Scoundrels' Jig (The Chronicles of Eridia)

by J. S. Volpe

  * * *

  Kirby awoke to the dawn sun in his face. He sat up with a grunt, blinked a few times, stretched, yawned. He looked down at Blunt’s snoring form next to him, then nudged him with his elbow.

  “Come on, wake up. We gotta move.”

  “Whuh?” Blunt sat up, his face twisted up in confusion. “Where are we?”

  “We’re over halfway to the gold, man. Remember?”

  Awareness dawned on Blunt’s face. He smiled. “Oh, yeah. The gold. Yeah.”

  After crossing the Millisin River, the duo had made their way across southern Umperskap, getting as far as the eastern eaves of Dead Man’s Wood before the need for sleep overtook them. They had curled up in the shelter of a massive oak tree, using wads of moss for pillows, and slept for about three and a half hours.

  Kirby grinned as he and Blunt shared some athelok jerky. Things were going well. Sure, the river crossing hadn’t gone quite as smoothly as planned. And sure, five seconds after they’d changed into dry clothes, that massive downpour had started. But heck, they’d made it all the way across enemy territory without being spotted. Their journey was two-thirds over. He could almost feel the weight of that beautiful lump of gold in his pack already.

  All they had to do now was cross Dead Man’s Wood. And that, admittedly, concerned him a little, mainly because virtually nothing was known of Dead Man’s Wood. There were stories galore, but no actual proof of anything. Depending on who you asked, it was the home of zombies, vampires, dragons, spiders the size of horses, vast sentient colonies of pink mold, killer robots, the Norka, carnivorous trees, sheens, ghosts, evil clowns, the Tretchers of Bern, and the King in Yellow himself.

  Any one of the above would give most men pause, but having gotten this far without serious mishap, Kirby was brimming with optimism, and he figured that since stories, especially cautionary ones, tended to get inflated way beyond any resemblance to reality, whatever dwelt in Dead Man’s Wood—if anything—was probably something fairly minor. Maybe irritable stray cats or poison ivy.

  After breakfast they resumed their journey. As they entered deeper into the woods, the trees grew taller and thicker. Most were oaks, but there were a good number of beeches and maples and yinks. The ground often dipped down into small valleys floored with the leaves of forgotten autumns. The foliage overhead grew dense enough to blot out most of the daylight, lending the whole forest, and the valleys in particular, a shady, twilit aspect that Kirby would have found creepy if he hadn’t felt so irrepressibly cheery.

  Blunt, however, was more susceptible to the forest’s spooky aura.

  “Geez, Mr. Kirby, can we hurry up through this part? It gives me the willies.”

  Kirby waved a hand dismissively. “It’s just the light. Don’t let it bother you. This is just a forest like any other.”

  “But all the stories I’ve heard—”

  Kirby snorted. “They’re, like, old wives’ tales. Do you know anyone who’s seen a monster in these woods?”

  “Uh, well, actually, I don’t know anyone who’s ever been in these woods at all.”

  “Exactly!”

  “Huh?”

  “All the stupid stories scare everyone away. And if no one’s ever been here, then how the fuck do they know there’re monsters here, huh? They don’t! They don’t have any fucking idea what they’re talking about!”

  Blunt blinked in astonishment.

  “Golly, Mr. Kirby, you’re right!”

  “Of course I am. Unlike most people, I stop to actually think about all the stuff people tell me. I refuse to take anything at face value.”

  “Wow! You’re a genus, Mr. Kirby.”

  “Genius, Blunt. The word is genius.”

  “Oh, right.”

  They walked on. An hour passed. Then two. As they neared the heart of the woods, the trees became older and more gnarled. Long tufts of some kind of gray-green moss hung from their trunks like seaweed from a pier’s wooden piles. Squat bushes with broad, shiny dark-green leaves ran rampant. At times Kirby and Blunt had to slog through vast expanses of these bushes as if they were wading through waist-deep water.

  Eventually they came to a cozy little clearing free of trees and bushes. A rotting log lay across its center, and Kirby and Blunt sat upon it to rest and have a bite to eat.

  As they sat there eating some blackberries they had found growing near the eastern edge of the clearing, Blunt suddenly stiffened and stared off at the trees to the north, his brow crumpled in a small frown.

  “What’s wrong?” Kirby asked.

  For a moment Blunt didn’t answer. He just tilted his head slightly to the right as if to listen from a different angle.

  Finally he asked: “Do you hear that?”

  “Hear what?” Kirby said. “I don’t—”

  But then he did. Very faintly in the distance there was a sound like a man shouting one continuous unwavering shout: “—aaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhh—”

  “The hell?” Kirby said, nose wrinkling in puzzlement.

  The sound slowly grew louder. Not once did the shout cease. It just went on and on and on, steadily increasing in volume as whatever was making the noise approached.

  “—aaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhh—”

  “I don’t like the sound of that, Mr. Kirby,” Blunt said.

  “Neither do I,” Kirby said.

  He stood up. Blunt did likewise. A few last uneaten blackberries, forgotten now, tumbled from his lap to the grass.

  Whatever this thing was, it was moving much faster than Kirby had initially thought. It now sounded as if it were only about fifty feet from the clearing.

  “—AAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH—”

  But, hey, if this person, or thing, was dumb enough to attack, then by Lukano, he and Blunt would see to it that whatever-it-was would have to spend a week stitching its face back together.

  “Get ready,” Kirby said, whipping out his short sword.

  Blunt drew his long sword.

  The two of them faced the approaching shouter and waited.

  “—AAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH—”

  Given the volume of the sound, Kirby was expecting a huge, hulking beast of some kind to come bursting through the trees. Thus he was stunned when a six-inch-tall humanoid popped out of the bushes and raced along the ground toward them, its legs moving so fast they were a blur. And as it ran, it continued screaming its constant, unwavering scream.

  “—AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH—”

  At first glance, it looked like a miniature human pirate. It had an eye-patch, a big black hat with a skull and crossbones on the front, a shaggy brown beard, a long burgundy coat, and tall brown boots. But a closer look revealed that it was all of one substance—that is, its skin, clothes, hair, and eye-patch were not separate elements but one seamless mass. It looked like a pirate carved from some odd material, each part colored the proper color, and then animated.

  But carved from what, exactly? Kirby couldn’t tell. The substance had a soft, spongy look that reminded him of mushrooms.

  The mini-pirate’s face was blank and expressionless, like that of a zombie. Its mouth was open as wide as possible, and from that gaping maw the endless scream emerged.

  “—AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH—”

  “What is it, Mr. Kirby?” Blunt cried.

  Kirby couldn’t answer because he had started backing away from the onrushing mini-pirate only to trip over the log they had been sitting on a moment ago. He thudded onto his back on the other side, his legs waving in the air.

  Blunt, too, started to back up, but by then it was too late. When the mini-pirate was a foot away from him, it expanded like a balloon, its features stretching out in a way that would have been comical if the situation hadn’t been so weird and creepy, while its scream grew concomitantly louder and shriller, and then it exploded with a loud, flat bang.

  “Owie owie owie!” Blunt cried, hopping up and down on one leg while clutching the calf of the other.

  Kirby peeped over the top of the log.


  “What happened?”

  “The little pirate blew up! It hurt my leg.”

  Kirby stood up, stepped over the log, and looked around. The only traces of the mini-pirate that remained were a few shreds of that mushroomy material and a foot-wide patch of bare dirt where the grass had been torn away by the force of the explosion.

  Seeing that it was safe, Kirby turned to Blunt. “Let me see your leg. Stop hopping, for Gurm’s sake. Just sit down and let me look.”

  Blunt obeyed. He sat down on the log and held out his injured leg.

  His pants leg had been reduced to tattered flaps below the knee, and his leg was covered with small holes from which blood was starting to trickle. The holes didn’t look too bad. No worse than shaving cuts, really. What bothered Kirby far more was that here and there tiny black flecks like kiwi seeds were clinging to Blunt’s flesh. Kirby guessed that they had been expelled by the tiny pirate when it exploded. He further guessed that the bleeding holes were where the seeds had been driven in really deep.

  “Hold still,” Kirby said. He carefully picked off all the seeds on the surface of Blunt’s skin and flicked them away into a nearby bush. He used his knife to dig out a few that were just below the surface. As for the rest, though, the ones way deep down in the flesh, there seemed to be no way to get them out without slicing Blunt’s leg wide open.

  Should he? He had no idea. He didn’t know what the tiny pirate was, or what the black seed-like things were. They might be perfectly harmless.

  And then the decision was wrested from his hands, for another scream grew audible deep in the woods to the north of the clearing: “—aaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhh—”

  And then another scream rose up from the northwest: “—aaaaaaahhhhhhhhh—”

  And then another from the east. And from the northwest. And the southeast. And the south.

  Kirby and Blunt sprang to their feet and looked at each other in horror.

  “Oh, shit!” Blunt said. “What do we do, Mr. Kirby?”

  Kirby’s mouth flopped open and closed several times, and during those few precious seconds, it became clear that each of the approaching screams was being produced by more than a single creature. Far more. If Kirby was any judge of things—and he liked to think he was—there were whole platoons of these little mushroomy fuckers bearing down on them.

  Except from the west. There were no screams coming from that direction yet.

  Kirby grabbed Blunt’s arm and pulled him toward the west side of the clearing.

  “Run!” he shouted.

  They did. Brush tore their clothes, and branches whipped their faces and arms, leaving welts and cuts, but they didn’t even notice. All they were aware of was the fact that the screams were quickly converging on them, like the eager cries of hounds chasing a fox.

  “They’re gaining on us, Mr. Kirby!” Blunt cried.

  “I know, damn it! Just keep running, fast as you can!”

  Despite his own injunctions and better judgment, Kirby couldn’t resist slowing down a little and looking back over his shoulder. At first he couldn’t see anything except trees and bushes and moss. But then he caught a glimpse of another six-inch-tall humanoid figure racing after them through the undergrowth. This one looked like a miniature orc.

  “What the fuck?” he muttered. “Pirates, then orcs? This makes no fuckin’ sense whatsoever.”

  “What’d you say, Mr. Kirby?”

  “Forget it. Just run.”

  They ran. They ran so fast the air felt red-hot in their lungs, and sweat flew like rain from their faces. And still the screaming creatures drew ever closer.

  “—AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH—”

  And then they came to a spot where the land dropped down into a small valley, its steep sides thick with old leaves, its bottom a dense tangle of trees and bushes. They didn’t waste time climbing down the slope; they just leaped off the edge and slid down the leaves on their butts like little kids on sleds. It was only when they were halfway to the bottom and going too fast to stop that Kirby realized they were going to shoot right into the brush. If there were any logs or thorn bushes in their line of travel, he and Blunt were in big trouble.

  Being bigger and heavier, Blunt reached the bottom of the slope a good three seconds before Kirby and whooshed right into the brush. A moment later there was a loud clang, and Blunt cried, “Owie!”

  “Aw, shit,” Kirby muttered. He tried to slow himself down by digging his feet into the leaves, but it was too little too late, and he streaked into the brush about three feet to the left of where Blunt had entered.

  Leafy branches swatted his face and his arms. In the midst of this barrage, he had a brief, confused glimpse of a huge, hulking two-legged form towering above him, and then he was drifting to a stop in a heap of leaves, his shirt rucked up around his armpits, his hair sticking up every which way, every inch of him peppered with dirt and bits of leaf.

  Behind him Blunt kept crying, “Owie, owie, owie!”

  And far up the slope came those awful shouts: “—AAAAAAHHHHHHHH—”

  Kirby scrambled to his feet and staggered back toward Blunt, who, he saw, was rolling around on the ground clutching his right knee. Next to him was a tall, thin, vine-wrapped silvery column that Kirby at first assumed was some kind of tree. But then he spotted an identical object about eight feet away from the first one, and he remembered the hulking form he thought he’d seen. He looked up.

  For a moment he thought he was looking at some kind of huge, bizarre, two-legged plant creature plant. But then he realized that it was a man-made structure that had been overrun with vines. It consisted of a domed, flat-bottomed object about ten feet in diameter supported by a pair of tall, slim pillars.

  He stepped closer and pulled some of the vines away from one of the legs, exposing a metal surface slightly pitted with rust.

  “I think it’s a machine!” he said.

  “Whah?” Blunt said. He had finally stopped rolling around and wailing like a four-year-old and stood up. He limped toward Kirby. “How’d a machine like that get way out here?”

  “It must’ve been here since the Cataclysm.”

  “Wow.” Blunt gawked at the machine as if he had just met a god. “That’s, like, really old. Hundreds and hundreds of years.”

  “Yeah, it—”

  One of the screams suddenly grew trebly loud as a four-inch-tall purple-haired gnome—or at least a bizarre quasi-fungoid replica of a gnome—appeared at the top of the slope and began bounding down it in a series of sliding hops.

  “—AAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH—”

  “Oh, crap!” Kirby yelped.

  As he started to turn to run, his eyes fell on a metal ladder extending down from the flat underside of the machine’s central hemisphere. Its bottom rung was seven feet off the ground, low enough for Blunt to reach it.

  “Up the ladder!” he said to Blunt. “Boost me up first, then you climb up after me.”

  Blunt nodded. Working quickly—the mini-gnome was nearly at the bottom of the slope already and would be on them in a matter of seconds—Blunt grabbed Kirby and held him up far enough for Kirby to grasp the bottom rung of the ladder.

  The mini-gnome was only about twenty feet away now and closing fast.

  “—AAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH—”

  And then three more mini-screamers shot over the top of the slope and descended the hill. One was the mini-orc Kirby had seen earlier. The other two were eight-inch-tall brown horses that were identical to each other in every way and screamed just like all the other mini-creatures. They were also considerably faster than any of the others, just as a normal horse would be. In no time, both of the mini-horses had left the mini-orc in the dust, even though all three had begun their descent of the hill at the same time.

  Kirby scrambled up the ladder. As soon as Kirby’s feet were clear of the bottom rung, Blunt reached up and grabbed it, then folded his legs up until his knees touched his chest. Just in time, too, because as he did so the mini
-gnome ran underneath the machine and then expanded and exploded, just like the mini-pirate earlier. This time, fortunately, Blunt’s legs were too far away from the explosion to get hit by any of those mysterious black seed-like particles.

  They scrambled up the ladder and soon came to the bottom of the hemisphere, where the ladder simply dead-ended. Kirby looked around for doors or keyholes or anything that might allow them access to the interior of the hemisphere—there had to be a way in, he reasoned; otherwise, why was the ladder here?—but he saw nothing except those damn vines and a few exposed swaths of slightly rusty metal.

  “Crap,” he muttered. He began yanking the vines away and letting them drop to the ground below the machine, where the two mini-horses were running in endless circles as if they didn’t know how to stop moving.

  “—AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH—”

  As Kirby watched, the mini-orc joined them. And from the sound of it half a dozen more of the stupid things were descending the slope. He shook his head and resumed tearing away the vines.

  Soon he uncovered a black panel about three feet square. It had to be the door, but when Kirby pushed against it, it didn’t budge. There must be some trick to opening it. And if they didn’t find it, or couldn’t operate it, they were pretty much fucked.

  Kirby pulled off more vines and tossed them to the forest floor below, where a mini-human female, two mini-elvish males (not identical), a mini-Labrador retriever, a mini-black bear, and two mini-pirates identical to the one they saw earlier had joined the group circling below the machine. The screaming had reached eardrum-skewering levels.

  “—AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH—”

  Kirby had to bite back his own screams at all the noise. In the distance, what sounded like hundreds more of the awful little bastards were converging on their position.

  Mustering every last scrap of concentration, he resumed his search for a way to open the door. Almost immediately his eyes fell on a palm-sized square that was fractionally darker than the metal around it.

  Kirby pushed against this smaller square, expecting it to sink inward. It didn’t, but a moment after his skin made contact with it, there was a faint whine from the interior of the hemisphere, and the big black square slowly slid open. As it did, dusty, stale air billowed out, making Kirby wince then sneeze. Through the widening aperture, he could see a handrail and metal walls lit up by hazy beams of sunlight that seemed to be coming from somewhere on the hemisphere’s west side.

  When the hole was wide enough, he grabbed the handrail inside the hemisphere and pulled himself in. He tried to roll aside to allow Blunt room to climb in after him, but there was nowhere to roll. He tried going one way, hit a wall; tried the other way, hit a wall.

  “Fuck,” he muttered.

  He looked around and discovered that the “wall” to his left was actually only a two-foot-high partition, and that beyond it were the backs of two seats. Beyond the seats was a curving window almost completely shrouded by vines. The few chinks in this veil of vines were where the feeble beams of sunlight were coming from.

  Kirby stood up and stepped over the partition. While Blunt climbed in behind him, he saw that the two chairs faced a console directly below the big window. The console was covered with a bewildering array of switches and dials and levers.

  “What the heck is this place, Mr. Kirby?” Blunt asked as he stepped over the partition and joined Kirby in the narrow space between the two chairs.

  “I’m guessing it’s some kind of pre-Cataclysm house. They probably lived up on stilts like this to keep away from monsters.”

  “Like those little screamy things, huh? Boy, that’s smart.”

  “Yeah, it is pretty smart. It reminds of something I might come up with.”

  Behind and below them, the sound of screaming dwindled to a faint buzz as the black hatch slid back into place with a clack.

  “Ha!” Kirby said. “We’re safe for now. We just have to wait for those little buggers to go to sleep, or head off in search of other prey, or whatever.”

  With a satisfied sigh, Kirby flopped down into the left-hand chair.

  Immediately a beep sounded from somewhere in the depths of the chair and lights flared to life in the ceiling and all over the console. Buttons glowed red, white, yellow. Tiny needles swung across dials. Digital displays lit up with green numerals.

  “Whoa,” Blunt said, sitting down in the other chair. “What’s all this stuff for?”

  “I, uh…” Kirby hated admitting he didn’t know something, so he just shrugged and said, “I suppose it might make food or something.”

  From a small grille on the console, a pleasant female voice said, “Mo-shkwikwa shkwash?”

  “What did it say?” Blunt said.

  Kirby frowned at the grille. “I dunno. I think it’s foreign.”

  “Mo-shkwikwa shkwash?” the voice said again.

  “Is it Orcish?” Blunt asked.

  Kirby shook his head. “Can’t be. Orcs’re too fuckin’ stupid to build something as complicated as this.”

  “Maybe elves, then?”

  Kirby scowled, still pissed off at how those fucking high-and-mighty pointy-eared shits had stopped him and Blunt from burglarizing that storehouse and thereby making their fortunes last week.

  “I certainly fucking hope not,” he growled. “Besides, that doesn’t sound like Elvish to me. And these seats are too big for elves. I bet it was humans who built this. Just humans who spoke a different language than us.”

  “Like those weird guys in the green leather armor and the helmets with the bird wings on them?”

  “The Contridians? Yeah, like them. Or like the Mangish.”

  “Ooh. They’re weird. They have funny eyes.”

  “Mo-shkwikwa shkwash?” the voice said again.

  “I wonder what it’s asking,” Blunt said.

  “Probably nothing important.”

  Blunt leaned forward and peered at the buttons and dials on the console.

  “Geez, there sure are lots of things on here. Do you think they really make food?”

  “Well, not for sure.” Kirby noticed Blunt’s hand moving toward a line of blinking yellow buttons on the console. “Uh, it might not be such a good idea to play around with them.”

  “But I’m really hungry. I lost the rest of my berries. And there weren’t really enough of them to begin with.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Mo-shkwikwa shkwash?” the voice repeated yet again.

  Blunt’s eyes lit up and an eager smile spread across his lips. “Oooh! I wonder if one of these makes jelly!”

  “Blunt, don’t!”

  But Blunt already was. He slammed his thick thumb onto one of the blinking yellow buttons.

  Kirby flinched.

  Nothing happened except that the button ceased blinking and stayed lit up.

  “Huh,” Blunt said with a disappointed frown. “That’s—”

  “Ma-moshkakwa mo-shash!” proclaimed a deep male voice from the console, and then there were a hundred groans and creaks as metal that hadn’t moved in centuries suddenly ground to life.

  Kirby looked around in alarm. “What the hell is—”

  He was unable to finish the sentence because he and Blunt were suddenly flung from their seats hard enough for their heads to slam against the hemisphere’s ceiling. They thumped back into their seats only to be flung upward once again.

  Slam! Thump! Slam! Thump! Over and over and over again. It was as if the machine had started doing vigorous jumping jacks.

  After about twenty seconds of this they finally discovered exactly what was going on, for a tree branch banged into the window and then screeched away across the glass, tearing off most of the vines in the process.

  As he looked out the window as best he could while slamming and thumping up and down, Kirby had the vertiginous sensation that the forest was moving, that all the trees and bushes had sprung to life just like the mini-creatures and were racing toward and then past the machine
for some inexplicable reason.

  But then he realized that it wasn’t the forest that was moving; it was the machine! The damn thing was sprinting through the woods like a racehorse, trampling bushes, uprooting small trees, and veering sharply around larger ones as it went.

  As he dropped into the chair for the umpteenth time, Kirby felt something hard poke his ass. As he ascended toward the ceiling again, he twisted around and looked down and saw that it was a metal tongue attached to a strap on one side of the seat. On the other side of the seat was a small boxy metal thing on the end of a similar strap. There was a slit in one side of the boxy thing, and as he thumped into the chair yet again, he realized that the slit was exactly the right size for the metal tongue.

  A belt! It was a belt!

  The next time he landed in the seat, he managed to grab each half of the belt and held on tight as he was thrown upward once again. Over the next few jounces, he managed to get himself into the seat and belted in. The jouncing was still bad enough to make him queasy, but at least his head wasn’t putting dents in the ceiling anymore.

  “Do what I did!” he yelled to Blunt. “Grab these things and strap yourself down!”

  It took a minute, but Blunt managed to do it. After that, the two of them just sat there for awhile, marveling at the forest speeding past at what had to be twenty miles an hour. They could dimly hear the snap and crack of bushes and small trees being trampled under the machine’s heavy, rapid tread.

  “I bet we left all those little screamy things real far behind,” Blunt said.

  “I bet we did.”

  “I hope the big machine-house squashed a bunch of ‘em, too.”

  “That’d be—”

  “Doshen mo-ma!” a male voice said in an urgent tone.

  “What’s that mean?” Blunt asked.

  “How should I know?”

  “Doshen mo-ma!” the voice repeated.

  At the same time several lights on the console turned red and flashed rapidly.

  Kirby stared at them for a moment, then swallowed and said, “Somehow I don’t think that’s a good sign.”