by J. S. Volpe
* * *
Ludwig van Beethoven was already far in the lead. That was the good thing about being able to fly: You didn’t have to navigate treacherous nighttime terrain; you didn’t have to slog through woods and swamps; you didn’t have to worry about bridges or rivers or guardhouses. You just proceeded along, straight and true, with the landscape sliding past far below and only the birds and clouds to keep you company.
On the other hand, the bad thing about flying, at least for Ludwig van Beethoven, was that it was very taxing. It required constant concentration, and though the ability was entirely mental, it resulted in a physical exhaustion that forced him to return to earth every hour or so for a long rest.
He’d been flying for close to forty-five minutes now, and though he’d made excellent time—he estimated he must be most of the way through Umperskap at this point—he could already feel the first threads of exhaustion wending their way through his system: His breathing was becoming labored, his hands were starting to feel cold and shaky, and his eyelids were growing increasingly heavy. In another ten minutes or so he’d have to land. But if he could keep up his pace of about twenty miles an hour, he should be very close to the western edge of Hump-a-scab by then. Beyond that, he could walk for a while, or maybe just sit down somehow cozy and secluded and take a nap—after all, he had certainly left the rest of those miserable fuckwits from the tavern far behind by now. Once he was rested up, he should be able to fly the rest of the way to Ghost Gulch. And then the gold would belong to Ludwig van Beethoven, as all gold should. It would buy many, many ales.
He passed over a small cluster of huts. From so high up, they looked like toys. The glows from hearth-fires spilled from the windows of some of the huts, throwing orange rectangles of light upon the dirt and grass. At times figures passed through the patches of light. These figures were too far away for Ludwig van Beethoven to see in any real detail, but he was able to discern each one’s general size and shape. There was a gangly, knobby-jointed form over eight feet tall. And there was a squat round grayish thing that waddled like a duck. And coming up behind it was a hulking hammer-headed creature scuttling about on half a dozen angular spider-like legs.
Gorgim. Freaks of the universe. Like snowflakes, no two were the same. According to the scholars—a bunch of semen-brained losers, in Ludwig van Beethoven’s not even remotely humble opinion, though he suspected they were right in this case—the gorgim possessed something called a chaotic genome, which meant that they could potentially look like practically anything. Ludwig van Beethoven had once lip-read a conversation between two drunk scholars in a tavern in southern Istenhame, and they’d yammered on and on about a lot of things he didn’t understand in the slightest—they threw around words like dee-ennay and introns and chromizomes and a lot of other brainy, know-it-all gabble that they probably just made up to make themselves feel smarter than everyone else—but one of the things he did understand (or thought he did) was that all living things had tiny little blueprints somewhere inside them (maybe in that moronically named dee-ennay), and that these blueprints determined how a particular creature would be constructed. Most creatures, the scholars had said, had blueprints which were largely specific to whatever kind of life-form they were. Human had human blueprints, and elves had elf blueprints, and wolves had wolf blueprints and so on and so on. The gorgim, on the other hand, seemed to have all of these tiny little blueprints. Every single one from every kind of life-form that ever existed and maybe even some that never existed. Blueprints for humans and elves and wolves and birds and fish and mosquitoes and dragons and atheloks and maple trees and, well, everything. What’s more, these spotty-faced scholarly geekboys claimed that normally a creature’s blueprints were somehow determined by the blueprints their parents had (which Ludwig van Beethoven conceded made sense; it explained why kids looked like their parents), but since every gorgim possessed the same plethora of blueprints, and any of these blueprints could dictate the final form of a gorgim irrespective of the ones that had dictated their parents’ forms, the average gorgim didn’t resemble their parents in any way. There had been numerous cases of gorgim mothers dying during pregnancy or childbirth because their offspring turned out to be giant-sized, or covered with spikes, or dripping with toxic slime.
And that, essentially, was why everyone hated the gorgim. They were the ultimate freaks, Mother Nature’s hideous miscarriages who lacked the decency to die, choosing instead to swarm and breed and pollute the globe with their disgusting plasticity. They were a reminder of the imperfections and impermanence of the flesh. They were a violation of most creatures’ sense of rightness and orderliness. They were messy and ugly and untidy. They were chaos personified.
Ludwig van Beethoven wrinkled his nose at the warped shapes moving about in the fire-light far below and pushed himself to go a little faster. Squinting into the darkness, he could just make out the shadowy expanse of Dead Man’s Wood about five miles ahead. Almost there. He just had to get past the last of these gorgim settlements and find a nice clearing in which to land.
As he peered about in search of such a clearing, his coat tightened across his shoulders and tugged him backward. For a moment he thought that the coat’s tails must have caught on something, but then he realized there was nothing up here for them to catch on.
He twisted around in mid air and came face to face with…well, he supposed it had to be a gorgim. It couldn’t be anything else.
It was the size and general shape of a man, but instead of arms it had huge wings covered with long powder-blue feathers. The rest of its body was not only featherless but hairless. Its skin was the same color and texture as a human’s, but its face…by Zyuss, its face was a nightmare. Its eyes were huge and round and glossy-black like pools of tar. Instead of a nose and mouth it had a bright yellow beak like a chicken’s. It seemed to lack ears of any kind. The top of its head dwindled to a bumpy peak covered with freckles. In place of feet it had a pair of gnarled coral-colored talons, and it was one of these that had hold of the bottom hem of Beethoven’s coat.
In his surprise, Beethoven let his concentration slip, and the powerful yet localized updraft that bore him aloft dissipated for an instant. Before he could drop more than a foot, he regained his wits and mentally set the air moving again.
The gorgim kept hold of his coat the whole time, watching him intently, keeping itself aloft with graceful sweeps of its wings. It tilted its head first to the left, then to the right, regarding him with its inhuman black eyes.
“Let go of Ludwig van Beethoven’s coat, you insufferable shit-eating smear of slime!”
The gorgim’s beak opened and closed. Beethoven just scowled at it and tried to tug his coat free. The gorgim ignored his efforts and, holding the coat fast in its talon, opened and closed its beak a few more times.
It was only then that it dawned on Beethoven that the stupid thing was talking to him. The problem was, he didn’t have the slightest idea what it was saying. Having been deaf since the tender age of seven, he had long ago mastered the art of lip-reading. If he could see someone’s lips moving, even at a great distance, he knew what they were saying. This abomination, however, didn’t have lips. It had only that hard, fleshless beak, which did nothing but open and close like the mouth of a ventriloquist’s dummy.
“Ludwig van Beethoven does not understand what you are saying, you insufferable little turd, and would not care even if he did!”
The creature tilted its head again, then gave his coat a single firm tug.
“What!”
The beak opened, closed. The talon tugged again, harder this time, hard enough to wrench the coat off his left shoulder.
“Unhand Ludwig van Beethoven right now!” he cried, trying to yank his coat back onto his shoulder.
The gorgim stuck its head forward and peered at the shoulder where the coat was coming off. Then it looked down at the end of the coat clutched tightly in the talon. Its beak opened and closed rapidly, excitedly.
“What are you—”
And then the gorgim gave a mighty tug, and Beethoven’s coat flew off him so suddenly that the gorgim was thrown off-balance by the sudden lack of resistance. It flapped its wings a few times to steady itself, then held up the coat and peered at it as if it had never seen such a thing before.
“You insidious beak-faced fucker!” Beethoven roared. “Return Ludwig van Beethoven’s fucking coat right fucking now!”
He darted forward on a gust of air to grab the coat, but the gorgim glanced up at him with its liquid black eyes and then whirled around and streaked down and away toward a distant cluster of lights amid the trees a few miles to the northeast.
“Ahhhh! You shitter!”
He stared in horror as the creature flew away with his coat. It wasn’t the coat itself that concerned him; it was what was in the inside breast pocket—the tattered dirty page from an ancient book that proved he was the great and talented Ludwig van Beethoven reborn rather than a scrawny little deaf kid named Vretch Ploom who got beaten up every day because he couldn’t hear the big kids creeping up behind him.
With an almost feral snarl, Beethoven took off after the gorgim. He hadn’t gone more than fifty feet when a wave of dizziness overcame him, forcing him to stop. All the excitement, coming on top of a forty-five-minute flight, had sapped his strength. He had to land right now. If he tried to fly anymore, he’d pass out and plummet to his death.
He took one last hateful look at the disgusting little gorgim—it was just a faint flutter of movement among the distant trees—and then descended slowly to the ground.
As he hunted around for a secure spot to take a quick nap and replenish his flagging energy, he vowed to himself that he would hunt down that avian ass-biter and retrieve his precious coat and the irreplaceable cargo within its breast pocket. He’d have to put his hunt for the gold on the back burner for a little while, but he surely had enough of a lead on everyone else that he could afford to do so.
Before long, he found a cluster of bushes with an open space in the center that was sheltered from view on every side. There he stretched himself out on the grass and quickly fell asleep.