Gregor The Cripple

If every knower of a name dies or forgets, does the name disappear? Gregor supposed that it should. Nobody was around to call the river whatever it had been called in the past, so he felt that it might as well be nameless. He had asked Mildred, but she didn’t know.

Names are just labels that people agree on, and at that moment there were only two people who cared enough to have a vote. Thus, Gregor decided that this was now the River Kaius – distinct from the wizard Kaius – and all relevant parties agreed to the new designation.

The naming committee thus rode up the recently christened Kaius, searching for a place to cross. The land was undulating and blazing their own trail was hard-going. Reeds grew at the water’s edge in thick bunches and every little flat plateau that the mountains allowed was turned by the river into a horrible marshy mess, like flood-plains in miniature. It was as if the Kaius was taking every chance it got to burst its banks in angst at its cramped situation between all these great mounds of earth.

Nearly half a day of hard travel passed by before Gregor found the sane sense to stop. Even with all their upward progress, they had found no bridges and observed no significant decrease in either the depth or breadth of the water. This concerned Gregor and the sky was getting dim.

He and Mildred were thoroughly in the mountains now, and a river born from meltwater trickling to lower elevations or from captive rain flowing down the walls of a watershed valley should thin considerably with elevation. The fact that they had not yet observed such a change in the River Kaius meant that they were not likely to see it ever.

It seemed that, rather than a stream that began as a trickle of moisture rolling down a mountain, this was far more likely to be an underground river from deep below, driven up and out the mouth of a cave by geothermal activity.

If this was the case, they likely wouldn’t be crossing comfortably until they found either the cave or a bridge, which might add days to their travel time.

Given that this diversion was intentional on the part of the enemy, they probably knew this. It would be poor form to play along.

Sitting at rest under an aspen with the horses, Gregor’s eye roved. A few meters behind him, Mildred was doing her business in the woods. Ambush was on his mind. More than a play for time, Gregor knew that the enemy would use this opportunity to herd them into danger, because that’s what he would do. It was a certainty. Perhaps not soon, but definitely upstream. If there was a bridge it would be there, and if not there, then at the cave.

If the detour took too long, he wouldn’t just be dealing with people sufficient to capture Mildred. By then they should have been able to find killers who dealt with people like him. He was confident that he could kill anyone, but protecting Mildred while he did that was quite another thing.

It would obviously be best to cross before the trap was sprung.

Squinting hard because he lacked the commonly underappreciated utility of two eyes, Gregor determined that the water in front of him was perhaps as high as the shoulder of his horse. It was neither too fast, nor too deep, but still too fast and deep to cross safely.

Most people might not think it, but water can be heavy, particularly with the force of the rest of the river pushing on it from upstream. The horses would topple if they tried to wade through.

“This is the perfect place to cross.” He announced as Mildred returned from the woods.

Not being stupid, she found herself rather confused by this declaration.

“No it isn’t.” She responded.

“The enemy knows that we need to cross the river, and they also seem to know where we are.” Doubtless, there would be better places to cross upstream, but he knew that if the enemy had truly burnt the bridge to force them into an ambush, those places would be dangerous. “They would never expect us to cross here, so it is perfect.”

Mildred understood what he was getting at, but Gregor’s plan still had the problem of impossibility. “Strategically perfect or not, Gregor, we can’t cross here.”

“You seem to have forgotten, but I am quite good at being a wizard.” Mildred needed reminding that Gregor was a professional problem exterminator.

When problems met Gregor, they hid their children and kissed goodbye to their wives. When he was around, problem orphanages filled to overflowing and problem refugee camps burst their banks. His presence disrupted problem economies and terrorised problem societies. Problem religions reviled him as the Great Solver and problem heretics worshipped him as the same thing, which was quite problematic of them.

Mere impossibility wasn’t going to be enough of a problem to stop him.

The water was his obstacle. It was flowing, and there was a lot of it, so he couldn’t freeze a path across the top. At least, not one that could bear the weight of himself and Mildred and the horses.

Teleportation was also out – Given the mass involved and the insane complexity of dealing with three bodies that weren’t his own, it had the issue of potentially death-inducing magical exhaustion.

As Gregor saw it, his best option was was to divert the water around them as they walked across the bottom, which sounded simple but was actually quite mad.

***

They took their first steps in through the reeds and grassythings of the bank, going from dirt to mud and then to slop, sinking ankle-deep in the gunk. The wedge-shaped barrier held as it forced the shallow water to flow around the quartet of horses and humans. This type of barrier was called a sphenoid ward, not that anybody had ever needed to know. It was meant for ploughing through crowds on horseback, but Gregor was using it to keep dry. The people walked on the riverbed, leading the horses who were likely to have a problem with the situation. Gregor was on the inside, closest to the barrier, the horses were side-by-side in the middle, and Mildred was on the outside, in greatest danger of being drenched as the water rushed to fill the void that the wedge left in its wake.

Turning back, Mildred found that the dry behind them had turned to a trickle of wet. This trickle grew and grew until it wasn’t something that could be stepped over, and water began surging in around her feet.

In this new and novel application, the barrier had to be quite a bit larger than usual, and thus it was not easy to maintain. Increased surface area meant an exponential increase in magical expenditure, and as they went further in, the weight of the river pushing against the barrier increased accordingly. It was likely that nobody had ever tried this, not only because it was stupid and of very niche utility, but also because few sorcerers could afford to feed the spell for long enough to matter, and all the ones that could likely had cleverer options available.

Gregor probably had cleverer options too, but he didn’t need them. He knew that this was a bad idea, and that was the point. If your opponent knows how good you are, the best way to disrupt their plans is to act like an idiot.

Displaced water flowed fast around their plough, and Mildred was wading thigh-deep by the time they reached the middle of the river.

Curiously, the river around them was flowing faster than when they had entered. With less space to occupy, the water was being pushed against itself and against Gregor’s barrier, and then being squeezed out faster on the other side of the constriction. It was a fascinating phenomenon, and Gregor imagined that one might be able to collapse dams with enough careful fortifying of upstream riverbanks, although the payout certainly wouldn’t be worth the work.

By the time two-thirds of the distance was behind him, Gregor’s jaw was clenched and his eye bulged. Beneath his hawkish nose, nostrils flared. Veins wormed across his pallid neck and temples and he tremored, not with the palsy of withdrawal, but with the strain of exertion.

This was, it should be reiterated, a very cleverly stupid idea.

The occasional fish or branch struck the barrier and he gave corresponding grunts. Mildred watched on, bending to peer at her wizard beneath the neck of the horse whilst trying not to think about the uncomfortable inconvenience of the water around her legs getting any higher. Besides having a dragon for a father or being petrified for ten and threescore years, this was probably the strangest thing she’d ever done.

It took perhaps fifteen seconds to trudge through the mud of the riverbed and Gregor almost expired from the effort. Step by step, the waterline slowly dropped below their shoulders, and then their elbows, then their knees. He released the barrier as soon as there was no freely flowing water between him and the opposite bank. It fell and they trudged up, boots squelching with wet.

The ground turned solid and Gregor’s legs turned gelatinous with exhaustion in trade. Panting into his horse’s shoulder, he just stood there, doubting his ability to pull himself into the saddle and not feeling up to the task of thinking about what to do next.

This was a risk – a gamble. If the enemy somehow knew to show up at that very moment, he’d be helpless to protect Mildred. On the other hand (even though he only had one), if they didn’t know to show up, the enemy ought to still be waiting to mount an ambush a decent distance upriver for prey that would never come. They would be far away from Gregor and Mildred and on the wrong side of the river, victims of their own ploy.

IF it paid off, then the whole thing would have flipped, so that the wizard and his charge were no longer the ones losing time.

Their foes had some unknown capacity for divination, but that didn’t make them omniscient. Some seers saw things yet to be, and some saw things as they were. Gregor had no idea which was subordinate to the Worldeater, but in either case, he reasoned that his gamble should catch them off guard. After all, they had known where to find Mildred after her de-petrification, but not that Gregor would be there.

He didn’t know precisely why, but there were things they couldn’t see. The Norn might be intervening on his behalf, or perhaps he simply happened to occupy a causal blindspot for one reason or another.

Divination is never an exact thing – the future that you see might come to pass, or you might see a future that is only true for the present. In this regard, it is widely known that there are many possible futures.

While this is absolutely correct, the reality is that there only ever one of the many possible futures that is actually possible, even though they all definitely are. Gregor was aware of this little-known secret of the universe, but he didn’t understand the how or the why of it. He lacked the architecture of mind necessary to accommodate such an understanding, which was a good thing, Kaius had once told him.

Time is a dangerous thing to understand. The powers that be might put you to work, and that would be altogether too much trouble because intelligences that exist an arm’s distance from reality have a very poor concept of values measured in money.

The thing that should earn them the largest share of their gains from this gamble, however, was not the intricate mechanisms of divination, but rather the simple practical limitations of people. Unless he was quite unlucky, it would take time for the enemies upriver to notice that something was amiss, and further time for communication, revised divination, then some more communication. After that, the actions they that they took according to this new divination could only bring them to pursue the pair as swiftly as was possible, and no swifter.

Looking up to the monolith that was their goal, Gregor determined that ‘as swiftly as possible’ would not be swift enough to intercept them.

Briefly, the pair sat on some nice non-muddy rocks to launder away the muck. Then Gregor clambered onto his saddle to pass out with Mildred’s assistance. She led the way from there.

The shard pierced the sky ahead of them, no longer just a feature of the horizon.