Then, to mix things up, he undid a spell: he made the army behind him visible, or most of it. Take a good look, gentlemen. Those ones with the horse bodies are the hippogriffs; griffins have the lion bodies. It’s easy to mix them up.
Then—and he indulged himself here—he made the giants visible. You do not appreciate from fairy tales how unbelievably terrifying a giant is, at all. These players were seven-story giants, and you did not mess around with them. In real life humans didn’t slay giants, because it was impossible. It would be like killing an apartment building with your hands. They were even stronger than they looked—had to be, to beat the square-cube law that makes land organisms that big physically impossible in the real world—and their skins were half a foot thick. There were only a couple dozen giants in all of Fillory—even Fillory’s hyper-abundant ecosystem couldn’t have fed more of them. Six of them had come out for the battle.
Nobody moved. Instead the Great Salt River moved.
It was right behind them, they’d just crossed it, and the nymphs took it out of its banks and straight into the mass of the Lorian army, like an aimable tsunami. A lot of the soldiers got washed away; Eliot had made the nymphs promise to drown as few of them as possible, though they were free to abuse them in any other way they chose.
Some of the ones who weren’t swept away wanted to fight anyway, because they were just that valiant. Eliot supposed they must have had difficult childhoods or something like that. Join the club, it’s not that exclusive. He and his friends gave them a difficult adulthood to go with it.
It took them four days to harry the Lorians back to Grudge Gap—you could only kick their asses along so fast and no faster. That was where Eliot stopped and called out their champion. Now it was dawn, and the pass made a suitably desolate backdrop, with dizzyingly steep slopes ascending on either side, striped with spills of loose ruck and runnels of meltwater. Above them loomed icebound peaks that had, as far as he knew, never been climbed, except by the dawn rays that were right now kissing them pink.
Single combat, man to man. If Eliot won, the Lorians would go home and never come back. That was the deal. If the Lorian champion won—his name for some reason was Vile Father—well, whatever. It wasn’t like he was going to win.
The lines were about fifty yards apart, and it was marvelously quiet out there between them. The pass could have been designed for this; for all Eliot knew it had been. The walls made a natural amphitheater. The ground was perfectly level—firm packed coarse gray sand, from which any rocks larger than a pebble had been removed overnight, per his orders. Eliot kicked it around a little, like a batter settling into the batter’s box.
Vile Father didn’t look like somebody waiting to begin the biggest fight of his life. He looked like somebody waiting for a bus. He hadn’t adopted anything like a fighting stance. He just stood there, with his soft shoulders sloping and his gut sticking out. Weird. His hands were huge: they looked like two king crabs.
Though Eliot supposed he didn’t look much less weird. He wasn’t wearing armor either, just a slightly floppy white silk shirt and leather pants. For weapons he carried a long knife in his right hand and a short metal fighting stick in his left. He supposed it was probably pretty obvious that he had no idea what to do with them, apart from the obvious stabbing and whacking motions. He nodded to Vile Father. No response.
Time passed. It was actually a teensy bit socially awkward. A soft cold wind blew; it was freezing up here even in May. Vile Father’s brown nipples, on the ends of his pendulous man-cans, were like dried figs. He had no scars at all on his smooth skin, which somehow was scarier than if he were all messed up.
Then Vile Father wasn’t there anymore. It wasn’t magic—he had some kind of crazy movement-style that was like speed skating over solid ground. Just like that he was halfway across the distance between them and thrusting his blade, whatever it was, straight at Eliot’s Adam’s apple at full extension. Eliot barely got out of the way in time.
He shouldn’t have been able to get out of the way at all. Like an idiot he’d figured Vile Father was going to swing the blade at him like a sword, on the end of that long pole, thereby giving him plenty of time to see it coming. Which would have been stupid, but all right, I get it already, it’s a thrusting weapon. By rights it should have been sticking out of the nape of Eliot’s neck by now, slick and shiny with clear fluid from his spine.