Scoundrels' Jig (The Chronicles of Eridia)

by J. S. Volpe

  * * *

  Hetchiglingum barely noticed the sorry fate of John Grommet; she was too focused on making it to Daddy Vermin’s headless corpse as quickly as she could. Speed was critical for General Blood’s plan to work.

  When she got there, she threw herself onto her knees next to the body, not even caring that she was kneeling in his still-wet blood and that it was rapidly soaking through the legs of her pants. She placed her hands on the corpse’s shoulders and reached out with her mind to make contact with the freshly dead flesh.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed the robot’s head swivel toward her. She couldn’t let it distract her, so she closed her eyes and gritted her teeth and focused on the task at hand.

  There was a clank and a scrape of metal on stone as the robot began to move.

  She ignored it as best she could and focused harder. A moment later her mind connected with the decomposing mass of organic material before her, the inert remains of a once-living thing that had been made to move and thus wanted to move but now lacked the motive power to do so.

  She gave it that power.

  The headless corpse gave one mighty galvanic jerk that tore it from Hetchiglingum’s grasp, and sprang to its feet. Just in time, too, for as it started running toward the brown door, the robot landed ten feet in front of it and Hetchiglingum. Its buzz-saw arm, which had begun to telescope toward Hetchiglingum, swung away from her and toward the corpse.

  It was then that Gojan raced out from behind the boulder he had scared John Grommet away from. He barreled toward the robot, his mouth already opening and lighting up with the bright yellow glow of his atomic breath.

  The robot detected Gojan’s approach as its right buzz-saw bit into Daddy Vermin’s torso. While that blade whirred through already-dead flesh and bone, the robot sent its other arm rocketing toward Gojan.

  When Gojan saw the blade streaking toward him, he let loose with everything he had. A cone of fire blasted from his mouth and engulfed the fast-approaching blade. He half expected to see the blade emerge from the fire unscathed and tear into his tough hide, but it didn’t. Instead he saw blobs of melted metal drop from the fire and plop to the ground, where they quickly cooled and hardened.

  He kept running toward the robot, never letting the cone of fire diminish even though he could already feel the ache in the back of his throat that told him he was overdoing it. If he survived this, he’d have quite a sore throat later on.

  As soon as the robot finished cutting Daddy Vermin’s remains in half, it executed a perfect side-flip. When it was upside-down in mid-air, its head only inches above the ground, it swept its undamaged arm underneath Gojan’s cone of fire, and severed the reptile-man’s legs two inches above the ankles.

  With a shrill cry, Gojan tumbled to the ground, his atomic breath sputtering out and his leg-stumps jetting vast quantities of the green ichor that served as his blood.

  He raised his head. The robot was on its feet again, its now-retracted left arm ending in a misshapen lump of melted metal, its right arm still extended and swooping back around toward Gojan’s neck.

  Gojan knew he was done for, but he still had one last chance to put the robot out of commission and thereby help General Blood and the others accomplish their mission.

  Straining so hard he felt his throat split, he unleashed a blast of atomic fire unlike any he had ever emitted before. It burned white-hot, bright enough to permanently blind him. Not that permanent blindness was much of an issue for him at this point: Even as the atomic fire hit the robot’s torso dead-on and reduced it to a spray of liquid silver, the robot’s right arm, which had been swinging toward Gojan from the side and was thus well outside the cone of fire, continued on its path, carried by momentum, and neatly decapitated him.

  Hetchiglingum, General Blood, and Slobog converged on the edge of the battlezone in front of the hill of moraine.

  Gojan’s body lay in a spreading pool of green ichor. The robot’s right arm, its buzz-saw now silent forever, sat next to the corpse. The arm was no longer attached to anything and ended in a melted stump. Gojan’s final blast of atomic breath had been so intense that a patch of cracked and blackened rock fanned out from his body to the blobs of metal that, aside from the left arm, were all that remained of the robot.

  “He died with honor,” General Blood said.

  “I’ll say,” said Hetchiglingum. “I thought for sure I was dead.”

  Slobog frowned. “You should’ve been. It’s not right that Gojan should die but a corpse-fucker like you should still be alive.”

  “Corpse-fucker?” snarled Hetchiglingum. “I’ll kill you for that, you semen-brained bastard!”

  “Both of you shut up!” roared General Blood. “What in Nün’s mad eyes has gotten into you two? I understand that this is an abnormally stressful situation, but that is hardly any reason to let the whole world see what worthless little fucks you really are.”

  “How dare you talk to us like that, you sanctimonious prick!” snarled Slobog. “We’ve been nothing but loyal to you, though not even Quillith knows why.”

  General Blood’s face blazed red. “You will not raise your voice to me, you inept turd! That is insubordination! And the punishment for that is the permanent silencing of your fat, quacking mouth!”

  He whipped out his sword. Slobog immediately reached for his own sword, but it was too late: Before he could draw it from its scabbard, the General had sheathed his own sword hilt-deep in Slobog’s belly. When the General yanked the sword out, blood flecked with blobs of shit gouted from the wound.

  Slobog collapsed to the ground. As he died, he sneered up at General Blood and hissed, “Fucking piece of garbage. I hope you die.”

  General Blood snorted in contempt. “Every second that I live after this will be a glorious blessing, for I shall no longer have to share the globe with you, you dumb cunt. Ow!”

  This latter comment was in response to a sharp pain in his calf. He looked down and saw Hetchiglingum plucking a bloody dagger from his leg. She glared up at him, eyes full of murder.

  “You’re the worst general in the history of Umperskap, you shit-breathed motherfucker!” she shrieked. “All your troops hate you, but none so much as me! Oh, I hate you, I hate you, I hate you! Die die die!”

  She stabbed him twice more before his sword lopped off her head.

  “You festering cock-sore!” General Blood shouted at her head as it bounced away. “You…you…”

  The rage drained from his face like water from a cup whose bottom has just dropped out. In its wake came an expression of horror and despair.

  “What—what have I done?” he wailed. “My soldiers—my friends—I didn’t mean any of those things I said. Oh, why? Why? Whyyyyyyy?”

  Tears streaming down his face, he sank to his knees between the corpses of Slobog and Hetchiglingum. He was weeping so hard that when he tried to speak again, all that came out was a series of gasping sobs.

  Shaking his head as if in negation of everything, he turned his sword so that the tip of the hilt was pressed against the ground and the tip of the blade against his belly. Then he took a deep breath and launched himself forward. The sword tore through him with a slick, tearing sound, its point emerging from the back of his leather armor, and then his body sank to the ground with a heavy, lifeless thud.

  And then Brother Wisswick stepped out from behind a boulder thirty feet away, a goofy, almost orgasmically happy grin on his face, the psycho-machine from the Snowman’s armory in his hands.

  “Did you see?” he asked Brother Tantora and Sister Moshi as they stepped out after him. “It made them all kill each other. I made them all kill each other. First I sent them hate”—he pointed at a button on the box that was labeled “hate”—”then when only the one gorgim was left, I sent him a blast of despair.” He pointed at another button, this one labeled “despair.” “And that was that. So simple. So beautiful.” He beamed down at the machine. “Oh, this is the most glorious device ever creat
ed.”

  Brother Tantora chuckled like an indulgent uncle. “Yes, it has done its job most efficaciously. But do not forget that it, like all things, is destined for entropy. You must one day give it up.”

  “Of course,” Brother Wisswick said with a nod. “But while it lasts, I plan to thoroughly enjoy it.”

  “The coast is now clear for us to get the gold. Let us proceed.” Brother Tantora took a step toward the moraine.

  “Perhaps we shouldn’t bother,” Brother Wisswick said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, the whole point of getting the gold was to use it to further our ends. But now we have these wonderful devices, and we know where the Snowman keeps many more.”

  “Yeah, but he might move that stuff once he finds that his prized possessions have been taken,” Sister Moshi said. “We can’t count on any of that stuff still being there when we head back that way.”

  Brother Wisswick cocked an eyebrow. “Were you not the one who seemed sure that something had happened to the Snowman, that his absence from his lair was not normal?”

  “I said it was a possibility. I don’t know exactly what happened any more than you do.”

  “Well, if the Snowman is still alive and has moved his weapons, then we shall simply have to find them again. It shouldn’t be difficult.”

  “Oh, right! Like he won’t hide them somewhere even more secure.”

  “Enough!” said Brother Tantora. “Brother Wisswick, what is it that you are proposing?”

  “I think we should just blow this place up, gold and all. We don’t need the gold. Ultimately gold is anathema to our plans. Gold makes things—goods and services and wealth. Our goal is to unmake. Besides, if our aim was to use the gold to further our entropic ends, I don’t think we really need it anymore, considering the weapons we now have. They should provide all the destructive power we require.”

  Brother Tantora frowned and pursed his lips in thought.

  “Hm,” he said. “That is an interesting point.”

  He turned and stared at the doorway in the moraine slope.

  “Hm. Yes. I think you might be right. It would be most logical to—”

  “Glgk,” Brother Wisswick said behind him. A moment later there was a heavy thump, a sound remarkably similar to the one General Blood’s body had made when it hit the ground.

  “Eh?” Brother Tantora said, turning. “What’s—”

  Turning, he came face to face with Sister Moshi, who plunged a dagger into his gut. As he gaped at her in shock, he saw Brother Wisswick’s still form sprawled on the ground behind her, his throat slit, his blood rapidly pooling out around him.

  “You…you…” Brother Tantora said, and then she twisted the knife, and the pain in his gut exploded like a supernova. She yanked the dagger out. Blood gushed out after it. Brother Tantora took three stumbling steps backward and crashed down on his ass.

  The antimatter bomb. He still had it in his pack. He fumbled at the leather cord that tied the pack shut, but Sister Moshi strode forward and kicked him in the face hard enough to knock him flat on his back and send his head thwacking against the stony ground. As he lay there dazed and moaning, she tore the heavy pack from his shoulder and heaved it aside as if it were garbage.

  “Nope,” she said, kneeling on his chest, pinning him to the ground. “No more of that for you guys. You’ve done more than enough damage.”

  Brother Tantora blinked at her. “What…why?”

  “Because you piss all over this wild, wonderful universe. You abhor the mad fecundity of creation. You’re afraid of change, time, difference, chaos—of reality, basically.”

  His eyes narrowed. His upper lip curled back, baring his crooked teeth. “Nünite,” he spat.

  “That’s right, bitch,” she said. “And I’ve been subverting you fucktards ever since I joined this ridiculous group. I was hoping to find a way to put you out of business without killing anyone, but since you found those weapons and were actually planning to use them…well, you didn’t really leave me much choice, now did you?”

  Brother Tantora sneered. “Your ‘victory’ here is hollow, meaningless. No matter what you or anyone else does, all will end. All will disappear. Ultimately everything becomes nothing.”

  Sister Moshi leaned forward until their faces were only inches apart. “No. Everything becomes something else.”

  She drove the dagger into his chest.

  “In the end there is only chaos,” she said.

  When he stopped twitching and went limp, she stood up, shook the blood off the dagger, and then stared down at the pack containing the antimatter bomb.

  The question now was, what should she do with the bomb, the psycho-machine, and the flensing cloud thingie? She would have loved to take all three—she had no qualms about using them, per se; she just didn’t approve of the Yellow Pawns’ projected uses for them—but while the antimatter bomb was small and light, the other two were heavy and bulky. She would have to leave one of them behind.

  After weighing her options, she took off her pack, removed the flensing device, and hurriedly buried it in a heap of moraine about fifteen feet from her former partners’ bodies. She hoped it would be safe there until she could come back for it.

  She stuffed the antimatter bomb and the psycho-machine into her pack, then strode toward the brown door.