The troll’s stomps were almost a strut as he approached me with a hungry look on his face that verged on obscene. He tossed his baton aside, the head now dissolved into colored steam.
As he stomped closer and closer, I grit my teeth through the pain, pushed a couple chairs off me, making a scraping sound that metalicly echoed on the platform above as I managed to crawl under it, searching for my cannon.
“I'll give you one thing hob, you’re a natural born entertainer.” He pried the lightning stick out of Raccoon's mouth, thumbing it on and off like he was an obese child carrying a sparkler. His shadow swallowed me. “And you're going to put on a very veeery long show for me before your last curtain call.”
The metal scraping sound above me again—not an echo at all—what—
“Bossss!” a goblin screeched.
“Egh?” Grivonne looked up just in time to see the steaming pot spilling, the two goblins tipping it over, but not in time to avoid it.
A twisting ribbon of boiling oil.
It drenched the wide-eyed troll, kicking up a cloud of smoking flesh. His screams oscillated around the chamber like a siren. Skin melted, muscle charred. Covered in the fuming black oil like this, shrieking, he seemed like he was some kind of mascot in an insane chocolate syrup commercial.
Grivonnne’s raw flesh was exposed, sheared of its protective hide, his mouth was completely pried open as he wailed, a hippo yawning.
Hrngh—clenched teeth drove me through the pains shooting all through me. I hopped up, wood chair sliding off me, took two lunging steps, prying a wax capsule from my pocket and hurling it into the troll’s gaping mouth.
The capsule. The final concoction of my late night alchemy. It sparked a chain reaction with the troll mucus lining his throat and mouth. Foam fizzed through his teeth. His slug lips snapped shut, his throat seemed to seize up, raw muscle exposed as hide and blubber were sloughed off by the oil. Now his spine was curling as he tried to contain the growing pain of his swelling gut.
Hlrrgh—HLLLRRRGHHH! He wretched, every inch of his body swelling, distending like a corpse left to rot.
An explosion of white foam and viscera. Troll pieces splattering everywhere.
My nostrils burned at the chemical smells of the froth spilling from the two legged stump that remained of his body.
“Regenerate that, ya piece of cagg!” I spat. “How’s that for a recipe!!!”
“Hreeeheee!” The two goblins above howled in triumph. Even in the chaos I managed to see that one of them was the gobbo who’d stared at us. He'd torn his chained mask off and with it the skin on his face, bloody sinews exposed now to open air.
“Boss! Boss!” this faceless one screeched. He must have gotten the keys from Grivonne then freed the other goblins because they were scurrying all over the room now, tipping over all the pots with boiling oil, swiping torches from their sconces and throwing them in flaming spins. In all the madness the whole room was getting drenched in oil and flames.
“Well get the flog down here!” I shouted, finally finding my cannon and snatching it off the ground.
The gobbos scampered down the steps while I ran over to the far side of the room.
“Wahira! Ey Wahira!” I found her in a heap. “Wahir...” I turned her over and hairs were spilled over her face, a veil made of dried grass.
“The troll...” she wheezed as she began rising, one eyelid swollen, lip cut.
“Turned him into soap,” I panted. “Vomit soap.”
“You know... even wearing this thing... that cannon of yours nearly knocked me dead.” Her fingers touched the singed lead plating showing through the hole ripped on her robe—my shield vest that gave her torso a strange exoskeleton under coarse fabric. “And you could have pulled your kick...” She rubbed her back.
“Hey we sold the scene.” Gang, if there's something I take seriously, it's bardery. “You're alive.”
Her face lit up as she saw the gobbos running toward us. “Skreecher!”
The gobbo actually seemed to recognize her too. “Old Wahi! Old Wahi!” He jumped around, barely containing himself, pointing between us. “Boss! Old Wahi!”
“Come on! You can skip around outside!” I dashed for the hallway, but stopped dead in my tracks. “The money!” Sweet god of flapping gold. “The moneyyyy!” My whole body jerked and I ran back toward roiling flames.
“Teek!” the Wahira called, but I didn't give a flying flog even as embers danced around me and the air began rippling with heat, my face lit as if by an enormous camp fire.
“I must've lost the bag... when uh Raccoon uh...bit...” I talked to myself in that madness that only gold can conjure in us hobs, “or when that walking parade float threw me like a rag doll...”
I ran to the clutter of chairs getting charred. Finding a grip on wood that wasn't yet flaming I tossed aside a chair. Heat made me recoil. My heart wrenched as I saw a smattering of cash getting soaked in flaming oil, catching fire. The sizzling slickness seeped onto my boot and I tapped it frantically to get it off. Reaching down, I grabbed a wad of cash but my fingers recoiled as the oil singed them. “Gaaaah!” Still, I shook some of it off and managed to save a chunk of gold bills. My eyes scanned the floor for more salvageable cash—
A crackling snap above me.
“Boss!” A warning screech came.
A burning beam had split free of its joint above and was falling. Little hands yanked me back, the sizzling beam smashing the ground just inches from my feet—hot oil splashing, sparks hissing.
I’d been pulled back by the gobbo with the skinless face drenched in blood, who was staring at me with crazed alertness, two round eyes on the bloody soup of his face.
“Teek!” K’matli called to me as gunshots were going off in the distance. A piece of flaming canvas was sliding off its hooks, like a tilted window to hell. The whole place was going to come down.
“Flog! FLOG!,” I cursed, “Fine! Let's go.”
Fire, wild beasts, and goblins are a terrible combination... or a great one depending how you look at it.
As we ran, utter chaos chased us. The rest of the goblins had snuck out of the dining room and were causing a ruckus in the stage where the orc hound had chased some of them earlier, a ruckus which rippled and grew. Yeah gang, the gobbos had a field day of released insanity. Setting things on fire, using chains, fireworks and boards with nails through them as weapons, riding a red horned lion around like a biting, clawing battering ram, cracking crowd members over the head after who knows how many days or years of pent up rage. Smoke, fireworks, falling sandbags, trumpeting elephanti, echoing parrots, collapsing canvas and all the meanwhile dancing flames and goblins howling with joy. In the confusion, the crowd, gobbos, performers, and circus goons that remained all fell into wild fighting, looting and the fleeing panic of a growing stampede. Some choked on smoke, others were trampled under fleeing orcs and ogres and beardies and what not.
The maze didn't catch fire. Perhaps its magical nature protected it, but its striped canvas walls and candy fog were filled with a handful of confused fleers, most others that made it out having fled through the secret carnivals’ many other passageways. K’matli and I along with a gaggle of goblins made it out of the maze, out to the night air where the outer carnival was still kicking.
“Gobbos! Where you going!” Wahira yelled to some goblins that just ran in random directions as soon as we pushed through the maze’s heavy canvas exit. They kept running, getting lost in the oblivious crowds of the mundane carnival. “Hey!” She called to them. They didn't even look back, just kept skittering, giggling with utter glee, scooping from a popcorn machine, climbing onto the ferris wheel, or just fleeing into the darkness.
My throat stung as I gulped air, my hands resting on my knees—all the cigs were catching up with me. We’d ran until we made it to the rocky alcove where I’d hidden my car. Me, the Wahira and 3 goblins. One of them, parrot nosed, skin a dark teal, barely fazed by the run, craned his neck, studying my Stallion’s head lights with a curiosity of a cat mixed with a miner’s. He hopped onto its charcoal hood with a metallic hollow thump. “Hey! Get off!” I coughed and coughed, pains stabbing me in the chest, burning cuts and scrapes all over. “You’ll scratch the paint!”
Wahira K’matli wheezed to catch her breath too. Her hands reached behind her back, pulling her robe up and unfastening some clips at the sides of her hips. She shrugged, fingers pulling on straps. My shield vest thudded to the ground at her feet, and she stepped out of it like it was a strange metallic underwear, a perplexed furrow on her thin brows:
“It has shield runes on it, doesn’t it?”
“Had.” I winced at all my cuts and bruises as I slung it on my shoulder like it was a duffel bag, rubbed dirt off the runic symbols that my handcannon had blasted to a charcoal stain. “Looks like most are gone... or damaged... At least they stopped one of my home made rounds. But flog... it’s gonna cost a fortune to get it re-runed.” I popped my ride’s trunk and dropped the vest in. Reaching in, I popped open a black briefcase, grabbed a small glass bottle. Closing the trunk, vertigo spun me. I gazed around, felt exhaustion warring with pain inside me, the carnival noise now lost in a constant buzz of crickets, a gilla moth bent a long fuzzy weed growing up between two boulders, before fluttering off, up, up, past the crag walls enclosing two thirds of our circumference, up, and across the moon.
The bottle in hand was an antiseptic paste that knit small wounds, or at least stopped the bleeding, bought time for proper healer work. My mouth twisted at the paste’s sting on my cuts, but my finger went on spreading it.
“My little gobbo!” K’matli’s hands cupped the faceless goblin’s shoulders as he nuzzled to her, her robe smeared by his face’s half congealed blood. He was a foot or so shorter than her and wearing only a pair of raggedy short pants, nails thick and crusty that reminded me of acorns on sinewy hands and feet real big for his frame. “Look what they did to you. Your face.”
“I did! I yank face off!” His legs went stiff as he mimicked the motion of pulling on his chain with his whole body. “Like that—mragh!”
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The Wahira dug through her purse. “I have only one healing root.” She glanced between me and him, then handed the tuber to the faceless goblin.
“You only have one and you give it to him?” My teeth clenched as I held my waist where a claw swipe had gashed me, burning pain mixing with the paste’s cold sting. “I wouldn’t be all cut up if I hadn’t let you use my vest.”
“Magic food?” The faceless goblin eyed the root in his knobby fingers, then held it out to me. “Boss eats it!”
I reached for it but then felt the Wahira's appalled glare floating between me and his bleeding, skinless face. “Egh... I guess... I guess you can have it.” He was after all, worth her entire inheritance. I'd live—no point in messing up the deal.
“But boss...”
“I don't know where all this boss talk is coming from but if I'm boss then you do as I say. Eat it already.”
An eye flutter of hesitation. He gobbled it with loud, crunchy chews.
“He recognizes you as a natural leader. All the goblins did. That's what drove the fear from them. This is your first step toward becoming a Hobgabarrin lord...”
“Whatever.” I spat, a little blood mixed in with the spit. “All I care about is that the next step involves gold. A lot of it.”
“Of course... I wouldn't go back on a promise.” Her small hand dug into her purse and my imagination sparked: a map to a buried fortune, a magic key to unlock a vault somewhere. She handed me a small pouch. Unfastening the string that held it shut, I peered inside. There were coins, the kind they made before the war but that were still accepted as currency, though they were slowly being phased out.
“What is this? There's 80, 90 gold in here...”
“97 gold.”
“So...”
“My inheritance.”
“That's it?! All that trouble back there for 97 gold!”
She smiled, wrinkles bunching so that her skin looked like palm trunk, eyes like walnuts in their shells. “I did not lie. That is my entire inheritance.”
“Hats off to your flogging honesty! But I need to walk away with something else besides 97 gold!”
“Like what?”
“Like more coin! A lot more!”
“Well...” She reached for her purse again, started counting. “I can offer you another, oh 60 silver...”
“I don't want your silver!” My hand pushed her purse away then swept through my hair. “I didn't collect the debt!” I took some of the charred bills from my pocket, shuffled. “I mean I saved—what is this—19, 20, 35, 36 hundred gold. I was supposed to collect 12 grand! I diverted my whole plan, risked my con’ n’ sack to get these damn gobbos out!”
“What... then... forgive me. What can I do?”
“What can you do? Wahi, aren’t you listening? Get me cash, coin, scratch, glitz, racks, dough, moolah, money. Like you said. An inheritance. Money. A lot of it.”
“Is this money?” Screecher, his face still skinless, but at least not bleeding anymore, held something out to to me in his green hand. Inspecting it I saw that it was a severed troll thumb and bloody tooth.
“No! That's not money!”
K’matli, pensive: “There is one more thing I have of value...”
My eyes landed on her earrings. They were gold and enchanted. That would be worth a decent amount of coin but moving black market artifacts meant cutting their price a great deal so for all I knew it might only be a few hundred gold, maybe a couple grand at most. They seemed integral to her casting so her giving them up might have been impossible anyway. They also had the symbol of Mog on them which stirred my ill superstitions.
“Skreecher.” She considered the faceless goblin, then gazed at me. “It’s only right he go with you.”
“What? Come on I’m tired of the tricks.”
“It’s not.”
“You said that his hive has been in your family forever.”
“It has. And as I think on my words, ah our agreement was that I give you my inheritance. He is part of it.”
“I've never lorded over a goblin.” Exasperated, I leaned back against my car. “What would I even do with him? What would he do for me?”
“You provide him food, shelter and instruction. He'll be a loyal servant for life.” The image of him pulling me back from the falling beam flashed in my mind's eye. “This is the way of Mog.”
“Look, I told you... I'm not religious. Not really.”
“Mog burns in your soul, tugs at your destiny like a flame does a moth. It matters not whether your eye is open to it.”
I shook my conya as if this would dissipate the drudging metaphysical conversation—If only this wahira knew how many years that’d been at the center of my life, and how exhausting it was to start weaving that thought matrix afresh. “Ghhhff... Wahir, the whole point of you doing all this was to take him back!”
“I said that I wanted to free him. And now we have.”
“Look. I'm no bleeding heart—I'm pretty sure you know that by now—but how's he free if you can just order him to go be my pawn or whatever?”
“That ah... that comes from a Hobgabarrin who's forgotten the traditions...” before I could protest she went on, “but there is a certain wisdom in it, there is.”
“Alright. Then...”
“Then let us put it to the wheel of fate. Screecher, come.”
The Goblin stepped to her on calloused feet.
“It is time you glimpse your futures.”
The sound of her rubbing her creviced palms. A stray wind sneaking through the crag walls around us, tossing up a couple of gray hairs across her face. She cupped her hands. A tiny flame bloomed and danced above her palms and hovered there as if caught in a web. Her calloused fingers plucked at it as expertly as an old village Wahira on a loom, hands moving like artful spiders, pulling fiery strings, weaving the flame into the intricate shape of an occult rune. And as she completed it I realized it was the sigil of Mog, a mix of spirals and jagged lines, and the flames turned from their natural color to an ultraviolet rimmed flame that had at its center only darkness. The sigil hung there between all of us, hinting of some eternally vigilant, murky intelligence watching us. I swallowed.
“Screecher, your hive’s thread has been in my clan’s tapestry for generations.” She took out a pack of oracle cards from her purse and unwrapped the hide around them. As she shuffled them she spoke, “Now comes a place where the flame of your life splits into many. Mighty Mog, reveal his fates.”
She placed the hide wrapper on the desert ground, the cards atop it, took a small bit of finely ground wolf weed from her purse, and sprinkled it into the burning glyph. The glyph bled smoke, thick, pungent herb smoke that spread its tendrils like ghost fingers. These smoke tendrils sank to the earth slow as jungle snakes, then slipped several cards from the deck and arranged them around the rune in the air in a 3 x 3 top heavy diamond. The cards were worn, faded, torn in spots. Their illustrations of a quality that was becoming rare in the modern day. The images all hailed from a fading time, images of castles and knights and goblin peasants in medieval garb.
The Wahira pointed to a column of cards: A beggar with a broken leg receiving alms. A ship sailing the seas on another. A bottle of wine on the last. “Your first fate is it to leave both of us. To walk your own path entirely. You will see the world. You will experience some of its pleasures, more than many, but you will walk your life alone. Surrounded by others, perhaps, but alone.”
She flipped a finger to the next column of cards, which twinkled from the glowing rune as they winked like tree leaves in a whispering wind: A gaggle of goblin peasants playing in an orchard. A Wahira carrying a jug of water on her scarved conya. A warg, a goblin hound that is, sleeping in a cobbled street. “Your second fate is to go with me. South of the Union, even beyond Aztlan. You will always be among your own kind. Your life will be quiet toil but you will have true peace.”
“Gobbos...” Skreecher said, eyes unblinking on the cards, fixating on the one filled with goblins especially, as if for a moment he believed one of them was somehow his own portrait.
“Your third fate is to go with Teek.” K’matli pointed to the next column of cards: Two Lords in armor, swords clashing, one an Elf, one a Hob, their armies warring in the background. A hand rising from a pool of gold coins. A princess falling from a tower, eyes with the shock of coming death, the tower ruptured by a bolt of lightning. “Go with him and you'll be surrounded by constant strife, the pursuit of riches and sorrows deeper than the sea.”
My arms crossed, jaw restless with an obscure resentment. “Sorrows deeper than the sea? That's why you’re a witch and not a bard.”
Wahira looked intently at the gobbo. “Speaking now, in Mog's presence, do you wish to go on your own, remain with me, or to go with—”
“BOSSSSSSS!!!!!” He shot his fists up into the air, big fists for a goblin, fists on green reeds for arms. “Boss boss boss boss!” He hopped around me like I was some friggin’ idol, to the point that even I myself was left uneasy.
“It looks like... he's chosen.” The cards all drifted back into their stack, which she slipped into her purse. The rune collapsed in on itself, into a tiny flame that slowly drifted to the ground, gently Illuminating our faces as it dimmed until it was only a lit match dwarfed by the white light of the moon.
“Look, I didn't come here meaning to take away your family goblin...”
“Mog takes and he gives. I have these two now. ” She glanced at the two gobbos next to her. They stepped closer. One of them was 3 feet tall or so, the teal bald one, the same size as Screecher. The other one was about half that, a runt childe of a goblin with a mop of wild hair. This one tugged on Wahira's robe and called, “Wahi. Wahi.”
“We should go.” She smiled, embraced Screecher tight. He just kind of stood there, limp, unsure what to do. For a moment she looked like some little girl holding a stuffed animal. I looked away.
“Look,” I hissed. “I'm no Hob lord or whatever... but at least one thing's for sure,” I thumbed at Skreecher, “he's better off than he was before. Right? So, so the whole ocean of sorrows thing, I mean that seems ridiculous. And anyway how good of a scryer are you really? Once the Arcanum put the Tellurian Veil up it created a parallax current through all the frequencies of the space time continuum.” I used words like frequency and paralax, half unaware of my pompous attempt to stick my nose up at her with my supposed erudition. “Are your cards really even synced right? Did you account for the Astral mass ejection? The echoing void point in the hybrid manasphere?”
“Do not fear, hobgabbarrin.”
“Fear?!” I blurted.
“We are always weaving our fate.” The Wahira reached into her purse and took out something wrapped in a home woven patterned cloth. Inside it was some kind of pale twig which she dipped into the tiny fire at her feet. She closed her eyes and murmured some ancient words shuekshakshurri shuekshakshurri shuekshakshurri shubba... She waved the incense around herself and around the two gobbos, inscribing runes with the smoke. And on she went chanting shuekshakshurri shuekshakshurri shubba...
Sealing the ritual she clapped her hands together and intoned oyanqui olha.... Her earrings clinked and sparkled with hidden flames. Her body along with the two goblins took on this sort of smokey form, starting at their feet and rising up their legs, their hazy toes lifting into the air. “Yes, fate is ever changing. But the stronger the fate, the more difficult it is to escape, the more the cards reveal them. Are the cards true? Can you escape your fate? I cannot see that far, only read the look in your eyes, as all things are signs, and I see there that just as your vassal’s fate split to three, so yours splits in two. One is the path of Mog, the other his opposite. Which you will chose, I cannot see. Only Mog can see in the final night.”
“Hey, don't pull that mysterious mage thing on me!” A strange sensation in my chest. An embarrassment, a regret, I couldn't say. Like listening to a song you once loved but upon playing it for another now seems the most childish of tastes. The sensation was piercing enough to turn my lip heavy, to animate my limbs with half flails that enunciated my words. “You think your spells impress me? You have no idea who I am!”
“Perhaps.” K’Matli went on rising, a slow ember. “But I can tell that whichever path you take, you carry with you a burden... and at either of your two paths’ end you look for one who can lift it from you. I tell you now as far as my mortal eyes can see: only one truly can. And that is Mog. Worship him. Follow his path.”
My eyes glassed. “Yeah? Well first I gotta ask him some questions! Like if there's no good or evil, why I shouldn't have just put a bullet in your skull—I’d be up a hell of a lot right now! Yes, Maeh, I got alotta questions! Questions that would make your skin crawl that would turn your bones cold! Questions he better answer before I so much as throw him a flogging copper!”
“In time he will answer them... He is where all things end...”
She drifted off in a gust, she and the two goblins turning into ghostly winds.
Then they were only an ashy stain on the desert sky. I swallowed a lump in my throat. Felt my jacket pocket’s soft inner lining. Stared at the charred gold bills in my hand, then back up to the sky, now only stars and a frayed cloud. Empty.
Gang, I can tell you that there is no pain that compares to a debt you can never repay. And as I stared at the desert sky I thought back for just a passing mirage of a thought to someone who had worshiped with me long ago when I was still a child.
Child. Hgffhh. Even then I was a knave.
“Boss! Boss! What we do now?!” Skreecher hopped about.
I shook my conya, hand on my neck. Breathed.
“Kill more trolls?!”
“...The hells am I gonna do with you?”
“I dunno. You boss!”
I opened my ride’s door. “All I know is you need a new face, that's for sure.”
“Yesss! Can I get monkey face? Oh! No no no! A tiger!”
My Stallion revved and its red taillights snaked into the darkness.