Death March

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.

A smile tugged at the corner of Grallik’s lips as Horace’s discomfort increased. His sleep was no longer so peaceful. The wizard had no intention of harming the priest, just making him a little uneasy. It wasn’t fair that Grallik should suffer without company.

Grallik stopped worrying at the thread on his under-tunic just as Horace bolted upright, gasping. The priest placed the back of his hand against his cheek, as if to check for a fever, then slowly turned and glared at Grallik.

But the wizard did not meet the priest’s gaze. He had returned his attention to the red-skinned goblin. Her arms were thrust into the hard-packed earth nearly up to her elbows. It was as if the ground had turned to liquid around her.

“No, this was not a mistake,” Grallik said to himself.