As Bern Sandros watched him nervously, the man dropped the sack to the ground, then spun on his boot heels, and walked away.
Chapter 18: Riches to Rags
Tracy had gotten a better hold of himself.
I knew better than that, his male psyche informed the others.
It would seem you didn’t, Current Tracy Riley, his female psyche laughed back, a little angry at the danger he had put them into.
No use crying over spilled milk, his androgyny added. The other two gave him a psychic dirty look.
He walked over in a measured but fast-paced gait, eager to see what was wrong. C
limbing into the ring, he knelt down to the mat and placed his hand on the barbarian’s chest.
“Please be alive, Mr. Yenrab.”
He looked around the ring and realized that this long delay had been due to the end of the first round of the competition. He probably didn’t have a lot more time before people would sweep the body off and out to a ditch who knows where.
“Yenrab. Hey. Get up,” the sorcerer said, punctuating it with a slap. “We should go.”
Yenrab’s eyes flew open, and he seemed to strain a bit.
“I can’t,” the half-orc said from his place on the ground, his head floppy with trauma.
“The one god lives, Yenrab. Jeez, you scared the crap out of me!” Tracy exclaimed in delight.
“I’m glad I’m loved,” the half-orc said with a liquid cough. There was no doubt that he was bleeding on the inside.
“Why can’t you get up, Yenrab? What’s up?” Tracy asked with genuine concern.
“I think I’m broken,” the barbarian coughed out again. “I can’t move my body.”
Bern and Carric came up at a light jog, the heft of their new wealth making a jingle and a jangle out of their trip.
“Well, thank the gods, he’s alive!” Carric beamed.
“What’s wrong with Yenrab?” Bern asked in relief. He had clearly expected the worst.
“He’s broken. But not dead broken. More like we-need-cleric-magic broken,” Tracy explained. The smile on his face let everyone know that everything was going to be okay.
“How broken is not dead broken?” Bern asked, his own face rising into a smile. Tracy’s optimism was contagious.
“I can’t move!” Yenrab bellowed out in anger. Seeing everyone smile at him was not putting him on his good side. Also, the barbarian had the growing realization that he was about to become the butt of a number of jokes, and this thought did not make him happy one bit.
“That’s pretty broken,” Bern said with a strange face before covering up with his hand to snort and chuckle.
Carric, catching that joyous feel, laughed out loud and said, “I’m totally writing this into a ballad.”
“Really? Really?! This is nothing to laugh about,” the paralyzed Yenrab yelled up from the ground. “Guys, I need healing.”
“Yenrab, this is Gennopolis. Not some small village out in the middle of nowhere. There will be a divinely anointed priest with the power to fix you,” Carric informed him matter-of-factly.
The barker with the colored clothes came up to the group huddled around Yenrab still lying in the ring. “I don’t know if you are his friends or not, but I would take him to a cleric fast before he dies. Or if you aren’t his friends, I’d ask you to get him out of my ring before you loot him. We’re gonna be starting the next bout soon enough.” And, just like that, the barker left.
“Well, that was grim,” Yenrab noted. “Someone, carry me out of here.”
Tracy balked. “I don’t think any of us can carry you.”
Bern stood tall.
“We’ll figure it out,” he pronounced, starting to gather the materials for a litter.
***
As the party figured out how to build their stretcher, Carric sat down with the adventurer’s tome to see if it couldn’t help things along a bit. Tracing his finger through the table of contents, he found a few new entries that well pertained to their situation.
“Well, I be blessed. Guys,” the bard called out to the rest, “there’s something here!”
The first entry, “Gennopolis”, itself had a lot of subtitles underneath. The book had opened itself up immensely. Carric decided to read the first entry, paging through to its number.
Gennopolis, gem of the Freeholder’s Republic and a nation that fought a long and deadly revolution to be able to accept all, of any race, regardless of creed, so long as they behaved themselves.
“Tell me something I don’t know!” he fumed aloud. His companions frowned but said nothing.
Paging through the enormous entry, he suddenly stopped. All eyes were upon him.
“Alright, guys. There’s an entry for temples.”
He cleared his throat.
Gennopolis is a place of many faiths and creeds, and a great deal of people around the world flock here for its unique acceptance of all. What foreigners to the city often find suspicious, though, is that the temples here have a large number of divinely anointed priests and clerics capable of healing, since the majority of clergymen about the world do not, and that they have a propensity to ask for a lot of coin to do so. Those who are suspicious have their thoughts generally confirmed when the prices are quoted.
Carric paused, feeling a bit queasy.
“Well, I know where to go, but I have a feeling none of us are going to like it.”
***
“What do you mean twelve hundred gold coins to get Mat here to walk again?” Bern thundered, realizing that the barbarian had been right and that this was indeed no laughing matter.
“This is an outrage!” Bern paced a bit to cool himself down. “There is no way that people can pay those kinds of prices. Especially for powers that you get for free! The heavens above give you the power to heal!”
“Look,” the stern-looking cleric barked, looking weary. “The prices here at the temple are set without profit in mind. Everything we price, we do so with reason. Look at me. I wear simple robes with little ornamentation. I eat gruel all day and live in a simple cell with a cot and a desk. Just pay Haithos his due. Or visit one of the thousand other gods plaguing this planet, Haithos damn them.”
Carric sighed. “Alright, guys. This isn’t ideal, but you know what, we can get him fixed up now, go back to that bar, and play up those backwoods vermin for whatever cash they are worth.”
His companions looked surprised. This really wasn’t like him. His cheeks were red, and his brow was furrowed as he continued on with his talk.
“It might not be the most moral thing to do, but we’re about to lose everything we won, and well, those idiots are the ones that caused it.”
“Yenrab, what do you think?” Tracy asked, his fingers lighting through his hair as he did so.
“Yeah. You know. Let’s take them for what they are worth.”
Yenrab took a moment to reflect, taking it all in as he realized that those settlers that he helped for free weren’t about to return the favor.
“Yeah, for sure, let’s do it. Just get me walking again.”
***
Everyone in the party wore a sour face as they poured their coins out. A gaggle of priestly acolytes swarmed in, bees to the queen, working with diligence as they counted up the value in an impossibly short length of time. Nodding to the cleric, they began to scoop the coins back up into various sacks, sorting them by denomination.
“It would seem you are more or less in possession of the required amount. Set Yenrab upon the blood-encrusted and filthy slab behind you so that he may be healed,” the priest of Haithos stated clinically.
The party was still ornery, having watched all they had go to fixing their Bit O’ Coin mistake. Bern looked especially upset. He seemed on the brink of protest, but settled back and said nothing.
The air, earlier stagnant with the smell of infection and disease, changed in quality. The smell of dandelions and itchweed filled the air as Haithos, god of childhood plants, pulsed his vitality into the room. The cleric before them raised his hands.
“Haithos, I love thee, I love thee not.”
With wizened and brittle fingers, the old man raised up a daisy and plucked its petals as he continued the chant.
“Love thee, Love thee not, Love thee . . .”
Bern looked troubled again.
“What’s wrong, friend?” Tracy asked in a whisper, somehow having figured out the seriousness of the event and acting accordingly.
“I know this chant. Back when I was a kid, Becky Linder used to taunt us boys with it. She would give us a kiss if we ended up right. The problem is that it was never
right.”
“Could she, perhaps, have counted the petals beforehand?”
Bern suddenly looked quite embarrassed.
“Mate, I, well, yeah. To a tee.”
Power blasted into the room as the cleric finished on a possibly pre-counted ‘I Love Thee,’ slamming into the old man, who placed hands sparkling with energy onto the shattered back of the half-human. The faint sound of kids laughing and playing spread forth, with the smell of country, and then faded. Its absence left a small quiver of sorrow in all of them.
Then, with a sudden blast of Grandma’s cookies, the spell was done. The aroma, though, lingered.
Yenrab rolled off of the hard surface, gritty with the blood of those before him, looking quite fresh.
The old cleric turned and gave a brittle bow.
“Am I such a monster now?” he inquired, a small smile on his face and a childish glint in his eye.
Chapter 19: The Weeping Widow
“Am I such a monster now?! What a trash-digging, feces-eating kobold,” Carric complained, making sure to scrunch his face and act stupid as he quoted the cleric.
“Hey!” yelled a kobold, his head poking up out of a pile of trash, his mouth stained brown and smelling horrid.
“Oops, sorry. Didn’t mean it!” Carric squaked out in a hurry.
Bern laughed.
“It’s alright, mate; let it be. You didn’t mean it like that, and if that snot-eating gobshite thinks otherwise, he can go live with the rest of the nasties.”
“Yor’?” A fat goblin was sitting on the edge of the road, his finger in his nose, looking at them with offended eyes.
“Oh, shite. Just screw off, ya green-skinned runt. I am a bit off when I’m in a bad mood, and I’m not gonna apologize.”
The goblin stared at him, then shrugged and went back to whittling at wood with his dagger.
Yenrab looked impressed while Carric looked shocked.
“I gotta say, Bern, I would never have thought to own it like that.”
How to Be an Adventurer- World of Gimmok Page 14
