Scoundrels' Jig (The Chronicles of Eridia)
Page 27
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John Grommet had made it most of the way past the gorgim village when he noticed the light from the village growing exponentially brighter. Peering at the bizarre assortment of buildings half a mile to his right, he saw what he quickly realized were countless fires blazing away. Simultaneously the wind shifted, bringing faint cries and screams to his ears.
With a frown, he lowered his head and walked faster. It was none of his concern. All he cared about was getting the gold, saving his mother, and avenging poor Rosabelle’s senseless murder. As he stalked across the dim landscape, he kept seeing Rosabelle’s bulging eye staring at him, pleading with him; and somehow the horse became conflated with his mother and her rheumy eyes and the sweet, saintly smile she had given him when he left her house tonight. No, wait…technically it would have been last night. Probably. He wondered what time it was.
The lights blazed brighter and the cries and other sounds of frantic activity grew louder. It sounded as if the whole village was in upheaval.
John didn’t care. He just kept his head down and refused to let anything distract him from his mission.
After about five minutes he became aware of a loud trumpeting sound coming from the direction of the burning village. He ignored it as long as he could, but it rapidly grew louder and louder, and finally John realized it was heading straight toward him.
He looked up, but saw only a small grove of trees that currently blocked the village from view. He couldn’t even see the glow of the burning buildings at the moment.
The trumpeting noise rang out again. It didn’t sound like a musical instrument; it sounded organic.
He reflected that gorgim could look and sound like practically anything, which meant that the approaching trumpeter was most likely a particularly freakish gorgim.
The sound rang out once more, making it clear the trumpeter was right on the other side of the grove and closing fast. John needed to hide, and quickly; but as he looked around, he realized that the only place to do so was in the grove itself. Maybe if he hunkered down in a bush, the trumpeter would pass right by him in the darkness.
He ran toward the trees. He wasn’t even halfway there when he heard the sharp crack of branches breaking in the heart of the grove. The trumpeter was advancing much faster than John had expected. Still, there might be enough time to get to cover on the very edge of the grove.
Somehow he found the energy to run even faster, and for a moment he actually thought he would make it to the tree-line. A mere moment after he had thought this, however, a flickering yellow-orange light came into view in the depths of the grove directly ahead of him.
At first glance it looked like a campfire. But campfires weren’t six feet off the ground and didn’t move. And this fire was moving at a rapid clip straight toward John.
As it drew closer, John discerned that it was a large hulking figure whose upper body was on fire. The trumpeting cry sounded again, this time so close and so loud it made John’s eardrums hurt.
“Oh, dear,” he muttered as heavy footsteps thoomed through the woods toward him. There was absolutely no way he could get to cover in time.
But maybe if this gorgim was on fire and in pain, it would just ignore him. After all, it surely had more important things to occupy its attention than one scrawny unthreatening human.
John veered to his right, thinking to simply step aside and let the gorgim pass, but as he stepped to the right, the gorgim stepped to its left, apparently dodging around something in the woods that John couldn’t see, maybe a tree stump or a bush. Whatever the reason, it had matched John’s change of position and was still barreling straight toward him.
John jumped to his left. Simultaneously the gorgim swerved to its right, once again avoiding something in the woods, once again matching John’s change of position.
“Oh, give me a break!” screamed John.
There was no sense trying to dodge again; there was no more time for him to do so. It was too late.
“Wait!” John cried, holding up his hands, palms out, at the flaming gorgim as it burst from the trees. “Don’t—”
He had a quick glimpse of a huge gray figure with two beady black eyes, enormous ears like sails, and a pair of long, curved tusks sprouting from beneath a thick, serpentine nose. The gorgim’s chest, shoulders, and back were covered with flames, and the skin there was already black and crisp and cracked. One of its ears had also caught fire, and as it flapped in the breeze of the gorgim’s mad headlong flight, tiny burning cinders of ear-skin broke away from the ear and floated away through the trees like fireflies.
There was a body-juddering impact and an ear-splitting cry, and the next thing John Grommet knew he was lying flat on his back on the muddy ground.
No, wait, not on the ground; more like in the ground. The gorgim had been so heavy it had actually embedded him in the mud. His entire body was one great mass of pain, especially his chest. He raised his head and looked at the huge round muddy footprint in the center of his shirt, then groaned.
It hurt too much to keep his head raised, so he let it plop back into the mud. It landed tilted back just enough for him to see the gorgim, now upside-down, racing away toward the horizon, still burning, still trumpeting.
John’s eyes rolled in their sockets until they were focused on the heavens above, and he cried, “Whyyyyyy?”