Root and Branch

by Tripp Greyson

  Root and Branch

  The Third Book of Fell Tobias

  Being the Chronicle of the First True War of the Commonwealth of Icarus, with Thoughts on the Repercussions of Colluding with One's Demigod Son to Disobey His Divine Mother;

  as documented by

  his scribe,

  Tripp Greyson

  Copyright © 2019 Tripp Greyson (a.k.a. Floyd Largent)

  This is a work of fiction. While alternate versions of some locales mentioned herein do exist, any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, existing businesses, or events is purely coincidental.

  Reproduction in whole or in part of this publication without express written consent from the above is strictly prohibited.

  Special note: per Commonwealth Edict 12X1a-Subsection c, the All-Father Fell Tobias and his scribe, Tripp Greyson, are immune to any and all libel and defamation suits, especially in regard to truthful historical narratives. So suck it, cobbers!

  To the innocents of Wayko,

  Neither gone nor forgotten

  Table of Contents

  Prelude

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  The Confession of Fell Tobias

  Afterword

  Prelude

  The Goddess Aurora was a bit perturbed. Several times in the past local year, Her unborn son Eos had borrowed Quintessence from his future self, delaying his own birth by months, if not years. At one point, his fetus had been as large as Her fist; now he had shrunk back down to the size of a bean.

  That was all very well for him. He didn't have to deal with morning sickness, which had totally blindsided Her when She first started heaving Her guts out. So much for omniscience.

  Being stuck in a physical body was more limiting than She had expected, in more ways than She had expected. She didn't have Little Magic's gift of borrowing against his Quint, or She'd probably be back in the alt-Nether by now, where She could oversee everything properly in this worldline...

  ...this amateur mess of a worldline She had allowed to form when an advanced skewline entangled with its innocent neighbor while She was distracted. Damn that Sudoku!

  Not that She wouldn't come back eventually if She did leave, once Eos finally decided to be born. She'd rather liked teaching Fell Tobias about physical love, and looked forward to more instruction, and perhaps a daughter this time. As She was Divine, She could make a loophole that allowed him a girl-child if She wanted.

  Then too, those new Elves were rather attractive.

  Otherwise, things were going well. She had insinuated a suggestion into the minds of the leaders of the Bejar Coven that they should ignore the Commonwealth of Icarus for the time being. A flood of Lloradas from Mejico, and an incursion of Selkies up the Ria Santa Antonia, was keeping them occupied for the moment anyway. Meanwhile, the Waykans would soon be exterminated by Her Toby.

  Even now the new army of Dixies, fathered by the eight boymakers She had collected thus far, was being born outside of Icarus Township. There would be far more new Dixies than anyone expected emerging from the eighty host animals. She had fine-tuned things so that the Dixies dropped their baby fangs a day earlier than normal, which made them stop eating each other, kick-started their brains, and would have them begging to get out as soon as their Broca's areas tuned in.

  Any earlier than that, and they wouldn't be sufficiently developed to survive. This batch would start out a mite smaller than the original Hero Dixies, but would soon grow to normal proportions. Because the self-winnowing had ceased early, this batch averaged twelve per host, all of whom would emerge nearly mature and as knowledgeable as their fathers and Pixie mothers, ready to help wipe out the Waykans with their brand-new Dawn blades.

  She counted 997 in this birthing. That would double the Commonwealth population, including the Tauras and Hamiltownians. She would need more Dawn steel.

  Soon, Tobias and the six Hero Dixies who had gone with him to fetch Old-Father Trent would arrive home to take control of the new Dixies' training. They'd better hurry, or Apollo and Gration would go mad from the stress of dealing with nearly a thousand of the unruly little monsters.

  Chapter 1

  A weary column of infantry and cavalry, accompanied by four wagons, toiled west across the post-oak savannah of North-Central Tejas. Above them, six little men with dragonfly-like wings buzzed along and sang loudly,

  We are the Hero Dixies, hurray, hurray!

  We saved the day and made 'em pay,

  And broke their skulls with tricksies!

  Hurray, hurray, here come the hero Dixies!

  Hurray, hurray, here come the horny Dixies!

  There was some objection to this latest verse, one of about fifty so far. "You didn't kill the Tejarkanye, ya little runts!" Puck the Faunlet yelled out. "It was me and my girls!"

  "We provided moral support to the village!" "Yeah, we morally supported 'em with our wangles!" "Those babes needed us bad!" "And they got us!" "More notches for the ol' bedpost, ha ha ha!"

  As usual, Eros waited until everyone else was done to smugly shout, "I definitely impressed the Meyer sisters with my bedpost!"

  "SHUT UP, STUPID CUPID!" cried a mass of voices, not all of them Dixies.

  We were seven days out from Hamiltown, and would have been home already if we hadn't encountered Queen Helge's group of 41 Tauras along the way. They'd been quite interested in the Elves and Dixies, and had been quick to sign a treaty to join the Commonwealth.

  We stayed the night, left three of them pregnant with boys and several with girls as an act of goodwill, and pushed on the next day. Helge and her daughter Freyja had joined our group, wanting to see the capital and contribute to the fight against the Waykans. Though they hadn't lost anyone to the cannibals, they had friends in other tribes who had.

  Though I was riding a horse, I felt mortally exhausted, and not just because Helge's other daughter Freydis had kept me up half the night. Several different worries were nagging at me on different fronts, including how we were going to save the children of Wayko from my Goddess's genocide order, and my mounting worry about how Icarus Township was handling the new Dixie situation that had surely sprung up by now. Hundreds of tiny testosterone-driven flying boys invading our quiet community couldn't help but wreak havoc, prior planning or no.

  I was still confounded by the existence of the Lord Protectors that I and some force I still didn't understand had created in Hamiltown, three of whom were riding with us, looking dangerously heroic in their sleek, colorful armor. I'd left behind Boyd Carlo, the Lord Protector of the East, in Hamiltown, since that was now the easternmost outpost of our Commonwealth, to hold off representatives of the Tejarkán Empire.

  And for some reason, my mind kept turning back to a conversation I'd been privy to between my Old-Father Trent and my demigod son, Eos, the night before we'd left Hamiltown...

  "Grandpapá," Little Magic had said to Old-Father Trent, seemingly apropos of nothing as we were chatting about my childhood, "would you happen to have any biology or chemistry texts in your library?"

  My father replied, "Why, yes, actually. We have a college-level biology text that wasn't wiped clean by the bitty-swarms, probably because it was made with an experimental soy ink. But that's it. Why?"

  "It's a good start," my son said shrewdly. "Have you read it?"

  "Not all of it," Old-Father admitted.

  "Please do so, Grandpapá," Little Magic replied. "It will be useful in the war effort, and I
have a feeling you will be crucial to our future success. You want to know the answers to so many questions." My son, who was still in his young Elf guise, reached out and casually touched the old man's forehead.

  "There. Now you'll to be able to read and retain it all within an hour. Later, we'll need some chemistry texts for you to read; we may be able to find those at Mother's, or maybe in the remnants of the Baylor University Library system, if we can access it. I believe the micro-fish files will have been ignored by the nanites, since they were mostly celluloid."

  I wondered what small fry could possibly have to do with anything in a library; but when I opened my mouth to ask, Little Magic just groaned, rolled his eyes, and said, "I'll explain later, Dadday."

  He turned back to my father. "I have an idea about how to wipe out all the Waykan cannibals at once." He glanced at me, and said, "Also, you, I, and Dadday must speak before we leave town."

  The discussion was a brief one, but one we had to shield from Little Magic's mother. I still had no idea how he managed that; nor did I want to know. Somehow, he had also arranged to shield any thoughts we might have on that particular subject, which had to be taxing even for a demigod. I hope he wasn't borrowing against his future Quintessence again, as that would just push his birth much farther into the future, but he probably was.

  Our little talk had to do with our plan to disobey the Goddess his Mother's direct orders. She had commanded us in no uncertain terms to destroy the cannibals of the Scholastic Empire of Wayko "root and branch," which meant we had to kill everyone — children included. My son had already told me he couldn't, and I had decided on my own that I wouldn't… with one exception I hadn't told Eos about.

  I had already concluded that I would have to kill every member of the immediate family of the Waykan ruler, the Provost, no matter how young and innocent they were. I knew from learning history that even one heir left alive would later cause some fool to rally an army around him or her, to try to retake the "throne."

  There would be no thrones in our Commonwealth. I was determined to reunite the representative republic that had once ruled the southern part of this continent, the Confederate States of America, and make it better than before.

  If I had to be incredibly ruthless to do it, I would.

  I was desperately hoping (I would have prayed if I hadn't been terrified the Goddess would hear) that the Provost was either a bachelor or a middle-aged man with adult children but no grandchildren, but I doubted that was the case. If I was going to have to root out that branch of the Waykans, I would do it myself, so no one else would have to stain his soul.

  And indeed I did that, and to this day I regret it. Every night before I sleep, and every morning when I wake, without fail I recite the names of my seven sacrifices for peace, as a form of penance. They are —

  But no. It's not yet time for that sordid tale.

  We brought Old-Father Trent into the circle of knowledge about our plan to save the innocents of Wayko; and he wholeheartedly agreed. Later, after my son had de-manifested in his usual blaze of Glory, I told my father about my exception. Again he agreed, though very reluctantly, because he was the man who had taught me my history; and as I had when I made the decision, he wept. It would not be the last time for either of us.

  ❖

  Old-Father spent most of the trip back home reading and digesting book after book on anatomy, general biology, human biology, medical science, general chemistry, organic chemistry, biochemistry, laminar flow, gaseous behavior, physics, meteorology, military logistics, and several other subjects.

  Only the general biology book came from the Hamiltown cache; the others Little Magic materialized from his mother's library, or borrowed from any other sources he could find, including — ironically — the Science and Medical Library of Baylor University. The "micro-fish" turned out to be not baby seafood, but plastic sheets read using an odd little handheld machine that Little Magic was able to manifest for Dad. He had to replace it twice, as bitty-swarms kept eating crucial components.

  Now, why would they name plastic cards after fish, especially really small ones? I never learned the answer to that.

  As promised, my father could now devour an entire textbook in an hour or two. There was one, however, that took over three. He called it PANIC because of the way the title was arranged on the cover:

  Physics:

  A

  New

  Introductory

  Course

  No doubt some monstrous author and their publisher had thought it was a funny little joke. That book, a green monster thicker than my son Dion was tall and five times heavier, would have served perfectly as a doorstop or furniture prop back home. It would have just fit Old-Father's favorite armchair, which was currently held up with a cinder block. I decided that were I an introductory physics student in the old days, I would definitely PANIC upon seeing it, especially as it said to right on the cover.

  I hope that publisher went out of business. Preferably because a maddened student burned down their headquarters.

  When he wasn't reading, Old-Father was integrating what he had learned from the books into his capacious brain, and muttering to himself. Late that afternoon, as we approached home, he addressed me for the first time in days: "I've got an idea that I think will work, based on what Eos told me he wanted to do. It'll do what the Goddess wants and what we want at the same time."

  "And?"

  "You told me that as far as you know, only the adult Waykans eat long pig?" The term "long pig" was our code for human meat.

  "That's what I've been given to understand," I replied cautiously.

  "How about a gas that kills anyone who's eaten long pig anytime in the past year or so? I think I can synthesize a derivative of an old agricultural pesticide called 'Cyclone' that will lock onto the metabolic products of digested human tissue in nerve cells and turn them toxic, causing fatal nerve damage. Anyone who isn't a cannibal won't be affected at all."

  I stared at him for a long moment, before I responded, slowly, "Meaning the adults will all die, and the children won't." He nodded. "And how long will it take them to die?" I pressed.

  "That's the tough part. I want it to take them down instantly, but Cyclone doesn't work like that. It causes intense, repetitive muscular contractions and spasms. I remember using it on cockroaches when I was a kid. It caused them to bounce around like grasshoppers as they lost control of their nervous systems, then they fell over and quivered for a while."

  He sighed and shook his head. "In its raw state, a victim the size of a human would take an hour or so to die, if not longer, and would be in agony the entire time. I don't want that on my conscience, son. I can make it easily enough if we can get certain chemicals, but I'll have to tinker with it for a while to make it instantly fatal."

  I stared out at the post-oak savannah for over a minute, thinking about my lover Sif and her tribe, before I said, "Don't."

  My father's thoughts had moved on quite a distance by then, so he responded, "Uh, what? What do you mean, don't?"

  "Don't make the Cyclone instantly fatal. We'll deliver it in its raw state."

  Old-Father Trent gaped at me. After a long moment, he finally asked, in a voice so low it was almost a whisper, "Are you serious, son?"

  "As the proverbial heart attack," I replied flatly.

  "You... you want to torture thousands of people to death?" he rasped. "Wh-what happened to the sweet boy I helped raise, Tobias?"

  I turned to look at my father.

  "He lies buried on Boot Hill, outside Hamiltown. Whereas Fell Tobias has seen with his own eyes the butchered remains of Queen Isengrid's tribe — and has learned that his minotaur sons, and the sons of the other Fathers of Icarus, were ripped from their mothers' wombs to be eaten as veal."

  "Oh. Oh my," my father said as I mechanically turned my gaze forward. "I guess I understand, then."

  And that was the last time we spoke directly of the horrible deaths reserved for the victims o
f what came to known as Cyclone-B. Not allowing my father to make it instantly lethal was one of the greatest mistakes of my life, the one I regret the second most. To this day, the very name sends chills down my spine. I would have Little Magic remove the knowledge of it from the minds of everyone involved, if I could.

  But by the time I thought of that, it was too late.

  Chapter 2

  We knew we were getting close to Icarus Township because of the ruckus in the far distance and the thin haze hanging over the city. I could smell smoke faintly on the breeze, but as I later learned, that was just the charred remnants of the paddocks and corpses of the livestock that had served as the hosts for our new Dixie army.

  The guardians, sickened after a week of having to listen to the painful screams and squeals of the hosts, had burned the place to the ground after the Dixies had finished emerging. I hadn't authorized that, but I couldn't blame them. We'd build new paddocks and find new guardians if we needed to repeat the distasteful process.