As
the chamber door thudded against its post and the metal latch clicked into its
groove, Reetsle Baggershaft had his blue and brown eye fixed upon the floor.
Some might have thought him studying knotholes that resembled faces, or seeking
coins between the planks, but he wasn’t engaged in either of those activities.
Reets kept his eyes upon the floor because
of the man who’d just left the room, the man who ranked as captain in the
Jashian military and who was currently leading the investigation into the
happenings. Reets couldn’t stand the sight
of him.
Obviously, humans and halflings had different
standards for masculinity, but upon one standard the two races tended to agree—beardedness—and
it was there that Reets found the captain lacking. Women couldn’t grow beards
and men could, so there you had it. Women were to have clean cheeks, men were
to have shaggy cheeks, and any deviation from the standard was different and
wrong and subject to social sanctions of the severest degree.
And yet, this man—quote,
unquote—who just left the room had one of the smoothest, cleanest faces that Reets
had ever seen. And worse than that, this man had somehow been allowed to
ascend the social and military ranks of the kingdom without the slightest bit
of obstruction.
In his homeland of Erinthalmus, Reets knew
that a halfling with a face like that would have been beaten mercilessly,
dragged to the edge of the village, and then tossed out on his ear. And had
they found this same halfling wearing elk-skin boots—the kind of soft-skinned
leather used in nurseries to swaddle infants—they’d have beat him for that, too.
But Reets didn’t need to despise the good
captain for his looks alone. He was perfectly willing—and able—to despise him for his actions as well. Take these lackluster
reports for example. What exactly was Reets and the council to do with the sort
of ignoramus nonsense the captain was bringing back? Typically, in an
investigation, an officer went into the field to resolve questions about
an incident, but not the fancy-man. He came back with a full report on what he didn’t
know, what he hadn’t found.
What really infuriated Reets, however—more
so than fancy’s abysmal performance in the field—was the fact that Reetlse had known
this would happen. And not only had he known it would happen, he had warned
his fellow advisors that it would happen, had told them outright that unless
the mission was to find an ale skin in a brothel house they were sending the
wrong soldier.
And how had they responded?
Yes, Reetsle,
they had said. We are aware of his scouting deficiencies, they
had said. But his ability to scout isn’t really the issue, is it?
Ain’t it? Reets
had said. I thought we was lookin into them happenin’s?
Well, Reetsle, they
had said, if you’d been paying attention in our last meeting, instead of
pacing the room and counting the splinters in the floorboards, you’d know that
the happenings are of a secondary concern and that the health of the
magistrate is our primary concern.
That had been Mums. Only
Mums dared to call Reets by his full name, an act—in Reets’ halfling country of
Erinthalmus—akin to discussing a bowl movement at the supper table.
But what did he expect? Mums was a stupid
titan cow from the Dead Lands of Igus and he’d learned long ago to ignore
anything that spewed from her stupid cow-like mouth. If she wanted to call him
by his full name, let her. If she wanted to play blind-cow and pretend the fancy-man
had hidden worth—‘specially after hearin that goat-puke of a report he’d jus
laid on us—then she was one seriously damaged cow and Reets was better off
bypassing the fancy-issue and pressing on to the larger matter at hand, which
was the amelioration of the happenings and the restoration of the kingdom.
Because whether or not the big-mouth titan
wanted to admit it, fretting over the king’s health made absolutely no sense
when the kingdom itself was crumpling out from under them.
Meeting the far wall of the bedchamber,
Reetlse wheeled back the way he’d come and said, “Did I not tell yeh
this would happen? Did I not warn yeh about the man?” He limped along on
his uneven legs and let his words reverberate. “Missin skin. Missin
soldiers…Bunch’a giant handprints in the soil.” He shook his misshapen head.
“That boy’s cockamamie reports ain’t nothin but murder on the ears—An’ yeh
all know it.”
He hobbled along on his twisted feet and waited
for one of his colleagues to offer their support. But what he heard instead was
a litany of other gutless sounds: One of them sipping nosily at her disgusting beverage,
another snoring raucously at the ceiling, the last showing his disproval by
making no sound at all.
Cowards,
he thought, detouring from his circuitous route and stopping before the
furniture for which the chamber was named. He rose up on his crooked toes and
peered across the tangled sheets of the mattress.
“I doan’ reckon we need to
hear no more’a Janu’ery’s forked tongue,” Reets said, using the fancy-man’s
proper name and pronouncing it Jan-yery, despite the innumerable times
he’d been corrected by both captain and council. “I reckon it’s purty-much
clear what needs doin’.”
In the shadows of one poorly-lit corner,
the slurping noises came to a halt and the hidden slurper said, in a voice that
flowed across the muddled, medicine-stinking air like audible streams of milk
and honey, “And what, pray tell, would that be, my good Reetsle?”
“We go to war,” Reets barked. “We mobilize
them troops.”
Shifting her weight in the gloom, Mums
said, “Mobilize them against what, Reetsle dear?”
Reets sighed, pulling his pipe and leaf
pouch from the pocket of his shirt. “You heard Janu’ery same as me, Mums—An’
doan’ bother tellin me most’a what he said ain’t worth a bucket of goat swill,
cause I ah’ready know it—” he pulled the ties of the pouch free with his teeth
and dumped the contents in the bowl of his pipe “—but puke or no puke, what
come through loud’n clear is that it ain’t just rivers and sheep no more. Our
boys’ve been attacked.”
Mums parted the shadows of the corner with
an enormous shaggy hand and set what appeared to be a steaming bucket of liquid
on the floor. “That does appear to be the case,” she said, sounding
disappointed. “But again, Reetsle, did you happen to catch a description
of the attacker?”
“Nope,” Reets said, veering to the wall
and plucking a candle from the sconce. “E’ry time we try an’ send our boys to get
one…,” he tipped his pipe to the flame and sucked a yellow stripe of fire down
the bowl, “…you an’ your big cow’s mouth gets in the way.”
Mums hummed thoughtfully as she pretended
to process this, but Reetlse was not fooled. They had covered this ground
before—several times before—and she knew exactly what she was doing.
After awhile, she said, “So this is reconnaissance you’re advocating.”
And after that, “I’m sorry, Reetsle, I thought you mentioned war.”
“I did,” Reets said, setting the candle back
in its bracket and reminding himself that it wasn’t Mums’ fault she was a
gutless coward. She was a titan, after all, and like all titans from Igus,
she’d been raised in a culture of cowardice and taught to think without consulting
their spines. “Yeh cain’t call it recon, Mumsy, not no more, not when people’s
dyin. When they sta—”
“Dying—Eh? What? What’s that?”
The voice was weak and raspy and riddled
with panic, the sort of voice you’d expect from a desiccated corpse suddenly
spooked from its grave. But as disturbing as that image might be, Reets did not
leap for cover or spin for battle. He simply kept on limping, and wishing very
hard that the owner of the voice would go back to sleep and allow the
deliberation to continue.
That did not happen.
When Reets reached the far end of the room
and performed his about-face, he could see the whole of the bedchamber sprawled
before him, complete with tables and chairs, dressers and bureaus, even the
enormous four-poster bed pressed back against the wall.
Sitting in a chair on the other side of
the four-poster—his wrinkled eyes bulging, his white brows raised—was the
oldest living man that the halfling had ever seen. Admittedly, very little of
the old man’s face was visible between his long wispy beard and his tangled head
of hair, but what face was visible looked to be sagging and pale and lined
with wrinkles.
“Did it happen?” the old man asked,
peering from the bedding beside him to the irritated halfling across the room.
“Did he go? Did he?”
“No, Godfry,” Reets sighed, the bowl of
his pipe bouncing up and down. “Everythin’s fine,” he said. “Why not go back to
your book, huh?”
Godfry’s massive brows moved further up
his forehead and his lower jaw began to totter, signs that meant the old man
had no intention of returning to his book. Reets groaned to himself and
continued limping.
Had it been anyone else disregarding the
halfling’s command, Reets might have rushed them or cursed him or at least
waved them an obscene gesture. But with Godfry, Reets knew the blatant
disregard had more to do with the old man’s mind than his manners, so he let
the matter go.
Godfry was, after all, the most senior of
the advisors—well into his nineties, or older—and if that didn’t
contribute to a man’s senility, then Reetsle didn’t know what did. It also
didn’t help matters that Godfry had been a bit of an odd duck even before the amnesia and dementia.
For as far back as Reets could recall, Godfry
had always been fond of those especially thick tomes with the egregiously long words,
the ones with the eye-straining print and absolutely no pictures. Reets had
flipped through one once, and it had taken the rest of the day to rid himself
of the headache it had caused. And yet, every time he saw Godfry, the old man
had one with him; the gardens, the council, headed to the privy.
In Reets’ estimation, it was no wonder the
man’s mind had finally gone. Every halfling knew that the brain was just like the
body, and that if you overused it—or, in this case, abused it—it would
eventually wear down.
But at the same time, Reets had often
wondered if aspects of Godfry’s mental illness had not been in place even before
the tomes. Because surely it would have taken several decades of reading before
a human mind deteriorated, and Godfry had been rumored to wear those ghastly
outfits even in the days of his youth.
Tonight, for example—after being summoned
to the king’s bedchamber for yet another crucial meeting regarding the happenings—the
local representative for Jashandar came sporting sunset-orange robes with tiny,
red fishes sown into the fabric. The robes hadn’t seemed inappropriate to
Godfry then, as he came hobbling into the room with his giant-sized book under
one arm, and they didn’t seem inappropriate to him now, as he gave the wadded
covers of the bed another worried glance and then turned his attention to the
halfling, who refused to make eye-contact.
“I could have sworn someone mentioned dying,” Godfry said, watching Reets
hobbled across the floor. “Wasn’t you, Reets?” But again, the halfling gave the
old man the cold shoulder, keeping his head down and his eyes unfocused.
Giving up on the halfling, Godfry swung
his bushy white head to the corner. “Mums,” he called. “Mums, did you hear
something about dying?”
“No, Godfry dear,” the titan lied.
“Really,” the oldest of the advisors said,
twisting his enormous beard to the door and squinting at the stooped figure who
sat there. “Balthus?” he cried. “Bal, did you say or…did you hear anything
about someone dying?”
Like the halfling before him, the hunched
figure by the door did not reply. He just sat there and continued slumping in
his chair, looking for-all-the-world like a drooping sculpture of mashed potatoes,
one hand on the armrest—perhaps to hold himself up—and the other on the crooked
line of his cane.
“Can you hear me, Bal?” Godfry called,
leaning forward and brushing back the hair on one side of his head. When the
stooped man still made no reply, Godfry turned to the shadowy corner,
then the hobbling halfling, and found that neither of them was speaking to him either.
Reets was praying to Rendel again and
Mums, more than likely, was chanting to her fates, both of them waiting
patiently for the eldest of the advisors to notice the book in his hands, lower
his face to the pages, and then slump heavily to one side.
When the old man’s snoring finally
resumed, Reets said, “Ah’right, where was we?”
“I believe,” Mums clarified, her voice
wafting from the darkness, “you were fabricating an enemy for us to declare war
upon.”
Reets snorted. “Ain’t me doin’ it,” he said.
“It’s your boy, fancy, there. He’s the one makin up dead soldiers and marks in the
soil. I’m jus tryin to fix a problem.”
“By making it worse?”
“No, by—”
“I would have thought,” Mums interrupted,
“that after the tragedy that befell us at the end of the Lathian war, you’d
have learned your lesson. But since you apparently have not, please allow me to
reiterate that in warfare,” she said, sounding rather smug, “it isn’t always
the enemy who suffers.”
Reets rolled his eyes. “Yeah, I knows
that, woman. But I also knows we’re sufferin ah’ready. Or did yeh miss
the bit where that feller got himself skinned alive?”
“I did not,” Mums answered, “but as awful
as that is, Reetsle, until we have more information about the skinner, I
don’t see the purpose of mobilizing our forces and putting even more lives at
ri—”
“Muminofilous...”
Reets missed a step and staggered, so
taken aback he was by the sound of that voice, not so much because of the
voice’s low and breathy tone, but because of the voice’s unexpected emergence
in matters of Jashian counsel and governance.
An’ he liked to never cut people off,
Reets thought, turning so he could see both advisers at the same time, the
outline of a Mum’s mane in the corner and the silhouette of Bal’s hunched back
by the door. He watched as the two stared at each other for what he considered
to be a very undiplomatic length of time.
Around them, the candles
flickered and Godfry snored.
“Muminofilous...,” the stooped figure
breathed, “…what game do you play?”
Mums lifted her steaming bucket from the
floor and withdrew it to the shadows. “Why, Counselor Sneel,” she said,
brightly, sipping at her drink, “I believe sitting over there by the door has
severely affected your ability to hear.”
Balthus leaned over the head of his cane,
chapped lips peeling back to reveal rows of bent and yellowed teeth. He wasn’t
smiling. He was simply parting his jaws so as to extend his yeast-coated tongue
to his dry and flaking lips.
“It is not an issue of hearing…,” he said,
“…but an issue of believing.”
“Balthus, dear,” Mums said, feigning offense,
“are you accusing me of dissembling?”
Still licking at his lips, the
representative from Lathia said that he was.
Mums drew a deep breath. “Well then,
Counselor Sneel, if that is the case, then perhaps you wouldn’t mind
elucidating for us the source of my mendacity.”
Balthus withdrew his tongue. “As I
understand…,” he sighed, reaching inside the pocket of his gray sleeping
attire, “…the Mela is defiled…the Leresh is dry.” He withdrew a small square of
cloth—originally white, but now stained red and brown—and cleared his left
nostril therein. “The golden one is missing…,” he said, “…our livestock are hunted.”
He cleared the right nostril, then wiped at his nose. “An element of risk…,” he
said at last, “…is already upon us.”
Oh,
he’s got’er now, Reets cheered, spinning to the corner.
“And if I concur, Counselor Sneel,” the
titan asked cordially, “what then do you purpose?”
Balthus stared impassively—appeared to
have gone to sleep with his eyes open—then said, “I know of laborers to the
south…men of skills and specialties.”
“Or send our troops,” Reets
interrupted. “Doan’ forget our boys, Mums.”
“No, we certainly wouldn’t want to do
that,” Mum said, dryly. “But let me see if I have this. These men—these mercenaries
and soldiers—they’ll be entering the Bottoms, will they?” Without
waiting for an answer, she said, “Well, naturally, they will. That is where
the Mela flows and they will want to inspect every league of those banks
if they hope to locate the infection.”
Reets cleared his throat. “Well, I
reckon—”
“That’s assuming, of course,” Mums
continued, “that the impurities in the river have fallen in from above. They
very well may have infiltrated from below, which is a reasonable possibility
considering what crawls through the slime of the Bottoms. But of course, there
is no evidence the cause is even located in the Bottoms. It might very well lie
several leagues to the east, in the uncharted lands of the Nameless.”
“Or it might be in the Sway,” Reets
said, rolling his pipe across his mouth. “You doan’ know.”
“That is true,” Mums agreed, “but even if
it is located in the Sway, and even if your men redeem it overnight,
what of the other happenings? What of the Leresh?”
“What of it?” Reets barked. “It’s jus
clo—”
“It is not clogged,” Mums assert.
“Think for a moment, Reetsle. If it were clogged—if a tree or obstruction had
fallen across the shallows—it would have dwindled gradually. The debris and
silt would have choked it over time. But as we both know, the water levels of
the Leresh dropped over night. They dropped as swiftly as the waters of the
Dell rose and as swiftly as the waters of Blue Hole turned warm and filmy. If
this is not the work of yet another cave, I will be very much surprised.”
“Well, get ready fer a surprise then,
woman, cause Serit din’t see no cave.”
“In the Promise, no,” she
corrected, “but no search was made of the terrain to the north, the Harriun or
the Dead Lands
“I reckon we could…,” Reets trailed off,
searching the floorboards. “We could irr’gate, cou’nt we?”
“And if the chasm is a league wide and,
say, two across?”
Watching the wood knots pass beneath his
feet, Reets struggled to imagine a split that large, let alone find a
solution for running water across it.
From the vicinity of the door, the Lathian
counselor suggested an aqueduct.
“A league wide?” Mums challenged,
her lightless corner rustling with movement.
“Well…maybe,” Reets said.
“No,” Mums countered, “there is no maybe.
A league of aqueduct is structurally impossible, so let us not waste time on
fantasy. Tell me, instead, of the golden one. I want to know how you plan to
corral the beast.”
Reets glanced at the door, but Balthus
offered no assistance, only blank stares. Dropping his eyes to the floor, the
halfling said, “Well, we cain’t rightly say ‘til after tomorrow, woman. We gota
have a report ‘fore we go to plan anythin.”
“Oh, no we do not. You were the one who
opened this discussion by pointing how we didn’t need another report. I
believe your exact words had something along the lines of goat puke, but
the essence was that we need not endure another failed report from Captain
Janusery and that we were, in fact, going to war. So, please, Reetsle, share
with us the war strategy necessary for procuring a man-eating old one.”
Reets limped in silence. “I doan’ know,”
he said, speaking the purest of truth. “We could lure it, I reckon.”
“Lure it with what?” she demanded.
“The only things the creature has ever showed an interest in were gold and
prairie cows, and—I’m afraid—you have access to neither—Which,” she said
testily, “brings me to the last happening your men shall be loosed upon: the
tracking of the Sway killer. So tell me…,” she paused for a fine sip of the
brew, “…how is it that your men plan to track and kill a creature that cannot
be seen?”
Reets shot a crooked finger in the air. “Here
now!” he protested. “Yeh cain’t say that no more. We got prints.”
“Not in the east, you don’t,” Mums
countered. “The handprints were waged against Jashandar’s finest, who—by your
definition—can take care of themselves. No, Reetsle, I’m talking about our poor,
defenseless livestock in the southeast.”
Reets watched his boots for awhile, then
said, “We could move a few of the boys across the way.”
“And do what?” Mums asked. “Look
for clues that our finest scout could not find? And those were your
words, were they not, Reetlse? Did you not label young Jaysh as the finest
scout in all of Jashandar?”
“I did,” Reets said, the feeling of
painting himself into a corner rushing to his chest, “but there’s…if there were
more of em…more heads and eyes…that’d help.” He was nodding now, pleased with his
own improvisational thinking.
Mums sighed. “Honestly, Reetlse, I have
issue with that,” she said, “for the same reason I’d have issue with you flooding
the Sway with blind men.” She took another sip. “But for the sake of argument, which
army did you purpose to send?”
“Which arm—?” Reets threw up his
hands and spun on her, opening his mouth and preparing to scream that she knew
good-and-bloody-well what army he purposed to send. Before he could, though,
the adviser from Lathia cut him off.
“Muminofilous…,” the Lathian croaked, “…we
are all aware that the army withers.”
“A fourth its regular size, is that
not so, Blathus?”
Ignoring the loaded question, the
counselor said, “But this is not a question of man power…for if the general
cannot spare his men…I am sure there are men to be hired.”
“Yes, I’m sure there are,” the titan
conceded. “I’m sure we could invite the whole of Lathia and set them up in
tents, but if they know as little as our good Captain of tracking and hunting,
then I’m afraid you’re still pursuing a dead-end street.”
“Dead!” came a cry from the
vicinity of the bed, this one followed by a startled snort and a flurry of
pages. “Did he go?”
