Book 3 Sound And Fury

  Ch 18 Night Terrors

  The walls of Numbly town weren’t very tall or particularly thick; but they were all that the eight thousand permanent residents and around one thousand traders, travelers and merchants in the besieged town currently had to hide behind. The flying, flame spewing nightmare nesting on the beach made the sturdy stone structure feel deeply inadequate.

  That a strange madman had somehow made his way atop the battlements was not nearly as concerning, however wild his claims might be.

  “The god of death? And figs?” Marshal Benedict sighed wearily and turned to a nearby young legionnaire. “Corporal Smythe, get this loon off my walls and tuck him away someplace safe… where he can’t hurt him… self?”

  As the soldiers and officers on the wall watched, the strange man waved his arm dramatically at the sky. Slowly, an image began to appear in the clouds of smoke from the ravaged docks, the image of a goblin man clad in brown robes and sandals, standing in the ruined market square. A brief, shuddering flicker passed over the clouds, jolting the figure into sudden movement.

  The small, strangely handsome monster capered and jeered silently at the ragged corpse of the enemy leader. A corpse that threw flames, lightning and darker forces from his hands in great scything arcs. Again and again the dead man flung energies and spells at the fast moving lesser monster, striking nothing at all aside from wreckage.

  With a dancer’s grace and supreme confidence, the goblin warrior alighted on the sandy soil and struck a pose of infuriatingly casual indifference. His rude gestures and obscene hip thrusting dance moves were aimed directly at the undead wizard; who was busily calling up more unclean forces to fling at the obnoxiously cocky little monster.

  “Hmm…” The goblin murmured contemplatively, between the lich’s spells. “I think maybe some of that damaged flesh is slowing you down. Let me help out.”

  A bolt of sickly gray lightning sundered a palm tree into rotting splinters of decaying pulp, while Ghnash dashed in close and twisted the dead man’s horribly mangled left arm off with sickening and squishy pop.

  The muscular and athletic goblin hurled the shattered limb into a nearby burning hut and thrust his obsidian tipped spear into the soil, looking theatrically disappointed. “No, you just suck at fighting.”

  He grinned cheekily at the lich lord while he abandoned the weapon and sprang away from a hurled clot of boiling human fat, conjured and thrown by his undead opponent.

  The searing, sizzling mass resolved into a tangle of reaching, grasping hands as it flew, hands that gamely clutched at the elusive monster… before the boiling fritture golem splattered into the hut, setting it fully ablaze once more.

  That flickering light danced across the clouds, illuminating the battle, watched over by the strangely placid undead dragon. After a second or two, sound erupted from the battle among the clouds, a slightly high pitched male voice, taunting his foe.

  “Nub nub, deadman. Gobbos are quick quick… Need faster spells, better targeting! Focus up!” Ghnash scolded the corpse, as he spun past him, close enough to reach out and swat the undead creature on the ass… which he did, loudly.

  “I dropped my spear for your sake, noob! Get up off your heels, lich boy… I had a long flight to get here! The least you can do is provide some entertainment before I tear the unlife out of you!”

  The goblin sprang off his toes and took a quick spin around a porch post that was all that still stood of a demolished house. On his second revolution, he released the pole, flying right at the confused lich… and kicked the corpse in its reeking, battered belly.

  With an awful and sickening sound, the goblin fell, his foot entangled in the corpse’s spilt and tangled entrails. Slowly the ropey, rotting flesh convulsed and began dragging the hapless goblin close, seeking to pull him into the dead man’s ruptured abdomen and the unknowable filth waiting inside.

  “Oh, nasty nasty! You has tricky tricks, dead man! Ghnash has tricks too… wanna see one?” In a flash, the goblin stopped resisting the grasping bowels and leapt at the shambling cadaver.

  He grappled the rotting thing face to face, the goblin’s left hand deep inside the corpse, rooting around while the lich tried desperately to get a spell started. That was complicated by the goblin’s right hand, which punched the undead man in the face, every time he began an incantation.

  All the while, the goblin witch whispered dark things into the dead man’s ear, in frequencies that Fletcher was unable to hear.

  Frustrated and furious, the lich lord began waving the fingers of his right hand in a complex gesture.

  “Somatic components? Nub nub… not for you anymore…” Ghnash barked cheerily, right before he lashed out and sheared all four of the corpse’s fingers off in a single bite. He chewed twice and swallowed, followed by a loud belch of satisfaction. “Oh, no more fingies… So sad for you!”

  The goblin followed up with a savage punch to the throat that crushed the dead man’s vocal apparatus into goop.

  “It’s fun… Playing with dead things and tormenting the helpless… isn’t it, deadman?” The goblin cooed cruelly from the clouds, two hundred feet tall and leering with vicious joy at the lich, his left hand still lost inside the horribly abused corpse’s torso.

  “I’m finished playing with you now, so it’s time. My wife will be cross, if I come home with too much dead human all over me…” He looked down at his robes and sighed wistfully.

  “Aww… now Ghnash is gonna be in big big trouble! Goblin wives get all neat and tidy, when they are babyfull. Ghnash has many many wives…” He confided with a wink, as he tore the corpse’s heart out with a quick twist and tug.

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  Fletcher the lich lord watched from his vesel’s eyes, as he fell to the ground, inert, trapped in an immobile cadaver. “How…?” He croaked up at the cheerful goblin standing over his collapsed vessel.

  “The remnant ghost of this poor man you are riding around in… He is still in there, trapped with you, bound to your Will. Most necromancers learn to speak with the dead, and then wind up only speaking to the dead. Witch doctors also listen to the dead. In return, they listen to us.” The goblin jeered at his helpless foe.

  “I told him he can’t move once I tear out his heart. Ghosts are gullible… They trust me and he thinks you are a huge asshole.”

  The goblin king sang out happily over his fallen foe. “I could bury you like this, trapped and helpless in this decaying meat until he returns to the soil entirely…” Ghnash mused thoughtfully at the desperate haunt infesting the mangled corpse. “But that would leave the scraps of poor Albert’s shade stuck in there with you…”

  “Ghnash…” The immense dragon rumbled quietly from the shore. “We promised Gary we’d do no funny business. Pull this idiot’s soul out and let’s be done. We are frightening the locals unnecessarily.”

  /

  “To be clear…” The madman on the city wall sighed breathily into the night breezes and gazed into the distance with a pensive expression on his absurdly handsome face.

  “My brothers down there are just wandering Adventurers from very far away. They will clean up this mess and then fly away, lord Benedict. Can I call you Ben?”

  “Uhh? What?” The exhausted and battered lord asked, his facade of calm finally crumbling to dust and blowing away before the tempest of absurdity raring through his quiet little frontier town. “Adventurers?”

  “Exactly… and we all know how high level Adventurers are, right? Especially Delvers.” He almost whispered his words, leaning close enough that the lord could smell the strange man’s scent of green growing things and sun warmed fig tree; undercut with a whiff of cold, fresh turned grave soil.

  “We can just chalk this up to the strange and obscure abilities of these odd Adventurers… Guild members in good standing, I might add…” He displayed a pair of Adventure badges, new minted and iron ranked.

  “Yes, Adventurers with the guild… I see.” The lord mumbled, as he slowly sank to his butt on a battlement with a long sigh of relief. “That makes so much sense…”

  “Corporal Smythe… Can I call you Jimmy? Run fetch his lordship some tea, please. We need to have a little chat, in private.” Ward asked the very nervous young legionnaire who was still standing there, paralyzed by indecision and a feeling of dread that radiated from the man in black, despite his pleasant smile and radiant good looks.

  “His lordship is…” Corporal Smythe began feebly, as he squirmed in his red armor.

  “That was an imperative, dressed as a request, Jimmy.” The man spoke with a hint of authority in his voice, a faint flicker of something beyond his ability to understand, but was impossible to resist or deny.

  “We will meet again, you and I, that is certain. I meet everyone at least once, my friend; for I am Death, the gateway to your next adventure and all the mysteries of the universe.”

  His slightly crooked, more than a little mad smile reappeared, as he made a gentle shooing motion at the young warrior. “Run along now, Jimmy.”

  /

  “Hmph… No fun at all!” The goblin complained as he produced a long flute of yellow bone from his filthy robes. “He was so weak, I didn’t even work up a sweat!” With that, he began to play his instrument in long, slow and sweeping notes that drifted like fog in the night breeze. The music swayed and drifted in tones of birdsong and rustling leaves, bubbling springs and green growing things under moonlight.

  “Very nice, brother… What is that? Something original?” Necro asked softly when the music paused.

  “Old goblin lullaby, it’s called ‘Wrist Deep In Entrails’...” He shrugged and went back to his work. “It sounds better in marsh gob dialect.”

  Five long minutes and another goblin folk tune later, Ghnash was scowling at the intractable corpse. “Lich is stuck in there. He must have a phylactery of some kind… was probably on his ship. Sunk now, I suppose.”

  “Well, that complicates things.” The dragon complained mildly. “I doubt many locals could approach such a thing, even if it were not underwater, lost in a half burnt hulk.”

  “Aura of undying… typical of these clowns.” Ghnash agreed, after contemplating the harbor for a moment. “Soul jar…” Ghnash muttered angrily. “This guy pickled his soul in obscene liquor… Willingly!”

  “Really?” Necro asked, suddenly much more interested in the wretched lich, trapped in his rotting corpse. “What would drive a creature like this to risk his existence by travelling the void, with his soul in a jar of booze?”

  The vast dragon head rose from his nest to eye the sad heap of flesh at Ghash’s feet. “Can you speak to him? Or compel him to speak?”

  “Nub nub… Albert’s ghost has him bound up for as long as his body remains intact. In his rage, the angry slave has dominated this nameless lich and refuses to allow his former master any agency. If we do nothing this filth will go free in a few decades, a century or two at most, until then Albert will not be moved.” Ghnash muttered angrily.

  “Nevermind that soul jar, brothers; I will see it taken care of.” Ward announced calmly, while stepping out of the shadows of a creeping fig vine.

  “As for this bag of meat… I can’t touch either of those two. They have both embraced undeath and slipped beyond my reach. When their struggle ends, one of them will slip free. The other will stupidly believe himself free, while existing inside a jar.”

  The tall man leaned over the remains lying on the ground and smiled. “Now, Fletcher… You have my apologies. Yes, I see you, Fletcher Asmuth, Necromancer lord and aspirant to the cult of light’s inner council. Earlier, when we spoke, I was wrong on two counts. You Are important enough for me to learn your name… And you Will be meeting my brother, Gary.”

  He turned to the goblin and smiled warmly, a sturdy oilcloth tarp held out in his hands. “Could you bundle our friend and his captive up in this? I can’t really touch the material world directly, without Gary or his kids nearby.”

  “Sure, Ward…” Ghnash sighed, taking the cloth from his brother’s semi-substantial hands. “Hey! This is nice material!”

  “Oh, You like it? A friend weaves it for me… Lady SpiderBoobs will be quite flattered…” Ward’s saucy wink and sly chuckle helped Ghnash ignore the fact that he was shoveling some very decrepit and moist human remains into an artifact created by his Contracted goddess’ own spinnerettes.

  /

  “I still reject being called ‘the Chariot’; even if you insist on treating me like a taxi…” Necro complained gently, as the goblin and his undead dragon mount flew back off into the night, leaving a deeply confused but elated town behind them.

  “Such a tsundere…” Ward sighed, emitting a long, high chirp from his proboscis, once more in the form of a bat man.

  “Why are you even here? Can’t you just god stuff your way back to the inn?” Necro demanded, a few jets of ghostly blue flame flickering deep in his skull.

  “God stuff?” Ward scoffed merrily. “You guys slay me! Even though I can step through the shadows and emerge from beneath any fig tree in this and several other worlds, flying home in victory can’t be beat. You gotta enjoy the simple pleasures of living.”

  “Why are we carrying this sack of reeking offal all the way back?” Necro asked, hoping to divert the odd being back into useful topics. “I could incinerate the corpse and then fish that wretch out of the bay later. He won’t cause any trouble, down in the silt… Aside from ruining their little harbor for shipping.”

  “We’re giving him to Gary…” Ward answered confidently.

  “Your normal rank bard?” Necro sighed wearily. “Ghnash and I are the most capable of our family, when it comes to handling the undead. If we can’t do any more with him…”

  “Nub nub… Ward is right.” Ghnash muttered. “Let the Fool have him.”

  Ward whistled a short melody of agreement, harmonising with Ghnash, as they flew through the cool, summer night.

  “He’s been out of the game for a while, but nobody handles the undead like my brother… The guy has a gift for managing the unmanageable.”

  /