Scoundrels' Jig (The Chronicles of Eridia)

by J. S. Volpe

  * * *

  Dressed in fine light-gray cloaks of the sort commonly worn by mid-level government functionaries, Gaspard and Merizen strode toward the guardhouse at the east end of the Briarwood Bridge. Before they had gotten to within twenty feet of it, the door opened and two of the King’s soldiers stepped out, eyeing them with stony expressions.

  When Gaspard and Merizen were ten feet away, the older of the two guards, a tall, gaunt man with brown hair going white at the temples, stepped forward and said, “What’s your business here?”

  Gaspard and Merizen stopped in front of him, their faces betraying not the slightest trace of worry.

  “We are here on orders of the King,” Gaspard said.

  He reached into a pocket on the inside of his cloak, ignoring the way the guards’ hands flew to the hilts of their swords as he did so, and pulled out a scroll sealed with a red wax disc.

  The guard took it with a raised eyebrow, as if he suspected Gaspard were trying to put one over on him. But when he looked at it and saw the royal seal—five stars in an arc above a stylized A so curlicued it resembled a snarl of pubic hair—imprinted on the wax, his eyes widened and his mouth dropped open. The other guard, a short stocky fellow who had been looking at the scroll over his partner’s shoulder, gasped and said, “That’s…that’s…”

  “I know what it is,” the older soldier said in a low voice.

  He looked at Gaspard and Merizen and licked his lips. His left hand hovered over the wax seal.

  Gaspard nodded. “Go ahead. Open it. It will explain everything.”

  The soldier cleared his throat, cracked the seal, and unrolled the scroll. He read it slowly and carefully, his lips silently mouthing each word. His partner, who was illiterate, pretended to read it over his shoulder while casting occasional awed glances at Gaspard and Merizen.

  “I trust that is satisfactory,” Gaspard said when he felt that enough time had passed for the scroll’s official appearance to sink in. It was, of course, a complete fake. He and Merizen had managed to get hold of (i.e. steal) a sealed scroll from a particularly dull-witted royal courier two years ago, and they had spent days manufacturing counterfeit royal scrolls that granted the bearer(s) full right of passage and cooperation by any and all government servants in order to aid said bearer(s) on their appointed task(s). They had also forged a stamp that passably matched the imprint on the original scroll’s wax seal. They had used the counterfeit scrolls and stamp dozens of times since then. Sometimes it almost made things too easy.

  “Yes, sir,” the soldier said as he rolled up the scroll and handed it back to Gaspard. “But, um, if you don’t mind my saying so, it doesn’t actually say what your business here is all about.”

  “No,” Gaspard said coolly. “It does not. That information is strictly top secret.”

  “Yes, sir. So, how exactly can we be of assistance, sir?”

  “We need to enter gorgim territory, soldier. That is all.”

  The younger soldier gave the older one a shocked look. The older one studied Gaspard as if he were crazy.

  “No offense, sir, but…” He shook his head. “It’s dangerous for humans over there. There’s a gorg guardhouse right at the other end of this bridge. They’ll see you before you’re halfway across.”

  It was at that point that lightning cracked the night sky, and thunder boomed and sheeting rain poured down.

  Gaspard winked at the soldiers. “As always, the King has everything covered.” He turned to Merizen. “Let’s go.”

  They strode onto the bridge. When they were sure they were far enough away for the rain and darkness to hide them from view of the two guards, they started running, their boots sending up great splashes of water from the puddles that had quickly formed on the bridge’s uneven surface. As they neared the far side of the bridge, the gorgim guardhouse became visible as a dark, blocky shape in the rain, its single window a hazy circle of yellow light.

  When they were about a hundred feet from it, Gaspard motioned for Merizen to slow to a walk lest their footfalls alert the gorgim guards within. They crossed to the north side of the bridge, opposite the guardhouse, and crept along as silently as possible, eyes never leaving the yellow window. Thunder banged far to the south.

  They were nearly past the guardhouse when the canvas sheet that served as a door flew open and a voice barked, “Who’s there?”

  Gaspard and Merizen immediately smiled brightly and strode straight toward the two figures that were emerging from the guardhouse.

  The foremost figure would have been able to pass for a normal human male if not for his bulbous compound fly-like eyes. The other was a ten-foot-tall bipedal green lizard with glaring red eyes and a row of faintly luminous fin-like plates running down his back and all along his tail.

  “Identify yourselves and state your business,” said the bug-eyed gorgim. In his hands was a two-headed battle axe, and judging by his tone and his expression he expected to be using it very soon.

  “We have returned,” Gaspard said with a triumphant smile. “And I am pleased to report that our mission has been a complete success.” He held up three more of the forged scrolls.

  “What?” the bug-eyed gorgim looked at the giant lizard, who shrugged his broad scaly shoulders. “Who are you?” he asked Gaspard and Merizen.

  “Don’t you know?” Gaspard said.

  Merizen clucked her tongue. “Of course they don’t. It’s not as if the lower ranks were informed of our mission.”

  “Ah, yes.” Gaspard laughed a little embarrassedly. “Well, at any rate, we’re working under orders of the General.”

  “General Blood, you mean?” the reptilian gorgim said.

  “Yes!” Actually Gaspard hadn’t known the names of any of Umperskap’s military. But he knew that their highest-ranking officers were generals, so he simply referred to “the General” and let the guards generously fill in the blanks for him. Morons. “We were sent on an intelligence-gathering mission. General Blood shall be overjoyed to learn that we intercepted a number of key missives sent by Glí’s king.”

  He flourished the scrolls again. This time the bug-eyed gorgim took one and examined it. When he saw the faux royal seal, his mouth dropped open.

  “What’s it say?” he asked.

  “We believe they contain crucial information on the distribution and movements of Glí’s military forces. But, of course, the General insisted he alone read the scrolls.”

  The gorgim’s fingers, which had begun to toy with the wax seal, now jerked away from it.

  “Ah!” he said. “Of course!” He handed the scroll back to Gaspard.

  “Well, we’d best be on our way,” Gaspard said. “We’d hate to keep General Blood waiting.”

  The bug-eyed gorgim waved them on. They began to go, but then the reptilian gorgim held up a hand.

  “Hold on,” he said in a deep, gravelly voice. “No offense, but we need to ask the password. Protocol, you understand.”

  “Of course,” Gaspard said.

  “Just doing your jobs,” Merizen said. “We understand.”

  “The password is ‘swordfish,’” Gaspard said. He and Merizen resumed going as if they knew with absolute certainty that was the correct password.

  “Hold on,” the bug-eyed gorgim said. “That’s not it.”

  Gaspard and Merizen turned and looked at the two guards with raised eyebrows and faint smiles as if suspecting a joke, then, when the guards’ expressions made it clear it was no joke, glanced at each other in puzzlement.

  “What do you mean?” Merizen said in a slightly annoyed tone. “Of course that’s the password.”

  In the face of Gaspard and Merizen’s monolithic certainty, the guards’ own certainty wavered. The two gorgim glanced at each other.

  “Um, actually…” the fly-eyed gorgim began. He never got a chance to finish the sentence, but it didn’t matter. Now that the gorgim’s confidence had slipped, the battle of wits was as good as won. Deep down, nearly everyone
was unsure of themselves. If you just acted more confident than them and never once allowed that attitude to waver, you’d usually win out in the end.

  Gaspard and Merizen were spared the effort by a commotion at the Glí end of the bridge. The sound of shouts and many running footsteps echoed in the night. Over the last few minutes, the rain had tapered off to a light drizzle, improving visibility, and now the quartet peered along the length of the bridge just in time to see a rectangle of yellow light appear as the humans’ guardhouse door flew open. An authoritative voice hollered something. Several small flames streaked through the darkness, hit the guardhouse, and then burst into fireballs, the light of which revealed five men charging across the bridge. Behind them, the two guards briefly gave chase, then turned and hurried back to try to put out their now-blazing guardhouse.

  Gaspard cried, “Hold them off as long as possible! We’ll alert General Blood!” Without awaiting a response, he and Merizen dashed off into the woods.

  Once they were safely out of sight, they hunkered down and peered out through the foliage to watch the drama unfold.

  “What do you think is going on?” Merizen whispered.

  “The Zombie Hill Boys, I suspect,” Gaspard said.

  Merizen’s nose wrinkled. “Oh. Those children.”

  The two gorgim stood side-by-side at the end of the bridge, ready to intercept the onrushing interlopers, the fly-eyed one clutching his battle axe, the reptilian one hunched and snarling, his thick tail flapping back and forth like an angry cat’s.

  As the five men drew closer, the one in the lead held up something cylindrical in one hand, then made a motion with his other hand. There was a spark, and a bright yellow flame sprang to life, revealing the man to be Daddy Vermin and the cylindrical object to be a bottle of the Zombie Hill Boys’ hooch with a burning hooch-soaked rag stuck in the neck. The Zombie Hill Boys’ hooch had many uses: It was good to drink; it killed germs; it stripped paint; and it was more flammable than gasoline.

  The bug-eyed gorgim frowned and said, “What are they—” and then Daddy Vermin hurled the bottle right at him. The gorgim tried to sidestep it, but it struck him on the left shoulder and shattered, spraying burning hooch in every direction. Within seconds, the entire upper half of the gorg’s body was ablaze.

  “Ah, fuck!” he shrieked in a high, almost girlish voice. “Fuck!”

  The reptilian gorgim ignored him and opened wide his huge, fang-filled mouth at the approaching men, barely fifteen feet away now. Bone Boy, who had taken the lead, raised a hooch-bomb and prepared to throw it at the gorgim.

  The gorgim let out a shrill cry, and a cone of yellow fire shot from his mouth. It engulfed Bone Boy from the sternum up.

  Bone Boy howled as his skin charred and blackened and flew away in crisp onionskin curls. The bottle in his hand burst, blowing off three fingers and further fueling the conflagration. His flaming corpse tumbled to the ground.

  “The boot-fielder ribbited Bone Boy!” cried the Mosquito. He quickly raised his own hooch-bomb and with one troll-skin-gloved hand popped a firebug next to the rag. [3] The rag caught fire.

  He threw the bottle as the gorgim turned toward him, the cone of fire never diminishing. The bottle sailed toward the gorgim’s head, but the moment it entered the cone, it exploded, sending burning hooch splashing across the creature’s chest.

  The cone went out. The gorgim staggered backward, his chest burning like a bonfire.

  “Uppit, de-ooo!” the Mosquito jeered. As he sprinted past, he gave the gorgim a swift kick in the tail.

  With the exception of Bone Boy, whose corpse lay smoldering on the bridge, the Zombie Hill Boys streaked past the guardhouse and toward the woods, while the reptilian gorgim ran for the rain-swollen river, where his fellow guard was repeatedly submersing himself in the muddy water. So strong was the Zombie Hill Boys’ hooch, however, that despite the bug-eyed gorgim’s best efforts, the flames on his upper body were not completely out yet.

  “Creeze!” Daddy Vermin shouted as they raced away. “Bone Boy’s spleeded! These chum-bots’re gonna rup some nazy rectifon!”

  “Trut!” the Mosquito agreed.

  The four remaining Boys disappeared into the woods a hundred feet south of Gaspard and Merizen’s position.

  “Well, that’s one less member of the competition we have to worry about,” Gaspard said.

  “Yes, but they’re ahead of us now, too,” said Merizen.

  Gaspard shrugged. “We’ll catch up. They’re just addle-brained teenaged thugs. We can run rings around oafs like that. Before they know what’s happening, that gold will be ours.”

  Merizen grinned. A light burned in her eyes. “Oh, yes. It certainly will.” She licked her lips. “All that gold. All of it ours.”

  “Um, yes. But we’d better hurry up if we want to—”

  She grabbed him by the collar of his jacket and pulled him atop her in the bushes.

  “Right here,” she hissed. “Right now.”

  “But—but—”

  But she was already tonguing his ear, and his defenses and arguments vanished faster than an ice-cube in a blast-furnace. Within moments they were fucking each other silly while the two gorgim splashed about in the river, still trying to put out the hooch flames.