been answered.
Ekhar bowed deeply, clamped his clay pipe in his teeth, and walked purposefully toward the lifeless cyclops. He stood there for a while, hands clasped behind his back, and stared at the dozens of arrows sticking out of the body. He paid particular attention to those around the giant’s face and neck, especially the one poking directly out of its sightless eye.
All of this would have been interesting, possibly even amusing to Jag Dubblspeir, except that he still had so much to do. He called four of his men aside and they huddled around him as he squatted in the muddy street.
“Three of you go around to every barn, stable, and manger in town” he pointed to the three newest recruits. He knew it was best to send them on an assignment together. It just about guaranteed that they’d stay focused on the job at hand. “Gather up every plow horse, oxen, and mule in Minroe and bring them to the hitching post in front of the Dancing Roc. While you’re at it, grab every coil of rope you come across. Make sure they’re strong and at least twenty feet long, though. We’re going to drag that cyclops out of town before it has a chance to start stinking up the place.”
The three young men stood up, saluted, mumbled “yes sir” at least five times each, saluted again, and headed off toward the Happy Horse Livery repeatedly tripping over one another the whole way.
“You, stand guard over the body” he said to the remaining deputy. His name was Riktus, and he was a few years older than the other three. While not a born soldier, Riktus had learned a lot in the three years since Jag took him on. “People are already gathering around and poking at it. If the cursed thing really was brainsick, I don’t want anyone cutting slices off it to take home as souvenirs.”
The lad snapped off a crisp salute and trotted over to his post. He could handle responsibility, Jag reflected, which meant that the Purple Dragons were sure to snatch him up when next they passed through on a visit. This job was never going to get any easier if he couldn’t find some way to get the qualified soldiers to stay. Still, knowing that the things were beginning to come under control eased the throbbing in Jag’s head. The worst of the day was surely over. Now all the constable had to worry about was that no one got too rowdy in the celebratory atmosphere that pervaded the unaffected quarters of Minroe.
As if on cue, a crowd of cheering people rounded the corner and marched toward the wreckage of the Dancing Roc. Kethril Fentloque and his son Abril led the way. Jag met them at the barricade.
“Where do you think you’re going?” he asked. He made sure to keep his posture civil, but spoke in the voice he mastered as a Purple Dragon commander, the one that made raw recruits wet their tabards. Kethril flinched.
“W-we’re going to remove the head of that giant. The Dancing Roe may have been destroyed, but I’m going to rebuild the inn and name it ‘One Shot In The Eye.’ We’ll get the head stuffed and mounted to hang over the bar.” The frail man pulled his even frailer son close against him. “My boy killed that giant. We have the right to a souvenir!”
Jag knew it would come to this.
“I’m sorry, Kethril, but we’ve reason to believe the giant may have some disease. You wouldn’t want to hang a trophy that would poison all your guests now, would you?”
The sour old man looked unconvinced.
“If it’s so dangerous, why is that gnome touching it?”
As the constable turned, the pain in his head surged again. There stood Riktus, obviously at his wits’ end, helplessly trying to convince Ekhar to stand away from the corpse. The gnome, for his part, tut-tutted and poohpoohed the guard, continuing to merrily poke and prod at the cyclops.
Jag’s eyes narrowed. “He won’t be for long!” the constable muttered half to himself as he stalked over to the site.
“Sir!” Riktus almost whined. “I tried to stop him, but-”
“Don’t worry, son” Jag said. “Ekhar! What the hells do you think you’re doing? I already told you we think the thing was brainsick. How am I supposed to keep the citizens away from it when here you are sticking your damned hands in its mouth? By the gods, that’s disgusting!”
“Oh, my friend, that you’re here I am glad. I’m quite certain now, this giant was not mad.” He held a finger aloft and it was covered with some of the frothy yellow foam that still clung to the giant’s lips. “A brainfevered or sick thing might spew a white lather, but only a poison makes this foam I gather. It may seem I do this just to be bold and defiant, but the truth is I know someone murdered this giant!”
“Blessed Torm, give me strength-of course it was murdered! I shot it half a dozen times myself!!” The constable turned to the crowd. “How many of you shot the giant?”
Several dozen hands shot into the air along with a resounding “Huzzah!”
“See the arrow that sticks from the poor creature’s eye? It felled this great beast-who let that one fly?”
The crowd shouted, “Abril! Abril! Abril!” and the frail boy flushed with pride.
“That fragile youth killed such a monstrous attacker? Not a well-seasoned knight, not a slasher and hacker? Come now you Minroeans, you’re all genteel folk. Such an end to this battle seems like a poor joke.”
Jag looked at Ekhar in bewilderment. “‘Slasher and hacker?’ What the hell is a ‘slasher and hacker?’”
“It’s true!” came a shrill voice from the crowd. Kethril Fentloque broke the barricade and walked straight up to Ekhar Lorrent. Jag marveled at the fact that next to an elderly gnome, even the spindly Kethril looked hail and hardy. “My boy did it! Everyone else was shooting the blasted thing in the arms and chest and back. But only my Abril was smart enough and brave enough to wait until it turned to look at him, then shoot it square in the eye.”
“A Wise move it’s true, and not easily done. The boy stood and fired when most others would run. It’s an action to be considered uncommonly brave, since the boy’s family and home were in danger so grave.”
“Is that so hard to believe?” Kethril fumed. “That my boy has a backbone?” The innkeeper turned to face the crowd. “You all teased him so. Every day he would come home from school battered and bloodied, but he kept going back. All you did was toughen his spirit!”
Several of the young men who had earlier carried Abril on their shoulders looked abashed and scuffed their shoes in the mud, unwilling to meet the elder Fentloque’s gaze.
“Though brave he may be, and remarkably quick, neither of these two skills today did the trick. The giant died not from a piercing of marrow, instead he was poisoned by the tip of the arrow.”
Jag, who had been mouthing the Words ‘slasher and hacker’ over and over to himself, suddenly regained his focus. “By all that’s right and just, Ekhar, who cares? The giant attacked the town. Do you think it matters to anyone that the lad used poison instead of muscle to kill it?”
“Yes! Yes!” cried Kethril. “I think he showed uncommon sense. I’ve always said he was a bright one, my Abril. Not like you, Alon M’Greely, who gave him a job and snatched it away all in the same week. So he sometimes gave back the wrong change-bah! That was no reason to fire him, let alone embarrass him the way you did!”
Ekhar Lorrent nodded to himself. Of all those gathered only Jag noticed, but then he was also the only who knew the gnome well enough to guess at the gesture’s significance. He was sure now that the pounding in his head would never stop.
“But you, innkeeper Kethril, you believe in your boy. Have you filled his whole life with nothing but joy?”
Someone from the back of the crowd yelled, “What about when the lad wanted to go to Waterdeep to study at the bardic academy? I thought you were going to flay the skin off him right there in the main room of the Dancing Roc!” And everyone gathered murmured their agreement.
“Bah! It was for his own good!” Kethril snorted. “Bardic academy indeed! We Fentloques run inns, we don’t perform in them!”
“The murder is solved, I’m happy to say. I know who it was killed the giant today!” Ekhar bounced about like a squirrel with its tail caught in a bear trap.
“Oh, Ekhar!” Jag groaned. “Abril killed the giant. I’ve been telling you that since the minute you arrived!”
“The boy killed the giant, that much is true, but how and why he did it just might surprise you!”
The gnome had every eye in the crowd on him. As much as Jag wanted to tell him to close his fool mouth, he knew that at this point the citizens would demand to hear Ekhar’s wild theory. Best just to let him go, the constable thought.
“Wary was I of the giant’s foamy lip. The odd yellow froth gave me my first tip. You don’t care that the boy used poison to fell the cyclops, but the next thing I tell you may make your eyes pop. The poison he used is called
