by G. R. Cooper
"Your magic user thing?" asked the thief. His words slurred from swollen bloody lips.
"I think so."
Wulfgar looked up to the troll. It still looked back at him.
"Hey, Trolly McTrollface," he grunted, "carry me over to my horse."
Panic rose in Wulfgar as the troll advanced on him, but the creature did as it was bid. He gathered Wulfgar up into its arms and walked back to the grass. He set Wulfgar gently onto his feet next to the mount. Wulfgar began rummaging through the saddlebags, pulling healing materials out. He heard a snuffling behind him and looked over his shoulder to see Bear, dripping wet, rejoin the group. As Wulfgar watched, Bear began to shake, flinging water in all directions, spraying the prone bodies of Snorri and Lauren in the process.
Snorri snorted, wiped the water away from his face and rose slowly onto one elbow. A look of fear took over his face as he saw the troll standing behind Wulfgar, but Wulfgar waved it away.
"It's OK. He's on our side. Now."
Too tired and wounded to question, Snorri just rolled over toward Lauren and nudged her.
"I'll be there in a second," called Wulfgar, closing up the saddle bags.
"Too late," said Snorri softly. "She's dead."
Wulfgar froze, then ran, dropping to his knees next to her.
"What?" He looked down at her oddly peaceful yet heavily bruised face. One of her arms was twisted in an unnatural fashion.
Wulfgar was overwhelmed. Panicked. He shook his head, unbelieving.
"What can we do?"
"Calm down," Snorri sighed, patting Wulfgar on the shoulder. "Heal me up and I'll take a couple of horses and go back for her."
Wulfgar sighed in relief, remembering. Dead was not dead. Not here, not anymore. Lauren was probably already trotting along the road they'd already traveled, on her way back to the bridge. He turned and began healing Snorri.
Rydra joined them, he looked down at Lauren's corpse, "Good thing you managed to get us a binding point."
Wulfgar smiled, "We should only lose half a day, instead of three."
"Less," corrected Snorri. "I can take the two horses at a gallop there and back. I should be back in an hour. Two tops."
Wulfgar nodded. They had been riding leisurely during the trip. Having horses that they didn't have to worry about riding to death, he assumed, meant that a full run was possible for long periods of time. Uncomfortable, but quick. He finished with Snorri and began healing Rydra.
"Back in a jiffy," said Snorri in farewell as he mounted, then spurred his horse. Lauren's mount ran behind. Wulfgar watched the horses retreat back up the road, leaving small clouds of red clay dust in their wake.
Rydra groaned and stretched, now fully healed. Wulfgar began working on himself while the little thief walked to the troll and looked him over closely. Bear too was warily walking around the creature, sniffing at the massive, wide stone legs. The troll stood impassively, looking to Wulfgar.
"So, let me get this straight," said Rydra looking back to Wulfgar, a grin spreading over his face. "You are granted a wondrous boon, the ability to meld yourself with any of the creatures of the world, and you pick a stone troll?"
"Well," countered Wulfgar, "I didn't really pick him. Not consciously." He shrugged, "I don't even remember thinking about the option. My brain just sort of did it on its own."
"On its own?"
"Yeah, I panicked. OK? I'm still not used to the whole idea of death being no big deal. I guess I'm still trying to avoid it." He began to laugh with Rydra. "Besides, what's wrong with a stone troll?" He looked up to the creature, who towered over him looking down blankly at his new ally.
"What's your name?" asked Wulfgar.
The troll looked back impassively.
"No name, eh?" Wulfgar scrunched his face in thought. "Can't have that." He looked over to Rydra, "What do you think, would Tim work as a good name to give a big dumb oaf," he glanced back to the troll, "no offense."
"It would certainly continue the trip's theme," agreed the thief.
Wulfgar nodded. "OK. From now on, your name is Tim."
"Thim," said the troll plainly. "Me Thim."
"Thure thing Thim," grinned Wulfgar patting the massive beast on the elbow - which hung at around Wulfgar's shoulder level. He began to root through his pack and pulled out a healing poultice. He looked over Tim trying to determine the best place to apply the healing. Giving up, he just slapped it onto Tim's chest. It stuck to the massive pectorals with a slimy thwapping sound.
Wulfgar shook his head, looked back to Rydra, "It doesn't seem to be working. The healing. I have no idea how to fix my stone beast." He looked up to Tim, "Do you have any clue about how I can heal you?"
Tim shook his head, "Me hungry."
"What do you eat?"
In response, the troll wandered to the shore in the creek bed and began shoveling handfuls of water smoothed rocks into its gaping maw. Wulfgar walked to him and squatted beside Bear, who was still following the troll, confused. He reached out and began scratching the dog's ears as they watched the troll, crouched in the shallows of the river. As it ate, its health began to regenerate, slowly. It fed with a sense of determination, dropping rock-fulls from his left and right hands in succession.
Wulfgar nodded, "OK, you eat rocks. It heals you. Why not?"
"I guess it makes a weird kind of sense," said Rydra, joining them from behind. "He's made of stone, so I guess he's replenishing himself. Somehow." The little thief dropped a huge pack onto the ground in front of Tim. "I went through his little abode and put everything that belonged to him, which wasn't much, into his pack."
"We go?" asked Tim walking out of the water. After eating his fill, his health bar was slowly, very slowly, increasing. At this rate, Wulfgar mused, it would be a day before it filled. He wondered if Tim would have to eat again before it completed.
Wulfgar nodded, "Yeah, we go soon. As soon as our friends get back." He pointed to the sack hanging from Rydra's belt and beckoned toward himself. Sighing, Rydra removed it and gave it to Wulfgar, who handed it to Tim.
"Sorry we took your gold."
Tim looked into the sack suspiciously, then began adding the bridge fare that Wulfgar had given him back into his stash. He looked like he was slowly counting the total.
"You're weird," chuckled Rydra.
"What? It's his."
Rydra shrugged, "And he's yours."
"He's not my slave," said Wulfgar shaking his head. "I'm going to think of him as an ally." He looked up at the grin spreading across Rydra's face, "What? I mean, he can speak," he looked back to Tim, "sort of. So anyway, I'm not sure I'm feeling comfortable with owning someone. So the gold is his."
"You're weird," repeated Rydra, laughing loudly this time.
Wulfgar just shrugged and grinned, but he was thinking about the horror of being under control by the other Tim, in the village. He worried that the troll felt something of that. He tried to convince himself that it was highly unlikely that the AI troll was in any way sentient, but his definitions on what it meant to be sentient had blurred recently.
"Hey, I just remembered something. When we were fighting, I got a critical hit and it said that Tim was enraged. He started swinging his fists and jumping around like a rat on crack. What's up with that? Doesn't seem like much of a benefit for me to get a crit like that."
"Not sure," answered Rydra, "We'll probably need to ask our warrior when he returns." Rydra pointed back up the road, "Which looks to be in a few seconds."
Snorri and Lauren came pounding over a little hillock overlooking the bridge, causing a cloud of dust to rise around the group as they reined in. Wulfgar walked up to the horses, waving the dust away from his face.
"That was quick!" he said, a bit too happily. He looked up at Lauren, beaming.
She dropped off the mount and gave him a quick hug before trotting back to her corpse. Wulfgar watched as she, clad in only a linen bikini, began pulling her gear off her old body. It felt, Wulfgar though
t, extremely weird to watch someone strip their old, inert body. Thankfully, she didn't have to undo the straps to her armor and gear - she just pulled on them and they seemed to come away, piece-by-piece, into her hands.
"What does the enrage critical hit do?" asked Rydra as Snorri walked up to him, "Wulfgar got that hit on him," he jutted his chin toward the troll, "during our fight and neither of us know what it means."
Snorri nodded, "It's kind of like sending them a bit out of control with anger. They get a speed boost on their attacks, but they also get a big to-hit penalty. It also sucks down their Stamina like crazy."
"What happens when your Stamina runs out?" asked Wulfgar
"You get slow. Like, real slow."
Snorri thought for a moment.
"It's like you're just completely out of energy. Beat. Tired. You can barely hold onto your weapon," he paused again. "You really have to watch your stamina in a fight. At least we do," he nodded toward Lauren. "The tanks do. You sneaky little bastards probably don't get in stand-up fights long enough to worry about it. Your hit-points would run out long before your Stamina." He grinned.
"Now," continued Snorri, "can we address the elephant in the room?" He nodded toward the troll.
"Tim," chuckled Rydra. "We're calling him Tim."
"Thim," agreed Tim.
"I don't know exactly how it will work. Yet." Wulfgar shrugged. "Tim and I have entered into some sort of symbiotic relationship." He opened up the page describing the Familiar skill and began scrolling down it, his eyes flickering back and forth as he scanned the information. Included was Tim's character sheet.
"Crap," laughed Wulfgar. "Tim is a level 2 troll. A baby." He looked through the rest of the troll's stats.
Level 2:
STR: 75
INT: 01
AGI: 13
HP: 88
AC: 8 (Stone)
STA: 13
"He's one tough, baby, though," he continued. "Eighty-eight hit points. Seventy-five strength." Wulfgar rubbed his jaw, remembering the skull shattering, brain bruising hit the troll had given him. He looked up at the walking cairn with new respect.
"He can also quarry and build with stone!" Wulfgar said excitedly.
Snorri raised one eyebrow, "And? Not sure exactly how that's going to help us, unless you're planning on going into the toll-bridge business."
"Me neither," grinned Wulfgar, "I just think it's pretty cool."
"Not to rain on your parade," said Rydra, "but your resume is filled with all kind of sneaky, quiet, unobtrusive kinds of activities. Activities that he," he pointed up at Tim, "seems unlikely to contribute to."
Rydra cocked his head, "I mean, even a rat would've been a better match for you. You could at least send one of those in to quietly check out rooms you're trying to sneak into. Assuming you can see what they're seeing."
"You can," agreed Wulfgar, "and you're right." He shook his head, "You're right," he repeated, "I have no idea how Tim and I will work together."
He shrugged again, "It's water under the bridge now. I can't undo the decision. I can't ever, as far as I know, choose another Familiar, so," he raised his eyebrows, "I'll just have to make the best of it, won't I?" He looked up at Tim, "Won't we, I mean."
"You seem kind of cheerful about it, though," interjected Lauren.
"I was just thinking about what kind of difference our Tim would have made in our fight with asshole Tim."
Wulfgar leaned forward into the saddle, trying to maintain his balance as the group left the valley and began climbing into the mountains. As tall as the eastern range was, the western seemed even higher, but not as steep. The foothills rose into the peaks more gently, and their going was much easier than it would have been had they been scaling the other range.
Tim had been quiet during the day's trek, keeping alongside Wulfgar's mount. He seemed to have no trouble maintaining the horse's walking pace. He never seemed to tire and Wulfgar rapidly acclimated to seeing the troll's head, on a level with his own, bobbing along at the rightmost periphery of his vision. Bear seemed to accept the new group member, but still followed along a pace or two behind.
As the day waned, the group drew close to a large escarpment. It seemed to funnel the lower, easier, approach into the mountains through a small, steep pass. Two high peaks flanked either side of the opening. There was enough room for an army on the lower slopes, but the way through the pass, up a short, steep, climb, looked to be no more than fifty to a hundred meters wide.
It was a naturally placed defensive position.
Anyone could see that.
Which is probably why, near the center of the pass, at the point where the ground seemed to once again return to a gentle slope, a small keep had been built. It was no more than a story or two high, but it was placed to contest any advance into the pass.
As the light of the day faded into darkness, they could just make out light coming from a pair of windows arched into the stone building. They could also make out a wisp of smoke rising from the top of the battlement.
Wulfgar turned to Rydra and raised an eyebrow. Rydra nodded.
"We should make camp," he looked back over his shoulder, "back a bit, out of sight of the tower." He turned his horse and the rest followed as he led them back down into a small hollow.
"We'll make camp," he repeated, "and get fed and watered. Then once it gets fully dark, Rydra and I will go up there and see what's manning that fort."
And I hope, he thought, that it's men who are manning that fort.
Chapter 5
"Should we take Tim?" whispered Wulfgar, grinning. He and Rydra were sitting on opposite sides of the campfire. Wulfgar looked up from the mortar and pestle he was using to grind the ingredients for the climbing potions he was making for himself and the thief. Rydra tilted his head and raised his eyebrows.
"Maybe. We can leave him back a little ways and call him if we need him to pull our ass out of a fire."
Wulfgar considered it, "Good point. I just assumed that we'd go check out what's going on in the tower, come back here and decide on a course of action." He finished grinding the herbs and spread them evenly into two bottles, filled them with water, then stoppered them with corks. He shook them vigorously, then handed one to Rydra. The little man put the vial in his pack, then stood and began pulling the straps over his shoulder. It was a small leather backpack, black, that he pulled in tight against his lower spine. Wulfgar had a similar pack, which he put on. It fit snugly into the small of his back just above the scabbard containing Shepherd's Bite.
Wulfgar stretched then turned to Tim.
"Follow us," he said smiling.
The troll, standing sentinel as he'd been since making camp, didn't respond, but began walking after Wulfgar and Rydra as they made their way up the small hillock that sheltered them and their fire from the tower.
"Holler if you need us," whispered Lauren, muffled from deep within her bedroll. The night was just chilly enough to want a full covering, but not so cold that they'd suffer without it. Perfect sleeping weather.
"Nrrrgh," grunted Snorri in agreement from his similar cocoon.
The trio passed through the horses, untrammeled but standing contented as they waited to be commanded. They were, as Lauren often said, much easier to deal with than real horses had been. You didn't need to feed or water them, they could travel all day without tiring - though the distance they could be galloped at any given time was limited - you didn't need to restrain them at night. They were, literally, care-free.
They crested the hill and the lights from the tower came into view in the distance. They'd camped a couple of kilometers away to ensure that they wouldn't be discovered by whoever - or whatever - inhabited the keep. Wulfgar and Rydra had looked it over from a distance before the sun set, and had seen that it was a fairly nondescript rounded tower. Maybe ten meters high. It looked like there were only a few windows near the top - they hadn't seen any sign of a doorway, but that would probably be on the other side
of the tower.
"Odd," said Wulfgar softly, "that there's no door on this side of the tower. That would seem to indicate, to me, that it was built to defend from this direction. To defend the mountain pass from the valley."
"Interesting," said Rydra, "what would that suggest to you?"
"That though this quest is taking us to the frontier of Clive's kingdom, to the frontier of Heim, that this fortification might not have been built by Clive. It might have been built by whatever society Heim butts up against. Do you know anything about that?"
"Not really, no," admitted Rydra, "I really only focused on the city. The kingdom as a whole never really held any interest for me. I'm in the dark, literally and figuratively."
Wulfgar smiled, "I wonder if we're walking into a border skirmish. It might be wise to not assume that whoever is in that tower," he jutted his chin toward the stone edifice a few hundred meters away, "is hostile."
"It just might."
"But I also don't think," Wulfgar added, "that walking up to whatever door we find and knocking is the best approach either."
He stopped and Rydra and Tim did likewise. They were about a hundred and fifty meters from the keep. He looked it over for a few seconds. Two lit arched windows, little more than large arrow slits, showed dancing firelight within the tower. Wisps of smoke rose from the crenelated top, highlighted against the brilliant star-field splayed above the peaks of the mountain range behind. The tower centered a narrow pass between two of those peaks. A natural choke point. Wulfgar looked to the left and right. The pass was fairly flat, and opened up into a much larger valley beyond.
"The three hundred Spartans could have held that pass for days," he muttered.
"With support," whispered Rydra.
"Huh?"
"The Spartans who held Thermopylae weren't the only ones defending the pass. There were also between five and seven thousand other Greeks there as well. Corinthians. Phocians. Thebans. Thespians. Don't get me wrong, the Spartans were the tip of the spear, and the entire Greek force was outnumbered by at least ten-to-one. But don't believe the hype. The Spartans had a lot of help."