by A. Giannetti
The shape changer, his slender, pale body covered with long, corded muscles that stood out beneath his skin, leapt lightly onto the road and began to speak angrily to Gramash. The Goblin captain made an irritated reply, and his mount hissed at the shape changer, suddenly striking out at it with a slender, clawed forelimb. The Goblin sprang back before climbing out of reach onto his boulder. Resuming his wolf shape again, he raised his head and gave a short, summoning howl. The rest of his pack immediately began to emerge from behind the trees and rocks on the hillside. The lupins were all growling softly, and the long hairs along their spines were bristling straight up. Behind Gramash, his company of Mordi shifted uneasily and drew their weapons. In the rear of the column, the mutare threw down their packs and began to approach in a snarling pack. It seemed that a fierce battle might break out at any moment, and Elerian began to look hopefully around him in case some opportunity to escape presented itself.
Suddenly, Gramash leaned over in his saddle and said something to a Mordi standing nearby. As the Goblin walked back toward the prisoners, some of the tension dissipated from the air. The lupins laid down their hackles and waited expectantly, their fiery eyes gleaming with anticipation. After examining several prisoners, the Mordi dispatched by Gramash pulled one out of line who was a little taller and stronger looking than the others around him. The poor fellow began to tremble when the Goblin took off his shackles and led him toward the head of the column. Elerian cursed his luck, for he would have gladly traded places with the man if it meant having his manacles removed.
Gramash turned to the terrified prisoner and said in a cold voice, “Run into the forest. You are free!” When the prisoner looked at him in disbelief, Gramash leaned over and struck him across the face with the open palm of his right hand, sending him staggering. “Run, I said, before I rip the hide from you where you stand!” The Uruc’s voice was cold and emotionless, but none could doubt he meant what he said. The prisoner spun on his left heel and sprinted for the forest on the west side of the road. In a matter of moments, he had disappeared.
Gramash turned back to the shape changer who had spoken for the lupins. “Go!” he said irately. “Take your sport before I change my mind.”
Gramash watched angrily as the pack of lupins leaped eagerly off the hillside, loping off in pursuit of the prisoner. Excitement shone in their eyes, and the creatures began to howl and whine in excitement. A short time later, a series of terrified shrieks filled the air. They trailed off and then began again as if the lupins were playing with the released prisoner, just as a cat would with a mouse. The sounds of the chase finally drew too far away for even Elerian to hear.
Gramash finally turned his atrior to the north, and the company continued on its way. He remained in a foul mood. The loss of one prisoner meant nothing to him, but he disliked having his authority challenged by the lupins. Just before dawn, the pack returned, tails drooping with weariness. They began to shadow the prisoners again, and Elerian saw that some of them were still licking their lips, as if in remembrance of some recent feast. At sunup, Gramash stopped at another clearing by the side of the road, and the Goblins set up their camp. When the prisoners were fed, Elerian ate his ration of bread and drank his allotment of water, but he found it impossible to rest. Worry about the safety of Balbus and Tullius gnawed at him constantly now. “Lurco may have already sought them out,” he thought to himself, thinking about all the days that had passed since his capture. He feigned sleep, but his half-closed eyes searched ceaselessly around him for some way to escape.
FIMBRIA
When the sun rose and the air heated up, an unusual drowsiness pervaded the camp, seemingly affecting everyone but Elerian. Two of the Mordi remained awake to guard the prisoners, but the rest of the troop, even the normally alert lupins, slept in the shade under the trees. By mid afternoon, even the two guards were nodding their heads as they struggled to keep watch on the sleeping prisoners. It would have been an ideal time for Elerian to attempt an escape, except for the shackles on his ankles. He ground his teeth in frustration at the lost opportunity, but there was no other choice for him other than to wait for more favorable circumstances.
“It is a long way to Nefandus,” he consoled himself. “Sooner or later, a chance to escape will present itself.”
The slow hours crept by. Then, in the evening when the shadows lengthened, the Goblins began to stir. Some of them built a cooking fire, which the prisoners, most of whom were awake now, watched nervously, for the Mordi were grumbling among themselves that they had had no fresh meat for days. Gramash glowered at them, and they fell into a sullen silence, but a look of rebellion remained in their eyes that boded ill for Gramash’s future. Rather than chance a knife in his ribs while he slept, Gramash finally walked into the crowd of cowering prisoners, eagerly followed by two of the Wood Goblins, stopping before a Hesperian who had developed a slight limp. The two Mordi immediately seized him and dragged him away, screaming and struggling furiously. The unfortunate captive was killed and butchered in plain sight of the other prisoners.
The smell of cooking meat soon filled the air. When the Goblins began to eat their dreadful meal, Elerian turned away, but many of prisoners remained huddled together, watching with horrified looks as the Goblins ate. The mutare gathered around the Wood Goblins, hoping for scraps, and a fight soon broke out between two of the changelings over a bone tossed to them by one of the Mordi. When one of the pair fell to the ground with his throat torn out, his fellows carted him off to the fire and began butchering him for their own supper before he had even drawn his last breath.
Once the Goblins finished their meal, they fed the prisoners, removed their leg shackles, and then formed them up into a column. Led by Gramash, the company marched north as soon as darkness fell. At daybreak, they reached the ruins of another town, built on the eastern shore of a wide, swift flowing river. In the center of the town, the road they were following merged with another larger, better-maintained road that ran east to west. It crossed the river over a wide bridge, supported on graceful arches of dressed stone. Beyond the bridge, Elerian saw a barren, brown land. Nothing grew there, not even weeds. A few battered, ancient stumps, bleached gray by the sun, were the only sign that life had once existed there.
“This can only be Fimbria which the Goblins destroyed in the Great War,” thought Elerian to himself. It struck him, then, that the barren country before him bore a striking resemblance to the land he had seen in the basin. “Is it the same place where I first saw Torquatus?” he wondered to himself as he followed the rest of the prisoners into a ruined fortification where they spent the day sitting chained under the hot sun in an open courtyard. When night fell, the Goblins gave the prisoners their usual sparse meal and allowed them to drink from the river before leading them onto the bridge. It was easily twenty feet wide, and the stones of which it was built seemed fused together, reminding Elerian of the stonework he had seen in Drusus’ lair.
The road beyond the bridge ran west, straight as an arrow. It was about twenty feet wide, and ditches had been dug on either side for drainage. The large, flat stones that made up the surface of the road had been skillfully laid so that their edges fit together with no space between them.
The company marched along the road until almost daylight, passing through an empty, barren landscape. When the sun first lightened the horizon with a rosy glow, they came to a walled fortification built of stone on the right of the road. Upon passing through the outer wall through a wide gate, the prisoners found themselves in a large courtyard full of wagons. The sides of the courtyard were ringed by buildings built of dressed stone and roofed with drab brown clay tiles. The prisoners remained outside in a corner of the courtyard. After replacing the prisoners’ leg shackles and passing out bread and water, the Goblins took refuge from the sun inside one of the buildings. They left no guard, but Elerian was certain that alert eyes watched them from the dark windows that ringed the courtyard. The mutare remained in the courtyard with
the prisoners, dozing in the shade of a wall.
Elerian sat and looked around him. It struck him how thin everyone looked after days of privation. Hunger was a dull ache in his own stomach, and it seemed years since he had eaten a decent meal. Many of his fellow captives had already fallen asleep. The few that remained awake looked around them with furtive, terrified eyes. The hardships they had endured had already begun to steal away their wits.
“Will I become like them, full of fear and thinking only of survival?” wondered Elerian bleakly. A month ago such a thought would have seemed inconceivable, for his strength and magical power had seemed sufficient to overcome any danger.
“Only luck has kept me alive this long,” acknowledged Elerian to himself, “and it seems as if even my luck has finally run out. I hope Balbus and Tullius have managed to evade Lurco and his Goblins,” he thought worriedly to himself.
As the sun rose higher, Ancharians began to emerge from some of the buildings, hitching up teams of black oxen that they led from the stables to their wagons. The oxen had fiery, crimson eyes, and it seemed to Elerian that wisps of white smoke drifted up from their wide, dark nostrils, but he could not be sure in the bright sunlight. Soon, the courtyard emptied out as the Ancharians drove their wagons east.
There was little for Elerian to do after the departure of the Ancharians. His fellow prisoners were now all asleep and no one wished to talk in any case. They had all withdrawn into themselves, each concerned only with his own survival.
Elerian heard activity on the road all through the long day. Overhead, high in the blue sky, he watched carrion birds circling, the only sign of life he had seen in this desolate land. In the courtyard, nothing stirred until the evening shadows began to lengthen once more. Two Mordi brought the prisoners their evening meal. There were strips of dried meat with the bread tonight. The half-starved prisoners wolfed theirs down without questioning what it was, but Elerian gave his away when the Goblins were not looking. After what he had seen the last few days, he did not care to accept any meat given to him by a Goblin.
The company left the fort, and at first, it was almost a relief for Elerian to be out on the road again, but soon, the tedium of the empty land around him began to take its toll. He grew bored again, for no living thing broke the barren expanse around him. The company might have been walking through a desert, for there was no water anywhere. The old watercourses that occasionally ran under the road looked as if they had not held water for years.
Midway through the night, a large black clad troop of Mordi and mutare, led by a single Uruc mounted on a sleek atrior, unexpectedly appeared on the road in front of the prisoners, traveling east. The company was much larger than his own was, and cursing under his breath, Gramash was forced to give way before them. He pulled his column off to the left and watched sullenly as columns of black clad Mordi and mutare marched past. Standing well off the road, Elerian found himself next to a gray, weathered stump almost fifteen feet across. It bore the signs of hundreds of ax marks, as if someone had tried to chop it out of the ground. Elerian wondered what sort of tree it was and how it had survived the ravages of time and the Goblins, for surely, it dated from the time before the Great War when Fimbria was still green. Idly, he touched the weathered wood with the fingers of his right hand. Of its own accord, his third eye opened, and he started when he saw that the stump was covered with a film of shimmering green light that welled up to cover his hand. The night sky and the barren landscape around him suddenly disappeared, and a flood of images filled his mind, so many at once that he could not distinguish one from another. The kaleidoscope was interrupted by a sudden, heavy blow across the back of his head that felled him to his knees. With his head spinning, Elerian looked up in confusion and found a furious Mordi standing over him, brandishing his black whip. He had struck Elerian with the weighted handle.
“Move when I tell you to,” he shouted furiously. “The next time I’ll flay the skin right off your bones!”
Elerian stumbled to his feet, keeping his head down so that the Goblin could not see the anger smoldering in his eyes. He heard a sharp crack and felt the hot touch of the lash around his legs, as the Mordi sought to spur him on. Elerian fought to keep his anger in check, for the incident had focused Gramash’s attention on him. From his saddle on the back of his Atrior, he regarded Elerian with an angry look, for he was impatient to be on his way again.
Elerian took his place in the column of prisoners, imitating the frightened look and weary walk of the other prisoners in an attempt to blend in with them. The Mordi who had beaten him continued to cast suspicious glances in his direction, as if looking for an excuse to use the lash again. Elerian ignored him, for he was occupied with trying to make sense of the images that had poured into his mind when he touched the stump. As he concentrated on them, one image among them became clearer by the moment, resolving itself into a scene like a memory, for there was motion in it as well as the passage of time. In the scene, it was no longer night but midday. Elerian found himself surrounded by a grove of enormous beech trees, their smooth silver gray trunks rearing so far into the air that he had to tilt his head back to see their wide spreading branches, which were as thick as young trees. Covering those branches were masses oval, red gold leaves that made a soft, whispering sound as they fluttered in the breeze that blew among the treetops. Short, thick green turf covered the ground beneath the trees. A narrow, winding path of smooth stones, carefully joined together, led off into the distance between the silver trees. At the limits of his vision, Elerian saw tall, slender figures walking on that path, but he could not see their faces.
“I am looking at a memory,” Elerian thought to himself. “Even though the stump I touched looked dead, there must have been some life still left in it. When my shade touched that life force, it must have given me recollections from its past. It cannot have been a real tree, however, for trees cannot see. The stump must be all that remains of a shape changer, perhaps an ancient Ondredon who lived in Fimbria before the Great War. I wish he had passed on some of his magical knowledge instead of these scenes from his daily life,” thought Elerian wryly to himself. “These memories, while interesting, are not likely to be of any help to me.”
The Ondredon’s gift receded to the back of Elerian’s mind as one long march followed another through the wasteland that was Fimbria, Thirst became a constant torment for Elerian and the other prisoners, for the dry air parched their mouths and throats, and there was no water to be had on the road. During the day, at the way stations, they received, from deep wells, all the tepid water that they cared to drink, but it did them little good, for they were forced to sit in the open all day in the baking sun. Hunger tormented them, too, for the rock hard bread and occasional strip of dried meat they received each day were barely enough to keep them alive.
Balbus and Tullius were constantly in Elerian’s thoughts now. Recalling the waves of sadness that had twice swept over him in Esdras, he began to fear the worst for them. If they were not already dead, they must be prisoners of Lurco and his Goblins by now, a fate that would be worse even than death if Lurco decided to torment them for information.
As the hardships of the march took their toll, Gramash began to look for prisoners each evening, who were too weak to go on. If one caught his cold, pitiless eye, the Mordi took him away, deaf to their intended victim’s calls for mercy. Each time Elerian observed one of these scenes, he strained silently against his shackles, desperate to break free so that he could wreak some sort of vengeance on the Goblins, but the result was always the same. The pain the shackles inflicted on him increased until it became unbearable, and he was forced to give up his attempt to break free of his bonds. A noisy, evening feast always followed the slaughter of a prisoner, as the mutare and lupins battled among themselves over the scraps from the Goblins’ ghastly meal. Then, the rest of the prisoners were whipped to their feet, and the march was resumed.
Occasionally, as Elerian walked along among the other pr
isoners, he caught Gramash staring at him thoughtfully. “Does he suspect something?” he wondered to himself one night. “It would be almost a relief to be discovered if it would bring an end to this awful journey.”
When it began to seem as if the road before them would go on forever, until they all died of exhaustion, the column of prisoners reached another bridge that spanned a wide, swift flowing river. “This must be the Elvorix,” thought Elerian to himself, for he knew the river formed the western boundary of Fimbria.
Gramash led the company over the bridge, and from there, the road ran through a narrow valley with high, stony mountains rising up on both sides of it. To the left of the road a smaller river flowed down to the Elvorix, but Elerian did not know its name. Only a few miles past the bridge, they came to a large, well-fortified city. After spending the night there, Gramash continued to lead his company west again. At first, the valley and the slopes on either side remained barren gray rock, but as the road swung toward the north, Elerian had his first sight of green in many days. The valley on either side of the road became covered with thickets of thorn bushes and brambles while the rugged slopes above disappeared beneath a blanket of dark, twisted trees. Despite the greenery, an unwholesome, evil feeling hung over the land and every hundred paces along the road, there was now a stone pedestal, hideously carved and topped by a bleached human skull.