by Ed Greenwood
“Coward.”
The voice was labored, the word thick and ill-formed, but it was clear enough to draw everyone’s attention to the figure framed by the library’s massive doorway. Captain Truesilver glared balefully with the one eye left him and started into the room.
The crutch braced under his right arm thudded like a coffin-maker’s hammer with every other step. Without it Gareth Truesilver couldn’t have walked at all; his right leg was missing from the knee down. Nor was that the worst of his injuries. Angry red blotches patterned his arms where the skin had been flayed away. Incisions held closed with thick black stitches snaked across the back of his left hand. There, the body snatchers’ patron had pilfered the muscles and sinews, leaving the hand nearly useless. Similar scars creased the captain’s once-handsome face; they traversed the angry purple bruises over his cheekbones, disappearing into both the gap that had once been his nose and the dark circle that had held his left eye.
The butler turned, muscled arms cradling two shelves of displaced books. “You should rest, Captain. The city guard will be here soon to take your statement.” Uther shifted his gaze for an instant to Sir Hamnet. “I have spent the past three days aiding the watch in their search for the captain. If you’d told the truth the morning the guards found you screaming like a madman, we might have rescued him days ago, before the butchers had time to cut him up.”
“Gareth,” Sir Hamnet stammered, as if he hadn’t heard the accusation. “We thought you lost. Helm’s Fist, but I’m glad you’re alive!”
“Liar,” Truesilver managed in a slow, pained voice. From the way he mangled the word, it seemed likely a part of his tongue had gone to power some wizard’s spell, too.
Awkwardly the captain hobbled to a stop in front of Uther. With his right hand, he lifted the largest book from atop the pile and pitched it into the fireplace. The flames danced along the spine. With a sharp pop, the tome flipped open, revealing a hand-colored map of the Hordelands. Fire hungrily devoured the page and set to work on the rest of the book.
Truesilver tossed another volume into the fire, and another. Sir Hamnet raised a hand to stop him, but a low and rumbling growl from Uther warned him away.
Helpless, he turned to the others in the library, his friends, his fellow explorers. But Sir Hamnet Hawklin found loathing in the faces of the Stalwarts, and disgust, and anger. They stared at him with open contempt, silently cheering the destruction of his life’s work.
He tried to shrug off the contempt and shore up the barricades he’d built around his craven heart. But the walls were crumbling now. The society’s shared glories fled him like deadfall leaves abandoning a winter oak. The myriad ceremonial blades and trophy shields hanging on the walls had been his to wield. The slaughtered monsters and conquered dragon had been his trophies, too, proof of valorous deeds beyond imagining. No longer. The Stalwarts knew the truth, and each accusing eye reflected that truth back at the nobleman like a perfect mirror.
Sir Hamnet Hawklin was a coward.
The room began to spin, and the nobleman covered his face with trembling hands. He could block out the sights, but he couldn’t deafen himself to the crackle and hiss of the fire as it destroyed his journals and turned his maps to ash.
And in that instant, just before his heart was crushed by those toppled walls of borrowed honor, Sir Hamnet heard it-the low, sibilant laughter in the flames. He’d been right all along. It was the vicious chuckle of Cyric, the satisfied sigh of the Lord of Strife as a man’s spirit shattered and his damned soul went shrieking down to Hades.
Vision
Roger E. Moore
The summons brought me out of a meeting in an overcrowded den where the candles had eaten up the air. My clan head grumbled, but he released me and returned to bullying compensation from an opponent over an imagined slight of honor Such wars of words, often punctuated by drawn knives and brief duels that left the cavern floors slick with blood, were far too frequent these days among my people. I was glad to go.
I would have been happier for the freedom, but the warrior who called me out told me I was summoned by Skralang, shaman of all our kind. My stomach grew tight at the thought of meeting the old goblin. I was no coward, but I was no fool The warrior hurried off as I bound up my fears and set off myself through the long, narrow tunnels of the Nightbelow, our home under the Dustwalls.
At twenty winters I was a guard captain and assistant to my clan head, a young fist among the many hands of the goblins of the mountains. I had fought on the surface against human intruders on our lands since I was twelve, and had been captured once and held prisoner for a year until I had escaped. My captivity taught me to never let it happen again. I knew humans well and feared none of them, but Skralang was not a human, and some said he was not a goblin, either.
The old shaman’s door opened automatically when I reached it at the end of a black, web-filled tunnel. Skralang greeted me with a nod from his bed. He carelessly waved me to a chair at a table on which a lone candle flickered. I steeled myself and entered his den.
I picked my way across the tiny, litter-strewn room. My iron-shod boots crushed bits of bone, bread crusts, and other debris beneath them. Skralang did not seem to care about the filth. The world meant less to him every day, it was said. How he could stand to live in such vile conditions was beyond me, but it was not my place and not to my advantage to say so. Who insults a mouthpiece of the gods?
I sat and waited as the shaman took a small bottle and earthen cup from a box by his bed of rags. He carefully swung his feet off the ruined bed and got up, shuffling over to pull up a stool and take a seat by me. I stiffened and almost stood to salute, but he seemed not to care. His familiarity was astonishing; it was if I were an old and trusted friend.
Even more astonishing was Skralang’s appearance at close range in the candlelight. His robes stank of corruption, as if death were held back from him by the width of an eyelash. The skin was pulled tight over the bones of his face and hands; open sores disfigured his arms and neck. Yet even with this, his pale yellow eyes were clear and steady. He gently poured another drink for himself, but did not take it right away. Instead he sat back and regarded me with those cold, clear eyes.
“You are bored, Captain Kergis,” he said. His voice was no more than a whisper. In the silence, it was like a shout, “life here has no appeal for you. You long to be elsewhere.”
I almost denied it, but his eyes warned me off from lies. I nodded hesitantly. “You see all, Your Darkness,” I said. I knew that with his magic, the old goblin probably did see all within the Nightbelow-even the hidden places of the heart and soul.
The old one toyed with his cup. His spidery fingers trembled. “Has the security of our home begun to wear on you? Do the petty ravings of the clan heads lull your blood to sleep, rather than stir it with fire? Or do you have plans of your own for advancing your rank and position, and your boredom is merely feigned to cover your intentions?”
To be accused of treachery was not uncommon, but hearing it fall from the thin lips of our shaman was like hearing my death sentence pronounced. “I am loyal!” I pleaded, much louder than I wanted. “You wrong me, Your Darkness!”
I bit off my words. Skralang wronged no one. He was the law, and there was no other. I sat frozen, half expecting that his response would be my execution. A swift death was better by far than a slow one, and I prayed for the former.
Instead, Skralang drank from his cup and sighed. “You are loyal, yes,” he said, staring at the cup in his fingers. “You are neither coward nor traitor. You merely seem… disenchanted, not impure in spirit. You do not carry yourself like a true goblin lately.” He was silent for a moment, then looked up at me. “But then it sometimes seems to me that none of us do.”
I could not have been more amazed than if he had informed me that he was actually a halfling. I was at a loss for words for several moments. “I do not understand,” I finally said. “We are all true goblins. We are not tainted like-”
Treacherous tongue! The words had no sooner left my mouth than I would have cut out my tongue to have them back! Skralang flinched when he heard it, and his aged face became like steel.
“We are not tainted like a certain one among us, you say?” The shaman’s eyes were icy yellow orbs shining from the depths of his face. His fingers gripped his cup like a web grips prey. For one awful moment, his cup became me.
Then-without warning-the old shaman’s face softened and melted. He looked away as he set his cup on the table. ‘Tainted. You are right. No one has spoken that word to me since the birth of my grandson, but there is no hiding it.
When I call him my kin, it is like swallowing daggers. He is tainted, tainted with the blood of a human.”
The ancient visage looked my way again, but in sadness, not anger. “Everyone must talk about it. It is a disgrace, and there is no atonement for it. None but death.” He sighed deeply and looked off into the darkness of the room.
I knew better than to say anything more. Everyone knew of his half-human grandson, the child of his mutilated daughter and her human attacker. Both child and daughter had been hidden from all other eyes for over a decade, but we knew from rumor that they yet lived. And that we could not understand. Had the daughter belonged to any of the rest of us, we would have slain both her and her infant before birth, and thus removed the shame from our line. What had happened to prevent this?
The shaman looked back at me as if he could read my every thought. ” ‘As the gods will, we do without question,’” he said, quoting the maxim in a tired voice. “They spoke to me as I held a knife over my daughter’s belly, eager to cleanse our honor, and their words turned my knife aside. It was their will that Zeth be raised among us, in my daughter’s den, though they would not say why. I had the girl and her bastard walled up, as the gods did not forbid that. I feed them once a day, give them a candle or two for light, but keep the taint away from the rest of our people. It was the gods’ will, and I obeyed them, as would any of us.” He rubbed his face with a skeletal hand.
I did my best to hide my surprise at this revelation. The gods’ will? He said so but still lived, so it must be true. The sharp, clear eyes turned away again, and the old one refilled his cup and stared into it for a long moment, chewing his lower lip in perplexity.
The old shaman drank again and set the cup down. The ghost of a smile came to his withered lips, but there was no humor behind it.
“I am older than old for our people,” he said softly. “If I see another midwinter’s day, I will be forty-six. I ache ceaselessly. I pray for death before I sleep, yet the gods want me to live a little longer.” His cold eyes looked across the table at me. “Can you guess why, Captain?”
“Why what, Your Darkness?” I asked after hesitating. I had lost the way of the conversation entirely, and I now considered every word I spoke so I might live the longer.
“Why the gods have kept me alive when I have strived so hard to die,” he said patiently. “I rot from within, yet awaken every evening and draw breath into my bleeding lungs. Can you guess why the gods still want me to live a little longer?”
“No, Your Darkness.” A lesser person would have offered an opinion-a worthless way to risk one’s soul.
The shaman’s lips pulled back as if he would laugh. “This last day, the gods spoke to me again,” he said, as if the other topic were now forgotten. ‘They came to me in a dream. It was time, they said, to free my grandson and send him out from the caverns with a force of true goblins at his command.” The old shaman drew in a deep breath through his nose, staring at me. “I’ve seen fit to end your disenchantment, Captain Kergis. I’ve already given orders for three sergeants to assemble their squads for a foray this evening. You will go with them, led by my grandson. Draw rations and equipment for a mission far from our Nightbelow, among the lands of humans.”
I believed for a moment that I had gone deaf, so incredible was the news. Goblin warriors led by a half-human bastard?
“What is our mission, Your Darkness?” I managed.
“Zeth will let you know,” said Skralang. “Obey his every word as you would mine. It is as the gods command.”
The wrinkled face suddenly leaned close to me, and I caught a whiff of the drink he had prepared for himself. It was ale mixed with a pain-deadener made from the blossoms of the corpse lily. I knew its scent from the battlefields, where warriors chewed such blossoms to subdue their pain. Sometimes, if badly wounded, the warriors chewed too much and fell into a sleep from which they never awoke. We left them for the dogs to eat.
“The gods have ordained that Zeth must go out,” said the shaman steadily. I shuddered at the smell of his breath. “They ordered nothing more. For my part, when he is gone, I am finally free to clear the taint from my family. I will cleanse my line with my daughter’s blood, but there is the fear in me that even this will not bring me a long-deserved death. The gods want one thing more of me, and I cannot see into their plans.”
Skralang sat back. “My other dreams have all been troubling of late. The gods are unhappy, I fear, with the way the lives of our people have fallen into quarrels and tedium. You are bored, Captain Kergis, because you sense it, too. We have not gone out as we did in the old days to remind the surface world that we exist. We’ve gotten old in our heads, old and petty, and we hide in our caverns and complain about the dark. We are not the children of our fathers, not fit to be their lowest slaves.”
The old shaman’s gaze fell, and his face grew slack. “I believe the gods are especially unhappy with me, their servant, for allowing such deterioration to come about. I have favored rest and ease over struggle, against their teachings, and the rot of my words has spread and ruined us.” He looked back at me, and his eyes gleamed. “Did you ever wonder in your private moments, Captain Kergis, if the taint among us reflects a greater taint? If Zeth’s coming, and the manner of it, was purposeful?”
The old goblin had long ago strayed into territory that not even the greatest fool among us would have tread. I wished now I were back in that stale cavern room, listening to my clan head shriek about his worthless honor.
“Never,” I said truthfully.
The shaman’s smile deepened. “You will.” He dismissed me with a wave and drank again of his cup of poison, swallowing it without so much as a tremor at its bitterness.
There was much that Skralang had not told me. He hadn’t said that Zeth’s skin was the color of a dead toad’s belly, white and dry like the face of the moon. Or that Zeth wore no armor and carried no weapon, and knew nothing of how to use either.
Or that Zeth was blind.
I shivered when I saw the shaman’s grandson led out of the mouth of our Nightbelow into the evening air. He was big and long-limbed, no doubt from the human blood in him, but his muscles were slack. I could have thrown him down with only mild effort, had I dared.
And he had no eyes. His eye sockets were dark holes in his face, half-covered by sagging skin that made him appear sad faced. He wore only a short, pale robe, belted with a thin rope. It was the sort of thing only a prisoner or slave would wear, and entirely the wrong color for a warrior at night.
Skralang brought Zeth to me as my warriors looked on with surprise and curiosity. In the failing sunlight, the withered shaman seemed to have deteriorated even more since I had seen him, only hours before. Splotches of blackness dotted his face and arms, marks of a curse on him. I was terrified he would touch me.
“Zeth,” said the old shaman with a prompt at his grandson’s elbow. “Here are your warriors. Go forth, as the gods have commanded, and carry out their will.”
The big half-human stared over me, his unseeing gaze level with the top of my head, then nodded dumbly. I saw that Zeth had no weaponry, and I started to pull an extra dagger from my waist scabbard. Skralang stopped me with an upraised hand. “Not necessary,” the old shaman said. “Zeth has no need of blades or armor. He has all he will need.”
With a last look at me,
the shaman summoned his retinue of guards and servants, then retired inside the cavern. The great doors were pulled shut behind him and barred. Not even the usual guards were posted tonight.
I swallowed as I stared up at the eyeless sockets of the white half-human. He merely looked off to the west, where the sun had vanished a while ago.
“What is your wish?” I finally asked. If I were lucky, Zeth would prove to be mad as well as blind. I wondered if the prohibition against arms and armor was meant to speed his death in battle. It made sense to me. His quick death would release us from this mission, perhaps allowing brief foraging in the countryside to gain a few pigs or cattle before returning to the Nightbelow.
The big half-human slowly turned his head to the south, as if he’d heard something in the gentle wind. Southward lay the kingdom of Durpar, which we had once raided regularly. He nodded slightly, then set off toward that distant land. After two steps, he almost fell over a log that had been pulled up to the cave entrance as a bench. He stumbled, caught himself, and walked on. No one laughed or moved to help him. We merely watched.
I nodded to myself. With luck, the mission would be a short one.
“Single file, scout fore and back, standard march,” I called. The warriors glanced at me, then fell into place. We set off into the coming night.
We marched south for about ten hours by the stars. That Zeth had some ability to sense his path became more evident as the night deepened. He would pause at times, then slowly make his way across a creek or through a rock field. At other times, he acted as blind as he appeared, running into low tree branches or dancing out of thistle. Perhaps his hearing gave him a little help, but I began to think perhaps his eyes were present but merely small and deeply set.
Dawn was coming on when I finally moved up alongside the stumbling half-human. I hesitated over proper forms of address, then ignored them all. I couldn’t see that it mattered. “Dawn is near,” I said under my breath. “We must pitch camp soon.”