A Gamer's Guide 358

I stare at him, feeling my mouth slowly slack open. “Ah. Um…” I look at the others comprising this merry gang. There are several hundred. No… There are only several hundred. I sigh to myself. “Can this wait? Preferably until after we all get killed by the dragon herald?”

“Oh, no worries, Fennrick! I wasn’t planning on anything of the sort. Frankly, my allegiance to his majesty Simel is a purely monetary hand-shaking. A shame, really. If he weren’t so obsessed with undoing you, he could have made a truly great master. That’s what I’ve been looking for, you see. The perfect master. And, believe me, I’ve looked everywhere! I’ve been in the service to two kings, fifteen arch-judges, several dozen judges, and if you wanted to make a list of all the gods I’ve tried to worship, you’d have a complete list of the whole lot! And yet, none have been worthy of my devotion. Somehow, there’s always this one aspect they lack, this little spark…” 

I try not to let my distaste show on my face. “I see…”

For the second time this evening, this guy whose name I don’t even know sees right through me. “You think me a madman, don’t you? Not to worry, you are not the first to view me suchly.”

“No, no, that isn’t it,” I say. 

“No?”

“No. I don’t think you’re crazy, I just…” In the distance, the village is growing nearer and nearer. Now, I’m starting to smell it. The scent of hundreds of villagers, many gathering from the nearby villages to come celebrate, and even more so the smell of foods and things all brought to be sold and shared with one another. Smoked and cured meats, sweets and candies, bread both hard and soft, jams and marmalades, woven baskets and wooden figures, and over all of it, like a single drop of poison in a pot of stew: the rotten, dead odour of fermented grapes and burnt sugar. I swallow my words. There’s no time to argue with a madman about how stupid it is to try to find the perfect master. “I see something of myself in you, that’s all.” A part of myself I’d rather forget. 

“Really? How flattering! From what I’ve heard of you, this could mean many things. I tend not to pay too much heed to the tales his majesty Simel regales as they are always tinged with the insanity of the survivor. He has seen too little of war. The goddess of war has made her abode in his city, and yet he holds no faith in purifying fire? Ridiculous! Not to misspeak, of course. I have been in her service. To burn is not to live. She can be very cruel, and as I refused the ordeal of ash, she would not have me. To think there would yet remain a god with notions of such purifications! And after what brought about the extermination, too? No, it is not to be. Gods are not to be waited upon...”

The smells are growing stronger now. I can tell the villagers apart by the concentration of sweat on them; the degree to which they fear. There is so much terror. All of them, afraid. I can smell the kids too. Lisa, Nils, Uyurum… 

I choke on nothing. A big fat ball of nothing has lodged itself in my throat and even though I have no need for breathing the animal part of my brain that still thinks I can faint is screeching and braying breathe! breathe! you must breathe! But I can’t breathe, and I won’t, because if I breathe, then I’ll smell it again. 

I’ll smell how Lett is missing. 

“How’s the situation?” Rice asks from right next to me. 

“I don’t know,” I tell her weakly. “I genuinely don’t know.” But the village is approaching now, and the closer we get, the more striking the scent becomes. The smell of the unwanted intruder. Rotten fruit and dust and the cellar mom told me not to go into as a kid but I still did. Like the cellar with the dusty wine bottles lining termite-eaten shelves on a stamped dirt floor. And all at once, with the same innate understanding as I understand addition and subtraction, I understand that the herald’s heart doesn’t beat. The realization doesn’t even feel like a shock, but rather a memory being uncovered, and it feels so right to recognize that I can’t even pretend to be unhappy with it.

It has a heart, but it doesn’t beat. Dead flesh and dead blood.

The village rears over the horizon with its snow-squashed houses and plowed roads. Rice shoots me a glance, soundlessly asking for directions; I merely point dead ahead. 

The thundering approach of several hundred drakes echo across the village unhindered, because there’s no other noise to be heard. There is neither screaming nor shouting. As we rush between squat houses and gentle, carved icons, I can’t help but smell deeply and carefully. “Nobody is dead,” I mutter, half in awe, half in fear. Why would nobody be dead? It’s a herald. Heralds kill and leave villages and cities aflame. That’s what they do. And this herald is a dragon. “Nobody is dead, but…”

Little abandoned food stalls and seasonal decorations begin appearing by the sides of the road. Woven crowns of dried hay to praise the god of harvest, late-blooming bundles of flowers in remembrance of the god of yesterdays, and little wooden dolls to be thrown in the fire as worship to the goddess of fire. I remember. Aunt Gyrdle explained them to me so I’d know to put the hay crown on my head and throw the little wooden dolls in the fire—not the other way around. I had been looking forward to it.

On the side of the road lies one such wooden doll in the shape of a friendly, smiling child. As we rush by, it is absently trampled underfoot by one of the many galloping riders. 

“There,” Rice says, forcing me to look ahead. There’s a crowd of people, alive, standing around. Waiting? I can’t tell. Once we’re close enough, I can tell that there are a few crushed houses around them. But no one is hurt severely. 

They turn to us as we approach, their faces glassy and absent, as though they can’t really tell what they’re looking at. A few move to let us through, but most simply stare at us, dazed by whatever happened before we came. 

Close enough to communicate, Rice addresses a nearby villager, saying, “You—please tell us what—”

I leap from the back of the drake and rush through the crowd on all fours, deftly weaving between feet and legs and confused, yelping people until I finally arrive right next to one of the crushed houses. There. There they are. All together, some in each others arms, watching a trail of destruction leading out of the village. I rush to them and grab a hold of Glyph’s arms, unheeding of how tightly I’m holding her, only barely introspective enough to know that I must look wild, and with her foggy, vaguely stupified face mere inches from mine, I shout, far louder than I should, “WHERE IS LETT?!”

Her head starts to shake, but I can’t tell if she’s even conscious of it or not. Unhappily, I realize again that even though this might be the maddest I’ve been in months, I have none of the biological functions to punctuate it. I feel as cold as a corpse at a funeral. Nothing in my body anchors the anger, and I know that it will soon be gone, leaving another hollow indentation where  a feeling was supposed to be. 

I shake her harshly. “WHERE, DAMN IT?!”

“He was taken,” she whimpers, and now she’s starting to cry. “I couldn’t—I couldn’t stop—”

“By who?”

She shakes her head again and it takes everything I am and everything I have no to slap her across the face. A hand reaches out to grip my wrist and I see Holly, her face showing all the rage I wish I could have. “Stop it,” she whispers. “Stop hurting her.”

“Tell me,” I say to her, my voice trembling. “Tell me who took him. It was a dragon, wasn’t it? A dragon took him, and—”

“No,” she says, her voice suddenly full of strength. “There was a dragon, but it didn’t—oh, God, it wasn’t…”

“There was a boy,” Holly pipes in. But even though her words seem clear, there’s some deep disbelief in her voice, as though she were sharing a hallucination and not a true event. “A little boy in purple clothes, with a huge nose.”

“And no ears.”

“No ears,” Holly agreed. “He came on that dragon, and he took Lett, and then they left.”

“Why is no one hurt?” I ask. Honestly, I can’t even tell if I’m asking them or if I just want my question heard.

“I don’t know,” Glyph says. “I just don’t know.”

Okay. They are no longer useful to me. Even without great values sniffer, I can still smell the trail of stench leading towards the church. I can’t fathom why they would be going there, but it’s unimportant. I just have to get there, defeat the dragon, and everything will be fine. Maybe it would be best if I did it alone? It’s a dragon. If Rice comes along, there’s no telling what will happen, not to mention the rest of the cavalry. But I’ll need the speed of the drakes. Every moment I spend here muttering about things is another moment wasted. I have to go, and I have to go now.

As I turn around to leave, a hand falls on my shoulder. I turn to look and find Glyph’s face clenched up in desperation. “Please,” she says, pathetically. “Let me come along.”

“You’ll die,” I tell her.

“I don’t care,” she says. “It’ll be a worthy death to save him.”

Thankfully, although I do happen to like her, I’m not attached enough to care much whether she lives or dies. “Alright,” I say. “But we need to hurry.”

For a moment, Holly’s gaze hops between the two of us, eventually settling on me. “Me too,” she says, with far less strength than I assume she hoped for. “I’ll also come along.”

I frown at her and gesture at the crowd of empty-eyed orphans standing and sitting right behind them. “What about the kids?” But even now, ants are crawling across my back, telling me to hurry and hurry and hurry because who knows what’s happening to Lett at this very moment? 

“I’ll take care of them,” someone says, and I watch as Aunt Gyrdle rises slowly, cradling two silently weeping children in her arms. “Please. Bring him back home.”

Holly nods to her with all the gravitas of a knight going to war, which we really don’t have time for. “We will.”

Or you’ll die. But that’s unimportant. “Right, yeah, of course, let’s go, please let’s just go, okay? Okay.” Grabbing both of these damn humans by the hand, I begin dragging them through the bovine and unaware crowd, successfully making them part like the red sea by applying a generous amount of killing intent. Useful. But it’s still too slow. 

Diediediediediediediediediediediediedie.

Please don’t let us be too late. Oh, God, please let Lett be okay. 

Please.