by J. S. Volpe
* * *
John Grommet, sopping wet from head to foot, water still dripping from his slicked-down hair, staggered through the forest. That’s all he had been doing for hours now. He had even continued doing so during the blinding downpour earlier, though he hadn’t been able to see where he was going. Step after step after step, he just kept plodding on, feeling numb, spent, dead. He no longer had any tears to shed for his mother, or for himself. There was nothing. Just blackness and blankness. Just one monotonous step after another in this endless forest.
And then he pushed through a thick screen of foliage and stepped into a clearing where three figures lay wrapped in blankets around the remains of a campfire.
John opened his mouth to shriek with joy at finally finding salvation, but then it dawned on him that people who sleep in clearings in dark woods in the middle of the night were probably not the sort of people apt to help him. Rob him, more likely. Just like all the scum in that awful bar.
As he peered at the sleeping figures in hopes of finding some clear-cut indication of what kind of people they were—perhaps tattoos that said “I am a nasty bandit” or something of that sort—he saw that the truth was far worse than he had feared: One of them had four arms and was covered all over with long, silky brown hair; another looked as if it were made of leaves; the third had a pig’s head, with a single curved horn sprouting from its right temple.
They weren’t people at all! They were gorgs!
Stomach clenching with instinctual, atavistic revulsion, John slowly and carefully stepped backward out of the clearing and into the forest once again.
Beasts. Horrible monsters. And not only were they freaks of biology, but they openly worshipped Nün, the worst of the Twelve, the embodiment of chaos and uncertainty and the mad, messy fecundity of the universe. John couldn’t fathom that kind of thinking at all. He liked things neat and tidy and comfortably the same day after day. Chaos was bad. Chaos was the enemy.
He shook his head as he circled around the clearing and resumed his seemingly endless trek. What were gorgim doing on this side of the river anyway? Were they here to rob unsuspecting humans? Rape a few women? Or maybe they were part of an invasion force! Maybe the gorgim were about to start another war!
Should he try to alert the authorities? Doing so would mean abandoning his pursuit of Bastard Jack and the gold. But he was already so lost and probably so far behind everyone else that he had no hope of succeeding.
But his mother. He still had to help her. Without that gold she had no hope of getting well.
He sighed disconsolately, unsure what to do.
As he weighed his options, he passed through a line of bushes and, much to his amazement, found himself out of the woods. Finally! Before him, the grassy ground sloped down toward a large village.
But it wasn’t any village he was familiar with. The houses were weirdly constructed. They were made of all different kinds of material—wood, stone, metal, grass, straw bales—and they were of all different sizes. Some looked as if they were made for giants, others for dwarves.
Here and there, figures holding torches moved about on the streets, and in the light from those torches, John saw that none of those figures were human. They were all gorgim.
For a brief moment John was sure that the invasion had already happened, that while he had been wandering about in the woods, the gorgim had poured into Glí and taken it over.
But no. That wasn’t possible. There was no way the gorgim could have constructed so many elaborate houses in such a short time.
The only explanation, then, was that he was in Umperskap, that at some point in his peregrinations, he had made his way into the gorgim’s land.
It didn’t seem possible. How could he have gotten here? He would have noticed if he had slogged through the swamp or waded across the river. The only other alternative was one of the three bridges across the Millisin. But that was absurd; there was no way he could have exited the forest and clopped across a long stone bridge without being aware of it or being spotted by the guards.
Then he realized than given the driving rain earlier, and given his disheartened and almost zombified state, he might well have plodded straight across a bridge without either him or any guards being aware of it. Visibility had been nearly zero.
“Ha,” he said, smiling, as renewed determination surged through him.
He had made it across the river and out of the woods after all. He was back on track. Things weren’t as bleak as he had believed.
And with his renewed determination came renewed hatred for Bastard Jack.
His smile twisted into a leer as his teeth clenched and his hands balled into fists.
He strode down the hill, angling toward what he guessed was the south so as to avoid the village below.
By Lukano, he’d get that lovely, mother-saving hunk of gold and in the process teach that vile Bastard Jack a few hard lessons about justice.