Horde, page 20
“Sword!” Petunia shouted, and Paug didn’t hesitate. He tossed his blade toward her, not doubting for a moment she would catch it.
Still holding the spear under his arm, he swung his feet upward and kicked hard against the owlbear’s chest. The spear came free followed by a gout of blood. Paug fell in an explosion of sand with the spear across his chest. Unable to get to his feet, he parried a swipe from one of those deadly forelegs. The beast was too close for him to effectively use the spear except as a quarterstaff, and Orcs didn’t even get rudimentary training in regimen for such a simple weapon.
As the owlbear lunged down with that monstrous beak, a sword flashed into its cheek, deflecting the creature’s entire head sideways. “Stay away from my brother!” shouted Milph, whose face was a mask of blood with ragged strips of flesh hanging off it where the owlbear’s claws had laid him open.
Petunia plunged Paug’s sword into the beast’s side, trying to reach its heart. She may have found its vitals or not, but it bucked her off and she tumbled to the sand beside Paug. She rolled backward over her own shoulder and got back to her feet with an acrobatic maneuver that would have left Paug stuck with his ass in the air and his feet over his head if he’d tried it.
The owlbear turned its head to lunge at Milph, tearing the sword free from the Orc’s hands. “Stay away from my brother!” Paug’s shout echoed his brother’s. He choked up on the spear haft and jabbed it at the creature’s eye, making the owlbear miss Milph. The owlbear roared and suddenly Petunia was right in front of it, one hand on each side of its beak, forcing its mouth open.
The muscles in her arms creaked like coiled springs as she strained against a far stronger beast. She screamed as the jaws started to close. If it snapped them shut, she’d lose all her fingers. Paug dropped the spear and leaped to her aid, lending his strength to hers. The two of them strained to hold the creature’s beak spread apart, and Paug’s entire world shrank to his aching arms and those two pieces of rock-hard bone. As he strained beside Petunia, he became acutely aware of her own struggle, and swore to himself he would let his own fingers be eaten before hers. Then he wondered why exactly they were fighting to keep the owlbear’s mouth open at all.
A battered, bloodied Milph shoved his arm between Paug and Petunia, deep into the owlbear’s mouth, and shouted “Kabob!”
The owlbear exploded from the neck back in gobbets of burnt meat and organs and ash of incinerated bones.
Gilpin ran up, waving a sheaf of papers at them. “Guys! I just read in the manual that if you play dead, it will leave you alone.” He stopped. “Oh. Well, maybe it would have worked.”
“We’ll never know now, will we?” Paug let go of the charred skull, burnt clean of flesh and brain by Milph’s wand.
“Well, I finally saw me a bear,” said Milph. “Can we go home now?”
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Chapter Seventeen
Into the Forest
The following morning, after Hodak had treated all their wounds with what he called, like, the Healing Hand, bro, Paug awoke with an awful feeling that they were taking too long to get to Maìdenslakh. He waited for Petunia to finish her morning constitutional. She emerged from beyond some large rocks jutting out of the sand that the tides hadn’t yet moved or eroded away, adjusting her cloak and stretching out her arms in the morning sunshine.
Paug watched her approach and for perhaps the first time, noticed how large her chest was beneath her armored breastplate, how it curved down to a taut, muscular abdomen darkened by the sun and then expanded to wide, powerful hips. She wasn’t beautiful like Mademoiselle Fortune in The Wicked Garden. In fact, Paug reflected, she was downright ugly with her sunburnt face with all the piercings, scars, and tattoos on it. He’d never found Humans to be a particularly attractive race, but then, he’d never really considered the concept at all until he’d first found Fankwipf Bluehat’s special magazine. Elves were a good-looking race as a rule, and nobody could deny that. They also bled particularly well, according to the sergeants in regimen. Something about all the racial inbreeding had created slim, beautiful, fragile creatures that couldn’t manage to comprehend bathing as a concept.
Petunia knelt beside the remains of the previous evening’s campfire. She’d taken the time to decapitate the owlbear’s corpse and spent a good portion of her watch cleaning it of flesh, tendons, and brain matter that hadn’t been destroyed by Milph’s spell. After burning off the last bits of flesh in the campfire, what remained was a cleaned skull.
“What are you going to do with that?” Paug asked.
“Give to you,” said the Barbarian. “Orc helmet good for taking hit on head, but will not scare opponents.” She held up the skull, now with the jaw removed. “This take a hit, and is for being scary.” She beckoned to Paug. “Come, we see how it fit.”
Paug stepped around the campfire to stand before Petunia. Up close, she towered over him, reminding him just how large a Human she was. Taller than the biggest Orcs by a full head, she approached Ogre size. Paug found himself staring right at the space between her breasts with a strange admiration. He couldn’t see how her steel armor cups protected anything important, or how the stained leather straps between them and wrapping around her neck and under her arms kept her bosoms in check. It must have been a Barbarian secret. Suddenly, he found himself wanting to see beneath them, to see if perhaps she resembled Mademoiselle Fortune in any way. He squashed that thought like a cave worm beneath his feet. Petunia would break him like she had her man-whores back in Wilmasnatch.
She lifted the Orc helmet off Paug’s head and tossed it aside, then set the owlbear skull upon him with unexpected gentleness. “Barbarian armor is scary,” she said. “You will be scary too. When we fight, enemies fear you more.”
The skull fit over Paug’s head surprisingly well, but rode too far forward, and he couldn’t see through the eyeholes that were too far apart. “This isn’t going to work,” he said, his voice sounding muffled through the bone covering his ears. “I can’t see a thing.”
Petunia tilted it back until it sat more on the back of his head. She smiled down at Paug, an expression that was truly terrifying to behold on the Barbarian’s face. “Do not worry. I fix. Hold here.” Paug raised his hands to support the skull and keep it from slipping over his eyes again. The owlbear fangs rested flat against his forehead, with the longer canines framing them on either side.
Petunia picked up a handful of pebbles and started tossing them at Gilpin, who was snoring on the other side of the campfire. The first expertly-launched pebble hit the Halfling’s nose and he reached up to rub it without awakening. The next one bounced off his forehead, making him stir and mumble. A third pinged off his chin and he sat bolt upright. “What the fuck-ass fuck are you doing?” he shouted.
“Oh good, Halfling is awake,” said Petunia. “Open backpack. Need leather straps and padding.”
“What makes you think I have that stuff?”
“Do you not? Halfling hide make good leather, I think.”
Gilpin sighed. “Yeah, let me see what I can do.” He grumbled under his breath something that sounded suspiciously like kill you in your sleep, but Paug didn’t think he really meant it. He doubted anybody could sneak up on Petunia while she was sleeping. He was pretty sure she slept with her eyes open to prevent just such a possibility. After a minute of rummaging through his pack, Gilpin came up with a coiled leather strap long enough to repair a saddle and some batting that Petunia said would suffice for her needs.
She fussed with the strap, cutting it with her dagger and knotting it through holes in the side of the owlbear skull. Once she had straps arranged how she wanted, she worked the batting into the skull. “Glue,” she mumbled. “Never is horse around when you need.” She looked up. “Halfling. Go find horse to steal. Need to make glue.”
“Funny enough,” said Gilpin with a funny tone in his voice. “I know where some horses are right now.”
Paug looked over at Gilpin, who was sprawled atop a rock and staring out at the ocean through a spyglass. Something about the Halfling’s tone made him hurry over to lay beside Gilpin and stare out at the brilliant ocean, shielding his eyes from the uncomfortably bright sun overhead.
A four-masted galleon was cruising up the coastline, well enough away for her draft not to risk hitting any hidden sandbars. A corral on the main deck held a good dozen horses, and their caretakers scurried about, procuring bundles of hay and barrels of fresh water from belowdecks. There was more activity on the forecastle, but Paug couldn’t make it out. He grabbed the spyglass from Gilpin’s hands.
“Hey!” said the Halfling, but Paug was already putting the end up to his eye.
“This stupid thing isn’t working.” Paug switched to his other eye with the same result. He couldn’t see any better through the spyglass than without it.
“Um . . .” Gilpin raised a finger, seemed to think better of it, then shrugged as if he was always going to live dangerously. “You have to hold it up to your open eye.”
Paug looked down at the Halfling. “Of course you do.” He closed one eye, then held the spyglass up to the other eye.
There on the forecastle was none other than Flupp Reginald, posing while an artist painted his portrait. His flaxen hair blew majestically in the sea breeze while he stood with one foot on a chest overflowing with gold and jewels while a mostly-unclothed Human woman wrapped her arms around his other leg and stared longingly at his crotch. Paug realized a flag was flying over his head, and upon that flag was a likeness of Flupp Reginald, looking equally heroic and desirable.
“That son of a cave troll’s ugly aunt,” Paug muttered.
“Hey, Paug . . .” Milph sauntered over. “Whatcha doin’?”
“Shhh! Get down!” Paug hissed.
Milph dropped down with the kind of admirable speed that had been trained into him. “What’s goin’ on?”
“It’s Flupp Reginald.” Paug grimaced. “Somehow he’s caught up to us.”
“Who?”
“Flupp Reginald. The guy whose horses we stole.”
Gilpin sniffed. “Let’s call a spade a spade here. The horses I stole, if you please.”
“Like, the horses were stolen, bro,” said Hodak as he ambled over. “Oh, bummer. That’s my cousin.”
“What is commotion?” Petunia asked. “More booty to win?”
“No,” said Paug. “We can’t attack that ship.”
“Why not?” Petunia’s logic was as blunt as an Ogre’s club.
“Because they’ve got the wind,” said Gilpin, “That ship would be flying if it were any smaller.”
Petunia sniffed the air. “Is no wind here.”
Paug moved the telescope along the ship’s deck all the way to the poop deck, where he spotted a figure all in blue waving his arms like he was directing a gale. “It’s that wizard. He’s probably making it windy.”
“I could make it all firey,” said Milph. “You think I could hit it from here if I said—”
“No!” everyone shouted over him.
Milph kicked at the sand. “I wasn’t gonna say it.”
A trick of the wind carried a bit of conversation from the galleon to the adventurers on the beach, bringing Flupp Reginald’s sonorous baritone to them as clearly as if he were beside them. “ . . . So I said not today, Dragon. I raised my magic sword—that’s Dragon’s Bane, if you recall from a previous adventure—and saluted it. Instead of attacking, the Dragon bowed to me and said take one thing from my hoard, so of course, I . . .” His voice became inaudible as the galleon continued along its route.
Paug stared after it in dismay, and pushed the telescope back at Gilpin. “He’s going to do it. He’s going to complete this quest before us, and we’re going to be left with nothing.”
Petunia shrugged. “You not worry. We kill him, take booty for ourselves.”
“I hate to tell you this,” said Hodak. “But all that bullshit he was spouting just now? He’s really done those things. I mean, he’s a jackwagon and a dick of the highest order, but he’s also an incredible adventurer.” The Cleric sounded more like Hodak the Inconsequential than the Bearer of the Hanrah Hand, which gave Paug an indication of just how much Hodak detested his cousin. “Every time he leaves on a quest, he comes back loaded down with new treasure and magical items. I’ve seen him depart with a full team and come back alone, barely alive, but bearing treasure of unimaginable value.”
“That kind of shit is bad for the economy,” said Gilpin. “You can’t just go dumping a bunch of actual currency into a market. You get inflation, and that makes everything way more expensive for regular folk who have to make an honest living.”
“Or for regular thieves who have to make a dishonest living,” said Hodak.
“Da’ gets inflation every time he eats mushroom pies,” said Milph. “One time it was so bad we had to go sleep in Up South Hall. Oh, dang. I miss Da’, Paug.”
“I know you do, Milph.” Paug looked at the others. “We can’t let Flupp Reginald get ahead of us.”
“He’s already ahead of us,” Gilpin pointed out.
“Petunia, how far are we from the mouth of the Dhûm River?” Paug asked.
“Two more days,” she said.
“At the rate that beast is cutting through the waves, he’ll cover that distance in . . .” Gilpin had pulled out an odd device made of beads on strings in a frame. He flipped the beads back and forth, like he was concentrating. “Half a day.”
“They’ll, like, never get that galleon up a river. It’s got too deep a draft, bro,” said Hodak.
Paug felt like slapping his own face. “They’ve got horses on the deck. They don’t need to get the boat up the river. They can just land at the river mouth and then ride horses.” He grimaced. “They’re going to get ahead of us. Unless . . .” He stared at the forest.
“No, is bad idea,” said Petunia.
“I’m going to go with the Barbarian on this one,” said Gilpin.
“I’ll follow you anywhere, Paug,” said Milph. “You’re my brother.”
Paug looked at the Cleric. “Hodak, you’re the deciding vote here.”
Hodak’s Clerical home-grown, laid-back attitude was subdued enough that he seemed more like the man Paug and Milph had first met back in that alley in Wilmasnatch. It seemed like it had been forever ago, Paug thought, even though it really hadn’t been more than a couple of weeks. “You know, all my life people have been telling me I wouldn’t ever amount to anything. Being fourteenth in line for the throne makes for a worse life than if I’d just started out as a baker, or a bricklayer. I’m the most useless kind of royalty, and yes, I know most royalty is already useless. No wonder I turned to a life of, er, poor decisions.” He held up the Hanrah Hand and looked at it as if really seeing it for the first time. “This has shown me another way to live, how my life can have meaning beyond just being a poor card player. I can bring health and hope to peoples’ lives when they had none before.” He smiled at Paug. “I’m still a terrible card player. Probably always will be. But I’m a gambler, Paug. I take risks. And I owe you my life. I say let’s get ahead of Flupp Reginald and show him what it’s like to lose for once in his charmed life.” He raised his hand. “High-five me, bro.”
Paug high-fived him.
* * *
It took almost an hour of fighting their way through the forest’s thickly-congested underlayers for Hodak to change his mind. “This was, like, a bad idea. Somebody should have told me it was this tough.”
“You think this is tough?” Milph chuckled. “We once had to drag a battle wagon all the way from the Lower Reach to Up South Hall after a couple of goblins lost control of it. It had flat wheels and everything. Took nearly our whole regiment. The sergeants said it was for buildin’ character, but I kinda think they just made us do it so they wouldn’t have to rouse the Trolls to do it.” He dropped his voice to a whisper. “Them Cave Trolls are just as likely to kill their handlers as their opponents. I once saw one eat six Kobolds before anyone thought to stop it.” He paused. “Mostly because don’t nobody think much about a Kobold.”
“Less talking, more walking,” said Petunia from up ahead. She’d taken the point automatically, as the others would be able to squeeze through anything she could. It was a good idea in theory, but in practice, the various branches, vines, and undergrowth she pushed through tended to snap back in her wake, making it just as tough for whoever followed behind her.
After the sixth or seventh time a branch smacked him full in the face, Paug decided to find his own path not immediately behind Petunia’s. Others seemed to determine this was a good strategy, and the group fanned out, each picking their route.
“How soon until we reach the river?” Milph asked. “I’m gettin’ tired of trees.”
Petunia chuckled. “Not all of forest is like this. Only borders. Deeper in, where is darker, less undergrowth. More high branches.”
“Well, that sounds all right,” said Hodak. “How soon until we get there, bro?”
“Maybe by nightfall. Maybe not.”
“You mean we have to sleep in this green chowder?” asked Gilpin. “I’ve seen no less than six different kinds of poisonous fungus. There are snakes and bugs and spiders and crap in this rotting carpet under our feet. And unlike you all, I’m a lot closer to it.” He shuddered. “I hate nature. People aren’t meant to be out here.”
“That’s why they call it the Wilderness,” said Paug. “It’s untamed.”
“Do not fear, Halfling.” Petunia looked back and winked, showing what must have been an incredibly painful tattoo of an open eye on her eyelid. “We have Cleric. Fix you good. No poison. All better. Is good.”
“Right on, bro.” Hodak raised his hand but nobody bothered to high five it. “Aw, really? Leaving me hanging like this?”
