Disenchanted (2 page)

The Skaal, for their part, weren’t about to try to send supplies up a two-hundred-foot cliff; it was hard enough to keep the tower supplied when nobody was trying to kill them. The Skaal realized shortly after they’d finished building Kra’al Weibdrung that they had made a terrible mistake: the fort was nearly impossible to keep supplied and in any case taught them nothing about the Ytriskians other than the fact that their sheep were seriously troubled. They’d have been glad to desert Kra’al Weibdrung if it weren’t for the loss of face that would ensue. The Skaal archers, knowing that no supplies were forthcoming, decided to take the offensive.

The two hundred or so Skaal who had been walled up in the tower rappelled down the cliff under the cover of night. They took cover and the next morning their crack archers shot volley after volley of arrows at the two hundred or so Ytriskian aggressors, who waited a hundred yards across the plain. The archers, being accustomed to shooting from great altitudes at large, slow-moving, easy-to-spot animals with brains the size of tangerines and almost no will no live, found their skills wanting against the men across the field wearing metal shirts. The men in metal shirts, for their part, quickly tired of having their metal shirts dented by arrows and charged.

The Skaal didn’t stand a chance. Besides being out of practice at anything other than playing cards and firing arrows into sheep, they had as their leader a cowardly imbecile by the name of Captain Randor. It had been Captain Randor’s idea to advance on the Ytriskian belligerents, but once the battle started, he was nowhere to be found. In contrast, Boric the Implacable led the Ytriskian charge with a battle cry that struck fear into the hearts of the Skaal warriors — even the one who had once skewered a sheep from three hundred yards. The Ytriskians slaughtered half the Skaal and disarmed the remainder, sending them home to report to King Sharvek in Skaal City about the fall of Kra’al Weibdrung.

Boric handpicked a contingent of his most expendable soldiers to man the tower of Kra’al Weibdrung, and together they scaled the cliff wall. The men waited at the foot of the tower while Boric climbed to the top of the tower to address them. He walked to the edge of the parapet and began, “Brave men of Ytrisk — ”

He had intended his address to be somewhat more comprehensive than this but was forced to cut it short, having been stabbed between the ribs with a broadsword. Captain Randor, it seemed, had been hiding under a pile of rubbish at the rear of the tower and had been compelled by his cowardly and imbecilic brain to stab Boric the Implacable in the back. Captain Randor was one of the few who had not yet heard what a stupendous badass Boric was. That was about to change.

Boric spun around, blood spewing from fresh gashes in both his chest and his back. He calmly drew his sword, took two steps toward Randor and sliced his head clean off. Randor’s head and body fell separately to the cold stone floor, with a
thud!
and a
tink!

This latter surprised Boric. Military men were supposed to
thud!
or
clank!
to the ground. Only sedentary nobles and merchants
tink!
ed.

Boric, feeling dizzy and light-headed, shambled toward Randor’s corpse, which was still making an impressive effort to pump blood to Randor’s head. His head unfortunately lay some three feet away — an insurmountable distance for even the most robust circulatory system. Wheezing and coughing up blood, Boric felt underneath the corpse, finding a small cloth purse full of coins. He tore the purse from Randor’s belt, spilling its contents on the stone: forty gold coins. Boric’s mind reeled: setting aside the fact that no soldier would carry that much money into battle, no soldier would
have
that much money, period. Each of those coins represented a month’s wages for a Skaal captain.

Before he could fully analyze the situation, Boric fell to the cold stone floor, dead. Boric’s reputation as a badass unmarred by the desperate final act of a cowardly imbecile, his spirit readied itself for its journey to the Hall of Avandoor, where he would enjoy an eternal banquet with the other stupendous badasses throughout history. He hoped to sit next to Greymaul Wolfsbane or, in a pinch, Hollick the Goblin-Slayer. On second thought, Hollick the Goblin-Slayer seemed, from what Boric knew, to be the sort who would hog all the mead. Boric would insist on sitting near Greymaul. Surely his slaying of the Ogre of Chathain twenty years earlier, if not the decapitation of Randor, had earned him that much.

Boric couldn’t hear the shouts of the men below, who didn’t realize he was dead and were nervously handing him possible lines for his speech. “I salute you for your brave, uh, service to Ytrisk,” one of them offered. “I declare this a national holiday with, um, free beer,” another suggested. “And dancing girls!” shouted a third.

All Boric heard were the haunting cries of a Wyndbahr — one of the great, white, winged bears that served as steeds to the Eytriths — the spirits who escorted warriors to the hallowed Hall of Avandoor. The Wyndbahr alighted with a thump on the stone floor next to Boric, its giant, bird-like wings pushing powerful gusts of wind over Boric. The Eytrith leapt from its back. She was a fierce-looking woman, tall and beautiful, and bathed in a sort of bluish-gray light. She wore fine-meshed chainmail and a silvery breastplate that made her cleavage into an inviting crevasse between two vast, snow-covered hills. Her blond hair was braided in a ponytail that reached her waist.

“Boric of Ytrisk,” she intoned, “thou hast been summoned to the Hall of Avandoor!”

“Kick
ass
,” Boric replied, unable to contain his enthusiasm. Wondering if there was a rule against fraternizing with the Eytriths, he got to his feet.

Actually, his feet remained exactly where they were; his spirit was now standing over his body, regarding the pierced husk of flesh with some derision. “Good riddance!” he said, giving himself a kick in the ribs. He was surprised to see the corpse jerk in response to the blow.

“Boric! There is no time to lose!” the Eytrith hissed. “Thou must mount the Wyndbahr!” She was already back on top of the great winged beast.

“Right,” said Boric. “Mount the Wyndbahr.” He moved toward the creature, but something was holding him back.

“Be not afraid,” said the Eytrith, patting the creature on the neck. “He biteth not.”

“Afraid!” howled Boric. “Boric the Implacable fears no creature on Earth or in heaven! I just can’t seem to…”

The problem, it was becoming clear, was that Boric had died clutching his sword, and his brain had never had a chance to issue the order to release his grip. Boric, the spirit, was holding the sword as well. While death had broken the connection between Boric’s flesh and spirit, the flesh-hand and spirit-hand still overlapped on the hilt of the sword, and now he was playing tug-o-war over the sword with his own corpse.

“Thou will have to drop the sword,” said the Eytrith.

“Drop my sword!” cried Boric. “A warrior does not enter the Hall of Avandoor unarmed!”

“We can get you a new sword,” said the Eytrith, dropping her formal tone. “Seriously. We need to go. I’ve got six more warriors to deliver today. If I show up late, they start wandering around, scaring the shit out people. And if they wander too far, I can’t find them, and I get behind schedule. Please, for Grovlik’s sake, just drop the sword!”

Boric was stubbornly attempting to pry the sword from his cold, dead fingers. “Damn you,” he growled at himself. “Let go!”

But Boric the Implacable was as stubborn in death as he was in life, and he wasn’t about to surrender his sword — not even to his own spirit. For this was no ordinary sword: it was one of the seven Blades of Brakboorn — designed by the Elves of Quanfyrr, forged by the Dwarves of Brun, and blessed by the Gnomes of Swarnholme.
^[4]
This sword, known as Brakslaagt, was the blade that slew the Ogre of Chathain, minced the Trolls of Trynsvaan, and banished many a chunk of salted pork that had been stuck between Boric’s molars. He wasn’t about to leave it to be buried with this pathetic meat-sack.

The spirit of Boric tried slamming the corpse’s fist against the stone, stomping on his fingers, even biting his knuckles in an attempt to get it to release the sword, all to no avail. The corpse simply wouldn’t let go.

Voices could be heard from the stairwell leading to the tower. The men had evidently figured out something was wrong and were making their way up to Boric. If they were to emerge from the stairwell now, they would be greeted with the bizarre sight of Boric the Implacable’s otherwise flaccid corpse waving a sword wildly in the air with its outstretched right arm.

“Boric! Let go of the sword!” growled the Eytrith. “This is your last chance! Come now or remain here, cursed to roam the plains of Dis as a wraith!”

“Fine,” muttered Boric, and released his grip on the hilt. But the sword remained in his hand.

“Boric!” growled the Eytrith again.

“I’m trying!” Boric snapped, beginning to feel the slightest inkling of something like fear. His fingers seemed to be stuck to the sword, as if they were frozen in a block of ice. He had no more luck prying his immaterial fingers off the hilt than he had with the corpse’s.

“It’s stuck!” he cried to the Eytrith. “I can’t get my hand off the sword!”

“Well, thou canst not take it with thee,” announced the Eytrith. “Perhaps,” she added after a moment, “the sword is cursed?”

“Oh,” said Boric, remembering something that he had very nearly succeeded in forgetting over the past twenty years. “Oh, shit.”

[1]
All of them, at last count.

[2]
It is also said that history is written by the victors. This was particularly true in the Old Realm, where the official historians at the Library of Avaress had been required for centuries to be named Victor.

[3]
This actually only happened once, and isn’t as impressive as it sounds. When you’ve got a dozen bored archers at the top of a tower overlooking a pasture occupied by some six thousand sheep, it’s only a matter of time before a sheep gets skewered. Additionally, one witness claimed that the sheep deliberately moved into the path of the arrow.

[4]
This last didn’t add any value to the sword, but Boric had been in the area and the Gnomes of Swarnholme liked to bless things.

TWO

When the Old Realm finally collapsed under the weight of its own superlative wondrousness, it left behind a ragtag collection of city-states and quasi-independent fiefdoms that fought like wild dogs over the scraps of the Realm’s bloated carcass. For the average peasant, the end of the Realm was just another reason for things to go to shit. The marauding bandits that had been kept more or less in check by the vague threat of being drawn and quartered by Soldiers of the Realm now roamed freely, raping and pillaging whomever and whatever there was to rape and pillage. Many of the Soldiers of the Realm, who were no longer getting paid on a regular basis, joined in the raping and pillaging as well.

For a brave, resourceful young man like Boric, the chaos presented an opportunity. His father, Toric, had been a wealthy landowner who had begrudgingly paid tribute to the Overlord of the Realm in the distant capital of Avaressa, but when it became clear that Avaressa had become preoccupied with defending itself from the goblins to the east, he withheld his tribute and focused on building an alliance with the petty chieftains in Ytrisk. Toric became the Duke of Ytrisk in defiance of the weakened Realm. After the Realm fell, he had himself crowned King of Ytrisk. Other provinces in the region reacted to the threat of a united Ytrisk by forming their own ad hoc realms — the Peraltians to the east and the Skaal to the south, the Blinskians to the southeast, and beyond Blinsk the Quirini. Avaressa itself was reduced to being the capital of Avaress — now just another of the Six Kingdoms of Dis.

In retrospect, Boric’s ascension to King of Ytrisk may seem to have been assured by his circumstances, but that is far from the truth. For one thing, Boric was the youngest of the three sons of Toric, which doomed him to a tertiary role in the Dukedom of Ytrisk. In fact, his father had it in his head to send Boric to the dismal, rocky island of Bjill, some three miles off Ytrisk’s western coast, to oversee the lucrative pumice mines there. Overseeing Ytrisk’s pumice supply was a vital task in the Kingdom of Ytrisk, but it wasn’t a job with a lot of potential for upward mobility. Additionally, most inhabitants of Bjill succumbed within a few years to a form of gradual, creeping pneumonia known simply as the “Bjills.” Bjill’s low-grade volcanic activity, combined with its location smack in the middle of a ringlet of tall, uninhabitable atolls that arrested nearly all air movement, gave it an atmosphere that was simply too cool, damp, and filled with microscopic crud for mammalian lungs to operate for any extended period of time. Bjill had a single, eternal season characterized by temperatures that lingered halfway between brisk and freezing, and a featureless sky that alternated between dismal gray and black. Only suicide killed more Bjillians than the Bjills.

Boric’s opportunity to escape a death sentence on Bjill came in the form of a wild ogre
^[5]
who wandered down from the Chathain Mountains one day to wreak havoc in southern Ytrisk.

Now the problem with ogres is that they are bullies, and despite being notoriously dim, they have an uncanny ability to know when they are outclassed. An ogre isn’t going to attack a garrison of soldiers or, for that matter, a troll or even a bugbear. Ogres pick their victims carefully, and they are masters of the hit-and-run. Ogres like to hide in caves and drop rocks on passing merchants or feast on errant goats. After the attack, the ogre will skedaddle out of the area and find a new place with easy pickings. He isn’t going to hang around waiting for somebody to be a hero.

This particular ogre, who went by the name Skoorn, was (by ogreish standards) exceedingly clever, and he had developed a taste for what ogres call “screech melons.” Screech melons were small, juicy, pinkish fruits that could often be found in the dwellings of humans. The humans loved their screech melons, taking great pains to keep them from spoiling or being bruised. The humans kept the melons wrapped in cloths and generally stored them in little padded cages, taking them out only occasionally to clean them or perform other screech melon maintenance that was beyond the understanding of ogres. Despite the humans’ devotion to their melons, it was often a simple matter for an ogre to reach through an open window, pluck the melon from a cage, and pop it into its mouth before the humans even knew it was missing. Of course, you could only do this once or twice in a given town before the humans got wise to what was happening and started taking greater precautions to protect their melons. Then you’d have to go back to goats for a while.