Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Acknowledgements
Dedication
Introduction
THE POISONED CHALICE
BATTLE OF WITS
THE HERO OF KILLORGLIN
GOBLIN LULLABY
CRUMBS
FELLOW TRAVELER
FOOD FIGHT
MOONLIGHTING
THE ROSE, THE FARMBOY, AND THE GNOME
A DAY AT THE UNICORN RACES
DRAGONSLAYER: - Being the True and Terrible Tale of a Fearsome Meeting Between ...
THE MURDER OF MR. WOLF
NEW YORKE SNOW
MEET THE MADFEET
FINDER’S KEEPER
IS THIS REAL ENOUGH
Follow the trail of breadcrumbs . . .
“Vanishments,” Sir Hanson read. “Mysterious vanishments within the Dark Woods, cause unknown, sorcery suspected.” He shook his head. “But that’s impossible. Who’d go into the Dark Woods these days? Everyone knows that they’re rife with witches who’d turn a child into gingerbread and gobble him up before you can blink. And since the construction of the Dark Woods Bypass, there’s no need to risk traveling through this unholy place. Only a fool would do so.”
Once more, Sir Hanson’s head filled with the king’s indignant voice giving him his assignment: We’re not talking about a bunch of children or village idiots here, Hanson; we’re talking about some of the most cunning, ruthless, successful merchants in my realm! These were not stupid men, and yet, they were all last observed going into the Dark Woods and not coming out again.
Men? Sir Hanson had echoed. But in the old tales, isn’t it always children who—
His Majesty cared not a festering fig for the old tales. Do you think I’d be wasting any of my manpower if this was about children? Children do not pay taxes, or see fit to remember their beloved king with appropriately lavish gifts at Yuletide. To the fuming pits with the children: These are real people who’ve vanished, and I want to know the reason why!
—from “Crumbs” by Esther M. Friesner
Copyright © 2006 by Tekno Books and Brittiany A. Koren.
eISBN : 978-1-101-08715-2
All Rights Reserved
DAW Book Collectors No. 1377.
DAW Books is distributed by Penguin Group (USA).
All characters and events in this book are fictitious.
All resemblance to persons living or dead is coincidental.
The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal, and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage the electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.
First Printing, September
DAW TRADEMARK REGISTERED
U.S. PAT. OFF. AND FOREIGN COUNTRIES
—MARCA REGISTRADA.
HECHO EN U.S.A.
http://us.penguingroup.com
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
“Introduction” copyright © 2006 by Brittiany A. Koren
“The Poisoned Chalice” copyright © 2006 by Brian Stableford
“Battle of Wits” copyright © 2006 by Mickey Zucker Reichert
“The Hero of Killorglin” copyright © 2006 by Fiona Patton
“Goblin Lullaby” copyright © 2006 by Jim C. Hines
“Crumbs” copyright © 2006 by Esther M. Friesner
“Fellow Traveler” copyright © 2006 by Donald J. Bingle
“Food Fight” copyright © 2006 by Thranx, Inc.
“Moonlighting” copyright © 2006 by Devon Monk
“The Rose, the Farmboy and the Gnome” copyright © 2006 by Phaedra M. Weldon
“A Day at the Unicorn Races” copyright © 2006 by Christina F. York
“Dragonslayer: Being the True and Terrible Tale of a Fearsome
Meeting Between a Man and a Monster” copyright © 2006 by Jana Paniccia
“The Murder of Mr. Wolf” copyright © 2006 by Josepha Sherman
“New Yorke Snow” copyright © 2006 by Susan Sizemore
“Meet the Madfeet” copyright © 2006 by Michael Jasper
“Finder’s Keeper” copyright © 2006 by Janny Wurts
“Is This Real Enough” copyright © 2006 by Lisanne Norman
For Robert J. Ambrose,
When my reality wasn’t always what I expected,
And my fantasies were far from coming true,
You were there to listen.
Thanks, Dad, for always knowing.
—B.A.K.
INTRODUCTION
Brittiany A. Koren
Late one evening, my husband and I were talking, bouncing ideas off one another about our future and looking back to see if our lives had turned out to be the way we had tried to plan it. Not quite, but we decided we were content in our amusement, as we quietly tucked our three children into bed after numerous drinks of water, teeth brushing, and finding the correct stuffed animals. Again, all was still in the house. A peaceful time for reflection. It was a night like most, still I’ll remember it the rest of my life. It was also the night the wheels began turning for this anthology.
Why was there such a fascination with humorous fantasy that was making more headway into the theaters? My personal favorites were movies like Shrek and Ella Enchanted that I had enjoyed many times, watching along with my kids. But still, what was so interesting about stories that went wrong? They weren’t the typical epic fantasy, but still had all the context of one.
Well, I decided, so many times there is an expectancy of where our lives should be and where it’s going to end up. As in most stories there is a path, if you will, that we should be on. However, that path isn’t always the right one we need to have under our feet, although, sometimes it still leads us to where we need to go even if it makes getting there a little more bumpy.
The stories herein are just that. It’s slapstick humor with all the elements of a good fantasy: dragons, elves, knights in shining armor, quests, and the occasional talking magical creature.
I asked sixteen wonderful authors to write stories about a fantasy with a little humor (after all, everyone needs to laugh) and an irony to the story that was far from being foreseen, stories where the paths were far from the expected. And I’m very pleased with the results. From Mickey Zucker Reichert’s “Battle of Wits” where the battle is more in the mind than on the field, to Lisanne Norman’s story about how gaming can sometimes be more lifelike than reality in “Is This Real Enough” to Brian Stableford’s “The Poisoned Chalice” where an elf wonders if his quest will ever end. All the stories are rich with prose that will make you laugh and make you wonder how your own life has taken that different path. And how you’ve survived to become the wiser, or at least enjoyed the scenery along the way. I greatly enjoyed reading these tales and I want to thank these outstanding authors for sharing their talents and showing us their version of fantasy gone wrong.
THE POISONED CHALICE
Brian Stableford
Brian Stableford hopes to publish his hundredth book before the end of 2006. Titles that are helping him through the nineties include Kiss the Goat: A Twenty-First Century Ghost Story from Prime Press, translations of various volumes in Paul Feval’s pioneering crime fiction series featuring the Habits Noirs—beginning with Salem Street—from Black Coat Press, and a definitive reference book, Science Fact and Fiction, from Routledge.
WORLD’S EDGE 4 MILES said the relevant arm of the signpost. At least, that’s what it said now. The 4 replaced a scratched-out 5, which had replaced a scratched-out 6, and so on to 10. There had been other numbers before that
, but someone had repainted the sign some years ago to make way for a new set.
The signpost’s only other surviving arm was set at right angles to the first. Since the repainting the hamlet to which it pointed the way had apparently changed its name to Brinkville. The arm pointing in the direction from which Umsonofer had come had been broken off.
The elf lowered his backpack to the ground and sat down on it. His long journey was almost over. He was very tired. It was nearly sundown, and he’d been walking since noon. There was a stream beside the road, making its leisurely way to the Big Drop, and he knelt down with cupped hands to take a drink. He intended to go on, by starlight if necessary, until he reached his destination. There would be time enough to start looking for somewhere to sleep, and perhaps get a bite to eat, on the way back.
When he stood up and turned around, though, he found that he was hemmed in by three stout dwarfs. He was a foot taller than any one of them, but his girth measurement was a good yard less. Had he had time to draw his poniard, he’d have had a substantial advantage in reach, but they were crowding him and their two-headed axes were already in their hands.
“This is a really bad idea, lads,” he said.
“No it’s not,” said the oldest of the dwarfs. “Since you’re on your way to die, you won’t be needing any of your luggage, so the charitable thing to do is to drop your pack and your dagger, and take off your clothes. It’s a balmy evening, so you won’t get cold before you jump—and if you do, it’ll give you an incentive to run to meet your fate.”
“I’m not a jumper,” Umsonofer told them. “I have to throw something off the edge, but then I’m coming back. You can rob me on the way home, if you want to.”
“No need to lie about it, old son,” said the dwarf. “We don’t mind suicide around here—it’s our chief source of income these days. Don’t get many elves, mind—but then, you don’t look much of an elf. A touch of the human in your family tree, I shouldn’t wonder.”
The insult was gratuitous. Umsonofer’s family had been pure elf for at least fifty generations. On the other hand, fifty generations wasn’t that much, by elvish standards, even though it extended to a past more remote than the Seven Magic Wars, the Troll Rebellion, the Invasion of the Giant Moths, and the Great Moon Disaster. There was, of course, no proof that the Ers of any previous era had ever erred in that uniquely perverted fashion, but such appearances tended to persist, like stains that would never wash out. Now that humans were finally extinct, people would probably forget, in time, what “a touch of human” might look like—but the world might have dwindled to a mere boulder by then.
The elf had met dwarfish bandits before, in lands where the Rule of Law was a great deal more secure than it was hereabouts, and he knew what the best tactic was for dealing with a situation like this. He picked up his pack, leaped over the stream with a single mighty bound, and took off at a run. Dwarfs’ legs were even shorter than their bodies; they couldn’t run to save their lives. That, presumably, was why they were so stubborn and tough in armed self-defense.
The land on the other side of the stream had been cultivated within the last ten years, but it had lain fallow long enough to accumulate the usual litter of scrub, including some rather nasty brambles. It wasn’t the ideal ground for sprinting—but it was, alas, entirely suitable for setting an ambush. There were two more dwarfs crouching in the bushes, and they had a trip rope. Umsonofer hadn’t taken twelve paces before he was brought crashing to the ground with a bone-jarring thump.
He had been holding on to the pack with iron determination, but the impact jarred him so badly that he lost his grip. When he was eventually able to sit up again, he had been disarmed and the dwarfs had already ripped his pack apart, immediately identifying the most interesting and mysterious object within. They had dropped the rest of his meager possessions in order to study the magical seal on the black leather bag, although one of the five was hanging back, standing over him in a calculatedly menacing attitude.
“Have to take it to the village,” one of the dwarfs was saying. “Need the sorceress to get into that.”
“Then we’ll have to split the take twenty ways instead of five,” another complained. “And the old woman will want at least double.”
“Best to torture the elf here until he opens it for us,” opined a third.
“I don’t know the spellkey!” Umsonofer was quick to protest. “And if I did . . . opening that bag would cause the death of everyone present.”
“Sure,” said the oldest dwarf. “I never heard that one before. He really might not know the spellkey, though—and if we apply gentle persuasion out here, his screams will likely attract more than the lads from the village. Best take him home, just in case. Smack him over the head would you, Potbelly.”
“You don’t under—” Umsonofer began, before the double-headed axe descended upon him.
Umsonofer woke soaking wet, with a terrible headache. Someone had thrown water over him to bring him around. He rapidly figured out that he had been hit with the flat of the axe rather than the edge, but he wasn’t sure whether he ought to be grateful for that. He opened his eyes to find himself propped up in a sitting position, with a roof over his head and a fire near his feet. It was difficult to see much else because of all the dwarfs crowding around him. Dwarfs had a less generous sense of personal space than elves, presumably because their flesh was so ambitious in extending from its vertical axis.
There were three females present, but it wasn’t hard to identify the sorceress. She had only one eye, only one tooth, and the craziest eyes Umsonofer had ever seen. Sorcery was a costly business; the power it gave its practitioners to defy cause and effect tended to be debited from their health and welfare in other ways.
The sorceress didn’t beat about the bush. “I can’t open this, darling,” she said. “Not without the spellkey—or something to set me on the right track. Shaggyback here says you don’t know it—which is a pity, if true, because it’s going to take a long time to feed you to the fire feet first.”
“Did he also tell you that opening the bag would kill you all?” Umsonofer asked her. “Your hairy friend thought it was just a ploy, but he didn’t have the time or the wit to think it through. You know magic, though, and you’ve been trying to break into the bag for hours. Why do you think I was on my way to throw it over the edge of the world, if it’s something valuable? What do you think it might be?”
The crazy eyes narrowed. “Why don’t you tell us what’s in it?” the crone said finally. “Who knows—we might believe you.”
“It’s a weapon left over from the Magic Wars,” Umsonofer said, knowing that they weren’t going to believe him, even though it was the truth. “Forged by the last surviving coven of human magicians—the Brotherhood of the Unseeing Eye—when they knew that defeat and extinction were inevitable. It was their last bid to take all the other races with them: a doomsday weapon. They called it the Poisoned Chalice.”
“Never heard of it,” the sorceress retorted—but there was an extra glimmer of light in her mad eye. She had heard of the Brotherhood of the Unseeing Eye, and understood the kind of lust that might lead the magically ambitious to sacrifice both their eyes instead of the more usual one.
“Few people have heard of it because few who’ve encountered it have survived to tell the tale,” Umsonofer told her, “but you might have felt its existence, in your wildest dreams.”
“When you live in Brinkville, darling,” the seeress told him darkly, “you can always feel the world dissolving under you, even when you’re wide awake and haven’t touched a potion in a fortnight.”
“Believe it or not,” Umsonofer said, “it’s not much better a thousand miles closer to the center—not since the seventh war ended, in fact. Our sorcerers reckon that we might just turn the corner, if we can get rid of that for good and all. Why else would I have come all this way?”
“To jump,” the oldest male dwarf put in. “Just like everybody else who comes thi
s way.”
“If I wanted to jump,” Umsonofer pointed out, “I’d have given you the pack, and my clothes too. I tried to run away—doesn’t that suggest that I had no desire to die?”
“Start feeding him to the fire,” suggested a voice from the crowd. “If he hasn’t coughed up the spellkey by the time we reach his knees, we can slit his throat and cook the rest of him properly. There’s not much meat on him, but he’ll see us through to the weekend.”
“You know better than that, Mother,” Umsonofer said to the sorceress, who certainly didn’t look as if she hadn’t touched a potion for a fortnight, or slept peacefully for the best part of a year. “You’ve felt this moment creeping up on you for weeks. If you can just remember your dreams, and interpret them correctly. . . .”
“Shut up!” said the old female, with such vituperation that Umsonofer knew he’d hit a raw nerve. Unfortunately, he also knew that it wasn’t always a good idea to hit nerves as raw as that, especially when they belonged to people as corrupted by long exercise of the Black Arts as the dwarf sorceress seemed to be.
“I’ll make up my own mind,” she said, “when I see what’s in the bag. Tell me the spellkey—or as much of it as you know.”
“What’s in the bag,” Umsonofer told her, “is a chalice—a drinking cup. It seems to be made of gold, and studded with precious gems, but that’s just glamor. The same glamor will fill you with a raging thirst, and you’ll try to drain the cup, but the cup doesn’t drain. No matter how fast you drink, there’s always more liquid inside. It’s said that it tastes exceedingly sweet, but I wouldn’t know. What I do know is that when your thirst is slaked, you drift off into sleep, and never wake up.”
Fantasy Gone Wrong Page 1