Being Wherein
Sidney the Vicious lives up to his name and Fuji (remember Fuji?) lends a hand.
or
What's a nice girl like you doing
in an inn like this?
SID
Glorm poked his head halfway out the window and squinted. Determinedly clopping down the lane came a mounted party.
"Be looking to me like the town guard," he said, climbing back out onto the roof. "This be good! I'll go down and explain things. They be helping us for sure!"
The Sid squawked and leapt to collar the knight errant. Dragging him back in he hissed, "You'll do no such thing! We're strangers in this town and, in case you have *forgotten*, there are *bodies* all over the place! If we're still here when they arrive we'll be arrested for sure!" He shot out the door and jumped corpses down the corridor trailed by the erstwhile Dwarf. "Fire!" he frantically cried pounding down the stairs, "Fire! Fire!"
At the bottom of the stairs, Delrin was riffling bodies as Krinn stood guard with cradled crossbow. Fuji playfully bounced a dark clothed figure's head off the bar. Sid jumped the last half-dozen steps and burst among them and ran for a lamp, "Fire! Fire!"
Krinn caught on instantly. "Oooo!!! F-i-r-e! F-i-r-e!" She pitched a scream in an admirably maidenly voice, "O-o-h! F-i-i-r-r-e!" and whirled in search of fuel.
Fuji's head jerked around. His eyes narrowed. He smiled. "FIRE!" he bellowed like a wounded bull, "*$%@FIRE!" In a flash he vaulted the bar and a limp body slid earthward. Sid dragged a torch off the wall and frantically struck steel to flint to no effect. "Damn cheap faggots!" he cursed mentally, "Damn!" and hurled the stick away. He spun in desperation. And froze in shock! Behind the bar, Fuji hefted a five gallon cask above his head. "No!" he shouted, recognizing the Inn's lamp oil. "Too much!"
Too late. Arm and shoulder muscles knotting, Fuji swayed back, then jack-knifed his upper body forward. "AIEYAYAYA!" a Kandayan war cry ripped his lips and the cask missled across the room. Wood being no match for cornered stone, the cask shattered as in careened off the top edge of the hearthside. Planks and kerosened fish oil sprayed the banked fire within.
All eyes fixed to the fireplace. There was a sizzle. A sputter. There was a groan. A curse. An imprecation. There was hiss, a mist. "Down!" shouted a diving Sid as a !!k-e-e-r-R-R-P-L-O-O-S-H!! rent the air and a huge ball of flame exploded out the hearth, gooshing across the room. Flames covered the hearth face. Flaming oil spattered and stuck to every surrounding surface. Wood and coal ash hung as an impenetrable black sooty cloud. "E-e-e-e-e-e-e--" commenced the Inns fire alarm spell and water began to drizzle from the rooms beamed ceiling. "UELY-UELY-UELY!" ululated a slightly singed but exultant Fuji in an Urakai war cry, "UELY-UELY-UELY!" He capered in victory.
Cries and screams penetrated the attentions of the preoccupied party, this time real ones. Guests, who had wisely kept to the refuge of their rooms when explosions had rudely disturbed their sleep and men began to die in anguish from mortal belly wounds, now responded to the time-honored alarum of "FIRE!" Fire, ever the terror of towns and cities constructed principally of wood, was horror in their hearts. Better to risk a length of steel and a bit of spell then burn, trapped in their beds. The Inn's dozen-odd other patrons began to spill out of their rooms, shouting and pleading! The innkeeper burst through the kitchen door struggling with a large firetarp and an underage apprentice. "My inn! My inn!"
"FIRE!" roared Fuji, "FIRE!" and bear-hugged the encumbered man. "No! No! Let me go! My inn!" the hapless keeper struggled to free himself, "Let go!"
"FIRE!FIRE!FIRE!" Fuji countered in glee and slam-danced the poor man off a wall and back through the kitchen door.
The Sid picked himself up off the floor, coughing black soot, and oriented himself. "Damn that barbarian!" he muttered, "At least he's on our side."
"I think" he amended mentally, as he watched Fuji body-throw the youthful washboy butt-end first through the air to smash through a shuttered window.
"Down!" he cried a second time and slammed into the sawdusted floorboards again. The flames k-e-r-W-O-O-O-S-H-E-D!!, knifing towards the new oxygen with renewed life. If there was any question of the fire spell's ability to contain the blaze unassisted, this put an end to it. It simply wasn't enscorceled with this kind of deliberate mayhem in mind! "Fire!%&*Fire@*! Fuji continued to choke out, kicking and hurling chairs, stools and the odd table into the conflagration.
The Sid rolled onto his back and tried to clear stars from his head. His eyes came to focus on a ceiling licking with flames. K-e-r-A-A-C-K! and one of the ceiling beams gave up, sagged. The fire alarm petered into silence. "A-y-e-e! FIRE!" screamed a suddenly motivated Sid. He rocketed in the general direction of the kitchen door. "FIRE!" and collided with a still whooping Fuji, guided by sound. He pulled him backwards out the door, through the utter chaos of the swirling bodies and smoke.
Emerging coughing into the relatively clearer air of the kitchen, he saw that the innskeeper had apparently resigned himself to the loss of his livelihood. He now struggled mightily to empty the cellar of valuable foods, casks of wine, brandy and platterware. His wife, the two maids, and Glorm, were assisting. He heard rather than saw the thudding of several guests and their belongings from the second story into the stableyard behind the inn. "Come on, you," he growled at a now silent but grinning Fuji. "If we don't make it, I suppose we can try claiming that a country boy simply panicked in the Big City." He slid one hand through Glorm's belt from behind and surreptitiously grabbed a lamp with the other. The three men made their way through the smoke and confusion out the back door.
Emerging into the stableyard covered in soot and coughing, the Sid still managed a piercing whistle. Immediately came the muffled cry of a mighty warhorse and the banging of heavy hooves on wood, and splintering. Releasing Glorm, the other two men raced to the stable and through the door. Carefully sheltering the flame, Sid knelt lamp to pile of straw and another conflagration began. Johnny Rotten emerged from the darkness to the rear, having disassembled his stall in detail. He carried his bridle in his teeth.
Pushing an armload of their gear into Fuji's arms, Sid told him to load the charger and make for the west of town. He then raced from stall to stall freeing the now screaming horses, mules, donkey and the odd goat or two. This was less motivated less by compassion for the innocent animals than by a desire to increase the confusion outside.
Fire-maddened animals burst through the stable door to mill, rear and buck in the courtyard beyond. New screams of terror and pain came as several hapless tenants had arm, rib or leg shattered like matchsticks.
A proud warbeast from hell, black as coal, eyes flaming red, high-stepped through the stable door. Lined in firelight, an equally coal black demon sat astride him. A frightening Urakai cry split the night, "UELY-UELY-UELY!" and the monstrous twosome crushed humans and animals aside to pound into the night.
Unseen, something that could just have been smoke slipped around the stable door, into deepest shadows and was gone. An eyeblink slipped around the stable door and into deepest shadow. Two small green eyes glowed. Then there was nothing.
Later as they wound their way into the wilds to the west of town, the party paused on a small rise to gaze back upon civilization. In the dawning light, dense gray-black smoke rose skyward, underlit with an orange-red glow. The Sid reflected upon the many dead assassins, the destroyed livelihood of the innkeeper, and of his family and dependents. For them, starvation now threatened. He reflected upon the broken, possibly crippled, bodies of the inn's other guests. He reflected upon all these newly ruined lives. All so unnecessary. A tear rolled down a soot-blackened cheek.
He turned away, reshouldering his load with one arm and slapping Fuji's back with the other. Damn, he shook his head, he hadn't had this much fun in years.
He felt like a kid again.
They gathered around the campfire, ten miles west of Cidan and in a small gully that should keep them from being spotted. The fire had covered their tracks well, with the riders, who had turned out to be redcloaks, joining in the attempts to save the inn rather than pursuing intruders.
Glorm quickly and skillfully joined the metal band together, locking the emerald in place, then looked at his handiwork. The jumping cat with the Emerald eyes that formed the hilt of Tanaka’s sword now had a thin silver band around the beast’s waist holding the Blackheart gems on opposite sides of the handle. El Sid, Krinn, and Delrin looked on with interest.
"It be done."
El Sid looked on, a distance expression on his face. "Nothing obvious. Another good idea for getting the stones to do something interesting, but nothing obvious. Maybe it needs to be blooded?"
Krinn frowned. "I don’t know. It clearly didn’t require it in the vision you told me about." The Sid frowned as if he was still unsure telling her about Blackheart was the right thing to do.
"Try to pick it up" suggested Delrin.
Glorm picked up the sword, swung it gently one way, then the other, suddenly fell to one knee with a gasp. Everyone stepped back one step.
Glorm rose back to his feet, and looked at the party under hooded brows. Everyone stepped back another step. "Hee hee hee hee" Glorm tittered uncharacteristically. Delrin stepped back two steps, tripping over a branch, then scrambled back up again in a classic pre-flight position.
"Glorm?" asked the Sid carefully.
"Me be not Glorm, but BLACKHEART." Another titter.
"Oh, shit" said Krinn, turning white.
A laugh.
Delrin scrambled backwards and fell over again.
A guffaw.
El Sid looked more carefully. "Glorm?" he said hesitantly.
"No, be I Black... bla..." hee hee hee... "Be I..." hee hee HO HO HO hee hee.. Glorm finally collapsed in bouts of hysterical laughter. "You... you... you should be seeing your faces..." he gasped out, then collapsed in laughter again.
El Sid gritted his teeth. "VERY." "FUNNY." Glorm stopped laughing, but shook slightly as he tried to swallow his mirth. El Sid let out his breath with an exasperated sigh. "OK, you’ve had your joke. What about the sword?"
Glorm swung the weapon around more seriously. "Nice balance. Feels good. Why don’t Fuji try?"
Fuji took the sword and did the elaborate half-dance of a professional sword fighter warming up. "It IS better" he replied. "Stone skimming water" he called, and the sword swung a tight flat arc in front of him. "Wind rustles reeds" and the sword swung in a overhead arc, switched hands on the downswing, arced again, switched hands on the downswing, arced again, all in one continuous motion that looked deadly and graceful. "Tree dies in agony WHUUUNCK." The tree to the side of Fuji stood long enough that Krinn thought that she imagined the sword passing through it. Then it slowly toppled to the ground. "Head of..."
"We get the idea" called the Sid. He motioned to Fuji, then took the sword himself and took a few practice swings. "Nice. I wonder if the sword, or the death spell, is more valuable? To bad it won’t do both." He pointed the sword at a squirrel. "Die."
The squirrel toppled over.
Glorm looked disapprovingly at the Sid. "It works only once a day. At least you could have gone for something with some meat on it for dinner..."