Book: 4

  Chapter 15

  Open Secrets

  The rattle and clatter of wooden weapons clashing in the garden told the neighbors that the Ward family was awake and active before sunrise… again.

  Gary staggered back, his breath stolen by a well placed blow to his giblets, followed by a shove that left him sprawled on his back, gasping and flailing weakly. Birds wheeled and danced among a few scattered clouds of fluffy whiteness high above, scudding along under a flawless blue sky.

  “You ok, old man?” Barry asked gently, the big, young warrior leaned over his defeated foe and smiled. “We tried to take it easy on you.”

  “Screw you, meathead.” The pummeled musician gasped at the lad. A weak, drifting and fluttery hand raised in a pathetic attempt to theatrically slap the younger man’s face. “I’ll get my revenge… somehow.”

  “Yeah, I’m sure… let’s get you into the baths.” Perry and Larry dragged the battered bard away for a pre-breakfast, post-workout soak in the healing waters that sprang from the void in his soul.

  “How did I wind up facing all four of you brats this morning, anyway?” He grumbled.

  “Mom said to be sure and work you hard while she’s away. She’s the boss.” Harry replied with a grin. “We were only following orders, dad!”

  “Barry, slap your brother for me, please?” Gary asked weakly from the pool. “You’ve always been my favorite!”

  A tiny, piping voice rose from the bamboo and steam, over by the twining passionflowers. “I’m gonna tell Amy what you just said!” Kree complained merrily, as she buzzed in to land on her bonded companion’s nose, while he floated.

  “She’s gonna be so mad!”

  “Sorry, dad, you’re on your own with her!” Perry muttered, as he and his brothers made their escape.

  The four big, doofy lads bumbled and chuckled their way out of the grotto, leaving the man and his tiny familiar in silence, save for the sounds of the water.

  “They will be fine.” Kree mumbled softly at her companion. “Lets take a fly around! That’s always fun!”

  “Can you fly into the Goblin March and check on my wife and kids?” He asked, sounding sullen, crabby and generally pathetic.

  “Stupid skinbag…” The tiny wasp girl sighed sadly. “Within a dungeon level, communication is impossible. You know that. We just have to wait for them to return.”

  “I suppose…” He grumbled weakly. “Am I gonna get my ass kicked like this every morning til they finish? Even my ears hurt.”

  “Big baby. Hold still, I’ll sting you just a little.” The sharp bite of her familiar venom sent Gary drifting off to sleep, his body entangled in water weeds in the hidden grotto pool behind the garden baths.

  /

  Gary woke in the desolate and blasted plains of Luna’s airless surface, in the twilight zone between the light and dark sides. He stood at the very bottom of a vast crater, a few yards from Ghnash and War, who were bickering at each other.

  “Just say it, pal… You think becoming a goblin god is beneath you!” Ghnash snapped at the towering, oiled and blood spattered bodybuilder giant, dressed in absurd, fantastical armor, leaning on a sword that was frankly ridiculous in size, weight and decoration. “You think we’re not worthy of your divine guidance!”

  “Perhaps you are not as stupid as I assumed, creature!” War barked in return. “Try again in ten thousand years; perhaps your species will have developed enough by then.”

  A scant few seconds after Gary appeared, both turned to him shouting and scolding the musician at once. “I’m running out of patience with your boy, Gary.” Ghnash growled, delivering a truly venomous glare with his complaint.

  “While I wish this farce ended! I cannot be forced to Contract this… animal!” War shouted an instant later. “Release this witchery or face divine punishment!”

  “War, you have been Contracted to my brother. Face that fact; your own nature makes the Contract unbreakable, just like all those people you had bound to you back on the other world… Except, this time you are the less than fully consenting party. Feels weird, right? Kinda abusive? Yeah… deal with that, baby.” Gary purred at the gore splattered giant. “The imbalance in the power dynamic is what makes it work so well. Here, you are the supplicant, bound to my brother’s soul to maintain your existence on this world.”

  He turned to the goblin and grinned in a disturbingly mad way. That same, wicked, mad smile took root on Ghnash’s face, making their similarities even more disturbing. “I told you, he’s yours now. Make something useful of him, or feed him to your dungeon core.” The musician shrugged carelessly and laughed, a cruel and bitter sound in that desolate place, far from the worlds of the living. “I don’t care either way.”

  “Don’t believe him, War.” Ghnash sighed at his taller brother, while addressing the god. “Gary can’t seem to let anyone suffer, even complete assholes. I’d bet good money he has a scheme of some kind cooking, just in case I get too rough with you.”

  “Nope. Handle this guy how you see fit. He burned his last chance with me even before he made my wife and kids sad. Now I’m just done with him.” Gary answered in a calm and matter-of-fact kinda way. “I’d have juiced him into the Devourer right away, if I’d known.”

  “You sure about that, Gary? No getting squeamish later?” Ghnash asked with a look of real excitement in his eyes. When Gary just shrugged and sat down on a jagged boulder, Ghnash nodded in silence, as if some communication had taken place between them.

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  “All right, War… It’s time we really started communicating.” The goblin murmured warmly, as he took off his shirt and began stretching out. “We both have some things to work through here, so let’s just be honest about our feelings.”

  “Feelings, mortal? Do you take me for some womanish, mewling weakling?” The deity scoffed, his disdain evident in every fiber of the war-god’s essence. “Go back to your mother’s breast, if that is what…”

  While the giant stood, hands on hips and berated his tiny adversary, Ghnash bunched up his legs and launched his small, green body at the deity's jaw, delivering a vicious double heelkick that sent both forms flying in opposite directions. Ghnash turned his body in flight; gathering himself, before launching off of a crater wall, directly back at War’s tumbling, ungainly blur of flailing arms and legs. The flying king’s fist connected with War’s breadbasket, folding the divine in half with a terrible, wheezing gasp and whimper.

  The war-god staggered away, his momentum arrested and his body wracked with pain. “Reduced gravity and no air resistance…” Ghnash mumbled happily as he stretched a little more and bounced on the balls of his feet, smiling happily. “I am gonna enjoy this, War… I’m gonna enjoy it a lot.”

  “What are you doing! Mortal filth! Stop! I command you!” War stammered through a misshapen face, spilling several of the sacred teeth out with his words.

  “That was not the phrase that pays, buddy. Try again.” Ghnash declared grimly, as he settled a set of ogre bone knuckles over his fists. “You’ll figure out what I want to hear, eventually.”

  “You boys play nice; I’m gonna go visit Ducky and the others.” Gary said mildly, as he slipped through a hedge that existed for only a moment.

  “Huh… I really thought he’d try and stop this.” Ghnash remarked casually, as he twisted War’s tree-trunk sized wrist and slammed the divine to the gritty, jagged lunar surface with punishing force. “We call this an attitude adjustment. Not my favorite way to handle things, but you are just too stupid.” Bone shrouded knuckles drove into the divine abs with each word, hammering the sacred insides into goop.

  War scrambled for his colossal sword, desperate to turn the tide; only to feel iron hard talons around his little toe, dragging him back from the weapon with terrifying strength. “Impossible…” War stammered through broken and bleeding lips, busted teeth and a facial bone structure that looked pretty unstable. “A mortal…”

  “Yes, a mortal man.” Ghnash sighed sweetly, his fist knotted impossibly in the thick, golden metal pectoral armor of the War god’s divine raiment. “We are guests of my brother… In the Fool’s dungeon world, the only size and strength that matters is the strength and size of one’s Will. In this place, all my brothers and I are basically one being…” A vast legion of shadows stirred all around, in every shaded place on the barren lunar surface, they pressed against the thin veil of reality, distorting the world with their presence and gaze.

  “Do you begin to see what you created in us, how you set your own doom in motion?” Ghnash asked softly, delivering a few gentle pats to the battered god’s enormous face. “You and your friends tore me… us, whatever… You shredded us to pieces again and again… What did you think was going to happen when I… uh, he…? Whatever, what did you think would happen, when we started coming back together?”

  “I don’t know… I don’t really remember how it all started.” War mumbled as he sagged to the dusty ground in a slowly drifting cloud of lunar dust. “I was really small, then. I was War, but no one was fighting at all… I just kept getting smaller and smaller.” He mumbled, as his physical form diminished rapidly. “Humans were so war-like when they arrived… I was popular and so many warriors joined my cult!” He sobbed, now appearing as a human man of improbable size, rather than a twenty foot giant.

  “Then, slowly, they stopped fighting each other! Humans just quit waging war! They only fought monsters and beasts! I can’t thrive on that! I’m War, not the Huntsman! I need armies in the field, comrades shedding blood together and the carnage of a victorious army running wild in the streets!”

  “Yeah… that must have sucked for you, asshole. We all want to feel needed and wanted. Did you ever consider a career change? Of course you didn’t.” Ghnash scolded the sobbing divine. “You started scheming with shady beings from the outside to keep your own paltry ass intact!”

  “Morrigan said they were cool!” War complained weakly. “The Light cult wanted to let a few eldritch horrors in and cause a ruckus, so why not? I didn’t know they wanted to exterminate humans!”

  “You thought they just wanted to wipe out a few cities and kill a few hundred thousand people?” Ghnash asked softly, offering the god enough rope to really hang himself well and thoroughly.

  “Exactly! Six or seven generations and they wouldn’t even remember… cause we silenced Knowledge and made him become Secret!” War agreed eagerly, nodding and smiling as best he could in his battered state.

  “Uh, huh… I want you to think about that, War. You tried to murder one of your own and helped your friends drench this world and several others in misery, blood and shame for centuries and centuries…” Ghnash whispered, his face pressed close to the god’s messed up mug. “You’re so close to dissolution right now, I could sweep you under the rug with a thought; but that would be wasteful. Also, I don’t want your essence stinking up the place. You suck ass right now, buddy.”

  The goblin chuckled darkly and patted his broken god on the armored shoulder. “Let’s see what we can make of you, then we’ll decide where you belong.”

  “I’m a divine being…” He sniveled, as Ghnash helped him to his feet. “I am War, immortal and eternal! Worship me!”

  It was a plaintive and feeble thing, less a command than a plea for help from someone who was feeling very lost, small and alone in a big, wide world.

  “Yeah, buddy you’re gonna be just fine; once we get you to see the world from another angle…” Ghnash sighed, as he led the disheveled and bruised divine through the hedge and onto the Madman’s Moon. “This is where we start your training; where you get stronger and learn a few new tricks.”

  /

  “Trick incoming, Benny!” Frankie called from the rear, as he flung another handful of envenomed darts into the mass of ravenous, deranged goblins crowding the passageway. Something small and sparking flew by the huge, armored figure blocking the tunnel in front of the team, to vanish in the dark chamber beyond the knot of furious goblins Benny was holding back. A flash of brilliant light erupted behind the screaming, spear wielding little monsters, followed by screams of fear and pain, as the flash-bang grenade blinded and deafened the troop of gobbs holding the room.

  “Amy, go!” A wildly thrown stone axe rang off Benny’s shield, as if to punctuate Frankie’s shouted command. The din and cry of battle shook the damp, earthen walls of the tunnel, in counterpoint to the low, musical drone of Maya’s iron staff; whistling its song of pain in the dim goblin burrow. Her weapon struck and moaned constantly, holding a tangle of enraged little lunatics at bay as rear-guard, while the goblins screamed for the blood of Adventurers.

  At Frankie’s cry, a blue coated dynamo crashed by the big man who nearly plugged the narrow tunnel, leaving blood and ruin in her wake. Following the Admiral’s rush, Rio and Wilf hurtled past Benny, followed by Maya, cueing the big man to turn and plug the passage behind them, taking the rearguard position from his partner with smooth and practiced confidence. That huge shield of burnished steel shut the swarm off like turning a spigot, leaving a few confused and isolated goblin men staggering around among the armed and armored young Adventurers, wondering where all their friends were.

  Wilf and Rio smashed them down quickly, before turning on the remnants of Amy’s foes, who were having a rough day already. Amy’s cutlass took one of the last green defenders a few seconds later, shearing through his interposing spear-shaft, the arm that held it and the scrawny thing’s neck, before gutting the last gobb standing, while the spear guy’s head was still falling to the damp, earthen floor.

  “Fire in the hole!” Frankie shouted, as he tossed another small object past Benny’s shield, into the tightly packed mob outside. “Masks up!”

  At his command, the team quickly double checked their face protection and whispered the secret words to activate their air filtering enchantments. Seconds later, Frankie’s Habanjero Hotfoot? grenade let out a soft whoosh and a jet of red light, along with a cloud of choking, blinding chili-pepper smoke.

  “Push!” Frank shouted, before the coughing and wheezing barely even began outside. Benny pulled his shield back, unblocking the narrow portal, just as Wilf hurtled out into the mob, a short, stout cudgel in each hand and carnage in his heart. Behind the whirling engine of red armored destruction, Rio and Maya followed; his spear and her long, iron flute dealing out death in the tangle of blinded, choking monsters. In a few short seconds the human kids stood alone, gasping with exertion, adrenaline and exhaustion.

  “Oh, that sucked…” Rio gasped, trying and failing to find somewhere to sit that wasn’t covered with goblin blood, goblin filth or otherwise disgusting in general. “Let’s hole up in that room for a few minutes before we tackle the level boss. It’s less gross in there.”

  “Good plan…” Amy sighed quietly in the suddenly silent burrow. “Rio, help me collect the magic stones.”

  Together, the small, slim girl in blue naval finery and her green armored brother waded through the slowly vanishing field of carnage, plucking tiny red gemstones from each little corpse as they vanished in a cloud of spicy smelling smoke.

  “I feel kinda weird about this…” Amy remarked a few minutes later, when the pair returned with a small sack filled with the miniscule gemstones and sank gratefully to the blankets spread out on the earthen floor for them. “Some of my friends are goblins now.”

  “Dungeon monsters be figments; haunts of memory animated by remnant souls. Dispatching them is no sad thing.” Shai murmured, breaking her art of concealment with a smile for her children and their comrades. “Tis how the dungeon system works, children. Go on now, rest and eat a mite.”

  The tall red-haired adventurer and smith settled in among the kids for a meal in the dim confines sighing with almost perfect contentment. “If only the lot of us could have come together…” Her smile became distant and wistful as she contemplated their return home to her husband and family…

  That thought soured slightly, when she remembered that Gary and the Clown-shoes would be entering this dungeon, the morning after her own party’s return.

  /