The owner of the Shattered Skull went by the name of K'trl, and was a Brownie¹, with drink in hand.

K'trl was, like most of his species, nocturnal, tall, vain, with pointed ears, black tattoos representing his family and bleach blonde hair. He was watching the game of Pans from behind the bar. He knew Baxter, he hated Baxter and he also knew what was going to happen next.
For a coward, Baxter was calm and smug while playing the cards. It was in a drunken state that he had irrational thoughts, like thinking he was going to leave alive if he kept winning. The other men were ogres. The kind of people that steal your seat, leading to the following lines lines:

'Hey! This's my seat!'

'Ah don'ts see yers name on it.'

'Yes, but, nngh! I'm still in it...'

Ogres were just taller forms of dwarf in reality, except that they had shorter tempers and schizophrenic-like stability that flared when, say, someone is beating them at a game of Pans because it involved the slamming of fists that ogres had invented, or when a goat walks over their bridge, or questions the sharpness of their axe or breathes.
The three at the table, Grrr, Argh and Whooarghhhh!, were technically calm, at least by their standards, but tempers were beginning to flare at the fact that Baxter, The-Most-Hated-Person-In-The-City-Even-For-This-One, had some stupid inane look on his, well, him. And that stupid bandana. And stupid brown hair. And stupid goatee that looked like it was thrown onto his chin.

It was Baxter's turn. he slowly took a card, the last of a downturned pile. It was a 'Complaining Spouse'. He slowly moved the card face-down, turned it and placed it upon a duplicate card on another pile of cards, this one upturned.

Four arms shot across the table to reach the pile in the middle. Three arms were thick and hairy. One was small and scrawny — Baxter's — and it was his fist that slammed on top of the pile first.

'Pansh!' he yelled, with an impaired lisp that could out-spit the pronunciation of five Welsh place names, and happily pulled a mass of coins toward his chest.

If he was sober, he would have known that this was a mistake and he wouldn't have entered the tavern in the first place.

The ogres threw themselves up off their axes — one theory for their tempers — and brandished them.

Reality hit Baxter like a moth falling into a flame and he sprung from his seat. The arms may have been skinny, but his legs had all the available muscle. They had to. He ran into many people such as thieves, assassins and Morris dancers, and thus had to run away from them.

Whooarghhh!, largest of the three ogres, pulled back his axe and swung straight for the neck of the chicken. He missed, embedding the axe into the huge arm of Argh.

'Arghhhhhh!' bellowed Argh, but he simply removed the metal blade from his shoulder socket and sniffed. 'Pfft!'

Baxter hadn't moved. He was going to, and the aim was perfect... but he wasn't there. He had vanished.

K'trl looked down at his glass, and then to the empty space where Baxter's corpse was supposed to be. He hadn't expected that to happen! He returned his gaze to the alcohol in his hand. Blinked. A smile appeared on his near-white face...

'Thank you!' he cried, kissing the glass...

HPB

10.11.05 Front Page

Back Issue Page