Mogworld

by Yahtzee Croshaw

  I screwed my eyes shut and hung my head, turning my back on Civious. I could still feel his gaze boring into my shoulder blades.

  “Then let’s all head for home, my little back stabbers.”

  “Despatch officers to nearby churches with orders to recapture the individual who identifies as Slippery John,” said Bowg to one of the gnolls.

  The gnolls filed out through the surface tunnel, Civious and his wife following, pictures of quiet, straight-backed dignity. Meryl tried to copy them as she followed, but looked more like a small child imitating her parents while out on the town.

  She stopped at the door and looked at me. I expected there to be milky gray tears in her eyes, but they were dry. Her mouth was set into a flat, angry line. “You really aren’t any kind of hero, are you.”

  “I did keep saying.”

  Then she was gone.

  “Chin up, my little dog biscuit,” said Mr. Wonderful, taking up the rear of the procession. “Once you get yourself killed properly there’ll be plenty of loose chicks in the special hell for people who betray their mates.”

  I dug my hands in my pockets, hunched my shoulders and followed. “We’re more like colleagues, really.”

  The sun was setting and the thick smog from Lolede’s corpse incinerators was painting thick brush strokes of brown on a glowing orange sky.

  “Sorry we couldn’t get a proper procession to the palace worked out, your lordship,” said Mr. Wonderful to Civious. “On longer notice you’d have gotten the full treatment. Stupid hat, donkey cart, pulled along through the streets for the kids to throw rotten peaches at. You’ll have to make do with being manhandled by the smelliest gnoll we’ve got.”

  “Greef?” said a nearby gnoll hopefully.

  “No, the gist of Mr. Wonderful’s statement was that there would not be peaches available to your colleagues on this occasion, Terrorfax,” said Bowg. “At the point when we pass through the market you will be debited one or more boxes of spoiled cabbages.”

  “Groff.”

  I risked a glance over at Meryl. She was walking along beside the Civiouses (Civii?), staring at the ground. The last I’d seen her impenetrable bubbliness vanish like this was in Yawnbore, when rumors of my disintegration had been greatly overstated.

  That’s because she genuinely cares about you, went a little voice in the back of my mind. Not in the sense that you could potentially be useful at some point, or because they’ve got nothing better to do than tag along, the way most of your relationships work.

  Look, I replied, Back off. Firstly I have enough voices in my head with all that Deleter rubbish I have in here, and secondly, you can stop trying to appeal to my human side, because that part of me is currently a layer of dust in the bottom of a coffin thousands of miles away. She’s only been trying to keep me going because I’m from Borrigarde and she’s a nationalist weirdo who wants me to join the pig farmer’s rebellion. There’s no reason to give a flying toss about her.

  No, I guess there isn’t, said the voice. So why do you?

  I took another glance at Meryl, but a crowd of fleeing peasants were got in the way.

  The fatalistic population of Lolede had suddenly conjured up a lot of energy from somewhere. They were running at full pelt, the men clutching as many bags and boxes of possessions as they could muster, the women dragging screaming children by the hand. They were all fleeing in the opposite direction from where we were going, a detail I should probably have read more into.

  “Stop!” yelled Mr. Wonderful. He had to yell it a few more times before the order osmosed through the gnolls’ earwax to their brains. Then he stepped out into the middle of the street and held an arm out rigidly to the side. A few seconds later, there was a SMACK and a fleeing peasant fell back with a broken nose.

  “What’re you running for? Where’s the fire?” asked Mr. Wonderful, holding up the unfortunate fellow by the hair.

  “Over there,” the peasant replied, pointing, before struggling free of Mr. Wonderful and sprinting after his fellows.

  By then, the smell of smoke and the sound of roaring flames had reached us. The sky was suddenly orange with fire rather than glorious picturesque dusk. We looked up just in time to see the large upper window of the towering palace of Lolede burst outwards and vomit flame.

  “So, I believe you were saying you were escorting us to the palace,” said Civious, turning to Mr. Wonderful. The elf chose not to reply, but his habitual knife-twirling accelerated a few notches.

  “Proceeding to the administrative center will resume as planned, pending further developments,” said Bowg.

  Further developments came when I saw a couple of those white robe-wearing types round a corner and drift towards us, ringing little finger bells and occasionally skipping. Certainly disquieting, but I still felt that the townspeople had overreacted somewhat.

  “Oh, hello,” said Benjamin, for the lead devotee was none other. “Happened earlier than we anticipated, don’t you know.”

  “What did?” I asked, running forward.

  “The coming of the LORD, of course. He arrived an hour ago with the rest of our happy little group.”

  “What’s the hold up?” called Mr. Wonderful from the rear. “Just tell him we don’t want any pamphlets!!”

  “Barry’s here?” I said. “Did he light all those fires?”

  “Well, not personally, no. The LORD always calls for verbal diplomacy and authorizes violence with extreme reluctance, as I’m sure you know. It’s just that the followers of the Truth can tend towards the over-zealous.”

  “But . . . all you’re doing is skipping about ringing bells.”

  “Ah. That’s the thing about learning the Truth, you see. It changes you, but there’s no way of predicting how. I was one of the ones who made peace with themselves. Some people just stop caring altogether, become totally indifferent. And some people . . .” He rotated a hand and screwed up his face meaningfully.

  “Some people what?” I could hear the distant thunder of charging feet. I’d assumed that it belonged to the peasants who had just run past, but now I realized it was getting louder.

  “Some people go completely off their bonce. You remember Groyn? Short chap, beard, sawed off your foot?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Learnt the Truth the same time I did. Went on a voyage to blotto junction, I’m afraid. I don’t think he’s stopped biting the heads off children for a moment since then.”

  The rumbling was getting extremely close, and, I realized, was mingled with a bloodlusty roar of absolutely incredible fury, emerging from several well-muscled throats.

  “Isn’t it marvellous?” said Benjamin, looking back down the road towards the sound. “Soon everyone will know their own Truth.”

  The noise was suddenly joined by accompanying visuals when a horde of muscular fanatics in red-spattered white robes appeared at the far end of the street, bearing down upon us, brandishing massive bladed weapons overhead and screaming.

  “Gnolls, adopt battle formation,” droned Bowg, who had shrewdly maneuvered himself to the back of our group without anyone noticing.

  “Grurf?”

  “He means, wave a weapon around in front of you and run in that direction until the screaming stops,” said Mr. Wonderful helpfully.

  “Grafk.”

  The gnoll army’s tactics were virtually identical to the cultists; they immediately charged forward holding weapons aloft and bellowing all the air out of their lungs. But while the gnolls were doing the same thing they did for most of their waking (and sometimes sleeping) lives, the insane acolytes were genuinely angry about something. So it may have been complacency that led to the gnoll defeat.

  One gnoll can easily kill one adventurer, even a foamy-mouthed rabid adventurer drugged up to the eyeballs with religious fervor. Indeed, a gnoll could comfortably kill six adventurers simultaneously by employing all four limbs, teeth and tail, but it’s the seventh adventurer lodging axes between their vertebrae that proves pro
blematic, and there were more than enough adventurers to go round. They were still pouring into the battle even when the last of the gnolls was being stamped into paté.

  “It seems your forces have been found wanting,” said Civious.

  Mr. Wonderful was breathing fast and his knife was twirling so quickly that an occasional fingertip flew out of the blur. “Just say ‘we lost!’” he yelled. “TWO WORDS! WE! LOST! YOU SOUND LIKE A PRICK!”

  “Perhaps we should start running,” I suggested, as the victorious adventurers turned to us without even pausing to wipe the pulverized gnoll off their boots.

  “Why don’t you just offer them a deal and sell us all out?” said Meryl nastily.

  Everyone else present was either too proud, too upset, or too insane to see sense, so it was up to me to seize the initiative and run for the nearest side alley. My companions followed one by one as the sight of the advancing horde broke down their confidence.

  While large armies of berserk warriors are fine with simple instructions like “run down a street killing everything,” they have trouble when you try to program in more complex instructions like “follow stragglers down alleyways.” The mob roared harmlessly past the junction behind us, and were slowly absorbed into the background noise of the stricken city as we ran roughly in the opposite direction, taking random turns.

  We were temporarily safe, but that came with the tense realization that we had no idea where we were. We stopped in a little alley that opened into another main road and peered around the corner. The area was deserted but for discarded suitcases and a few stragglers.

  “We must find access to the underground,” said Civious. “In my lair, we can regroup.”

  “We don’t have to regroup, we’re already in a group,” said Mrs. Civious. “You want to go back for your train set, don’t you?”

  “No,” he replied, a little too quickly.

  “Well, maybe we should find an Adventurer’s Guild and hook up with OUR mates,” said Mr. Wonderful, hands on hips. “Maybe that’d make you a little bit less inclined to think you’re in charge, hmm?”

  “We could just work together for a bit,” I said nervously as the air between Civious and Wonderful began to crackle with hatred.

  “Oh, listen to the noble bastion of friendship,” said Meryl, arms folded.

  “You know, Meryl, at some point you have to let being cross at me fall below survival as a priority.”

  “What do you care? You don’t want to survive at all.”

  “Will everyone . . .” began Mrs. Civious in a loud, schoolteachery sort of voice, before she was silenced by a crowd of screaming children fleeing past the alley entrance, closely followed by a very hungry-looking Groyn.

  I poked my head around the corner and withdrew it as fast as I could when I saw another charging mob of white-clad murderers following him. “How many of them are there going to be?” I wondered aloud, exasperated.

  “Logically however many are required to destroy or force submission from the largest city in the world,” offered Bowg.

  “You really think that’s what they want?” said Meryl.

  “Well, doesn’t look like they’re here for the theaters, does it?” snapped Mr. Wonderful. He was clearly feeling confused and redundant from no longer being the most dangerous thing in the room.

  “This way,” commanded Mrs. Civious, since all the other potential leaders were too busy glaring at each other.

  We zig-zagged back through the alleys, switching direction whenever we heard screams and tramping feet, until we inadvertently took one too many turns and burst out of the slums altogether and into the commercial district, where the streets were wide enough to occasionally admit sunlight to the ground.

  “I hear crowds,” said Mr. Wonderful. “Back we go.”

  “Wait,” said Mrs. Civious. “It’s not the cultists. I don’t hear screaming.”

  That was novel enough to engage everyone’s interest, and we carefully made our way towards a nearby pedestrian precinct. The sound of a bustling crowd became clearer and clearer until I poked my head around the corner of a pie shop and saw the cause of the commotion.

  Making its way down the street towards us was a makeshift army of townspeople. Burly builders and dockworkers in rolled-up sleeves and flat caps clutched sledgehammers and crowbars, forming a protective frontal guard in front of a few rows of office workers armed with staplers and chairs.

  Leading them, holding aloft an expensive-looking ornate sword, was a familiar man in an equally familiar hooded robe. He noticed us arrive and held up a hand for his army to halt, which they eventually managed after a few yards of pushing and swearing.

  “Hail,” said Civious.

  “’Ello,” said Mrs. Civious.

  “Baron Civious,” said the King of Lolede. “Will the Magic Resistance join our struggle against the invaders?”

  “We are at your command, your majesty,” said Civious.

  The king suddenly spotted the black smears of Mr. Wonderful and Bowg amongst us. “Don’t call me your majesty!” he said instantly. “I’m not the king! I’m someone else!”

  “But you’re holding the King’s Sword,” said Meryl.

  “That’s true.” He coughed and hid it behind his cloak, trying unsuccessfully to make it look natural. “That’s. Because. The king let me borrow it. Because. I’m. His . . . dentist.”

  One of the dockworkers tapped him on the shoulder. “I thought you said you were the king?”

  “Does it matter?” said the king.

  “Well, yeah, it’s kind of the only reason we’re following you around . . .”

  “Shut up, you stupid peasant,” replied the king, through his teeth. The peasants accepted this as an answer.

  “Do you know what’s happening?” asked Civious, after we had integrated our pathetic army into theirs and movement towards wherever-the-hell-we-were-going had resumed. Bowg and Mr. Wonderful took up the rear, hands behind backs non-committally.

  “I was in the palace,” said the poorly-disguised king. He shot a nervous look at Mr. Wonderful, who was listening with interest. “As would be expected of me, being the royal dentist. They marched straight into the courtyard and started hurling burning missiles at the walls with some kind of catapult thing with a sling.”

  “Trebuchet,” I corrected, but he ignored me.

  “I sent out . . . they sent out the guards to repel them, but most of the guards had already run away. Their role has been entirely ceremonial for years; we don’t even train them to use weapons anymore. I mean the king doesn’t, obviously.”

  “Obviously,” said Civious, deadpan.

  “I was forced to sneak out the back. I barely had time to

  ta—to borrow the King’s sword. There was nothing more that could be done for the palace, but it doesn’t matter anymore. I knew that as long as I had the sword, the people would have a symbol to rally behind, and inspire them to fight, and die, for their city.” One of the inspired peasants coughed. “But I caught a glimpse of the invader’s leader before I left. They’ve been setting up a base in the main square.”

  “Their leader,” said Civious. “Is he a priest?”

  “Yes, sort of. More of a vicar, though. Flighty chap, got a problem with the ground. How did you know that?”

  “The lifeblood of the Magic Resistance is its intelligence network.”

  Mrs. Civious rolled her eyes and Civious himself gave me a look that would require several washes in bleach before it could be described as merely “dirty.” The king noticed and looked at me in the general patronizing faux-interested manner of royals meeting commoners.

  “Ah, hello again,” he said, obviously fighting the urge to ask me what I did and if I enjoyed the work. “Remember me? I was the mysterious stranger who gave you the key to your cell?”

  “Yes, we’d met just before then, in the throne room.”

  He tried to laugh that one off, but it came out rather hollowly. “Ha ha, that doesn’t seem likely at al
l.” He flashed me a rather threatening look before quickly returning to noble civility. “Do I take it you’ve encountered this vicar before?”

  “He tried to set us on fire, back in Garethy. Deleters took him over, then he went mad. There’s a longer version of this story, obviously.”

  “Is that one of his people?”

  I looked where he was nodding. A familiar figure was jogging leisurely up the street towards us. “That’s Benjamin. He tried to set us on fire a couple of times, too, but in a slightly different way.”

  “Hello there, everyone,” said Benjamin, waving. Civious held up a hand to stop the army and they did so instantly, to the annoyance of the king. Benjamin stood before us and clasped his hands earnestly, and if he was rattled by the multitude of armed working class glaring at him, he didn’t show it.

  “I’m just going around sending a bit of a message to all the resisting armies I can find,” he said. “The LORD wants you all to come to the main square by the palace. Bring as much backup as you like in case things get ugly, but we’re hoping we can resolve things without having to crush your entire forces. Agreeable?”

  Civious, Mrs. Civious and the King, the self-appointed generals of our makeshift army, exchanged looks. “Advice?”

  “A par-lay would evaporate all possibility of a surprise assault,” said Civious, stroking his cheekbone again. “It would also, however, present the opportunity to assess our enemy, and perhaps even kill their leader while he is close and has his guard down.”

  The king snapped his fingers excitedly. “Underhand tactics. I knew you’d be the right fellow to have around. They only ever taught me how to be gentlemanly in warfare and that always struck me as so bloody idiotic.”

  “That would be at dental school, would it?” piped up Mr. Wonderful from somewhere at the back.

  “The . . . war on plaque can get pretty nasty.”

  TWELVE

  “Meryl,” I said, sidling close to her as we marched upon the city center. “Can I talk to you for a moment?”

  “Hmph,” she said, not looking at me.