Maverick

by Curtis, Greg

  The dinner would be good too, he hoped. His cooking skills perhaps weren’t the finest, but the chicken and apricot casserole bubbling away in the oven smelled good to him, as did the fresh herb bread cooling on the kitchen bench. Some bartering with the local shopkeepers had netted him a few herbs and spices in exchange for a couple of potions of clarity, and an elaborately knotted tablecloth had been thrown in with the bargain, which added a nice touch of elegance to the dining table.

  He had set out some entertainments for the children as well, a few board games and a cups and ball set which should keep them happy when they’d finished annoying Bearabus, while a set of game cards were also available if the adults wanted to play Swords and Shields. He still wasn’t completely clear on the rules of the game, there were so many of them and it took years to truly master it, but he knew the basic collections and how to tally the points, enough to not make a complete fool of himself.

  If Essaline’s parents believed him unworthy to continue seeing their daughter, it would at least not be because of his home. Though Essaline herself had told him many times this was merely a social visit and that no decisions were intended to be made this evening, or for many more to come, he still had this strange certainty running through his head that they couldn’t really be happy with their relationship, and that they would seize on any excuse to end it.

  So it was with thoughts like those, and more than a little nervousness to match them that he hovered around the cooking and waited for the doorknocker to be struck.

  ****************

  Marjan was about to lay down his triple eight of swords and claim some very useful points when he felt the brutal tear forming, almost like a ripping inside his own flesh, and he gasped in shock at the unexpected pain. The summoning if summoning it was, was so powerful that it tore at the very fabric of the world, the magic that held it together, and the menace of whatever had been brought through the rift portal, was even worse.

  “Sweet Ephesus!”

  Something terribly powerful and deadly had been brought into the world he knew, something hungry and vast, and very close to where they sat, and he knew they were all in terrible danger. Somehow the enemy had struck at them even through the new wards that had been raised around the village. And just when his first evening of entertaining had seemed to be going so well. The dinner had been good, the conversation pleasant and the children were all happy, and even Bearabus was being restrained. It just wasn’t fair.

  “What’s wrong?” Essaline was immediately concerned, while the rest of her family were also staring at him, and he could guess why as he knew the blood had drained out of his face, but she couldn’t yet know the truth and he didn’t want to tell her, then she would be truly worried, they all would. Yet still he had to.

  “Something very bad and very powerful is here.” With no more than that, in fact he knew little more himself, he gathered himself together, dropped his cards, stood up and hurried for his armour and weapons, he had no idea if they would be useful or not, he suspected not considering the power of whatever had been called, but somehow they made him feel a little more secure. A dozen heartbeats later he was dressed and already at the front door, when he remembered the important things and turned back to them.

  “Stay inside and stay alert, please. This cottage is well built and warded, it should protect you, but if need be there is a back door beside the bathroom.” Of course he didn’t know how much value the cottage’s walls or wards would be, as he still didn’t know what had arrived in the town, or how, but at least it was something.

  Stepping outside and swinging his axe into its normal position on his back, he instantly knew things were worse than they appeared. Already in the distance he could hear people shouting in confusion, some of them in fear, he could feel the ground shaking under his feet, as if trembling in anticipation of something truly horrible, and he could see the twinkling lights that adorned the walkways and terraces, swinging about as though in a windstorm. But it was when he turned to face his previous cottage that he truly became alarmed as he discovered it was covered in traceries of orange lightning, the residue of a rift closing, a gigantic rift hastily opened and torn too badly to close easily, and that could not be good. And yet there was one good thing to come out of it, seeing it over his old cottage he knew that at least it wasn’t the enemy who had come among them, who had summoned whatever it was. It was the wizards.

  What were the wizards up to? It was his only question as he saw the source of whatever was happening five hundred paces ahead of him, until he remembered that Master Silas was away, gone to confer with his colleagues in Ellington, leaving only Dimeter and Ferris behind. Not long after he remembered that, he knew the culprit if not the crime.

  “Dimeter what have you done?” He asked the foolish question to the skies even as he set off at a run towards the disturbance, Bearabus beside him all the way. She knew what they were heading towards was an enemy, and yet she wouldn’t leave his side, a thought that cheered him even as it left him even more worried. He wouldn’t have wanted anything to happen to the little cub. Already, in such a short time, she had become very dear to him and he didn’t want to lose her.

  On the way as the cries of the people all around them in the trees, staring at what he was staring at, grew louder, and as he could still see far too little he released a globe of light up into the clouds, hoping to at least identify the danger, and the entire sky brightened enough to bathe the glade, the town and the forest beyond in silver. Normally that would have been a very pretty colour, but right then he didn’t care about anything except what was threatening them.

  The silvery light helped, a little, as at least it showed him the entire town, and revealed the strange shadow that seemed to be covering his old cottage like a hen laying on an egg, but not enough. The shadow was not something that welcomed the light to it, and even in the middle of the day he suspected it would still only have been an outline, a tracery of little white lines in a ghostly mass. He had no idea at all what the shadow was, except that it was alive and it made all the hairs on his back stand on end. Others had similar reactions and he could see elves on the balconies in the nearer trees pointing and staring, though not running as he had the horrible feeling they should be doing. Whatever else it was, the shadow was hungry, he could feel the creature’s appetite like a living weight wrapped around him, wrapped all around him and squeezing.

  It was also alive. A hundred and fifty paces from the cottage, somewhat short of breath despite all the running practice he kept doing, he stopped and stared at it, and learned that much at least. As massive as it was, it moved and it writhed strangely, almost like a huge jellyfish swimming in the ocean, but it was somehow tethered to the cottage, completely surrounding it, maybe stuck to it, and he had the distinct feeling he didn’t want it to come free. Strangely he also had the feeling that it couldn’t come free, that for all its might, and the creature was truly, horribly powerful, it was trapped, bound to the portal. Something must have gone terribly wrong with the summoning.

  “No closer!” He yelled it at the rangers and guardsmen he could see approaching it from all sides, knowing that this creature was deadly. Even if he couldn’t have known that from the terrible and overpowering impulses he was picking up from the creature as it hungered, as it wanted to feed, he could see it from the bodies he could suddenly make out lying on the ground not far from his old cottage.

  One was Ferris, he couldn’t mistake that great grey beard even at that distance, and the knowledge was like a physical blow as he knew that one of his few friends was dead, a good man and a brother laid low by foul magic, and worse by the looks of things a man who’d died a terrible death. By the light of the glowing clouds he could just make out the expression of undiluted horror etched into his face, and see the great dark circles branded into his skin where his robes had been ripped away, and he knew that this creature was responsible. The other man was an elf, a stranger to him, and yet he felt sorrow for him as we
ll, especially when he saw the same markings branded into his broken back. Though he couldn’t see how it had done it, somehow this terrible creature, bound as it was to the cottage, had simply reached out, crushed them and then sucked the life out of these two innocents. It would do the same to everyone else if it ever got free.

  The one person he couldn’t see was Dimeter, and though it occurred to him that he too might be dead, he doubted it. That would have been too neat. All too often those responsible for their crimes survived where their victims didn’t, and he rather suspected the adept was hiding inside the cottage, frightened of and perhaps trapped by whatever he’d summoned. But what had he summoned? And why?

  “Dimeter!” He yelled at the lad, using a little magic to enhance his voice, making sure he knew he was there, and perhaps also that he was angry. Of course he got no answer. They were not close and even if the adept had heard him the chances were he would simply have ignored him. But the mountainous monster heard him, and his eye was caught by its sudden movement and knew a moment of pure terror as he realised it was somehow behind him as well as in front.

  He turned as fast as he could only to see some sort of translucent tentacle as thick as a horse’s body begin crawling and wriggling along the ground towards him, not twenty paces from where he stood, twenty paces behind him. He hadn’t seen it before as it lay quiescent on the darkened ground, but once it started moving towards him, and the silvery light glistened off it in all sorts of interesting ways, it became obvious, as did its intent. This he realised, was what had killed his friend, and somehow he doubted that the creature wanted to shake hands with him. Bearabus knew the same and was snarling at it, almost about to charge, but he wouldn’t let her, holding her back with an order that she seemed to understand. Not when he suddenly realised what the creature was and why it was trapped. It wasn’t still tied to the portal, it was simply unable to move, held down by the cruel embrace of the earth.

  “Back away people! Get up in the trees if you can, as high as possible. It’s a kraken!” He screamed it as loud as he could and was rewarded with any number of shocked stares from all around him. It didn’t surprise him.

  Of course it couldn’t be a kraken, he knew that, not when the nearest ocean was at least three hundred leagues away, but it was, and despite being land bound, its body collapsed in a gigantic, translucent heap all over the cottage, held down by its own vast weight, its tentacles weak when not buoyed by the water, it was still very dangerous. Fortunately there was a way to kill it, he remembered that even as he remembered his lore about such creatures.

  In the ocean they were majestic creatures, frightening and deadly beyond all others, true monsters of the deep able to drag down ships and hunt whales, their only vulnerability their inability to leave the water or even enter the shallows. Getting washed up was a death sentence for them, likely the only one they knew. But this one had gone much further than that, and already it was vastly weakened, its tentacles wriggling across the land rather then shooting out like harpoons. Soon, no matter what he did it would be dead. In the morning the sun would dry it out and what would remain would be a puddle of foul smelling jelly. But Marjan didn’t want to wait for the morning. Not when he knew that this thing could be killing innocent people until then. Killing anyone unfortunate enough to be within range of those enormous tentacles, and he knew already that there would be many more of them. In the oceans, those tentacles could stretch out as much as a third of a league, and each beast could have hundreds of them. Yet he could only see one, the rest concealed by the darkness and more dangerous because of it.

  A fireball appeared in his hands almost without him calling it and he hurled it at the approaching tentacle, and then watched with satisfaction as the snake like appendage suddenly shrivelled up a little and then wriggled back a dozen paces while the creature shook silently with pain or rage. He had no doubt that it would have been screaming had it been able, but with rage not pain. The fireball had only annoyed it, and that only because it was no longer in the sea. Another fireball he sent directly at the great bulk of the beast, but then left it hanging barely a few feet above it a heartbeat before it hit, and the result was everything he could have hoped for.

  Kraken flesh, loaded with water, was notoriously tough, and resistant to magic and fire both. Attacking the beast directly would have been a mistake, even on land. In the ocean it would have been futile. There it was king, the dragon of the sea, and there was no fire magic that could harm it, and very little other magic either. But here on land, so away from the ocean, those magics would have been rendered at least a little less effective. But of course it had one other vulnerability on land, drying out. It had only survived thus far because it was night, but when the sun hit it, it would have suffered and died. Marjan however had no intention of waiting for the morning. He couldn’t burn it with his magic, but he could cook it. So for the moment, he had to be the sun, and slowly but surely he began pushing all of his strength into that fireball, making it ever larger and hotter.

  The heat from the flaming orb instantly began hitting the creature hard, and as it grew in strength, the kraken’s flesh began releasing vast clouds of steam into the air, while it writhed and wriggled around in obvious pain. But it was a huge beast, fantastically powerful, and it would take more than a little cooking to kill it. For five, ten and then twenty long minutes he continued his work, straining with all his might to add heat to the glowing orb, and watching the clouds of steam grow ever thicker as they streamed off its flesh heading for the dark sky.

  Then finally, just when he was beginning to wonder if it would ever die, he knew his battle was almost over, as he saw the beast’s translucent flesh begin to turn white as it cooked in the last of its own moisture, a whiteness that spread out in all directions letting its tentacles slowly become visible, and as he discovered there were a lot of them. With time he could begin to see tentacles everywhere, spread out over the entire glade and far into the forest beyond, shuddering and writhing slowly in pain as they gradually cooked and died, and he finally understood just how vast it was. In the darkness they had all raced right by several of them, never seeing them, but all of a sudden they were obvious as they danced their final dance.

  In time the translucent almost ghostly outline of the great beast’s body became much more solid, like the white of an egg as it cooked in a pan, and the cottage began to disappear underneath it until eventually what remained was a small white hill as high as a small tree, at least a hundred paces across, a foul smelling hill. But this was no mere egg burning in a pan, it was something far more putrid and probably even poisonous. Nothing that smelled that bad could be safe he knew, but it was still better that it die.

  As the fire above continued to cook it, he watched as dark black cracks appearing in its flesh, fissures of burnt flesh larger and deeper than a man, each one erupting to release more dark smoke and then leak strange clear slime, while the foul smelling fumes and the burning smell grew even stronger until he could hear those around him almost choking on it. Marjan was choking too, but he knew he had to control his magic least the creature survive and someone else was killed, and so somehow he kept going, forcing his breath to flow in and out of his lungs, smooth and even.

  Then, with one final gasp the creature died, though it took him and everyone else gathered around a while to realise it. Its huge, bloated body suddenly popped, just like an egg yolk cooked too hard, spraying noxious looking globules of putrid jelly in all directions, and the foul smoke and steam streaming from it turned a bitter black as flames shot out of its remains, but in such a vast creature, it took time for the rest of its body to know that its heart, if it had a heart, had stopped beating, and the tentacles, spread out for hundreds of paces in every direction, kept on wriggling in their dance of death for many long minutes, until they too finally ran out of strength and fell back to the grass.

  After that Marjan stood there for a while, letting the strength leave his glowing fireball, watching, wanting t
o believe it was dead, but not certain, and he wasn’t alone. All the time he stood there he kept imaging that another tentacle was creeping up on him, waiting to crush him into a tiny morsel of food and then drag him back to its terrible maw, but nothing happened, and eventually he let the last of the fireball go, choosing instead to send another burst of light up into the clouds high above them.

  For ages it seemed, he stood there, staring, waiting until the fire in what remained of its flesh burnt out, waiting until the smoke cleared. He still didn’t approach it however, not until a ranger with more sense than him fired an ice spelled arrow into the nearest tentacle and nothing happened. It didn’t move, it didn’t pull back in pain, it just lay there, ignoring the fact that part of its tentacle had just frozen solid and then shattered. Surely nothing living would do that. It must have been a sign as the others started approaching him and looking to approach the beast. Many, many more by then, were on the walkways high above them, staring.