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The Last Little Bit - Robert Earl

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THE LAST LITTLE BIT

Robert Earl

Winter had locked the Goldtooth brothers into the constricting stink of their burrow for over two months now and, within the pressure cooker of these narrowing walls, their sibling rivalry had risen to boiling point.

In past years Father Goldtooth had been able to control his sons, but now he was too ancient. Too weary. His offspring awaited his fall as saplings beneath a mighty oak await its collapse, the better to grow massive themselves.

Ogres, however, lack a sapling’s patience. Father Goldtooth had already been forced to kill two of his more ambitious heirs. It was to avoid having to kill any more that he had called for this sacred feast, the great competition that would decide his successor.

All eight of the remaining Goldtooths had started the contest, each hungry for the glory. Now, three days into proceedings, only Father Goldtooth and two of his sons, Greasus and Grond, remained.

The three of them sat squeezed around the bloodstained granite slab of their feasting table. By now their sweat-slicked hides burned as hot as furnaces, and their bodies had swollen up as fat as ticks. The humid air was greased with their stench. Even the flies which buzzed unseasonably through the stink seemed heavy, sluggish and ripe to burst.

Father Goldtooth, who had been the last to finish the previous trencher, rubbed some lard from his face into his beard and called for the next round.

‘Butcher,’ he bellowed, his voice booming through the burrow and setting its infestation of gnoblars cowering. ‘Bring us meat!’

Greasus and Grond roared their approval. Father Goldtooth, his face as impassive as the granite table itself, felt a burst of pride. It was right that one of these two would be his heir. Grond had the muscle to stop a charging thundertusk and Greasus had a gut as fat as that of a pregnant rhinox. Sons to be proud of indeed.

‘Meat you will have,’ the Goldtooth’s butcher said as he lurched in. The venerable creature was haloed by buzzing flies and his blood-stained apron bulged over the immensity of his gut as he heaved rough-hewn slabs of mutton on to the table. Splintered bone, sharp as fish hooks, threaded through the raw flesh.

Father Goldtooth felt his mouth water.

‘Dig in boys’ he said, and they did. As they bit into it they found the mutton to be lively with maggots, and the bone had a satisfying crunch as it shattered beneath their teeth. The remains of the three sheep disappeared with barely a belch.

‘More!’ Father Goldtooth roared. The butcher returned with rhinox heads, each a quarter of a tonne of bone, gristle and horn. The three contenders chewed through them with the determination of ogres who know that the odds are shortening by the mouthful.

‘More!’ Now the butcher brought them great leather buckets of slithering cave eels, as white and blind as maggots. Even with the heads bitten off they squirmed delightfully in the throat, but the ogres didn’t pause to savour them.

‘More!’ Dozens of mismatched hoofs were piled on the table, most already gnawed on by rats and gnoblars. For once, the ogres didn’t resent the theft. By now their gluttony had started to bring with it a terrible pain, and their porcine eyes glittered through a sheen of sweat and slobber.

‘More!’ they cried, and more there was. Trenchers of porridge made from ground stone and rhinox blood. Bundles of rotten pheasants, each a putrid bundle of feathers and melting meat. Planks of cured rhinox hide, jerky made from dried orc flesh, decayed wood alive with clusters of psychedelically coloured fungus.

Father and sons devoured these delicacies with a joyless determination. And then, instead of more food, all the butcher had left was bad news.

‘That’s it, lads,’ he said, wringing blood from his apron ‘You’ve eaten the lot. We’ve got nothing left.’

For a moment the ogres stared at him uncomprehendingly. They sat sodden and dazed in pools of their own sweat, their eyes glazed and the remains of their clothes stuck to them. The cloth had long since burst apart at the seams to reveal the slicked expanses of painfully distended fat beneath.

‘More?’ Grond slurred through a mouthful of bloody drool.

‘No.’ The butcher shook his head. ‘No more.’

Greasus rolled onto the floor with a wet smack. He groaned as he grabbed the back of his iron bound chair to pull himself up.

‘No more,’ Father Goldtooth wheezed, each word an agony ‘Then… Then it must be a draw.’

‘No!’ Greasus roared and, as he lifted the iron and oak chair above his head, his cry of defiance turned into one of sheer agony. All three ogres watched dumbfounded as he staggered towards his father and, with a scream that sent liquid spraying from his every orifice, brought the chair down onto the ancient’s skull.

There was a crack of iron and wood and bone and Father Goldtooth, tyrant for the past forty years, collapsed onto the table into a mass of blood and spilled brains.

The two brothers regarded the bulk of their late father as it lay cooling on the slab in front of them. He had taught them everything they knew about hunting, about fighting, about the lore of the tribe. He had been their guide. Their tyrant.

Now what he was was half a tonne of fresh meat.

‘I’ll do the honours then, shall I?’ the butcher asked after a moment of respectful silence.

Greasus collapsed back down onto the remains of his chair. Grond grunted in what could have been either assent or agony. The butcher got to work. Steel thwacked into muscle, crunched through bone, rang on granite. Blood splashed. When he had finished he paused, considered and then piled the two halves of their father’s dismembered corpse in front of the brothers.

Grond hesitated. Greasus didn’t. As soon as his share had spattered onto the table he fell upon it. After a moment, perhaps sensing that he was eating alone, he looked up.

Grond looked back at him through a red mist of agony, and as he did so remembered a lifetime of rivalry. Of fighting for their dam’s teat, for the first bite of a rat, for Father Goldtooth’s approval, although that was never asked for or given.

Grond grimaced and picked up the first of his own morsels.

The two ate in relative silence. Fresh meat didn’t have the squelch of the previous delicacies, nor did it seek to fight back. There was nothing to it but the purity of its sheer, stomach tearing volume.

Greasus felt something burst inside him. He ignored it. Grond was struck with the sudden urge to vomit. He massaged his own throat until the feeling passed.

A low groan of agony escaped from Greasus as he chewed through his late father’s skull and the splinters of wood that were buried in it. Grond noticed the beads of blood scattered across his own naked stomach. At first he assumed that they had dripped from his food, but as soon as he wiped them away they reappeared.

‘I’m sweating blood,’ he wheezed through a mouthful of flesh.

‘You will explode,’ Greasus told him, his voice flat with certainty.

Grond nodded. ‘So be it,’ he said.

The two continued, rivalry almost forgotten as they passed the pain barrier together. Numbness set in and it became difficult to hold the slithering flesh for long enough to cram into their tearing bodies. The ordeal lasted for ever until, miraculously, it was over.

‘That’s it,’ the butcher said with the simple humility of one who has witnessed greatness. ‘You’ve eaten him all. All apart from the last little bit.’

All three looked at the last little bit. It lay glistening on the blood-soaked stone.

‘More,’ Greasus croaked.

The butcher nodded.

‘Of course’, he said, raising his cleaver and chopping the last little bit into two halves.

And Grond vomited.

No, not vomited. Erupted. Every muscle contracted at once, turning him into a living bellows. His diaphragm tightened, his gullet spasmed, his stomach trembled and clenched.

A half-digested tide of rotten meat sprayed the room. It covered Greasus with a chunky slime. It covered the table, pooling for a moment before flowing over the edges and splattering onto the floor. It covered the walls and the rafters above.

Then the smell of it hit Grond, and he vomited again.

When he had finished, the three ogres watched each other through the rising steam. A few of the candles, those which had been shielded by the ogres’ dripping bodies, remained lit.

‘More,’ Greasus croaked again and the butcher, knowing that he was becoming part of history, fished through the waste to find Greasus’s half of the last little bit. He handed it to the champion who, without even wiping the vomit from his prize, swallowed it with a single crunching bite of gristle.

Grond, finally losing his poise, wept a bloody tear. Then, slumped and defeated, he dragged himself away to tend to his grief. Greasus paid him no heed. He merely waddled though the liquid filth of the feasting hall to the throne that awaited him at the head of the table. And that is how he began his reign, as a legend made of vomit, blood and sweat and, above all, of that last little bit.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Robert Earl graduated from Keele University in 1994, after which he started a career in sales. Three years later though, he’d had more than enough of that and since then he has worked and travelled in the Balkans and the Middle East. He now lives in England, and his credits for the Black Library include the Florin and Lorenzo series and Ancient Blood.

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Published in 2012 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK

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