by Kevin Hearne
As Argabella’s song continued, the Dark Lord Toby’s wispy beard waved like the tentacles of an irascible squid and his clutching fingers spewed green lightning into the sky, which arced toward the giant and was very impressive for a half second until it turned into a flurry of pointed almost-baguettes that dealt the giant approximately zero damage.
“I was kind of hoping,” Fia said, “that you’d hit him with something a bit deadlier than bread!”
“That wasn’t what I intended!” Lord Toby protested. “My battle casting is adversely affected by stress!”
“So it’s useless in an actual battle is what I hear you saying.”
“Well, it’s not like our bard is helping! Everybody knows songs only help if they rhyme, and this one doesn’t even have a chorus!”
“They didn’t teach me that at bard school!” Argabella wailed, forgetting her song altogether. “You’d think they would have mentioned that on the first day!”
And then they had no more time to argue, for the giant arrived and reached out with a six-foot-long hand to scoop up the seven-foot tall Fia, leaving only her head visible in his gnarled and knobby yellow-ochre fist. Argabella stopped playing her lute and cried out as the giant’s mouth yawned wide and he brought his hand toward those massive choppers and she could see down his throat, a dank, Moistful cavern into which Fia would go spelunking and never return. The mighty Fia, who had been so sure that she could handle anything, screamed defiance at the giant as she was helpless to do anything else, her arms pinned and her sword useless, and Argabella’s heart screeched as her vision dimmed, her rabbit psyche unable to handle the horror of it all as she waited to hear huge teeth chomping down—
* * *
Argabella woke staring at the sky with her entire back uncomfortably wet and stinging a bit.
“What?” she said, trying to make her mind and mouth work. “Where? Wet? Why?” She began to panic and thrash as she realized her arms and legs wouldn’t move. She was trussed up like a holiday hen.
“Oh, welcome back to the land of consciousness,” Gustave said. Argabella turned her head and saw the billy goat lying next to her in a thin layer of pale orange liquid, his legs tied together like a man bun. Beyond him she could see hints of the others—including Fia!—also tied up and lying in an enormous ceramic baking dish. Even the oxen, Moxie and Doxy, were tied up at the far end and mooing dejectedly. “You woke up just in time to be cooked up,” he added. Clearly the goat had not run away fast enough.
“Cooked?” she squeaked.
“Grilled, actually,” a voice rumbled from above. It was a deep, rolling, scratchy voice, as if three barrels of port had smoked four thousand cigars and wanted to brag about it. “Over an apple wood fire. There are subtleties of flavors smoked into the meat that I find superior to oak. And the orange-lemon marinade in which you currently soak will add a top note of insouciant citrus as I crunch through your bones and slurp out your internal organs.”
“Will there be mustard?” Poltro asked, which seemed like a waste of a question to Argabella. She could have asked to be released, for example, or begged for mercy, but had instead inquired about condiments.
“Why would there be mustard?” the deep voice said, a touch of querulousness in its tone.
“We saw a sign on the road that said you ate a lot of people with mustard,” the rogue explained.
“Oh, yes, I did do that once, years ago. First I ran them through the meat grinder with spices and made a festive bratwurst out of them, and the only way to enjoy a bratwurst is with some fresh sauerkraut and mustard, yes? But it’s foolish to assume I’d eat the same thing every time. When you have been eating as long as I have, you must become a gourmet or perish of boredom.”
“Ah, that’s wisdom right there,” Lord Toby said. “I know what you mean.”
“Do you?” A huge hovering triangle of flesh heaved into Argabella’s sight, blocking her view of the sky, with two tremendous black, round, hair-lined orifices at the base and, falling from them, a wintry cascade of whiskers that split across an unseen upper lip. The mass of flesh angled down until she could see the horrible pitiless eye sockets regarding them from the boiled corncob head of the giant.
“Well, perhaps I should ask first: How long have you been eating, exactly?” Toby continued, as if it were perfectly ordinary to have a conversation with a monstrous giant while marinating to improve one’s tenderness.
“I have been eating for uncounted tens of thousands of years.”
“Huh. A smidge longer than me, then,” Toby admitted. “Still, I understand the impulse to seek variety in one’s diet.”
“That’s surprisingly empathetic,” the giant said. “I don’t get much of that from my food. For I must eat you whether I wish to or not. Which is not to say I don’t wish to, because I do. It’s just that I have no choice. You have seen my brothers and sisters, yes?”
“Uh, I don’t think so?”
“The pillars. The stones. What do you humans call them now?”
“The Titan Toothpicks.”
The giant sucked his teeth and winced. “Oh, that’s a terrible name. And I thought the God Straws was bad! Well, that’s what happens to me if I don’t eat: I turn to stone like my family before me. A beautiful, sparkly, many-colored stone, but dead and sadly hairless. I used to have a fantastic head of hair, you know, about twenty thousand years ago, but now all I have left are my eyebrows and the mustache.”
“I might be able to whip up a handy tonic—” Toby began, but the giant cut him off.
“No, no, never mind that! There’s no use trying to bargain or beg for your life. There’s nothing you can say that will make me act against the interests of my own survival. Hair today, gone tomorrow, you know. So little food comes this way anymore. Better that we have a nice chat while I prepare side dishes, and then I promise to kill you quickly with a nice pinch to the skull before throwing you on the grill.”
“What’s your name, sir, if you don’t mind me asking?” Poltro asked.
“I am known by many names, some of them intended to be less than kind. Nostrildamus is a favorite of the local assorted cretins, as is Nebuchadnoser, Noseph of Nosareth, Nosy McHonker, Booger McSchnozz, Beaky McSnotlocker, and Lord of the Sneeze. But my given name is Faktri, and the songs and tales about my life that I like best call me Ol’ Faktri in that familiar way, you know, wherein one is thought of with affection, but also implying that I have been around a long time, which is a truth. I knew mountains around here when they were but young hills. I smelled the world when it was in diapers and remember well that terrible day when it became ill and shat out humans.”
Argabella saw Faktri daintily move a twenty-pound bag of onions between thumb and forefinger across her vision, then heard him dump the lot onto a cutting board next to the dish in which they marinated. An unseen knife began to chop them.
“Wow. If I wasn’t already tied up and horizontal, I’d fall over with revelation,” Gustave said. “Wow, wow, wow! You know what I wish, Fia? I wish that Pooboy was still alive and with us right now. I would have loved to see his reaction to learning that he was actually poo.”
That prompted Poltro to ask, “Are you speaking metaphorically, Ol’ Faktri? Because if we humans are the boom-boom of a baby Pell, sir, I’m wondering why you’d want to eat us.”
“I’m wondering where the boom-boom came from,” Fia said. “I mean, where in the world were you putting these diapers? And who made the diapers, because they had to be pretty big if they’re going to fit a planet-sized backside, right? And now that Pell’s grown up and not using diapers, where’s all the boom-boom going?”
Argabella thought Fia’s questions only raised more. “And how’d you clean it all up?” she asked. “You’d need to divert a river at the very least, and then maybe you catapulted some payloads of baby powder in there. You had to do something, right? Because ch
afing is real.”
“Hey, if Pell plooped humans when she was sick,” Toby said, struck by inspiration, “there’s no telling what she could squeeze out if we just gave her some mayonnaise we left out too long in the sun. A turtlehog, maybe! And if we gave her some dodgy oysters, whoa dang, then stand back, because here come the rhinogators! This could be amazing!”
Ol’ Faktri stopped chopping onions, and his mustache drooped, indicating that a frown had formed under the frothy waves of hair, and a deep cleft of worry yawned between his eyes. “I was speaking metaphorically, of course,” he said, and a chorus of disappointed groans greeted this news. He slowly shook his massive head and returned to his onions. “I’m disheartened. Really, I was hoping for more elevated discourse than this.”
“Elevated—oh, because you’re a giant!” Poltro chuckled. “Good one, sir! Ha ha!”
“I’m not really accustomed to high society, but I can try to accommodate you,” Toby said.
“That’s going to be a tall order for me,” Gustave added.
“I’m not much for lofty words,” Argabella said, feeling quite liberated by her slyness. “I don’t have a towering intellect.”
Ol’ Faktri sighed and raised a single wild hedge of an eyebrow at Fia. “Well, what about you?”
Fia made gentle sloshing sounds as she shook her head in the marinade. “I got nothing. I hate tall jokes, too.”
“Hmmf. Hurr hurr. Aha ha!” Faktri’s mustache shook with laughter, and he threw his head back to laugh some more, affording them a spectacular view of his nostrils. It gave Argabella an idea. While the others tittered and giggled along, amused by Ol’ Faktri’s laugh, the bard quietly sang a song she thought might have a better chance of working than telling him to ignore his hunger, as she’d tried before. Her subtle magic wasn’t very effective at changing the fundamental nature of things, but encouraging what was already there? While rhyming? That she could do.
“Giant nose of Nostrildamus
Be tickled as if by buzzing bees;
Let loose your juicy phlegm
In a most mighty sneeze.
Sneeze, giant, sneeze!
Just like a violent breeze
Give those giant lungs a squeeze
And sneeze, giant, sneeze!”
The party was all sharing a mad sort of laugh together, and Poltro commented that this was a much more agreeable way to die than the shrieking business Lord Toby had predicted, when something horrific happened in less than a second: Ol’ Faktri was seized with the involuntary compulsion to sneeze. And as sometimes happens when a sneeze surprises even the sneezer, there was no time to cover one’s mouth. And as sometimes more catastrophically happens, a glob of mucus was ejected with not insignificant speed from the back of the sneezer’s throat. And said glob—a giant glob, it hardly needs to be said—first splattered every single occupant of the baking dish, displacing much of the orange-lemon marinade, then settled down upon them like a blanket, warm and moist and a pale green that Argabella would have thought pretty on most anything else but a layer of mucus resting upon her torso.
And then there were many howls and lamentations. Even Moxie and Doxy, the most placid of ruminants, became raucous oxen under the sudden application of Ol’ Faktri snot.
Far too late, the giant covered his mouth, and his brow curdled into an expression of deep embarrassment.
“Oh, no! Oh, my!” he said. “My marinade—my luncheon! I’m so sorry! Oh, no! Ew, gross!”
“Oh, really?” Fia shouted. “Gross? Ya think?”
Faktri made a retching noise as his gorge rose. His pimpled, cobbled eyelids closed as he reached out and scooped up the baking dish. The sky whirled in Argabella’s vision, the tops of the Titan Toothpicks briefly making an appearance, and then her stomach got left behind as they dropped precipitously before being upended onto warm sand, which immediately made everything worse.
The howls and lamentations grew louder.
“Sorry! So sorry. Here! Take your weapons and free yourselves.” Fia’s sword and shears fell from the sky, as did Poltro’s sword and dagger and Argabella’s lute. “I can’t eat you like that. You’re the opposite of delicious now, ugh! Just…go.”
Fia wasted no time. She rolled over to her shears and used them to clip through her twine, then freed everyone else as Ol’ Faktri continued to apologize.
“You can take your oxen and your wagon, but I’m keeping all your food. I really do need to eat something. I’m just not fond of…sandy boogers. It’s always a lovely dinner until…it’s not.”
Gargling and gagging, Ol’ Faktri shook the wagon upside down, pocketed everything that fell out, and shambled away, opening the distance that he had once closed until he was nothing more than a far-off shimmering stone pillar, quivering a bit more than his fellows and possibly still horking. Argabella, although freed, still sat on the sand, dumbfounded and slimy.
“Need a hand?” Fia asked, her face eclipsing the sun as she leaned over and held out a slime-covered mitt. Argabella gladly took it and stood, her fingers lingering in Fia’s strong grip.
“Thanks,” she murmured with a smile.
She was about to say something entirely foolish when Poltro shouted, “Cor, enough of this rot! I’m for the ocean, I am!”
Before she could bolt, however, Lord Toby stepped on her long, black cloak. The rogue landed on her face in the sand and shook herself, looking very much like a sugar-dusted doughnut. “If you look clean, you might also look delicious,” Toby said. “I’d rather live greasy than die tidy. Let’s harness the oxen and hurry to the south while we can.”
Poltro stood and tried and failed to dust off her black equipage. “Fair enough, m’lord. Anything’s better than being eaten by a moldy squash man. Right lucky that he sneezed when he did, weren’t it?”
“Fortunate indeed,” Toby sagely intoned. “Fortuna smiles on our happy band.”
Argabella held her tongue. If they knew she had saved them, they might expect her to do it again, possibly on command. She shot a glance at Gustave. He flashed a goat-lipped grin and winked a yellow goat eye at her. So he had heard her sing that little song but was keeping his mouth shut. What a Sneakful little ungulate.
Argabella winked back at him. She could be Sneakful, too.
They had to travel only half a day before they came to a river in which they could wash off the sand and snot. While the rest of them argued about who should go first, Gustave didn’t wait. He leapt into the river and swam back to shore and shook himself off, then repeated the procedure twice more. It was wide and shallow near the banks, deepening to a swift channel in the center, and there was a ferry platform with no visible ferryman or indeed a ferry. There was, however, a sign that said: IF YOU CAN READ THIS, CONGRATULATIONS! OL’ FAKTRI DIDN’T EAT YOU. FERRY AT DAWN EVERY DAY, RAIN OR SHINE.
“How much is passage, I wonder,” Lord Toby said, and looked at Gustave.
“Hey, don’t look at me, man. I don’t have a purse full of coins. Wouldn’t mind snacking on a purse right now, though. Are you using yours?”
“Purses are for wimps,” Toby sniffed. “I use a fanny pack.”
After they had all washed and set up camp for the evening, the Crepuscular Lord assaulted the sky with fingers of green lightning and dinner fell out of it, wee pillows of steaming soda bread. There was no butter to be had or anything else; Poltro checked behind at least three trees, and there was simply nothing to be hunted. But at least they wouldn’t starve, and Moxie and Doxy had plenty of grass to graze on.
Hunger continued to rankle after they crossed the river as well, for the ferryman turned out to be a rather surly gnome who insisted he had no food to spare. He told them he lived in a fortified burrow with multiple escape routes in case Ol’ Faktri ever decided to wade across the river to eat him and his family and their bewildering brood of tiny yapping dogs.
Gustave didn’t like them. There were twelve or more lined up on the dock, barking incessantly as if they’d never seen an adventuring party.
“Hey, they aren’t waiting around to eat a goat, are they?” Gustave asked.
“They let me know when Nostrildamus is coming,” the gnome explained, tugging nervously on a glorious white beard that Toby eyed enviously. He wore a helmet covered in spikes that glistened with something greasy on the tips, and his armor was likewise tricked out. Those were all poisoned, he claimed, to discourage Faktri from picking him up. “Just don’t touch me and you’ll be fine,” he said.
“So if your dogs are barking right now, how do you know when Faktri is coming?” Gustave asked.
“Oh, they sound different when there’s real danger around. More growly, lots more teeth showing, that kind of thing. And the little red lights on their collars glow. Just one of my little gnomeric inventions.”
“How many people have you ferried across the river this year?” Argabella asked.
“You’re the first in three years, actually.”
“And nobody has crossed going in the other direction?”
“Nope.”
“How do you make a living?”
“I get a stipend from Grinda the Sand Witch down in Malefic Beach. She pays me to work here in case anyone gets past the giant. Says she wants to meet whoever can manage that. So you’re doubly lucky, kids: you aren’t in Faktri’s digestive system right now, and you get to meet Grinda immediately. That’s no small thing.”
Lord Toby frowned. “And why is that?”
“She throws a heck of a party. She’s connected. Loaded. And not just with money. She has some pretty amazing potions. If you want to do anything about those three hairs you have on your chin—” The gnome waved at Toby’s beard with a raised eyebrow.