Chương 8

The inside of the cottage was as bad as the outside. The hag had a cauldron hanging over a firepit in one corner, and something that looked more like a nest than a bed opposite of it. Rope lines were strung overhead, various animal carcasses hung from them to dry. A few cracked ceramic jars sat on a lonely shelf on the back wall. It was hard to decide whether the stink of Bad Magic was stronger between the cauldron, the jars, or the hag. Agurg squinted at Lemon as she came into the cottage.

"You're not Gargly," the swamp hag said.

"Who are you?"

"My name's Lemon."

"That's a dumb name," Agurg said, rudely. Lemon liked her name. Lemons were bright, and yellow, and they smelled good, just like her. Most of the time. Except for the skunk incident a few years ago. And right now, Lemon supposed. She had a lot of mud and swamp water in her fur, and that didn't smell too good either. Not as bad as skunk musk, but not good.

"What do you want?" Agurg continued, apparently unaware of how insulting she'd been.

"I… I want you to stop doing Bad Magic." The hag threw her head back and cackled.

"Bad magic is all I do, you dumb dog. Maybe I'll do some on you!" Lemon already didn't like where this conversation was going. Agurg was mean, and smelled awful, and the way she held that cleaver and kept giving Lemon weighing glances was making her uncomfortable. If she didn't know any better, she'd have thought Agurg was sizing her up for a meal. Did hags eat dogs?

"You just try it! I have magic too." The cackle cut off abruptly and the hag stood up.

"Really? That's interesting. Real magic, or just that trinket hanging off your collar that lets you talk?" Oh, that wasn't good. Her charms weren't exactly hidden, but normal folk couldn't see the magic. If Agurg could, that meant her eyes were sensitive to magical emanations, which Hogarth said was never a good thing for an enemy to have. It made it harder to surprise them with magic. Then again, Hogarth's magic took a lot longer to work than hers did. All Lemon had to do was concentrate.

Hogarth had to wave his arms around and make funny poses with his hands while muttering rubbish words. Lemon hoped Agurg needed to do that too. It would make it a lot easier for her to fight back if she could guess what the hag was trying to do. And it did look like it was going to be a fight, not that she was surprised. Agurg had started sizing her up the moment Lemon had walked through the door. A massive crunch from the window distracted both of them.

Lemon glanced over and found Gargly half crouched on and half hanging off the window sill, his massive tongue hanging out to push against the floor and keep him steady.

"Agurg," he croaked out.

"What do you want, you overgrown toad? I'm busy."

"The dog is the one who disrupted your harpies' ritual," Gargly said. That treacherous toad! It was bad enough he'd bullied her out here in the first place (never mind that she agreed that Agurg needed to be stopped), now he was blabbing to the hag too. Just whose side was he on, anyway? Agurg cackled again.

"You say that like I should care? I'm getting a double payment this month so they can redo it. If anything, the dog's good for business. That reminds me, I'm going to need another twenty toads from you." Gargly let out an outraged croak and dragged himself fully through the window.

"That wasn't our deal!"

"What deal? The deal where I don't kill you because it's marginally more convenient for me to let you wrangle my ingredients? Sure, go ahead. Make it less convenient for me. See what I do." The toad boss let out a deep, basso rumble from his reverberating throat and glanced over at Lemon.

"Well?" he demanded.

"Well what?"

"Gargly is trying to get somebody to give him something for facilitating this meeting," Agurg said.

"He thinks he's clever, but he's failed to realize that he has no leverage. I never promised him anything to get you here, never even asked him to. I didn't even know you existed until Lagarta flew over this morning to whine about something wrecking her ritual and needed new catalysts. So I'm not giving him anything for his trouble.

"And since you're clearly not leaving here alive, you're not going to be giving him anything either. Sorry, fat toad, but you're out of luck. All you get to do is leave here with your miserable life to go gather me more toads for the next potion." This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere. Gargly hunched in place on the floor, his dead black eyes swinging back and forth between Agurg and Lemon.

He was obviously waiting for the fight to start, to see who'd win. Lemon had no doubt he'd ambush her in a heartbeat if it looked like Agurg was going to kill her, anything to save his own warty skin and make himself look good. That also meant if she got the advantage and he thought Agurg was going to lose, he'd throw in with Lemon to make sure it happened. It was obvious there was no love lost between the two of them. In the end, it didn't change much.

He wasn't going to help unless she was already winning, and if she was winning, she didn't need his help. That just meant Lemon needed to make sure she won, and since she was fighting against someone who did Bad Magic, she was guaranteed to triumph!

"I'm not going to let you do bad magic anymore."

"You can't stop me," Agurg said with a laugh, brandishing the cleaver. Her eyes narrowed into a squint, and she flung the blade at Lemon. The throw was… well, kind of pathetic. It wasn't well-aimed, or very fast, and Lemon didn't even need to do anything to make sure it missed. She was starting to think the hag had bad eyesight. But since Agurg was going to throw kitchen knives at her, it seemed only fair to return the favor. She caught it with Wizard's Hand and threw it right back.

It struck Agurg right between the eyes, handle first.

"Arrggh! You little bi-""I don't like that word," Lemon said. Her tail wasn't wagging now. Agurg grabbed the cleaver out of the air and wrestled it out of Lemon's control.

"Gargly," she screeched.

"Fetch me that collar." The toad looked back and forth between the two of them, then flexed his legs and hopped back out the window.

"Gargly!" Agurg said, outrage in her voice.

"Get back here, you miserable toad! Lemon heard a splash of water through the window.

"Fine then, like I needed your help anyway." Agurg spun in place and grabbed up a stick off a rickety table in her free hand. She waved it around, muttered something under her breath, and sent a blast of solid magic across the cottage at Lemon. The hag's aim was off, but the magic corrected for that and the bolt smacked hard into Lemon's flank. She yelped and flinched away, then growled at the hag. Magic built up in her speaking charm, and Lemon barked, once, then again.

Sound reverberating through the cottage, shaking the walls and making Agurg cry out in pain. Lemon didn't give her a chance to recover. She leaped forward and sunk her teeth into the hag's calf, then dragged her forward to tip her off balance. Agurg's cries sharpened, and she swung a surprisingly fast hand down at Lemon. The attack was done blindly, but it was close enough that it forced Lemon to let go in order to avoid being hacked into by the cleaver.

Another bark filled the small cottage, sending Agurg staggering back.

"Stop that!" she howled, wildly swinging the cleaver. Lemon ducked away, took a beat to get the timing, then leaped up and bit down on Agurg's hand. She shook her head viciously and forced the hag to drop the blade. Hag flesh was absolutely disgusting, without a doubt the nastiest thing Lemon had ever had in her mouth. She was going to need a hundred sausages to get rid of the taste. Despite that, she hung on gamely as the hag thrashed.

Then she was slammed into the wall hard enough to smash a hole through the rotting wood, and Lemon found herself tumbling through the air to splash into the lake. She struggled to right herself, started kicking her legs, and then felt something long and flexible push against her. Her snout broke the surface of the water and she was shoved back towards the house. Lemon got back onto dry land and rushed back towards the house.

She needed to take the fight back to Agurg before the hag could really start using her magic. If that happened, there was no telling what kind of attack she'd pull off. Agurg must have realized the same thing, because by the time Lemon caught sight of her again, she'd somehow lit a fire that had the cauldron bubbling over and had scooped up three different jars off the shelf.

"Let's see how you like this!" she said, pouring the contents into the cauldron all at once. Instantly, the frothy bubbling burst into fetid, purple-black smoke that rolled off the metal to spill out across the floor. Now, that was Bad Magic, poison given shape and form. It was exactly the kind of magic Lemon was determined to stop from happening. She was too late to prevent Agurg from pouring those jars into her cauldron, but not too late to stop the hag from making things work.

Without her magic to power the cauldron, the potion would become inert. Lemon had one more advantage Agurg hadn't accounted for. She'd been wearing her alchemical mask charm all day, and was in fact still wearing it now. It had been filtering out all sorts of things while she roamed the swamp. She trusted her master's magic to beat this toxic cloud too.

While the swamp hag hunched over her cauldron, feeding it Bad Magic and cackling insanely at the thought of Lemon succumbing to her poisonous smoke, she darted into the darkness. Her nose was practically blinded by the stink, and her eyes were blinded, but her ears worked just fine. The cottage wasn't that big; Agurg made no attempts at being stealthy. Why would she? There was no need when she thought she was protected by her spell.

Lemon closed the distance, charged her voice charm to its maximum capacity, and BARKED. Sound waves rolled out of her, throwing Agurg forward to smack into the cauldron at her waist and dipping her head and torso in the liquid. The walls shook and creaked alarmingly, and part of the roof fell down to strike the floor nearby. Lemon ignored that to focus on Agurg, who'd lost control of her magic. She pulled herself back out of the cauldron with an agonized wail and flailed wildly, blinded by pain.

Lemon ghosted behind her and tore out a chunk of her leg. Agurg tumbled to the ground, grasped at the lip of the cauldron, and jerked her hand back. The cauldron was far too heavy for Lemon to lift with Wizard's Hand, otherwise she would have tipped it over on the swamp hag right there. Failing that, she would just have to get her teeth dirty. By the time the smoke cleared out and Gargly hopped into view, Agurg was laying on the ground, her body covered in blisters and boils from her own out-of-control spell.

She was also missing a few key chunks of flesh, and had already stopped twitching. Lemon looked over at Gargly, who'd frozen in the doorway, and said,"I believe we had an agreement. Now, please show me how to get out of this swamp."