The Lore Anthology: Lore of the Underlings: Episodes 1 - 5 (5 page)

“Spineless swill.”

“You could have axed them, Ixit.”

“Bloody Boxbo. Who’d you kill?”

As his question hung on the air unanswered, Fyryx turned to walk away. With a flick of the wrist he summoned the nearest and most menacing of the Guard — a warrior clad in all of an armor well-waxed, black, and thick, and one who’d been watching like a bloodhawk from astride a great, brutish bull chevox.

“Syar-ull! See to it.”

They seemed as one these two, this team of animal and man, with eyes that flashed unworldly through the dark night’s rainy veil. The bull let out a thunderous snort and pounded the puddling ground hard using its wide front hoof.  The Guard mashed his battle pike three times into the gauntlet he wore on his right. Then he dexterously turned it in air to rest across his heavy breastplate, a vestment adorned by an artisan’s skill in a pattern of yellow leaves and shoots that sprung from a long thorned vine. The same markings covered the intricately carved shaft and handhold of the pike.

He called out from behind the visor of his
full face mask and helmet, which allowed no window to the wearer but a wide, thin eye slot. The sound was nearly song, strong but highish pitched:

Till the grave

Plow this row

Reap their souls

Sovereign, ho!

The bull began to lumber forward. But then
, all of a sudden…

“Hi-ho sirs! Hello!”

Stranger three, the fattier folkish one, stood out betwixt the taller two. His arms were open wide and he gave a cheery smile.

“May I call you ‘
sirs’?”

Fyryx looked back over his shoulder.
Bull’s-eyed Sovereign set his sights.

“Permit me please, very quickly, to introduce myself. Morio Yoop at your service.” Morio made the briefest bow
while keeping one eye bullward. The other he shifted to send John Cap a cheeky secret wink.

John Cap squinted at him with a question on his face. “What?”

But his eager colleague did not wait to answer or elucidate. Instead the fuller fellow was off on a venture of his own invention. In other words, that is to say, Morio set some scheme in motion…

To begin he took a slight step back and said something odd like
, “Psst! Tuck and run,” in a whisper to the tall young woman. She tipped her head, puzzled, and frowned at the words. Meanwhile his foot found the fleshy mass of friends lying low amongst the tufts and he kicked it hard with his soft shoe heel. “Tusk and run Ogdog,” he half hushed. “On my mark!”

Beneath the shielding skin something seemed to
stir and wake… with a weak cry and a muffled voice.

And the
brawny bull was upon them. Morio bounded to meet the beast with a leap like a hoppalope then thrust his hands up high in the air. The chevox was nimble and stopped on the spot, so near that its nostrils flared in the stranger’s face and sprayed him in a mist, a warm shower of sour mucus.

Morio turned his head to breathe. “You can see, noble sirs, that I bear only arms.”

The rider leaned over the neck of his mount.

“But for even further fellowship, I hope you will accept my full and unconditional submission to your will
and every whim!”

The black Guard raised his
battle pike to strike the stranger down.

A score of strides away, the vell shoved Pyr Hurx in the back with its long
and boney nose. Somehow that gave him the pluck to speak. “Hold there, honored Guard! Forgive me, Uncle…”

Syar-ull swung. Morio ducked, but the weighty stick still struck his shoulder with a glancing blow, barely so, but enough to fell him aground. “Mmmph.”

Fyryx fired a livid look. “Mind your place, boy!”

“But Uncle…”

“The Guard do not take orders from children. Nor do I.”

“But Uncle…”

“Silence! Go. Tend to your animal.”

Morio gazed up from the
sodden grass having fallen flat upon his back. The dark pikesman loured over him, unmoved by the man’s cherubic look or that friendling kind of face. He gripped his weapon spearwise and then spiked the fat foe through his ruckscoat’s right side, just by a wide but solid belly, to pin him to the spongy sod.

Morio made to wriggle or roll but could not move
at all. “Kudos, good warlord! Your mastery of the rod is real, or really unreal… I am awed… Owww!” He reached to rub his arm. “Your hand will come in handy.”

John Cap peered through the darksome drops at the flailing of his friend. He twitched as if about to act but the tall young woman shook her head.

Morio gave a hard lurch left and heard his ruckscoat rip. “But pleasantries aside,” he said, “I wonder whether you’ve had the chance to chat with your cohorts or associates on a matter that I mentioned earlier tonight. Sound familiar? The notion of negotiating a temporary truce or treaty to attend to some ever-more-pressing private business? Ring a bell?”

Syar-ull drew from his planted pikeshaft a long
well-honed impaling lance, one hewn smooth and sharp by an old cold hand to mock the mark of an oddcat’s fang. “Prey die!” he sang, inspecting it. Then he stabbed at the stranger to finish him off. But Morio popped up just in time and flew afoot with his coat torn in two and a nick on his neck from the tip of the point.

“Sorry!” he sang back, “Business first!” And he flew, straight as a stingle wing and fleet as his wee feet could flee, drawn to the
darkness and the black mass of the Liar’s Tree.

The
great Guard growled and leveled his lance as all eyes followed the fugitive’s flight.

“He must be mad.”

“Is this a full moon?”

“Farewell,
you fool!”

“Toodles!”

“Good night loon.”

Holding the grip of the lanc
e in both hands, a riled Syar-ull snapped off the butt to reveal a length of wrapture rope knotted at one end. He yanked the knot hard and it popped like a cork, spilling a spool of fine vine down Sovereign’s meaty, sinewed side. Then he heaved the new-made harpoon up upon his padded shoulder and gave it a mighty hurl.

Morio turned
in time to see the weapon sail right overhead. And then the vine unfurled behind. It speared the soil mere feet away and blocked the route he had been on — straight to the foot of the armored arbor. The tail of it lashed his back and latched on tight to rope his every limb, wrapping his trunk in a knotty embrace.

“Mark! Mark!” he cried
out loud, signaling back to his small stand of friends.

Boxbo kicked Ixit. “Who’
s Mark?” he asked. Ixit kicked him right back. “Mark of the dead, I guess!” He laughed.

Now everyone
anticipated the endgame of the Guard.

“
We’re taking wagers, gentlemen! Don’t be late. No bet, no win!”

“A basket of sand beans says he’ll
start by splitting the man in half.”

“I’m in!”

“Who’ll bet on a skinning?”

“Alive?”

“Five sticks.”

“Six if it takes two peels.”

“Hmmm…”

“That is a porkling one…
”

“Indeed,
but the Guard is very good…”

“Tell you what
— because we’re kin — I’ll throw in a head of pepper salts too.”

“You’re making an offer I can’
t refuse.”

“Are we on?”

“Sure.”

“Easy treasure!”

But away from the bloodsport, there in the secret space behind the young woman and man, another game began. The og hide that hid Jixy safe inside suddenly fell slack and slipped from her back to the sweetgrass about her kneeling knees. It rolled up tight to a twisted tube then turned and turned again… right before her amber eyes remade as a leg-long boney blade. At that it lay flat on the given ground, still until it went all white, a deathly pure from pommel to point.

The young woman called softly to the child but with urgency in her voice. “Go girl, run. Seek safe haven. Your time is to come. We
will need you then.”

Jixy nodded her tangled mane. Though sleepy-eyed she underst
ood and her muscles mindlessly knew what to do, what had kept her alive this long. She plunged her hands into the rich, black mud that bubbled between the leaves of grass and smeared it thick like warpaint over every inch of innocent skin — face, arms, legs — all concealed. Then, as if guided by an ancient instinct never learned, she fled for the darkest corner of the Guard-filled field. Eastward she went and away from the walls of the Keep.

No one saw as the soily creature scurried toward the near ring of riders, slipping quick and low through the tallest tufts. In a stroke of luck she caught them off
guard while the war men, by order of a bull-mad Syar-ull, lit from their mounts to converge afoot upon the alien three. The little mud maid pounced at her chance. She snuck to flank the first chevox she found, the brown cow Clarion, and ducked under the beast’s wide belly to hide amidst her hooves from the marching Guard. There the girl held, huddled and hushed as they passed. Then suddenly the cow sensed something below and let out a bellow low and long. But Jixy was already gone.

John Cap stood ready to meet the dismounted. He was not long alone. Something grasped his wrist and he glanced down to find a
n almost ghostly gray hand and slender fingers wrapped around it. The tall young woman had joined him to stand at his side.

“Let them come John,” she said calmly. “Do not resist.” The ever green of her beautiful eyes gazed deep into the handsome blue of his. His lips let slip the hint of a smile.

It was strange about this tall damsel, this maiden, this youthful lady of the pale… how she somehow seemed to be untouched by the dark night’s teary fall. The few drops that caught her sun-dipped hair glistened like stars in a twilight all aglow with yesterday’s goodnight kiss.

The peace of the storm’s eye passed. The vanguard of the footmen, the blue-clad coast keeper named Faal-syr, greeted John Cap with a short heavy harmlet to the throat and threw the tall traveler aside with surprising ease. Then he dropped the leaden club with a thud and strode ahead, for he sought not the man but the space he took. It was his in no time. “Child’s play,” he said to himself.

Yet, despite the bright of a fresh torch following just behind, all the blue Guard found was the white weapon at his feet. He picked it up, heavy handed in his gutting glove, and studied it suspiciously. He turned it over and over again, seeking some sign of the hidden hand that made its fine wide blade and doubled edge, that fashioned the toothy sharp tip of it, or that cast it so strong down to a hilt the thick of an arm.

The black Guard barked. “Faal-syr! Report!”

“Sir!” answered Faal-syr smartly, crossing his arms in salute. “My sir!” The blue made a beeline for the black except for a stumble on a little something hard lurking in the grass. It was Jixy’s jagged pummel stone. He quickly collected the fist-shaped shard and delivered it double-time with his other find to the moody master Guard.

“Our search did yield but these, sir my sir.”

“A pale blade and a broken stone?”

“Yes, sir my sir. But this sword… ‘tis a strange thing…
unlike any I have known.”

Syar-ull scoffed and took
up the arm, weighing it in his hand. “Odd, the hold of it. And so light…” He waved the tusk-like weapon in air. “It seems to mind its motion…”

A voice from afar
caught their ears. “Yoo hoo! Will some friend kindly set me free from this mortal coil? It surely packs a pinch.”

Faal-syr the Blue bowed his helmeted head. “The
snared stranger, sir. Shall I send him hellbound?” He placed his free hand on the handle of the spikey halfpike hung at his side.

Syar-ull answered in a mutter black and bitter, as if to no one but himself. “He has chosen the liar’s path. Let him suffer the liar’s fate.” Then he tore from the fingers of Faal-syr’s left fist the lost
half pummeler of young Pyr Hurx and launched it into the sinister arms of the looming ironwood.

As it flew he sang an old childling’s song:

Come the fall

When iron flies

Quick Boy darts

But Slow Boy dies

The dark, deformed limbs of the great tree shook, unleashing a hail of ironfire upon the poor soul below. Morio struggled against his bonds to duck and dodge the rain of terror as hell’s cruel elements fell all around with the ring and clang of a devil’s dance. A squall of razor leaves sliced the skin of his ragged ruckscoat, in places slashing his underclothes too — and nearly more. Indeed, where one sleeve was shredded and torn right to his snowy white folking-wear, a weak streak of red bled through but then blurred in the waterlogged fibers of limberwood.

The doomed man’s mouth moved yet
the din was too loud. It looked as though he said, “Oh my!”