R.A. Salvatore - Spearwielders 1- The Woods Out Back

The Woods Out Back

R.A. Salvatore

To the memory of J. R. R. Tolkien and to Fleetwood Mac, for giving me elfs

and dragons, witches and angels, and for showing me the way to find them on

my own.

PRELUDE

"You were caught fairly and within the written limits of your own rules," Kelsey said sternly. His sharp

eyes, golden in hue and ever sparkling like the stars he so loved, bore into the smaller sprite, promising

no compromise.

"Might that it be time for changing the rules," Mickey the leprechaun mumbled under his breath.

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Kelsey's golden eyes, the same hue as his flowing hair, narrowed dangerously, his thin brows forming a

"V" over his delicate but angular nose.

Mickey silently berated himself. He could get away with his constant private muttering around bumbling

humans, but, he reminded himself again, one should never underestimate the sharpness of an elf's ears.

The leprechaun looked around the open meadow, searching for some escape route. He knew it to be a

futile exercise; he couldn't hope to outrun the elf, standing more than twice his height, and the nearest

cover was fully a hundred yards away.

Not a promising proposition.

Always ready to improvise, Mickey went into his best posture for bargaining, a leprechaun's second

favorite pastime (the first being the use of illusions to trick pursuing humans into smashing their faces into

trees).

"Ancient, they are," the leprechaun tried to explain. "Rules o' catching made for humans and greedy folk.

It was meant for being a game, ye know." Mickey kicked a curly-toed shoe against a mushroom stalk

and his voice held an unmistakable edge of sarcasm as he completed the thought. "Elfs were not

expected in the chase, being honorable folk and their hearts not being held by a pot o' gold. At least,

that's what I been told about elfs."

"I do not desire your precious pot," Kelsey reminded him. "Only a small task."

"Not so small."

"Would you prefer that I take your gold?" Kelsey warned. "That is the usual payment for capture."

Mickey gnashed his teeth, then popped his enormous (considering his size) pipe into his mouth. He

couldn't argue; Kelsey had caught him fairly. Still, Mickey had to wonder how honest the chase had

been. The rules for catching a leprechaun were indeed ancient and precise, and, written by the wee folk

themselves, hugely slanted in the leprechaun's favor. But a leprechaun's greatest advantage in evading

humans lay in his uncanny abilities at creating illusions. Enter Kelsey the elf, and the advantage is no more.

None in all the land of Faerie, not the dwarfs of Dvergamal nor even the great dragons themselves, could

see through illusions, could separate reality from fabrication, as well as the elfs.

"Not so small a task, I say," Mickey iterated. "Ye're looking to fill Cedric's own shoes—none in

Dilnamarra that I've seen are fitting that task! The man was a giant..."

Kelsey shrugged, unconcerned, his casual stance stealing Mickey's rising bluster. The human stock in

Faerie had indeed diminished, and the prospects of finding a man who could fit into the ancient armor

once worn by King Cedric Donigarten were not good. Of course Kelsey knew that; why else would he

have taken the time to catch Mickey?

"I might have to go over," Mickey said gravely.

"You are the cleverest of your kind," Kelsey replied, and the compliment was not patronizing. "You shall

find a way, I do not doubt. Have the faeries you know so well do their dance, then. Surely they owe

Mickey McMickey a favor or two."

Mickey took a long draw on his pipe. The fairie dance! Kelsey actually expected him to go over, to find

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someone from the other side, from Real-earth.

"Me pot o' gold might be an easier barter," the leprechaun grumbled.

"Then give it to me," replied a smiling Kelsey, knowing the bluff for what it was. "And I shall use the

wealth to purchase what I need from some other source."

Mickey gnashed his teeth around his pipe, wanting to put his curly boot into the smug elfs face. Kelsey

had seen his bluff as easily as he had seen through Mickey's illusions on the lopsided chase. No

leprechaun would willingly give up his pot of gold with no chance of stealing it back unless his very life

was at stake. And for all of the inconvenience Kelsey had caused him, Mickey knew that the elf would

not harm him.

"Not an easy task," the leprechaun said again.

"If the task was easy, I would have taken the trouble myself," Kelsey replied evenly, though a twitch in

one of his golden eyes revealed that he was nearing the end of his patience. "I have not the time."

"Ye taked the trouble to catching me," Mickey snarled.

"Not so much trouble," Kelsey assured him.

Mickey rested back and considered a possible escape through the meadow again. Kelsey was shooting

down his every leading suggestion with no room for argument, with no room for bargaining. By a

leprechaun's measure, Kelsey wasn't playing fair.

"You shall accept my offer, then," Kelsey said. "Or I shall have your pot of gold here and now." He

paused for a few moments to give Mickey the chance to produce the pot, which, of course, the

leprechaun did not do.

"Excellent," continued the elf. "Then you know the terms of your indenture. When might I expect my

human?"

Mickey kicked his curly-toed shoes again and moved to find a seat on the enormous mushroom. "Suren

'tis a beautiful day," he said, and he was not exaggerating in the least. The breeze was cool but not stiff,

and it carried a thousand springtime scents with it, aromas of awakening flowers and new-growing grass.

"Too beautiful for talking business, I say," Mickey mentioned.

"When?" Kelsey demanded again, refusing to be sidetracked.

"All the folk o' Dilnamarra are out to frolic while we're sitting here arguing..."

"Mickey McMickey!" Kelsey declared. "You have been caught, captured, defeated on the chase. Of

that, there can be no argument. You are thus bound to me. We are not discussing business; we are... I

am, establishing the conditions of your freedom."

"Suren yer tongue's as sharp as yer ears," mumbled Mickey quietly.

Kelsey heard every word of it, of course, but this time he did not scowl. He knew by Mickey's resigned

tone that the leprechaun had surrendered fully. "When?" he asked a third time.

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"I cannot be sure," Mickey replied. "I'll set me friends to working on it."

Kelsey bowed low. "Then enjoy your beautiful day," he said, and he turned to leave.

For all his whining, Mickey was not so unhappy about the way things had turned out. His pride was

hurt—any self-respecting leprechaun would be embarrassed over a capture—but Kelsey was an elf,

after all, and that proved that the chase hadn't really been fair. Besides, Mickey still had his precious pot

of gold and Kelsey's request wasn't overly difficult, leaving plenty of room for Mickey's own

interpretation.

Mickey was thinking of that task now as he sat on the mushroom, his legs, crossed at the ankles,

dangling freely over its side, and he was thinking that the task, like everything else in a leprechaun's life,

just might turn out to be a bit of fun.

"It cannot be," the sorceress declared, pulling away from her reflecting pool and flipping her long and

wavy, impossibly thick black hair back over her delicate shoulders.

"What has yous seen, my lady?" the hunched goblin rasped.

Ceridwen turned on him sharply and the goblin realized that he had not been asked to speak. He dipped

into an apologetic bow, fell right to the floor, and groveled on the ground below the beautiful sorceress,

whining and kissing her feet piteously.

"Get up, Geek!" she commanded, and the goblin snapped to attention. "There is trouble in the land,"

Ceridwen went on, true concern in her voice. "Kelsenellenelvial Gil-Ravadry has taken up his life-quest

to forge the broken spear."

The goblin's face twisted in confusion.

"We do not want the people of Dilnamarra thinking of dead kings and heroes of old," Ceridwen

explained. "Their thoughts must be on their own pitiful existence, on their gruel and mud-farming, on the

latest disease that sweeps their land and keeps them weak.

"Weak and whimpering," Ceridwen declared, and her icy-blue eyes, so contrasting her raven-black hair,

flashed like lightning. She rose up tall and terrible and Geek huddled again on the floor. But Ceridwen

calmed immediately and seemed again the quiet, beautiful woman. "Like you, dear Geek," she said softly.

"Weak and whimpering, and under the control of Kinnemore, my puppet King."

"Does we's killses the elf?" Geek asked hopefully. The goblin so loved killing!

"It is not so easy as that," replied Ceridwen. "I do not wish to invoke the wrath of the Tylwyth Teg." She

winced at the notion. The Tylwyth Teg, the elfs of Faerie, were not to be taken lightly. But Ceridwen's

concern soon dissipated, replaced by a confident smile. "But there are other ways, more subtle ways,"

the sorceress purred, more to herself than to her wretched goblin.

Ceridwen's smile only widened as she considered the many wicked allies she might call upon, the dark

creatures of Faerie's misty nights.

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CHAPTER 1

The Grind

Whrrrr!

The noise was deafening, a twenty-horsepower motor spinning eight heavy blades. It only got louder

when a chunk of scrap plastic slipped in through the creaking hopper gate and landed on that spinning

blur, to be bounced and slammed and chipped apart. In mere seconds, the chunk, reduced to tiny flakes,

would be spit out the grinder's bottom into a waiting barrel.

Gary Leger slipped his headphones over his ears and put on the heavy, heat-resistant gloves. With a

resigned sigh, he stepped up on the stool beside the grinder and absently tipped over the next barrel,

spilling the scrap pieces out before him on the metal table. He tossed one on the hopper tray and pushed

it through the gate, listening carefully as the grinder blades mashed it to ensure that the plastic was not too

hot to be ground. If it was, if the inside of the chunks were still soft, the grinder would soon jam, leaving

Gary with a time-consuming and filthy job of tearing down and cleaning the machine.

The chunk went straight through, its flaky remains spewing into the empty barrel beneath the grinder,

telling Gary that he could go at the work in earnest. He paused for a moment to consider what adventure

awaited him this time, then smiled and adjusted his headphones and gloves. These items were his

protection from the noise and the sharp edges of the irregular plastic chunks, but mostly they were Gary's

insulation from reality itself. All the world—all the real world—became a distant place to Gary, standing

on that stool beside the grinder table. Reality was gone now, no match for the excitement roused by an

active imagination.

The plastic chunks became enemy soldiers—no, fighter jets, variations of a MiG-29. Perhaps a hundred

of the multishaped, dark blue lumps, some as small as two inches across, others nearly a foot long,

though only half that length, lay piled on the table and inside the tipped barrel.

A hundred to one, both bombers and fighters.

Overwhelming odds by any rational estimate, but not in the minds of the specially selected squadron, led

by Gary, of course, sent out to challenge them.

An enemy fighter flashed along the tray and through the hopper gate.

Slam! Crash and burn.

Another one followed, then two more.

Good shooting.

Work blended with adventure, the challenge being to push the chunks in as fast as possible, to shoot

down the enemy force before they could get by and inflict damage on your rear area. As fast as possible,

but not so fast as to jam the grinder. To jam the grinder was to be shot down. Crash!

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Game over.

Gary was getting good at this. He had half the barrel ground in just a couple of minutes and still the blade

spun smoothly. Gary shifted the game, allowed for a bit of ego. Now the enemy fighters, realizing their

enemy, and thus, their inevitable doom, turned tail and ran. Gary's squadron sped off in pursuit. If the

enemy escaped, they would only come back another time, reinforced. Gary looked at the long line of

chunk-filled barrels stretching back halfway through the large room and groaned. There were always

more barrels, more enemies; the reinforcements would come, whatever he might do.

This was a war the young man felt he would never finish.

And here was a battle too real to be truly beaten by imagination, a battle against tedium, against a day

where the body worked but the mind had to be shut down, or constantly diverted. It had been played out

by the ants of an industrialized society for decades, men and women doing what they had to do to

survive.

It all seemed so very perverted to Gary Leger. What had his father dreamed through the forty-five years

of his working life? Baseball probably; his father loved the game so dearly. Gary pictured him standing

before the slotted shelves in the post office, pitching letters, throwing balls and strikes. How many World

Series were won in that postal room?

So very perverted.

Gary shrugged it all away and went back to his aerial battle. The pace had slowed, though the enemy still

remained a threat. Another wide-winged fighter smashed through the creaking gate to its doom. Gary

considered the pilot. Another man doing as he had to do?

No, that notion didn't work for Gary. Imagining a man being killed by his handiwork destroyed the

fantasy and left him with a cold feeling. But that was the marvel of imagination, after all, for to Gary, these

were no longer pilot-filled aircraft. They were robot drones—extraterrestrial robot drones. Or even

better, they were extraterrestrial aircraft—so what if they still resembled the Russian MiGs—piloted by

monster aliens, purely evil and come to conquer the world.

Crash and burn.

"Hey, stupid!"

Gary barely heard the call above the clanging din. He pulled off the headphones and spun about, as

embarrassed as a teenager caught playing an air guitar.

Leo's smirk and the direction of his gaze told Gary all that he needed to know. He bent down from the

stool and looked beneath the grinder, to the overfilled catch barrel and the pile of plastic flakes on the

floor.

"Coffee man's here," Leo said, and he turned away, chuckling and shaking his head.

Did Leo know the game? Gary wondered. Did Leo play? And what might his imagination conjure?

Probably baseball, like Gary's father.

They didn't call it the all-American game for nothing.

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Gary waited until the last banging chunks had cleared the whirring blades, then switched off the motor.

The coffee man was here; the twenty-minute reprieve had begun. He looked back once to the grinder as

he started away, to the piled plastic on the dirty floor. He'd have to pick that up after his break.

Victory had not been clean this day.

The conversations among the twenty or so workers gathered out by the coffee truck covered everything

from politics to the upcoming softball tournament. Gary walked past the groups, hardly hearing their talk.

It was too fine a spring day, he decided, to get caught up in some discussion that almost always ended on

a bitter note. Still, louder calls and the more excited conclusions found their way through his indifference.

"Hey, Danny, you think two steak-and-cheese grinders are enough?" came one sarcastic

shout—probably from Leo. "Lunch is almost an hour and a half away. You think that'll hold you?"

"...kick their butts," said another man, an older worker that Gary knew only as Tomo. Gary knew right

away that Tomo and his bitter group were talking about the latest war, or the next war, or the chosen

minority group of the day.

Gary shook his head. "Too nice a day for wars," he muttered under his breath. He spent his buck fifty

and walked back towards the shop, carrying a pint of milk and a two-pack of Ring Dings. Gary did

some quick calculations. He could grind six barrels an hour. Considering his wages, this snack was worth

about two barrels, two hundred enemy jets.

He had to stop eating so much.

"You playing this weekend?" Leo asked him when he got to the loading dock, which the crew used as a

sun deck.

"Probably," Gary spun about, hopping up to take a seat on the edge of the deck. Before he landed, an

empty milk carton bopped off the back of his head.

"What'd'ye mean, probably?" Leo demanded.

Gary picked up the carton and returned fire. Caught in a crosswind, it missed Leo, bounced off Danny's

head (who was too engrossed with his food to even notice), and ricocheted into a trash bin.

The highlight of the day.

"I meant to do that," Gary insisted.

"If you can plan a throw like that, you'd better play this weekend," remarked another of the group.

"You'd better play," Leo agreed, though from him it sounded more as a warning. "If you don't, I'll have

him"—he motioned to his brother, Danny—"next to me in the outfield." He launched a second carton, this

one at Danny. Danny dodged as it flew past, but his movement dropped a hunk of steak to the ground.

He considered the fallen food for a moment, then looked back to Leo.

"That's my food!"

Leo was laughing too hard to hear him. He headed back into the shop; Gary shook his head in

amazement at Danny's unending appetite—and yet, Danny was by far the slimmest of the group—and

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joined Leo. Twenty minutes. The reprieve was over.

Gary's thoughts were on the tournament as he headed back towards the grinding room. He liked that

Leo, and many others, wanted him to play, considering their interest a payoff for the many hours he put in

at the local gym. He was big and strong, six feet tall and well over two hundred pounds, and he could hit

a Softball a long, long way. That didn't count for much by Gary's estimation, but it apparently did in many

other people's eyes—and Gary had to admit that he enjoyed their attention, the minor celebrity status.

The new skip in his step flattened immediately when he entered the grinding room.

"Now you gonna take a work break?" snarled Tomo. Gary looked up at the clock; his group had spent

a few extra minutes outside.

"And what's this?" Tomo demanded, pointing to the mess by the catch barrel. "You too stupid to know

when to change the barrel?"

Gary resisted the urge to mouth a sharp retort. Tomo wasn't his boss, wasn't anybody's boss, but he

really wasn't such a bad guy. And looking at his pointing hand, with three fingers sheared off at the first

knuckle, Gary could understand where the old plastics professional was coming from, could understand

the source of the bitterness.

"Didn't teach you any common sense in college?" Tomo muttered, wandering away. His voice was full of

venom as he repeated, "College."

Tomo was a lifer, had been working in plastics factories fully twenty years before Gary was even born.

The missing fingers accentuated that point; many older men in Lancashire were missing fingers, a result of

the older-design molding machines. Prone to jams, these monstrosities had a pair of iron doors that

snapped shut with the force (and appetite, some would say) of a shark's jaws, and fingers seemed to be

their favorite meals.

A profound sadness came over Gary as he watched the old man depart, limping slightly, leaning to one

side, and with his two-fingered hand hanging freely by his side. It wasn't condescension aimed at

Tomo—Gary wasn't feeling particularly superior to anyone at that moment—it was just a sadness about

the human condition in general.

As if sensing Gary's lingering stare, Tomo spun back on him suddenly. "You'll be here all your life, you

know!" the old man growled. "You'll work in the dirt and then you'll retire and then you'll die!"

Tomo turned and was gone, but his words hovered in the air around Gary like a black-winged curse.

"No, I won't," Gary insisted quietly, if somewhat lamely. At that point in his life, Gary had little

ammunition to argue back against Tomo's cynicism. Gary had done everything right, everything according

to the rules as they had been explained to him. Top of his class in college, double major, summa cum

laude. And he had purposely concentrated in a field that promised lucrative employment, not the liberal

arts concentration that he would have preferred. Even the general electives, courses most of his college

colleagues breezed through without a care, Gary went after with a vengeance. If a 4.0 was there to be

earned, Gary would settle for nothing less.

Everything according to the rules, everything done right. He had graduated nearly a year before,

expecting to go out and set the world on fire.

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It hadn't worked out quite as he had expected. They called it recession. Too pretty a word, by Gary

Leger's estimation. He was beginning to think of it as reality.

And so here he was, back at the shop he had worked at part-time to help pay for his education.

Grinding plastic chunks, shooting down enemy aircraft.

And dying.

He knew that, conceded that at least that part of Tomo's curse seemed accurate enough. Every day he

worked here, passing time, was a day further away from the job and the life he desired, and a day closer

to his death.

It was not a pleasant thought for a twenty-two-year-old. Gary moved back to the grinder, too

consumed by a sense of mortality and self-pity for any thoughts of imaginary battles or World Series

caliber curve balls.

Was he looking into a prophetic mirror when he gazed upon bitter Tomo? Would he become that

seven-fingered old man, crooked and angry, fearing death and hating life?

There had to be more to it all, more reason for continuing his existence. Gary had seen dozens of shows

interviewing people who had come close to death. All of them said how much more they valued their

lives now, how their zest for living had increased dramatically and each new day had become a challenge

and a joy. Sweeping up the plastic by the catch barrel with that beautiful spring day just inches away,

beyond an open window, Gary almost hoped for a near-death experience, for something to shake him

up, or at least to shake up this petty existence he had landed himself into. Was the value of his life to be

tied up in memories of Softball, or of that one moment on the loading dock when he had unintentionally

bounced a milk carton off of Danny's head and landed it perfectly into the trash bin?

Tomo came back through the grinding room then, laughing and joking with another worker. His laughter

mocked Gary's self-pity and made him feel ashamed of his dark thoughts. This was an honest job, after

all, and a paying job, and for all his grumbling, Gary had to finally admit to himself that his life was his

own to accept or to change.

Still, he seemed a pitiful sight indeed that night walking home—he always walked, not wanting to get the

plastic colors on the seats of his new Jeep. His clothes were filthy, his hands were filthy (and bleeding in a

few places), and his eyes stung from the dark blue powder, a grotesque parody of makeup, that had

accumulated in and around them.

He kept off the main road for the two-block walk to his parents' house; he didn't really want to be seen.

CHAPTER 2

The Cemetery, the Jeep, and the Hobbit

A cemetery covered most of the distance between the shop and home. This was not a morbid place to

Gary. Far from it; he and his friends had spent endless hours in the cemetery, playing Fox and Hounds or

Capture the Flag, using the large empty field (the water table was too high for graves) in the back corner

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for baseball games and football games. The importance of the place had not diminished as the group

grew older. This was where you brought your girlfriend, hoping, praying, to uncover some of those

"mysteries" in a Bob Seger song. This was where you sneaked thePlayboy magazines a friend had lifted

from his father's drawer, or the six-pack someone's over-twenty-one brother had bought (for a 100

percent delivery charge!). A thousand memories were tied up in this place, memories of a vital time of

youth, and of learning about life.

In a cemetery.

The irony of that thought never failed to touch Gary as he walked through here each morning and night,

to and from the grind of the grinder. He could see his parents' house from the cemetery, a two-story

garrison up on the hill beyond the graveyard's chain-link fence. Hell, he could see all of his life from here,

the games, the first love, limitations and boundless dreams. And now, a bit older, Gary could see, too, his

own inevitable fate, could grasp the importance of those rows of headstones and understand that the

people buried here had once had hopes and dreams just like his own, once wondered about the meaning

and the worth of their lives.

Still, it remained not a morbid place, but heavy with nostalgia, a place of long ago and far away, and

edged in the sadness of realized mortality. And as each day, each precious day, passed him by, Gary

stood on a stool beside a metal table, loading chunks of scrap plastic into a whirring grinder.

Somehow, somewhere, there had to be more.

The stones and the sadness were left behind as soon as Gary hopped the six-foot fence across from his

home. His tan Wrangler sat in front of the hedgerow, quiet and still as usual. Gary laughed to himself, at

himself, every time he passed his four-wheel-drive toy. He had bought it for the promise of adventure, so

he told others—and told himself at those times he was feeling gullible. There weren't a lot of trails in

Lancashire; in the six months Gary had owned the Jeep, he had taken it off-road exactly twice. Six

months and only three thousand miles clocked on the odometer—hardly worth the payments.

But those payments were the real reason Gary had bought the Jeep, and in his heart he knew it. Gary

had realized that he needed a reason to go stand on that stool and get filthy every day, a reason to

answer the beckon of the rising sun. When he had bought the Jeep, he had played the all-American

game, the sacrifice of precious time for things that someone else, some make-believe model in a

make-believe world, told him he really wanted to have. Like everything else, it seemed, this Jeep was the

end result of just one more of those rules that Gary had played by all his life.

"Ah, the road to adventure," Gary muttered, tapping the front fender as he passed. The previous night's

rain had left brown spots all over the Jeep, but Gary didn't care. His filthy fingers left a blue streak of

plastics' coloring above the headlight, but he didn't even notice.

He heard the words before his mother even spoke them.

"Oh my God," she groaned when he walked in the door. "Look at you."

"I am the ghost of Christmas past!" Gary moaned, holding his arms stiffly in front of him, opening his

blue-painted eyes wide, and advancing a step towards her, reaching for her with grimy fingers.

"Get away!" she cried. "And get those filthy clothes in the laundry chute."

"Seventeen words," Gary whispered to his father as he passed him by on his way to the stairs. It was

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R.A. Salvatore - Spearwielders 1- The Woods Out Back

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