Death March

HONOR

The sword cleaved into the goblin’s side with enough force to sever its spine. “To the deepest corner of the Abyss with these things!” cried Bera Kata. The Dark Knight commander thrust her heel against the dead goblin’s hip and yanked hard to pull her blade free.

She was covered in blood, none of it her own. She pulled up the hem of her tabard, using the underside to wipe off her face. After a deep breath, she plunged forward into the mass of goblins again.

Bera thought she heard one of the goblins cry, “Stop!” in the Common tongue. She knew them capable of language and recognized the clacking, snarling gibberish so many of them used. But as far as speaking her language? She considered them parrots repeating words taught to them by owners; they were not able to understand.

Goblins were stupid, pathetic creatures, lower than common animals, Bera knew. Filthy and annoying; the only good goblin was a dead one … or a slave.

She snarled when a pot-bellied goblin darted forward, a dagger thrust out as if the puny weapon were a spear. She let the creature in close as she raised her sword high above her right shoulder and brought it down in an executioner’s swing, slicing through the goblin’s neck and lopping off its ugly head.

Around her the battle raged.

She felt her heart thrumming and the surge of blood to her face, her chest tightening and breath coming faster-all sensations she relished. Her arms grew warm, and she clenched the leather-wrapped pommel of her sword with both hands to put more power behind her swings.

“Dance with me,” she cooed.

Bera was never more truly alive than when she fought-real battles, not the mock combats she staged to keep her men fit and their skills reasonably honed. Fighting kept her mind away from all of her other concerns. She enjoyed the emotional and physical rush it provided. It was the danger she savored, the real danger, the chance that with each step forward she put her otherwise-staid life at risk. It was why she let two of the goblins come at her, raising her sword so they could dart in beneath the sweep of it.

Bera spun, presenting her back to them for just a heartbeat. But when she completed the pivot, her sword low and whistling, her blade sheered into the thigh of one of the goblins, maiming it.

“Sing!” she taunted. “Sing and dance!”

The injured goblin howled and grabbed at its leg as if by pressing its bony hands against the gushing wound it could keep the blood inside. “Mercy,” she thought she heard the goblin say. “Please.”

“Sing louder! Wail for all you’re worth! The gods won’t listen to you.” She left the crippled goblin on the ground, considering it no threat and sparring with the other one. It backed up, the dagger held in front of its scrawny body mimicking a defensive stance.

“Rats, no better than vermin you are!” Bera couldn’t have said where her hatred of goblinkind came from. She’d never associated with them on any level other than what she was doing-fighting and killing them. She’d never been posted to the Nerakan mines or to other compounds where they were used for slave labor. Thank the gods for that, she thought, as it would have been difficult to live close to them. They were so far beneath humankind.

Their appearance alone was enough to justify slaughtering them. They smelled horrible and were hideous, and they chattered in a vile-sounding language that reminded her of wild dogs yapping. What clothes they wore hung on them in tatters, their eyes were yellowed as though they were deathly sick, and their skin was bumpy and scabrous, as if they carried some foul wasting disease.

She spit as she advanced on the goblin, tasting her own sweat in her mouth and trying to rid herself of it. She knew that she needed to finish it quickly and move on. There were so many other goblins to deal with that prolonging any one segment of the battle, no matter how much she enjoyed the contest, put her-and, more important, her men-at risk.

The thing continued to chatter, lips curled up and eyes narrowed, making it a grotesque sight that sent a disgusted shiver down her back. She couldn’t understand it and could barely hear it; everything else was so loud in comparison-the shushing sound swords made against goblin ribs, the screams of the dying goblins all around, the whoops of the youngest knights, the victory shouts of the older ones. Too, there was the thunder of feet stomping against the ground and the occasional clang when a goblin weapon was raised in successful parry.

Her own foe managed that just then, somehow barely deflecting her blow with its dagger. Luck, she thought; goblins could be lucky, but they were not so skilled.

“Not again, you. No more will you block my blade and no more will you suck in my air.” She crouched when she swung the next time, her blade biting deep into the goblin’s arm and causing it to fumble its dagger. It grabbed futilely at the gaping slice with its good hand, the wounded arm useless and hanging gruesomely by a bit of muscle. She swung again, slaying the foul creature, and she raised her gaze to survey the scene.

Despite the growing shadows from the mountains ringing the valley, it was easy to pick out her men; even the shortest among them towered above the puny goblins. Her Dark Knights were dressed in fine plate armor with black tabards and cloaks spotted with dirt and blood. Some of the goblins possessed armor, pieces of this and that they’d cobbled together into breastplates and greaves to comical effect. Many of them wielded weapons that had been taken from a Dark Knight mining camp; Bera saw the rose and lily etchings on some blades and the black-leather-wrapped pommels. Also, she spotted Dark Knight tabards on a few of the hobgoblins in the mix, confirming her belief that she’d been successful in locating the escaped slaves.

“Kill them all,” she breathed. “All but one or two. Monsters to parade before Lord Baltasar Rennold!” That last she shouted. “Save one of the hobs!” She recalled someone telling her that hobgoblins were slightly smarter than their small cousins, and she knew a handful of them had been used as foremen in the mines.

She inhaled deeply, pulling the battle scents into her lungs, tasting the blood and mud and the stink of the goblins. She held the breath briefly, struggling to take all the excitement in.

Her eyes gleamed as she glanced over her shoulder. One of her men joined her, Eloy. He put his back to hers and without a word met the rush of a broad-shouldered hobgoblin with a sunken chest. At six feet, she matched Eloy in height. She turned back to face her own assailant, a yellow-skinned goblin wearing a chain mail shirt that dangled above his knobby ankles and weighed him down. He wielded a short sword, the first goblin she’d seen toting something other than a mere dagger or the sticks they tried to use as clubs.

The colors of the creatures had always perplexed her. Some were yellow, but most were various shades of mud-brown, a few of them red, with one or two in the mix gray. All of them were the shades of molds that grew in the woods, she mused as she drove her blade forward with enough strength to part the links of her opponent’s mail and pierce his heart. Their color was always the same on the inside: blood red.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw one of her men fall, four goblins swarming on top of him.

“To Gare!” she shouted.

“Aye, Commander! Together, then.”

Fighting back-to-back, she and Eloy worked their way toward the downed knight.

Bera hadn’t joined the fight until it was well under way. She’d watched at a distance for several minutes, wanting to appraise the skills of her newest knights. She commanded a force of sixty-two, nearly a third of them freshly assigned to her just twelve days past in the capital of Neraka. Though not the first battle for them-according to the records she’d reviewed-it was the first time they’d fought against something other than humans and the first time they’d worked as a blended unit with her previous charges. Her new knights had earlier been stationed south of Jelek, at an outpost that had fallen into a rent in the earth when the first of the earthquakes struck; they were the only survivors.

One of those men had caught her eye from the beginning. She studied him as he entered the fray, wielding a double-edged battle-axe that swept with the regularity and appearance of a pendulum. He was the largest in her unit, easily seven feet tall and heavily muscled, looking formidable in his suit of plate mail, with his chest evidencing some bluing-atypical for his low rank. She speculated that he had some ogre blood in his veins, but he’d not specified it in his records. He’d told her that he was twenty-six, but she put him at least five years younger; his face was boyish, unlined. In any event, she knew he came from a reasonably wealthy family; his bearing told her that, as did the battle-axe she’d allowed him to retain-a keepsake from his grandfather, he’d claimed. The Dark Knight wizard in her company whispered that it was enchanted.

That he hadn’t risen up through the stations was due to several documented incidents of insubordination. Lesser men would have been drummed out for half the number of offenses she’d found in his records before leaving on the march. No doubt his fighting skills, coupled with the losses the Order suffered from the recent earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, preserved his job. He’d not shown her disrespect or balked at any of her commands … yet. And his courage and apparent bloodlust impressed her.

Zocci was the name he went by among the knights, though his full name was much longer-Zoccinder Angeda Redstone of… — a long name, so she would settle for Zoccinder. She’d left all the papers about Zoccinder in Neraka, along with her husband and nearly-grown daughter. Bera had seen less and less of her family in the past few years. The Dark Knights were more of a family to her; she’d been raised in the Order and would die with it.

“But not die this day,” she’d murmured to herself, watching the battle unfold at the outset. “Not to these grimy rats.”

She’d taken a position on the rise and ordered her men to fan out through the mountains. Her scout had discovered the goblins resting in that narrow valley, settling in as the sun was setting. Bera directed her most experienced knights to sweep around and come at the goblins from both ends of the valley, where a narrow pass cut through the hills, effectively trapping the enemy while the bulk of her force descended. Despite their heavy armor and weapons, the knights had moved at a stealthy pace, alerting the goblins only after the pass through the valley had been sealed.

Zoccinder had been among the first to rush into battle, and even from her lofty post, she’d heard his feet pounding across the earth, or perhaps she’d only imagined it. But she’d enjoyed hearing the first scream as his axe cut through a skinny hobgoblin.

She was pleased by the spectacle below. A grim tableau, some would describe it, but to her it was a glorious sight. There were six or seven times the number of goblins and hobgoblins compared to her knights, she guessed; it was impossible to count them. But her force didn’t need to outnumber them. The goblins were unskilled, most of them unarmored and without weapons; they were disorganized. Their screams of pain and disbelief roiled up the side of the mountain and tugged her down to join the lopsided battle.

“If Gare’s finished, Commander, those monsters-”

“Will pay with their lives, Eloy,” Bera finished.

They raced toward the fallen knight. Bera couldn’t see Gare’s chest rising and falling, but that didn’t mean he was dead; the plate mail could conceal his breathing. Gare was facedown, with two goblins standing on his back, one yanking aside his tabard. Two others were on the far side of him, grabbing at his weapons.

She snarled and swept wide with all of her strength, slicing through the waist of the first goblin, cutting him in two. The blade continued on its path, lodging in the chest of the other.

One of the other goblins had managed to free Gare’s sword. The goblin tried to wield it like a lance, clearly struggling with the unfamiliar weapon.

“Take care!” Bera warned Eloy.

He leaped over Gare and the two she’d slain.

The goblin drove the sword forward, but the weight of the blade caused him to lose his balance; the blade dipped down and speared the earth. Eloy cleaved the goblin’s shoulder, drew back, and ran it through just as Bera joined him and slew the other one.

“There’s traitors with them, somewhere,” Bera said. “Keep an eye out for the traitors.”

“I remember, from your briefing,” Eloy returned. “This is a mission of honor.”

Honor on many levels, she mouthed. Bera put her back to her comrade again and caught her breath. “Dark Knights, one of them an officer-and a wizard too, remember? Face scarred, I was told. An Ergothian priest, too, big as a barrel. Did I mention the priest was an Ergothian? A man of the water in a desert-dry mining camp?”

Eloy nodded. “Haven’t spotted them,” he said. “I can’t see any humans beyond us among this mob.” The knight was winded from the exertion. “Hiding somewhere in the rocks, maybe, they are.”

Eloy was young, half Bera’s age, and she was disappointed to note his weakness. She would force him and a handful of others to double their drills and exercise later. She left him behind as she rushed toward a trio of goblins harrying another of her knights.

“Where are those damnable traitors?” she said to herself. “I see only dying goblins. Too bad they don’t have better weapons. This is really too easy.” She drew a deep breath and thrust her blade through a small one’s chest. “Leave one hob!” she shouted to her troops, reminding them in a shrill voice.

In the end, they managed to leave alive three goblins, the hobgoblins having all fought to the end, refusing to surrender.