Chapter 6
On the other side of the kingdom, at the point in the sprawling landscape where the hills of Onador leveled out and the rolling pastures of the Sway swept peacefully to the south, Reetsle Baggershaft heard rustling for the second time that day.
The sound had come from up by the river, less than a stone’s throw from where he stood in the grasses that rose to his helmet, and it had sounded so much like wind that he almost forgot where he was.
He held his breath and listened, wondering what it could be. With his blasted halfling senses, the rustling could have been a water moccasin slithering from the Mela, a jackrabbit hopping from the moccasin, a coyote bearing down on the jackrabbit. All he knew for certain was that it was not the wind.
Had he been in his homeland to the west, a section of the Hinter known as Erinthalmus, he might have assumed it was the wind. Back home, there was more raw nature than one knew what to do with: blizzards and windstorms, earthquakes and volcanoes.
Out here in Jashandar, however, such was not the case. Out here in the land of the old ones, the wind did not blow.
Reets thought back to the days of his diplomatic appointment, back to that awful tour he’d been given shortly after arriving. The stillness of the plains had plagued him even then.
The Sway? he’d asked, speaking softly to his guide. And why yeh call it that?
The guide had given him the standard response, some stock reply having to do with the first explorers to the Drugana and what they’d seen at the time, and Reets had accepted it. The land had once been a wild and windy place, and now it was not, simple as that.
But wind ‘r no wind, Reets thought, somethin’s sure movin up there.
He cocked his head to the side and listened to the sound of the ocean rolling against the shore. To anyone else, this was the equivalent of having seashells strapped to the sides of their head. To a halfling, however, this was just one more example of how Rendel the Bloodletter had screwed them over, their auditory world filtered through the roar of the waves.
After a while, Reets was able to tune out the innate drone in his busted eardrums and focus on the thing in the grass, listening to the displacement of the reeds and guessing the creature within to be nothing smaller than a prairie bison. That was what it sounded like, at least. The same beast of burden he and his halfling brethren had used to clear fields of stumps and slag.
In his mind, he recalled the sensations of wandering through the hinter prairies with a pry bar in one hand and a shovel in the other, the feel of the reeds against his face, the smell of his own body order rising from his shirt, the sound of something huge creeping through the vegetation.
That same sound was up ahead of him now, but it probably wasn’t a prairie bison with a slag wagon attached. It could have been, he supposed—a bison or a bull or even a wild stallion—but he didn’t think it likely. Not after hearing the fancyman’s report about what he and Jaysh had found in the Sway.
In Reets’ opinion, if something had been butchering the livestock of the Sway, and if that something had been doing so for the past moon cycle or so—wadding them up and leaving them to rot—then the source of the rustling was probably not a beast of burden.
After thirty days of unending slaughter, there probably wasn’t much left of the Jashian livestock, especially those poor dumb animals that stood head and shoulders above the rest (animals like the ox, for example). So unless this was a particularly clever ox, one who’d learn to duck its head in the reeds and stand still when it heard someone coming…
The rustling stopped.
Reets jerked his head up high and twisted his other ear forward, listening closely to the place where the noise had ceased. Over the muffled drone of his defunct auditory canal, he heard the shrill eeeping of crickets and soft uhzzzing of the cicada. At no time, however, did he hear the continued rustle of the creature as it cut its way through the pasture.
Must’a heard me breathin, he thought. Heard me breathin an’ took to holdin in the brush.
He mulled that over for a time, weighing the merits of the accusation, then realized he hadn’t been breathing. He knew this because he’d been listening, and in order for someone like him to listen—someone with ears like a salamander—he had to hold his breath and standing completely still.
And speaking of respiration…
With lungs burning and nerves on edge, he opened his mouth wide and exhaled as slowly and as soundlessly as he could, drawing in an equally delicate breath and repeating the process several more times before sliding shut his bearded jaw.
He cocked his left ear in the direction of the disturbance and strained for all he was worth. The faint sound of bugs came back at him, as did the more pronounced sound of ocean waves rumbling inside his ears.
He twisted his right ear to the disturbance—his good ear, in most cases—and waited until he could hear the unmistakable, yet arrhythmic sound of thudding. After a moment more, he recognized the sound as his own deformed heart.
“Blood ‘n’ Guts,” he muttered, exhaling in a rush and giving up the pretense of stealth. He yanked his trusty battle-axe, Old Friendly, from off his shoulder and stood on his tiptoes, peeking over the concealment.
His eyes weren’t much better than his ears—probably on par with Brine’s vision from what he remembered of the lad squinting as a boy—but they were at least a little better. He could see to the point where he believed the rustling had stopped, and he could see beyond that to where the blurry-green hillocks leveled out flat and the winding smear of the Mela straightened into a long black line.
What he saw most in the prairie to the west, aside from shapes and colors and the steadily dying light, was the inertia of the place. It was like staring into the dungeons of the castle or the tombstones on Memorial Hill.
“Ain’t no way,” he said, this time not bothering to mutter. “Ain’t no bloody way.”
He shook his head and spat at the prairie, clenching his uneven teeth and trying to hold back his growing frustration, a feat which might have proven more effective had he lowered himself in the grass and taken his eyes from the pasture.
He did not, though. He kept staring at the emptiness of the prairie and thinking about his wasted afternoon, thinking about how circumstance might have gone differently had his gutless companions been here or had his eyes and ears not been so abhorrently defunct.
This led, inevitably, to the obscenity dam in his mind bursting wide and a string of guttural epithets spewing from his mouth, first at his cravenly partners who’d abandon him in his greatest time of need, then at the mighty war god in the sky (Rendel the Bloodletter) who’d shackled him with these unthinkable ailments.
When he was a child, Reets had heard of villages in Erinthalmus that worshiped and loved the war god. He’d heard that they held worship services once a week and sang praises to the omnipotent deity and that some scrawny halfling with a warm smile and a fancy white dress stood before the villagers in the meeting house and spoke kindly of the war god. What was more, this scrawny halfling did so for nearly a full morning, and then everyone gathered afterwards for fruit salads and sweet tea and shared with one another the pathetic experiences of their week.
Even more bizarre than this, Reets had heard that the morning-long monologue centered on the war god’s infinite wisdom and mercy, rather than his terrifying wrath and vengeance. The grinning halfling in the silky gown would go on and on about how Rendel the Kind—as they called him—had created halfling disabilities with a specific purpose in mind. That the war god had crippled the halflings at birth to instill in them a thankfulness for what they had as well as an undying capacity to endure.
Counselor Baggershaft, on the other hand, had been raised in a tiny backwoods village on the outer edges of the Hinter, a place where religious services and political meetings were overseen by a group of halflings referred to as the throng.
The throng consisted of the wisest and, for the most part, roughest hu
nters in the village. These were halflings who’d seen the dark horrors that the Hinter had to offer and who had lived to tell the tale, halflings who’d lost arms and legs to one battle or another and who now held a slightly less benevolent view of their genesis.
For example, one of the more popular legends of Reets’ time held that Rendal the Bloodletter, in his maddening haste to attend a great and raging battle, had dropped something noxious in the batter of life, but rather than pausing to scoop out the malady-causing substance, he kept right on stirring.
Another common theology maintained that the batter was pure, but that Rendel had dropped his creations on the ground while preparing them for the kiln. After spending days sculpting the perfect warrior bodies, he’d inadvertently knocked the baking pan from the table and had—once again, in his impatience for combat—plucked the ruined creatures from the ground and slammed them in the kiln.
Legend had it the war god actually noticed the smashed and twisted bodies, but had muttered something like, “Good ‘nough,” and cooked them all the same.
Needless to say, religious services in Reets’ neck of the Hinter tended to be few and far between and without the tasty fruit salads at the end. What was more, the old hunters who orchestrated the services were hard and callous and not the sort of men one cried to after losing a loved one.
Rather than developing one’s thankfulness or undying capacity to endure, these rugged halflings were teaching their followers to hone their combat skills. What better way to honor Rendel’s warlike culture than to mimic his warrior prowess, and what better way to demonstrate your warrior prowess than to bring your axe to bear on the one who’d made you.
Reets couldn’t wait to reach that Great Battlefield in the Sky. He was going to honor Rendel the Bloodletter like no halfling before. He was going to thank him into little pieces and then praise those little pieces into the ground with the heel of his boot.
If he was lucky, he’d be able to chop the war god into as many pieces as he had maladies, and he had quite a few of those; stunted bones and uneven muscles, itchy skin and deformed limbs, missing tendons and half-formed organs.
The latter were the worst, especially the sensory organs. Not that a defect in a major organ was a walk in the park. It just wasn’t a very long walk. A few moments of sharp pain and the walk was over. But with the sensory organs…Well, the walk started at birth, lasted until death, and was uphill the whole way.
“Undyin capacity, my axe.”
Reets turned from the Mela River and marched for Eastpost. There was nothing he could do about Rendel—at least not in this lifetime—but there was plenty he could do about his gutless partners at camp. This was just as much their fault as it was the war gods. They were the ones who’d ignored Reets when he said he heard something by the river. They were the ones who opted to stop at Eastpost and rest their worthless bones.
“And if’n I get back there,” he fumed, barreling into the matted grasses where the pasture became camp, “an’ I see ole Fancy with so much as a rock in his hand…”
He rounded a pile of feed sacks and the red blaze of the campfire swung into view. He narrowed his beady eyes on the seven figures he spied seated around the flames.
On one side, he saw Mums still seated as he’d left her, legs spread wide, eyes to the east, still resting both arms in her great and shaggy lap and—Bless My Axe!—not a mug of brew in sight. Reets made a mental note to speak with the lying cow about this then turned his irate focus to the fancyman.
On the other side of the flames, Captain Janusery—A.K.A. the fancyman—sat in a ring of five soldiers, trying his darnedest to talk their ears off. There weren’t any cubes on display, or metal coins for that matter, but of course that didn’t mean anything. When it came to the fancyman, he’d probably heard Reets coming and hid the stash in one of those beard-loving boots of his. He gave the clean-shaven sissy a bit of the stink-eye and veered towards the titan.
Before the night was over, he’d nail the fancyman to the wall for playing him like a fool, but for now he’d work on that holier-than-thou titan. She had a certain smugness about her that Reets was going to enjoy wiping away.
“Mums,” he said, speaking cordially as he rested Old Friendly against a tent line. “How’s the view over here?”
Muminofilous did not say, nor did she take her eyes from the horizon.
Reets removed his helmet, set it on the ground near to his axe, and turned to face his fellow counselor. Mums was still staring dreamily at the pastures in the east, her watery brown cow’s eyes soaking up the growing shadows. Reets grunted indignantly and ambled to his pack, rustling theatrically through his gear and retrieving a pipe from one pocket.
“How’s that mug’a brew tas’e, Mums? Tas’e good, does it?”
But again, Mums didn’t say, and neither did she move.
Reets padded the pockets of his shirt and waited for the titan to break her trance-like stare. When she failed to do so, he said, “Yeh hearin me there, Mumsy,” and this time the words finally broke through.
The titan started, jerked as though an invisible shell had shattered from her frame, and said, “I’m sorry, Reetsle. Were you speaking?”
“I was at that,” Reets spat. “I was at that.” He eyed the titan’s hands resting between her legs, her legs spread wide to relieve the pressure from the saddle sores she’d developed, and said, “Where’s that precious brew’a yours?”
With her eyes still in the distance, the titan reached beside her and lifted a large and steaming bucket from the shadows.
Reets glared at it, thinking he felt steam rising from his face.
“Well, yeh best drink every drop,” he blustered, locating a pouch of berry leaves in his pants pocket and pulling it free, “as much as yeh whined fer it.”
Mums—who’d been lifting the bucket to her lips—set it back down.
“Jus had to stop,” Reets carried on, tapping his pouch on the side and filling his pipe with ground leaves, “jus had to have your nasty ole bean juice—And Fancy, over there,” he directed his voice across the fire as he withdrew a branch from the flames, “he wants me to believe he stopped so he could bore these fella’s with his big mouth.” He brought the tip of the branch to his pipe-bowl, lit the dried leaves inside, and tossed the branch to the fire. “But I ain’t fooled,” he said. “I ain’t.”
Janusery had looked up at the word Fancy and was in the process of returning a glare himself. “War dog,” he said coldly, “we couldn’t fool you if we tried.”
“Well, now,” Reets said conspiratorially, “have yeh been tryin?”
“A little,” Iman said, shrugging.
Reets grunted as if he expected as much. “There best not be no cubes over there,” he said, shaking a finger at the captain and puffing on the pipe. “You an lazy over here—” he nodded to the titan “—yeh might’a outvoted me on the trail, but that doan’ matter none in here. I’m still your better, Janu’ery. You ‘member that.”
Janusery shrugged. “No cubes, war dog. Just me boring these goo—”
“And what’re you boys doin?” Reets said, turning his hostile stare on the five privates seated in the circle. “Yeh ain’t got no duties to get on with?”
At some point, the royal council had relocated the troops of Eastpost and turned the camp itself into a supply depot. Reets couldn’t remember the specifics, but it seemed like the last easterly assault had been committed over twenty generations ago by a group of Nameless from out of the Uncharted.
They were defeated quite handily. The troops of Southpost rode up to join forces with the men of Eastpost and, together, they fended off the unspeakable threat.
Of course, in those days, having posts on all sides of the kingdom was a tactical necessity. After the Great Warrior drove out the old ones, everyone and their brother had tried dominating the Drugana, the halfling country of Erinthalmus included.
It was not until several generations later, when neighborin
g kingdoms failed to conquer Jashandar (and when it became clear nothing else was going to wander out of the Kilashan) that the council abolished Southpost and turned Eastpost into a source of food and weaponry for those troops deployed against the uglings.
To ensure the grain stores were safe from livestock and the weapons crates were shed of moisture, the council had stationed five men at the once-thriving camp, five men to keep the fires blazing and the tarps mended, five men who now faced something far worse than any hungry cow or ruinous storm.
“Well?” Reets demanded, his hard eyes darting between them. “Haven’t yeh, now?”
One of the privates—a man with a broad hook-nose and a thick set of lips—swallowed so loud that Reets turned to face him. Hook-nose looked quickly away and fixed his eyes on the ground. As Reets searched the other four faces, he received similar responses as their eyes flittered towards the sky or supply crate or anything that wasn’t the enraged halfling.
Finally, one of them, a man who’d been playing with a steel ring hanging from his neck (probably a religious symbol of some sort), glanced up, made certain the captain was not looking, and nodded furtively at Fancy.
Reets’ beady eyes bulged. “I knew it,” he said, turning to Janusery. “I knew it.” He sneered at the captain’s beardless face. “Yeh give these boys an order, Janu’ery?”
Janusery hesitated…then nodded. “I thought they could use a break, yeah.”
To the soldiers, Reets said, “He say anythin bout cubes, boys?”
The five privates hesitated, casting exploratory glances at one another, then finally breaking into a collective bray of no, each man shaking his head with a bit too much conviction. Reets glared at each in turn.
“Tha’s good, boys,” he said. “Tha’s good. But jus you know that if’n I find any cubes over there, or if’n I find out yeh lied to me on this…,” he shook his head grimly, letting his gaze fall to the fancyman in their midst. “Same goes fer you, Janu’ery.”
Janusery glared back.
“Yeh heard me,” Reets said, and slowly turned around, taking a seat by the titan.
Behind him, the six men sat in silence, the one in the middle still stabbing his eyes into the back of Reets’ helmet-matted hair and the other five probably checking their pants for wet spots. Reets pretended not to listen, staring into the horizon and taking desultory puffs on his pipe.
When the captain’s chatter finally resumed, it came as harsh mutterings about what he’d like to see happened to a certain halfling. Soon after, though, the mood brightened, the topic changed, and facny’s story continued.
Much to Reets’ chagrin, Fancy was launching into one his many tales of daring that most assuredly had never happened, this one involving a horde of were-uglings that he’d bested right here in these very hills.
Reets listened for two, maybe three moments, then his upper lip began to curl as though he could still smell the bloated fish rotting by the Mela’s banks.
Shaking his helmeted head, he said, in a voice of purest amazement, “Can yeh believe the scruff of this pup?”
The titan kept her opinion to herself, but to be fair it had been a rhetorical question. Reets hadn’t expected her to reply in the affirmative or negative, although some sort of a response would have been nice. Something along the lines of, What can you do, or, You know that Iman. Instead he’d received nothing at all, not so much as a clearing of the throat.
Looking over, he found the titan as he’d left her, her liquid cow’s eyes still soaking up the pasture. He turned to stare with her.
“This help block him out?” Reets asked. “‘Cause I’m ready to try anythin’.”
Mums didn’t say.
Reets turned and frowned at her. “Yeh in there, Mumsy?”
“Hmm?” she said, her eyes blinking, but still not leaving the prairie.
“I said, yeh ah’right?”
She paused, then said, “I’m fine.”
Reets narrowed his eyes. She didn’t sound fine, nor was she acting fine. She was acting like a titan with something on her mind. Reets grimaced at the pasture—which registered in his eyes as an uneven pea-soup smear—then directed his dissatisfied scowl at her.
There was something about that look, he thought, something about the way her bulbous brown orbs were drinking up both land and sky. It was a look he knew well, the one she’d given maps when proposals for war came to the table, the one she’d given merchants who couldn’t quite explain what they were selling, and the one she’d given him on more occasions than he cared to remember.
He looked back out at the Sway that didn’t sway. It might be a green smear to him, but not to her. In her all-seeing eyes (eyes that could pick gnats out of the shade) it probably looked quite a bit different.
He took the pipe from his mouth.
“Hey, Mums,” he said, speaking softly, “what’cha see out there?”