Mogworld

by Yahtzee Croshaw

  Something felt terribly unusual about the silence that followed,until I realized that Meryl and the priest were both lost for words. I enjoyed it while it lasted.

  “I’m going to Borrigarde,” said Meryl, finally. Then she turned and strode off down the road back to Applewheat for a moment, before smartly rotating on a heel and heading for New Pillock.

  I watched her until she had disappeared into the darkness, then turned to the priest. “Well?”

  He drew himself to his full, impressive height and set his mouth and nose into the usual disapproving grimace, but there was uncertainty in his eyes. “I will go with her,” he announced after some thought. “Be watchful of thy womenfolk, for their wombs are forever welcoming of Sin’s mighty flesh.” He marched stiffly after Meryl before I could think of a response.

  The sprite on the sign must have been motion-sensitive, because after I hadn’t moved for a while, it winked out. There I stood, abandoned by my fr— by my collea— by some associates, alone at a darkened crossroads with only a wheelbarrow full of catatonic adventurer to keep me company.

  It was fairly obvious what was going to happen next. Somewhere in the distance, a wolf would howl. A cold wind would blow across the hills. The sudden unpleasant knowledge of being totally alone would creep over me like fast-growing fungus. Within a minute I’d realize that for all my talk I really had valued the company of Meryl and maybe even that dipshit priest. Within two minutes I’d be pelting down the road to New Pillock after them.

  In the distance, a wolf howled. A cold wind blew across the hills. I picked up my wheelbarrow and took the road to Yawnbore, whistling.

  FOUR

  After a few days uneventful journey—for there is no other kind in Garethy—I reached the coast. The sun was rising again, the reflections on the calm ocean providing it with a temporary scarf. And there, at the bottom of the hill, lay Yawnbore, a crescent-shaped forest of brick houses jealously hugging the bay.

  “Here we are, Drylda,” I said. She was much more agreeable to talk to than my previous party members. “Are we ready for the shithole of the day?”

  Yawnbore was a retirement hotspot and tourist destination. It featured the closest thing to a beach in the entire continent of Garethy, a bank of razor-sharp shingle that had taught many a child’s feet to dread the traditional family holiday. It had the largest density of inns of any town in the country, some of which were even classified as “hotels” because they put a few mattresses in the stables and a diving board over the horse trough.

  It was stupidly early in the morning, even for old people. As I headed down the main road through the outskirts of town, nothing was stirring except a few poorly-secured garden gates, squeaking back and forth in the chilly morning breeze. The only other noises were the grinding of my rusty metal wheelbarrow and the jingle of Drylda’s accoutrements.

  “So we just have to find something heading to Lolede,” I thought aloud. “Charter ship. Fishing boat. A buoyant piece of wood will do. I’ll have to lash you on with a bit of rope, Drylda.”

  I looked down. The wheelbarrow was empty, but for a faint whiff of fake tan.

  A number of unpleasant scenarios ran through my mind before I turned around and saw that Drylda was lying ten feet behind me in a scantily-clad heap. I sighed, backed up the wheelbarrow, and piled her back in.

  “You’re a bit too light for your own good,” I muttered, proceeding with the barrow. “Suppose that armor can’t weigh much, hm?”

  Again, I looked down. Again, she was gone, although the fake tan smell was diligently holding the fort. She had fallen out of the barrow at exactly the same place as before. The next time, I pushed forwards as slowly as I could, and watched her closely.

  There. Right as we were crossing the imaginary line border that separated the town of Yawnbore from the surrounding countryside, her body moved. She bent at the waist, her head and upper torso diving for the ground. It was rather like she was being wrenched out of the barrow by an invisible rope. Or . . .

  I took up Drylda’s limp wrist and pushed her hand towards Yawnbore. Something pushed back, as if I was trying to hold two repulsing magnets together.

  “ . . . Or pushed by an invisible wall,” I realized aloud. “But why can I . . .”

  An idea occurred to me. Leaving Drylda and the wheelbarrow where they were, I walked back to a little pond a short way back down the road and rummaged around in the vile algae-covered water until I discovered a sleepy frog, grown fat and complacent from an abundance of flies and lack of predators. I took him back to the barrow, bounced him up and down in my hand once or twice, then flung him overarm.

  He bounced off thin air with a wounded croak, leaving a splatter of reddish-green stuff that hung unsupported for a moment before raining down upon the gravel. His little warty body twitched in death throes for a few seconds, then I carefully picked up his body by one spindly leg and flung it forwards again. This time, it sailed uninterrupted through the air before coming to a squidgy rest in someone’s flowerbed.

  So there was a magical barrier around the town that blocked living things. It wasn’t a completely absurd concept. Many towns had walls to shut out all the gnolls, goblins, and football hooligans that roamed the countryside looking for things to fight or pour beer over. And magical force fields were cheaper than walls, although they were less reliable and tended to result in one or two local babies with seven heads or lycanthropy a few generations down the line. The fact that this one was invisible was a little harder to understand. The raw form of the spell was invisible, but coloring agents were usually added before distribution, so that they couldn’t be used for nefarious (if entertaining) purposes.

  “Hello!” I called. “Is someone in charge of this wall? Medical emergency!”

  The only sound was the distant rumble of the ocean and a very faint wet noise of frog innards sliding down flower stems.

  “I’ll just see if I can find a watchman, Drylda,” I said over my shoulder.

  I left her at the barrier and made my way into Yawnbore proper. This early in the morning she was probably safe from slavers—god knows what they’d even expect her to do.

  I was surrounded on all sides by quaint retirement cottages, and looming over them was the clock tower that marked the town center. I shielded my eyes from the watery glare of the rising sun and checked the time.

  “Nine twenty-five,” I read aloud. That couldn’t possibly be right. Barely half an hour had passed since sunrise.

  I turned a corner into another pristine row of thatched roof cottages, and became aware of a metallic sound. I’d finally found someone: an elderly woman standing behind a picket fence, trimming her bush with a pair of heavy duty clippers.

  “Hey,” I said, jogging up, but anything I had to follow that up with died in my throat as I took a closer look.

  She was holding clippers and standing in the vicinity of a bush, but there seemed to be several inches of clearance between the two. Nothing about her dreamy smile or the contented, flouncy way she handled the clippers made any indication that she didn’t know exactly what she was doing.

  “Er, hey,” I repeated with a little less confidence. “Do you know where I can find someone to open the barrier?”

  “Yes, mister?” she said, in a cheerful tone of voice. She didn’t look at me, but continued her work while staring vaguely at something above and to the right of her hedge.

  I waited for her to elaborate, but she seemed to forget I was

  there. I coughed. “So . . . can you point me in the right direction?”

  “I don’t know what she was thinking!” she replied.

  She still wasn’t looking at me, so I took a quick glance around to make sure there wasn’t anyone else in the street. Then I waved my arms around for a moment to check for invisible ones.

  “Good morning,” she said suddenly and loudly, as if calling to someone from across the road.

  I jumped in surprise. “Good . . . morning?”

  “What
a wonderful fabric,” she added, before sliding to the ground and continuing to happily clip at a fence post.

  “We don’t like your sort around here,” said a gruff male voice from behind me. I turned around, and saw a bald man in a checkered shirt lying stomach-down in the road, glaring at me with open hostility. We regarded each other for a few moments, then he attempted to stride briskly off into the ground.

  At that point I decided that a brisk jog to the town center would be prudent. I met a handful of townspeople on the way, but none were in any position to be of use. Most of them didn’t even respond to my presence, and just walked around in small circles in the middle of the street. A small boy was standing catatonically on a curb with his arms outstretched at his sides, and a small girl was punching a dog.

  The town center was a large circular space that separated a row of shops and hotels from the laughable beach, with the clock tower in the center. At the base of it an unshaven man in the clothes of a town official was staring intently at the winding handle while turning it extremely slowly.

  My first thought was that the magical barrier around town had been in place for a few too many generations, but that didn’t seem to add up. There wasn’t any mutation going on; instead, it felt more like the people of the town were working from some kind of script that had had all its pages mixed up and stamped on a few times by an aggressive horse.

  Driven now more by morbid curiosity than my original search for assistance, I continued along the seafront, where my eye was drawn to the largest hotel, a tall, white, grand affair with a pair of impressive classical pillars around the entrance. It looked like it had been the victim of some kind of invasion; all the ground floor windows were smashed in and the main doors were both swinging on one hinge. On the nearby wall, someone had daubed little symbols of male anatomy all over the No Riff Raff plaque.

  This was new. Every other building in the town was displaying signs of neglect, presumably because the caretakers were all busy punching livestock or banging their heads against walls. This one showed all the hallmarks of deliberate vandalism, and I’d done enough looting in my time to recognize

  the work of a fellow enthusiast. That meant sane people had been here. I stepped gingerly over the ruined doors and into the lobby.

  The interior wasn’t any tidier. Anything that was potentially valuable was missing, and everything else was damaged. The reception desk lay in an ugly pile of splintered wood and pages from the check-in book. The manager was propped up against a wall with a lampshade on his head and his torso wrapped in velvet curtains.

  “Lovely ocean view,” he repeated like a mantra.

  I passed under a broken timber into what I suppose must have been the dining room, because the splintered remnants of tables lay near crumpled tablecloths and shattered flower vases. An elderly, posh-looking couple were sitting on two of the few upright chairs. They were dressed only in underwear and the woman was running a comb through the man’s impressive handlebar mustache.

  Behind the bar across the room a podgy man in a pirate outfit held an upended bottle of wine to his lips as the contents were transferred to his gullet with a series of rhythmic “glook” sounds. He hefted the bottle as if to hurl it across the room, but froze when he noticed me flinch. His gaze tracked back and forth from my head to my feet a few times.

  “What’s wrong with yer face?” he said.

  I blinked. “What?”

  “WHAT’S WRONG WITH YER FACE?!!”

  “No . . . I heard you, I was just caught off guard.”

  “Yeh’ve seriously never been asked that before? Bugger me. Where the ‘ell are you from?”

  “It wasn’t the question, it was . . . why has everyone in this town gone all weird?”

  “Aye, we noticed that. Same question crossed our minds.”

  “We?”

  “Aye,” he said. Then he added “Aaargh,” because at that point an extremely large and heavy rock came crashing down through the ceiling, and his headscarf did very little to slow the fatal destruction of his skull.

  I tried to think of something to say, but all I could come up with was “Waagh.” A second boulder crashed in and came to rest an inch from my foot, drizzling splinters of ceiling onto my shoulders.

  At first I made to bolt for the door, but then I heard a siege weapon being activated right outside, so I spun on my heel and went for the stairs. Another missile struck the building as I reached the third floor and almost threw me off my feet. I knew then I’d probably made a mistake, but there was no time to re-assess. I ran into the nearest room. A middle-aged man was trying to write on the window pane with a fork. I pulled him gently away and took a look outside.

  The source of the missiles stood in the middle of the street on four mighty wheels. A large, sturdy catapult being operated by a gaggle of meatheaded mercenaries. No, wait, I corrected myself. Not a catapult, one of those sling things. A trebuchet.

  I flinched as another payload slammed into the building, and felt the floor slant forward an inch. The hotel wasn’t designed to withstand much of anything more stressful than an energetic honeymoon couple, and the trebuchet had apparently moved past warning shots and was ready to get down to some good old-fashioned total destruction.

  I had to get out of this building, preferably via a back door of some description. I should have made my move then, but a sudden cessation of movement out in the street caught my attention.

  As one, the adventurers manning the trebuchet had suddenly snapped to attention, thrusting their pectorals out like bricks mounted to cupboard doors. I poked my head carefully out the window, and saw, coming down the road, the very same big cage on wheels I had gotten to know intimately in Applewheat, still blackened from our previous meeting. Its new occupants had probably been picked off the streets of Yawnbore, because they were talking to themselves and acting out a variety of incongruous mimes like some kind of mobile performance art troupe.

  The carriage was being hauled by a pair of overworked horses, and there was a row of individuals walking along either side of it. Some of them were adventurers, but most I recognized as the white-clad members of the youth group that had destroyed Barry’s church. And leading the procession was Barry himself.

  Even from a distance he was easy to recognize. I’d seen more than enough of that jowly, self-righteous face when it had been glaring at me through the bars of a cage, not to mention disappearing beneath the wings of ravenous Deleters. Something had changed about him, though. There was something new and confident about the way he carried himself. Three inches above the ground.

  “Things ticking along nicely over here?” he said, levitating over to the trebuchet. He was in an unusually good mood, and maybe it was my imagination, but his voice seemed to possess more of an echo than everyone else’s.

  “We are beginning the demolition as ordered, your Divine Majestic Holiness,” said the adventurer holding the trigger rope, an elven fellow in a girly purple doublet.

  “And you’ve already checked the building for people, yes?”

  The elf swallowed hard, and even from the window I could hear the thick wad of nervous sputum thumping down his gullet. “I . . . not just yet, my glorious lord.”

  Barry looked up at the hotel with mock confusion. “I don’t see how you’d be able to search the place after it’s been destroyed.”

  “He forgot, son off de most High,” said another member of the trebuchet party. It was the oily northern barbarian. “I didn’t vont to say anyting ‘cos he vos supposed to be in charge.”

  “Oh dear,” sighed Barry.

  “My lord, if I forgot it was because GAAAAAGH,” said the elf, as he burst into white flame. My skin prickled in sympathy as his body convulsed with agony before collapsing into a heap of crumbling ash.

  Barry withdrew his pointing finger. “I ask one simple thing from my employees: that you follow all my instructions and not deviate from them. You’ve only got yourself to blame. Oh yes, and—” He paused to point at t
he barbarian, who immediately flared up with a heavily accented scream. “—Nobody likes a tell tale. You can both go and think about it by the clock tower. I’ll resurrect you later if there’s any time left in the schedule.”

  I had learned about the level 60 Righteous Smitation spell in my first year of magic school. Only the highest-ranking priests in the most ethically flexible religious sects are allowed to learn it, and even then there’s a whole pile of forms to fill in before someone can be authorized to cast it. On top of that, it uses up their entire magic reserve for the day, leaving them in need of a lengthy lie down and a few decent swigs of communion wine. Barry the vicar had just cast it twice in one minute and wasn’t even swaying.

  “Right then,” he said, rubbing his hands. White energy crackled around his palms. “The rest of you, get inside and clear everyone out before you throw any more rocks.” The three adventurers at the trebuchet—a dwarf, a swordsman and a battle mage, who had been standing with the frozen but relaxed look of students when the teacher is picking on someone else—suddenly snapped to attention and jogged smartly into the hotel.

  Barry called after them. “Our target is to get everyone rounded up and at least half the demolition work done by the end of the day. Quickly, people!” He clapped his hands.

  The very last thing I wanted to do was fall into the clutches of the new and improved Barry. I slipped out into the stairwell. I could already hear muffled bumps and scuffling on the ground floor, and a couple of pairs of boots began tromp-tromping their way up the stairs.

  I flattened myself against a wall—I wasn’t sure if it helped, but it felt like an appropriate thing to do—and made my way through the halls, wincing with every creak of the floorboards. If I could find a window, perhaps I could escape before they found me, even if it meant jumping down three stories and having to sneak out of town with my legs partially embedded into my torso.

  I found an unlocked door quickly enough, and ran through it into a large double room. The occupying family were all sitting cross-legged on the bed around a plate of half-eaten breakfast. As I pulled the door shut behind me and shoved a chair under the handle, one of the children took a fried mushroom, shook it in her hand, then cast it back onto the plate like a die.