"Shh," replied both Tehra and Jillis.
"Yes, wait… it was." Jillis sounded worried, and that in itself was worrying. The grassy soil beneath them was already turning cold after losing the reliable touch of the day's sun. A light breeze was beginning to lift up now. It was going over their backs and toward the direction they were all gazing in.
"No," said Jillis. "No, that's not good. Was the wind blowing just now? Did it just start? Shit, shit, no." She went to stand up and then crouched herself back down, halfway between looking as though she was about to run somewhere, and nearly about to hug the ground below her.
"The breeze's been going since we stopped here," said Yuri. "You going daft or what?"
"What?" asked Jillis.
"Do I need to take over this party?" said the dwarf dryly. "Have you actually seen an ogre in the flesh before?"
"What? Yes, of course I have. In fact, that might have been what distracted me," said the rogue. Her face coiled up into a tight knot of horror, but just for an instant, then it flashed away, and she was blinking profusely and shaking her head. "We've all seen things, right, nothing special. We're going to take this thing down."
“We need to go back to the city and make a plan, start again fresh tomorrow. It's caught our scent now," said Yuri. "What the fuck are you in charge for if it's gonna get away from us before we can get anywhere near it?" He was not going to start making any friendly banter at all now, clearly.
Jillis stood up and walked back down to her mount. "Is that why you didn't want to help me out when I missed something like the slight breeze? You're pissed off that Benevic made me the leader on this quest instead of you, like he usually does? This is a hunting job, not open conflict or sheer thuggery. What the hell does a clumsy dwarf know about sneaking up on anything? You're here to put spears and swords into it once I find it, you got that?"
"Yes, ma'am," he said with such an aggressive tone of sarcasm that Tehra almost laughed from the raw awkwardness building up at being so close to the argument.
"Both of you need to save this argument for later when we've gotten back alive," she said. "I don't care if you tell Benevic that I'm no good for this line of work either; it's not worth dying over just to be popular in this company."
"Fuck. The elf's right," said Yuri. "Stands to reason someone so pretty would always have to be right on top of it. I'm getting back on my horse. Fuck standing around waiting for that ogre to run up and tear me a second hole to shit from."
Jillis was nodding and half talking to herself like she'd been working out equations on a chalkboard in her mind. "Okay, okay, the ogre's gone, and that means it probably did catch wind of us. So, it probably ran away. If it were going to attack us, it would have already attacked other guarded caravans and wagons. But it only goes after peasants, farmers, people who can't stand up and defend themselves. It's afraid of a fair fight.”
"You think so?" asked Tehra. Her faith in the abilities of any of this party had started to decline drastically after this whole display of ineptitude and pettiness.
Something else was bothering her too, but the others called to her to get back to her mount, and she didn't want to be left out there in the growing darkness on the edge of some field she'd never seen before in her life. More importantly, she felt like she could sense something out there, which was becoming clearer now that the night was closing in even more. It wasn't her natural infravision: the natural ability to 'see' heat in the darkness. She wanted to say it was nothing, just her fear and a hunch that there was a big bad monster lurking out on the edge of the rising darkness.
Mostly, Tehra wished she knew if ogres had any type of innate magical aura to them, or if they could be imbued with it by someone who did have magical ability. That would have explained what she was sensing.
"Come on; you're going to get us lost out here, Jillis," Yuri said. "Benevic would rather us return empty-handed tonight than be found with our legs wrapped around our necks and our spines poking out the skin of our backs, like some of those farm animals we saw. You think he wants to replace our whole party on a minute's notice on top of coming up without any rewards for the day?"
"Ugh, fine. You're right there I guess," Jillis said. "Okay, we'll head back to the river and signal to the ferryman. And if that price-gouging bastard doesn't come out to meet us like he promised, I'll personally pay to have a false warrant put out for his arrest."
"Not that you would ever be involved in that sort of thing, eh?" added Yuri with the laughter back in his voice. "Looks like it's the alehouse for us then, lads!"
The other men cheered lowly, everyone seeming to forget about the ogre that they'd seen no less than a mile or two away. It was unlikely that it would have followed them successfully all that way, on foot. A beast of that size and manner was sure to make as much noise as a rutting pair of wildebeest.
They got to the water, but Jillis was skeptical as to whether the ferryman would see their signal from so far along down the river. "If that asshole's going to be watching out for our fire at all, he's not going to see it from here." They were a good half mile along. So, they walked along the shore away from the softer sand. Eventually, the hills started to rise again as they got closer to being adjacent to the city along the river.
"There's a section of low cliff coming up soon," said Tehra. She knew this area too well from her time saying out here, however brief it had been.
"That's fine. We'll just stay on the shore where it's nice and flat," replied Jillis.
Yuri didn't have much to say. He seemed to be busy deciding what he was going to drink first when he finally got to his precious alehouse, and probably how big the breasts on tonight's whore were going to be.
"What do you think?" Tehra said to him.
"We listen to the leader," said one of the other men, his face dark and hidden.
"That's right," said Yuri. "She wants to be in charge of this bullshit failed quest, who am I to argue about which path we take back with our tails between our legs?"
"It doesn't seem smart to take the low road," said Tehra. It was in her bones, in her heart, the presence of danger. There was a type of glowing out there like the presence she had been vaguely aware of with Benevic's daughter earlier that day.
"You’re going to sit there and argue with me, trainee? Do you want to be a professional adventurer or not? Come on." Jillis urged her mount onward, and the rest of them followed without complaint.
"Wait," she said, but no one listened to her meek effort to stop them. "She was just about to get her own horse moving when the sky began to fall around them.
23
Covered in blood, greased with filth and saliva, the sky did fall on top of them. Only, it was just an expansive part of the darkness directly above, where the ogre blocked out the eerie glow from the distant moon. It didn't even make a sound as it fell.
Tehra was sure no one else saw the thing drop down from the low cliff along the flat shore of the river. "Look out!" she screamed at them, only her words could not come out nearly as swiftly as the hulk dropped onto a patch of unsuspecting men on horseback. The warriors were mostly holding spears and halberds, perched against their shoulders while they rode. The ogre could not have known this when it had leapt down on top of them. Otherwise, maybe it was impervious to such blades. In that case, all was already lost.
"Move!" shouted Yuri as he saw the thing slam down onto three of his men.
The ogre made its first sound when one of the spears found its flesh, and thankfully it was one of pain and sudden injury. The thing was ten times as big as any of the men, the huge body reverberating when it growled and roared bloody murder. The spear shaft must have broken or gone right into the thing, because its huge mass continued the trajectory toward the sand below, taking all three men with it and knocking them down off their horses. One of the animals ran off as its rider was dismounted, but the other two were tangled up in the heap of flesh and steel as it pummeled the river beach.
The whole lot o
f limbs and body thrashed around, but it didn't look like the men were ever going to get back up. "Damned men! Die!" growled a voice unlike anything nature could create, more like a demonic nightmare made barbarian flesh.
The impact had been at the back of the group, leaving Tehra cut off from the rest of her party. She backed her horse away, the frightened animal wanting to turn and run but being too well trained for combat situations to do that. "Easy, boy," she whispered to her mount, stroking him kindly despite how her own fear was turning into terror.
The ogre was punching downward, not hitting the sandy shore. The men it had sent from their horses screamed for help. One of them started to gurgle as though he was trying to breathe through pudding; then his shouting was cut short along with another roar from the ogre. This was all so fast that it was like a blur. The cliff made shadows out of the area of shore, and the moon's light reflecting off the slowly moving river only made it harder to see anything else but the water and sky. But Tehra could see the warm bodies moving around, and the blood that had started to spurt from various places on various human parts she could not identify for their rapid shaking. She couldn't even tell which one of the three men was being assaulted by which of the ogre's hands or stomping feet. It also used its teeth to bite down and rip away flesh when it found a convenient place to do so without the steel of armor getting in the way.
"Get back and form ranks, now!" shouted Yuri. "This is what we've been after all night, men! Let's take this ugly fuck's head back to the boss so we can go wet our lips, and our dicks!"
The mounted warriors shouted, and armaments were clattered together against shields and steel plates of armor. Most of them were only wearing mail, however.
"Ranged weapons ready," said the dwarf.
Tehra backed away from the ogre as it stopped pummeling the now dead trio of warriors and looked up at her. She could see its glowing warmth, the blood that covered it starting to cool and create a surreal effect in her infravision sight. It was almost definitely smiling right at her, and chewing on something disgusting as it did so.
Expecting the ogre to give chase, Tehra turned her horse and began to trot back the way the party had come. She didn't look behind her until she'd gone a good twenty yards. It was not giving chase, however. In fact, it wasn’t even standing up yet.
The thing was not deaf, nor as stupid as they had all believed. It must have been fully aware of what the dwarf had told his men. As he shouted, "Loose!" the ogre lifted up two of the mutilated warriors' fresh corpses and held them between itself and the line of firing adventurers. The arrows and bolts were deflected by the armor of their dead comrades, with one or two seeming to stick into their bodies.
The young elf said a quick prayer—to any god who might still wish to hear her—that those men the ogre had used as human shields were already dead.
Again, the ogre screamed in pain. Could one of the projectiles had made it through? Roaring like a perturbed child whose party had been called short due to bad weather, the monster threw the bodies to the side and ran toward the line of mounted adventurers.
"Polearms ready!" shouted Yuri with his falchion in hand and at the rear of his men. It was hard to make out where Jillis was in all this, or the faces of the different men whose names Tehra had not learned yet. She was thinking that there would be no chance to know any of them now because this was sure to be their last quest.
You have to get out of here, she told herself. "No," she said out loud, as though arguing against a separate entity. It was, in a way, just like that: the good of her conscience was abhorred by the notion of fleeing while her own party faced off against a rampaging ogre. Her natural state of mind told her that this was a lost cause, and getting out alive to face another day was better than being a dead hero no one would even know the name of.
The beast's back was glistening now in the light from above, as some clouds had moved away, giving the humans more light to work with. It ran at the horses in a bloodthirsty rage that was carried across by the way it was screaming at them with hatred. The sound was both low and high pitched, as though two different beings were at war within the ogre's body.
When it hit, several of the horses were knocked back or taken to the ground. Their riders went down too, but the ogre had a spear shaft sticking out from it as it came away from the group. It was moving strangely now, and Tehra was beginning to feel sure that this would all be over as quickly as it had started. Perhaps the life of an adventurer really was this exciting!
The ogre turned and ran directly toward where the elf was sitting atop her mount. The horse saw it coming too, and begin to whinny and turn left and right in sharp, partial circles. It was begging without words for its rider to allow it to flee without being forced to go against its extensive training.
"Shit!" Tehra shouted as the ogre lurched up near her, finally letting the horse turn and run. It was too close to the monster, apparently, and in a state of panic. Instead of running up the shoreline and toward the farmlands they'd come from, it bolted to the side and into the water, jumping up and throwing Tehra from its back as the shock of suddenly winding up in water startled the horse.
She toppled into the icy water and landed upside down, not hurt right away, but sure she was about to be torn apart by the angry monster’s hands. When that didn't happen, she waited for the water to take her, but soon she managed to find her way back to the air above the moving current.
Only a slowly shrinking bulk of shadow remained of the ogre. It continued running into the night.
The horse had come around and was walking back to the shore, seemingly embarrassed and acting as though nothing had just happened as it went with quiet dignity.
"Fucking horse!" she called out, feeling immediately bad for blaming the poor animal for her own hesitation in taking action.
24
The ogre had gone out again. It had complained of hunger and wanted to find some animals to eat. Mertho allowed himself to believe that it was really going to eat just animals. He knew Thark was evil, but the wizard fought to keep his mind free of guilt by ignoring the obvious.
Was it somewhat like a scientific experiment to Mertho? Perhaps. That didn't mean he was heartless or inhumane. Time went on as he pondered this, and it was almost a delight to again be alone without the presence of another sophont creature making him painfully aware that things moved so slowly. Time was something he was glad to see fly by now that he felt sure he was immortal and would not age as it did so.
The ogre was old, but it was mortal, flesh and blood—wretched at that. Mertho enjoyed the solitude too much to want to ruin his pet creature's good time by insisting that it stayed inside the dungeon. He felt that it was drawing near just then, and wondered if it had brought back an unspoiled corpse for the wizard to drain the soul from.
Thark came up the side of the hill, moving quickly but not as quietly as usual. This was a monster who knew how to go undetected, and it tended to do so out of habit, or perhaps because it liked to try to sneak up on its omnipresent master. "Hurt," the ogre said when it came up to the cave's entrance. "Men on horses, armed, fighters. Tasty elf meat..."
Elf? Did you, have you killed her? Or him. Mertho immediately envisioned that beautiful face of the elven maid who had spent part of the night in his chamber with his core, unafraid of him despite his strangeness. Then, terrified when she'd learned the truth of his powers. Her absence thereafter was enough to tell him how she felt about nearly befriending a magical entity such as Mertho. She would have made a superior ally to the ogre for many reasons. He told himself that had nothing to do with weak, human preferences.
"Not eat, not kill elf. They give, ugghh…" It made a sickly warbling sound before continuing to speak, taking more effort to do so now, "give chase."
Why did you come here if you are being chased, you idiot?
"Master, protect. Our arrangement!" The ogre slammed its fists against the rock of the entrance tunnel.
Very well. Yes, you are right, of
course. Get inside. I will do my best to heal you.
"Thanking, master," Thark said, his words increasingly slurred. The ogre went to its lair and began to drink from the pool of water. Then it lay down on the pile of skin and bones it used as a bed.
Mertho recalled a simple healing hands spell and tried to think of how to use it without any hands to physically lay on his monstrous patient. It turned out to be simple, and he could feel the pierced body of the ogre starting to mend. There were stab wounds from long, thin steel, probably spear tips or some similar polearms.
You charged well-armed men who had spears pointed at you? he asked, aiming to reprimand.
"Yesh, and jumped down on, ambushed them." Thark was not able to speak any longer, and he became very still. The life in him was still present, but Mertho began to wonder what it would be like to absorb the soul of such a creature. If it even had one for him to absorb.
Mertho sensed people coming up to the entrance of the cave. Their natural auras betrayed feelings of fear, and some of them were already bloodied, but did not appear greatly hurt.
"Here's where the trail leads," said a stern-faced human woman with light leather armor.
A dwarf was with them too. His face was a tale of woe. "You sure about this, Jillis? I don't want the 'wind changing' on us again and getting half of my men killed."
"Keep your mouth shut, Yuri. Your kind are already loud enough without always chattering about nonsense. And you don't fund the payroll, so what the hell do you care? I'll let Benevic decide who's to blame for our losses, thank you." The woman acted like she was in charge, but the warriors with them stood by the dwarf, Yuri, and didn't seem to have any respect for the rogue woman. The only one paying her much attention was—"
It's the elf, Mertho said with mouthless words.
"What?" said Tehra. The others in the group with her outside the cave gave her a strange look.
"You heard me," said the rogue. "Don't tell me you wish to start questioning my tracking skills now?"
The Wizard (Dungeon Core Book 1) Page 12