The Goblin and the Empire

by JD Cole

  The tower was gone.

  The woman sobbed with racking coughs, and she allowed him to pull her with him against the wall where he sat, exhausted. So many people had already died during the battle. How many more people beyond those twenty nine that he had seen had been inside that tower? The army and national guard were doing a good job of locating and destroying the remaining glassies, but how many of the robot killers were left?

  After several minutes, he let go of the woman and pulled himself to his feet. “I’m sorry I couldn’t save the others.” He stood silently for a moment. “There wasn’t enough time.”

  The woman looked up at him, her hand over her mouth. “I know,” she quietly sobbed. “Thank you. Thank you for saving me. Oh dear God…”

  He offered his hand to the woman. “We can take the stairs,” he told her, “but it would be faster if you let me take you down my way.”

  The woman took his hand. Her crying was subdued, but she was still sniffling a lot. “Thank you. Thank you so much.” She looked over to the empty block where her office used to be, then quickly turned away. “Whatever you need to do,” she told him.

  “I’ll be gentle,” he promised, taking her by her waist. Hopping over the wall, he used his tractor beam to slowly lower them down to street level. Paramedics, firemen, and guardsmen were frozen in despair nearby, driven back by the debris cloud. This was the fourth building to be brought down today.

  A policeman wandered over to the Hood, offering his hand. The Hood shook it.

  “I saw what you did, goin’ back in there. That was the most courageous thing I ever seen.”

  The Hood guided the woman into the policeman’s arms. “Take care of her, will you?”

  “Of course. What are you gonna do now?”

  The Hood shrugged, his fatigue evident. Without another word, he turned and began making his way toward where he’d left his car.

  The heavily modified roadster had once been a Toyota Celica GT, built back in the late 1990s. The Hood had made extensive modifications and built an entirely new powerplant for it. He’d driven it for the first time last night, and used it to smash four glassies against a concrete wall. The Hood studied it now, wondering how to get it home. The state of the frontal alignment alone precluded his driving it anywhere. He climbed into the cockpit, thinking as he unlocked the computer’s security systems and ran a diagnostic on the turbine. The technology in this car –primarily the tractor beam projectors— could not be left behind for anyone to reverse-engineer.

  He was debating on whether or not to destroy the vehicle, and did not notice the watery apparition that approached him until it was too late.

  « CHAPTER 1 »

  Meanwhile, In That Other Place

  MATARI, IN THE ESRUN PROVINCE OF THE BADLANDS

  *THREE WEEKS AGO*

  “Once more against the enemy, Maxillion?”

  The elf’s broad shoulders turned at the comment, and he smiled at the dwarf who’d taken up position behind him. “Aye, Lagraen. Once more, and again, as many times as I need to until Matari has fallen!”

  Lagraen laughed and clapped his large hand against Maxillion’s back. “You borderlanders are confident, that’s for certain!”

  “You doubt our success?”

  “Hmm.” The wide dwarf rubbed at his furry chin. “Doubt is a strong word. We’ve been at this only a few days, and I’ve seen the frontline morale crack twice. The goblin armies can inspire fear with their looks alone, and their screams are the trumpets of Sen’giza itself.” He sniffed and spit. “I’ll tell you this, if we do fail, it won’t be because of my orelords or your rangers!” He gave the elf a toothy grin.

  Maxillion stood straight, looking up at the morning sky. “We will not fail. The slaves here already know we have come to free them. Destroying a hope we gave to them is not an option, my friend. We will conquer this place, and we will bring them all home.”

  “That’s a pretty poem,” Lagraen offered. “Things happen, or they don’t. That’s been the way of the world since before any of the mystics were born. Mind you, that doesn’t mean I’m not going to kill as many shadowlanders as I can reach with my blades!”

  Like all dwarves, Lagraen was roughly the same height as the average wood elf, but much more heavily built and covered in body hair. Maxillion, however, stood above him by two full hands, and the dwarf briefly wondered if the blue-haired ranger had some non-elf blood in his lineage.

  Lagraen tightened the leather straps for his pauldrons and wrist guards, taking a moment to survey the army behind him. A faint glint from gold armor caught his eye, and he assumed he was looking at the General, Khun ‘Rhee. The distance made it hard to be sure. He tapped Maxillion’s arm and gestured. “Is that him?”

  The elf had much keener eyesight and looked over to where the dwarf pointed. A human-sized warrior, powerfully built and impressively armored, stood among a group of sprites, elves, and vampyres. “The General? Yes, that’s him.” Maxillion did not offer further comment. He had personally met the General not long ago, when Khun ‘Rhee had shared with him a vital secret.

  This war was a ruse, and Maxillion was one of the few who knew it.

  “He’d be real handy up here with us,” the dwarf observed.

  Maxillion began tying his long, blue hair into a tight tail, criss-crossing it with thick leather straps. “I believe he’s more vital where he is. He isn’t just fighting, he’s helping shield us from the sorcerers in the city.”

  “Magic,” Lagraen spit. “This battle would be over by now if not for their dirty tricks.”

  Maxillion, before being drafted for the war along with all other borderland rangers, was the captain of the ranger troupe in a borderland village called Renna. Four of his rangers had been sent into the human world on a quest to recover the new Sprite Queen, and this army was laying siege to Matari so that the Goblin King would not find out about it. The other rangers had been told those four questers were at the Sprite castle in Windham for some special mission, but nothing more.

  But here Maxillion was not a captain. Here, he was a foot-soldier under the command of another elf, a blademaster named Denn from the regular elf army at their capitol, Jenshire. Denn commanded a full battleprok of fifty soldiers. From what Maxillion had been able to gather, there were at least fifty battleproks like this one stationed around the front gates, and a further unknown number surrounding the rest of the fortress city.

  Most of the front line was composed of rangers from villages like Renna, and orelords like Lagraen from the mining clans. In order to mitigate any devastation among the mines and villages, all of the orelords and rangers had been spread across different battleproks to prevent entire clans and troupes being wiped out in any single attack. Only two of Maxillion’s rangers were part of Denn’s battleprok with him; Lagraen was alone here, with no one else from his clan assigned to Denn.

  The distant sound of war cries and marching drifted over them. “Sounds like the goblins are ready to go,” Lagraen said, hefting his sword and buckler. A pair of hatchets rested strapped across his back. Two elves quickly joined Lagraen and Maxillion.

  “Padessi, Dex,” Maxillion greeted his fellows from Renna. They already had their weapons drawn and ready.

  “Captain,” Dex greeted with a casual wave of his sword. Maxillion’s rank carried no authority here, but he had given up trying to get them to stop addressing him with it.

  “Are we babysitting the pashryk again today, then?” Padessi smiled at Lagraen.

  “Basking in the glory of my skill, you mean?” Lagraen chuckled. “I don’t think the two of you combined have as many kills as I do.”

  “Agreed,” Dex laughed, “the smell of you can hit more irenaks at a time than our blades can!”

  Maxillion shook his head and, smiling, drew his standard length, double-edged dueling blade, followed by a much shorter sident, or parrying-rod. The sident possessed a hilt and hilt-guard like his sword and had a sharpened tip. This particular elvish weapon
was notorious for snapping the blades of their opponents. The quartet quickly walked into place among the frontline soldiers. This army was indeed a rare sight: vyzen wood-elves fighting alongside pashryk earth-dwarves, joined by wolves, vampyres, dulumin gnomes, and even a formidable contingent of kathet.

  Under the sprites’ banner, armies from all the nations were joined in the siege of Matari, hoping to destroy the fortress-city and free the slaves held within. Matari was nearly as old as the faery realm, created by the Goblin King as his first stronghold, then converted into this slave-driven city. Vyzen and pashryk captured over the centuries were kept here in forced labor, tending to rich farmlands and numerous workshops and smithies to produce the Shadowland’s food, materials, and weapons. The King targeted wood-elves and earth-dwarves specifically; of all the faeries, only these two peoples –along with the sprites— could be said to have never had one of their kind subservient to him. There was no danger of his subjects, all of whom hated vyzen and pashryk, ever aiding in an uprising.

  Matari sat partially atop a high hill. Enormous, crenelated walls encircled the city’s entirety, and while several gates dotted the walls, the largest and primary of them was located on the hill. The smaller entrances were easily sealed and defended, leaving the main gate the best option for the sieging army to attack. The gate had four huge entrances: the wall beveled inward toward hulking double-doors that swung closed together, and a door on either side of them mounted at roughly 30 degrees where the wall angled outward. It was from these side doors that the goblin army began to pour from this morning.

  At that moment, Blademaster Denn, riding atop a large armored gherat, trotted to the head of the group. The gherat was a furless beast that stood low to the ground on six stout legs. It had a round head and a flat face with two pairs of eyes, and large bat-like ears. It also possessed a large, flat tail that it used along with its dull claws for digging burrows, but they could be trained to swing their tails at enemies with more than enough power to kill anything smaller than a minotaur.

  “Fae!” Denn addressed his battleprok, marching the beast back and forth to get a good look at his soldiers. “You know the drill by now, and you have all proven your worth several times over! It is time to do so again, and now that I have seen what you are capable of, I expect to see so much shadowlander blood on the ground this evening that all the vampyres in the world could not drink it!”

  The battleprok roared in agreement.

  Denn pointed the tip of his bow at the city walls. “And then we’re going to take all that blood and drown those necromancers in it!”

  When the soldiers roared back again, Denn believed it would have knocked him from his mount had he not been holding on. He nodded approval; every soldier on the field was as motivated as they could be. Every one of them wanted Matari destroyed, its hideous necromancers slaughtered. He wheeled his mount to face the oncoming waves of goblins and hulking, reptilian irenaks. He led his battleprok in a measured march forward, joining the dozens of battleproks to either side of his.

  As they marched, Denn quickly but casually fired off most of the arrows in his quiver, each one killing an irenak. He wasted none of the projectiles on the goblins; they were already dead and could only be stopped by completely destroying the bodies. Eventually, the irenaks he killed would also be raised up as goblins if they didn’t take care of the corpses during the battle.

  The march of the battleproks gradually sped into a jog before breaking out into a full-on sprint at the enemy. Lagraen roared as his first opponent came within reach. He smashed the goblin’s face with his buckler, then rammed his sword up into the belly of another goblin that had crawled up over that one’s shoulders. It was holding a short sword, aimed at his neck. With a powerful heave, Lagraen pulled his blade all the way up the goblin’s belly –both of these had formerly been elves— through its skull, splitting the creature in half from the waist up. Blackened jelly spilled from its insides, and the pashryk just barely managed to step aside and avoid being bathed in the mess.

  The goblin elf hit the ground and reached for his ankle. It was still holding its sword, and was readying the weapon to swipe at the dwarf’s leg. Lagraen had already returned his attention to the first goblin, punching it in the face with his sword arm before swinging his weapon to behead it. He looked down to see that the disemboweled goblin had both of its arms and both halves of its head removed by someone else in the battleprok who hadn’t waited for any thanks before moving on. Not wasting any more time on it, Lagraen finished off his first opponent by quickly removing its arms and legs. As he pressed forward, one of the irenaks Denn had killed earlier lay at his feet. For good measure, he took its head off as well, kicking it away.

  Further behind Lagraen, Maxillion was once again proving his reputation as a fearsome fighter. Four irenaks and eight goblins had already been defeated by his blade. Dex and Padessi alternated between covering his flank and Lagraen’s, and where possible the flanks of others in their battleprok. There were a couple of magic users among their ranks, and Maxillion appreciated the lances of fire that jumped past him to burn the oncoming irenaks, making them that much easier to dispatch.

  As one more irenak fell to his blade, Maxillion caught a short chirp whistled from another elf some distance away. He, like all rangers, recognized the whistled warning: “something extremely dangerous is upon us.” Searching beyond the mobs of irenaks and goblins around him, he caught sight of a dark blur on his periphery. He spun and raised his sword just in time to block an attack from someone who immediately seemed to disappear as a shadow, and Maxillion clenched his jaw. There were some elite opponents on the field today.

  Vampyres.

  Maxillion was still fresh and alert, and would remain so for several more hours of fighting, which meant he still had plenty of innate magic to feed his trained ranger skills. Motion around him slowed considerably as he focused every one of his senses on the vampyre, his perception heightened beyond what most creatures could attain. This skill was the only thing that might keep him alive today.

  Vampyres were the pinnacle of faery predators. Lacking the brute strength of wolves, kathet, and minotaur, vampyres instead possessed speed, balance, and cunning that surpassed even wood elves. Most faeries would not survive even a three-on-one encounter with an untrained vampyre, and the odds grew upwards of ten to one against trained warriors. Even more worrisome were the vampyres who mastered sorcery. These were considered all but invulnerable to anyone but their peers.

  Maxillion found his foe a moment later, moving lithely between soldiers engaged with goblins, using his black blade to dispatch distracted victims. The ranger captain surged toward the vampyre, who immediately detected him. His black outline had been a blur as he was silently moving through the ranks, but now the vampyre stopped to face Maxillion, the blur disappearing. He was wearing a dark, matte armor that reflected very little light, and a thick, elbow-length cloak covered his shoulders. The helmet had no opening for his eyes, a common vampyre design. Their senses were all sharp enough to know what was happening around them without sight, and eyeholes would only give their enemies a target to aim their arrows at.

  The vampyre cocked his head at Maxillion, then lunged forward with amazing speed. Maxillion, despite his uncommonly large size, was still several hands shorter than the vampyre, putting him at significant disadvantage. He reacted with speed and strength matching his opponent, parrying with his blade and side-stepping while counterattacking with his sident, stabbing it toward the vampyre’s armpit where the armor was leather instead of steel.

  The vampyre leapt sideways, raising his arm to avoid the sharp rod, cartwheeling to his left and immediately launching into attack again, even quicker than before with his blade shooting for the elf’s shoulder. Maxillion’s blade missed blocking him by a hair, but he managed to buckle his knee, dropping low enough that the vampyre’s sword did little more than score the leather strap of his pauldron.

  The elf would not be able to safe
ly recover himself into a defensive stance as his knee was now practically at the ground, so instead he shifted his weight backwards, lifting himself onto his fist in a backward flip to put distance between him and his foe, aiming a kick at the vampyre’s head as he did so. The vampyre dodged backward, then stabbed again, this time aiming for Maxillion’s lung through his back. But Maxillion spun on his fist as he was flipping his legs upward, bringing his rod-arm around to parry three successive blows, all while planting his feet and spinning once more to face his enemy.

  The elf knew this match would be decided quickly. The vampyre was far too swift, and would land a killing blow sooner rather than later. Thankfully Maxillion had held him at bay long enough for more than a few of his fellow soldiers to realize a vampyre was in their midst, and the black-armored warrior became everyone’s primary target. Six elves attacked him simultaneously, but none of them accomplished anything beyond surviving their assault. Again, elves attacked, then again with several more, until finally the vampyre found himself defending against more than twenty-five elves and several dwarves. In all likelihood, he could probably have survived long enough to retreat and fight again at a time of his choosing, but the commotion had drawn the attention of Denn, who rode into their midst, leaping from his saddle and running straight toward the vampyre. The gherat charged ahead, attacking with its tail and forcing the vampyre to dodge right into Denn’s path.