Glimpses: an Anthology of 16 Short Fantasy Stories: An exclusive collection of fantasy fiction

by Kevin Partner

  How long the speech endured for, Ignis couldn’t say, but he suspected that new suns had been born and acorns had matured into ancient oak trees while he stood there not listening to a word of it. His eye caught the gaze of the wife who, on second examination, wasn’t a bad looker. She blushed momentarily as, it seemed, their minds wandered over the same, illicit, landscape.

  Finally, it was over. Ignis took the pamphlet, shut the door, and leaned against it. “What a complete tosser,” he said, before walking into the kitchen where the wolf sat, patiently awaiting his breakfast.

  “I’ll tell you this,” Bel said, “if that freak knocks at this door again, I’ll hand your mangy hide over to him rather than go through that. Mind you, the wife’s a bit of alright once you look closer. Pity she has to stand next to him all the time. A rose isn’t so appealing if it’s growing in cow shit.”

  “Sorrry”, the wolf said. He had re-assumed human shape, but it always took a few hours for his mouth to sort itself out properly.

  Ignis grunted and headed over to the range. “Bacon?”

  The wolf nodded eagerly. He hadn’t had bacon since that series of unfortunate events with the three pigs and their increasingly effective forms of defence. In the end, he’d been forced to steal explosives to punch a hole in their nuclear bunker. The resulting fireball had roasted the pigs nicely, but it had also scattered their blackened flesh over three fields and attracted the attention of the pitchfork brigade. He’d been forced to eat in a hurry, and then leave the area at a run.

  Ignis cut several thick slices from a ham hock and dropped them into a jet black frying pan where they began to sizzle immediately. As the overpowering aroma filled the little kitchen, the wolf gave a brief howl. Ignis picked the carving knife up and regarded the creature carefully. For a moment, its outline morphed, its body shape cracked and hair sprang from its skin. And then, like a child with its eyes on a steaming pudding, it forced down the metaphorical brussels sprout and pulled itself together.

  “Good lad,” Ignis said, as he let the knife drop, “keep a good grip on your humanity and you’ll be rewarded...”

  The wolf looked at him with a hint of suspicion in his lupine eyes.

  “...with bacon. How your gods will treat you, if ever you meet them, is another matter. But you must keep quiet - we know well enough what will happen if the Brothers get their hands on you. It won’t be good for either of us.”

  “Friend Ignisss,” the wolf said, “thank youuu.”

  Ignis slid a wooden platter under the wolf’s nose and turned away so he didn’t have to watch the creature eat.

  “We weren’t properly introduced,” he said, staring into the garden and aware that he would never be able the unhear the noise of the wolf devouring its bacon. “You know my name, Ignis Bel, but I don’t know yours.”

  “Oh,” said the wolf, to the accompaniment of spittle, “I am called Woger.”

  “Roger?”

  There was the smacking of lips, followed by the licking of the lips and then the plate. Bel made a mental note to use that one for firewood once the wolf had gone. “No, my name is Woger.”

  Ignis turned to face the creature. “Woger Wolf?”

  The wolf laughed like a howl, or howled like a laugh (it was hard to tell). “Of course not, my surname isn’t ‘wolf’, that would be ridiculous. I am Woger the Wolf, at least at this time of the month, but that’s not my family name.”

  Silence fell on the little kitchen in the cottage of Ignis Bel. Except, that is, for the soft plunk, plunk, of bacon-infused saliva dripping from the edge of the table onto the stone floor.

  The question had to be asked. “So, what is your family name?”

  “Weelll. You see, my father and his father and his father were all in the same business, a sort of family trade.”

  “Like smith, or cooper?”

  The wolf nodded. “Yeeess.”

  More silence. The question still demanded an answer.

  “So you are Woger Smith?”

  The wolf shook his head. “My father and his ancestors were in the handyman line. They would put shelves up for little old ladiesss and install the latest lead plumbing for the posh. My grandad Wandolph was famousss for his central heating. Latest technology of the day it was, hypocaust. But then he burned his own house down, with him inside it, when his experimental smarthovel hub went rogue. But then, you can’t trussst demon-based teknology can you? Anyway, that’s us. Handymen through the ages.”

  “Your name’s Woger Handyman?”

  Now the wolf’s howl of laughter was so loud, Bel grabbed its snout and held its jaws tightly shut. “Quiet!”

  The wolf nodded and breathed again as Bel released him. “So what is your bloody name?”

  “Woger Bodger,” said the wolf, with a sheepish grin.

  Woger was lying in front of the fire, curled up and fast asleep. He wore his human form during daylight hours, but it took little imagination to perceive the wolf within. There was something unsettling about him, though the scene could hardly have been more peaceful. A quiet, but insistent, warning inherited from a bottom-feeding ancestor who, in the distant past, thought the perfectly ordinary looking lump in the sand ahead was suspicious and swam around it.

  Ignis sat and watched, blowing smoke rings from his pipe and recounted the events of the previous night as if he were there. Had he done the right thing? He’d gone out to kill the wolf that had been taking lambs and chickens, before it turned its attention to humans. Yes, he tracked the beast and found it howling in agony, its leg caught in a man trap. It was morphing between wolf and human form, the latter becoming visibly weaker as he watched. He drew his knife and had been about to put it out of its misery when it spoke to him, begging him to help.

  He examined the metal trap and wondered why such a device had been chosen for catching a wolf. Unless whoever had set it knew that its quarry might be in either shape. Ignis pulled his illuminator from a pocket and ignited it. The wolf, seeing the flame, tried to move away, but cried aloud in pain as it strained its trapped leg. “Easy,” Bel said, “it’s not magic, it’s my own invention. I am an alchemist. Do you understand?”

  He put the illuminator on a rotting log and peered at the trap. It had snapped shut around the wolf’s ankle (or back paw, depending on which form he was in at the time), biting into the flesh. Blood had congealed around the wound, though fresh trickles were staining the creature’s flesh as it struggled in its agony.

  Bel looked across at the pitiful beast. It had stilled, and lay there, silent, amongst the autumn leaf-mould. Shock. There was no time. Ignis ran the illuminator along the black metal side of the trap and saw a name - Deliverance Travers, Guardian of the Faith. He knew that name - Travers was a particularly nasty example of the species. Legend had it he’d been bitten by a wolf as a child, but the fervent prayers of his community ensured that a missing ear was the only mark of his encounter. It was, perhaps, natural enough that he’d want to revenge himself on those he saw as disease carriers, but he’d joined the Guardians with the express purpose of persecuting anyone with a trace of the unusual about them. Unless, of course, they were members of the Brotherhood themselves where the unusual was, more or less, part of the entrance ticket.

  Travers rose quickly through the ranks of the Guardians and it was rumoured that he’d been responsible for the decapitation, burning or drowning of at least dozens of the impure, and possibly hundreds. He was, in short, a complete and utter bastard.

  Bel had hoped, when he’d moved to this little village in the middle of nowhere, that he’d be too remote for the more noxious of the Brotherhood’s tendrils to reach him. But no, he’d been a fool - it was exactly this kind of out of the way community that these leaches preyed upon. Alone, ignorant and superstitious, these people were like lambs to the wolves.

  Talking of wolves. He had to decide what to do. Put it out of its misery, or take it home. The leg was badly damaged so healing would take time and, throughout that period, he wou
ld be at constant risk of being discovered. And then there was Travers - he would examine the trap and know that something had been caught and had escaped. He would turn the landscape upside down to find it.

  Bel scrambled around the edge of the trap until he found the release. With a thunk, the jaws sprang open and Bel leaned in close to examine the wound. The wolf, unmoving, seemed to have fixed on its lupine form and Bel, sighing, hefted it in his arms. The beast’s head lolled from side to side as he strode through the woods and, avoiding the lane by climbing over the hedge to his back garden, he entered the cottage from the rear.

  Luckily, Ignis, as an experimental alchemist (Retd.) had a secure basement in which he kept his rather more exotic supplies and, in one corner, was a large storage cupboard with a grilled door. He’d laid the wolf on the floor and cleared the cupboard, before dragging it inside. Still, it didn’t move. Good. But, just to be sure, he found a bottle of chloroform, soaked a cloth with it and placed it under the wolf’s snout.

  The wound was nasty, but the leg wasn’t broken. Ignis Bel cursed the setter of such a cruel trap. He shaved the area, cleaned it out and stitched it back together as neatly as possible, then he bathed the wound in spirit before backing away from the sleeping wolf and barring the door. He would have preferred to stay and wait for the creature to wake up - it would accelerate from confused to apoplectic in six seconds, but Bel had hoped the basement would keep the sound in.

  He’d had one more job to do that couldn’t wait.

  “Ow!” cried the wolf in human form.

  Ignis forced the leg down and wiped it clean. “I’ve told you before, you must hold still, and you must be quiet.”

  The wound had healed well in the days since he’d rescued Woger, but Bel knew that the longer the wolf stayed under his roof, the greater the risk.

  “How much longer before the wolf hides again?” he asked, though he knew the answer.

  Wincing, Woger thought for a moment. “Tonight is the last before the moon is too weak to force the change. After tonight, I can control it.”

  “And will you control it?”

  Woger sighed. “I hate being a wolf and I curse the day I was bitten and became what I am. I would give anything, save my life, to prevent that happening to someone else. So, yes, whenever it is in my power to remain in human form, that is the form I take. However provoked I might be.”

  “Good, then we will find somewhere safe for you to go on the nights of the full moon but, in the meantime, you will come here.”

  “But that is not safe for you, friend Ignisss,” Woger protested. “If they find me here, that would be the end for me, but also for you. That man who hunts my kind, he must know I escaped.”

  Bel shook his head. “Deliverance Travers. He’s a hero of the Brotherhood, did you know that? He cleanses the country of the impure, and the likes of you are about as impure as it’s possible to be. To be frank, you don’t do yourselves many favours by taking lambs, and worse. I’d gone out that night to kill you, after all.”

  “Yesss. Shame I feel, but also thankful. I am not evil, friend Ignisss, I simply cannot help my nature when the wolf takes over.”

  “I know, otherwise I’d have killed you then and there, however much I pitied you,” Ignis responded, settling back into his armchair as the light began to fade in the windows. “But I made quite a study of shapeshifters in my former life, and I know that what you have is a disease, not a choice, and no-one should be punished for that which they cannot control. It is now your nature. I am sorry for you, but I will help as I may.”

  Woger sat on the floor, in front of the fire. If he’d had a tail, it would be wagging. “Thank you,” he said, “but I would not have you be endangered for my sake.”

  Ignis Bel looked at him, an emaciated little man barely out of boyhood, his leg bandage stained with blood. “I know, but this is a matter of principle, and I’m a stubborn bastard. Now, down to the basement with you, dusk is falling.”

  Woger hauled himself painfully to his feet and limped down the cellar steps. Ignis followed him, helped the wolf into the muzzle that would keep him from howling, locked both the inner and outer doors and climbed the stairs.

  There was a banging on the front door. Ignis froze for a moment and then, assembling his expression into that of a calm man with nothing to hide, opened it.

  A short man with bulging eyes stood in the fading light, framed by two hugely muscled apes so similar in appearance they they were clearly twins. Two bodies sharing one brain judging by the confused look that had etched itself into their brows.

  “I am Thadeus Cornwright, Seeker of enemies of the faith. My companions are Ronald and Reginald, Most Excellent Dispensers of the Holy Cudgel of Justice.”

  Ignis nodded to the little man. “And I am Ignis Bel, former head of the Guild of Alchemists, amateur apothecary and in command of enough explosives to send Ronnie and Reggie here flying through the air like particularly thick pigeons.”

  “I like birdies,” Ron said. Or it might have been Reg.

  Cornwright flapped at him. “Oh shut up, Ronald. I’ve told you before, not to speak unless I expressly say so.”

  The thug’s puzzled expression somehow managed to deepen while, next to him, his brother’s face went purple and he began jumping up and down with his hand in the air.

  “What is it?” Cornwright sighed. Then, after more confused jumping and shrugging, he continued. “You may speak.”

  The big man exhaled, sending a wave of alcoholic air in Bel’s direction. “I’m Ronald, Master Cornwright. That was Reggie what said that about little birdies. He’s a idiot, that Reggie.”

  Cornwright stamped his foot in frustration. “I don’t care! You’re both morons, now shut up!”

  Ronald relaxed a little and resumed his stationary position, resembling more than anything a particularly flea-ridden brown bear. “Well, maybe I am a moron, but at least I ain’t a idiot,” he mumbled.

  There was a momentary pause, while Cornwright composed himself and, acting as if the past several seconds hadn’t happened, puffed himself up. “There is no need for threats, Master Bel. I am well aware of your past, though I must warn you that your position within the Guild of Alchemists holds rather less weight amongst the enlightened than it does in the city. We place our faith in the deep truths expressed in the Book of the Twins.”

  “Fortunately for you,” Bel responded, an iceberg in a foggy sea, “I tend to prefer the actual truth. Luckily also for your wife, as I recall. Didn’t she accidentally pick up a nasty wound walking carelessly into a door? And didn’t it fester? And wasn’t she in death’s waiting room? And yet she survived, did she not?”

  Cornwright wagged a finger at Bel. “Because our prayers were answered!” he shrieked.

  “In the form of the liniment I applied,” responded Bel. “Oddly enough, that’s the second time I’ve been accused of being a heavenly instrument recently. And yet here you are, on my doorstep, presumably about to implicate me in something distinctly unheavenly.”

  “What makes you say that? I am merely making a polite house-call.” Cornwright had deflated. The ironclad logic of Bel’s arguments having finally passed beyond his credulity horizon.

  Bel thumbed at the two figures looming at Cornwright’s shoulder. “Are they even house trained?”

  “Look, you don’t seem to appreciate the seriousness of the situation,” Cornwright shrieked. “There is a wolf on the loose, and Guardian Travers is missing. Now, you claim to have dealt with the matter, but I desire to search your house to be sure you’re not hiding anything.”

  “As I told your chicken-faced informer, I found and killed the wolf. His skin lies drying over yonder.” Bel pointed into the shadows to where a woolly pelt could be seen stretched over the door of an old wooden shed.

  Cornwright reddened. “Nevertheless, I must insist on being allowed in to search.”

  “For what? Unless you’re suggesting there’s two wolves and I’m hiding one in my house. Are
there two wolves, Master Cornwright?”

  There was a pause as Cornwright considered the least damaging response. “There is only one wolf, but I suspect you are hiding something.”

  “Unfortunately for you, however, unfounded suspicion isn’t enough to legally justify searching a man’s house without a court order, unless you suspect me of a crime against the faith and, as I have pointed out, I performed a favour for the blessed Brotherhood by ridding the world of that wolf. So, perhaps you’ll bugger off now and, if you want to search my premises, you’ll get a warrant.”

  Bel stepped back, slammed the door and stood with his back against it, although he seriously doubted he could resist the knuckles of Reggie and Ronald if they were ordered to break it down. He held his breath as he listened, then sighed with relief when he heard two sets of boots thudding up the garden path, led by a quieter scampering that marked Cornwright’s departure.

  He’d bought some time, but the officious little sod would be back tomorrow.

  Ignis Bel opened the door, walked cautiously along the garden path and scanned up and down Wool Street. It was an hour after dawn and he could expect people to be up and about pretty soon. Now or never.

  He turned to Woger. The young man looked pitiful and Bel had to force back the urge to offer him a home but, after the events of the night before and the general suspicion Ignis endured from the locals (when they weren’t asking for his help with illness, fixing the watermill, clearing scum from the pond or whatever) would be enough to put Woger in danger the longer they were associated. Bel was pretty certain Cornwright didn’t suspect Woger was there or, indeed, even that he existed. The pompous tit had always itched to take an unfettered look around Bel’s home and this was simply the pretext. Sadly, however, the pompous tit had power so they’d been forced to act sooner than intended.

  “Remember what I said,” Ignis said to Woger, “follow Wool Street until it meets Lower Lane and head west towards Swampy Stratford. Ask around the shops in the marketplace, one of them is bound to need some bodging doing in return for a little money and somewhere to sleep. Be a good lad and feed yourself, human food of course. And then come back in 22 days and I’ll have prepared somewhere for you to stay safe. I’m going to start working on a cure, if you’re willing to be the test subject.”