It was widely considered unsafe for centaurs to be wandering alone outside the Centaur Pastures. Gryphons, trolls, giants, and halflings wanted to eat them; dwarves on Meadschpringå wanted to kill them; elves took them hostage and held them for ridiculous cheese ransoms; but humans were the worst. Every centaur foal learned the six-line teaching song:
Never trot in human cities
Because they’ll try to take your kidneys!
If you do go, see what I mean
When you wake up missing your spleen.
They’ll draw the marrow from your bones
And make a tonic from your gallstones.
Such songs, of course, were designed to encourage questions from foals, and Vic had fired some at his revered dam, Barfing August:
Why do they want our kidneys?
Because we have two sets of them leading to a single bladder and they think we don’t need them all, and furthermore, they believe they’re entitled to take them.
Why do they feel entitled?
Humans look upon us as animals, son, and they feel entitled to do anything they want to animals.
But aren’t we part human too?
Yes, but humans always tend to focus on the part that doesn’t look just like them.
What the heck is a gallstone?
Gallstones accumulate in your gallbladder over many years. They’re basically nuggets of hardened cholesterol. The humans grind them into powder and put them in fruity drinks because they think it will make them perform well during mating season.
What’s mating season?
Let’s talk about that some other night.
Does the drink work?
No. Unless by working you mean it eventually kills them. Then it works great.
Then why do they think it’s great for mating season?
Because humans are stupid, son. Stupid and deadly. Don’t go into their cities.
As a result of that conversation, Vic had always suspected himself to be half stupidly deadly. But he was all hungry at the moment, and the captain’s decision to grant his crew an afternoon of shore leave in the human port city of Bustardo gave Vic the perfect chance to find enough food to fill both of his stomachs for the first time in weeks.
Ship’s biscuits weren’t sufficient; he needed a lot of calories to keep his body going, and he’d secretly been conjuring cupcakes and fruitcake during the voyage and scarfing them down when no one was looking; as a result, he was looking a bit less cut and ripped. So despite the warnings he’d received in his youth, he felt it worth the risk to venture into a strange city so he could feel full again. And besides, nothing bad had happened to him while he’d been staying in Sullenne—he’d had more trouble from other centaurs at the gym than he’d had from humans. That was one of the many benefits of being swole, or at least slabby: Nobody wanted to risk being pounded into jelly by his fists, much less his hooves.
His best bet, according to Qobayne, was to find a diner that served breakfast all day, which might provide gallons of steel-cut oatmeal to go with his bacon and eggs. His second stomach was not a true horse stomach, because he didn’t have to digest grass; it was designed more along human lines but was very efficient at the processing of grains and fruits, and it dumped its load, so to speak, into a bowel that merged with the one from the human stomach and led to a “common rectum,” which was terminology that Vic despised. He thought he had an extraordinary rectum.
As Vic trotted down the gangplank to the docks, humans uttered startled exclamations of surprise at his approach and sometimes squeaked in fear. They didn’t get too many centaurs around here, apparently. Their fear was delicious but not nutritious. Vic needed victuals. His stomachs were growling. The other crew members were going off in groups and clumps on other errands and Vic was left alone to find his own way.
“You there.” He pointed at a slim man cowering against the wall of a kuffee shop. “Tell me where I can find a diner with plenty of good food.” Captain Luc had paid them each a small purse of fickels for their work aboard ship so far, and he was anxious to spend it.
“Th-th-the Knacker Barrel has great f-f-food. And large booths.”
Vic took a couple of menacing steps forward. “Knacker Barrel? Are you saying that because of my equine posterior?”
“No, no, all manner of beings eat there! Plenty of centaurs!”
“Where is it?”
The man pointed a quivering finger. “Three blocks that way, on your left.”
“Thank you.” Vic clopped down the main street of Bustardo, glaring at humans who dared to make eye contact with him. He wanted them to think about losing organs if they messed with him instead of plotting how they could take his. At least the humans on the ship didn’t seem particularly interested in his innards; he’d never once awakened to find someone poking his gut to assess the tenderness of his filets.
Spotting the Knacker Barrel, he noted a long row of rocking chairs out front, which made him feel a bit left out. But this was a human city—of course they weren’t thinking about the needs of other species. The door was extra wide and tall, at least, and his hooves clattered on the wooden floorboards as he entered a claustrophobic sort of gift shop full of aged and dusty tchotchkes. The walls were covered in old signs and garbage, not to mention several offensive harnesses, saddles, and bridles. Vic almost turned around, but then he smelled grease, and his stomach growled. Politely elbowing his way to the counter, he requested a table and was quickly ushered to a spacious high-top in a corner. That, at least, was just his size. His waiter appeared, greeting him with a welcome enthusiasm, and he ordered a dozen scrambled eggs, a steak cooked medium, five orders of hash browns with onions, and all the oatmeal they had, with plenty of brown sugar, cinnamon, and apples—hold the raisins.
“All the oatmeal?” his server asked. He was a diminutive person who sweated a lot. The kitchen must be hot, or perhaps the man really liked his meat.
“All of the oatmeal,” Vic confirmed.
“That would be, like, twenty bowls or something.”
“Bring it here now, sir. My horse half hungers for nourishment.”
“Do you, uh…have money?”
Vic understood that this question came up because he possessed no pockets and his fanny pack did not look nearly so swole as the rest of him. He jiggled the coins within, allowing the fickels to clink around, and leaned down toward the server. “All the oatmeal,” he whispered.
“Y-yes. Right away.”
He stood proudly at his table, one hoof cocked, and glowered at anyone who dared to look in his direction. He didn’t want them checking out his torso and estimating where his kidneys might be. Perhaps it was time to eschew the crop-top trend.
The oatmeal started coming, and he shoveled it in as fast as they could bring it out, switching his esophageal valve to close off his human stomach and thereby shunting the oats down the long esophagus to his second stomach. He would savor the steak and eggs later; oatmeal was fuel, and he just wanted to get it in there as fast as he could swallow, in case he had to gallop away from a rogue spleen-snatching gang.
It turned out to be twenty bowls, as promised, and then the steak and eggs arrived with the hash browns. He poured hot sauce on the eggs and shifted his valve over to close off his horse stomach. The proteins and taters were bound for the human stomach.
He took his time cutting up the steak, a perfect pink in the middle, and enjoyed two bites before his eyelids unaccountably began to droop.
Why was he so tired all of a sudden?
His knees buckled a bit and he staggered to the left, knocking over a rake that had been badly nailed to the wall. He blinked furiously. That was embarrassing, and more than a little weird. Oatmeal didn’t usually have such a soporific effect.
A human man dressed in a stained white apron emerged from the direction of the kitchen. He had a poufy hat on too. Probably the chef. Maybe the oatmeal chef?
“Heyyuh. Dish ohmeal. Ohmeal? Ohhhhmeal! Whereza T? Suppozed be a T in that word. Ohmeal ish funny. Summin…wrong. Widdit.” He pointed at the stack of empty bowls with what he thought was a single finger, but somehow he saw three. How was that possible?
“I know, I know,” the chef said. “Sometimes people have that reaction. We can fix it. Can you walk?”
“I kin awk. Walk. Yeah.”
“Follow me? I can fix you right up.”
Vic tried to follow him and walk straight, but tables kept jumping in his path and getting knocked over. The ground wasn’t steady.
“Summin wrong,” he said again.
“I know, but don’t you worry,” the man said. “We’ll get you all settled. I’m very sorry about this.”
Vic staggered into the kitchen, his hooves sounding very loud on the tile and not hitting in any rhythm he found comforting. They were nervous footfalls.
“Muzza.” Vic’s mouth was so very dry, and he smacked his lips and tried to generate some saliva in there. He was going to say something profound. What was it? Oh, yeah. “Muzza bin summin I ate.”
What had he eaten? Vic’s thoughts were thick and sludgy, like lumpy oatmeal. That was it! Oatmeal! He’d eaten a lot of it. At this place.
The man in the apron fetched a long boning knife out of a wooden block and faced him.
“You’re suffering toxic shock,” he said. “I can help you and you’ll feel instantly better. Would that be okay?”
“Yeah. Do it.”
The chef looked over at the server and several others in the kitchen. “You heard him say I should do it,” he said. “He gave me permission to remove one of his kidneys. To save his life, of course.”
“Hole on now, hole on,” Vic said. “Wuh wuzzat? Kinneys? No kinneys.”
“You’re having a bad reaction to the food, sir. Just relax. Lock your knees and go to sleep. I know you must be tired.”
“No, izza ohmeal. Frumma place. Thish place! Hey! Yourra guy who made a ohhhmeal. You did thish to me!”
“No, sir, you’re confused.”
“Yourra guy my dam tol’ me about! You canna have mah kinney!”
The chef took a step back and his eyes flicked to the left. “We miscalculated the dose. Hit him with the extra shot,” he said, and that is when Vic realized that his dam’s warnings weren’t just stories to scare him straight but were actually about real things that happened to real centaurs and it was really about to happen to him. They’d knock him out, and if he ever woke up at all, it would be in a very large ice bath with missing organs and hide-marring scars.
But he liked his kidneys. Especially when he could pronounce them correctly.
Many times over the years, Pissing Victorious had wished for the ability to call down lightning on his foes, but this was the one time he truly, desperately needed it: to smite the evil human who wanted to steal his kidney. And not just for his own sake—to smite him for all centaurs, so that humans would know what dire fate befell those who tried to snaffle centaur body parts. But all he could summon was tea and cake.
Or maybe a pastry? A dire pastry. A scone!
Yes, a day-old scone with expired raisins in it, dense and dry and angry that its ingredients had not been used to bake something more winsome and moist and altogether delicious. A furious scone, an unwanted scone, passed over by hundreds of customers in the kuffee-shop pastry case, the Scorned Scone of Dry and Crumby Death!
With this thought, Vic raised his swole arms and clenched his fists at the chef. In his head he said something victorious and cutting and clever, but what came out was “Gyyyauuughh!” as he poured all his will into a desperate scone-summoning. The chef shortly ceased to exist as a single contiguous unit.
Blood sprayed behind what was left of the chef, and his eyes widened in surprise as a large portion of his abdomen was blown out by a deadly high-velocity scone, which had appeared in the air, rocketed forward, and disintegrated into crumbs even as it destroyed, leaving a visible hole clear through the man’s torso.
A gasp from his left drew Vic’s gaze, and he saw his server standing there agog as the chef collapsed and the knife clattered on the floor. The server held a small tube that probably contained a blow dart; he sucked in a big breath and prepared to blow.
“Gyyyauuughh!” Vic said again, and another scone missile obliterated his server’s head. Vic hoped he’d remember later how he did this, because the results were every bit as good as lightning. Maybe even better.
Other people in the kitchen, however, noticed that two of their co-workers had just been exploded by a vengeful centaur wizard. Some of them screamed and ran, which Vic appreciated. Some of them grabbed knives and shouted, advancing on him, which he did not appreciate at all.
“You don’ wanna come ammee, bros,” Vic said, backing up until his rear hit a wall. He waggled his fifteen thousand fingers at the scone-peppered bodies as he made his case and staggered slightly to his right. “They wuz tryna take mah kinney. Whuh wuzzeye sposed ta do? Leddum havvit? Well, I did leddum havvit, hurr hurr. Lemme go, jus’ geddoudda daway, an’ nobuddy getzurt.” Vic belched. “I mean besides dose guys, who are dead ’cause they’re kinney thieves!”
An overweight dishwasher, seeing his chance for promotion, erupted with a battle cry as he approached Vic with a cleaver. Vic made a slashing motion with his right hand and shouted, “Yaaah!” and a high-pressure stream of scalding tea splashed in the man’s face. He screamed, dropping the cleaver and clutching his burning cheeks. That gave the others pause, and Vic seized on it.
“Jus’ lemme go. Jus’ step aside. Don’ threaten me an’ I won’ hurcha.” Vic hastened toward the back door and the people in his way drew aside, flattening themselves against the walls and hiding behind barrels of mayonnaise and eatum. He had a clear path to the exit, but he was incapable of walking a straight line to it. He swayed and weaved on unsteady hooves down the length of the kitchen, shouting at everyone as he went. “Drop your knives! If you havva knife I’ll make you hate cake, I swear!”
Someone promised he would pay for this. They’d get the city watch and call the local battle wizard. He was a dead centaur trotting!
Vic didn’t like the sound of that. He didn’t want to face a real battle wizard, one who could summon actual lightning. His only hope was to get back to The Puffy Peach.
Outside in the alley, Vic got tangled in rocking chairs and tried to move faster, hooves scrabbling on cobblestones, knocking over garbage bins along his way. But he did manage to miss the last one. He hoped that meant he was shaking off the effects of the poison and it wasn’t just luck. He turned right, sending a couple of people sprawling in the street as he passed by the front entrance of the Knacker Barrel. Someone burst out of the door and pointed at him.
“Stop that centaur! He just murdered two people!”
There were some gasps and most folks screamed and ran away, giving him a clear path down the street.
“Iwwuz self-defense!” he hollered, both his shouting and the mad clopping of his hooves warning people that a fast horse was incoming. He hadn’t known before today that he could summon scones capable of mortal blows, and it wasn’t fair to cast him as the villain here. “They woulda stole mah kinneys!” he added, but he didn’t think the current witnesses were understanding of his position. While most folks just let him pass with a blank stare, he saw some men and dwarves set their mouths in grim lines and flex, and when he risked a glance over his shoulder—which caused him to drift to his right and knock over a fishwife in a slippery tumble of salmon and petticoats—he saw that people were starting to chase after him.
He hoped Captain Luc would be ready to set sail and that they could actually get away without being blown out of the harbor by the inevitable battle wizard.
He should have listened to his dam and never trotted into this human city.