Fantasy Gone Wrong

by Greenberg, Martin H.

  “Purity of spirit,” the queen replied. “Beauty of soul. The unicorn found you. And you found the unicorn when you thought it was in danger. You are the chosen one. Congratulations. I don’t suppose you’ll want to wear white for the wedding.”

  “Uh—no,” Amali answered, and realized that she’d accepted her fate.

  Queen of Yorke. Well, someone had to do it. It might as well be someone who could do a decent job of it. Her. Gran Nautha had been right about her finding a good man and settling down. The king would do.

  “I prefer wearing scarlet,” she told the queen mother.

  MEET THE MADFEET

  Michael Jasper

  Michael Jasper gets by on not enough sleep and too much caffeine in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he lives with his lovely wife, Elizabeth, and their amazing young son, Drew. Michael’s fiction has appeared in Asimov’s, Strange Horizons, Interzone, Jigsaw Nation, Aeon, and Polyphony, among many other fine venues. His mixed-genre story collection Gunning for the Bud- dha came out from Prime Books in 2005. His first novel, the paranormal romance Heart’s Revenge, came out from Five Star Books in June 2006 (under the pseudonym Julia C. Porter). He really doesn’t have anything against hobbits. Honest.

  EVERYONE WHO LIVES AND breathes in our green land thinks that my predecessor, the Mighty Greybeard, could do no wrong. That includes the accursed little people, those smiling, singing, irritatingly needy little fur-feet.

  I tried to stay away from their villages built into the sides of hills and keep out of their business, especially if it entailed a visit to the cramped caves that they call home. Without exception, I found their holes filled with mouse droppings, birds’ nests, and blue mold, not to mention the ends of worms and an oozy smell.

  Yet the fur-feet kept calling me back, and my fellow wizards claimed to be too busy to respond to their summons. So I went, if only to keep my membership in the Guild active for at least one year more. That was the price I paid for my youth and my vocation: a fledgling wizard must serve the common good, for when he stops, he loses his power. My predecessor, now living a life of repose in the Far Havens, took this fact to heart.

  Which explained how I found myself on an early spring day under a glistening white and blue sky, perched on the unforgiving seat of my mule-led cart, venturing into their distant rural villages once again.

  I looked down at the piece of parchment pinned to the gray cuff of my sleeve. These directions surely had to be the worst yet; our cartographer had been smoking too much pipeweed again. According to these scribbles, I was to turn left after the stone bridge over Wellwater Springs and continue up the slow incline leading west. I mumbled a quick spell of veracity over the parchment, and the ink glowed a confident baby blue. The directions did not lie.

  I felt a tiny shiver run through my bones at the use of Magic. After only three years as a full-fledged Guild member, I thrilled at the way the power felt as it flowed through me. Though I must admit, I still hadn’t gotten used to all the energy the Magic required, taking it from me one bite at a time.

  I turned off the smooth dirt trail onto the rock-strewn path, and immediately the sky began to fill with rain clouds. The cart’s wheels jarred against a boulder, then a hole as big as a small crater. As my mule honked in protest—oh, for an actual horse, like the rest of the wizards, I thought, and not for the first time—I realized where we were now heading.

  The brown hills. Or I should say, the Brown Hills. I’d never been this far west, nor had I encountered any fur-feet who actually lived in this hostile clime. Gone were the fields of wheat and barley hemmed in by quaint rock walls, past me were the alehouses and bakeries on each corner, and behind me were the dancing children and crowded gardens of flowers and vegetables big as your head.

  Here, in caves carved out of the petrified mud and crumbling rock of the Brown Hills, lived the Madfoots.

  According to the rules of the Guild, every wizard needed to find a specialization, a needy population to whom he or she could provide personalized assistance. Arimea the sorceress had her wood elves and tree sorcery to keep her entertained for decades, if not centuries. Old Raddy had his birds and small animals. And way back when, the dark wizard Malusar had his pet orcs, seven feet tall and built for battle.

  Me? I decided to be different. I wanted to be a sort of rogue spirit, a free agent, and not pick favorites. I’d go wherever the Guild sent me, or, even better, I’d travel the land and conquer injustices and right wrongs wherever I went. I could see myself wearing out my leather boots and learning new languages and customs as I traveled across our green land.

  That was my dream.

  Problem was, the fur-feet picked me. With Greybeard gone, they soon found themselves facing mundane squabbles that apparently only a wizard could resolve. Someone stealing your cow’s milk? Finding strange shapes in your wheat field? Tired of a fur-foot bullying you and spilling your ale? Send immediately for Palap ateer. Better known as “Greybeard’s replacement.”

  I hoped he was enjoying his ageless retirement, most likely surrounded by gallons of wine and lovely ladies, while I toiled on in anonymity and thanklessness for the Guild.

  My only real challenge in almost three years of labor here in the hilly country of the fur-feet was the recent rousting of goblins from the western ridges. Now that was enjoyable. The Magic had poured through me like quicksilver, and many goblins fled from their hiding spots with singed blue skin and dented skulls. Took me an entire night and quite a few pints of home brew at the Dancing Dragon Inn to recover from my exertions.

  As the mule and I inched up the jagged hill, accompanied by the constant rumble of thunder, I thought about using a levitation spell to get us up there faster. But after recalling my orders from my Guildmaster, I decided to conserve my energy.

  “The little people have need of you once more, Pal,” Vardamann had told me in his speechifying voice. “They are being menaced by a vile presence encroaching upon their domiciles.”

  “More goblins?” I said, hoping for a challenge worthy of my skills. Vardamann shook his head. “Trolls?” No. “Undead warriors?” No again.

  I took a deep breath. “Surely not . . . a dragon?”

  “See to it, will you, Pal?” Vardamann the Voluminous said and snapped his fingers with a dry popping sound, dismissing me.

  “I’ll see to it, Vard,” I muttered as more rain clouds burst over me. “But, my fearless leader, all safe and dry up in your library, you never said anything about helping the Madfoots.”

  As if punishing me for speaking their name, the cart’s back wheel struck a boulder, throwing me face-first toward the mud.

  Luckily I had the command for the levitation spell on the tip of my tongue, and I never hit the ground. With a few more words of Magic I continued floating up the mountain.

  I’d return for my mule and ruined cart after my work here was complete, which surely wouldn’t take long. Dragons these days posed little challenge to wizards like me.

  This, I thought as I sat with my knees up to my chin and my cloaks sinking in cold mud, this was my punishment for not choosing to work with the faeries of the ageless forest. Or the dwarves of the distant ore-rich mountains. Or the trolls down by the blackened lakes.

  My diminutive host was Gammergub, who claimed to be the oldest of the Madfoots. He truly was the ugliest—his skin had an unhealthy blue tinge to it, and his bulgy pointed ears and squinting yellowed eyes were his best features. His back was hunched as a shepherd’s crook, and his soiled shirt and short pants were little more than a loincloth.

  Gammergub had refused to let me in until I’d shown him a trio of Magic tricks as well as my Guild badge. Still feeling a bit winded from my unexpected levitation spell, I was about to rap my staff against his pointy head, but old Gub finally allowed me into his muddy home.

  Now the self-proclaimed Dane of the Madfoots—Madfeet, he had insisted—was regaling me about his great-great-grandchildren as he tried to fix tea for me. At least, that was what I thou
ght he was saying; the Madfoot accent was thicker than sludge from the bottom of Lake Mudswallow.

  I finally had to grab Gammergub’s spindly frame and lead him to his stool so we could get down to business. The little fellow was heavier and more muscular than he looked—wrestling him into his seat took more energy than I’d expected.

  “Tell me about the dragon, Gub,” I said, giving him my best attempt at a benevolent smile. “That is why I’m here, isn’t it?”

  “Ah, yah, yah,” Gub said with countless nods. He passed me a chipped mug filled with lukewarm brownish water that gave off a bitter reek. I set it in the mud next to me. “Big dragon. Big, and hungry. Only ’tacks at night, yah, yah. When the sun sets.”

  I sighed. “It’s just now half past noon. Why didn’t you tell the Guild this bit of crucial information, so I didn’t waste half a day waiting here for the dragon to show itself?”

  “Well,” Gub said, after a long sip of his tea, “there is some other chores. Need doing ’round here. While we wait, yah, yah. While we wait for the dragon . . .”

  I shook my head, listening to the rain pounding against the roof of Gub’s cramped hole. The little urchin was already waiting for me at his front door, eager to head out into the driving rain. I got to my feet and bumped my head on the hard rock of the ceiling. I was not looking forward to getting drenched again. I supposed I could use a shielding spell to keep myself dry out there. Couldn’t hurt, could it?

  “All right,” I muttered. “Let’s get this over with, Gub.”

  My first task was to round up over a dozen goats that had slipped out of their pen. I got butted three times before I used a series of binding spells to gather up all the mindless beasts. When I was butted for the fourth time, my concentration slipped, and my shielding charm disappeared. I was now soaked, but the goats were corralled again.

  If only I were a rogue wizard, unfettered by the rules and control of the Guild, I thought, and not for the first time. Then I wouldn’t be stuck here, herding goats in the rain.

  I noticed that the goats seemed panicky whenever Gub came close to any of them. Must have been his smell—usually the fur-feet and animals got along smashingly. Or it could’ve been due to the way Gub smacked his lips around them.

  Feeling a bit out of breath after the goat-binding spells, I could’ve gone for hot tea and a loaf of bread at that point, even something from Gub’s muddy larder. Just a quick rest.

  But he was already pulling me off to my next duty. We hiked through the mud farther west, toward what could very well have been the ugliest front yard of any fur-feet I’d ever seen: broken ale bottles littered the dead grass on the other side of a splintered fence. A dead apple tree sat to the right of the muddy path leading up to the half-open front door.

  “This thing been haunting ol’ Gabgo Madfoot here. Got the old fella shakin’ in his suspenders. Yah, yah.”

  I gave Gub a long look, but he wouldn’t meet my gaze. His shoulders drooped further as we stopped outside the entrance to Gabgo’s hole. A cold, rancid breeze wafted out the front door.

  “So what did Gabgo do to this creature? Is it the ghost of an old enemy? A spook from a friendship gone sour?”

  “He did not a thing!” Gub’s eyes were suddenly yellow with rage and indignance. “Is just the lot of our poor people. Always taking abuse from foul creatures.”

  He stopped talking abruptly and looked off to the east, where the hills were rounder and the grassy fields were more plentiful. And the fur-feet living there were fatter and healthier than the few Madfoots—Madfeet—I’d seen today.

  “If only we lived in that county, not mountains here, yah, yah,” he muttered, eyes darkening until they were almost green. “We be shielded from such foul creatures. But no, no, Madfeet stuck in the Brown Hills. No green grass for Madfeet. . . .”

  As Gub grumbled, I shook the water from my hood and inched closer to the entrance to Gabgo’s hole. I pulled out my crystal of power and ignited it with a word of Magic. Gub stopped talking, and his eyes widened as he gawked at the fist-size gem. The Guild’s crystals often had that effect on people.

  “Let’s just finish this, shall we?” I said. “We can discuss the plight of the Madfoots later.”

  “Madfeet,” Gub said absently, still gazing at the crystal.

  As soon as I stepped inside, I could hear his bare, hairy feet slapping through the mud as he fled the scene.

  Fine, I thought, setting the crystal into its niche at the top of my staff like a Magical torch. I preferred to work alone.

  Lit up by the unforgiving light of the crystal, the only redeeming feature of this muddy, crumbling hole was that it contained less garbage than Gammergub’s, and its owner appeared to have packed up and moved. Gabgo was long gone.

  I searched the entire place, muddying my boots and getting countless cobwebs in my face and loose dirt down my collar. I only cracked my skull twice on the low ceilings and arches. And I could find no evil spirit lurking in any of the corners.

  I was about to give up and head back out into the rain when I heard a small tinkling sound, like the clink of rings on cold fingers, or cold chains in the wind.

  I drew my sword and held my staff in front of me as I dredged up the words to a spell to ward off the undead.

  “Begone,” I began in my best deep tone, but the clinking sound of metal continued. It came from below me. I looked down at the rotting burgundy rug under me and tapped my staff on the rug. I was rewarded with a hollow thunk. A trapdoor.

  As soon as I ripped the rug away, a black fist covered in dull silver rings punched through the wooden trapdoor I’d just uncovered. Cold air rushed over me, nearly stopping my breath.

  “Do not interfere, wizard,” hissed a lifeless voice that made my mustache curl up. “These vermin do not belong here. . . .”

  “Begone!” I shouted again, and the hand disappeared back through the shattered horizontal door.

  After a long moment of silence, I leaned close to the hole. I aimed the light of my staff into the hole, and looked down into the dead black eyes of a barrow-wight.

  Cold fear seeped into my heart, and I lost my willpower, gazing into those soulless eyes. The rest of the creature’s face was lost in shadow, but the eyes made me feel as helpless as I did on my first day as an apprentice to the mighty Greybeard.

  Then I remembered my Guild training, and my confidence returned. No undead creature, even if it was a barrow-wight far from its home, would best me in battle.

  I summoned up all my flagging energy, spoke the incantation against the nonliving, and threw open the trapdoor.

  A wizard’s work, I thought as I jumped down into the unknown, was never done.

  I came to in the basement of Gabgo’s empty hole, surrounded by half a dozen dull silver rings and a rusted sword that was easily four hundred years old. The ghostly creature had babbled on and on about intruders in these hills, and how they had to be removed, until I’d managed to send him fleeing back to his crypt with my final incantation. Then I’d blacked out.

  Desperate for clean air and warmth, I crawled up and out of the hole. I was glad to see the rain had stopped at last. At the gate, Gub stood waiting, arms crossed on his chest.

  “Time is a-wasting,” he said, then added, “yah, yah.”

  “You’re welcome,” I muttered. At some point in my battle with the lost barrow-wight, my staff had gotten broken in two. All I had left was the top half, and luckily my crystal had not come loose from its tip.

  “I have bad news,” Gub said, still eyeing the crystal as he led me north through the rutted streets of his village. We had less than an hour of sunlight left. “One of our Madfeet children just got carried off, yah, yah. By a giant spider.”

  I could barely believe my ears. I stopped, wishing my staff were whole so I could lean on it. “I see.”

  I looked around and saw a flimsy-looking wooden building with the crooked sign proclaiming it the Red Rooster Cellar and Inn. A drink would be nice right about now, e
ven if was a draft of Madfeet ale. I dearly needed to put my feet up and rest.

  But Gub was tugging at my arm again, trying to hurry me toward the patch of dark trees north of the village.

  “Must hurry, you can save the child. Think it’s lovely Marybelle Madfeet, yah, yah. You slay the spider first. Then we’ll have some ale before you meet with the dragon, yah, yah.”

  “Meet with the dragon,” I repeated as we hurried through the empty dirt roads of the village until the ragged Madfeet forest came into sight. “Shall I bring the tea, or will he?”

  Gub gave me one last shove, and then I was inside the forest. At least the rain couldn’t get through the thick, vine-encrusted tree limbs above me. I ignited my crystal and drew my dagger. My sword must have been back in Gabgo’s basement.

  I found the little Madfeet girl about twenty trees into the forest, dangling upside down from a web as thick as my wrist. I used my dagger to cut the child down. She hit the ground with a squeak, and then she was wriggling free of the webs binding her.

  Strangely, her arms and legs appeared blue, but surely she hadn’t been tied up long enough to slow the blood flow to her limbs. Gub’s skin was about the same bluish color, I noted.

  Marybelle was tottering off toward the village when the spider dropped toward me, clattering down through the branches clumsily, subtle as an explosion.

  This would be easy, I thought, swinging my dagger with relish. I won’t even have to waste any Magic on this creature.

  And then four other giant spiders dropped down from above, encircling the trees around me with thick, sticky webs.

  Gub and I didn’t have time to stop at the Red Rooster when I was done with the spiders. As the sun was touching the western horizon, Gub and I left the smoking remains of the forest behind and headed toward the northwest. I could’ve killed for an ale.