Everything seemed to freeze at that, like we’d all suddenly been cast in lead. I certainly didn’t make any movements. I had a sword still in the chair beside me, but drawing it was the last thing on my mind. Swords escalated things. Right now I was looking at three big fuckers with intent to beat me up and toss me out onto the street, it’d probably hurt. Maybe they’d go too far, maybe I’d be seriously injured, but that was all hypothetical and chance-based. It didn’t seem like this interaction was a killing one, not yet. On the other hand, draw edged steel and things changed.

  This was a fact I knew instinctively then, and have since reinforced through hard experience. Nothing attracts death like the willingness to kill. If you keep your head down and let yourself be bullied, nine times out of ten you’ll see no more than bullies.

  Of course the Grynkori didn’t seem to see things like that at all. With one motion, so fast it seemed his limbs turned to flashes of blurring light, he raised the long hammer over his head and swung it in a phantom-attack through the air. It came within inches of one of the men, who stumbled away.

  “Calm down here,” the barkeeper tried, “we don’t need to make this violent—”

  —”Violent!?” the Grynkori sneered, “oh but it was looking to be so wonderfully violent just moments ago. What changed so suddenly?”

  Nobody answered, nobody moved. Except me, to slowly creep away from the large men and try to subtly put myself behind the oreling. He halted me by aiming the hammer my way, pointing it like some Thaumaturge’s staff.

  “You stay right there you little fucker,” he growled. I stayed right there. Apparently, though, some of the toughs had seen an opportunity in the Grynkori’s moment of distraction, because one of them leapt forwards and swung down a cudgel that seemed to have materialized clean into his hand. I didn’t have time enough even to wince.

  But the oreling did, he had time for that and more. The shaft of his hammer caught the blow and turned it neatly away, then he punched the man. That, at last, brought on my wince, because the Grynkori’s fist was a great rounded thing which, while not a great deal wider than mine, seemed to have easily twice as much bone in it. Better to be struck with a brick, I thought, than that damned fist. The bouncer seemed to agree. He folded over and dropped clumsily to his knees, cudgel spilling from loosed fingers as he retched. The Grynkori just stepped over him, now tucking his hammer away even as other weapons came out.

  “The lank is with me,” he snapped, jerking a head towards my still-trembling form to indicate me, “I’ll pay for his drinks and food, anyone who has a problem with that can speak it up now and have their head put through the fucking wall.”

  Nobody, for some strange reason, did. The Grynkori turned back to me with a grin and gestured me towards one table. There were very few people I wanted to speak with less than this deranged hammer-wielding thug, but hunger and fear were motivators to outstrip any others, so I let myself be bullied down into the corner seat as he plopped himself down opposite me.

  “Now,” the oreling growled, “you said something about…Undead.”

  I should take this moment to note that despite a relatively wide span of travels with my father, at this point I had never actually seen a Grynkori in person. This one did not look or behave particularly unusual for their kind, though, as I would later learn.

  As said earlier, he was five foot nothing but looked somewhat heavier than most men through sheer muscle mass. His skin had an odd texture, sort of grey-ish and lightly…Not quite scaled, not quite not-scaled. I realised, studying it, that it struck me as being much like the hard shell of an insect. The same could be said of his beard, a great patch of protruding bristly not-hairs that I could devise no purpose for. His eyes had no visible pupils, and were beady black things hidden deep behind protective ridges of bone.

  Scholars the world over would debate whether the Grynkori were insect or some other order of beast, and I’m certainly not the one to settle that argument. All I can say is, meeting one for the first time, they’re fucking weird, and if we consider them male for the resemblance they bear to our more masculine sex, there’s little else to link their appearances with humanity. That hammer was still resting beside him, also. Which meant that studying him with any depth was a distracted affair, periodically interrupted by fearful glances at the deadly bludgeoning tool.

  “I…Did,” I replied at last, knowing that leaving this one’s questions unanswered was, to say the least, inadvisable for my health.

  The Grynkori leaned forwards, and I saw all the almost-hairs making up his not-beard stand suddenly on end. All of them, including the ones that measured inches long. It was bizarre, and somehow eerie.

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  “And where were these undead?” he affixed me with the sort of stare that demanded an answer. ‘Or else’, it silently added.

  I certainly was in no interest to be introduced to this man’s “else”, so I told him as quickly as my lips and tongue were capable of making the sounds. He leaned back, listening and silent until I’d finished it all. Then, at last, he spoke.

  “You don’t happen to know a mad Thaumaturge named…Morlo the Great and Terrible, do you?”

  He could’ve stabbed me right then and there, and I doubted I’d have gone so cold so quickly. I stared at him, struggling to say anything at all for a few moments before finally, weakly, settling on just nodding.

  The Grynkori laughed.

  “So you’re one of the little idiots he told me about, eh?”

  I didn’t quite know how to respond, and took my time in trying to figure it out. The Grynkori hadn’t given much impression as to whether he was an ally or enemy…No, he had actually, he wasn’t being adversarial or on edge—clearly he didn’t consider Morlo’s associates a threat. Ally or ambivalent associate, though, I still didn’t know. Would I earn myself any favours by exaggerating my association with the Thaumaturge?

  “I don’t know him very well,” I replied, deciding to be cautious and not commit to much yet, “but he didn’t tell me about you.”

  The Grynkori chuckled as if that were fare funnier than it actually was.

  “Aye, I’ll bet he didn’t. Doesn’t mention lots of things does he?”

  I had no idea what to make of that, and had already chosen caution, so once again remained quiet and waited to see if the oreling would add more.

  “Do you know what I am?” he asked, and I answered quickly. Idiotically.

  “An oreling,” I replied. I winced as a sudden fury overcame the Grynkori’s features, and his fist tightened about the tankard held within it. I saw the wood trembling, wondered for one moment whether it might splinter and break apart with the great pressure.

  “My people are called Grynkori,” he said evenly. I nodded faster and harder than I’d ever nodded before, actually making myself somewhat dizzy.

  “Right, yes, sorry.”

  The Grynkori stared at me a few moments longer, seeming to scrutinise my face for some hint that I was at all mocking him. He needn’t have bothered. I’d have sooner started a fight with one of those shambler behemoths than him, there was just something about this man that promised an excess of violence. His stare was interrupted only when two mugs were set down hard upon our table, and a dinner of roast rabbit and potatoes right beside mine. I tucked in without thinking even to pause, hunger moving me before thought could.

  It was only after I’d cleared most of the plate that the Grynkori finally spoke again.

  “Do you know what it is I do?”

  I paused, with a mouth still full of food, and hastily scoffed it down, chewing and swallowing like it might try to escape. Every second I kept this one waiting felt like I was holding my own life in a shaky grip.

  “No,” I replied at last. The Grynkori did not look surprised.

  “I kill things.”

  Now it was my turn to not look surprised, that was about the most obvious thing someone had ever felt like telling me.

  “I see.”

  “Shut up,” the Grynkori snapped, “I mean that I kill specific things, as a career. Monsters, you might say. I’ve killed trolls, lots of undead, orcs and the like. And a few weeks ago I received word from Morlo that he had a few more things for me to start killing.”

  The question just demanded asking, even if I was certain I didn’t want to hear its answer.

  “Am…Am I one of those things?”

  The Grynkori burst out laughing, actually seeming unable to speak for a few moments as he struggled to regain some measure of control over his spasming lungs.

  “No, boy, you’re not. If I was here to kill you I’d have just smacked that head off your shoulders and been done with it.” The Grynkori took another cheerful swig of his drink, finishing it in that second go, and left me to ponder that. Maybe my recent brushes with death had just left my mind shot, but I was actually somewhat comforted.

  “Can you just tell me what the fuck you’re doing here?” I scoffed, irritation and exhaustion pushing away my awe at meeting the first Grynkori I’d ever seen, and my fear of sitting opposite the most violent person I’d ever seen. I imagine this sort of mood is what gets so many young men killed. But not me, not that day.

  The Grynkori was far from pleased to see me snap at him, but he did not, at least, lunge across the table to tear my head off. That was something.

  “Impatient, your kind are. Always. Everything needs to be now and fast. Comes from your short lives, I think.” He was taking his time deliberately, making me wait out of pure spite. I decided not to play along. If the grumpy fuck was going to try and annoy me, I’d let him see himself fail. Maybe then he’d give up and actually give me an answer or two.

  To my dawning horror, minutes passed in nothing but silence. Finally, curiosity won out over pride. I asked again.

  “What exactly did Morlo take you on to do?”

  I could tell he was half-tempted not to answer, but it seemed he wanted to say it as much as I wanted to hear it said.

  “The bastard didn’t give me too many details, to be clear,” the Grynkori replied, “but I know a few things. There’s a place he wants to meet me at, I was heading there myself. Arvharest, you heard of it?”

  “Of course I have,” I snapped, “it’s one of the biggest cities in Anglyn.”

  Biggest, and richest. Arvharest was among the finest metallurgist and gunsmithies in all the world as far as I’d heard. My father didn’t work in such fields, and so we’d never actually been, but the phrase ‘true as an Arvharest cannon’ had made its way as far as Sheppleberry. And that was far indeed, because we were easily two hundred leagues from the place.

  “How exactly were you planning on getting there?” I asked the Grynkori, running an eye over his travel equipment, or lack-thereof, and finding no suitable explanation jumping out at me.

  He grinned.

  “The same way you will from now on, boy. I travel, I hear of things that need killing, I kill them and then I either buy food with the money I get as reward or…”

  My stomach sank. “Or?” I pressed.

  “Or I eat the things I kill.”

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