Gregor The Cripple

“The earth sings terrible discord. I listen.” The king was great and disgusting and the pile of bloody bones seemed imperceptibly larger, though perhaps it was just the low light giving body to horrible ideas.

Riches from above had been delivered as promised, and Mildred now stood awkwardly leaning into the haft of a monstrous war hammer. The majority of the metal was unknown to Gregor in the dim illumination, but he spied a decorative electrum inlay snaking across almost every inch, save for the strikeface and the large spike on the opposite side of the head.

Electrum, as most know, is an excellent natural platform for enchantments, and he felt the presence of potent artifice from the weapon.

The rest of the hammer was a shiny dark grey, and the head was a strategic composite of different shades of dark grey which Mildred claimed to vaguely recognise from her dragon father’s horde. It was valuable, without a doubt, and heavy enough that it likely hadn’t been constructed for human use.

“Your enemy is willing danger, intent to gorge himself fatter than any. All souls can expect to be his prey. He has grand ambitions.”

“I am aware.” Gregor didn’t need to be told that worldeaters liked to eat worlds. “Tell me where to find him.”

Regarding the wizard with an alien expression, the Deep-King fell silent.

“Your debt of information is not yet filled. Speak, or I shall return the danger to your cavern.”

“Peace, wizard.” After a pause, “The enemy threatens the world with death. Who would collapse the platform upon which they stand?”

Ah.

It spoke again. “You are an agent of one of the powers of the world – you carry her song. The powers of the world concern themselves with the enemy; he is as weighty as any of them. Some seek to profit from his victory and offer subordination. Others ally to make war against him. The earth wails in the wake of their agents, but sings nothing of the powers proper… You should understand.”

Gregor did. Ageless things like the Norn were too significant to make war in the physical world, and flesh was too frail to hold their power. They were gods, or something similar. The Worldeater would be the same.

No matter, he thought, I need only enter the astral realm and kill a god. Simplicity itself. Perhaps that was what the Norn intended for him after Mildred was seen to safety.

Although… He still couldn’t quash doubts that she was actually real. She might simply be a fiction of the madness constructed from a confluence of coincidences. The Deep-King might have heard the earth ‘sing’ of his conversation with Mildred and with Mildred’s assailants before that, and was simply profiting from his misapprehension. Or this could be a hallucination. Everything might be a hallucination.

He might he spasming half-dead in a ditch on his way to Der Hexenwald, delirious from feverish infection and withdrawal. He might never have made it to the waystation – everything after his encounter with the government men from the Golden Empire might exist only in his head.

But then again, perhaps this was the madness; this uncertainty. Perhaps it was very clear that everything was real and coherent.

Would he normally have these concerns? Gregor didn’t know. He couldn’t remember.

Seeing Gregor deep in thought, the King offered some final words. “Wizard, the true conflict is yet to begin. Neither side can bear lengthy war, and so they scheme for certain victory. Both of you,” it waved its hand in gesture, “are party to these schemes, I suspect.” The troll snortled piggishly. “Your reward is given. I will risk nothing further.”

***

Upward they went, until blessed illumination intruded into the deeptroll dark. Their guide silently left them at this first hint of the sun’s offensive presence. It was only late dawn outside by then, but seemed as bright as full day in contrast to the last few hours of blackness and magelight.

Lack of sleep heavily weighed on the both of them, but Gregor most of all.

He had been their sun, which was a constant magical drain exceeding even his telekinetic expenditures, which were themselves not insignificant. With relief, he dispelled the globe of illumination almost as soon as the troll departed.

Tall Mildred strode confidently before him as they walked into the day, the large hammer – which Gregor knew he wouldn’t be able to lift – was hefted easily over her shoulder and Greta’s old revolver was strapped low on her hip. She seemed different, though just a little.

Once outside- wait. Gregor stared intently at the war hammer in the greater illumination. The metal that formed the majority of the structure was bright and untarnished, appearing as silver to the unthinking mind. Gregor, who knew that weak silver would never be used to construct something so abuse-prone as a war hammer, instantly recognised the metal as dragonbone.

Mildred also seemed to recognise it, and she frowned gradually.

It wasn’t that the use of dragonbone displeased her in principle – her father actually kept a stock of the stuff for repairs – but that the thought of dead dragons was particularly unsavoury at the moment.

She was as close to home as she’d been in seven decades and her hopes had fierce competition from her worries, which were mounting almost in tandem with her proximity to the Shard.

“Do you want me to carry it?” Gregor offered.

“No.” She responded, which was good. The hammer was heavy enough that his own hat might balk at the responsibility. Kaius’s hat would need to carry it, and it might not feel like giving the weapon back again, just as it had released to him none of its contents except the grimoire. Old hats were willful like that. Although, he didn’t actually know that it held anything else. It should; Kaius was no pauper, and he had certainly kept things in there while Gregor was around.

Presumably, it intended to retain Kaius’s possessions until it sat atop the head of Gregor’s apprentice, which was fine, but the hammer was a different matter.

Thankfully, Mildred was in possession of an unladylike strength.

She remembered that there was a town half a day away, so they dragged themselves up the road without stopping to rest. Gregor slept on the way because she could not, and she slept at the town’s inn while he kept watch to ensure no recurrence of their previous inn-visit.

Since the enemy hadn’t expected to contend with him, it would be unlikely for them to have a legitimate threat at the ready nearby, though the chance certainly existed. People capable of contending against Gregor wouldn’t be wasted in idleness – they would have prior duties or extant targets. As such, he expected that it would take a week or more for them to arrange an attack worth caring about.

By that time, they would have already made the Shard.

But before then, he did expect harassment. Knowing that there might be a time limit, the enemy would act to slow the pair’s progress and wear them thin, hoping for an exploitable mistake.

That’s what he would do, at any rate.

After unpleasantly few hours, Mildred awoke to find Gregor seated in the room’s single table and chair, staring intensely at the Starbeast finger. It hovered in magical bondage above the cap of the pillar, which served its original duty rather admirably, even after being so rudely mutilated and stolen from home.

The Grimoire lay open nearby, displaying to the ceiling an anatomical breakdown of some bizarre sea creature in vivid detail and with careful annotation which stretched across two pages. Gregor glanced it dispassionately on occasion, but seemed to have no real interest for anything other than the monstrous finger.

He glared at it as best he was able with only one eye, and periodically pelted it with little shavings of wood taken from the table just to see what would happen, though he already knew exactly what would happen.

“Gregor, stop vandalising our accommodations.”

He complied with obvious frustration.

“I can’t do anything to it. It belongs to a different system of power, which is confusing, because it definitely came from this plane. I can only conclude that it must be older than magic – the product of some previous cycle of civilisation. A different epoch.” His face contorted into a sneer. “But that’s lazy work; nothing more than deciding that the thing is incompatible with my understanding simply because I do not understand it, like a politician defeating his opponent with scandal rather than policy, or an archaeologist declaring that an artefact of indecipherable purpose must have some cultural or ritual significance lost to time because nothing else fits.”

Oh boy. She thought. Mildred’s wizard was deep in the mire of one of his moods.

“Lazy or not, all three approaches seem reasonable.”

“Huh?”

“You can be lazy and correct.”

“Oh. I suppose so.”

And that was the end of that.

Mildred couldn’t quite be sure because she had no idea what a normal Gregor was meant to look like, but he seemed to be getting better, just a little.

Upon exit of the inn, they decided to ask a local for directions to the Shard, rather than trusting Mildred’s memory of roads that may no longer exist. It turned out to be pointless, but some villages along the way had notably changed names or become deserted.

They didn’t ask directly, but there was no mention of a village or town at their destination.

***

The hillside once-home of an ancient elector passed by slowly in the distance. Seventy years ago, a junker family had still lived there, managing a large village of tenant farmers. Now, the building was a corpse. Nothing remained except the moss-covered bones of the structure. Floorboards had rotted away to expose the stone spine and the walls had sloughed off to reveal brick ribs, which lay on the floor or stood in crumbled piles, half-tall.

Mildred didn’t look at it.

“Have you ever seen a hydra?” She asked Gregor, pursuing a distraction.

He had, and they discussed at length the absolute insanity of the encounter; Kaius had struggled. This diverted to anecdotal explanations of the firepower that modern munitions could produce, using an encounter between the Republic’s military and a hydra as an example. Being that wizards able to fight hydras are expensive and rare, they had decided to exterminate it themselves. They were not able to struggle, but they did injure the beast.

“Could mundane weapons kill a hydra?”

Gregor thought for a moment. “I could kill a hydra with mundane weapons. Other people might also be able to manage it, but in most cases it wouldn’t be necessary. The hydra the Republic fought was near the Empire’s border, so they had diplomatic pressure to not deploy any enchanted or alchemical munitions.”

The road took them not through countryside, but through wilderness; the calm kind of wilderness that city natives might imagine when trying to picture the countryside.

There were no fields here, though once there may have been, and the trees were unmolested by loggers and farmers. Not that loggers would have particular interest in the sparse birch copses. There were no cities nearby. This was an uncivilised place, and was perhaps better for it.

To the distant north-west, the horizon was faintly crenellated by jagged teeth of white-topped stone. These teeth of the world made a vast mountain range, with one principal tooth standing tall and sharp among them – the Shard. Allegedly, the peak had never been conquered and disappearances were common among aspirant climbers, none of whom had ever reported encountering a dragon.

Four or five days stood between it and them, but still it was visible.

Mildred could now see the place where her dragonfather hopefully slumbered, and felt curiously little. The anxiety was still present, and the hope and the dread, but there was no great pang of feeling when she laid eyes upon the mountain like she had expected. Did that mean something? It was hard not to be fiercely introspective at the moment.

Distraction. That’s what she needs.

“You once mentioned steam-driven ships?”

They continued on toward the distant Shard, though it seemed to grow no larger.