Untitled by Unknown Author Page A

again.
        After a few minutes, I snapped out of it, and started helping. That was a mistake. The next half hour or so was spent trying to ft into the ogre suits that we'd disentangled from the bloody corpses. This was worse than shooting someone.
        We grappled with the smelly, mangled bodies, and pulled off some clothing and accessories that seemed like they might ft. Then Pimbi, Tiltel and I went to a well in back of the building, where we rinsed off the outfts we'd assembled. They cleaned up surprisingly well. I guess if they'd been cotton and silk instead of leather and chain mail, they might not have done so nicely.
        It wasn't as easy actually putting them on. Most of these guys were much bigger than we were, and we had to use leaves and grass to stuff them out so that they'd ft. In the end, we didn't exactly look like the Biker-Nazi guys, but were close enough. From a distance, nobody'd probably bat an eyelash.
        I walked around through the barracks building. It was nothing to write home about. Like its former inhabitants, it smelled really bad. There was half-eaten food lying around everywhere, straw pallets with blankets on them, and a big hearth with the remnants of a spitroasted pig in it. It took me a few seconds to realize what was wrong with that picture, then I remembered that here, pigs sometimes wear clothes and have religious leaders. I hustled out the front door in a hurry.
        Nick had put on these amazing boots that covered up most of his legs. His cloak ft under a leather breastplate studded with spikes. Somehow, he'd cut off some ogre's long hair and fashioned a wighat from that and one of the horned Nazi-type helmets. His own big gloves covered his hands.
        All the action had made him downright cheery. He smiled as he saw me looking over his costume, half of his face complying. "Pretty good?" he asked rhetorically.
        "Yeah," I said, "You look like you're from Gwar or something."
        "Bad place, is it?"
        I decided not to press my luck. "Oh yeah. Yeah."
        "Now there," he said, gesturing off across the decidedly blue forest valley, towards the center of the towers of smoke, "there's a bad place."
        I looked and saw, over the tops of far trees, through the mist, a gray monolith on the horizon. A tower rose from the center of it, menacing the landscape.
        "That would be the Hollow Man's Fortress? Freddie's?"
        "Bhjennigh's. That is correct. We'll be there tomorrow."
        And he stalked off, without another word.
        I'd absentmindedly stuck my hands into the pockets of the ogrevest I was wearing. I felt something cool and rounded against my right hand. It was a cylinder of some kind. I pulled it out to have a look. It was a little gold jar, a little smaller than a soda can, with a tin cover on it.
        I unscrewed the cover and found that the top was covered with little holes, like a salt shaker. I shook it—it was flled with some kind of powder. There were curlyques engraved in the gold all the way around, and a word engraved in equally fancy style, it wasn't English, but thanks to the Language Bush, I knew that it said "Life." I wondered if I'd stumbled on the equivalent of somebody's coke stash, and decided to scrutinize the contents later on, when I had some time. Back in the pocket it went.
        A gigantic shadow loomed in front of me. I turned around to see the red elephant, looking over my shoulder and kind of leering at me. If you've never had an elephant leer at you, you've never lived. He'd seen what I'd found.
        "You want to be careful with that shit," he warned, in a deep basso profundo. "More trouble than it's worth." Then he winked, and bounded off into the foliage, trumpeting out a song, sounding like nothing so much as a demented tuba soloist.
        Not much after that, after having stacked the corpses neatly behind the barracks, we headed out again, straight through the blue