by Logan Jacobs
“As you command, Qaar’endoth, my lord,” she cooed in a passable imitation of Florenia’s voice, which was more velvety and had a more aristocratic accent than Lizzy’s own husky tones.
Then the she-wolf curtsied, threw me a wink, and followed Maire out the door.
That left me, Willobee, and the stranger in the hut on our own. Neither of them seemed particularly pleased about it.
“Ed, I know we don’t have much time,” I said. “So while you get what you need from the hut, tell me what I need to know about these ghasts. Besides what you’ve already told me.”
“They, ah… they look like the dead,” he responded as he started grabbing weapons and strapping them on. He also paused for a long swig from a tankard by the hearth. His large reddish nose and rounded gut suggested that he had somewhat of a fondness for drink. “They smell like the dead. Their brains are pretty much dead. But they can move like the living, and all they want to do is eat human flesh.”
“All right, well, how fast do they move?” I asked. “How strong are they? And if they bite you, do you get infected?”
“Yes, you do,” Ed said shortly. “That’s… that’s how Maire and I have lost most of our friends, the ones that reacted the same way to this crisis as us and thought Ferndale was worth making a stand for. And that it was up to us to make that stand, instead of relying on Father Norrell to tell us what useless foolery Hakmut wanted from us next before Hakmut would deign to stop the plague. And I tell you, there’s a lot of them that would scratch that priest’s ass for him if that’s what he told them Hakmut wanted.”
Willobee edged over toward me as he whispered, “Er, I suppose I’d be a liability in any kind of fight like this too, Master? Shall I be joining the princess and the duchess in their reluctant but imperative flight from your side?”
Ed retied his boots as he continued, “So the good ones are gone. I see that as plain as Maire does. But Maire never really liked this place, and I loved it. This is where I was happy with my wife and our children before the plague, and although I will never know that kind of happiness again on this earth, the least I can do now is contest the gods’ decision to completely fuck over this place and show ‘em what I’m really like when they’ve properly pissed me off. So whatever happens to Ferndale, I’m sticking it out to my last breath, even if I’m the last man left standing in a poxy pile of dirt and bones.”
“Which god do you think did this?” I asked.
Ed shrugged. “I don’t know but whichever one it was, fuck him. I hope some other stronger god comes along and chains him up for an eternal torture session.”
“I know the feeling,” I told him. I was really starting to like this guy.
“Anyway,” Ed sighed as he went back to the hearth for one more swig from his tankard. “You also asked about the dead and what they move like. Well, no faster or stronger than when they was living, but no slower or weaker neither, don’t matter what parts of them are ripped open or rotting off. So they don’t fight like warriors, just like farmers, but what makes them terrible is that a knife to the heart or an axe to the skull don’t bother them none, and if they get their teeth in you just once, you’re bound to come down with the plague the next day. So you have to take their heads off first. And then burn them before they get another chance the next night.”
“Lizzy found the pit and brought Elodette with her,” I announced. “We’d better hurry up and join them.”
“How do you know that?” Ed asked in astonishment as he grabbed one last thing, a stout oaken staff leaning by the door. Then he and I pushed our way out the door, with Willobee jingling anxiously behind.
“God, remember?” I said and grinned. “Like Lizzy said.”
“Well, just don’t expect me to scratch your ass,” Ed muttered.
Willobee huffed and puffed as he tried to keep up with us while still weighed down by the chainmail that he insisted on wearing everywhere. We weren’t even moving at my pace, we were moving at the stout and middle-aged although undeniably motivated villager’s.
“Master,” the gnome whimpered, “I hate to be a burden to you. Even more of one than I have already been, that is, by just trying my best to do what I thought you wanted me to do and inadvertently hindering this estimable agrarian from his pyromaniacal precautionary measures in the process. So I was pondering--”
“Willobee, I’d like you to come with us tonight,” I interrupted.
“I, uh, I understand that it’s an all-hands-on-deck kind of night, but, er, my martial prowess is not really what I am most famed for, Master….” the gnome gulped.
“I’d like you to come with us because I’m interested to see whether your slime can dissolve the bodies as well as fire can disintegrate them,” I explained. “I think it’s worth the risk, considering you can’t contract the plague. So just give me a shout if a ghast starts trying to eat you, and I’ll take care of it before it chomps any important parts off, all right?”
“Yes, Master,” Willobee squeaked. I couldn’t recall him ever complaining about being in my service up till that point, but I’m pretty sure I heard him mutter under his breath, “Ten years, just ten years Willobee my lad.”
As we reached the start of the trail beside the giant elm that Ed had mentioned as a marker, I examined the weapons that Ed was wearing. Besides his staff he had a wheat scythe and a meat cleaver hanging from his belt. He also had a shovel strapped to his back. These choices made sense with the facts he had told me about how the ghasts functioned. The staff and the shovel could be used to hold them back from biting distance, and the scythe and the cleaver could be used to remove their heads and put them out of action. Missiles like arrows or throwing stars obviously wouldn’t do any good, since the kinds of mortal wounds that could be inflicted with those weapons couldn’t stop the already-dead. But it seemed to me that what Ed was really missing, if the main threat from these creatures was contagion, was a better form of protection.
“Ed, do you and Maire have some way to make shields?” I asked him. “Especially with a few of us working together, we could hold them in formation, and the ghasts could never touch us. We could spear them from behind the shields and once we had them pinned, we could cut their heads off before they wriggled free.”
“Nah, we tried that with a couple different designs,” the blond villager replied, “but anything that was strong enough to really block a hungry ghast, was too heavy for us to hold up for long, and it made us too slow. I’ve heard about warriors and their shield walls like you’re probably talking about, so I thought of that too, but the problem is we don’t have training like that. We’re just farmers.”
“I could train you how to use a shield,” I offered.
“By the time we got strong and skilled enough to be good at it, the rest of Ferndale would be ashes anyway at this rate,” Ed replied gloomily, and I guessed he had a point there. “But if you’re some kind of elite warrior-- or god, pardon me-- then what are you doing here anyway? Do you just enjoy seeing this sort of thing? Death and despair and disease? Your life was too perfect, and you got bored?”
“He has a noble instinct to rescue those in need,” Willobee piped up. The whole time we were walking I could feel the gnome stewing in resentment bred of fear, but now that Ed’s tone was picking up some evident bitterness directed at me, my little friend seemed to feel the need to come to my defense. “And he never fails at anything he attempts, so you are incredibly fortunate that he has chosen to adopt your otherwise hopeless cause. Very soon, you and every other survivor in Ferndale shall owe him a decade of faithful servitude and your undying gratitude.”
“A decade of servitude?” Ed exclaimed in disbelief.
“No, no, that is a gnomish tradition, it does not apply here,” I said quickly. “No one in Ferndale will owe me anything for my help. The reason I came here was an oracle’s prophecy. She told me that my quest would fail unless I was able to save Ferndale. She didn’t know there was a plague going on here, actually I don’
t think she even knew that the village existed in her conscious mind, but it looks like she couldn’t have been more right about Ferndale needing help. Not that you and Maire hadn’t been doing a good job before I got here. It just seems like… a bigger job than two can handle.”
“That’s for damn sure,” Ed sighed. “Well, whatever odd reasons you might have, I guess I’m grateful you’re here.”
“Hold your gratitude till I’ve actually accomplished something,” I laughed.
“All right,” the ruddy blond man agreed. “I’m not grateful you felt the need to bring a meddling gnome, though.” He turned to glower at Willobee.
Willobee scowled back. “My master and I do not require the gratitude of some ignorant poxy farmer.”
I sighed. Willobee was clearly too terrified right now to even make an effort at his usual charm, and I guessed it probably didn’t help motivate the gnome that Ed was neither female nor beautiful.
Then a four-hundred-pound tawny wolf charging through the woods almost knocked all three of us over. Lizzy skidded to a stop and morphed into her naked woman form, and her soft skin glowed in the light of the setting sun.
“What the fuck?” Ed yelled.
Lizzy ignored him and told me breathlessly, “They’re right back there! Another two hundred feet. I brought Elodette over, she’s with your other-- oh. You already know that.”
I smiled, partly because I was happy to see Lizzy, and partly because I was amused by her obvious embarrassment over her mistake of thinking of my two selves as having separate minds, compared to her complete lack of embarrassment about standing around without a single stitch of clothing. Not that she had anything to hide; every inch of her was a pert, squeezable reminder of why life was well worth fighting for. Nonetheless, I sure was glad that I didn’t have to deal with a similar inconvenience when I doubled myself.
“Great job, Lizzy,” I told her, even though my other body had already told her pretty much the same when she met me at the pit with the warrior centaur, sans the princess centaur and human woman. “I knew I could count on you to get it done. Getting rid of Ilandere and Florenia was the hard part, I’m sure.”
“Now for the easy part,” Lizzy grinned wolfishly. “Ripping up some rotting meat and showing Maire my other body. Other girls are always jealous of it.”
She promptly morphed back into her lupine form and charged off toward the village.
“Don’t worry about it, she does that a lot,” I told the flabbergasted Ed.
Two hundred feet later, I saw my other self and Elodette standing together by the recently filled burial pit, courtesy of Willobee.
After my conversation with Ed on the way over, my other self had warned Elodette about not wasting her arrows. Instead, we had cut up my surcoat and used the leather to wrap her anvil-like hooves to provide her with a layer of protection against infection while stomping ghasts. I had also given her a sword. As much as the black centaur usually liked to complain about my decisions, I had noticed that she actually complained the least when we got into any real danger. Not only because she was too busy taking action to do much talking, but because she didn’t want her grumbling to be mistaken for cowardice.
So the fierce brunette actually sounded a little impatient when she remarked, “I thought the ghasts would show up before you got here for a second time, Vander. What’s taking them so long? Lizzy’s been a wolf for ages.”
Lizzy, I knew, had been a wolf for about six minutes, which gave me a hint that maybe Elodette was feeling a touch more nervous than her bold attitude indicated.
“Maybe they like the way I buried them, and they’ve decided to stay buried this time,” Willobee suggested hopefully.
“I’ll bet you a barrel of honey mead that that’s not it, Willobee, but I hope I lose,” I said as I drew Polliver. I did wonder if there was a way to make the ghasts grab Polliver’s hilt and burn themselves up more conveniently. But I didn’t want my friends and I to have to fight giant self-guided fireballs instead of corpses, and I didn’t want to end up setting the woods on fire either if I couldn’t keep the ghasts’ movements under control, so that was an experiment that would have to wait for morning. For now, I’d stick to a good old-fashioned beheading.
My other self was armed with two ordinary swords. They were my last ones left from the bandits that attacked Nillibet’s order, besides the one that Elodette was borrowing. The rest I had either lost during re-assimilations or I had lent out to my friends. One was more of a falchion than a proper sword, and the other was a bastard-sword. Badly mismatched in both weight and length as they were, it would be extremely awkward to dual wield them, so I would normally have left one sheathed. In this situation, however, we would be surrounded on all sides by unskilled opponents whose only weapons were their lethal teeth, and the critical strategy was not speed or precision, but just maximizing the number of opponents that I could hold out of biting range at once. Besides, this would be great practice for when I could get my hands on a set of twin swords, and then it would feel comparatively easy to pull off some truly flashy shit.
The shape of the pit that we surrounded was pretty obvious from the different color and texture of the recently disturbed dirt. It was unevenly shaped but about ten or fifteen feet across in every direction, and I didn’t know how deep. It must have taken Willobee a long time to fill in, and it must have taken Ed so much longer than that to dig in the first place.
“Er, Qaar’endoth?” Ed asked me.
“Yes?” I replied.
“That guy,” he whispered as he glanced over nervously at my other self, who was swapping the falchion and the bastard-sword back and forth between my hands out of indecision as to which side to weigh down. Dominant side would make me more effective, but I didn’t really want to exacerbate the slight strength imbalance between the two sides that I’d been working on correcting. “He looks an awful lot like you. Is he, er, your twin or something?”
I normally would have answered, “No, I am me,” from my other mouth, but I thought the middle-aged villager probably already had enough reasons to feel uneasy right now, so I kept my other mouth shut and just replied, “Something like that. I’ll explain later. Don’t worry, he’s good to have around in a fight.”
Then we all cringed as a bloodcurdling gnomish squeal stabbed into our eardrums from behind the tree where Willobee had apparently hidden himself.
That alerted the rest of the group to look around for its cause, which unsurprisingly turned out to be a hand clawing its way through the dirt.
Unsurprising in the sense that Ed and Maire had already explained to me that their plague dead had a bad habit of coming back, so on an intellectual level, I expected it to happen. That’s not to say that the actual sight of it happening didn’t still deliver a gut punch of horror and a visceral sense of absolute wrongness.
After the split second that it took me to process the sight of it, I lunged forward and chopped the hand off with my bastard-sword. The matching one burst out right beside the stump and clawed for its unseen opponent, and I amputated it with my falchion. As much as was practical, I intended to keep alternating reps.
By then the loose dirt was churning with re-animated body parts as the dead all around us emerged from their unwanted grave.
“Willobee, you owe me a fuckton of honey mead!” I yelled loudly enough for him to hear from behind his tree as I swiped off a grayish-purple pustule-specked head. Its remaining hair was so stringy that I didn’t trust it to hold the weight of the head, so I grabbed it by the ear in order to fling it off into the woods. I knew Ed had said the ghasts’ bodies and heads could rejoin themselves eventually, and I didn’t want to make that process any easier for any of them.
Elodette was trying her best to pound the ghasts back into their grave. She reared up over one of them that had managed to wrench himself out up to the waist and slammed back down so that one of her leather-wrapped hooves crunched straight through his chest and left a foot-deep depression in the earth
below him. Then she whirled around to kick another ghast so hard that its head flew off, hit a tree trunk, and burst open like an overripe melon.
The ghast with the hoof-shaped hole through his chest pried himself back out of the dirt and lunged for one of her hind legs. I lopped off his outstretched arms at the elbows first so that he couldn’t reach the centaur with his diseased hands. Then I scissored off his head from behind between the falchion and the bastard-sword. I managed to apply fairly symmetrical force, but the falchion had a much sharper edge, so the cut ended up being lopsided anyway due to the poor weapons-maintenance habits of the bastard-sword’s original owner. The rate at which I tended to cycle through weapons didn’t give my selves much incentive to get out the whetstone very often.
By this time, the ghasts whose heads we hadn’t managed to sever yet had made it all the way out of the grave. There were about ten of them down, and fifteen remaining. Some of the fifteen were badly damaged, not only by the plague but by my team’s efforts. Nothing we did to the rest of their bodies stopped them from trying to get at us unless their spinal cords happened to be severed in the process.
Ed impaled a ghast with his staff, and then almost got bitten when it managed to wrench the staff back out of its chest before he could reach its neck with his cleaver. But I slammed the staff back in place, and pierced deeper into the earth that time, and finished the task with my sword.
Elodette kicked a young female ghast’s knee in so that it jutted backward, and yet it continued to stagger toward the centaur, until Ed came up from behind with his shovel, knocked it down, and stabbed at it wildly until he managed to hack its head off. I swung at a dead little boy’s neck with my falchion, but since the edge was at this point padded with a glob of rotting flesh, it just knocked him over instead of cutting him. So I spun back in the other direction and slashed him in half with my bastard-sword as he fell, but since the bastard-sword had been held in a lower position, the bisection occurred at the waist. The short legs continued kicking, and both halves continued trying to drag themselves toward me until I corrected my mistake.