“Is this like a fiefdom or something?” I asked.
“Yep, you see, you aren’t so far out of your element here,” he said merrily. “A few weeks with us and you’ll fit right in.”
He steered the horses into the village and tipped his hat to a group of women walking by. The ladies looked to be in their forties, and they covered their mouths with their hands and whispered to each other as their eyes stared at me. I knew that they were gossiping about me, and who could blame them? I was in the middle of a medieval village wearing full Army garb, and I got about as many looks as I would have received if I walked through an Army barracks in a tutu.
The village reminded me of a set from Game of Thrones. It contained a blacksmith, a livery, a church that donned a big S rather than a cross, a butcher shop, and a small schoolhouse. There were also a number of quaint shops, along with numerous open markets that offered everything from fresh vegetables to pickled pigs feet. The smell of manure was almost overwhelming, but no one else seemed to mind.
Torrance didn’t apologize to me for his nosey neighbors, but instead yelled to them like a carnival barker. “Don’t stare, a painting lasts longer. Come on, follow us. We’ve a visitor from another land whose stars have never been read before!”
I pretended to be blocking out the suns and hid my face as the people ogled us and started to murmur. Within five minutes, it seemed that the message had reached every corner of the village, and by the time we stopped in front of the witch Granhelga’s little hut by the river, more than a hundred citizens of Hamstead had gathered to see what was going on.
“Come on, don’t be shy!” Torrance urged. He looked to be enjoying himself immensely, and I saw the glimmer of stardom in his eyes.
I reluctantly climbed down from the wagon, and the crowd gasped and murmured to each other. I made out random comments about how strange my clothes were, and speculation about whether I was a warrior of some sort. Other people scowled and spit on the ground, mumbling about foreigners and keeping to your own.
“Maybe this isn’t such a good idea,” I said as I eyed the growing crowd. Any plans that I had had about keeping a low profile shot right out the window when Torrance stood up on his seat, cupped his hands to his mouth, and shouted my arrival to the town.
Matilda stared at me with stars in her eyes, and the brothers stood beside me like conquering kings as they shouldered against each other to be seen better. Torrance gave a flourish of his frilly wrist and bowed low.
“Good people of Hamstead, I present to you, Ken Jewell.”
“What’s the racket all about outside my door?” the thick, raspy, voice of an old woman called out. She sounded like she drank whiskey all the time and smoked three packs a day.
I glanced at the door to the hut and watched as the old witch shuffled out of the place with the help of a gnarled and knotted cane. She wore a brown patchwork cloak, and on her right shoulder sat a frazzled looking black cat. On closer inspection, I realized that the thing was dead, stuffed, and pinned to her robe. Her nose was long and hooked at the end, and two beady green eyes partially lost to saggy, wrinkled skin scanned the crowd. When she spotted me, she froze, and her eyes grew about three sizes bigger.
“You …” she said, and pointed at me with a long, crooked finger. Her fingernails were so long that they curled up under themselves.
“Uh, hi,” I offered. “You must be Granhelga.”
The crowd began to murmur again when they heard my voice, and whispers about my accent didn’t miss my ears.
“I am Granhelga,” the witch said with a flourish of her robed arms, but then she let out a groan of pain, put her hand on the small of her back, and took a slow step forward. “But who are you?”
“I’m, uh, Ken.”
“Uh Ken who?” She sounded like a creepy owl, and I tried not to let on just how nervous the old hag made me.
“Just Ken,” I told her.
She grinned at me devilishly and reached up to take my chin in her long fingers. Her fingers smelled like hummus and ass, and I held my breath and glanced at Torrance. He offered me a reassuring nod.
“Hmm, ahh, Torrance has found a diamond in the rough, or should I say … a Jewel?” She leaned in when she spoke, and I nearly gagged. Her breath smelled like she had been chewing on cat turds.
I laughed nervously and tried to remind myself that Torrance had just introduced me to the crowd a few minutes ago, so she hadn’t really used any magical powers to guess who I was.
“Hmmm,” she murmured at me and turned my head left and right. As my noggin swiveled on my neck, I caught a glimpse of the crowd who practically held their breath in anticipation.
“Granhelga, Lady of Mystic Knowledge,” Torrance said as he bowed before her. “I have brought this man to you so that you might determine what powers he has.”
“I know why you have brought him here, you oafish fool!” she scowled at him and turned her attention back to me. “Come, and I will read your stars.”
I offered Torrance a pensive frown, but he continued to encourage me with his animated expressions. Granhelga waved her hand and beckoned me to follow, so I let out a pent-up sigh and walked into the little hut.
“Put your pack down and sit on the other side of the fire,” she instructed and proceeded to gather an armload of ingredients from the many shelves about the place.
I sat down on a cushion by the fire that burned at the center of the hut and surveyed the confined space in two heartbeats. The hut was perhaps twelve feet wide and circular. It had a stone half wall and a domed wooden frame covered with thatch. There were several open windows that gave the villagers a clear view of the inside of the hut and they crowded the windows so they could watch silently. The light revealed stacks of leather-bound books haphazardly stacked against the wall to my left. Behind me I saw a small cot, and to my right the wall consisted entirely of shelves littered with jars full of strange, many-colored liquids, some with pig’s heads, human hands, dead snakes, or trapped spiders inside, along with dozens of other sticky unnameables.
The place smelled like cat piss and old lady diapers.
Granhelga had gathered all her ingredients and spread them on a small table to her right. She then sat down across from me with many grumbles, groans, and general elderly protests. Once she had settled in, she turned her soul-searching gaze upon me once again. The look she gave me made my pecker want to retract into my sack like a turtle head, and I tried to relax.
I’d had my fortune read before. Granted, it hadn’t been in front of a hundred mystified villagers on another planet, and there were no real witches back on Earth that I knew of. But the villagers sure seemed to believe in the old hag’s abilities, so I guessed that she could probably do what they said she could do.
“You have come very, very far, haven’t you, Sergeant?” Granhelga asked.
“You can say that again,” I said and tried to remember if Torrance had told everyone my rank.
“Why, are you hard of hearing?” she inquired.
“What? No, it’s a figure of speech. Never mind. Hey, how long is this going to take?”
The crowd who watched through the windows and the door gave a collective gasp, and I guessed that I had broken some rule of etiquette. But the witch didn’t seem to mind. She smirked at me and gave a small laugh that turned into a smoker’s cough. Or a tuberculosis cough. One of the two.
“My friend told me that you witches can create portals,” I said, and watched her closely for a reaction. “Can you help me get back to my world?”
“First, I read your stars,” she told me. “Now be quiet and let me focus on my work.”
She proceeded to take her sweet time tossing ingredients into the simmering cauldron between us. In went a rabbit’s foot, a bull horn, two dehydrated toad carcasses, a pinch of salt, a hint of garlic, and something that might have been thyme. The list went on and on. I had started to get bored with the little show about two seconds after I sat down, and by the time she waddle
d her ass over to pluck out a few brown hairs from my scalp, my patience was wearing thin.
Granhelga tossed my hair in the fire, and to my surprise, a small explosion rocked the hut and multicolored smoke filled the tight quarters.
“Jesus, lady, you trying to kill me?” I asked as I waved the smoke out of my face.
She stood over the boiling cauldron, completely oblivious to my protests, while the crowd leaned into the windows with their breaths collectively held. I found myself on the edge of my seat cushion, and I realized I was holding my breath.
“You have not one magic power… but two!”
The crowd was shocked. Some onlookers’ jaws dropped like young men laying their eyes on their first set of tits, and others stared wide-eyed, completely entranced as Granhelga leaned down more into the swirling cauldron. I peeked into the pot as well, but the concoction looked like funky soup to me. It smelled like old gym socks, spearmint bubblegum, if that was possible, and there was a hint of sulfur somewhere in the rancid banquet of aromas.
“Your first power …” She took her sweet time, no doubt trying to work the crowd. The old bat was a showwoman for sure, and a good one at that. I wondered how much money she made selling snake oils and cures for limp dick on the side.
Her eyes suddenly widened, and she looked at me horrified. “Your first power is the ability to bond with monsters!”
The crowd reeled back. Someone fell back out of a window. A woman cried out, no doubt clutching at her pearls. Men protested angrily, and children began to cry.
“And!” Granhelga bellowed, silencing everyone. “Not only can you bond with them, your first power can also bring them up to the surface world… into the sunlight!”
I heard the women in the crowd start to sob, but before I could look at them, the witch let out a moan of terror.
“That isn’t all.” Granhelga clutched at her chest. “Your second power… is even more horrible. It’s… It is…” She began hyperventilating, and I reached out to steady her when she suddenly collapsed like someone had hit her in the head with a baseball bat. I managed to catch her before her face smacked into the side of the table, and then I set her down on the floor and reached to check her for a pulse.
And that’s when the villagers went ape shit.
“He killed her!” a man cried out.
“No, I was only trying to--”
“She said that he could bond with monsters,” a woman reminded them all.
“And bring them to the surface!” another woman screeched.
“Into the daylight!” a man bellowed.
“Get him, get the monster loving bastard!”
The villagers were pretty worked up, so I guided the old witch down to the dirt floor gently, sprang to my feet, and rushed to the door. A pair of burly men blocked my way, but I was a pretty big dude myself, and I shouldered into them both with the power of my six foot three, two hundred-pound frame, combined with the momentum of my seventy-pound molle pack.
We crashed through the threshold and spilled out onto the cobblestone street. I rolled, leapt to my feet, and spun a circle to get my bearings. I was surrounded. Some villagers looked terrified of me, but others slowly closed in, more than a hundred in all. They had begun to gather whatever weapons they could find, and slowly started to stalk toward me with pitchforks, shovels, axes, and even brooms.
“Everybody calm down!” I yelled, but they kept on coming.
Torrance and his family watched from the wagon that seemed to float on a sea of pissed-off villagers. The old fisherman looked crestfallen and couldn’t meet my gaze. Matilda held her hand over her mouth as tears spilled down her cheeks. Maximus’s bottom lip quivered as he watched me back up cautiously from the crowd, and his brother yelled at the villagers to leave me alone. But his voice was barely audible above the chorus of dissent.
“Get that monster lover!”
“Hang him high!”
“Burn him at the stake!”
“Cut off his balls!”
I glanced at the castration enthusiast who appeared to be a barber. He held a big pair of shears and snapped them open and closed as he and the others moved closer. One man got a little too close with the skinning knife that he carried, and I smacked the blade out of his grip with my hand before pushing him back. I might as well have kicked a hornet’s nest because the crowd began to buzz more angrily than ever.
“Alright, everybody fucking freeze!” I screamed as I pulled my sidearm, spun a circle, and trained the gun on the crowd.
They stopped, eyed the gun with confusion, and then kept on coming.
“Freeze!” I warned, but like a gang of medieval zombies they shambled towards me, so I aimed the pistol in the air and pulled the trigger.
The shot rang out like a snare drum rim-shot, and the townspeople collectively paused to look at my hand. For half a second, it seemed like they were a bit confused, and I thought my “Sheriff trying to restore order” routine might have worked.
But then they all turned their eyes away from my pistol, started to scream again, and closed in on me like the angry mob they were.
I charged through the crowd like a linebacker and slammed into the biggest guy I could see. He wasn’t a fighter like me, so he hadn’t been ready. The blow sent him careening into three other people, and the four of them fell in a tangle of flailing limbs. I leapt over them, landed among the villagers, and proceeded to introduce them to the concept of a mosh pit.
Then I danced through the crowd, bobbed, weaved, and shoulder slammed the men who got too close. Someone tried to hit me on the shoulder with a shovel, but I turned my back so my pack took the hit. Someone else tried to stab me with a kitchen knife, but I smacked the weapon out of their grip before they could get me. I took a few punches on the chest, and one to the side of my face , but I finally broke through the mob.
Then I ran as fast as I could for the bridge that would take me back in the direction I had come.
I wasn’t going to try to retreat to Torrance’s house, since I had already caused him enough trouble. I was just trying to get some space between me and the pitchforks.
Behind me, the crowd of angry villagers were in an uproar. A bell began to toll, and I imagined the cavalry charging out of the distant castle.
I urged my legs to run faster and ran through the village. Men with pitchforks and torches poured out of every street, brawlers with clubs fashioned from broken chair legs emerged from every pub, and cooks charged out of eateries wielding butcher knives and rolling pins. I ducked and dodged the groping hands and impromptu weapons and hauled ass to the bridge. Luckily, no one was coming from the other side of town, so I ran across the bridge without having to fight anyone else.
I was in prime shape, but I was also used to lugging around a lot of weight. If I didn’t put an end to the chase soon, I would run out of steam and be overwhelmed by the maniacal villagers.
To make matters worse, the baying of what sounded like a dozen hounds issued from a barn nearby.
“Go get ‘em, Blue!” a man yelled, and the dogs shot out of the barn and headed straight toward me.
I was a dead man. There was no way I could outrun the dogs. I might have been able to shoot them, but I wouldn’t be able to put them all down before one of them ripped out my throat. They closed in fast, and I frantically searched for a way out of this predicament. Then I spotted the wagon sitting beside a cottage, and I sprinted in that direction. The dogs were on my heels by the time I reached the wagon, but I jumped on the wheel, stepped up atop the wagon, and lifted myself up onto the thatch roof of the nearest cottage before they could bite me. Three more cottages and a barn lined up beside the one I was on, and so I raced across the rooftops.
I finally stopped on the roof of a large barn and considered my next move. A quick glance around showed me the screaming villagers in hot pursuit, more dogs, and a squadron of knights riding across the bridge. I’d been in tight spots before, and I had always gotten out alive, but I was beginning to
think that my luck had just run out.
Then I saw a horse being led out of the barn below me, and my mind drifted back to those old Western movies where people leapt from rooftops and landed on saddles before riding off into the sunset.
But this wasn’t a movie, and this horse wasn’t wearing a saddle. I imagined the intense pain that would fill my balls if I landed on the horse from this height, so I slid down the side of the roof instead.
“I’m going to need that horse, friend,” I told the man with the horse after I had landed next to him.
He stared at me wide-eyed and slowly handed me the horse’s reins. I was about to tell him to go piss off, but then I realized that I probably couldn’t get up onto the horse’s back with my heavy molle pack.
“Help me up, move, move, move!” I ordered with my best drill sergeant voice.
The squat little man rushed over and, to my surprise, dropped down on all fours so that I could use him as a stool. I would have laughed if an entire town wasn’t trying to kill me, but the man seemed more afraid than I was, and a moment later I was stepping on his back so I could climb up on the horse.
The animal didn’t like me on its back, but I didn’t much care what it liked at that moment. I snapped the reins and kicked the sides, and after a few seconds it finally complied. We rocketed down the street, hooked a left, and headed for the old road leading out of the village. Behind me, the dogs bayed and howled with anguish, and a look back revealed at least two dozen men on horses in hot pursuit.
I had only ridden a horse a handful of times, and I had always done so on a saddle. Riding bareback was way more challenging, and I knew that I had no chance of outrunning the riders who pursued me. As I exited the village and rode toward the forest of pine, I tried to figure out a way to evade the men. With the dogs on my trail it was useless to try to hide, and I knew nothing about the land, so trying to lose them in their own backyard was out of the question.
Then I thought of the one place that everyone here seemed to be afraid of.
The underdark.
Monster Empire Page 4