Nightfall (Book 1) (28 page)

The next spot of bother we ran into was only two days later and it was not quite what one would normally expect; we ran into quicksand, to which we nearly lost four of our group, and I thought had killed Mattin, until Izar shoved me out of the way and jump started his heart and got his lungs working again. That, however, was not when we lost our pack
—
that happened a few days later when we were being chased by a gnome.

Gnomes are tall and that one was no exception, he was three times my height, with a spindly body, vaguely resembling a tree with two branches and two roots, he was grey in color, with light blue tracings all over his hide, and his arms and branches bore drooping lichen. Gnomes rarely attack travelers, but they are extremely curious and have a strong grip; their prodding usually results in the curio being squeezed to death. Anyway, Balendin tripped and before he could right himself, the gnome had caught hold of his pack. The elf slipped his arms from the pack and was able to escape, the exchange was easily worth it,
so we let the pack go.

~ ~ ~

Over the next six days, I got to find out what a goblin looked like, kill a couple of them, and be annoyed to no end by their pestiferous little cousins, the hobgoblins. The fifteenth day of our journey we heard ghouls screeching through the treetops. I wanted never to hear the soul-shattering sound again, and wondered why the creatures were permitted to live within the bounds of the sunlit realms.

~ ~ ~

So it was that I found myself kneeling in front of Sendoa, as he drew a general layout of the icebound mountains we would shortly be passing through. “This thin area of the mountain range, which is to the West of us,” he pointed in the direction mentioned, “would be the quickest, though this time of year the stretch of plains bordering the sea will be teeming with basilisks, so we shall be taking the Northern route, which will take a bit longer because of the width of the mountain range, but is less likely to harbor any basilisks. Also, we will be trekking across the wasteland for a whole day’s march.” He blended the picture he had drawn back into the dirt, and looked up at the circle of faces gathered around. “If any of you still wish, you may follow the coast, though I will not be guiding you,” he said, a trickster’s grin spread across his face.

The firelight playing across the look on my friend’s face made me think of a deranged beast on the prowl. The sinister persona disappeared as Sendoa stood and stretched, yawning before he announced that he was ready to get his greatly needed rest, after the day’s surprises. His words were meant as a joke though, since we had not run into anything throughout the course of the day, and we had been able to march straight through it in relative quiet.

~ ~ ~

As the first bright rays of sunlight split through the trees, they pierced through to my sleeping mind, and in my attempt to ignore them I pulled myself from the realm of dreams and into wakefulness. I rolled onto my back and lay there in silence, listening to everything around me, before blowing the almost black lock of hair out of my eyes; I needed to trim my hair. It was still dark out, but again the bright flash of light pierced my line of sight and I turned to look in the direction it had come from—the West. I started; the sun did not rise in the West.

A small creature, mostly resembling a small, black, furry ball of fluff, held my dagger, which had caught the reflection of the full moon and shone it in my eyes. “Hey,” I shouted, and caught sight of two large, black eyes before the startled being bounded away and disappeared back into the dimness of an early morning, deep within the forest.

I only had time to grab my belt and its sheathed occupants before I bounded into the woods, pursuing the little thief. I could hear the creature scurry ahead of me, its hasty movements left a wake of disarray amongst the undergrowth and I found it quite easy to follow its path, though I never did catch up to it. After an hour of chasing the creature who had stolen my knife, I was ready to give up. I made no headway; I could see the creature’s disruption of the plants ahead, but I never gained even a foot of distance on it, and I was sure the others would call me foolhardy for chasing recklessly through unfamiliar woodlands.

I came to a stop and stood there, I let the creature continue on its way, its prize won. I heard a scuffling behind me and spun around. There was a small arrow on a bare section of ground before me, it was formed with acorns and pointed in the direction I had been going.
What is this?
 I wondered. I turned around again, and there in the direction I had recently been facing, was another arrow, facing the same direction. “Who are you? And what do you want?” I asked aloud.

There was another bit of rustling ahead of me, so I took a few steps forward and there was another arrow, laid carefully in the dirt. My feelings did not tell me to run back to my friends, so I took a chance and continued on the path I had been following, though at a slower pace, more wary of my surroundings. Whenever I would slow down or pause to take in
 my surroundings, an unseen visitor would again lay an arrow of acorns, to make sure I was still following in the direction they desired.

There was a second point when I sincerely considered returning, but still my instincts told me to continue on, even though my head did not. I was again ready to turn back, when through the trees ahead, I caught a glimpse of a bare hilltop. No arrows came when I paused, but the clearing ahead intrigued me; was that what the creature had been leading me toward? I heard a cry of terror ahead, and was startled by the sound of a human voice.

The pained sound was something I would not blatantly ignore, so I hurried to the hill and climbed it, and lowered myself to the ground as I reached the peak, so that I could look out over the valley below without being spotted. In the bowl of the valley, a small village was collected into a small circle with an empty space in the center for the inhabitants to gather in, surrounded by the houses and shops in two rings. I wondered how such a small society could survive there, so far from anything else—so far especially from the help of other nearby towns or havens.

The village square—obviously they had paid no heed to the fact that that indicated that it should have four straight
sides, and the same number of corners—was much larger than the rest of the village, it could easily have contained three or four times as many people as I assumed lived in the small establishment. Though it was the middle of the night, I noticed that a few people stood in the square, and there was a ruckus as an old man, with three small children huddled around his legs, was pulled from a house and into the cold, open space in nothing but their nightclothes.

The antagonists were a group of armored men, and filthy goblins wielding rough-hewn spears. An evil laugh came from one of the men as, from the next house, a family, including a girl my age, was pulled into the square. The man who had laughed stepped toward the girl and stroked her long, messy hair. The girl’s father stepped up to the man and told him to leave his daughter alone. That angered the other man and he hit the father, sending him to the ground.

“Who are you—that you think you can speak to me?” the man yelled, outraged. “Who do any of you think you are—that you can do anything against me? I own you,” he howled. “I bring you food, I let you live, and this is how you repay me? By withholding my payment?” He sneered at the girl’s father, and turned to look her up and down. “You have no champion, how can you possibly hope to do anything but what I tell you?”

I was already half-way across the field from my hideout to the group, before I really thought about what I was doing, but since I was already there I was not going to turn and walk away from the people. Leaving them to that evil man’s will was not something I could bear to have on my conscience, even if I knew I was the only one who knew of their existence, as miserable as it was. “They do have a champion,” I challenged, and my voice rang out strong and clear across the open space. I was glad that my voice had not broken, to betray my trepidation over the scenarios that ran through my mind.

The man was startled and let go of the girl, who quickly ran back to her family, and checked on her father, who had just risked his life for her. The brute turned toward me and guffawed. “You are just a boy,” he laughed.

I ignored his comment and stepped forward into the torch, and moon, light. “Where is your own champion? I would destroy him so that I can send you hightailing it into misery and shame, where you will come to know what you have inflicted upon these people.”

He seemed at least impressed by the fact that I was still holding my ground. “You really think that you can beat whomever I send against you in battle? That you can destroy me?”

“I do. I would follow you into uninhabitable wastelands of poisonous fumes and acidic rain; I would even follow you to the doorsteps of the Abyss and beyond, if that were required to end you.” I inwardly chuckled at my boasting, doubting that there were any lands even vaguely resembling the first I had described.

He laughed, beginning to think that I was just boasting myself into an intimidating figure, that I was mocking him into an easy defeat. “Would you now? First you must defeat my man, and then we will see if you can do these things, or if you are just a foolish boy trying to tempt fate.”

“If you do not mind; I have been waiting over-patiently.”

He smirked. “Bittor,” he roared, exclaiming the name as if to summon some dreadful wonder to come from the Abyss and rend my soul.

My guess came pretty close to the actual thing. From the forest opposite my earlier hiding place, an earth-thundering tread began, and brought my opponent toward the small village. “Let us go have some fun watching this upstart whelp get his arrogance beaten from existence,” the man crowed. He forgot the villagers and led his men out into the larger clearing of the valley. His men herded me along, but after one of them was knocked unconscious, they kept a distance from me.

The horde formed a half-circle in the enormous, flat, open space, and evenly distanced themselves from me, and waited to see my demise. The thundering footsteps carried a colossal cyclops toward me; his size paled in comparison to the demon Lord I had banished, but for a cyclops he was incredibly oversized, his head reached the height of the village’s tallest building.

The cyclops did not have horns as an ogre would, but he had small, stubby tusks that protruded from
the sides of his mangled, snarling maw. His single eye was bloodshot, likely an effect of some hallucinogenic substance his master had given him to keep him loyal beyond the point of death. His mouth foamed, and he was eager to be given the word to tear me apart, piece by piece. I wondered how it had been possible to work him into such a state in the small amount of time that I had been talking to the village’s tyrant. Surely it could not be safe to keep the brute around if he were in a constant blood-rage.

Bittor’s hide had been dyed red and his only clothes were a ragged loin cloth with varied lengths of cord hung from it, each covered in brightly painted wooden beads. He had one large, puckered scar from above his eye
 and down the left side of his face to his jaw. The rest of his body was covered in various white scars, but none of them were as prominent as the one on his face.

“Ah, Bittor, my friend,” the man exclaimed, as if to a pet. “This boy here thinks he can kill
 me. I need you to teach him a lesson. Kill him,” he shouted passionately. The cyclops let out a bellowing roar and charged me, and raised his club over his head; the weapon was easily as big as my entire body. I leapt from the path of the falling cudgel and it hit the ground hard, and left a crater when the cyclops wrenched it from the earth. While my opponent was distracted with retrieving his weapon, I spun around him and hacked at his calf; my sword clanged after it passed through the hide, and bounced back at me with the force of my blow still behind it. I got control of my weapon as I stepped back to admire the piece of work before me. Not only was Bittor likely the largest cyclops ever, but he had been given an unearthly metal exoskeleton, hidden from his enemies by his thick hide which easily masked the desecration done to his body.

He charged toward me again, as limber as if he had no suit of armor covering his body. I was astounded; the metal plates should have hindered his movements. I let him swing the club at me again, before I leapt out of the way so that he would have to pull the piece back from the ground. Again, I got behind him, but that time I aimed for a joint. I was pleased to discover that my sword bit into flesh, and I heartily yanked it from above the beast’s thigh, just below his hip. The cyclops howled in pain and his master yelled, obviously displeased that I had found the chink in his weapon’s armor.

Though I had easily found a way to get through his defenses, I still had to find somewhere that I could get a killing blow, and I had to keep myself alive in the meantime. His heart was certainly protected, his spine would be as well, but his head could have a spot somewhere around his jaw. I did not know how I would get to his head though—I did not doubt that he would try to bite me in half if I got too close to his maw.

When the club sank into the ground again, I drove my sword into the cyclops’ knee, and heaving all my weight against the hilt, I drove the blade through the joint toward his kneecap. I had to leave the sword behind and run, as his huge hand slammed down toward me. The hand made contact with the ground where I had been standing, and as he lifted it, he bumped the sword, and caused it to stick in the bone. Bittor tried to stand and as he did so, the muscles that had been clenched together, and that my sword had pierced, were sliced as they tore away from each other, causing him tremendous pain. I felt a leap of hope as he fell back to the earth.