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There weren’t any giants in the earth in those days. Too small, too low, too cramped, too narrow.

They’d moved into the sky instead. The ceiling was higher, the floor was airier, there were less bothersome little things underfoot.

But there was also less to eat, and what there was to eat was scarcer than would be appreciated, and the nutrition it supplied was smaller than convenient, and nothing could go to waste. And because of all of this and because giants have big appetites even for their size, certain professions were taken up.

Beantender Buckletin was a respected giant, and in a way that had nothing to do with his size (a moderate fifteen metres) or his wisdom (adequate to find his way out of an empty room within three tries) or his strength (he could hold a thunderhead overhead without his arms shaking for at least a few moments). No, it was the reason his mother had been a respected giant, and her father before her, and his father before him, and so on and on. They had been beantenders too and they had been revered for it as he was even now – a giant’s plate without a beanstalk of stratus upon it was empty and sad indeed, and a giant’s bowels would blame them for it most petulantly. All nodded to him when they met him, all knew his name, many thanked him when they parted.

But he bet they didn’t have to deal with things like this.

“Burrowed right up through the turf and stole a whole pod for itself, the little thief!” he complained to his wife, who was inspecting the hole in the cumulus with a critical eye guiding a steady hand holding a fog patch. “Where the little pest came from I don’t know, but we need to put a stop to it – are you sure that’ll hold?”
“For now,” she told him absently. Her name was Broomplate, and she was in work mode. No promises. “If there’s more they could dig in around the edges. Never seen this kind of damage before. Got any idea what it is?”

Buckletin held the cup-and-plate he’d captured the intruder in up to the light, fashioned of rainbow-hued glass burned in the kilns of the heavens. It bared its teeth and hooted at him.

“Not the faintest clue in the big broad blue and beyond,” he admitted. “Looks like a horrible tiny little giant if you ask me, but its belly is too small and its mouth is all narrow and puckered. Gross. Gross gross gross.” He shuddered. “Give me eelnadoes any day. At least those are big enough you can punch them.”

“Mmmm.” All attention on the hammer now, cold grey stone capped with ice, mountainous.

“I suppose I’ll fling it off the margins. Eugh, but what if it clings to the glass. It has thumbs, tiny little thumbs – augh, what a beast!”

WUMP, tons and tons of force slapped into fog slapped over puffy white cloud, ice particles and mist everywhere. Broomplate blew away the residue and freed up her attention span for a second, and with that second she said thusly the words of doom:
“Take it to the bakery.”

“Pardon?”
“It stole calories and vitamins. Let it become calories and vitamins. Nothing must go to waste.” She lined up the hammer again.

“Oh. Oh! Yes, how convenient. How poetic. I love you, you know. And your poetry.”
“Mmmmmmm.”
He scrutinized the offending creature with a newfound (wary) enthusiasm. “Mushy, but with a crunchy core… yes, that could do. That could do! The cup will be back before the evening is out!”
“Mm-hm.”
“Farewell!”
WUMP

So Beantender Buckletin took his cup and plate down to the bakery and left them there, and the first he heard of the rest of the day’s events was the screaming and crackling flames.

***

“I’m telling you, I’ve been off my feet since before the day started! Why, first that starwhaler comes in a week late with no notice before midnight, then as I’m trying to get that under control then grey-upon-his-skull Kettlemuck comes rushing down my door with a racket about how this sackful of barometernacles are perfectly fresh but need grinding down NOW before they spoil, and by the time I’ve made halfway progress on THAT everyone else has dropped off their own materials and I’m behind again, just like I was last week when we had all that overflow from the eelnadoes and I’d shut down early since the starwhaler wasn’t back yet.” Grinder Spoonfrond stopped for breath, then recalled his manners. “You DO remember that, right? I’m not boring you?”
“Guh,” said his audience, a perfectly innocent giant of advanced age and respectable clothing who arrived at precisely six o’clock in the morning every other weekday and whose name Spoonfrond would definitely get around to learning someday. Twenty minutes ago the golden doorchime at the bakery’s entrance had rung proud; twenty minutes in which the last twenty years of another’s life had been funneled into her skull via her ears. She was beginning to hyperventilate.

“Anyways, your loaf,” Spoonfrond said, and from the great burning oven he plucked bare-handed a brick of meteor-heated snow-iced ground cloudbone bread. “Was in a cirric dogfish this time yesterday, now it’s on your plate. Come again!”
“Bwuh.”

“Yes, I said come again – the gold-upon-the-door chimed, then chimed again – “WHAT NOW oh sorry beantender didn’t see you there, was talking about something else to someone else. Anyway! What have you got there?”

Buckletin held up a cup and a plate and a creature and a blissfully unaware smile. “Garden pest!” he said proudly. “It stole a bean, let it fulfill a bean’s function! Can’t let something go to waste.”
Spoonfrond inspected his prospective ingredient closely. He flicked the cup, watched its flesh ripple and its body cringe from the shockwaves.

“Well, there’re bones in there,” he said dubiously. “And I suppose they’ll do even if the flesh is no good. Come back tomorrow and I’ll see if I can fit it in.”

“Tomorrow?” said Buckletin with the genuine alarm of the blissful encountering a fact. “Oh no no, are you sure you can’t just take it now? I promised my wife the cup would be back this very evening! Please, my friend, my good grinder, can’t you just squeeze it in? Last thing before your meal, quick as a blink – see how small it is? It won’t take more than two twists of your pestle!”

In the face of such marshalled, earnest inconsiderateness from a publicly revered person Spoonfrond caved, but had the self-respect to do so gracelessly. “Okay fine, sure, I guess, well, maybe this one time, it’ll be tough, I’ll fit it in somehow,” he said in one long beleaguered sigh.

“Thank you!” said Buckletin, filled with cheer and an utter absence of awareness, and he departed in good spirits, leaving all of his troubles in his wake to fume and spill over the great granite slab of the grinder’s counter of the bakery.

Spoonfrond glared in distaste at the little trapped beast. It was, he realized with a pinch of amusement and a pound of revulsion, mirroring his expression in a most uncanny way.

“Vile beast,” he muttered, and put it to the back of the queue and out of his mind.

He took up the great pestle, hewn from a sapling that had held up a rainbow’s end. He took up the broad mortar, hollowed from a skywhale’s brain-pan.

There was grinding to do.

So grinder Spoonfrond ground.

He ground the fat-defleshed bones of the skywhale that had come in last night, thicker than his forelimbs and fighting the pestle every turn of the way, sparking with lightning that seared the scant hair of his forearms, and he put them into broad cakes that stank most heavenly with ozone, each a feast for a family with leftovers.

He ground the last bones of the day’s catch of cirric dogfish – lean and crumbly when dried, elastic and springy fresh, barely bones at all if you asked him, but oh what a fine toothsome loaf they made.

He ground the musty attic-smelling still-dripping bones of a nimbostratic gulper, and he shaped them into dumplings to be boiled in rainbroth at home until they were no longer bitter and would instead of spittle drip with toothsome, oilsome, delightsome grease.

He ground the many and thin and MANY bones of a sunfish that had swum too close to the sky, and he patted the charred lean loves that emerged fondly – they always baked so evenly.

He ground a little too vigorously, and cursed as he knocked over the scale and had to retrieve it from the floor. Clatter clatter clunk clang smash clang clunk.

He ground the fine-toothed bones of the lean skylurks that whispered unwholesome things under the gables of the giants’ homes and crept into their shoes at night to nest, and put them into simple muffins for midday snacks.

He ground a long, long, long sheaf of dried auroarfish borealis vertebrae, pale and perfect in the night, and from them made an anniversary cake of eighty beautiful interlocking donuts like chain-links, that could wrap around the happy couple twice over with room to spare, seasoning each in a different colour.

He ground until he was light in the head and then realized he was suffering from smoke inhalation, and that the air was hazy, and that it wasn’t coming from the oven, and that his door was open a crack and he hadn’t heard it happen because his golden doorchime was missing.

Then he fell over.

Spoonfrond’s last blurry thought before he passed out was that his head hurt from more than the impact. Someone had left broken glass all over his floor, and the cupboard he kept the matches in – dried pine saplings dipped in their own tar – was swinging wide open.

When he woke up again it was all over and it was too late to do anything but complain about it. Which he did, to every being in the hospital.

***

Kettlemuck was picking his teeth with a knife down at the wharf – as sky-fishers did, or so he’d assumed they did when he was a child, which had been whole YEARS ago by now – when he smelled the smoke. That got his attention. Then he saw the running fire brigade with their emergency glacier-buckets, which raised his eyebrows.

Then he heard a doorchime. That just confused him until he saw it scuttling along the ground at ankle-height, clutched in the grips of what smelled like a very tiny and very dirty giant.

“Ho!” he called. “Halt!”

The thing didn’t halt, which meant it was probably alright by the code of the sky-fishers to do what Kettlemuck did next and fling his knife at it. A meter-long blade of good wholesome sunset steel spun happily through the last of the day’s blue and embedded itself precisely in front of the scuttling vermin, which ducked and wove and hurried its way under the lofty cloud-pillared wall of the nearest garden.

Kettlemuck looked down the street. The bakery was aflame. The doorchime looked familiar. And if the bakery was aflame…

“Little shit! My order wasn’t ready yet!” he shouted at the unthinking vermin and the world in general, and took the wall at a leap, harpoon unsheathed and at the ready, bad-weather kilt of haze and smog swirling about his legs, teeth gritted until thunder cracked, every inch the portrait of the sky-fisher at the ready, defending kin and feeding kith with every expedition into the trackless reaches between the big broad blue and the black beyond.

He landed on the far side up to his ass in beans, tripped over a stalk, and almost landed on top of the escaping vermin, which shrieked in a barely-audible voice whose pitch cleaned his ears like a finger round a cup’s rim. Kettlemuck’s mind recoiled, Kettlemuck’s body lunged, and Kettlemuck’s harpoon split the difference and plunged a jagged furrow through the clouds below, dropping him down to his armpit – and then, abruptly, dizzingly, up to his armpit. He dangled below the garden, tangled in bean roots, gripping to the edge of the world by one finger.

Something touched the one finger.

Kettlemack looked up and saw a good meter-long blade of wholesome sunset steel and a little vermin clutching a golden doorchime in its free hand.

“Cursed be ye and yours from all that lies above,” he said. But he was a little surprised still and the knife was very sharp, so instead what came out was more like this.

“Ah! Uhh-nuh! ACK FUCK FUCK FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAUGH”

and so on.

***

Jack cut down the wispy cloud of a beanstalk afterwards to be safe against pursuit, then moved on out – to a bigger city, a bigger place where you could sell a magical golden thing that made music on its own.

But slow month by slow year, eventually, gradually, a second beanstalk sprouted from the crater where Kettlemuck had landed. A scrap he’d kept in his belt for emergencies, for an empty plate in times of need, fueled by his good strong bones and learning, root by root, stalk by stem, of all that lay around it.

And oh, and oh, what lay around it was such excess, such luxury, such shallow-rooted fleetingness! It knew how to compete with that. A thing that lives in the sky knows that nothing must go to waste.

It grew long meters while remaining a humble surfacebound sprout, wispy and ethereal. Downwards. Outwards. Reaching, gnawing at the deep earth’s feed of minerals and organic detritus, drinking down its cold hidden waters steeped straight from the bedrock. Storing its treasures in roots and tubers and nodules. Bracing its feet before stretching its arms.

There were no giants in the earth in those days.

But that left room for just one.

In a manner of speaking, Nezzy’s brother had been killed by the dragon.

It had been the dragon that had come to their lands years before, unprovoked and unsent for and unwanted. It had been the dragon that had hollowed the old bailey into its den and feasted upon the headmen within. It had been the dragon that had taken as satisfaction a head of cattle a moon – and two sheep besides –in payment. And it had been the dragon who at last fell to the blade and hooves and bravery of an adventurer-prince, bestial and ravening hunger laid low by skill and grace.

So if the dragon had been a little fiercer, a little faster, a little hungrier, a little less clumsy and a little more wise, Nezzy’s older brother wouldn’t be on the gibbet in the Square right now, where the crows were debating over the division of his eyes.

***

It had been a long time since their lands had known the hand of a king. Things had been relearned slowly. Allowances had been given. He was a just ruler.

Do not cut or fell the trees in the woods without express permission of the king, through his headmen.

Do not hunt the game in the woods above a given size, and do not seek permission otherwise from the king or from his headmen.

Do not fail to pay a tithe of the harvest or its equivalent value to the king through the headmen, annually.

Do not refuse a request of the king or his headmen for your time or your labour.

Do not gather an inordinate quantity of sticks from the woods.

Nezzy’s family had broken one or another of those rules in the first few years, but whose hadn’t?

Then mother passed, quick and quiet in the winter, and father drank until he got in fights enough to follow her, and Nezzy and her brother had gotten a bit behind, a little distracted, and that earned them a few big warnings and then her brother had gathered an inordinate quantity of sticks from the woods, and when a headman had suggested that some of them looked fresh-cut he had expressed his disagreement less than delicately.

So now he was on the gibbet, and his tithe had been taken, and Nezzy was owner of an elderly donkey and two worn cows and a half-broken shack and a headful of thoughts she shouldn’t dwell on and couldn’t stop.

Going somewhere was more important than deciding where to go. So she went, and her body did the thinking while her head did the wandering.

***

Dragons weren’t common, and thank the skies and the stones that it was so, people said. They lived in the trackless and traceless places, on moors and in thickets, where hills were stony and soil grew thin and no farm or herd could tend for a single season. No one looked for them, no one wished for them, some were just afflicted by them, and who could dare ask why?
But if you talked to the folk who worked in the woods – the deep treecutters, the charcoal-makers, the rangers and the trailblazers and the huntsmen, they would mention things. Not speak of them, you mind – not dwell on them, not introduce them, consider them, measure them, offer advice on them. Just little things in passing.

“Big one out past quarter-moon lake.”

And everyone present hadn’t nodded, hadn’t grunted agreement, had just kept on talking and if anyone had asked why none of them had ventured out by quarter-moon lake in almost a year, maybe they’d get the same answer and maybe they’d just get a shrug.

Best not to talk about what you didn’t want to think about.

Well, Nezzy was past thinking now. And past quarter-moon lake by a league, where the remnants of the trails were uneven and strange.

No fresh blazes. No woodsign. No trace of tent or graze.

But the path itself was clear. The trees hadn’t grown in. The shrubbery hadn’t swallowed it whole.

Something walked here.

Nezzy’s body, which was still doing her thinking for her, kept checking the wind and scanning her sightlines and – most importantly – never once loosened her grip on Irribelle’s lead. If something was wrong the donkey would know before she did, half-blind or no, and she wanted to have firsthand advice on which way to run first.

***

The cave smelt like death.

The cows refused to budge before Nezzy even caught wind of it. Irribelle dug in her hooves at the sight of it. And her stomach tried to keep her out when she stepped into it.

Dangerous to have the light at your back.

Dangerous to stand between any living thing and its only path away from you.

Dangerous to go alone into the woods where anyone with sense was staying clear, keeping out.

Dangerous to be the last member of a family whose second-last member had called the king in his bailey all sorts of things in public that you shouldn’t think even in private.

Dangerous to have half a fallen-down shack and two cows and a donkey to your name with winter coming on sooner than later.

While her mind collected all of those facts and stood there looking at them like an idiot, Nezzy’s body struck a light and walked in.

Still a breeze at her heels from the outside. Safe.

Still a dancing spark in her grip. Safe.

Still no movement on the walls beyond the twist and turn of the shadows. Sa

it growled.

Nezzy’s body stopped moving. Her mind accelerated.

The growl wasn’t stopping.

She stepped back. It sunk.

She stepped forward. It rose.

She stood where she was and raised her light and it pitched into a snarl into a short sharp squeal and a cluster of tree-gluttons bounced free of their nest and seethed past her feet to more hidden corners, bright teeth bared and angry eyes glistening, beautiful fur on sleek-shouldered frames and sharp sharp claws.

The nest, she recognized on inspection, was a bear’s carcass, half-mummified and half-skeletonized. It had probably died in hibernation, starved in its bed with nowhere to find food.

That could explain a little of the smell, and the rest was set by the leavings around the nest. All very regular. Very normal.

The noise she heard was not normal at all and also somewhat quieted by distance, so it took Nezzy a moment to place it: a donkey, frightened, cut short.

***

She’d seen the dragon six times. Four as a child, twice as an adult; five living, one dead and dangling from the tree of the Square, before they cut it down and raised up the gibbet. It had been huge and huge and huge and huge and stayed that way until it was dead and she could see it was taller than a horse, but not by much, and longer than a horse, but mostly in tail, and fiercer-toothed than any bear, but not impossibly, and so on. Its size had grown up with her in a way its body hadn’t.

This dragon’s belly was taller than a horse. This dragon’s tail was longer than a house. This dragon’s skull was larger than a bear. This dragon’s mouth contained all of Irribelle’s body, bar one stray hoof.

It crunched. The hoof fell and landed, maybe it made a noise or maybe it didn’t because Nezzy couldn’t hear a thing that wasn’t her own heartbeat.

Maybe the cave wasn’t helping. Her heartbeat was resonating up from her bones into her ears out and into the stone and back in her ears and to fix this she needed to get out of the cave. Yes, that was reasonable.

She stepped out of the cave into the daylight and the dragon looked at her. Tilted its skull, let those two seemingly-tiny eyes settle on her. Forward-facing like an eagle. Feet like an eagle too, three-toed and three-clawed. No arms.

Nezzy had seen the dragon six times. But she’d lived with it for years and years, and she remembered the rules her parents had taught her.

Do not make eye contact. If you do, do not hold it. Release it and move on.

Do not shed blood near it, nor show weakness or illness.

Do not stray from the adults. Do not let go of the children, and do not bring them near where it may be.

Do not ever run, and do not ever ever run away.

Do not contest its meals.

Do not venture out when it is hungry.

So Nezzy looked at the dragon’s tail, side-on as she walked – without flinching, without haste, without wobbling or whimpering – and saw by its bobbing and turning the dragon’s casual observation of her and a lack of alert focus.

And she thought to herself: thanks to all and everything that it’s so damned big that I’m not an important meal.

And: poor Irribelle, but at least it would have been quick.

And: thanks to all and everything that it’s so damned big that she won’t fill it up forever.

The cows were gone from where she’d left them, the tether worn apart in the sort of long-term sustained-effort that came from terror rather than panic, and it took her until near sundown to find them again, trembling in a thicket. She soothed them and patted them and brushed their sides and patted their noses and felt very badly about what she was going to do tomorrow, or the day after, or the day after.

She’d grown up with them. She’d make it quick.

***

Nezzy took Mop first. Poor trusting Mop, her brother’s favorite, who went with her because what else could she do, and she led Mop back towards home and tied her close to a tree and killed her as quick and quiet as she could, which was hard because Mop was no deer and she hadn’t had occasion to practice on deer since the king came.

“Sorry,” she said afterwards, and in reply she thought she heard that half-quenched bray again. Sorry Irribelle. Sorry Mop.

Better than to starve, right? Would brother have said that? Before or after he went on the gibbet?

Her knife grew dull and her arms grew sore, but the work gave her legs a rest until it was done and it was time to move, joint by joint, cut by cut, bone and muscle and sinew, all that weight that Mop had taken every moment of her life heaved up and hauled through the too-clear-paths by a single aching human body, limbs hauling limbs.

She alternated heavy and light. A big chunk. A tantalizing giblet. A whole leg. The liver.

Work and rest, work and rest. The trip back to Mop grew longer, the distance to the cave shorter.

“Hurry up,” Nezzy told herself as she flagged. The sun was high, the evening was going to come. This wasn’t something she wanted to do at night, although she’d bet her shoes that no bear wolf or otherwise was left in these forests for as far as they could run.

She threw the last, bloodied chunk – Mop’s tongue – into the air in the direction of the cave – as far as she could – and left, a stumbling, red-smeared walking corpse. If quarter-moon lake wasn’t as far away as all she’d walked today combined she’d have taken herself all the way there to clean herself; she made do with a cold stream and a mossy stone for a scrub, then shambled all the way to where Brush waited.

She hadn’t broken her tether this time. Either she trusted Nezzy more or she was too frightened to move without Mop. Nezzy wasn’t sure which made her feel worse, and slept guiltily against the cow’s flank with Irribelle’s death-cry in her ears again, distant and wavering.

***

She moved at dawn, stiff and sure, and before she’d even reached Mop’s butchering ground she knew she’d done it. The distant stink from downwind. The quiet of the larger birds. The little itch at her eyes that said: Look Wider, Look Carefully.

The dragon lay at rest under the tree, tucked neatly on its coiled legs like a hen, long tail behind it. Its eyes were open or maybe not, shaded under the thick ridge of its brows.

Mop was no longer in evidence.

Were its sides fuller? Did its stomach look distended? At rest it was hard to say what was which, and it wasn’t as if her parents had ever let her anywhere near the dragon when it was full, scarce less when it was feeding, never at all when it was hungry.

But she measured Mop by the bloody tether wrapped around the tree’s trunk, and she measured the dragon from that, and she put that together with Irribelle.

It can make room, she told herself. But a day or two first. A day or two. There’s water nearby, the weather is nice. It won’t move.

A day or two. She could brush Brush. Comb her until she shone.

The dragon’s head had raised up. When had that happened? It was smelling the air. She should’ve heard that, she’d forgotten how quiet the old dragon could be, had already lost in disbelief her memories that this dragon had crept up on Irribelle and killed her by surprise. Big didn’t have to mean loud. Not all big things were kings.

She walked back into the woods, kept downwind the whole way. And for two, three, four days she tended to Brush until her lean sides gleamed like new, in the noon sun and under the full moon, and with every other sweep she told her ‘thank you,’ because that sounded less cruel and self-serving than ‘sorry.’

***

Brush she doled out over a wider distance. Four days of observation showed her a dragon willing to slumber in place after a good meal, and she took that time to prepare a long and bloody trail, one that took them past the very rim of quarter-moon lake.

She didn’t see it move, at night or in the day. But on the morning of the fifth day it lay happily in the morning sun where Brush’s carcass had been.

Nezzy breathed out slow.

“Thank you.”

Nezzy breathed in slow, then almost choked because she knew better than to make a single noise around this thing and because she knew better she hadn’t done that, she swore she hadn’t unless her mind was fighting her body one and for all right next to a no-longer-sleeping dragon. Its head was up. Its snout tested at the air lazily.

She was downwind. Safe.

“Thank you,” said her own voice.

Nezzy broke her own rules and ran. She was not punished.

***

She stayed away five full days that time. Told herself she was waiting for the right game to come by. Told herself she was waiting for the dragon’s belly to empty again, get it just hungry enough. Told herself several things that were completely true while being obvious lies.

So she sat in a blind she’d made by a stream she’d favoured some years ago – when food had been tight and doing something the king didn’t know about seemed safe – where the tracks seemed fresh enough, and for three days she let the selfsame stag drink and walk away, telling herself she was just holding on for something a bit bigger, or getting up the perfect shot.

The stag left again and she walked back to her den, scraped under a fallen tree. A bear would likely appreciate this spot come winter, and by the smell of it, already had.

“Thank you.”

Nezzy jumped, full on leapt straight upwards like a squirrel on a branch with her heart between her teeth, and before she landed she knew that wasn’t her imagination, she wasn’t tired enough to be mistaken, and that it was her voice.

Nobody near, not in sight, not on the trail.

She wanted to run. She couldn’t see where to run. She didn’t run.

“Hurry up.”
She ran. She ran like she hadn’t since she was four and racing her brother. She ran like she hadn’t since the miller had called to her and said the leech was with her mother. She ran like she hadn’t known better.

When she was done she cowered in her scrape of dirt and dead wood and maybe she slept and maybe she didn’t and she rose with the dawn and stopped the stag’s life before it saw another sunset.

The knife was dull as a spoon by then. She kept her mind on that, and off other things.

***

“Dragon!”

Thump thump thump, the noisy sound of human feet on human floors of human dwellings, the loudest thing she’d ever heard. She hadn’t been in the woods that long, had she?
“Dragon!”

A distant whisper, a cautious mutter behind closed doors and latched shutters.

“Dragon!”

She was loud. She was so damned loud, louder than any of them, loudest thing she’d heard. Was that enough? She hadn’t been in the woods that long, surely.

“Dra-“

The bailey’s door opened under her hands, which clawed at nothing for a moment before fisting in a shirt. A headman blinked at her, groggy in the daylight, annoyed by her presumption. He hit her – irritated, businesslike – and she let her head snap to the side and pass the force in one side and out the other, gasped like she had no air in her lungs (she didn’t) and like she was shocked (she wasn’t).

“What?” he asked. Thump thump thump, other feet on the move. She HAD been loud enough then; they’d heard her words, not just some idiot making a ruckus.

“Dragon!” she said, loud but talking-loud now, shaken but reasonable, eager to speak up. “In the fields! It took my cow!” She clawed at his arms, blood slipping wetly from her to him. “Get the king! Send for the king! Help! Help! Help! Dragon!”

She took another punch then, but she’d expected that, made sure to smear the headman extra good on her way down the ground – which earned her a kick and she’d expected that too but damnit, his boots were too new and too good.

“Dragon?” the next headman asked. She could hear it behind the shutters in the houses too, between the tiny whispers. Could hear it passing from headman to headman down the hall into the bailey. Dragon? Dragon? Dragon?

“Who knows,” said the first headman, whose clothes were so fine he must be the bailey’s steward, and she might have smeared a bit too much blood on him because he sounded more upset with her than he did about the hue and cry. “But – hst! Hear that?”

Bless the paranoia of the shepherds. Bless the keen noses of their dogs. Bless whatever quick-footed paranoid had made it to the warning bell in the Square first.

Ding! Ding! Ding! The dragon was hungry! The dragon was to be fed! Let it come to the sound! Let it come to the square!

Nezzy could have left then. Their eyes were off her. Their thoughts. Their hands.

But she was too busy hoping, too busy thinking, and for once she let her brain creep into those thoughts too: did it work? Will it come? Will the bell frighten it? What if?

What if what if what if what if what if

“Bring her.”

Firm. Decisive. Sure. Mannerless.

She’d never actually heard the king speak before. But with that voice – not its pitch, or its timbre, but its attitude – she didn’t need to see the steed or the steel armour or the fine blade, did she?

***

Down the way from the bailey they marched in company, two score good headmen and all the rest besides, and the king at their front, armed and armoured. To the Square, to the gibbet, to the bell.

Nezzy got to march near the front, besides the steward. Well, half march, half drag. If she did too much of the former he shoved her until it became the latter.

The Square was empty, the bell-ringer fled. Even the echoes had gone cold before they arrived. Headmen spread like lumpy jam across the way, hammered on doors and pried at shutters.

“Open up!”
“Did you see anything?”
“Who ran the bell?”

“Hurry up.”
It was not very loud, it was in Nezzy’s ear. It was in her own voice.

“Hurry up.”
“Hurry up,” she said aloud. The steward looked sharp at her from the end of her cuffs.
“Hurry up.”
“Hurry up!” she called. He swore at her and yanked her tight, was shouting something in her face.

“Hurry up.”
“Hurry UP!” she yelled, shoved him hard in the stomach, smearing what sticky blood was left on her palms on his oiled mail. He grabbed her face and put a hand on his belt and someone made a short sharp cry.

Like Irribelle, she thought.

The steward turned to look. Everyone did. Nezzy shouldn’t have, but she’d shouldn’t have a lot of things.

The dragon stood between the company and the bailey, nosing with interest the remains of a headman. His body was heaped, if it was in pieces it couldn’t have been more than two.

Then it stood up and looked at them. All the way up.

It had forearms, Nezzy realized. They were simply very very small compared to the rest of it.

Its mouth opened the tiniest fraction. Something wet and sharp was inside. “Hurry up,” said Nezzy’s voice, right in her ear. Right in everyone’s ear, the way the company jolted.

“Thank you,” said Nezzy.

“Thank you,” said the dragon. And then – a quick jerk of its head – a short, sharp terrible sound, the half-choked bray of a donkey cut-short, and like that was a rallying horn the company raised their arms and cried and it moved.

Nezzy broke her rule again. Nezzy ran. Nezzy ran away, and Nezzy ran for the end of the company, where the king was cursing and wrestling with the head of his horse – the same he’d killed that older dragon atop? Surely not – and grabbed at his stirrups and hauled herself up, still coated in the leftover drying paste of stag’s blood, and started a fight with a man coated in tempered steel and brandishing a sword meant to be used from horseback.

It went poorly for Nezzy, although the sword wasn’t much help against someone practically inside the same suit of armour as its wielder. She swore and spat and clawed at the metal mask and twisted and thrashed like an eel as the horse jerked and shook under her, took two solid blows that – at the very least – removed some of her teeth, and did everything she could to keep all her weight, all her pressure on that one arm that was groping at his waist, where his dagger was.

The horse bucked, but even if she wasn’t strapped in the king was, and she took the weightlessness and let it put her right full on top of him, capturing his arm until he gave up and let loose the reins and struck at her left-handed and even as she lost a few more teeth she fell and grabbed and stole the dagger loose as she fell, swung wildly against firm hide and heard a terrible equine shriek, felt hooves slam near her head, then something else.

The world moved. A claw bigger than her forearm moved past her, one of three on one of two gigantic feet.

She’d broken a second rule. She’d contested the dragon’s prey. But it had broken another, and another, because not only was it bleeding but it turned to flee.

The king shouted something, and if he’d still had use of his sword he’d probably have brandished it. But instead all he could do was wave his arm –

Do not contest its prey. Do not make eye contact.

– which was what the dragon took him by, and when it tore him loose from the horse and let him fly he was limp both in flight and after his landing, so that Nezzy wasn’t quite sure at which moment he’d been killed.

She laid there on the ground, bleeding slightly, surrounded by many who were bleeding thoroughly, and when she was done she stood herself up – steadily, not slowly or quickly – and looked at the dragon’s tail, which indicated the dragon was bent over (face deep in the king’s horse, which was larger than any of the many, many, many headmen lying about, and less metallic) and facing in her direction.

Nezzy brushed her sides once, deliberately, and walked forwards – edge-on to her audience – and towards the door of the nearest house.

She knocked.

“Thank you,” said her voice.

“This is the new steward of the bailey,” she said. “Please let me in. There are some old rules you ought to know about, and some new ones you can forget.”

Part II: Fit For A King
The world was warm and dark and soft and vast, so vast that the little loud angry part of it is Nezzy’s ear stuck out all the worst, like a tiny pebble in a big boot.

She bent all the power of her will to ignoring it.

Success. All was wasn’t once more and forever.

Then water broke everything.

Nezzy shouted something unspeakable and jerked upright, hair turned traitor and congealed into a sopping mop that kept the cold hateful liquid close to her tender scalp. A scalp that was presently clutched in a big none-too-tender hand.

“You up for real this time?”
Nezzy said something unspeakable again.

“Good. Nod off again and I’ll stick a funnel in your ear and piss in it. Can’t make you dumber.”

“Cousin,” said Nezzy.

“Cousin. Family. Yes, if you’ve got nothing else, you’ve got family. And we’re all the family we have now, aren’t we?”
Yes. No more ailing mother, no more grieving father, and aunt and uncle had gone years before in the fire. And no more brother. Just Nezzy and Cousin Hacca. Cousin Hacca and her gentle manner. Cousin Hacca and her slender blacksmith’s arms.

“Go and die,” suggested Nezzy.

“Maybe I will. Maybe you’ve helped with that. Maybe it’s time for you to fix what you broke. Had a good night’s sleep after a hard night’s drink and fight and ruining everyone’s lives so I guess you’re ready now as any. I brought a sausage.”

“Gimme.”
Hacca gave her the sausage. It was cold and lint-ridden from her pocket and over-greasy and off to start with and she’d never needed anything so badly as long as she didn’t think about her brother and the last month.

“C’mere and take a look,” said Hacca. She’d stood next to the window.

Reluctantly, in defiance of the awful, hateful, penetrating light, Nezzy approached and looked outside.

They were in the bailey on the second floor. That explained the good bed she’d been slumped over and the fine desk she’d knock over and the sturdy chair she’d kicked until a leg came loose. That also explained her sore foot.

The dragon sleeping outside the bailey’s gate explained the rest.

“Like what you see?” asked Hacca.

“Should I?”

Hand on the scalp again, yanking on her braid like they were six. “Yes you’d BETTER you wart on a mule’s taint, because YOU did that! You! You brought it here! You’d better have some idea of what you were doing, and you’d better have some idea of what you were going to do next, and that’d better not have dribbled out your behind with the rest of your brains while you sucked down half the steward’s best firkin! Now REMEMBER.”

Hacca released her hair. Nezzy’s chin nearly hit the windowledge before she caught herself, and in that sharp drop and intake of breath she remembered another breath, another angry voice.

***

The folks of the Square had been tense. Having a king slaughtered on your doorstep with all his headmen did not soothe the nerves. But she’d gone from house to house, slipping through the alleyways and the shadows of the eaves while the not-too-distant crunch and gulp of the dragon’s dining slid alongside her.

“I am the new steward of the bailey,” she said to each door. And she told them the old rules they should know, about eye contact, and showing blood or weakness, and watching the young and elderly, and not entering the woods when it was hungry, which made them shrink. And she told them that the new rules – of tithe and tribute and duties and forbiddances – were all gone, which made them stare. And then she told them goodday and went to the next house.

It was the eleventh house – farther from the battle – where someone spoke back.

“Why’d you do it?”
“I didn’t do anything,” she’d lied.

“Why’d you do it? You left to die in the woods and then you came back and that thing came right behind you! I saw it when the bells rang! You led it to the bailey and put blood in the streets and a dragon back in our midst, just when we’d gotten rid of the old one, and for what? Because your brother was too stupid to shut up when the king-”

She wasn’t sure who he was – he? Yes, probably? – but she’d hit him very hard. Yes.

Someone else had taken exception and she’d hit them too.

***

After the fight was over Nezzy had gone home (which was the bailey now, since she was the steward) and gotten drunk, which was amusingly backwards now that she was awake enough to think about it.

That explained some of her bruises. The missing teeth were the king’s responsibility. She’d taken the trade happily; less than a minute later the dragon had killed him like a cat would a rat: irresistible yet restrained force delivered in eager glee

“I remember,” she said.
“Really?”
“Not opening the firkin,” she admitted. “But everything else.”
“Glad to hear spending the night stuck in here waiting for you to wait up wasn’t a total loss. You remember how to get rid of it?”
Nezzy squinted down again. The dragon was still sleeping, hadn’t budged. She knew how quickly and quietly it could change that. “No?”

Movement stop-and-started behind her, paused from slamming her chin into the stonework.

“Softie.”
“It’s the kids,” Hacca said frankly, unfondly. “You learn to reel it in or you learn to accept being your mother. In the name of all and everything, I’m not doing that.”
There was a significant syllable in that sentence. “Kids?”
“Yeah. Get rid of that thing you dragged in and you’ll live long enough to be an aunt again. Deal?”
Nezzy’s eyes hadn’t left the dragon, but her attention had. Was its snout turned to that side before? Too quick and too quiet.

“Deal,” she said. Because just like last time, it was this or nothing. And nothing never was what it promised.

***

Get rid of it.

Well, how could that be harder than bringing it there had been? Days and days and days freezing in the woods, dismembering three animals into breadcrumb trails with nothing but a sharp knife and total disregard for safety and sanity because that had been less important than daring a dragonslaying king to do it again against an animal half the age and ten times the size of the one he’d put down.

Now the king was dead and Nezzy was still alive and, she was startled to realize, she now cared about staying that way. Not in the bitter, nailed-down panic of someone who had a goal to accomplish come flame or scream but in the abstract, messy, vague way she vaguely remembered feeling all her life until she’d watched her brother spin and dangle in the Square.

What an inconvenient thing to feel again, when leaving the bailey meant walking right by the body of a slumbering animal whose mouth could fit three of her inside it without difficulty or a need for chewing.

No, there were better things to focus on. Like the bailey door. Well oiled, well tended – the king had been a prudent man, had cared for the things that stood between him and the rest of the land. Like his doors, and his rules, and his armour. And much good that had done him.

Nezzy appreciated the door, but didn’t rely on it. Slipped loose, sideways. Heel-toe, heel-toe, careful as if she were stalking a deer. Glanced at the dragon, saw it still sitting senseless.

Good. Good. She was out.

Now she could plan. With the air around her she could think again.

Get rid of it.

Not for a few days at least, not after the meal it’d had. At least. The king’s horse had not been small, and. Hmm. Neither had been the king and his headmen. Two score and more of headmen, all loyal to the end or loyal to too-near-to-flee.

She’d better check the battlefield. If she wanted the dragon to hunger again, to be lured again, to be spirited away into the woods, she’d need it without a banquet.

So she walked the road to the Square – longer now than it had been before, desperate and angry and frightened and tethered – and surveyed the wreckage.

Untouched. On the one hand, not a shock: from what she remembered of the houses she’d visited last night, nobody had been in a hurry to step outdoors. One day, one sleepless night, one morning. There’d be a little bit longer before anyone decided they needed laundry or chores or drag away and bury the corpses of men they feared-at-best more than they needed to avoid the dragon.

On the other hand, untouched. Within sight of the bailey, where the dragon slept. The horse was an unpleasant stain on the cobbles, taken hooves, saddle and all. But every one of those two score and more remained where they fell – to pieces, in pieces, whole but made small, whole but bent oddly, torn loose and leaking.

None of them touched. Morsels spread out far and wide and unplucked by the dragon.

Still sampled though. There were crows, enjoying a feast far grander than that ever provided by the gibbet. Anyone face-up was eyeless.

Nezzy thought of her brother and felt her teeth bare giddily. And as if drawn by a magnet, she took her feet to the king.

Yes, left where he fell. No crows for him, covered head to toe in armour. Untouched, if you didn’t count the interesting smells already brewing from within him. Death, in its majestic equality and dignity, did not see fit to withhold the royal bowels from the cobbles.

She was laughing. Quietly, but with real joy behind it. So she made herself busy and her over-blunted knife and began to cut loose the king’s armour, piece by piece, and when his body was free she dragged it to the center of the square, to the stump of the tree, to the gibbet, and she looked up at the rope and her arms already ached twice over.

“Deal?” said Hacca.

“Deal,” said Nezzy.
“Deal?” said Hacca. “Deal?”

Nezzy’s gut let her tired, hungover brain know that Hacca would never leave the bailey as long as the dragon was still sleeping in front of it.

“Deal,” said someone who wasn’t Nezzy, in her voice.

She went over the old rules from the old dragon again, very quickly and very calmly.

Do not make eye contact. Do not hold it.

Do not shed blood near it, do not show injury.

Do not let the children in its sight.

Do not run.

Do not contest its meals.

Do not venture out when it is hungry.

She wasn’t doing any of those things, mayb-

The king’s corpse hung like a side of beef in her hands.

Do not contest its meals.

-well. She hadn’t done most of those things.

Nothing to do but lay down the body – carefully, with a gentleness she didn’t feel, no sudden movements from either of them – and step back and stretch your arms, casually, overhead. Warming up in the still-rising sunlight. Glance around casually.

The dragon was standing behind her, head at a slight tilt, something like a dog or a bird and a lot more like a fifty-foot pile of scales and death on two legs. She could smell the horsemeat and blood on its quiet breaths, even closemouthed.

Nezzy didn’t step back. She turned and walked away at an angle, behind the gibbet. Not turning her back, not backing away, not cowering. Calm and collected. Untroubled and unbothered. She nearly filled her pants four ways over.

The dragon stepped forward. Not for her, not for Nezzy. It stepped forward and pressed its nose to the king, inhaled one long, steady huff.

Then it took him in its mouth, raised its head, and with a twist of its neck – thicker than Nezzy stood tall – it flung him through the air.

He was unarmoured. The noise was thicker and wetter this time.

“Hurry up,” the dragon said in Nezzy’s voice, head tilting again.

She leaned against the gibbet and watched.

Sixteen times. Sixteen times it smelled at him, pawed at him with its great three-toed foot, plucked him from the dirt with its teeth like a bitch with her pups, sent him to flying. On the thirteenth time it stopped to investigate his innards, licked him cautiously.

It took an hour, one of the best of Nezzy’’s life. And at the end it sighed – a real true bone-rustler of a sigh, all the way out, a little bit back in – and turned on its heel and walked back up the way,

Back to the bailey.

And there, at the door, it once again curled its long, thick-muscled legs under it, hunkered down like a broody chicken, and shut its eyes.

Well then.

Nezzy watched as the crows came for the splatter of the king and began to think.

So. Not such a banquet after all. Too sour? Too sweet? Too salty? Too small? Just too full for now?

A horse was maybe enough. A horse was clearly preferred. A cow had sufficed, a donkey had been accepted, a deer would do. Beg some livestock to be sacrificed now for future benefit, lure the dragon into the woods, farther and farther. Lure it all the way out to past quarter-moon lake, back where she found it, and – and…

…and hope that it stayed there, where it had clearly been hungry enough to eagerly follow her scraps?

Hope that it didn’t stay here, where it had stood and fought – against small enemies, yes, but so many of them? It could’ve left. It hadn’t. It had fought and killed for this ground, and now it was comfortably sleeping there – had chosen to comfortably sleep there again.

Did she have to pull it out into the deep woods and find something to fight it? Hope that it liked its new home better? Hope she could find a place to park the biggest dragon she’d ever heard of that had enough food to sustain it and wasn’t so favoured by the other woodsfolk that she’d be ‘accidentally’ shot by hunters in midwinter and have her body hidden in a charcoal pile?

Too much hope needed over only so much at hand.

Nezzy walked back to the battlefield, back to where the king had laid. Picked up his helmet in her hand, stared into its idiot polished surface. Flecked with crow guano on the outside.

She turned it. A hint of dried bloody spit marred the inside.

Fine steel still, though. Fine steel. Their king had taken their wealth and spent it on what mattered most to him.

Well, he had given it back, in its way. Useless but for trade, though – you couldn’t hunt a deer with a sword, but you could buy cattle for-

Ah, now that was a thought, and-

Oh.

Oh.

Nezzy trotted back to the bailey; forcing all her muscles to slow into a double-step as she approached the dragon. It squinted one eye open at her and grumbled in a sleepy way as she slipped through the door.

“I’ve got it,” she told it.

***

“I’ve got this.”

“You’re out of your mind,” said Hacca, but quietly and without intensity. Her body was too rigid to muster rage, standing with a single-however-thick wooden door between her and a sleeping dragon.

“Come on. It’s safe. I’ve been three times now. I’m there right now. Am I eaten yet?”
“You’re going to kill me and run.”
“No.”
“You’d rather murder me than be an aunt again.”
“No.”
“Hurry up,” said Nezzy’s voice.

“What?”

Nezzy held up one hand and looked at the dragon. It shut its eye again and gurgled quietly.

The scent of horsemeat in her nose again. Sharply half-digested.

“I said hurry up,” said Nezzy. She could explain that later. “I’ve got something for you to look at.”

Hacca was paler than fresh snow, but she listened. And she listened when Nezzy hissed not to run, and she watched their backs up until Nezzy found the king’s fallen sword and she had something to look at that was, to her, so much more interesting than the dragon.

“Never seen it up close before.”
“And?”

“It’s quality,” said Hacca. “The headmen carried worse.”
“Yes, but they carried two score and more of them.”
“Mmm.”
“And the steward’s chain. And their rings. And the king’s armour.”

Hacca was still glaring, but in the way that meant she was concentrating. Adding up all that metal. All that craftsmanship.

“That’s a lot of cattle,” said Hacca.

“Enough cattle?”
“Enough for what? You want to eat one a week?”

Nezzy scowled. “Not me,” she said. “And if that’s what we’ve got, it won’t be enough. Not if it’s going to stay.”

Hacca dropped the sword, the sort of gesture that happened because every tendon in her arms spasmed without her say-so.

“It’s going to what?” she hissed, a yell forced by (still-sleeping) circumstance to exit between her front teeth.

“Stay,” said Nezzy. “It doesn’t think we’re tasty. It’s in no rush to hunt us as long as it’s full and we’re respectful. If you could stomach our last king you can stomach this one, at least it’ll only kill you for what you DO to it, not what you SAY about it.”

“And in return we feed it a cow a week until we’ve out of cows and deer and elders and have to start stuffing children down its gullet?” said Hacca.

“No,” said Nezzy. “We feed it a cow a week until we’re running low on cattle. Then we beg the aid of an adventurer-prince. ‘Slay the dragon! Take the land as king!’ Just like the last time. Except now our dragon is a lot bigger.”

Hacca stared at her.

“An adventurer-prince has a sword,” said Nezzy. “And headmen with swords. And a horse.” She shrugged. “More cattle. And cousin, I don’t think our neighbours will ask too many questions about where our trade-goods come from so long as they keep coming and we keep asking for their cattle.”

Hacca wasn’t blinking.  Her mouth was open just a little.  Her breathing sounded funny, not too fast, not too snow, not too hard.  Just a little funny.

“Deal?” asked Nezzy.
“All and everything above and below,” said Hacca, almost awestruck. “My idiot baby ranger cousin stands in front of me and talks of harvesting humans for their gear like conies for their pelts, to fund a murderous beast whose only function is to kill anyone that comes to challenge it.” She clasped her hands atop Nezzy’s shoulders.

“You really ARE the new steward of the bailey.”

Then Nezzy’s cousin’s forehead came at her like a bowshot.

Nezzy lay there on her back, head ringing from cobble-shaped bruise on one side and broken nose on the other.

“Deal,” said Hacca’s voice, flat and dead above her.

“Deal?” asked Hacca’s voice, distant at the bailey.

“Sure,” said Nezzy. The blood was trickling into her smile, into the gaps the king’s mailed fist had left. “Sure.”

Opinion: Bring Back the Tribute-Obelisk of Golgripper the Masticator of Limbs

That’s right, you’re reading this here, and it isn’t a joke.  I, a concerned and furious citizen of this undermountain, did spake these words and convey them to the moleish and cowardly carvers of this mockery of a daily news-slab.  I dare to say what any delver worth their canary-bat should: the continued absence of the Tribute-Obelisk of Goldripper the Masticator of Limbs that once lay at the heart of our fair city’s Grand Hollow is a mockery of all that we have propped and beamed. 

Was it not Goldripper who most boldly led the Far Tunneling from the Undercoast, where now dwell only those who delve not but wring their hands, and would sooner swing fishing poles than axepicks?  Was it not Goldripper who most astutely recognized the wealth of strands of Earth-Nerves that ran throughout the peak we now house our heads and forge our souls under? Was it not Goldripper who most bravely routed the turbulent and vile Countess of the Scrabbling Munch, tore her arms and tentacles free and devoured them, and who planted the Victory Spike in her mantle?  Was it not Goldripper who, having secured an endless font of wealth by strike and stratagem, so selflessly had all the spoil of the war heaped into his Tribute-Obelisk where it would not benefit him but instead ward the prosperity and ventures of all who followed?

If it weren’t for granddelvers like Goldripper the Masticator of Limbs this undermountain would be as barren stone fit for dead bats and live crickets. And how do we treat this memory?  With scorn!  We have piled scree and rubble upon his deeds, poured pig-iron slag over his titling – his Tribute-Obelisk was ‘taken to a secure workshop’ to be ‘repaired of vandalism’ by ‘skilled chiselmasters’ and now it has not returned!  This is a plot, a plot by the Scrabbling Munch – yes, they are not dead, not as we were told, for Goldripper was BETRAYED by his advisors and they were saved by whispering in weaker delver’s ears of hidden veins leading to rich pustules of the deep earth! Long have they bided their time, and now they walk among us – ask yourself of a delver: who are those that gain from besmirching the great history of our undermountain and seizing the tribute of its founder, and find yourself the answer: THEY ARE THOSE WHO MUNCH.  Wrapped in stolen delver-hide; hidden under knitted delver-hair; swaddled in foul undelving LIES, they plot to use the wealth of their ancient foe – our founder –to deliver us to their conspirator-Scrabblers that envy our might and glory in our downfall! We must tear them out, pebble and boulder, hill and peak!  Cast the vermin from the highest chambers unto the World Above!  Redraw the great sigil in their lymph! Rend riven the paws of the slavish beasts who publish this travesty of a palsy-gripped news-slab and chain their weakling limbs to axepicks and orecarts that they might redeem their blindness in honest labour!

We should also bring back the Tribute-Obelisk of Goldripper the Masticator of Limbs, as I have indicated in this editorial’s title. Praise to you and yours,

–Your Thoughtful Neighbor

***

Opinion: Don’t Bring Back the Tribute-Obelisk of Goldripper the Masticator of Limbs

Please don’t put that thing back.  Please, for the love of a straight and true shaft that doesn’t sag.  Do you enjoy having money and neighbours that actually like you?  We only just started real trade with the Scrabbling Grip last century but nowadays that’s where half our crafts go, and putting up a giant statue announcing we revere the delver who backstabbed them after they did all the actual work of fending off the Scrabbling Munch is not a good way to keep the scutetokens flowing – or the nectar. Does anyone else want to go back to sloughfungus smallbeer?  I don’t.  You don’t.  Nobody does. It’s just not practical.  Nothing about putting that tribute-obelisk back up is practical, and more than that, it isn’t a good moral example.

Do you want to tell your joeys that when they’re in trouble they should mine their friends for all they’re worth and take a fast rail out of town?  Goldripper did it – drained Agate Current dry of credit and left them to fracture, and folks nod his obelisk and call him bold. 

Do you want your neighbours to swear on stacked shale that they came up with every blueprint and floor plan you draft? Goldripper did it – would’ve settled two ranges over with nothing to live off of but moleverines and flint had his fartunnelers not persuaded him otherwise. He took their ideas and wrote his name on them and folks nod his obelisk and call him astute.

Do you want your axepickers in the breach to call for a charge against the foe, to watch you fight and bleed and fall, and then sink their blade in your spine once you’ve burnt your brown fat to the quick in their name?  Goldripper did that to the Scrabbling Grip, and he did no better to anyone else that spoke against him, and folks nod his obelisk and call him brave.

You know better than that.  We all do.  We all have for a long, long time, and the only reason that stupid thing was still standing was because the few people that would’ve cared are louder than a rockslide in a nursery.

Whether it really was taken down to fix the vandalism or not who cares, just don’t bring it back.  Praise to you and yours,

–Grontle Gemcrack, Your Tired Neighbour

***

Opinion: Gee, I Get Why People are Upset About the Obelisk, but Can’t We Get Along?

Well this is a fine what-do-you-mean and a real mudotter in the brewvats, if you’ll forgive my foul words (old habits)!  It seems like our neighbours are rowdier than a rat with a king tied to its tailbone, and over just a little piece of stone.

I understand that everyone feels right deep in their guts about this.  Goldripper was a proper darksaint of mine and my poucher before me, and hers before that – grow up strong like Goldripper; think ahead like Goldripper; gnaw at that problem like Goldripper would on a limb – but I’ve also caught the whistle from other neighbours that maybe he was a complicated sort of delver and sometimes he made a mistake. I mean, he masticated a lot of limbs, sometimes in the hurry of the collapse you just drop the wrong tools, right?  And by drop the wrong tools I mean masticate the wrong limbs, if you feel my carving here. For instance, if he’d gotten that Second Great Mine he pushed for we would’ve ended up brawling with the Scrabbling Grip, and some of my best friends are Grippies – coprolite-on-copper, they’re pretty much nearly normal these days!  So maybe some of his ideas weren’t always perfect.  On the other hand, some of my OTHER other neighbours said that if we don’t put the obelisk back up we’ll forget Goldrippper ever existed, and that sounds like a real bent-beam of a time to have because I don’t know how we’ll make sense of our history slabs when there’s some delver mentioned all over the founding and nobody knows what his name was.  Also they told me once we’re confused like that the Scrabbling Munch will invade us from the surface with minewheels that shoot lightning and rain. That’d be a proper bucket of ammonites in your breakfast, wouldn’t it? 

So what if we try putting HALF the Tribute-Obelisk back?  Or all of it, or none of it, but half the time, or something.  So that everyone can get along.  Praise to you and yours!

-Clurg Shoemetal, Your Friendly Neighbour

Newsvein Uncovered: Tribute-Obelisk of Goldripper the Masticator of Limbs Revealed to be Fraudulent

Chiselmasters under the Grand Hollow have submitted bonded and alloyed testimony on the nature of the Tribute-Obelisk of Goldripper the Masticator of Limbs being a piece of slovenwork.

“The stone rings true enough to eye and feel,” Grand Carver Muush Crunchstab declaimed in subargument prime, “but a fingerspan beneath is hollow as sucked spider eggs since its erection, with a false bottom spanning ‘twixt a sealed bolthole-path.  As Obelisk it bare satisfies, as Tribute it denies in totality. Throw it to the overmiddens and spit on its makers. Strike that last comment.  Too tardy? Damn.”

The Accounts and Ledgers Geode has expressed extreme interest in the possible location of the missing tribute.  Undermayor Goldripper VII the Buyer of Big Delves decried comment on his family and ancestors.

More is very likely to pointedly follow. Praise to your and yours.

-Vunk Plungebrick, Master News-Slabber

“Run!” screamed the watcher on the belltower of the tallest steeple on the hill.

So they ran.

What else could they do?

What else could lord or serf do, could manager or employee do, could king or lover or thief or wizard or software engineer do but obey the simplest command?
The earth under Murble’s Crossing trembled. The sun shone watery in the pale blue sky. The snow dusted itself from the tree branches. A wren folded its wings and fell weary and resigned from the heavens. Someone’s cow gave a grunt and heaved out the hindlegs of what, it had become obvious some time earlier, was a three-headed calf. Mercury had started last night in retrograde, changed its mind halfway through, then punched Venus in the face. The moon had new spots on it. The mayor’s favorite cat had gone bald last night and had regrown all its hair five minutes ago (she had also gone from tabby to tortie).

Yes, even a blind eagle or a deaf bat could understand what was afoot. All could, save for Burtholomew Puddle, who was staying at the Murble’s Crossing Holiday Inn and was still angrily ringing the bell.

“About time!” he said to the manager, as she erupted from the backroom like boiling lava. “Your clerk just interrupted my simple request for cleaner sheets with – hey! Hey! Hey! Get back here!”
“Run!” called the manager over her shoulder, head only half turned, word gasped as much as shouted – only the sparsest of effort diverted from her own headlong flight. “Run!”

Then she was gone and Burtholomew stood alone at the desk with the tragic and bereft face of a man with a full head of indignation and no target whatsoever, a cat that had failed to catch their own tail.

He consoled himself with a pocketful of complimentary hard candies.

***

Burtholomew walked into the parking lot in search of someone else to complain to and found no one and nothing, including his car.

“Outrageous!” he seethed. “There wasn’t a SINGLE handicapped person around when I took that spot, and it’s a weekend! They have no right! On a Saturday! I ask of you, what kind of day is THAT to remove an innocent man’s personal transportation?”
“It’s the day.”

The words were gasped, the face was strained, the body was fumbling at the lock on a bike rack. A shallow curse, the withdrawal of an expensive phone from the pocket – oh! A hammer! Bam-bam-bam! The lock broke apart, the adolescent dirt bike was taken, the person – a perfectly respectable middle-aged man in a suit (no tie) fled down the road like the police were on his heels.

He’d dropped not only the phone – screen now an interesting diagram of geologic stress fractures illustrated by a professional orb-weaver – but his wallet. Harvroy Blonk.

Burtholomew pocketed it for safekeeping.

“He could have,” he told the lonely street, “at least kept cash on hand. For a finder’s fee.”

It did not answer.

***

After ten minutes it became apparent to Burtholomew that the bus was not coming, nor was anything else. The road was bare and dry and empty.

He waited five more minutes to be sure, then gave up when a turtle he’d been idly watching had reached the central lane marker completely unthreatened. Downtown wasn’t so far away that he couldn’t walk it, it was merely so far away that he deeply resented it and was going to add to the litany of complaints to lay on the desk of the mayor, the chief of police, the local bylaw officer, and anyone else who looked at him.

Maybe Harvroy Blonk, he considered. He’d looked like he had money, and now he’d owe Burtholomew. If not for the wallet, then for not telling people about stealing a teenager’s bicycle. That wasn’t the sort of thing people got arrested for, but it WAS the kind of thing that made people talk.

Downtown was empty. Doors were unlocked. A trail of hair in the street messily dithered back to a barbershop, clearly dragged by an errant boot. Half a bumper marked a sudden and clearly nonfatal disagreement between two vehicles, which apparently had induced neither those involved to stop nor witnesses to set up traffic cones.

The police station was unlocked. The secretary’s computer was still on and their chair was still warm. Their browser, private browser, and calendar were all open, the calendar foremost.

On the calendar February the second stared back at Burtholomew.

“Ground hog day,” he read. Horse and bull puckies. Why not rat day? Why not pigeon day? “Fwaugh,” he enunciated. It pleased him. “Pfft. Blmeah.”

“Help!”

“Hello?”
“HELP!” The voice was desperate and scraped and – it came to pass – belonged to a man in Murble’s Crossing’s single jail cell, whose hands were bloody at the nails and the knuckles and the tips from the clawing and punching and grabbing at the (cheap, but only half-dented) lock.

“Let me out let me out let me out let me out let me OUT” he said, too frantic to get enough air in him to scream properly. “Almost too late let me out let me out let me OUT!”
“What are you in there for?” asked Burtholomew. “It’s not stealing is it? I hate thieves. Low work effort and no pride. Disgusting..”

“I punched a guy I took the lord’s name in vain I shot up the stagecoach who cares let me OUT please let me OUT please please please please key’s on the desk PLEASE-”

With the long sign of a reasonable man put upon beyond all belief by reality, Burtholomew located the keycard and brought it forwards.

“Really,” he said as he waved it around. “I don’t see what the big deal is. Is groundhog day so important here? What stupid little nickname did you give your local weatherrodent?”
“NO NAMES!” howled the man. “They’ll HEAR it! It’s today! Today the ground hog wakes and seeks Their shadow!”

Burtholomew realized the cell door required a slide rather than a tap and unconsciously decided to pretend he’d known that all along and had been waiting until now on purpose. “Fine, well, but I don’t see what’s –”

The door beeped, then clonked directly into his face. The man fled in a single long hyperventilation.

“Hey!” he shouted after him. “I’ll call the police back on you!”

He didn’t care. He didn’t hear. He didn’t stop.

Burtholomew, fuming and rubbing his sore nose, made the best of a bad situation with the contents of the breakroom fridge. Someone named Sarge DON’T TAKE THIS had left a half-serving of meatloaf and greens.

***

City hall was empty too.

Even on a full belly this was very nearly too much to bear for Burtholomew. His sheets had not been changed. His car had been towed – or, as he had come to suspect, been stolen in whatever frenzy had gripped this miserable little town – and he’d been forced to watch a bicycle theft and not received payment for helping a stranger with their wallet and he’d had a door opened in his face. He’d eaten a just-a-little-too-small meatloaf and then been let down by subpar greens that left his mouth bitter and resentful. And all of this without a single person to complain to.

“I WILL,” he vowed in front of the empty hall in the middle of the empty street in the midst of the empty town, to himself and the whole universe, “meet with whoever is to blame for this cavalcade of poor service and worse manners.

The ground rumbled.

Burtholomew swore and kicked at a pebble.

The ground shifted.

Burtholomew yelped and clutched at a lamppost.

The ground rose, and was not the ground.

Up rose ABEC-Quillawthcellpleric, the Earth-Mover, the Mumbler, the Mountain, the Ground Hog, and the ground was They and They were the ground and it mantled Their shoulders and it was Their shoulders as a cape of ermine would delineate an emperor or a halo a saint or a haze of blood and sweat the naked flesh of a dying berserker lying prone on some plundered shore among the driftwood.

Burtholomew opened his mouth and made some noises.

Up rose ABEC-Quillawthcellpleric, the Whistler, the Chucker, the Incisive-More. And so down was cast Murble’s Crossing, rent in ribbons around coarse fur thicker than iron bars and hoarfrost-tipped with the secret veins and lodes of the deep stone where the gold is rich and the heat is boiling and the liquid-rock hum of the mantle grows loud and unavoidable; dripping in pavement and asphalt around forty stout limbs tipped with claws that turned through adamant as if it were unfired clay; spilling big box stores and suburbs and apartments into a Deep hollow below a body that could only be described as perfectly massive, perfectly unstoppable, and perfectly round.

The Deep was below. It was not the concern of the day. The great craggy head was still rising even as the body halted; the blunt stubborn neckless head questing, the nose sniffing – a space that aircraft carriers could be lost in was sucking in air and sampling the atmosphere, determining heat and cold and pollen and things humanity had neither words nor weathermen for, and after determining all those things the head reached its zenith and Their eyes opened.

Slowly. Watery (if magma were water). Carefully. They had been so Deep for so long.

ABEC-Quillawthcellpleric, the Earth’s Tail, the Not-A-Pig, the Fore-Caster, reared up into the blinding face of the still-rising sun, snout questing in squinting bafflement, and so did not see Their shadow, and was not afeared.

So They saw. And so They squeaked – once: short, sharp, satisfied, and so deeply-pitched that only an old, old earthquake warning system in Beijing could detect it. And so They turned and descended, limb by limb and turn by turn, until Their legs, Their skull, Their roundness was once more held beneath, and the Ground was ground again and the soft soil beloved of multicellular life once more hid Their back beneath.

All was as it was once more, save for Murble’s Crossing.

And Burtholomew, of course. But nobody much minded that.