by Logan Jacobs
“The creatures that been killing these poor suckers’ sheep ain’t gods nor wolves,” she said.
“Well, what exactly are they, then?” Elodette demanded. “Just more humans causing trouble for other humans?”
“No, not human really neither,” Lizzy replied. “I dunno what I’d call them. Never seen anything like ‘em before. But they’re kinda amusing. Their camp’s not too far from here. I’ll show you after breakfast.”
“Should we tell the Sanctimians?” Ilandere asked.
“Nah, we can just bring back some heads to show them,” Lizzy said. “Then maybe they’ll cheer up and start being nicer to everyone.”
So we went down to the first floor of the inn, ordered some porridge and eggs for breakfast, and drowsily stuffed our faces.
A few of the other inn customers eating breakfast at the same time who had been present the night before tried to ask Lizzy about the results of her nighttime investigation. But she seemed to remember how Willobee had excused her disrespectful outbursts against Monomachus by claiming that she was half-witted and responded to them only with grunts and gurgles.
“Her wits will return, her wits will return,” Willobee reassured them. “She just has spells like this, you see. Overexertion and emotional agitation and certain planetary alignments bring them on. But we are going to go take a stroll about your lovely village after this and the fresh air of the outdoors ought to work restorative wonders.”
“When children lose their wits in the womb, often it is because the mother’s sinful thoughts disturbed and interfered with the babe’s natural progress,” a bony middle-aged woman proclaimed. Her companion, who looked like her sister, unfortunately for both of them, nodded in agreement. They both eyed Lizzy distastefully as if speculating on the probable sinful thoughts of her mother. And the irregular breeding habits of Lizzy’s forebears couldn’t really be denied considering the physical evidence, and I was pretty sure the women had some judgmental thoughts about that too.
“What, you a doctor, bitch?” Lizzy demanded scornfully before I elbowed her in the ribs to remind her of her currently nonverbal role.
Both women emitted dramatic gasps. The pair of them were almost as synchronized as I was with my selves.
Willobee didn’t even bother trying to cover for Lizzy or make nice after that one. He just placed a ruby chip very grudgingly on the table and remarked to me, “This must be the least pleasant dining establishment to which I have ever granted my custom, Master. And that is saying something. Why, I have been to an inn where they started selling taxidermy when they ran out of fresh steak. I have been to an alehouse where they topped off mugs with dwarf piss and called it a delicacy. And I was hosted at a banquet by a tribe that had a custom of sacrificing its brattiest child at every holiday to be served as the main course. But the kind of hospitality we have received at The Traveler’s Providence turns my stomach more, I tell you.”
“Don’t even think about it,” I said through gritted teeth. Gnomish vomit had some extraordinary corrosive properties that I had witnessed firsthand. Which could be very useful in certain situations, but although I agreed with Willobee that the Sanctimians’ attitudes were unpleasant, I hadn’t quite reached the point of thinking they deserved to have their faces melted off. If it were possible, I planned to help them resolve this sheep problem of theirs. And then if that still didn’t improve their outlook on life, well, that was their business, and we wouldn’t be sorry to see the last of them and the laws of Monomachus.
I managed to restrain my companions’ homicidal impulses for long enough to finish my three bowls of porridge. After that, we left Willobee’s ruby chip as payment for the innkeeper, collected our belongings and our horses from the stables, and headed out to follow Lizzy to her mysterious camp of inhuman, ungodly sheep-killers. All I knew about them really based on Lizzy’s remarks was that they had heads of some sort.
Lizzy led us to the foothills of a local mountain range, and they loomed majestic and craggy in the early morning light.
“The sheep-killers are up there?” Ilandere asked nervously as she craned her head back in an attempt to see the top of the tallest mountain.
“Nope, they’re in the next valley over,” Lizzy pointed to our left.
“Oh, thank goodness,” the little centaur sighed.
“Er,” I said apologetically. Five faces turned to me. “This is. Um. The way we’ll be, er, heading. After we take care of this sheep problem, that is.”
“You think Thorvinius is on top of one of these mountains?” Lizzy asked incredulously.
“No, but I think a whole lot of his fighters are on the other side of them,” I replied.
“It is no easy task to bring an army over a mountain range,” Florenia remarked thoughtfully. Although she didn’t have any military experience herself, she knew a lot more than I did about the history of the many noble houses of Ambria and their civil wars, and I had no doubt that some of those historical campaigns had involved crossing mountain ranges.
“Thorvinius accomplishes a lot of things that aren’t exactly easy,” I said. There was no denying that. If Thorvinius had been weak or pathetic, I would have destroyed him a long time ago for what he had done to my people. As it was, his order was the mightiest and the most fearsome one that I knew of. Perhaps the most powerful order that had ever existed. Too bad its members seemed inclined to use their skills to annihilate as much of the world as they could, instead of building up civilizations.
“Perhaps, but Thorvinius could never accomplish the kinds of impossible feats that you do, my love,” Florenia replied.
“By definition, I’ve never done anything that was actually impossible,” I argued.
“You cured a necromancer’s plague,” Ilandere piped up immediately. “And saved the lives of many people who would have died without your valiant intervention.”
“You made an honest woman out of a part-wolf bandit,” Willobee teased Lizzy. “Well. Sort of.”
“You built that bridge to replace the one that the baron had destroyed,” Elodette contributed unexpectedly. Most people wouldn’t have considered bridge-building to be that much of a standout on my resume, but from the warrior centaur’s perspective, the ability to slaughter enemies en masse was normal. The ability to engineer a functional structure was exceptional. From what I gathered about the centaur herd from which both she and Ilandere originated, they didn’t build houses or even use tents. They just slept out in the open or under trees or inside caves at best.
“You made short work of some Thorvinians already, a dozen mounted bandits, a bunch of diseased undead ghasts, and another god,” Willobee said.
“You saved both me and Willobee,” Ilandere pointed out.
Florenia added, “You made me come seventeen times last night.”
There was a pause. Then two or three voices asked, “… Seventeen?”
“Uh, I wasn’t really counting, can we just focus on the task at hand?” I asked awkwardly.
Then another of my selves hissed, “Hey!” and motioned for everyone to be quiet. I pointed through the trees to draw their attention to some rudimentary wooden structures about half a mile away that looked like they comprised some sort of settlement.
I looked over at Lizzy questioningly. She nodded.
“No need for stealth, Vander,” the she-wolf said. “You pretty much have to hit these people on the head with a rock to get ‘em to notice you.”
“Er, is that what you did to them last night?” I asked. If we were walking into an already hostile situation, I wanted to know about it.
“Nope,” she said. “Wanted to keep ‘em all in one piece for y’all to get a gander at first. They’re something special.”
We tethered Generosity, Virility, Fury, Slayer, and Chivalry to some trees where they’d be mostly out of sight and left our packs with them as well for ease of movement.
Then the she-wolf and I led the way toward the settlement, and took a roundabout way so that we coul
d maintain tree cover during the approach, even though Lizzy didn’t seem to feel that any such measures were necessary. I hoped she was right, because although Elodette could turn herself terrifyingly silent and practically invisible at will despite her enormous mass, the much smaller Ilandere seemed to have an equally uncanny knack for treading on every single one of the snappiest twigs in the forest, and Willobee jingled deafeningly in his chainmail as well as huffing and puffing with every step. At least he’d left his oversized shield behind with the horses.
Although it occurred to me that, if I were some kind of enemy watching my own party approach, I definitely wouldn’t attack it. I would assume that it was a painfully obvious lure into an ambush.
Whether it was for that reason, or because they really were as oblivious as Lizzy reported, the occupants of the primitive settlement did not make any contact with us until we were right outside their settlement. From there, it became possible to see through the slatted fence they had built of sharpened stakes and observe the sheep-killers themselves.
They were not an especially attractive lot. Nor did they seem all that menacing. They had heads, all right, of a large and somewhat misshapen variety, with very little forehead, extremely prominent jaws, and squashed features. Their hair was thick and curly. Their posture was extremely hunched, and their muscular arms were so long that their knuckles practically dragged on the ground. I would have found it extremely difficult if not impossible to tell the males and females apart, except that the clumsily stitched-together furs they were wearing sometimes gave away the answer in ways that would have shocked and appalled the Sanctimians.
Other than all that, they looked to be somewhere in the vague phylogenetic neighborhood of human.
There was a group of them sitting on the ground around a ring of boulders arranged in the clear space in the center of their buildings. Each one had a stick in hand and was banging it rhythmically against the boulder in front of him or her while grunting enthusiastically. This was the most organized activity in evidence.
Others of the creatures milled around picking their noses or inspecting clumps of dirt, apparently to determine whether they contained any edible grubs.
“What are they?” Florenia whispered to me as she wrinkled her perfectly straight nose in distaste.
“… Drummers,” I answered. “Obviously.”
“Barbarians,” Lizzy hissed in another of my ears.
I was a little surprised by her vehemence. The bandit crews that Lizzy used to run with hadn’t exactly been filled with paragons of virtue, and Lizzy herself had never really given a fuck about society’s expectations. So, it made sense for her to laugh at these poor pathetic creatures, sure, but I wouldn’t expect her to be angry or offended by their deficiencies.
Then, I realized what kind of furs most of them were wearing. It was similar to the fur that covered Lizzy’s ears and her hindpaws part way up her calves, except for the fact that it was gray rather than tawny.
A color more typical for Ambrian wolves.
“Ah,” I said to Lizzy. “So that’s why the Sanctimians got the wrong idea?”
“Yup,” she confirmed grimly. “They got the wrong idea about a whole lotta things, but they weren’t completely hallucinatin’ about the fur and even some tooth marks. It’s like these halfwits were pretending to be wolves to make themselves feel better about getting the species short stick. But anyone who had a lick of common sense coulda told you it obviously wasn’t wolves that left little bits of themselves around the scene of the crime and left rock-bashing dents and single puncture wounds in those sheep. Wolves don’t bite with one tooth and none of ‘em got teeth as big as spears… except for me anyway.”
“They probably explained the discrepancies as some kind of sign from Monomachus,” Florenia muttered as she rolled her hazel eyes.
“How could you waste perfectly good meat like that?” Elodette wondered aloud. “Only a human could be so foolish as to kill something that wasn’t a threat to it or that it didn’t plan to eat.”
“Human?” I exclaimed, offended in spite of myself. “Those aren’t fucking humans!”
“They look pretty similar to me,” Elodette replied. “How do you think we feel when people call us horses?”
She had a point there. I myselves never called Elodette or Ilandere horses, but it did tend to be Lizzy’s preferred form of address for them, especially when she was annoyed with them, and strangers often made remarks along those lines too. Like the owner of The Traveler’s Providence who had assumed that maybe the princess and her handmaiden were planning to sleep in the stable.
“At least horses are beautiful too,” Ilandere pointed out. “Because Vander is beautiful, and these creatures are hideous.”
“Beauty isn’t everything, Princess,” Elodette said impatiently. The warrior centaur was a very attractive woman herself, in an icy sort of way, with her gray eyes and sharp features, but she didn’t seem to share the princess’ completely warranted sense of vanity.
As we continued to observe the drummers, as I began to refer to them in my mind for lack of a better term, one of them lost his grip on his stick. It bounced off his boulder and hit the drummer next to him smack in the forehead.
“Oopsie,” Ilandere giggled.
Then she let out a little gasp of horror and covered her eyes as the drummer who had just been accidentally hit in the face let out an enraged bellow of, “UGGAUGGAUGGA,” dropped his own stick, and wrapped his meaty hands around the thick neck of the unintentional perpetrator with the apparent intention of throttling him to death.
The other drummers stopped making music and started hopping around making excited grunts.
One of them pounded the one that was doing the strangling on the back with her stick to try to make him release his victim. He did release his victim, in order to pick her up and fling her bodily out of the way. Unfortunately for several of the parties involved, the female drummer struck her head on a boulder when she landed.
Some of the drummers ran over to poke, prod, and shake her and examine the amount of her brains that had been smeared across the boulder as if trying to figure out whether it was an amount that one could reasonably do without. The results of their examination caused them to gibber in distress and rage.
The drummer that had thrown the female tried to run away, but the rest of the drumming circle converged on him and beat him to the ground with their sticks. Then the one that he had almost strangled picked up a large rock and triumphantly smashed in his skull with it.
After that, the entire group of drummers suddenly calmed down and started doing a funny little skipping dance in a circle around both corpses while making happy little hoots as if they were very pleased with the morning’s accomplishments.
“Looks like we have a problem, guys,” I sighed.
“You mean that they’re horribly violent?” squeaked Ilandere, who was peeking through her fingers.
“No,” I said, “I mean that they can’t talk. That’s going to pose a real obstacle to constructive communication.”
“Communication?” Lizzy repeated incredulously. “But ain’t we just gonna slice and dice ‘em? You know, to spare those poor Sanctimians further heartache and all.”
“I think we should try diplomacy first,” I said firmly. “I mean, look at them. They don’t seem evil. Just dumb.”
“Qaar’endoth, my lord, I fear that they lack the mental and spiritual capacity for rehabilitation,” Florenia asserted.
“What she said,” Lizzy agreed.
Instead of debating the point, I walked up to the drummers’ fence. It was about seven or eight feet tall and the posts were sharpened at the top but they were not packed tightly together, so it would have been easy enough to knock any one of them down like a toothpick. Instead I hollered through a gap,
“Hello! My name is Vander! I’d like to meet you! Can my friends and I come in?”
I knew they wouldn’t understand any of the words, but I hoped they coul
d at least pick up some cues about my intentions from my friendly tone of voice and the context.
Behind me, my other two selves and all of my friends emerged from the treeline.
The dance circle of drummers froze to gape at us. Others of their kind loitering around the settlement stopped whatever they were doing to gape too. I half expected them all to charge us with their sticks and stones and attempt to bash our skulls in without further ado. If that happened, then Lizzy and Florenia would get their wish and the Sanctimians’ sheep problem would be solved. At least we could say we had made an effort to work things out peacefully.
But that is not what happened.
Instead, they gibbered in fear and made panicked grunting sounds. Then some of them ran into their huts. Others hit the deck and squeezed their eyes shut as if they were playing dead. Others curled up into the fetal position and starting humming loudly, whether to comfort themselves or as some kind of psychological tactic to distract or repel me, I don’t know.
“Boy, the wolves around here must be dumb as fuck to get themselves killed by these babies,” Lizzy said in disgust.
“Well, I was intimidated too when I saw Qaar’endoth for the first time,” Florenia said. That came as news to me. When I first met Florenia she had been surrounded by her sister vestals of Nillibet, and she had unveiled herself to me and announced her decision to leave behind her order and accompany me with supreme aristocratic confidence. Florenia herself had the kind of face and figure that reduced most men to nervous, pants-adjusting wrecks, so it was kind of hard for me to wrap my mind around the idea of her being intimidated by me on first sight.
“So was I,” Ilandere agreed, “but the instant I laid eyes on him, I knew that he had a benevolent soul.”
That wasn’t exactly how I would necessarily describe myself, considering, among other things, that revenge and murder was currently my primary source of motivation. I didn’t think the little centaur could comprehend the levels of anguish and rage that burned through my guts when I thought of Thorvinius and how his order had slain every last member of mine, for no other reason than to “slake the appetite” of their devourer god. I didn’t think she had any idea how deep my thirst for blood ran. And I knew she had witnessed me kill before, in circumstances that we both considered justified, but she probably wasn’t aware of how much I sometimes enjoyed it. Ever since I had saved the princess from her captor and would-be slaver, she had been completely devoted to me, and she had always seen me in a much gentler and purer light than anyone else. That was a different kind of high standard to live up to than Florenia’s. From what I could tell, the duke’s daughter just wanted me to win all my battles, become all-powerful, achieve dominion over the earth, and spend every spare moment having sex with her. That seemed a lot more doable to me than being the kind of saint Ilandere insisted that I was.