Chapter 9: Looting and Scooting

Not knowing how long the ogres would remain unconscious, Durri decided to spend as little time on their property as possible.

He took their wands, of course, and looked around for any other weapons they might be hiding. He found nothing else except the two shock collars, which he also collected.

Durri did not consider himself a thief. He was only depriving these individuals of the tools they would have used to deprive him of his freedom.

"Who knows how many people they captured and murdered?" he wondered. "Ma implied they ate the cops who came to arrest them... I wonder if I should just kill them for the sake of any other travelers who happen through the area."

But Durri simply could not bring himself to such cold-blooded murder. It was not his job to deliver justice to everyone he happened upon. Taking their belongings, making it harder for them to hurt others in the future, was a perfectly reasonable revenge.

Durri then returned to the drug garden and pulled up a sample of a half-dozen plants.

None except the mandrakes had any particularly interesting use on their own, but Durri thought it was better to have rare plants and not need them than to wish he had pulled up some catnip in the future.

After taking his samples, Durri put a mandrake root—which had a peculiarly humanoid shape—into the bottle he had taken from the wizard's tower. To his delight, he found that his body seemed to filter the liquid he drank, allowing him to decant perfectly pure water from his index finger.

"By Anaximander's beard!" Durri announced. He shook the bottle until it glowed red.

The root dissolved in the water, creating a substance that looked like blood—or maybe cherry syrup. The bubbles seemed to form a pair of eyes which peered innocently up at him through the glass.

According to the Codex, this Humanshape Potion would turn him into a human for up to one month if made in an artisan's crystal flask with perfectly pure water.

Pouring the potion into his hand before drinking it, which would preserve the vessel used to mix it, would cause the effect to last only a single day.

However, using an ordinary glass bottle, along with pure water, would allow the potion to last a week.

Durri went back into the cottage and found two empty jars labeled "Starlight Moonshine."

"Hmm," he thought. "I'd bet a lot that this was the stuff Colfax was talking about making."

The bottles certainly seemed similar to the one he had snagged from the tower.

Durri opened a pocket in his clay body and stored the two bottles inside it, hiding them for later.

Then he popped off the top of the Humanshape Potion and guzzled it down.

Durri had not drunk a potion for many years.

As an adult, he had rarely gotten sick.

Yet, as a child, there were a few years when Durri had caught cold after cold. On each occasion, Durri's mother had taken him to the local alchemist, who had brewed up weak restorative potions which had made Durri feel better within a day.

Durri remembered those potions tasting sweet and fruity, but this Humanshape Potion was utterly nasty!

It tasted like blood and burned meat as it soaked into his mouth and the pocket behind it. Despite this, Durri found he had no instinct to gag or cough at the nasty flavor.

"I suppose," he said out loud, frowning at the aftertaste, "that I'll never have to worry about throwing up in this body. That's a blessing! Nothing worse in the world than a stomach bug."

In moments, a strange sensation filled Durri's body.

He held his hands in front of his face and watched, astonished, as they shrank and became the coarse, scarred hands of his original human body. His perspective of the world shifted slightly as his body shrunk down to his original height of six feet and two inches.

"Amazing!" he said.

The witch's curse had forced him to die and reincarnate over and over in the span of a few days, so he had effectively inhabited many more bodies in addition to his original one. Yet, this potion had given him back the form of his original human body.

"That assumes I never reincarnated previously to that life," Durri muttered. "Probably not accurate. I can't remember those lives, at least. Even still…"

On impulse, he opened his mouth and poked a finger around inside. His teeth felt real, though previously there were only ridges of stone inside his golem body. When he looked into a metal kettle on the ogres' wood stove, it appeared he had a throat leading ostensibly into his stomach. Yet, when Durri tentatively prodded a finger deep into his mouth, he seemed to touch an invisible wall of force.

Grimacing at the weirdness of the idea, Durri then dug a finger into his chest.

The skin and flesh pulled away, as when Durri had gouged a hole in his golem body so he could store the bottles.

As the flesh moved, its edges turned gray and soft, revealing themselves—and his inner body—to be still made of clay.

"What an odd effect," said Durri. He pushed the clay back into place. The alchemical skin, which seemed half illusion, half transformation, restored itself.

Then he turned and kicked the cottage door, sending it flying off its hinges. "So the Codex description was right. I'm still as strong as before, but I look and even feel human. Yet, it doesn't seem like I regained the ability to eat and drink like I used to."

Durri realized, staring into the kettle's mirror surface once more, that several plants and herbs which he had stuck into his body were protruding from his skin. He frowned and performed a very natural-feeling action which was like inhaling deeply.

As he had intuited, the plants slurped into his flesh, disappearing from sight. Though they were no longer exposed to the sun, Durri could somehow feel nutrients and energy from his own self channeling into the plants. While they were inside him, they would continue to grow healthily.

"Perfect!" said Durri.

He planted all but one of the ogres' mandrakes in his body, realizing he might not have another opportunity to find them even in a week's time, then added a few final herbs from their garden to his store.

After all that was done, Durri was almost set to leave.

It was a good thing, too, because Pa was beginning to mutter on the ground.

Durri's last act was to steal a calico shirt and a pair of overalls considerably smaller than those Pa currently wore. Durri still had to roll up the legs, but they helped keep the sun out of the places where it did not belong, so he chose not to complain.

Then he closed his eyes. "I should be able to use my heightened sense of smell to find..."

Durri focused with every bit of his will to ignore the scents near to him and instead identify those of horses, frying oil, trash, and baking bread.

The smells of civilization, in all their beauty and ugliness.

"There!" he said at last, and pointed himself in the right direction. This source of smells was stronger than the town of Burnabad. He set off at once, smiling broadly, confident that his life was finally turning around.

***

TWO DAYS LATER

Durri sat, tied up, in some dark closet.

The thugs in shiny hats who had thrown him in there had been gone for hours.

He was beginning to wonder if incarnating into this golem's body had broken the witch's curse after all.