“I am not optimistic,” the medic elbh sighed.
“Beg your pardon! What’rre you saying, Doc?” demanded Major Elbh.
“Look!” He proffered his tweezers just millimetres from the major’s nose, waving them portentously. On the end of them was the body of what was once a dangerous bug. “You see that?” he said.
“You only got the body. The head is still in there!” the major concluded.
“Not only is it still in there, it’s not real. Look! It’s mechanical.” He skipped about on the spot in frustration clenching his free fist and waving it at everyone and everything about him.
“What?!” screamed original Elbh. “You said you’d get it out! You said...”
The leader of the small group tried to calm his young compatriot, “Calm down now laddie, no one expected this.”
“It was most waxen in there,” Medical Elbh muttered bitterly.
“But why didn’t you tell him when he was here, then you could have tried again? You made out that you had got it all! You let him go!”
“I know! I know…” Doc’s voice trailed off, lacking conviction: “He was big… and, and very angry. I didn’t think it wise to provoke him further.”
Major Elbh arrived at a conclusion: “This is not good at all! We must follow our patient and await a suitable opportunity to finish what we started. Come on, and bring the bunny mallet!”
*****
Fürgůïn quickly realised that Grimmbros was neither his usual self, nor was he to be hindered. The urgh-bane fidgeted, waiting for his companion to join him in a dash down through the thinning woodlands and out onto the open grassland below. "I thought you wanted to stay by your pond," the renling panted in an effort to keep up as the pair jogged through the last of the trees.
"That was before the elbhs and the slugs," Grimmbros beamed. "They gave me a little bottle too! Something for my ear apparently!" He stopped and brandished the ornate little glass phial jiggling it significantly mere inches before the renling's eyes. “Look it sparkles!”
"It would. I suppose they gave you husk-biscs too," Fürgůïn muttered, aware that elbhs were always handing out helpful little gifts like flavour-free lumps of what tasted like matted coconut hair that could allegedly sustain a full-grown pwiffue for months.
"Nope. I'm fit to run for miles. That where we're headed?" he added, nodding toward the grey tors over the green valley and distant moors."Yeah, the scree's over there. Anyway, what do you mean ‘elbhsss’? I thought there was only one. There’s not more of them now?"
"Good men! Bit too smart and kickable, but know what they're doing," Grimmbros partly explained.
*****
"What are we doing?" Original Elbh asked, "We'll never catch them up, not with my leg, look at them!" The trio, hindered by the limping of Original Elbh, stood where shortly before Fürgůïn had lingered, gazing at the backs of the urgh-bane and renling who were now striding out onto the verdant expanse some distance below the woods. "Depends on how long the bog slug remains efficacious,” the elbh with the medical appearance observed. If he keeps chewing it long enough they could be in with a chance."
*****
Not too far away, three bigger figures strode between the trees.
“They leave a trail a knohm could follow,” Egmord snorted, loping carelessly through the bluebells.
“We'll have ‘em soon and we’ll be ready this time,” Ignatious growled.
“Yeah - no underpants!” Ebore added, “Now what can he do?” Egmord gave the oafe a look of angry disgust and reached out to swat him with a vicious cuff, but Ebore saw it coming and ducked, giving a satisfied “Ha!” under his breath. The nettled bigh* didn’t bother with a second attempt but strode onward following the obvious path taken by Grimmbros and Fürgůïn, Ignatious close behind whilst Ebore jogged at a safe distance in the rear.
*The terminal digraph of the term ‘bigh’ is a guttural sound made as far back in the throat as one can manage without causing oneself to retch uncontrollably. It is a deep and disturbing sound that no creature other than a bigh can truly utter with appropriate gravitas. See endnote #3
Grimmbros half jogged, half skipped vivaciously through knee-deep grass with Fürgůïn keeping pace warily at his heel, frowning suspiciously up at his friend’s monumental back and boulderish head. The lush, spreading landscape that from the hill above had looked fairly flat, was actually an undulating vale of elder and hawthorn thickets, dog-rose tangles, meadow flowers and endless grass. A few hundred yards out from the woods, the pair noticed a lone rabbit standing in their path balanced up on its hind legs.
"Aaah, cute little fellow," Fürgůïn observed without stopping, "Oh, there he goes." The rabbit hopped off to one side, disappearing into a grassy tussock. "Did you notice that it didn't look too pleased?" Grimm asked, with a slight scowl. "It's a rabbit! How can a rabbit look not pleased? They're basically fluff on four legs aren't they?" "No look!" Grimm disagreed, "I can see its angry furry face glaring at us from its burrow. Look what it's doing with its nose!” Fürgůïn followed his friend's pointing finger but saw only grass.
"I can’t see anything," he said, "Maybe you need to buck up." The renling wondered exactly what unpleasantness a rabbit might perpetrate with its nose, but he wasn't inclined to stop and Grimmbros soon picked up the pace again so that Fürgůïn was forced to scamper to keep up.
"You didn't notice anything?" Grimm tried again, "It didn't look annoyed to you? Piqued? Miffed? Affronted? Not even a bit?"
"Hopping mad I imagine," Fürgůïn tried, having been thinking up more rabbit jokes as they went. "There's a couple more..." Grimm stopped and narrowed his eyes, examining the creatures ahead that had stopped nibbling some rabbit delicacy and lifted their heads. "There!" Grimm hissed, "See it?" He turned expectantly to Fürgůïn who was beginning to suspect that some arcane cocktail of elbh health food was curdling his companion's mental faculties. Fürgůïn contemplated some comment about rabbiting on, but thought better of it as the urgh-bane suddenly lunged at the poor creatures causing them to flee in rapid skips and bounds for cover.
"What was that?" Fürgůïn squawked in amazement! “What’re you doing?”
"They were doing it! They're up to something." Grimm shouted, stamping the grass down where the rabbits had disappeared. "Look, more of ’em!" This time Grimm ran straight for the little bunch of peacefully grazing animals yelling something about cursing their conniving, little leporine faces. Fürgůïn watched aghast as one small furry ball flew into the air in a long, graceful arc.
"You kicked it!" he exclaimed, "You actually kicked one! Is that what Chicken Scratching has reduced you to?" Grimmbros was panting and spinning about looking for more. "I really think you need to..." Fürgůïn began, but the sporting hero was off again. Fürgůïn hesitated a second and then dashed after him, "You can't kick them! It's not right!”*
*The rules of chicken scratching were quite vague (despite having much to say) about the kickability of various inanimate objects and living creatures. Cuteness and furriness had little to do with what might be booted about a field by a professional scratcher. Fürgůïn had no idea about such things.
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"You have to stop! It's all those Elbh potions! They've got you hyped up on some lethal dose of huskbiscs, yoboga sap and... and... pink ihmp crystals!" He suspected that he had just made up that last one, but it didn't matter, nobody really knew exactly what those nefarious elbhs put into their ‘health’ concoctions, besides, Grimm wasn't even listening. Come to that, where was he?
Fürgůïn became conscious of the fact that things had gone suddenly a lot less rowdy. Grimm was nowhere to be seen. The wind blew gently across the grass, the warm air tickled his dangling ears and the blue sky seemed huge and still. Where was Grimm? Cautiously, Fürgůïn pushed through the tall, swaying, verdant blades that encircled him, peering about in bewilderment. The grass was longer here, grass tended to be fairly long for a halfling such as himself anyway, but here it came pretty much up to his waist. "Grimm?" he called gingerly. A small bee landed on his nose making him twitch.
No Grimm. For a split second, Fürgůïn began to entertain the idea that his urgh-bane friend had been right, that these plains cottontails were not as innocent as they appeared. Had they got him? He shook himself causing the bee on his nose to flit into the air and his stupid thoughts to whiplash back to reality. Rabbits! "Grimm!" he called again. Taking a step forward he tripped over something in the long grass. A foot. Following the leg that protruded from the foot he reached a patch of shorter, well-nibbled grass and located the body that protruded from the leg that protruded from the foot. It was Grimm's... "Arrgghh! He's got no head!" Fürgůïn hadn't intended to bawl that out loud, but the sight of Grimm's headless body was a terrible shock. The rabbits! How? Why? Why him? The senseless waste of...
At that point, the rampant boundlessness of his own inanity came upon the renling like a hungry badger on a bees nest. It was apparent at the slightest investigation that the huge urgh-bane simply had his head jammed into a rabbit hole. Did Grimm have some sort of leporiphobia, unresolved childhood bunny resentment? The body spasmed and the head emerged ringed with soil, a hefty tuft of fur between his teeth. Grimm was wheezing in frustration, emitting a noise rather like an asthmatic gorilla on a kazoo. Fürgůïn was genuinely shocked."For shame!" he breathed, "What's got into you? They're rabbits! Rabbits!" he repeated in exasperation as if the word alone revealed the vastness of this insanity. “What exactly are you so worried about? Ingrowing hares?”
Grimm knitted his brows searching for words, “They were…”
“They were what?” the renling impatiently interrupted. “Hopping about ruthlessly? Nibbling nefariously? Burrowing in cold blood? What? What can rabbits do?” Grimm let out a long breath and frowned back at the little, dark burrow behind him. He said nothing, but it was obvious that Fürgůïn's common sense and reason were having an impact. Renling rationale wasn't the only impact that bore on the moment though, with a gut-wrenching, somewhat squelchy thud, something swift and powerful pounded the earth only feet away.
“They'rrrrr no match forrrr the bunny mallet!" Major elbh stood triumphantly waving a large wooden hammer with a studded, leather-covered head and a disturbing furry mat hanging off it. Fürgůïn wasn't sure what concerned him most: the implement or the official-looking elbh apparently examining his hair.
Before the open-mouthed renling could manage a sentence another elbh with a medical appearance slipped into view, pulled a face of revulsion, held his breath and took a good look in the downcast urgh-bane's ear, pretty much sticking his whole head inside and mumbling with a far-off echo before emerging with a knowing look and a slightly waxy sheen.
Flaring the larger of two nostrils significantly he announced, "It's still there alright! If we don't have it out it'll..."
But before the thought could be completed Major Elbh lunged forward with his oversized steak tenderiser. He smacked it with all his might at a little head that poked out of the hole from which Grimmbros had extracted himself. To Fürgůïn's relief, the little fellow ducked deftly back out of sight.
"I'm not happy about this, they'rrre planning something the conniving wee beasties."
"What? What's going on? How could you?" enquired Fürgůïn, trying to peep into the depths of the rabbit hole without getting too close and then trying to get a good angle to peep into his friend's equally cavernous ear, also without getting too close. He wasn't sure which one held contents more perilous.
“You don’t know what these rrrabbits are capable of!” Major grunted.
A sigh from Grimm once more shifted the focus of everyone’s attention."He's gone all like he did back at that wretched Norris' house,” Fürgůïn muttered.
"It's the dread despondicus, that's what it is," the medical elbh announced, “It’s not…”
"Despoddy what?" spat the perturbed renling.
Original Elbh then limped into view, emerging almost silently from the grass as only elbhs do. He suggested a bit of huskbisc and pulled out some almost weightless fibre cakes wrapped in one of the least palatable dried leaves you could imagine. Fürgůïn's mouth went dry and his tongue felt thrice its normal size just at the thought of it. He almost slapped it out of the elbh's outstretched hand, but as it was, that wouldn't be necessary.
It had all been something of a roller coaster ride of emotion for Grimmbros these last few days. One day he was a popular champion, cavorting about on the fields of chicken scratch pitches the Unknown World over; then he was sucked out of existence and flushed back in again; then he had been seduced into this journey with this renling and his now-absent knohm associate; then he was languishing in a bed of misery in some squalid oafe bridge; then all was bright and sunny; then all was hopeless and swampy and now...
Fight or flight? It was coming on again, an enormous, basic instinctive urge.
He looked darkly at the trio of elbhs whose names he didn't know. He scowled with undisguised abhorrence at the dug-out rabbit hole where little heads kept bobbing in and out of view as Major Elbh swung manically with the mallet. Fight or flight? The fat throb of the urge made his whole head pulse visibly.
Or maybe just lie here in the sun and...
And what?
Leaping to his feet Grimmbros let out a howl like a freshly-neutered water buffalo, head-butted the
nearest elbh, stuffed another butt-first into the rabbit hole, roared at the third until he fell backwards into a cowering heap and then he was off, galloping with all his might toward the horizon. That was it - fight and flight! Fürgůïn shrugged and took off in pursuit, glad that he at least had escaped his friend's blistering outlash.
“But I didn’t get to tell him about the mechanical head,” Medical Elbh moaned.
It was at about this point that Ignatious, Egmord and Ebore crested the hill in the forest. They paused in the self-same spot where previously Fürgůïn the renling had perused his maps and considered his options. The view was panoramic, the air clear and the sight of a racing urgh-bane closely followed by a scampering halfling not far in the distance cheered their spirits.
"That's them down there! They're headed for the moors," Ebore squeaked excitedly, stating the obvious as Ignatious calculated the time and distance.
"Well come on then!" Egmord shouted (he pretty much always shouted, even when his listeners were within inches of him, it could get a tad annoying), "There's nothing between us and them!"
The sight of his quarry and the free flow of a fresh breeze up his trouser leg was working the giant into a raving bloodlust. Ebore took a step sideways in anticipation of further bellowing and a whack still owing.
"I'm gonna wedgie that poncey, stinkin' urgh-bane so hard he'll have a permanent hump!" Spit was raining on Ignatious as the tirade developed. Ebore looked a bit smug at his decision to back off, but quickly hid his smirk as he noticed the expression of absolute seething contempt struggling to remain undisclosed behind their leader's veneer of control.
Grimmbros ran and ran, a conflicting mixture of dreary apathy caused by the head of the despondicus mosquito still stuck in his ear and a gradually flagging fight or flight impulse that drove him onward toward the moors up ahead. Fürgůïn struggled to keep up. He wondered how long Grimmbros could go on. He feared the urgh-bane had reached a point where he couldn't care anymore and might just run himself into the ground, to an ignominious end. Still, Grimm thundered onward.
The lush meadow verdure in time gave way to wiry moorland grass spotted with gorse as the land rose. Grimmbros paid no heed to the change of landscape, he just wove around the large granite boulders that lay deep in the grass, speckled and blotched with bright yellow and pale green lichen rings, and headed for the higher ground ahead.
Eventually, he pounded up the first of the rugged tors, at times leaping over a particularly dense cluster of the huge rocks that increased in number as the altitude rose. Scrambling over the great mass of weathered boulders at the top, he finally stood swaying at the very apex, upon an impossibly high, precariously balanced stack of granite. Fürgůïn was some way behind, but could still see Grimmbros standing there ahead on the topmost boulder. 'Grimmbros!' he called out. Grimmbros didn't respond, he just stared out into the distance.
Then, Fürgùïn saw a strange sight. The giant raised his arms out straight at right angles to his body. It looked like he was going to perform one of his old star-jump warm-up exercises, but instead he just swayed there on the very edge of the peak. Fürgůïn leapt and scrambled up the last of the crag noticing that they were a lot higher up than he could have ever imagined. The south side of the tor had been a gradual climb but now as wispy clouds spun past his head, he saw the precipitous drop ahead.
The wind blew with loud intensity and it whistled all around him causing his long renling ears to flick and snap against his head. He stretched out an arm, but before he could utter a word Grimmbros was gone. He had jumped! Or rather, leaned forward out and over the edge, a great falling star. As the giant toppled into the aching emptiness of the void Fürgůïn was mere inches behind, outflung arms grasping in futility when a huge gust of wind from nowhere caught the renling completely off guard plunging him too in shock and horror over the edge of the very same fateful apex!