by Kevin Hearne
Faucon knew his accident was just that, a matter of chance, and taking his anger out on Onni or Kirsi or indeed any gnome would be misguided and unjust, not to mention unmanly. Especially since Onni was doing everything he could to keep Faucon on his feet. The gnome was quite literally trying to restore balance to the situation—and he’d probably never be able to get all that fen out of his beard.
“Hmm. Not much more I can do with the tools at hand except reattach it snugly. But then you’re in the same situation as soon as you stand up. A low-tech solution might work out, though; I should go ahead and make that design adjustment I thought of earlier.” Onni turned to the gryphon. “Gerd, can you ask Gleek if they have any rope or string in those little packs of theirs, and if so, might we use some?”
I can do that. But you should be aware that the Figgish Fen Wyrm approacheth. I too smell what Ugbüt smelled, and it is Not a Good Smell.
Several of the Tym tamarins rummaged around in their packs after Gerd’s request and produced spools of spun swamp-spider silk. Onni used them to fashion a truss by looping around Faucon’s right ankle and then running the silk cord between the toes.
“There,” the gnome said. “The cord would have to snap for the mud to claim your toes now. That should keep them on until we can craft a long-term solution.” Faucon murmured his thanks while Onni repeated the process for his left foot, firmly lashing the prosthesis to the foot by twining the cord around the heel.
The wyrm is close. We should prepare for battle.
The Tym tamarins were already spreading themselves in a half circle, facing the other way and now doubling up on the backs of some capybaras while leaving others riderless.
“What are they doing?” Faucon wondered aloud as Onni hauled him to his feet out of the mire. He tested the cords by lifting one foot and then the other out of the muck. The toes remained in place, and he nodded once at Onni before drawing his sword.
Gerd consulted Gleek and then explained, It is how they fight the wyrm. One tamarin makes a cradle of its hands and launches the other in the air at the wyrm.
“They throw their friends to be eaten so the others survive?”
Not precisely. The leaping tamarins throw the smöl poddes at the wyrm—though I do not understand their purpose. They say the poddes are from something called the Figgish Fear Shrub. I do not know this plant.
Neither did Faucon, but the opportunity to inquire about the Figgish Fear Shrub disappeared with a quiver in the reeds, a gurgle and hiss, and the agitated shrieks of the Tym tamarins.
A sinuous shape arose out of the fen, topped with an enormous triangular head, covered in glittering green scales except for its pale-yellow belly, with spiny ridges over its eyes and down the middle of its head. A forked tongue flicked out and its cavernous mouth opened to reveal a row of sharp teeth, not two mere fangs. That was the hallmark of a wyrm: It could tear off gobbets of meat instead of swallowing its prey whole, allowing it to tackle larger animals and impress its friends. It looked pleased to have found the Tym tamarins and their mounts—as pleased as Faucon probably looked when his belly hit the table’s edge at Dinny’s. But when it saw Gerd staring back at it, it pulled up short and made a sibilant shrieking noise, another feature of wyrms: the ability to vocalize.
As if in reply, Gerd said, Leave this place or die, wyrm, and Faucon thought most creatures would be sensible enough to avail themselves of the first option. But the wyrm screeched a spine-shivering cry of defiance and surged forward, striking at the nearest riderless capybara and gobbling it whole. That set off the counterattack by the Tym tamarins, who catapulted their comrades as high as they could to throw their seedpods directly at the head of the wyrm.
The wyrm expected this and dodged many, but not all, of the pods. They exploded on contact and released a puff of white powdery seeds. The wyrm shut its eyes and reared back as the tamarins plopped into the fen and began to swim back to their fellows. Another batch of tamarins executed the same maneuver, and since the wyrm had its eyes closed, it didn’t dodge in time. Almost all of the seedpods hit their target, surrounding the wyrm’s head like a cloud of cotton but doing no damage that Faucon could discern. He honestly didn’t know what the point of it all was.
Kirsi wasn’t waiting for the seedpods to take effect. She hopped off Gerd’s back and directly toward Onni, who prevented her from falling into the mire as he had, then she plucked a hair from her beard and tied it into a bow, muttering all the while. Now unencumbered, Gerd leapt into the air and flapped mightily, circling around behind the wyrm, her claws outstretched as she shrieked, Come Gette Some!
The wyrm heard that, however, and much else besides, for it opened its eyes and hissed, its mouth opening for another strike. Faucon noticed that when it did so, the clouds of seeds moved directly into the mouth and eyes as if drawn there via suction. The wyrm struck again, this time taking two tamarins and their ride together. But when it raised its head to swallow them, the eyes were different, clouded over, and its mouth was too full of cotton to allow its prey to be swallowed. The wyrm dropped the full meal deal, and the two tamarins splashed down into the fen, remounted their beslimed capybara, and shrieked their victory.
As for the wyrm, it writhed and made gagging noises. Being suddenly afflicted with the loss of sight, taste, and smell would be quite alarming if one didn’t know the effects were temporary—that was probably why it was called the Fear Shrub. But of course the wyrm had experienced this fear before and somehow knew it would live to take another tasty bite of the world’s largest rodent and quite-nearly-smallest monkey.
Faucon couldn’t let such courageous little dudes die. He charged forward as best as he could through the sticky fen, hoping to get to the wyrm before Gerd did, his sword held firmly in his hand. He surged through the capybaras and tamarins and saw Gerd swooping behind the wyrm, her head and body hidden from his sight but her spread wings seeming to give the wyrm the appearance of a winged head. The halfling tried to move faster, which might have succeeded but mostly made more noise.
The wyrm cocked its head and struck, lightning-quick, at a spot just next to Faucon, attracted to the splashing he made—it wasn’t deaf. And even though it missed, the unexpected lunge also made Gerd miss. She swept on past in the air, talons empty of wyrm flesh, and shrieked her frustration. Faucon sliced down with his sword, but that bit of the snake was armored and didn’t so much as scuff. Gerd banked around, and Faucon kept moving forward as the wyrm reared back. In five steps, he leapt as best he could and put everything he had into an overhead thrust directly into the center of the foul wyrm’s somewhat vulnerable belly. The blade plunged in far easier than it should have but stopped at the hilt, and then Faucon’s weight on the hilt—he dangled from it—dragged the blade down and opened up a gory gash from which blood and slippery bits of viscera spilled, as well as a large hairball of partially digested capybara.
The gnomeric bristle witch shouted behind him in victory. “Yes! Armor weakened!”
The wyrm cried out and tried to rear back again, which only opened up more of its belly, like a self-peeling banana, until Faucon reached the ground and yanked out his sword. He had not hit the wyrm high enough to wound the heart, but he had delivered a mortal blow. That open wound, once lowered into the fen, would quickly turn septic, and Faucon might have damaged other vital organs as well. Sure enough, tender purple things that most resembled oversized jelly beans were plopping this way and that out of the wyrm and into the bloodied waters.
Gerd returned and raked her talons across the wyrm’s neck, closer to the head, and it popped open like a magician’s cane turning into a bouquet of flowers. That was the coup de grâce: The great beast died with ululations and a torrent of diarrhea. Its enormous bulk shuddered and toppled sideways, splashing into the mire. Silence settled over the fen, a silence of disbelief and wonder, broken by a capybara who let out a single wet, inquisitive poot. That sparked a
raucous celebration by the Tym tamarins, who hollered and squawked and monkeyed around on the backs of their capering rodent friends.
Faucon might have capered around too if he thought his golden toes would stand for it, but he contented himself with a little shimmy and a smile at his companions. Together, despite the odds, he and a gnome had bested the beast. And he had proven that even though his life was different now and it would be inconvenient at times, he was still Faucon the hunter. He still had a particular set of skills. And snake meat was still delicious, once you rinsed off the fen muck and diarrhea.
It was at that point that Båggi and Agape caught up with them, their chests heaving.
“Oh, bless my beard, this is a very merry muddy party!” Båggi said through gasps. “What are we celebrating?” He reached his arms into the brown murky water peppered with wyrm plops and capybara guts and splashed his face, patting at his cheeks to rub it in. “I do so love a proper restorative mud bath.”
“Consuming the raw heart of a fallen foe is widely acknowledged to be the only acceptable form of cannibalism, since it comes with a concomitant bequeathal of powers. It is perhaps fortunate that it tastes terrible and cooking the heart first destroys the magical transfer of talents, or else we’d be routinely eating one another’s hearts on breakfast sandwiches, in savory stews, or grilled and sliced atop a succulent chef’s salad.”
—ALMONT BREWNE, in Goode Fewd
“Oh, Båggi, no!” Kirsi cried, arms out in that way that suggested she wanted to be helpful from several feet away while not touching him at all.
The dwarf looked up, confusion plain in his twinkling eyes. “Not to worry, my fine bearded friend! For there’s plenty of healing mud to go around.” He slapped more mud around his eyes and mouth, smacking his lips. “And a very rich mud it is! I seem to detect notes of loam and…is it bass?”
“Close! It’s…ass,” Kirsi said, her voice trailing off.
“What?”
“You really don’t want to do that, Båggi,” Onni said, trying to rid his own beard of its brown streaks with a much-abused handkerchief. “That’s not mud.”
“But what else is in a fen besides water and mud? The cattails decompose, making the mineral content especially rich. We herbalists are experts on…”
A tiny tamarin skull blurbled to the water’s surface beside a nasty clot of brown and a floppy purple wyrm kidney, and Båggi’s mouth fell open.
“It’s the plops,” Agape said with her usual lack of nonsense. “Aaand it’s already in your beard, so please stop smearing it all over your face, and let’s get out of here.”
“Yes yes yes yes yes. Ha ha! That’s not the kind of mud I wanted at all!” Båggi said, swiping the dripping brown glop off his face and dancing about a bit as the mud flooded his boots.
“Let’s, er, find a nicer bit of swamp.” Kirsi looked up at the tamarins and wished her cardigan were properly pleasant. “Dear Tym tamarins, we need to reach the Toot Towers, which are astride the Rumplescharte River. Can you point us in the right direction?”
Gerd translated, and the lead tamarin nodded sagely as all the tamarins pointed in different directions.
“So that’s a no, then. Gerd, can you see the river from the sky?”
The gryphon seemed more than happy to rise into the air and shake off the muck, showering them in brown splatters as she spiraled up so high she became nothing more than a tiny black blot.
I see no river, she said. Only more quagmire of wretched fylth entirely lacking figges.
A light splashing signaled someone new entering the area, accompanied by a voice so beautiful and sweet that everyone stopped breathing through the mouth and sighed beatifically.
Perhaps I can help
For well I know
How to go when one needs to go;
The river wide and the towers tall
Are all this way, beyond the wall.
Even Kirsi was amazed at the figure who had suddenly appeared in their midst. It was clearly a bard, in classical bard dress, including a floppy hat with a huge feather, a puce velvet doublet, and wide pantaloons in chartreuse with burgundy slashes. The bongos hung around the bard’s neck from a silken rope were a thing of beauty, golden as honey and pitter-pattering so prettily that the capybaras purred in joy. But that’s where the usual bardisms ended, because the bard was clearly a…
“Kobold!” Onni squawked, stumbling backward in fear. “It’s a kobold!”
Kirsi’s heart beat faster than the drums, and she was doing her best not to join Onni in his Fluster, for kobolds were well known for their dislike of gnomes. While the conflict between gnomes and halflings was a relatively new development, the dragon-like kobolds had always hated gnomes and delighted in eating them—and pretty much anything besides galoshes and ceramic mugs. Fortunately, the kobolds had mostly self-destructed in the Giant Wars, so rare was the living gnome who had beheld their hideous countenance. If an iguana and a hairless cat had a halfling-sized baby with lizard feet who liked eating innocent people, it would’ve been slightly more pleasant to look at than a kobold.
Except that this kobold wore a smile and had the voice of an angel.
Does this creature require dismemberment? Gerd asked, having descended back to their level, with the feathers around her head up defensively even as her claws clicked together along with the bongos. For I do not sense incipient rage about its person.
“I don’t know,” Kirsi said, considering the bard as she twirled a beard hair between her fingers and fought her instinctive urge to pluck it. “Do you?”
The bard played a tiny drum solo that somehow attracted a flock of beautiful blue butterflies to hang, glittering, around their heads. Båggi laughed and danced around, the filth in his beard forgotten and drying into unsavory clumps.
“I’m more of a kobard than a kobold, if you get my drift. I was on my way to the Toot Towers to play for the kanssa-jaarli, and I thought you might need some guidance. If such is not the case, I’m happy to pretend you’re not following me to the quickest way out of this swamp.” The kobold, whose gender wasn’t readily apparent, winked a saucy eye.
Kirsi waved her party together for a brief huddle and flapped a hand at the bard to ignore them. “We need a minute. If you’d like some wyrm meat, no one will stop you.”
“Wow,” Agape whispered, leaning down toward the gnomes. “That’s the rudest I’ve ever seen you, Kirsi!”
“Well, it’s a kobold.” Kirsi bristled in a way entirely unrelated to being a bristle witch. “When your natural enemy shows up in a moment of need, you don’t immediately fall all over its scaly feet. Point being: Do we trust it?”
“You mean them,” Båggi corrected. “Because whatever their personal pronouns may be, it suggests they are not a person, which they very much are. And I say yes! Surely no one of evil heart could play such heartening drums! Why, the very bing-bong of those bongos was enough to make me temporarily forget that my face is caked in the excrement of an enormous reptile, and here we are many leagues away from a bath! Ha ha!”
“I guess so,” Agape said, and if the ovitaur was surprised by Kirsi’s rudeness, Kirsi was even more surprised by Agape’s easy acceptance of someone new.
“What do you think is the worst that could happen?” Faucon winced and looked like he wanted to rub his boar-chafed fundament but was too much of a gentleman to do so. “If the kobold turns on us, we fight it. I mean them. We are quite adept at that.”
“And if I wanted to use my bardic magic against you, I’d already be doing so,” the kobold interjected loftily.
“We really need to learn to be more quiet.” Kirsi sighed and turned and forced a smile. “Very well, my good bard. If you’d be so kind as to lead us, we will follow. But no funny business!”
“Oh, we kobolds have literally no sense of humor.”
The c
rew waved goodbye to the Tym tamarins, who waved back merrily as their capybaras sang a song of many ukka-chukka-chukkas and ooh-worra-worras, and the kobold marched through the Figgish Fen, fearless and fine, pattering on the bongos and humming a jaunty tune. Soon they began to sing a traveling song that included some helpful thoughts on healing, sleeping well, and perhaps hurrying a bit away from the goopier bits of swamp, and Kirsi felt as if she were floating above the water instead of slogging through it. When the fen became less fennish and more foresty, the kobold kindly sang a song about how lovely it would be if air could clean one’s cardigan and tidy up one’s beard and refresh one’s stank pits, and soon Kirsi was neat as a pin and grinning, as were all her companions.
“This is it!” Faucon shouted, capering about a little now that his golden toes were clean of swamp muck. He pointed at two worn ruts in the ground that suggested many wagon wheels had once packed the earth tight so that neither seed nor root could take hold. “This is the old road to the Toot Towers!”
“Why would there be a road leading into the fen?” Onni asked.
“It was not always a fen. It used to be a beautiful land that supported vast orchards of Skyr fig trees, now extinct, and the gnomes and halflings who lived there were fabulously well-to-do,” Faucon replied.
Skyr figges were the best figges, my great-grandfather Funt used to say, Gerd asserted. He claimed they were very high in fibre.
“What happened, then?” Kirsi asked, as she knew very little about fig business.
“The land was spectacularly mismanaged by the hereditary caretaker of the orchard, a man named Skotch Figgler,” Faucon said. “His family had maintained the orchard for generations, but during his time there were fires, floods, blights, trysts, twists—it’s a saga in itself. They say the land grew so very tired of his mismanagement that a chasm opened up and vomited swamp water until the old coot drowned, taking his spectacular facial hair with him. And now no one can drain this swamp.”