A BLACK HEART IN PARZAH,
by Kevin Kuhns
TO APPEAR IN "THE BARBARIAN" ANTHOLOGY
has "2227" words.
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Sweat. All of life’s
little riddles were answered by it. It was the one thing in this miserable
world he could count on. Sweat had accomplished everything that he could call
his own. Sweat had bought him every advantage he could count, and it had saved
his life more times than he could recall. It was his virtue and his salvation. A
single drop of sweat rolled down his forehead, over his thin eyebrow and
dropped to the floor in front of him. He watched it fall, tumbling through the
air, to splatter against the pool of blood that had collected there on the floor. He
knew that there were men that could see sublime poetry in events such as this,
but none of those men were here. The clubbing hand of his assailant mocked his
introspection, reminding him of how the world hated him.
There were only three of them. On any given day, killing them would hardly be worth the effort, but an ill-timed drinking binge made him an easy target. As he started the binge, he told himself that no one would be fool enough to threaten him at Manny’s place, and that was true … unless the “fool” was Manny himself. Not that a reprisal wasn’t inevitable, but he thought, for sure, that the ugly son-of-a-bitch would have waited until after the Trials. It wasn’t the first time he was wrong. Now, he found himself chained to a chair in a basement with three of Manny’s goons. The stupid bastard thought that he would lie down and drop the Trials so he could make some quick coin. He smiled and let out a slight chuckle. Another blow crashed into his face, but the amusement already had a hold of him. He laughed out loud.
“You gotta be the dumbest sonuvabitch in Parzah, Gor! You think you can walk into town, tell Manny what’s what, and not think that you got dues to pay?” The man’s name was Jilard. His nose was broad, even for a dwarf, and his narrow eyes squinted from beneath a canopy of eyebrow. He was broadly built and strong, but he was too heavy for his job. His breath became too labored, too quickly. This chump was used to beating people when they were tied to a chair, or in this case, chained.
Gor looked at the little man, “Don’t leave me alive, Jilard,” Gor warned, pausing a moment to play the drama to its full value. He waited until the dwarf’s eyes were locked to his. “It’s you that’s gonna die first.” The dwarf bolted to hit him, bringing his considerable weight to bear on the half-breed’s jaw. After the punch followed through Gor’s jaw line, Jilard stepped backward, admiring his work as he rubbed his knuckles.
Gor let a smile slip across his lips. The dwarf had moved too soon, and he was scared. “You’ll have to do better than that, chump.” Gor spoke defiantly as he spat blood to the floor of the tavern basement.
“I hate to say it, Gor,” Jilard said, “but I ain’t gonna kill ya. See? Me and the fellas are just here to remind you of who pays your bills and holds your leash. You’ve had this coming for a long time.” Jilard nodded to one of the other men behind the chair.
The second man was called Lori, some shiftless half-elf that wandered into town one day, looking for work. Manny took him in because he was easy to play. Lori stepped to the front of Gor and pulled a curved knife from his belt. “I’m the one that’s gonna do it, pig-face.” Lori looked into Gor’s eyes, trying to play the cool-killer. He softened his voice and played the tip of the knife across Gor’s cheek. It’d be laughable if it wasn’t so pathetic. “I lost too much money on you in the Pits, and when Manny said that he was gonna teach you this lesson, I begged him to be the one to do it.”
“You bet against me?” Gor chuckled. He looked up at the elf and cocked an eyebrow. “Lori?” Gor let his face soften as he chuckled but then quickly brought his eyes to the elf’s and hardened his face, steeling his eyes. “Isn’t that a girl’s name?”
“You bastard!” Lori lunged forward with his body and drew the knife up above and behind, threatening to plunge it into the half-orc’s chest. “So help me ... I’ll kill you!” Whatever resolve the half-elf had, it was broken.
Jilard and the third man, a human that Gor did not recognize, were laughing heartily. They took the opportunity to jeer their fellow goon. Gor knew that they all had the feeling that creeps into a man’s heart when he’s about to do something terrible to another man. It was a hollow feeling. A feeling that reminds a man that he is about to commit an act that is his own, an act that lacks support from the power that supports all life, an act of monstrosity. These were men that felt the absolute aloneness of their act and panicked like children clinging to the edge of a burning cliff. They weren’t killers, and tonight, they would die for it.
While the men played out their little bonding ritual, Gor tested the chains, subtly. They were strong enough to hold him. Big, strong chains. Jilard and Lori had watched Gor defeat dozens of competitors in the arena. They knew that he was strong, but they also thought he was stupid. Whoever had secured the chain was incompetent and underestimated his range of motion. In a fraction of a second, he could exhale and squeeze his shoulder blades together to create some slack. It wouldn’t be much, just enough for him to slip his right arm out between two lengths of the chain. It would be enough.
Jilard stepped forward. “Manny still needs you to show up for the Trials, Gor, so we can’t kill ya. In fact, you might be glad to know that all the damage we do, here, will be healed, free of charge. Heh ... well, almost all. You see, Gor? There are some things you don’t need in order to fight.” Jilard’s eyes drifted to Gor’s groin. “Now … we can’t turn Manny’s star stud into a mare, so Manny says we just gotta take one.”
Jilard nodded to the human behind the chair, and Gor felt a heavy arm wrap around his neck. The arm was strong, and whoever was at the end of the arm knew how to hold a man’s neck. If he wanted, the human could squeeze, cut off the blood flow to his brain, and knock Gor out in three seconds. That told Gor that once he made his move, he’d have to deal with the human first.
“How do you wanna do this?” Jilard stepped backward, rubbing the stubble on his chin as he asked Lori how to proceed.
“He’s getting healed, right?” Lori waited for a nod from Jilard before proceeding. “So as long as we don’t let him die, it doesn’t matter how messy it gets.”
Jilard laughed and slapped the elf on the back. “Ha! I like the way you think. We might as well have a good time with it. Why don’t ya start by bleeding his belly? He probably won’t die by the time we’re done.” Jilard’s face opened into a childish grin.
Lori slowly closed the distance to the chair, portraying a sadistic smile. Gor allowed his face to change, portraying a subtle collapse of confidence and surrender to fear. The facade had the intended effect as Lori lifted his chest, slightly, in renewed confidence.
Lori lunged for Gor, intent on plunging the knife into the softness of his belly, but he was sloppy. He couldn’t have known what was about to happen to him. Gor squeezed his shoulder-blades together, pulling his shoulders behind him to a near right angle. He threw his weight to his left and slid his right forearm through the gap in the chain that his movement had created. The knife slid along his belly, slicing his abdomen. He didn’t expect to avoid the knife, but Gor’s twist had been enough to allow Lori’s lunge to become a glance.
Gor felt the warm separation of flesh as the skin parted to allow the passage of the sharp metal. A killer keeps his blade honed to razor sharpness. A killer would have been sure that even a glance would be sufficient to slice open the layer of muscle beneath the skin. Lori was just a thug … and a stupid thug, at that. Gor’s right arm followed Lori’s hand, swiftly overtaking the half-elf’s clumsy lunge. In a single move, he had pulled Lori off balance and taken his knife.
The human had already begun to tighten his hold, and Gor felt the blood pool in his face. His vision began to darken almost instantly, but it was too late. He had already begun to raise the knife up and through the human’s right elbow. Gor felt the blade meet, and press through, the elbow joint and beyond to the base of the human’s upper arm bone. The hold slackened, instantly, and the human tumbled backward. His agonized whimpers told Gor he was no longer in the fight.
Jilard had already begun racing forward, screaming in panic for the men to kill Gor, but a stumbling Lori made an obstacle of himself. The dwarf repositioned himself, drawing his own knife. The metallic green shine to the blade and the smell of rancid meat told Gor that the blade was poisoned with Lifebane. All it would take was a single nick of Gor’s flesh, and the poison would do the rest. Somewhere in the back of his mind, outside the consciousness of the moment, Gor hoped that the dwarf had more of the stuff on him. It’d fetch a hefty price after he recovered it from the dwarf’s body.
Gor extended his body against the back of the chair, splintering the wood and sending himself to the floor. The chair had served as the primary support for the chains, and with the chair broken, Gor knew that it would be seconds before he was completely free of it.
Lori pulled another blade from his belt and moved toward Gor, but his forward movement was intercepted by the prone half-orc’s right foot, which had positioned itself behind Lori’s left heel. Before Lori’s weight was fully on that left foot, Gor had drawn his right leg toward himself, hooking the ankle, and sending Lori, ass first, to the floor.
The panic on Jilard’s face was unmistakable as he rushed around Lori’s sprawl, trying to get a better angle on Gor. Snaking both arms down through the chains and lifting them up over his head allowed Gor to be free. Jilard was out of position when he saw the opening that Gor’s outstretched arms created, but he lunged for the half-orc’s exposed ribs, anyway. He misjudged the range, and the knife never found it’s mark.
Timed with Jilard’s lunge, Gor slid himself backward across the floor. He moved away from Jilard and Lori, toward the human (who had gone unconscious after trying to pull the knife out) and between the men and the door. The two men stopped as the now-free “Champion of Parzah” stood to his full height. Gor looked over his shoulder at the barred door and then back at the thugs’ panic-stricken faces.
It does no good to have the screams of tortured men disturbing your patrons, so they had been sure to bring him to a place where his screams would not be heard. This cellar had been used for many beatings, and while it wasn’t sound proof, it could keep the screams of tortured men from disturbing it’s patrons. There would be no help coming, and they all knew it. A thin grin lifted Gor’s lips, exposing his sharp teeth.
“Kill that sonuvabitch!” Jilard cried out as he shoved Lori toward Gor. Lori took the shove in stride and used the momentum to take a wild swing at Gor’s face. It was an act of desperation … dumb and poorly executed. Gor stepped to the inside of the swing, sliding his left hand along his attacker’s right arm and bringing his right fist down across the bridge of the half-elf’s nose. Lori’s body dropped straight to the floor. His hands covered his face, unable to contain the fountain of blood that issued forth. Gor’s eyes locked to Jilard’s, and he did not break the stare as he tossed Lori’s knife to his right hand and dropped his weight straight down, stabbing Lori through the neck.
Gor stood up slowly, eyes locked with the dwarf’s. Jilard’s face became a deathly pallor as the time between Lori’s gurgling chokes lengthened until they were no more.
Gor waited a few seconds more before he spoke. “I have some good news and some bad news, chump. The good news is, I am not going kill you. The bad news is…” Gor leveled the knife, still dripping with Lori’s blood, and pointed it toward Jilard’s groin. He moved the tip back and forth in a cutting motion. “I am not going to kill you.”
There were only three of them. On any given day, killing them would hardly be worth the effort, but an ill-timed drinking binge made him an easy target. As he started the binge, he told himself that no one would be fool enough to threaten him at Manny’s place, and that was true … unless the “fool” was Manny himself. Not that a reprisal wasn’t inevitable, but he thought, for sure, that the ugly son-of-a-bitch would have waited until after the Trials. It wasn’t the first time he was wrong. Now, he found himself chained to a chair in a basement with three of Manny’s goons. The stupid bastard thought that he would lie down and drop the Trials so he could make some quick coin. He smiled and let out a slight chuckle. Another blow crashed into his face, but the amusement already had a hold of him. He laughed out loud.
“You gotta be the dumbest sonuvabitch in Parzah, Gor! You think you can walk into town, tell Manny what’s what, and not think that you got dues to pay?” The man’s name was Jilard. His nose was broad, even for a dwarf, and his narrow eyes squinted from beneath a canopy of eyebrow. He was broadly built and strong, but he was too heavy for his job. His breath became too labored, too quickly. This chump was used to beating people when they were tied to a chair, or in this case, chained.
Gor looked at the little man, “Don’t leave me alive, Jilard,” Gor warned, pausing a moment to play the drama to its full value. He waited until the dwarf’s eyes were locked to his. “It’s you that’s gonna die first.” The dwarf bolted to hit him, bringing his considerable weight to bear on the half-breed’s jaw. After the punch followed through Gor’s jaw line, Jilard stepped backward, admiring his work as he rubbed his knuckles.
Gor let a smile slip across his lips. The dwarf had moved too soon, and he was scared. “You’ll have to do better than that, chump.” Gor spoke defiantly as he spat blood to the floor of the tavern basement.
“I hate to say it, Gor,” Jilard said, “but I ain’t gonna kill ya. See? Me and the fellas are just here to remind you of who pays your bills and holds your leash. You’ve had this coming for a long time.” Jilard nodded to one of the other men behind the chair.
The second man was called Lori, some shiftless half-elf that wandered into town one day, looking for work. Manny took him in because he was easy to play. Lori stepped to the front of Gor and pulled a curved knife from his belt. “I’m the one that’s gonna do it, pig-face.” Lori looked into Gor’s eyes, trying to play the cool-killer. He softened his voice and played the tip of the knife across Gor’s cheek. It’d be laughable if it wasn’t so pathetic. “I lost too much money on you in the Pits, and when Manny said that he was gonna teach you this lesson, I begged him to be the one to do it.”
“You bet against me?” Gor chuckled. He looked up at the elf and cocked an eyebrow. “Lori?” Gor let his face soften as he chuckled but then quickly brought his eyes to the elf’s and hardened his face, steeling his eyes. “Isn’t that a girl’s name?”
“You bastard!” Lori lunged forward with his body and drew the knife up above and behind, threatening to plunge it into the half-orc’s chest. “So help me ... I’ll kill you!” Whatever resolve the half-elf had, it was broken.
Jilard and the third man, a human that Gor did not recognize, were laughing heartily. They took the opportunity to jeer their fellow goon. Gor knew that they all had the feeling that creeps into a man’s heart when he’s about to do something terrible to another man. It was a hollow feeling. A feeling that reminds a man that he is about to commit an act that is his own, an act that lacks support from the power that supports all life, an act of monstrosity. These were men that felt the absolute aloneness of their act and panicked like children clinging to the edge of a burning cliff. They weren’t killers, and tonight, they would die for it.
While the men played out their little bonding ritual, Gor tested the chains, subtly. They were strong enough to hold him. Big, strong chains. Jilard and Lori had watched Gor defeat dozens of competitors in the arena. They knew that he was strong, but they also thought he was stupid. Whoever had secured the chain was incompetent and underestimated his range of motion. In a fraction of a second, he could exhale and squeeze his shoulder blades together to create some slack. It wouldn’t be much, just enough for him to slip his right arm out between two lengths of the chain. It would be enough.
Jilard stepped forward. “Manny still needs you to show up for the Trials, Gor, so we can’t kill ya. In fact, you might be glad to know that all the damage we do, here, will be healed, free of charge. Heh ... well, almost all. You see, Gor? There are some things you don’t need in order to fight.” Jilard’s eyes drifted to Gor’s groin. “Now … we can’t turn Manny’s star stud into a mare, so Manny says we just gotta take one.”
Jilard nodded to the human behind the chair, and Gor felt a heavy arm wrap around his neck. The arm was strong, and whoever was at the end of the arm knew how to hold a man’s neck. If he wanted, the human could squeeze, cut off the blood flow to his brain, and knock Gor out in three seconds. That told Gor that once he made his move, he’d have to deal with the human first.
“How do you wanna do this?” Jilard stepped backward, rubbing the stubble on his chin as he asked Lori how to proceed.
“He’s getting healed, right?” Lori waited for a nod from Jilard before proceeding. “So as long as we don’t let him die, it doesn’t matter how messy it gets.”
Jilard laughed and slapped the elf on the back. “Ha! I like the way you think. We might as well have a good time with it. Why don’t ya start by bleeding his belly? He probably won’t die by the time we’re done.” Jilard’s face opened into a childish grin.
Lori slowly closed the distance to the chair, portraying a sadistic smile. Gor allowed his face to change, portraying a subtle collapse of confidence and surrender to fear. The facade had the intended effect as Lori lifted his chest, slightly, in renewed confidence.
Lori lunged for Gor, intent on plunging the knife into the softness of his belly, but he was sloppy. He couldn’t have known what was about to happen to him. Gor squeezed his shoulder-blades together, pulling his shoulders behind him to a near right angle. He threw his weight to his left and slid his right forearm through the gap in the chain that his movement had created. The knife slid along his belly, slicing his abdomen. He didn’t expect to avoid the knife, but Gor’s twist had been enough to allow Lori’s lunge to become a glance.
Gor felt the warm separation of flesh as the skin parted to allow the passage of the sharp metal. A killer keeps his blade honed to razor sharpness. A killer would have been sure that even a glance would be sufficient to slice open the layer of muscle beneath the skin. Lori was just a thug … and a stupid thug, at that. Gor’s right arm followed Lori’s hand, swiftly overtaking the half-elf’s clumsy lunge. In a single move, he had pulled Lori off balance and taken his knife.
The human had already begun to tighten his hold, and Gor felt the blood pool in his face. His vision began to darken almost instantly, but it was too late. He had already begun to raise the knife up and through the human’s right elbow. Gor felt the blade meet, and press through, the elbow joint and beyond to the base of the human’s upper arm bone. The hold slackened, instantly, and the human tumbled backward. His agonized whimpers told Gor he was no longer in the fight.
Jilard had already begun racing forward, screaming in panic for the men to kill Gor, but a stumbling Lori made an obstacle of himself. The dwarf repositioned himself, drawing his own knife. The metallic green shine to the blade and the smell of rancid meat told Gor that the blade was poisoned with Lifebane. All it would take was a single nick of Gor’s flesh, and the poison would do the rest. Somewhere in the back of his mind, outside the consciousness of the moment, Gor hoped that the dwarf had more of the stuff on him. It’d fetch a hefty price after he recovered it from the dwarf’s body.
Gor extended his body against the back of the chair, splintering the wood and sending himself to the floor. The chair had served as the primary support for the chains, and with the chair broken, Gor knew that it would be seconds before he was completely free of it.
Lori pulled another blade from his belt and moved toward Gor, but his forward movement was intercepted by the prone half-orc’s right foot, which had positioned itself behind Lori’s left heel. Before Lori’s weight was fully on that left foot, Gor had drawn his right leg toward himself, hooking the ankle, and sending Lori, ass first, to the floor.
The panic on Jilard’s face was unmistakable as he rushed around Lori’s sprawl, trying to get a better angle on Gor. Snaking both arms down through the chains and lifting them up over his head allowed Gor to be free. Jilard was out of position when he saw the opening that Gor’s outstretched arms created, but he lunged for the half-orc’s exposed ribs, anyway. He misjudged the range, and the knife never found it’s mark.
Timed with Jilard’s lunge, Gor slid himself backward across the floor. He moved away from Jilard and Lori, toward the human (who had gone unconscious after trying to pull the knife out) and between the men and the door. The two men stopped as the now-free “Champion of Parzah” stood to his full height. Gor looked over his shoulder at the barred door and then back at the thugs’ panic-stricken faces.
It does no good to have the screams of tortured men disturbing your patrons, so they had been sure to bring him to a place where his screams would not be heard. This cellar had been used for many beatings, and while it wasn’t sound proof, it could keep the screams of tortured men from disturbing it’s patrons. There would be no help coming, and they all knew it. A thin grin lifted Gor’s lips, exposing his sharp teeth.
“Kill that sonuvabitch!” Jilard cried out as he shoved Lori toward Gor. Lori took the shove in stride and used the momentum to take a wild swing at Gor’s face. It was an act of desperation … dumb and poorly executed. Gor stepped to the inside of the swing, sliding his left hand along his attacker’s right arm and bringing his right fist down across the bridge of the half-elf’s nose. Lori’s body dropped straight to the floor. His hands covered his face, unable to contain the fountain of blood that issued forth. Gor’s eyes locked to Jilard’s, and he did not break the stare as he tossed Lori’s knife to his right hand and dropped his weight straight down, stabbing Lori through the neck.
Gor stood up slowly, eyes locked with the dwarf’s. Jilard’s face became a deathly pallor as the time between Lori’s gurgling chokes lengthened until they were no more.
Gor waited a few seconds more before he spoke. “I have some good news and some bad news, chump. The good news is, I am not going kill you. The bad news is…” Gor leveled the knife, still dripping with Lori’s blood, and pointed it toward Jilard’s groin. He moved the tip back and forth in a cutting motion. “I am not going to kill you.”
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About the Author: Kevin Kuhns writes fantasy fiction, science-fiction, and suspense. He has also written a self-published children's book, titled "O Where O Where Did My Underwear Go?" Kevin Kuhns is forty years old and lives with his wife and children in Buffalo, NY.
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