Death March s-2

by Jean Rabe

  Zoccinder spoke once more in the odd, deep-throated tongue. The exchange went on for several minutes, and midway through it the Dark Knight, losing patience, stretched his arm forward and dug his fingers deep into the goblin’s thigh. The goblin stiffened and spasmed, hissing a stream of words.

  Finally Zoccinder released the goblin and leaned back, tipping his face up to catch the slight breeze that found its way down the mountainside. There was little natural light left in the day. Well away from Zoccinder and Bera, knights were building a large fire using the scrub they’d been gathering along the eastern edge of the valley.

  “The goblin’s name is-”

  “I don’t care what its name is.”

  “He’s of some tribe-clan he calls it, Hurbear’s-this clan split from the main group. But all of these were from Iverton.”

  “Steel Town,” she said, supplying the nickname the Dark Knights had called the place. Her father, Marshal Montrill, had been in command of Steel Town before the earthquakes erupted and destroyed the mines and camp. He died of injuries he suffered while trying to save his men, so she’d been told.

  “What about the traitor Dark Knights? Zoccinder, the creature is not telling us all it knows.”

  Zoccinder spoke in the ogre language again, and Bera found herself concentrating, trying to pick out familiar words in the strange tongue. The conversation went on too long. Her legs started to cramp, and she shifted back and forth on her heels, her thumb worrying over the pommel of her sword.

  Eventually Zoccinder stopped and stood and worked a kink out of his neck. He fixed her with his blue eyes, which looked black in the lantern light. “This fellow doesn’t remember any Dark Knights joining with them, though he says he remembers that a group of goblins came back after the first earthquakes and killed plenty of Dark Knights in a surprise raid on Steel Town.”

  Bera curled her lip. “Ask it about the rest of the goblins that escaped. Which way did they go? The traitor knights must be with them.”

  “I did ask that. Says he doesn’t know where the larger group went, just that his clan, and some other clans, came this way instead. Says his leader”-Zoccinder gestured to a mound of dead goblins. More were being heaped on the pile as he watched.-“his clan did not want to go wherever the large group was headed. He says if there are more Dark Knights, like us, hunting for goblins in the mountains, then they will probably be found.”

  “Yes, that will be their fate,” Bera said. In truth there was only one other unit, not quite as strong in numbers as hers. “Tell it that all of the escaped slaves will be hunted down and killed. Escaping is an affront that will be punished, making an example for the rest of the Order’s slaves. Tell it death is the penalty for running. Tell it …” She paused and ran her hands through her short brown hair, feeling it stiff with blood spatter. “Forget it. Tell it nothing else. Kill the one with the broken leg, Zoccinder. The other two will be marched back to Jelek in the morning. Lord Adjudicator Galen Nemedi asked we spare only a few for questioning and to be made examples of at another labor camp. More than that will burden our travel. And we have more work to do.” She took a dozen steps and looked over her shoulder. “And leave the dead one tied up with the two living ones.”

  Bera sat apart from the men, her back against a spike of rock on the western side of the valley. She listened to the steady buzz of conversation, the occasional outburst of laughter from those around the fire, and above it all the deep voice of Zoccinder, who was singing. He sang on almost every night that she didn’t order a quiet camp, usually offering hymns to the gods, but his choice that night was a battle song about the blue dragons and their riders who had died in the Chaos War. She could see his huge silhouette against the fire. She watched him and the specks of red that popped off the burning wood and floated away like fireflies.

  Zoccinder was starting in on the second chorus when a figure approached her, blocking Bera’s view.

  “Commander?”

  “Isaam.” Bera nodded a greeting and gestured for the wizard to sit next to her.

  “I was listening to Zoccinder,” Bera murmured. She kept her eyes on him, even when the wizard sat so close that their shoulders touched. The wizard was a slight man, only five and a half feet tall, with an oddly pudgy face that reminded Bera of a bulldog’s.

  “Yes, a remarkable voice Zocci has,” the wizard admitted. “Quite the repertoire too.” Together they listened until the song finished, to the mild applause of the other Dark Knights who’d been lulled into paying attention. “I understand you do not want me to burn the dead goblins, Commander.”

  Bera shook her head. “No.”

  “They draw bugs. Have you been over to the mound of dead? The gnats are thick as river fog. And there are beetles.”

  “Insects don’t bother me, Isaam.”

  “It is customary to burn the bodies. We always burn goblins.” The wizard had been under Bera’s command for nearly a decade. He was her second, and so she allowed him to argue with her from time to time. “We should accord them the honor of burial …”

  Bera chuckled softly. “You don’t know all that much about goblins, do you, Isaam?”

  “No. Do you?”

  “I know enough.”

  “To hate them. I know you hate them, Commander.” Bera smiled. “Aye, they are rats to me.” “So far from humankind, you’ve said. I agree. Repulsive little things.”

  “And their practices are barbaric.” Bera held her hand up, briefly halting the discussion as Zoccinder launched into another song. She’d heard that one a few times before, and when he reached the chorus, she continued. “I’ve had you burn goblins before; I well know that. But this time is different. This time we leave two survivors to tell the tale of this night. Don’t you understand, old friend? They prefer us to burn the bodies of their dead. It is not enough that bodies are dismembered, shredded, the bones broken. They must be burned. Otherwise, they believe, goblin souls will come back, returning to broken, rotting bodies.”

  Isaam’s eyes grew wide. “In all my years with you, I’ve not heard you speak of this.”

  “I’ve had no reason to, old friend. We’re not slavers to capture goblins, and so we’ve not left any survivors before. As you say, we’ve burned them before.”

  “But we’ve never before camped in such close proximity to the dead either. By all the gods, the stench and bugs-”

  “We’ll move on at first light, Isaam.”

  The wizard gestured toward the pile. “And so if their bodies are burned, the souls are freed, eh?”

  “That is what they believe. Otherwise the souls will return and be trapped in rotting corpses. But when the bodies are burned, the souls are free to move elsewhere and start a new life in a goblin baby being born,” Bera finished.

  “What an insipid belief,” the wizard pronounced.

  “They are insipid creatures.” Bera wriggled her nose in disgust. “And so the dead ones can draw bugs, and so the two we’ve left alive stare at the mound of corpses in terror, thinking the souls are seeping back and reinhabiting the bodies, becoming trapped.”

  The wizard nodded. “A horror story you’ve birthed.”

  “The two survivors will be taken to a slave encampment when the Lord Adjudicator is done with them. They’ll be quick to tell the slaves there about the massacre of their fellow escapees. And they’ll tell them that the dead were left intact so the souls would come back to be ensnared forever.”

  Isaam shuddered. “I understand the policy now.”

  “Use their own beliefs against them.”

  “The Order needs hundreds more slaves to rebuild Iverton.” Isaam rubbed at the stubble on his chin. “Perhaps we should not kill so many; we could bring back many more for labor.”

  Bera made a growling sound in her throat. “My orders were to spare only a few, so the tale of the mass killing could be spread, so slaves elsewhere will know that escape only leads to death and damnation.” She gestured to the northeast. “Already ogres and mi
notaurs work to gather more slaves for the Order. They look to the north, where your magic says the escaped slaves did not go.”

  “Yes. That is correct.”

  “Good.”

  Isaam studied Bera for several moments. “I think you are enjoying this assignment.”

  “Yes, old friend.” Revenge, Bera thought, vengeance for my father. Vengeance for the Order. “On many levels. Slaves dishonor the Order by escaping.” Bera clenched her hands so tightly that they ached. “It cannot be tolerated.”

  “And renegade Dark Knights …”

  “They are even worse,” Bera corrected. “No traitors to the Order should escape punishment. They must be hunted down too.”

  Isaam pointed toward the fire. Zoccinder stood with his back to it, staring at them. After a moment, he started walking their way. Isaam got to his feet.

  “The wizard too,” Isaam said.

  “Grallik N’sera,” Bera said.

  Isaam pulled an empty bottle from a pocket of his robe. “This is all I have to follow him with, all that was salvaged from where he lived in Iverton. The ink in it has dried, and the top is melted. But Grallik N’sera used it, and so I am using it too.” He replaced the bottle. “It is enough of a link that I can scry upon him. It and my spells tell me he is still with the goblins. In these mountains, somewhere, Commander. These vast, vast mountains.”

  Bera stood too, eyes on Zoccinder, who had come up close to them, ignoring Isaam even as she spoke to him. “But not with this group of goblins.”

  Isaam shrugged. “Unfortunately, no.”

  “Then we resume our search at first light,” Bera commanded. “Would that your magic were more precise, old friend. Would that it could lead us directly to him.”

  Isaam took that as a dismissal and headed toward the fire, giving Zoccinder a wide berth. The big knight turned to watch the wizard, then turned back to face Bera.

  “Commander?”

  “What do you want, Zoccinder? It is late, and the men are settling down for-”

  He bent and his warm breath tickled her forehead.

  For a moment, Bera considered berating him for his insolence.

  GRALLIK’S AIM

  Grallik N’sera sat cross-legged on an uneven patch of dirt, staring straight up and trying to ignore the pebbles that bit into the backs of his legs.

  The sky looked as flat and gray as the iron he used to leech from the rocks in Steel Town, the same shade as the fine robe that once served as a badge of office, the one he’d given to the goblins as an act of surrender.

  There were no clouds or birds to catch his attention, no breeze to tease his filthy, matted hair-just an unending emptiness that cast a gloomy pallor and masked the time of day. It could have been morning or early evening for all he knew; he’d lost track of how long he’d walked before being allowed a respite.

  “Was this a mistake?” he whispered. He was on a mountain trail in the company of hundreds of goblins, most of them milling behind him, resting their ugly little feet. He wished they would rest their tongues instead. Grallik could not shut out their galling chatter, which sounded like locusts swarming. He couldn’t fathom their crude language and had no desire to learn it.

  His head pounded horribly from the annoying din and competed with the burning ache that suffused every inch of his body.

  “Was this a mistake?” he repeated.

  Throwing in his lot with the once-slaves? Leaving the Dark Knights? Abandoning decades of work for an Order he’d been unswervingly loyal to?

  The goblins could kill him at any time; his magic could not best their numbers, and he knew they all hated him. Had he brought about his own demise by practically groveling to join them?

  He dropped his right hand onto his knee and rubbed at the thin material of his undertunic, finding a hole and absently worrying at the frayed threads. The goblins had let him keep the utterly dirty and snagged garment, along with his boots, which he’d taken off the corpse of another Dark Knight. One heel was cracked down the middle and would break soon, and the sole of the other had worn through in places and birthed painful blisters. It hurt to wear them, but he knew it would hurt far worse to go barefoot over the rocky ground.

  It hadn’t been a mistake to leave Steel Town, he told himself.

  There couldn’t be much left of the Dark Knight mining camp. What the earthquakes hadn’t ruined and what the escaping slaves hadn’t destroyed, the erupting volcanoes had no doubt finished.

  Shattered, melted, buried … all of it.

  He’d barely escaped the lava himself, following the slaves south into the mountains before magma covered everything that had been important to him. Sulfur still hung heavy in the air, and that, coupled with the stink that rose from the goblins like an omnipresent specter, threatened to send him into another fit of retching.

  Grallik worked up some saliva, swallowing hard and frowning when he was unable to dispel the taste of the sulfur and dust and his own reeking sweat. He felt his skin pulling here and there from thick scabs forming, on his left arm in particular, where yesterday he squeezed against a jagged outcropping on a narrow part of the trail. He’d cut himself rather deeply.

  Horace, a Dark Knight priest he’d lured along on his mad venture, had tended him, but Grallik had opened the cut again that morning. Grallik focused on his wound, hoping that its sting would take his mind off the rest of his miseries and swearing when the attempt was unsuccessful. He let out a hissing breath and lowered his gaze to the sleeping form of Horace an arm’s length away.

  The priest was dressed only in leather breeches, which had been stripped from the corpse of a young ogre and given to him by the goblins before they’d started their march. Like Grallik, the priest had surrendered his Dark Knight tabard, along with his chain mail, which a stout hobgoblin had claimed.

  Had it been a mistake to bring the Ergothian priest with him? Grallik wondered. And for that matter, should he have invited the only remaining member of his talon?

  Should he have headed north or east and found a Dark Knight outpost, accepted another posting?

  No, he told himself not for the first or last time, eyes focused on the regular rising and falling of Horace’s ample stomach. “None of it was a mistake.”

  Grallik had followed the once-slaves for purely selfish reasons. It wasn’t to save himself when the world shook and the volcanoes erupted, but to better himself. And he hadn’t so much as followed the slaves as he’d followed one slave-her.

  He could see her when he leaned forward and looked around-a gaunt goblin wearing a Dark Knight tabard.

  She was a diminutive, red-skinned thing with a flat face and wide eyes threaded with tiny veins. Her small mouth was drawn forward in a pensive expression. She commanded a discipline of magic that Grallik didn’t understand but desperately wanted to learn and control. When he’d watched her in the slave pens back in Steel Town, he’d seen her combine her magic with that of another goblin. She was doing that at that moment, kneeling across from a mud-brown creature a head taller than she was, a goblin with a mottled, bumpy hide that looked like a piece of the trail come to life. Together they rocked back and forth, slowly, fingertips brushing the ground.

  Back in the mining camp, their magic had created a hole beneath the slave pen that their fellows could escape through. He wondered what magic she and her mud-brown companion were casting.

  More, he wondered when he would get an opportunity to speak with her. The thought of a lowly goblin teaching him anything was at the same time appealing and demeaning. The wizards he’d studied under in his youth would consider his notion blasphemous.

  Goblins were so far beneath men!

  But that one goblin … she was special. She was why he had risked everything. No human or elf wizard Grallik had studied under had been able to join magic with another, with the earth, in the same way.

  Grallik needed to get her alone-or as alone as possible amid that malodorous mass. She knew a smattering of the human tongue, so he felt
certain he could make her understand what he wanted.

  Would she consent to teach him?

  By the dark gods, she had to; otherwise all of his humiliation and agony would be for nothing.

  But it might be days before he could find the right opportunity. The crowded mountain trail certainly wasn’t the place. So meanwhile, he would continue to watch her and wait until they left the trail and returned to flat ground, where the goblins and hobgoblins would spread out and he might find her alone.

  “Patience,” he whispered to himself. “It will happen.” He stifled a yawn and glanced back at Horace, the priest’s stomach still rising and falling in sound sleep.

  Grallik envied the Ergothian, who seemed to have no trouble dropping off peacefully any time the goblin horde stopped their march. The priest had told Grallik it was Zeboim’s will that he slept deeply, so that he could better face the rigors of each day.

  But no god seemed to will that Grallik should sleep-at least, not long enough to do him any good.

  Despite his exhaustion, Grallik couldn’t bring himself to close his eyes; he didn’t trust the goblins not to slit his throat as he dozed. His wounds ached. His feet hadn’t stopped throbbing since he joined with the goblins. His head constantly pounded as loudly and rhythmically as a blacksmith’s hammer. His legs were beyond sore; sometimes he couldn’t feel them.

  Grallik’s magic was powerful, but he didn’t know a single spell that could ease his wracked condition. In Steel Town Grallik’s spells enabled the work of the great smelters, and he fashioned glyphs and wards that shot columns of flame into the sky and kept the slaves in check. Fire spells came almost effortlessly.

  Horace slept effortlessly.

  Grallik tapped the fingers of his left hand against his temple and studied the priest’s face. Horace’s expression was serene. But in the passing of a few heartbeats, beads of sweat dotted his smooth forehead, and his eyelids twitched as if he were lost in a troubling dream. Moments more passed, and the sweat became a fine sheen that covered all of his face and traveled down his neck to settle on his bare stomach. The priest’s breathing became ragged. The goblin wearing the Dark Knight tabard turned to stare. She grunted something Grallik couldn’t understand, wiped her nose on her arm, and closed her eyes.