Goblin Nation

by Jean Rabe

  “No, sorcerer. She asked us questions first, gained our secrets, I say.” The spirit’s voice faltered but continued. “We gave up everything we knew. Gave up Commander Kata. Gave up you. The oath we took meant nothing compared to the pain we felt.”

  Isaam looked away from the skull and caught Bera’s gaze.

  “You wish more from his spirit? I’ll hold him here as long as you want. He wants to return to the Gray.”

  The Gray was the place where spirits were said to meander, close to the world of the living but unable to reach it.

  Bera stared at the maggots crawling over Isaam’s fingers. One disappeared up his sleeve. “Yes. I want more. He said the goblin gave up secrets as well. What did she tell them?”

  “That she was indeed from Steel Town. That the other escaped slaves are in the woods. She told us where to find all of them, and that their leader is named Direfang. He perches himself above their camp, on a bluff over a river. She betrayed them only because she thought word would never reach you.”

  Bera turned and passed by Zocci. “Let his spirit go, Isaam. Zocci, see that the head is buried with its body. We have a priest in our midst who will give the proper rites.” More softly, she added, “And soon Horace will also give rites over Grallik N’sera’s corpse.”

  She hurried around the clearing where the knights continued to dig deep, even graves. The flies persisted as she made her way. She was looking for one knight in particular.

  “Zathor,” she said to one group of knights after the other. “Where is Zathor?”

  A lieutenant caught her attention and directed her to the north.

  “He should be near the front, not the back,” she cursed. “He has the maps.”

  Finally she found him. “Your maps, Zathor,” she ordered brusquely.

  He nodded and swung his pack off his back. She motioned to a knight with a torch. “Light it. The sun is gone, and I need to see.”

  Bera was impatient, and after a few moments, she grabbed the torch from the knight and lit it herself. Zathor spread a series of maps across the ground, holding them in place with rocks. She looked from one to the next, studying terrain features and straining to read tiny marks about elevations.

  “Some of these are older than others. Things have grown and overgrown,” Zathor tried to explain. “But they’re all I have to work with.”

  “Too many streams and rivers,” she said. “This damnable forest is too damn big.” She reached her free hand to the back of her neck and scratched it then crouched to get a better look, careful to keep the torch from catching anything on fire.

  “Commander?” Zathor set down the final map and placed rocks on top of it to keep it down in place. “What are you looking for?”

  “Goblins,” she muttered. “Damnable goblins in this damnable forest.” After a pause, she added, “And a traitor.”

  She told him about the bluff and the river. After a few moments of scrutiny, he pointed to a spot on the closest map.

  “This could be it, Commander. I don’t believe we’re far from here. Less than a day or two’s march.”

  She straightened and thrust the torch into another knight’s hand. Zathor took great care refolding his maps. “Give that one map to Tavor,” she told him. “He’s our best scout, and I want him to follow this as best as possible. Move out soon!”

  “Aye, Commander.”

  “Horace!” Another knight gave her directions to where the prisoner could be found. She came up to him with a fierce expression. “Your prayers over our fallen brothers had best be short.”

  22

  THE STONETELLERS

  MUDWORT’S OBSESSION

  Mudwort was sitting, touching the ground, and after a moment sinking her fingers in, looking for her obsession: the spear.

  Mudwort had never been taught magic, as she knew Grallik had. She couldn’t read a spell book or a magical scroll even if she desperately wanted to; she couldn’t read. She accidentally learned of her inner arcane spark several years earlier, shortly after being captured by the ogres and sold to work in Steel Town. When her hours in the mine got longer and longer, she started imagining the stones talked to her. At first she thought her mind had gone sour, but eventually she discovered the stones really were speaking and that she’d merely discovered a way to listen to it. It wasn’t language in the way one goblin talked to another, but emotions and impressions she learned to understand.

  It took her a while to steadily and secretly hone her skills, and in the process she learned to sense where the richest veins of ore were, discovering places where the stone was either weak or especially strong, and finally discovering how to send her senses through rocks to see other places and creatures. Mingling her magic with others, such as Thya and Grallik, came later, much later. Steel Town seemed a long time in the past.

  Since coming to the forest, she had become obsessed with the shaman from the long-ago time—that shaman and her clan and the spear. That was why Mudwort had come to the forest to begin with.

  Her name had been Saarh, and when first Mudwort glimpsed her, she was little more than a youngling holding court deep in a cave in the mountains. That was before Mudwort realized she was looking through time as well as through the earth and that Saarh had been dead more years or decades than Mudwort could count.

  The ancient clan had a form of writing, but no goblins she knew of wrote. They were learned. Their leader was wise. Mudwort had tried to follow them through the stone and years.

  When last she had looked in, Saarh had wrinkles at the edges of her eyes, and her face was pockmarked—she was well into middle age. Her nose carried a thin scar, and another scar ran from her ear to her jaw. There was a bone hoop in her right ear, recently put there, as it was crusted with blood, and there was a feather and a bead on a string hanging from her left ear.

  It was clear all the goblins around Saarh treated her with respect and followed her orders. Most of those goblins were red-skinned, like Mudwort, but there were some brown-skinned goblins too, and a few were tinged orange.

  Mudwort thrust her hands in deeper, her fingers undulating like thick earthworms. “Where?” she said. “Where? Where? Where is Saarh now?” She remembered back to the clearing that the ancient goblins had come to after leaving their caverns. It was near the spot Direfang might try to rebuild his city … if the Dark Knights didn’t get him first. She would try to go there.

  The years and miles melted in a heartbeat as Mudwort sought out Saarh. At the same time she kept a hold of the thread that connected her to the spear. The greens of the woods swirled in front of her in a dizzying mix. When they stopped spinning, dozens of goblins stood around her. But they weren’t really there, she knew; they were all long dead with shattered pieces of bones. Their images were not real; they were inside her head.

  Several of the ancient goblins wore necklaces made of wood and stone and the teeth of small animals that lived underground that were strung on thin cords. Some had feathers and claws on thicker leather cords, bat ears and wings; and other goblins had pieces of bone pierced through their cheeks and nostrils.

  Saarh had worn eight necklaces the last time Mudwort had glimpsed her; at that moment she had nine. The longest necklace hung to just below her waist. It was composed of carved wooden beads, most of them round, but a few that were cut to look like bats. The beads of another necklace had been painted with dyes made from lichen; Mudwort guessed that Saarh favored that one, as she worried at the beads with her slender fingers.

  Mudwort gasped when she noted the most beautiful necklace. It was also the shortest one, barely fitting around Saarh’s head. It displayed irregular-shaped beads the color of the full white moon that shone overhead. The beads were smooth, and along their surfaces streaks of blue, pink, and green glistened.

  Opals: Mudwort knew the name of the gemstone only because a woman in Steel Town had a brooch made of the stones. Mudwort found it interesting and listened to the woman tell another what the stone was called and that it was
both precious and brittle.

  Mudwort had a few necklaces too, including a thin, gold chain festooned with sapphires. She tugged one of her hands free from the ground and reached into a pouch at her side. Tiny sapphires filled most of the pouch; they were among the treasures she had taken from a dwarf village south of Steel Town. Grallik had used a great many of the stones to buy ships to bring them to the forest and to purchase supplies. But he didn’t use all of them, and she’d never shown anyone her secret necklace. Her fingers probed to the bottom, and she felt the chain. She gently pulled it out, careful not to lose any of the loose sapphires, and draped the treasure around her head. Somehow the necklace made her seem more important and happy. She wouldn’t wear it around the goblins in Direfang’s ruined city; she didn’t want to risk someone stealing it.

  The necklaces marked Saarh as important too. At her shoulder stood an older goblin with a crooked face. Mudwort had seen the older one during previous visions. One of his cheeks was higher than the other, and his lower lip drooped as if the muscles in his jaw didn’t work properly. At first Mudwort had thought the old one stupid, but his eyes were bright and filled with intelligence, and the four necklaces he wore suggested he was important to the clan: Saarh’s consort, likely.

  Mudwort had listened to the two of them several times and recalled an argument. The crooked-faced goblin did not want to leave the caves in the mountains, but Saarh insisted, saying food was becoming scarce, and there would be plenty in the woods.

  “But the clan will return someday, Saarh. Goblins belong to the earth,” the crooked-faced goblin had said.

  “Yes,” Saarh said. “That is also certain, a return.”

  “Goblins were meant to live under the press of the dirt and stone.”

  Had she truly brought them out of the mountain for food? Mudwort wondered. Or had she, too, touched the spear and let it tug her along on its own path? Mudwort again cursed herself for not going after the spear the moment they’d set foot in the forest, leaving Direfang and everyone else behind in her pursuit of it. She almost let the vision dissolve, so she could renew her quest that very moment. But she lingered and watched, wanting to catch a glimpse of Saarh with the spear again.

  Mudwort squeezed her eyes tightly shut and concentrated.

  “Remember the vision. Where did Saarh find the spear? Remember it now. Remember!” Within the passing of a few heartbeats, Mudwort saw the sun setting in the back of her mind. Then she saw as Saarh and the crooked-faced goblin—whom she recalled was named Brab—left their large clan behind and walked west.

  Mudwort again watched Saarh find the spear.

  She watched Saarh rub the stones of her necklaces as she approached the largest oak tree in the young forest.

  It was an ugly tree, Mudwort thought, that particular oak more crooked than Brab. It leaned to the north, and its lowest branches were dead. The bark was thick and corky, and its leaves were oval-shaped with bristly edges. The acorns were big, and the cups that held them looked spiky and itchy.

  As Mudwort let the vision progress, she saw Saarh gesture and split the trunk. In the next instant, the tree shriveled to a woody pulp, the leaves vanished, and standing where the trunk had been just moments before floated a spear—Chislev’s spear.

  Saarh slowly approached the spear, bowed to it, and offered a prayer to Chislev. Mudwort thought her ancient counterpart weak and stupid for worshiping one of Krynn’s gods. But perhaps Saarh simply hadn’t known any better. Saarh stretched a hand out.

  The spear was green, as if it had been fashioned from a too-young tree whose bark had been stripped. Slivers of gold, silver, and platinum were inlaid along the shaft. Tiny gems that sparkled in the last rays of the sun were sprinkled among the precious metal runes. Most of them were diamonds, but there were also emeralds and a few yellow-hued stones that looked like pieces of sunlight caught on water.

  Its tip was metal, gleaming dully. Just below it was a silver band that held small rings from which dangled dark yellow feathers.

  “Chislev’s symbol, these feathers,” Saarh said, as though she were talking to Mudwort. “Chislev’s spear, this. The only weapon our god wielded.” Saarh slowly wrapped the fingers of her right hand around the shaft.

  Mudwort could feel the power in the weapon flow into Saarh. She focused all her energy on seeing more.

  “What happened to Saarh after that? What? What?

  What?” But that part of the vision had concluded. Mudwort saw only a blur of green, like the forest spinning around her, and she saw a finished goblin city, not nearly as large as the one Direfang dreamed of. It was the one the ancient clan had built at Saarh’s direction.

  Saarh was there, standing apart from the clan and staring up at the twilight sky, pointing to a star formation and saying that was Chislev’s and that she was Chislev’s too. The spear was firmly in her hand, and Brab was with her, no longer crooked.

  “The spear did that, the healing,” Mudwort said to herself. “It made Brab straight and fine-looking, and it made the forest grow.” In the vision, what had been a young wood was lusher, the trees taller. It was a much, much older and richly developed wood than what Saarh and her clansmen had first come upon. “What else can Chislev’s forgotten weapon do? Mudwort’s spear. What else! Is there anything else?”

  And why couldn’t she see what had happened between when Saarh gained the spear and when the forest grew? What had she missed?

  Mudwort tried something different. She looked ahead, wanting to see what happened next. The green blurred, and her senses whirled until she was weak and dizzy. When the colors stopped shifting, she found herself looking upon a far older forest—indeed, the woods she was physically in. She saw the ground where the ancient goblin village had been, but there were no homes and no goblins anymore. Had they all returned underground, as Saarh predicted they eventually would?

  Again and again she searched for the shaman, finding nothing.

  “The spear, then,” Mudwort decided. “Wasted enough time on this. Find the spear now. Mudwort’s spear.” Mudwort wondered if maybe she was afraid to find it for some reason. Once she had the spear, her great quest, her obsession, would be over. There’d be nothing left to tug her through the woods, nothing left to seek. Was the search itself more rewarding and exciting?

  “No. Find the spear now.” She directed her magical sight to the north and west, following the thread that still connected her. How long she spent searching, she couldn’t guess. But some time, too long, she thought, as her calves ached and her neck cramped.

  “There it is. Not far now.”

  Her mind touched a rotting cloth that at one time had been fine and elaborate, with silver, gold, and platinum metallic threads running through it. Tiny pearls had been sewn into a pattern that she couldn’t make out. The spear was wrapped in the rotting cloth and buried deep like the Dark Knights buried their fallen.

  Who buried it?

  Saarh?

  Brab?

  Their offspring?

  Had the ancient shaman no longer needed the weapon? Had she discarded it just as Chislev had thrown it away? Did Saarh finally learn that the gods were worthless and, thus, Chislev’s spear useless too?

  Mudwort’s fingers happily twirled in the dirt and basked in the eldritch aura that seeped out of the spear.

  “Mudwort’s spear.”

  She knew precisely where it was, and she extricated her hands from the earth and hurried toward its hiding place.

  Thya, who’d been quietly watching from behind a thick willow, scrambled to keep pace.

  23

  THE STONETELLERS

  DEAD SILENCE

  Nine hundred knights: Bera hadn’t led so many into battle before.

  She walked at the front of the column, her most seasoned scout, Tavor, at her side, Zocci a few paces behind, Isaam next. The rest followed four or five across, the trees too close for them to march in a regular formation. She kept the pace measured because of the sorcerer; she needed his coo
peration, and it wouldn’t do to either have him fall behind and get lost or to make him so exhausted that he couldn’t cast a single spell.

  Her knights would be more than enough to slaughter any number of goblins. But she might need Isaam’s magic against Grallik. And she would need his spells to record, for posterity and her superiors, the obliteration of the goblins and the—

  “Traitor,” she hissed, thinking of Grallik. Her scout glanced at her, but she gestured for him to face forward.

  “Landmarks,” she said needlessly. “Keep looking for them, Tavor. Find us something that corresponds to the map.”

  She hated traitors and couldn’t stop thinking of Grallik.

  The former Gray Robe was everything she despised in one half-elf package. He would die, like the goblins he’d fled the mining camp with, but he wouldn’t die easily. Maybe she’d use the traitor Horace to keep Grallik alive with healing spells so she could prolong the half-elf’s agony. That thought brought a slight smile to her lips. Maybe she’d kill the pathetic Horace first in full view of Grallik. And maybe she’d have the wizard burned alive—according to her reports, fire was his specialty.

  How could he have turned his back on the Dark Knights?

  The Order was everything to Bera—her heart, the code she lived by, and the family she’d adopted since joining the ranks. The knighthood had been good to her, giving her a purpose in life, and she’d earned her status; not a single award or medal had been a gift. Early in her career, she’d entertained the notion of rising to head the entire knighthood, or at the least leading the knights that reported to Neraka. That was a goal she’d let slip away through the years, considering it too lofty and unrealistic; she’d not had the opportunities to distinguish herself in that way, and up until that moment her actual rank had been modest.

  But her mission might catch the right people’s attention. Her superiors were livid over the goblins’ escape. They were rats, simple slave labor, but they had slapped the knighthood in its collective face by killing their overseers at the mining camp and by going unpunished and roaming free. For the honor of the Order, they had to be caught and made an example of.