The Heist

There weren't always dragons in the Valley. Nor were there any these days. But no one could tell you why except the one who got them gone.

“What’re me and Lanny doing?” Bifram asked.

“Right,” Meander unrolled a map, “My contact with the town’s criminal underground is going to get you in on the operation to hit one of the caravans delivering part of the tribute. They’ll take the gold et cetera while you two drive or push the armored carriage to a clearing here,” he pointed at the appropriate place on the map, “where you’ll strip the metal plates so Lanny can carry the rest of the car to a secondary location,” he dragged his finger over the parchment, “an abandoned cave. If the local goblins have shacked up there, evict them.”

Lanhulda was nodding along at the prospect of a fight, but Bifram’s brow was furrowed.

“Won’t the carriage be redundant if Valerius ends up having a bottomless bag?”

“Yes,” Meander rolled the map back up and handed it to Bifram, “But you’re primarily after the registry of ships that will deliver the full tribute over the Sea. This hit isn’t all daggers—you’ll alter the sheet to read one less ship coming from this town. The underground is using barbarians for muscle so this looks like a raid. It won’t seem suspicious that they don’t take any of the important documents traveling with the caravan.”

“And they’d be expected to strip the car for Kingdom-quality metal,” Bifram finished.

“Yeah, and they make perfect fall guys,” Lanhulda quipped with a rare, dangerous glint in her pale barbarian eyes.

“Easy, Lanny,” Ghev said and put his hand on her shoulder.

“Yeah,” Meander cut back in placatingly, “They’re going to be unmarked and considering this town’s proximity to the wilderness, it’ll be impossible to pin it on a particular tribe. The Kingdom won’t risk a retaliatory attack without firm proof, even with the Empire on their side.”

Lanhulda sat back in her chair and brushed off Ghev’s hand.

“Fine,” she said.

The forest around Pillar Sole was rather sparse. Marbledown was close enough that Pillar Sole as a town didn’t need lumber for building at all and the previously crowded forest caught fire almost apocalyptically.

But the near-total destruction of the canopy didn’t get rid of the shade around Pillar Sole, it lowered it: a fern spike in the carpet of ash covered the ground for miles around the town. What the townsfolk had feared would be a blank, black canvas was splashed with a green so vibrant and variant that it seemed iridescent.

In the short, ashen time between the fire and ferns, the region around Pillar Sole was called Giant’s Shadow, now just “the Shade.”

So, it was in the shade of the Shade that Lanhulda and Bifram waited on either side of the road for the caravan to come through. The tenacious ferns pressed on either side of the road, entirely obscuring the dikes packed with barbarians.

“We set up a landscaping front,” the criminal contact had said, “so when the town outsourced the keeping of the roads they came to us. We had our plant in the guard push the idea that it was beneath the guardsmen’s dignity to do that kind of work and bam, now we control how much room there is to hide on the road.”

Bifram had nodded approvingly. Lanhulda just shrugged.

“Fuck, you see that?” a barbarian said to one of his friends next to Bifram.

Biff pushed himself up to see through a generous gap in the fern cover: there were only six horses in the entire convoy, but the single vanguard and rearguard horses were of the giant’s breed. The two elephantine horses each carried a howdah packed with mercenaries, sporting loaded but not locked crossbows. These were professionals: they didn’t sacrifice bow tension for a couple seconds of readiness—their crossbow shots wouldn’t be weaker from the strain of being ready to fire for hours.

What would permit only one giant in a saddle made of dragon leather supported a crew of five and a driver, with phalanx-length spears in a bundle hanging point-first out the back of the platform. Between these equine dreadnoughts was an armored car pulled by four reasonably-sized horses. A driver and a shotgun whose crossbow was rather unprofessionally cocked were the only passengers.

“We still hit it,” the barbarian chief hissed, then, “On my mark…”

Lanhulda nocked a javelin-sized arrow on her bow, a modified giant’s “short” bow nearly as tall as that tower of a barbarian woman.

When the first gigantic horse passed, the chief leapt out of the fern cover with a holler. Lanhulda’s arrow unseated the vanguard driver and threw him spiraling down into the ferns with something like a dry, green splash. At the sudden presence of twenty or more glinting broadswords at the middle of the caravan, the rear giant’s horse reared. The five mercenaries were thrown to the ground, where they were easily finished by plunging swords. The horse’s plow-like hooves came down hard on a barbarian in a blow that must’ve killed him instantly. Heedless of the driver’s pulling and tugging of the reins, it bucked a few times and bolted off the road into the ferns. A barbarian whose collar bone was certainly shattered by the keratin comet of the horse’s hooves was pulled off the road and into a dike by a friend.

Driverless and spooked by the flash of an arrow in its peripheral vision, the front horse galloped on down the road a ways. A group of barbarians ran after it under fire from the crossbows of the mercenary guards, one of whom had seized the reins and pulled the horse to a stop. Lanhulda sprinted in the measured gap of crossbow reloading and leapt up for the tight knot of the horse’s tail just under the rear rail of the howdah.

She hoisted herself onto the platform with two handfuls of reed-thick horsehair and swung her claymore back to give the horse’s rump a smack with the flat of the blade. In the resulting buck, the spears were shaken loose and buried their heads in the ground below, from which they stood up like a cluster of flagpoles.

The guards also lost their balance and crossbows previously leveled at Lanhulda launched their bolts randomly into the air, ferns, or planks of the howdah. Lanny had held onto the rail to weather the horse’s fit and once it had calmed, she advanced on the mercenaries. If they weren’t cut down by the broad slashes of her claymore, the force of the two-handed sword threw them over rail and down to the barbarians waiting below.

Finally, Lanhulda leapt down onto a cushion of ferns with reins in hand and hitched the giant’s horse on the closest tree she could find.

Meanwhile, the barbarians had tamed the rearguard horse, but the carriage was whipped up to speed. Bifram threw his claymore, fully three times his height, into the spokes of the right rear wheel. The car now nailed to the road whipped about on its bladed anchor, presenting the shotgun side to Biff. The gnome, a small target, easily avoided the incoming bolt, whose force had been sapped by the bow’s being constantly strained. Instead of imbedding itself in the hardpacked dirt of the road, it skipped off harmlessly on its head like a stone.

The carriage’s seat was overwhelmed by a push from the barbarians and Bifram and the fight was over.

The criminal contact, Amplus, the barbarian chief, Karagmeyer, and Lanhulda met in the middle of the road while the rest of the tribe and Bifram worked on the car’s door.

“I’m done here,” Amplus said, shaking Karagmeyer’s hand, “We’ll send our people out to you with a fence in case you want help moving some items.”

“That won’t be necessary,” Karagmeyer replied, watching her small tribe as they pried the armored door open, “The gold will do for buying out the thanes we need.”

“Pfft.” Amplus crossed his arms. “Your people like hoarding treasure more than they understand its weight in gold to spend.”

Lanhulda frowned at the man.

“Listen to me, snake-eater,” she said, “Our people’s tradition of sealing alliances with cups is older than your Kingdom. It’s why we call them vassals, for the sacred wine vessels. The loyalty of vassal thanes to their lord has proven stronger than your cities’ walls time after time in your history.”

“Peace, Lanny,” Karagmeyer said quietly, “We’re not after something so aggressive. We just want what’s ours and it’s going to take some help to get my father’s hall back.”

“Hmph.” Lanhulda spat on the ground. “I hope you call on me when the time comes to take the hall.”

Karagmeyer gripped Lanny’s shoulder seriously.

“You will ride on the hall in one of my chariots, sister.”

Lanny nodded at the barbarian chief and Bifram came over from the car, his claymore resting on his shoulder and swaying as he walked.

“I altered the registry,” he said, “I’m thinking we’ll leave it and the rest of the documents with a dead giant’s horse.” He addressed Karagmeyer directly: “You can kill one and load the other. We’ll move to the clearing where your people can strip the carriage—”

“I’m going to want copies,” Amplus interjected.

“No time,” Karagmeyer said, “Besides, if your organization uses any information on those papers it’ll be too easy to see through the illusion of a raid and they could ultimately pin it on you guys. What I’d like to know,” she looked down to Bifram, “is why we can’t take both horses and leave the parchment scattered among the bodies like the illiterate barbarians we are.”

“One giant’s horse is hard enough loot to hide,” Biff said, meeting Karagmeyer’s eyes with an authority that belied his height, “It’ll be impossible to throw a Kingdom investigation with two. You’re going to have to get rid of both of them to keep this hit anonymous, anyway—why not make the scene more convincing?”

Karagmeyer nodded slowly.

“Fair enough,” she said, “We’ll kill one here and put the other over the cliffs on our way home.” Finally, beginning to walk toward her tribe she threw back over her shoulder, “To the clearing, then.”

Amplus, who had finished cleaning his sword, sheathed it, and then, to Lanny and Biff, “Give Meander my best. I can’t wait to hear about the scheme he’s cooked up after you guys pull it off. Like, what’s with having a whole boat slip through the bureaucratic cracks?”

Lanhulda shrugged.

“Even if I knew,” Bifram said, “I couldn’t tell you.”

Amplus laughed to himself.

You’re right,” he said, “It’s just fun to try and figure him out, you know?” He started to wade into the ferns. “I’ll have to buy him a drink when it’s over and get the details out of him—that’s a heist in itself.”

Lanhulda snorted.

“I don’t like that guy,” she said aloud.

“Because he’s Imperial?” Biff sank his sword into the ground and leaned on it as he watched the Barbarians load a giant’s horse with a normal horse’s weight in gold. “How does that make you any different from him?”

Lanny spat.

“Our clans only took what we needed from the Kingdom before the Empire showed up and started wiping us out for the sake of ‘definite borders.’ Fucker talked about how my people like gold more than spending it—big talk from a guy whose Empire wants land it can’t even use. Besides, that’s only part of it.”

“And the rest?”

Lanhulda creakingly unstringed her bow and hung the coil of thumb-thick bowstring on her belt.

“I don’t like his energy.”

Biff raised an eyebrow.

“You’re a magician now?” he asked.

“No,” she leaned heavily on the bow, now a staff, “He just leaves a bad taste in my mouth, like… I don’t know, I'm not Imperial but... over-spiced snake?”

The gnome shrugged.

“Snake-eating is more of a human thing. But you’ve got to expect a certain amount of snakiness from a professional thief, don’t you?”

“Yeah, but you’ve heard that saying ‘all fangs and no scales’?”

“Sure.”

“Well he’s all head and no tail.”

Biff scratched his head.

“You’re gonna have to explain that one,” he said.

“A snake without a tail is just a head. You can see his brain moving behind his eyes, but he doesn’t stand right, like the cleaners gave him the wrong body when he went to pick up his laundry.”

“And a snake’s head by itself is still dangerous because it holds the fangs?”

“Exactly.”

By then, the barbarians and Karagmeyer had finished loading the gold and scattering the paper. It took almost ten of them to slaughter the other giant’s horse: its stocky legs fell like trees onto the road and threw up a cloud of dust while its head splashed into the fern cover. After a minute, the low-lying canopy settled, but the fountain of blood gently gurgling up from the horse’s neck continued to cut a river course back toward the dike on that side of the road.

Bifram had read the stories about the gutters around a giants’ slaughterhouse, of ferrous islands of coagulated blood moving like ice floes, but he always thought that was exaggeration. Purply, inflated descriptions of far-off exoticism had always been the most reliable way to draw a large readership, but it seemed to Biff now that the tall tales about giants were merely proportional. After seeing the force-of-nature tree-fall and river-spill of the giant’s horse, he no longer doubted as exaggeration the comparison of an approaching giant cavalry column to a thunderstorm. Of course, any cavalry and chariots could normally shake a city’s walls and throw up a virtual cloud of dust, but the giant cavalry’s sandstorm must’ve been downright climatic and its earthquake-gallop easily geological.

Lanhulda broke the gnome’s reverent silence.

“We’re moving.”

“Yeah,” he said, giving one last look to the natural disaster in miniature, “Yeah, let’s go.”

“Fucking hell,” Lanhulda said, running her hand through her hair in stress.

“What the fuck,” Bifram chorused.

The cave was in a particularly lush region of the forest: a bushy, tree-topped hill poking up from the fern-cover of the valley. They had cleared it of the expected dozen or so goblins, but at the back of it and tangled in the roots of the tree above it was the desiccated corpse of a human child. It was about the size of a goblin, but the dry skin clung close to an unmistakably human skull.

“Is that…?”

Biff nodded.

“It has to be her. The missing girl from Pillar Sole.”

The gnome took off his head wrap in respect.

“Doesn’t have tusks,” he continued, “You can see she lost a few baby teeth.”

“Fuck,” was all Lanhulda could say.

“What do we do?”

Lanhulda shrugged solemnly.

“Can’t just bury her,” she said quietly, “The family deserves to know what happened to her.”

“So… what? We bring her to her family? How do we explain finding her?”

“Maybe we wait until after the job is over?”

“No,” Bifram paced at the cave mouth, “No. It’s already too undignified that she’s hung here so long. She has to come down today.”

“Okay, so we take her down and wrap her up and wait till the investigation or whatever blows over.”

“I’m not going make that family wait any longer while someone knows the answer.”

“You’re right,” Lanny sighed, “So how do we get her back without blowing our thing wide open?”

“Let’s start by getting her down, yeah?”

“Yeah.”

Bifram started to untangle the girl’s feet from the roots while Lanhulda worked on her arms over him.

“Uh… Biff?”

“Lanny?”

“I think there’s more cave behind these roots.”

“Yeah, I’m starting to get a ‘temple curtain’ impression from the votive offerings and candles here at her feet.”

Lanhulda looked down at the crude statuettes, stale pastries, and candles melted to their plates. The rough-hewn figures were mostly of birds and deer, but there were a few humanoid-looking pieces, some of them with tusks like goblins but two or three had single horns standing straight out from their foreheads.

“Can you see a stab wound in her clothes up there?” Biff asked.

“Sure can,” Lanny breathed, “They sacrificed her.”

“To what?”

But Bifram was mostly talking to himself as he pushed the damp, woody curtain aside. The roots had naturally woven together like creeping vines, but the absence of dirt from their coarse hair suggested that it had been some time since the goblins had dug this cave under the tree and scrubbed its roots.

The cave kept going and from the echo of his first footsteps, Biff guessed it must at least continue into the heart of the hill. There was an intermittent breeze back and forth that became apparent when he took a few more steps deeper. The air coming in brought the earthy smell of the root curtain, with a dry hint of the combined offerings. Going out, the weaker flow carried only dust.

“The goblins must’ve respected the division,” he called back to Lanny, “Doesn’t seem like they came into this sanctuary. Not very often, at least.”

Lanhulda only grunted back at the gnome. She was more interested in disentangling the girl than archeology.

“Yeah,” he said now mostly to himself, “It’s ventilated like an old smelting furnace. Still, it’s a bit deep and narrow for that…”

Biff unslung his sword from his back and threw it back through the roots. A series of clangs signaled that on the other side of the curtain Lanhulda had kicked the blade aside while she worked.

The gnome continued down the thinning passageway. When it became too dark to see by the weak light filtering through the roots, he struck a knife with flint to light a handful of kindling he had fished out of his pack. The improvised torch wouldn’t last long—and it didn’t need to. By the time he was at the heart of the hill, the flame had almost burned down to his hand, but it was still enough light to see that the cave suddenly broadened. His torch no longer even touched the walls with light and he shuffled forward through spacious darkness until the faint scrapings of runes on a standing stone appeared in front of him.

Before he could even try to read the text or even examine the ivory texture of the stone more closely, the giant leaning on it exhaled again, stoking the torch’s flame down to Biff’s hand and forcing him to drop it from pain and panic.

Bifram fell back onto his ass and elbows and crawled backward until his back was to the wall of the cavern. He held his knife straight in front of him, but the quiet and logical part of him wondered what the point was: it was hardly more than a needle to the giant.

“Peace,” the giant whispered in a language gnome did not know, but understood.

Even gently whispering the giant’s voice carried something close to a shout, echoing in the cave like a lector’s annunciated projection in a cathedral.

“What,” inhale, “is,” inhale, “your name?”

“Yours first,” the gnome squeaked.

There was a low rumble. A laugh?

The giant took in a breath that moved the whole air of the cavern toward itself.

“Mashem Dar-Gol,” it said with some effort, “King of the Pines.”

“Bifram,” said Bifram, “of the Damsetter gnome clan.”

“Ah,” the giant wheezed a light gust, “A gnome… I feared you were another child.”

“Another?”

Biff could hear the coil of the giant’s muscles and the creak of its bones as it nodded.

“The goblins,” he said, “Once they have something in their head…”

The giant trailed off and Bifram felt the sad tension of his silence. Goblin generations went by quick and it must’ve been ten or more lifetimes since they’d seen giants in this region. It only made sense that newer goblins held something like a holy reverence for something so large and ancient.

“You said ‘King of the Pines’?”

Another creaking nod as if Biff was in the belly of a ship at sea, settling between swells.

“This valley and its pines were mine,” it said, “I drank the lesser stream dry and planted sweet figs on the greater. The number of their fruit was matched only by the…”

The giant coughed from the effort of saying so much.

“…the herds of deer,” he finished rattlingly.

Biff had come to stand and his eyes were almost adjusted to the darkness. The giant was leaning so heavily on the standing stone that it had slid to the left and wedged itself between the vault and floor of the cave. It could have easily stood free in the middle of the earthen dome, but as it was it was serving as the giant’s crutch.

“But I have not seen the sun in years.”

The giant’s voice itself was so expansive that the air was coated with the melancholy that hung on its words.

“How has my widow aged?”

“What?” Bifram asked weakly, barely able to stand from the oppressive gravity of the giant’s echoing words. The air was heavy with the moisture of its breath and the dust shook free from its speech gave the air an almost muddy quality.

“After her husband went under the earth, how does my kingdom fare?”

“Oh,” Bifram looked back over his shoulder as if he could see beyond the tunnel and the root curtain. As if he could see the tree-sparse and fern-frosted valley around Pillar Sole, a human town no doubt younger than the giant lying right in front of him.

“There was a fire…”

The gnome was interrupted by the treefall creak of another giant nod.

“The smoke filled this hollow,” he said, “The cindering of my kingdom was total, then?”

“Nearly,” Bifram managed.

The giant’s sigh could’ve knocked Biff off his feet. His lungs were two capsized boats ready to sink, and when they let the last of their air out the gnome was sure that would be the end of it.

But the giant miraculously kept breathing.

“How…” Biff started, but stopped. Talking caked his mouth in mud. He felt like a golem with a clay tongue, limp and inarticulate.

When he was a child, his parents would take him to the temple and he’d pray like they taught him. But God always felt too big to reach with the voice of a gnomish child. He wasn’t even a fly who could buzz in God’s ear, he was one of those impossibly small creatures the alchemists had been talking about recently. If God sat in heaven with a magnifying lens, he thought, why would God ever look back down to search for something so insignificantly microscopic when the stars were right up there?

“How,” he began again, determined to push through, “How did you get here?”

But his throat had been corked with dirt and his vision swam. He fell to his knees as if commanded. His weak attempts at coughing couldn’t escape the packed dam at the back of his mouth and with nowhere to go the rattling echoed in his lungs without release. He was face-down on the dirt floor of the cavern and so filled with dirt himself it felt like being a sandcastle returned to the beach by the tide. Finally, tidally, his consciousness receded.

Bifram stood on a foothill, the valley before him and the mountains behind him. The Valley wasn’t bare or packed with pines, but the trees were spaced well enough that the breeze coming through whispered pleasantly in their prickly branches.

The open brightness of the valley and the shade of the pines negotiated a perfect peace.

And the deer: even up on the hill, he could hear the does running paths through the dry bed of needles. The stags were on the plain where the valley opened up to the sea—the perfect place to lay the foundation for a town. The antler-flashing boys sported more than they truly competed. There were more than enough does. Even as a new, gigantic presence made itself known rustling through the pines, the deer didn’t raise head nor tail. Their antlers remained bowed in an unconcerned reverence and Bifram looked back at the mountains trying to find even one lion.

But there was nothing to fear. The sea was calm, the trees though standing stood not on guard but at rest, and the valley’s one river did not foamingly meander in rapids. The watercourse was so gentle and the cover of the broad fig leaves so near complete that he could hardly tell there was a river cutting through the valley at all.

The giant walked to the river’s edge and sat against easily the tallest pine in the forest. Deer came and went, lowering and shaking out their antlers before coming to the river for a drink or a ford. Mashem Dar-Gol rested against the trunk of the tall tree with the same relaxed kinship a human child would feel resting on the grass. The temple priests taught that God made man from dirt, close to the ground, but carved giants out of lofty trees. There was no holy literature on the subject, but branching-antlered deer were obviously descended from bushes and the deer picking their hoofed way through the forest had their own plantlike familiarity with the giant.

Then, Bifram heard a faraway roar. Soon, a distant applause manifested as a clapping river of snowmelt cutting its way down from the mountain and through the hills. The giant stood to greet it, but it did not return the courtesy. Instead, it swept through the valley, felling pines and catching deer until it ran across the plain and dove from the cliffs into the sea, a waterfall.

Mashem Dar-Gol went to wrestle the river, his hands like dams blocking its course. But it was too broad and the ponds made by his palms quickly overflowed and spilled out, but not before they swallowed up more of the valley in their pooling. There was a flash in his eyes of a very specific feeling: losing to an old enemy. This was Mashem Dar-Gol, River-Drinker, now failing to stem the flow of this flood.

Trying a new tactic, he waded into the water, now up to his knees and tried to get his arms around it. His hands sank into the moistened earth and met somewhere underneath. Pulling up, he uprooted the river by the belly and it coiled back at him on either side. The shimmers and ripples of current became flashing scales and the tail swept around to squeeze his left leg and trunk. What was a waterfall spilling from the giant’s cupped hands manifested into a serpentine head with wickedly long adder horns.

“A dragon,” Bifram breathed.

Looking at the giant in his kingdom made Biff doubt that anything could kick up the roots of Mashem Dar-Gol, but if anything could dig that deep it would be the spade-shaped head of the giant snake.

Its fangs sank into the giant’s back. One tooth audibly broke against his shoulder bone while the other buried itself to the black gum. Mashem recoiled, twisting his body in agony. But he recovered and took the snake’s neck in one hand and the tail in the other and pulled it free. Bifram was reminded of his father pulling an invasive vine from the tree in front of their house.

The giant had fallen to his knees from the pain of the snake’s bite. Now kneeling, he held the snake beneath himself. Its tail curled up his left arm and it hissed from under his right. He lifted it above himself and smashed it again and again onto the earth.

When the fight was over, Mashem Dar-Gol was on his hands and knees in a lake far too placid for its violent birth. The giant reached back to pull the fang from his back, but the damage had already been done.

He was crumbling. He fell in fragments to the earth and it was now orthodoxically clear to Bifram that both men and giants were descended from dust. He fell, a barrow to bury the dragon-pool below.

Bifram opened his eyes to see the last shard of the giant—a weak impression not greater than a handprint—leaning on a tooth inscribed with a language the gnome did not know, but understood:

“Mashem Dar-Gol, River-Drinker and Dragon-Dead, King of the Pines.”

Finally, having found an adequate witness, the giant breathed his last. The ragged wind was too weak even to disturb Bifram’s clothes.

“You alright?” Lanhulda asked when he came out from behind the root curtain, “You were back there for a while.”

“Yeah,” he said, then looking at the girl’s wrapped body, smaller even than his own, he said “We’ll sneak her into the temple at night.”

“Okay.”