The Devil's Judgment

by Chris Pisano

  Bale clenched his fists and rolled his neck, each crack a small relief of pressure. He had no idea who this person was or what he had heard, nor did he know how to reply, so he responded with a simple, “You’re welcome.”

  General Perrator laughed and curled his fingers, knuckles cracking from the effort. “Your hubris will be your downfall.”

  This statement confused Bale. He stood straighter and sucked in his bulbous gut as best he could to look over it as he pulled away the top of his pants. “I know it’s big, but it’s never caused me to fall down before.”

  “Enough!” Perrator barked. “No more mind games. It’s time I end you.”

  Bale was tired. He had been fighting for so long that he no longer knew when an old day ended and a new one began. His memories of his children were those of tiny green creatures toddling around on unsteady legs. Now they were all grown, and he had missed all the moments in between then and now because of fighting, because of war, because of people who wanted to kill him. Before him stood yet another person he did not know who wished to kill him. So be it. Bale had no taste for killing but had feasted more times than he could count at the buffet of war. This time would be no different, but afterward he wanted to take his children and go home.

  Just one more time, he thought to himself as he raised his fists in front of him, trying to predict how the half-giant would attack. Before either of them could make a move, Lapin hopped in front of Bale and said, “It’s okay. I got this.”

  Bale was happy to have someone else fight for him and wanted to support his friend. “Okay. Did you have enough to drink?”

  The rabbit hiccupped in affirmation and turned to face the half-giant.

  Bale was satisfied that Lapin was inebriated enough to handle Perrator. Tiny gauntlets covered the tops of all four of the rabbit’s feet, silver and glinting in the sunlight as he hopped toward the half-giant. Bale almost mentioned how cute he thought they were but remembered the last time he had called Lapin cute. The rabbit shit in his ale. Well more than a decade separated Bale from that incident, but he could still taste it. “Go get ‘em, Lapin!”

  “I will! This shit stain doesn’t stand a chance against me and my—!”

  Perrator ended Lapin’s battle call by stepping on him.

  Bale had seen this before and knew what to expect. Perrator continued to stride toward Bale, unaware that the rabbit was still alive until Lapin shook off the hit and yelled, “Hey, shit stain! I’m not finished with you yet.”

  Perrator stopped and turned around. Before him was a rabbit still very much alive after being stepped on. The half-giant brought his foot down hard enough to leave an indent in the ground. But Lapin had leaped out of the way. “Oh yeah, shit stain? Is that how it’s gonna be? Well, I got a little somethin’ for you.”

  Lapin arose to his haunches and did a shimmy, twitching all four of his legs. Three crescent-shaped claws popped from each gauntlet. A tiny primal roar escaped from deep within his tiny chest. Lapin charged.

  At first, Perrator remained frozen, stunned that a creature small enough to fit in his mouth suddenly attacked him, but that changed when the rabbit drew blood. He had half a dozen cuts along his shins. He reached down to swat at Lapin, but his efforts yielded sliced wrists and forearms.

  Roaring, Perrator jumped from one foot to the next trying to stomp his opponent. He kept missing and Lapin kept cutting. The claws were minuscule, but were sharp and durable, strong enough to sever the tendons at Perrator’s heels and calves, dropping the half-giant to his knees.

  No longer able to stand, Perrator knelt and pounded on the ground anytime he saw the rabbit, his fists no faster than his feet. Even when the rabbit climbed upon him, digging his knives into flesh.

  Lapin left a trail of bloodied tracks along Perrator’s torso. He climbed up the half-giant’s chest and dragged his claws down his back. Perrator kept swatting, his hands moving faster in panic, but each strike was too late.

  Over shoulders and head, the rabbit continued to race along. Slices. Cuts. Gouges. If not for the claws, Lapin would have slipped in the flow of blood. Face. Head. Neck. Lapin did not let up.

  The swats diminished in power and frequency.

  General Perrator’s eyes rolled up into his head and he collapsed.

  Standing on top of the newly made carcass, Lapin licked the blood from his front paws. “Okay, now let’s find your children and figure out what to do next.”

  thirty-three

  Landyr had seen horror before. The gore of battle. The insidiousness of demons. Some would even say his sexual exploits with the likes of goblins, orcs, and boggarts would be considered a horror. But he had never seen the likes of Speekore’s experiments.

  He had battled against his chimeras before, and there were plenty of them now. Well over a dozen were tearing into the pitchfork-wielding militia. These other creatures that wriggled and crawled their way out of his laboratory and onto the battlefield would find new homes in his future nightmares. Men with six arms, made possible by three torsos stacked upon each other, wielded a sword in each hand. Human heads on the bodies of spiders and snakes scurried and slithered about. One monstrosity had the upper half of human faces attached to its shoulders, back, thighs, and chest, all sets of eyes functioning, looking around for the dangers of battle. Landyr personally killed this one, an act of mercy if there ever was one, but it still took a high level of swordsmanship to finish him off.

  Speekore’s battalion did not exclusively consist of humans; the vile hobgoblin was more than happy to experiment on any race. What confounded Landyr now were the giants. Specifically, their heads.

  Years ago, while hunting for wizards, Daedalus’ Elite Troop stumbled upon a village of giants. It took a regiment of soldiers, but the entire population was captured. Landyr never heard what happened to the giants after that. Now, he knew; Speekore removed their heads from their bodies and attached their arms to the sides. Their vital innards were relocated to the backs of their heads, contained in a pouch of skin that flopped about as they ran around on their hands. Eight of these abominations were wreaking havoc on the battlefield.

  With a mouth the size of a doorway, they used their teeth as their main form of weapon. They also crushed people by landing on them. While at rest, the abominations used their hands either to strike soldiers or tear them apart. They were far nimbler than they appeared.

  Landyr ran from one only to have it race after him on its hands and then drop. Landyr timed his jump well enough not to get crushed. He leaped to his feet and slashed at fingers larger than he with his sword leaving mere scratches. The giant’s hands were too large, too fast for Landyr to get close enough to its face, so he ran away again.

  The chase was shorter this time and the giant landed much closer. Landyr fell to the ground again but had no opportunity to get back to his feet, scrabbling around to avoid the grabbing fingers of the giant. This was a part of the plan, however. Then Chenessa dropped from the sky to squash the head like an over-ripened tomato.

  Landyr stood and went to his love. He pressed his cheek to her muzzle and stroked her snout between her nostrils. “That was close.”

  “Apologies, but some of Speekore’s creatures are more monstrous than I.”

  To add validity to her statement, one such creature landed next to her. Speekore did not discard the bottom half of the giants, he added dragon heads and wings to them. Dragons were elusive, hard to find creatures, but Landyr assumed that with the backing of the king’s resources nothing could remain hidden from Speekore’s motivations.

  The dragon head snapped its jaws at Chenessa’s tail, but she flicked it out of the way. This distracted her enough for one of the feet to kick her shoulder. She roared and pushed away from the ground. The creature flapped its own wings and quickly rose to a higher elevation, forcing Chenessa to fly too close to the ground into the massive
hands of two of the giant heads. One grabbed her tail and the other one held her claws, dragging her back to the ground.

  As soon as she touched down, she bent around and bit into the fleshy sack at the back of one of the heads and pulled. Innards exploded from the sack and splashed against her other two attackers. It was not enough to distract them.

  The giant head rushed to Chenessa, hands slapping the ground. Then it winked out of existence only to reappear above in the sky. It was far enough above the ground that when it struck, its skull shattered like an egg, splattering the yolk of its brains. Silver. The dragon creature was faster and could fly, so Silver used the more traditional fireballs and lightning bolts to turn the thing into a ball of melted flesh.

  Landyr had grown tired of this game. The only way to stop these things was to kill the master. Speekore controlled them and if he died, they died. Like a cowardly general, Speekore remained hidden in a small tent on a cart driven by more abominations. Each steed was the head of a man on four legs, two sets of hips connected back to back. Ten of these things pulled his carriage, usually away from any skirmish that grew too close to him. Now was the time to end this.

  “Silver!” Landyr shouted. When he garnered the wizard’s attention, he pointed to the carriage. “Time to do your trick.”

  Landyr ran to the carriage, careful not to let anything slow him down. He dodged the swinging swords of multi-armed soldiers and slashed the throat of a chimera who ran into his path. Nothing would stop him from this.

  The carriage never stayed still, the beasts’ feet in a constant state of movement. The directional changes were sudden and random. When Silver created a portal under the carriage, only a third of the steeds fell in but were quickly yanked back out by the others. He created another portal and once again missed. Another portal, then another. Finally, he made a portal so large that more than half of the hideous steeds fell through. As the carriage toppled into the hole, Speekore scrambled free onto solid ground. Landyr anticipated as much and drove his sword through the hobgoblin’s chest to the hilt.

  No cry of pain. No blood.

  The hobgoblin grabbed Landyr by the throat.

  Landyr lost his grip on the sword and hit the hobgoblin’s arms as hard as he could, but bent elbows were the only result. Squirming, he decided to return the embrace reaching for his attacker’s neck but withdrew his hands as metal jaws snapped shut just short of his fingers. Darkness crept into his vision from the sides. Soon all he would be able to see nothing else other than Speekore’s glass shielded eyes. His eyes. Something was irregular about his eyes.

  They were fake.

  The bulbous eyes did not look natural, more like boiled eggs after they had been shelled. Landyr dug his fingers under the glass lenses to pop them free, then shoved his thumbs into the sockets. They slid in with ease and thin yellow worms wriggled out of the opening around his thumbs.

  Speekore screamed and stopped his attack on Landyr, now struggling to push him away. Landyr extracted his thumbs to grab the hobgoblin’s head with both hands and shake it. The worms cascaded from the orbits of Speekore’s skull and Landyr stepped on them, bursting them open with purulent gushes. The hobgoblin flailed his arms and strained to escape, but Landyr refused to let go, shaking more worms free and crushing them.

  Eventually, Speekore’s body went limp. Landyr tossed it to the ground. It burst into flame as Silver floated closer. Chenessa joined them as well while Landyr watched Speekore’s abominations collapse. Those who were fighting them cheered, some running their swords through the bodies for good measure.

  As much as it pained him, Landyr said to Silver, “Nicely done. This could prove to be a turning point in this war.”

  “Unfortunately, as with all wars, there is rarely only one turning point.”

  Landyr frowned and tried to think of a sarcastic comment but noticed that the wizard was not looking at him, rather the forest. Dearborn and King Perciless returned on their green dragon, flying over the battlefield to Castle Hill. Right behind them were Oremethus and Daedalus on their bone dragon and gemstone dragon. Following them was madness.

  Half a hundred of the king’s wizards and five dragons. They wasted no time throwing themselves into the war. This was another turning point. A bad one.

  “Can you two handle that?” Landyr asked.

  “I’m grossly outnumbered,” Chenessa said.

  “As am I,” Silver muttered. There was a tone in his words that implied his statement was incomplete as if he could handle the situation, but there might be a steep price for someone to pay. Landyr waited a heartbeat. Two. Three. Four. When Silver spoke again, his voice was but a whisper. “However, there is something I can do.”

  “And that is?”

  As Silver straightened his back and extended his arms, palm up, the putrid organs hanging from his torso jiggled. He slowly ascended into the air. “When I possessed this body a decade ago, I was gifted with its immense power. This wizard is an ancient one. In fact, one of the first ones involved with acquiring the magic of this world. If you can understand something, then you can destroy it.”

  “You’re saying that you’re going to destroy magic?”

  Silver closed his eyes. “Not destroy it, but strip away everyone’s knowledge of how to use it. Magic will still exist, but no one will remember how to access it. Spells will be forgotten, written instructions will be incomprehensible languages, words will be nothing more than common sounds.”

  “No!” Chenessa yelled. Tail twitching, she clawed at the ground while pacing in circles. “No, you can’t!”

  Landyr ran both hands over her neck hoping to calm her down. “I don’t know, Chenessa. A world where no one can use magic might not be a bad thing. It actually might be a very, very good thing.”

  “You don’t understand! Without magic, I will forever be trapped in this form.”

  Landyr stroked her neck, his fingers gliding over her shoulder. “Actually, it is you who don’t understand. I love you, no matter what form you’re in.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous! A human and a dragon cannot know love.”

  Landyr looked into her right eye and said, “Too late. We know love.”

  A tear rolled from her eye, slicking her black scales. “I don’t want to be around people in this form.”

  “Then we won’t. I’ve come to find I have a healthy distaste for human company. We can make a home in one of Praeker’s tribes. We can live in the forest or inhabit a cave or find an island no one knows about.”

  “Truly?”

  “Truly.”

  Silver floated higher, arms extended. From Landyr’s perspective, it looked as if Silver held the suns, one in each hand. Then their brightness intensified and Landyr understood true power. Too much. Landyr looked away, his eyes burning from the suns’ brightness, and swore he heard the entire world die. When he looked back, everything was how it was moments ago. The suns bathed the land with their rays. The sky, cloudless. The sounds of war and death raged on. But the wizards that had been floating far above the ground all fell from the sky.

  Silver did it. He removed everyone’s ability to use magic.

  Landyr looked up to thank the wizard but he was not there. He looked to the ground to see if he had fallen like all the others. “Where’d he go?”

  “He’s gone,” Chenessa answered. “The body was an ancient being made of magic, but Silver was born and raised a human. With no knowledge of how to use magic . . .”

  “. . . he could not remember how to maintain the body. He sacrificed himself.”

  “And now no one can remember how to use magic.”

  Landyr turned back to Chenessa and went back to stroking her face. “I would disagree with that.”

  “Why is that?”

  “I can access magic.”

  Her scaled brow furrowed. “I�
��m in no mood to jest.”

  Landyr shrugged his shoulders. “No jest. I love you. What greater form of magic is there than that?”

  The corner of her mouth curved upward. “Oh, so this is how you plan to spend your days after the war, by being a poet.”

  Landyr smiled. “Well, it is a profession that pays well.”

  “It pays in nothing but adoration.”

  “As long as it’s yours then I’m the richest man in the world.”

  Chenessa sighed. “Thank all the gods you’re still a soldier until the war is over.”

  Landyr laughed and looked at the top of Castle Hill.

  His laughter faded.

  The war was over.

  * * *

  A sword. That was all Dearborn had to defend herself with against two madmen and seven dragons. Her allies were a sibling of the two madmen and a despot of abnormalities. She had a dragon of her own, however, it flew away after Daedalus destroyed the Dragon Soul and Perciless lost control of it.

  Daedalus tossed aside the broken bits of the shattered gemstone and howled in triumph. Perciless took advantage of the distraction and struck his younger brother, knocking him away. Before he could gain any form of tactical advantage, Oremethus charged and shouldered Perciless, allowing Daedalus to regain his senses.

  Both Dearborn and Praeker ran to Daedalus, their swords raised high. They swung downward in unison, aiming for his head. Their weapons ricocheted off his up thrust skeletal arm. Daedalus got to his feet and blocked another strike from Praeker by catching the sword and yanking it away. He squeezed, bending the sword into a useless shape, and then tossed it aside. In one fluid motion, he blocked a strike from Dearborn and followed through to backhand Praeker with enough force to take him off his feet.

  Dearborn had clashed swords more times than she could remember and was proficient with a multitude of other weapons. None of those experiences helped with steel against bone. Her sword did not react the way she expected after every block. She tried slicing his legs and stabbing his torso, but Daedalus deflected each attack until she put every bit of her strength into a strike at his neck. He caught the sword and the blade crumpled in his grasp. Daedalus’s next move was a blow to her face with his human hand. She blocked that with ease, but in doing so left herself vulnerable to the punch from his skeletal hand.