Death March

THE OTHER RED-SKINNED SHAMAN

Mudwort smelled the goblin bodies burning; the stench was so thick in the air and heavy in her lungs that she took only the shallowest of breaths. Although she’d smelled death often, it was an odor she’d never allow herself to get used to. Other goblins cast the smell off as commonplace; even Direfang seemed inured to it. But Mudwort thought it should always bother her, even if she had no special attachment to the ones who’d died.

The world was harsh and everything eventually died. But did goblins have to stink so badly when they stopped breathing?

She’d smelled nothing truly pleasant in a long, long while.

When she concentrated on the rocks and dirt beneath her fingertips, the odors from inside the earth grew stronger and helped mask the death scents, but it did not get rid of them entirely. The Dark Knights and goblins had moved away from her, and Direfang was busy helping the injured. So she relished the relative peace and silence that had settled around her.

When she was alone, it was easier to listen to the stone.

Exploring, she discerned traces of copper far below, and when she stretched her mind to the south, she found glistening fibrous blue crystals melded in bumpy, gray rocks. They were mixed with dark green hairlike threads in places, and there was a taste to them that reminded her of early summer mornings from before she was a slave. She lingered over the bumpy rocks, which she’d not encountered before, and her mind teased the hairlike threads.

“What do the rocks say? What say?” She cocked her head. “Saying something, but talking too soft. Stop the whispering. Say something louder.”

Mudwort heard crows cawing and angrily gnashed her teeth together. They’d inadvertently drawn her senses back to the surface. Many crows were circling, she knew, waiting for the goblins to leave the tylor carcass, waiting to feast on whatever was left … and on any flesh remaining on the goblins and hobgoblins that were still burning in the death pile.

“Stone saying something,” she scolded the crows. “Saying something more interesting than crows and bugs and Dark Knights and goblins.” She leaned forward and pressed her ear to the ground and twirled her fingers deeper into the dirt. She squeezed her features together, and her head started pounding.

“What say?” She jammed her knee hard against the ground in consternation. “What?”

It was a soft sound at first, for the most part words that were too indistinct for her to comprehend. But she picked out a few phrases in goblinspeak.

“Huh. Stones not speaking at all. Goblins are.”

She strained to hear clearly, finally managing to block out the crows and concentrate on the distant whispers that had become insistent and were pulling at her.

“Goblins are talking of magic!” She let her mind flow like water through cracks and over slices of shale and around the gray chunks filled with the hairlike green crystals. Then she detected the cavern below and raced toward it, finding the familiar oval with the symbols around it that she’d spotted a few days past.

It was near! That cavern had to be close to where she sat in the mountains! It felt close, but Mudwort couldn’t determine precisely where.

Her heart raced as she hurried down a corridor, spying a light ahead and focusing on it. She pressed her senses against the wall and instantly faulted herself for trying to hide. Whoever-whatever-was down there could not see her. She wasn’t really in that place. She was still above the ground, too close to the Dark Knights and the rotting tylor and all the burning bodies. Too close to the ceremony for the dead that she knew was happening and that she had no interest in.

Only her mind was below the earth.

“Hurry,” she urged herself. “Find the goblins.”

She wound her way through one tunnel and the next, sometimes dipping down, other times rising toward the surface, occasionally doubling back. The maze reminded her of the tunnels in the Dark Knight mines in Steel Town, where she’d toiled for too many years. But the stone in the earth tunnels was different than that in the mines. There were more of the gray, bumpy rocks shot through with blue and green crystals, and sections of granite along the floor had been worn smooth and shiny by many passing feet. Yet there were none of the rocks the Dark Knights had coveted to turn into their steel swords and knives. And there were no slaves.

But there were goblins. She continued to hear them.

Mudwort better understood the words; they were coming louder. Krood, dallock, slarn. Hunger, dance, sleep. Hunger was repeated the most often. Krood, krood, krood, she heard. Goblins were always hungry.

The tunnel she glided down widened ahead, opening into a chamber filled with goblins and lit by guttering, fat-soaked torches that had been rammed into crevices. The air was not pleasant; it was filled with smoke from the torches and the sweaty odor of goblins. But it was better than the air around the tylor, so Mudwort pretended that she was breathing the underground air.

The goblins down there were all of the same clan, likely, as their skin was the same color. It was red but much darker than hers, the shade of dried blood, almost black in places. One goblin had a gray patch on her back that Mudwort found curious. A mark from birth, perhaps?

The goblins milled anxiously as Mudwort observed them, and she grew anxious too. Thirty, she counted, or close to that number; they constantly moved, so it was difficult to know just how many there were for certain. They walked with shoulders back, proud like the Dark Knights who once paraded around Steel Town. Their chins were tipped up, faces set in grins, nostrils quivering. And their hides were relatively smooth; Mudwort could not spot many scars or a single sign of injury. Not one walked with a limp. Clearly, from their tall, full frames, they were not oppressed slaves. Not one of them was skinny. And not one of them wore a scrap of clothing or carried a weapon.

She saw the one with the gray patch look straight up, and Mudwort followed her gaze.

“Amazing,” Mudwort whispered to herself. The chamber they were in had a natural domed ceiling that she guessed was more than a dozen goblins high. It was covered with crude drawings and symbols, or perhaps they were words in some sort of language, the etchings darkened here and there from the smoke the torches gave off. Had the goblins made the drawings? she wondered. And if so, how could they have climbed the walls to make them? The chamber looked at the same time primitive and elaborate. The flickering torches placed at their odd intervals chased shadows around the dome and made the drawings move, which made her dizzy.

She wished she could be there in body, not just in mind, to join with the fat, happy goblins and feel the smooth granite beneath her feet. It would be so much more pleasant than walking on the hurtful trail where she led Direfang’s army from one meal to the next and where the air was so foul. She wanted to talk to the goblins, mingle with them, learn more about them.

What did they eat, those fat goblins? And where did they live? Certainly not in that chamber; it was too clean, and there wasn’t a single animal skin for them to sleep on. Two more tunnels led away from there, and maybe the answers were down one of those tunnels. She would explore the tunnels later, she decided. All of her attention was directed to watching the red-skinned goblins, clearly larger than any in Direfang’s army.

Her belly rumbled, and she cursed. Thinking about what the goblins ate made her remember that she was very hungry. She smelled something strong and pleasant in that instant-nothing from aboveground, where she still sat, but from the chamber below. The smell wasn’t instantly recognizable, it was something …

“Delicious,” she said. “What smells so wonderful?”

A loud bong suddenly sounded, and four goblins brought in a large wooden platter with the cooked carcass of a boar. They placed it in the center of the chamber, and Mudwort watched as the goblins crowded around it and fell upon the meat.

Despite their full frames, they acted as ravenous as her starving kinsmen, pulling loose the flesh and skin and stuffing it down their throats. Their manner was wild and frightening as they pried hunks off and barely chewed the flesh before swallowing it, some of them pushing their fellows out of the way and arguing over the largest pieces.

Mudwort could hardly believe the scene. She’d seen her kinsmen argue over the meager rations doled out in Steel Town before but never in such a barbarous fashion. There was a ferocity about the red-skinned goblins that excited and disturbed her. Their behavior seemed extreme, exaggerated, and she thought perhaps she was sleeping and that it was a dream. But when she concentrated, she could feel the dirt she’d burrowed her fingers into and could hear the crows cawing overhead. So she realized that what she watched in her magical vision was in some fashion real.

One of the four goblins who had brought in the tray-a tray she realized was a shield-wore a necklace of teeth and tiny bones. He thoughtfully chewed on one of the boar’s ears and distanced himself from the others, leaning against the wall between two torches. He tilted his head to one side, as if listening for something. Mudwort listened closer too, hearing an annoying pounding in her head and, under the pounding, singing. It was good singing, in a female goblin voice, enjoyable and not at all like the discordant tune Moon-eye used to wail.

It was a song about the earth and magic and old, powerful things. And it grew louder as another goblin came into the chamber, a female. She was the singer.

The female was young, and she stopped singing when the feasters turned their attention toward her. Like them, she wore no clothes, but she had several necklaces of carved wooden beads and bats’ feet that draped to her waist. She also had a wooden bracelet on her right wrist, cut with marks that resembled those Mudwort had seen carved into the dome.

“Little more than a youngling,” Mudwort pronounced. “But one honored, it seems.”

Indeed, the other goblins backed away from the boar, save four who removed it after making sure no scraps remained on the chamber floor.

The young female stood next to the male with the bone-and-tooth necklace.

“Those two with the necklaces wait for something,” Mudwort guessed. “But wait for what?” A part of her wondered where they had taken the delicious-smelling boar. There was still a little bit of meat left on its ribs, and she suspected it would taste much better than the raw tylor meat. It had been many years since Mudwort had feasted on something that was cooked in such a style. Again her stomach growled, and again she cursed.

“Waiting for what?” Mudwort repeated to herself. Her curiosity nearly overwhelmed her, and she held her breath in anticipation. “Waiting for something important,” she said when she finally released her breath and sucked in another gulp of air. “Something …”

Four goblins returned with the shield-tray, the boar carcass gone, and a skull-sized mass of crystals on the middle of it. Mudwort had seen crystals numerous times on her magical, mental forays into the earth, and she’d seen crystalline jewelry adorning some of the women in Steel Town. But it was the most amazing crystal she’d ever seen. Its base was a bowl-shaped chunk of the bumpy, gray rock, which had the green threads running through it. Dozens of finger-sized crystals sprouted from the rock in all directions. The crystals were iridescent like quartz, but not so common as quartz. Clear at the tips of each protrusion, like water struck by the sun, they were milky at the base.

All of it was gleaming angles and planes. All of it caught the torchlight and birthed a rainbow of colors that flitted around the walls like maddened fireflies.

Mudwort barely noticed that all the goblins in the chamber were as captivated as she. Some turned this way and that, their eyes trying to follow the lights. Others simply stared, entranced, at the entire mass. That’s what Mudwort did, stare, forgetting to breathe, and finally shaking her head and gasping to jolt herself back to consciousness.

She wished Direfang could see this amazing, beautiful thing-the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen in her entire life. She wished Boliver was with her, dipping his senses down along with hers and catching sight of this cavern and this crystal. But a part of her was glad she was alone and did not have to share this experience. She could show Boliver later. For the moment, she would keep this remarkable scene all to herself.

Mudwort drifted closer until the crystal cluster filled her vision. She saw the reflections of several goblins in the facets, their grinning visages looking broken in all the angles and planes. There was a wildness in their expressions, they looked primal. She hadn’t paid attention to their faces before. Now she studied them. They were goblin faces, clearly, but they looked different than her kinsmen. More frightening somehow. More savage. More willful and powerful. They had thick ridges above their eyes and wide noses with snuffling nostrils. Perhaps they were not so quick or bright, but perhaps they were better in other ways.

This tribe was to be envied, she thought … because of their more powerful faces and stances and seeming fearlessness; because they were beneath the earth where the air was better. Because they were staring at this mass of beautiful crystals, some of them tentatively reaching out to touch it, when all she could do was look at it wistfully, seeing it and them magically from a distance.

She imagined feeling the coolness of the crystal shards and suspected they would be smooth against her fingers, like polished granite. She tried staring inside the cluster and was practically blinded by the vortex of rainbow colors. Mudwort blinked furiously and willed herself to float back and up until she looked down on the goblin tableau from the top of the domed ceiling.

The cluster of clear and milky crystals was not magical, she recognized; she was certain she would have sensed any magic about it if that were so. Still, the cluster was breathtaking.

But there was magic somewhere in the chamber; she could feel the unusual magic. And after a few moments of searching, she realized it was in the young female goblin who wore all the necklaces.

Mudwort watched her approach the crystal and saw the goblins grudgingly part to allow her passage. The young goblin’s fingers played over the segments of one of her necklaces then stretched out and touched one facet after another on the crystal.

“A shaman,” Mudwort realized. “Like Boliver.” And like herself, she added almost as an afterthought.

But the young goblin was not as sure of herself as Mudwort and Boliver. Her movements were timid, skittish like a squirrel.

“Learning magic, maybe,” Mudwort guessed. “Using the beautiful rocks to help. The rocks are a focus.”

Mudwort knew that her own senses moved more easily through certain types of stones and not at all through others. So the young goblin was not yet proficient in magic and was using the crystal cluster to augment whatever skills she had. Mudwort wondered what powers resided in the crystal and how the beautiful rock might help her.

“But where exactly is this cave with the wild-looking goblins? And the dome? And the young shaman?” Mudwort’s brow knitted, her lips forming a needle-thin line. “Where, where, where?”

Mudwort watched the shaman for quite some time, not fathoming what she was attempting with the crystal, and finally deciding to leave the chamber. It was time to find out more, time to learn just where that cavern sat so she could physically go there. She willed herself to drift up through the dome then through one sheet of rock after another. She felt herself splinter when she passed through a thick layer of sandstone, just as the images of the goblin faces had broken apart in the facets.

Pieces of her consciousness skittered all over like bugs running from a disturbed nest. The sensation was unnerving, and as it lengthened, she briefly became terrified and could not tell where she was or where she was going. Her mind spun while she continued to splinter and splinter again. She felt like she was spiraling down, down, not rising to the surface.

Drowning in the stone.

“Mind going sour,” Mudwort said. She only faintly heard her own words, as if they were spoken by someone else a long distance away. “Mind running away. Mind is shattered and broken and-”

She gasped, her head jerking back from the shock of someone roughly grabbing her shoulders. The slight shift she wore-a shirt that had once belonged to a human child in Steel Town-was thoroughly soaked and plastered to her slight frame.

“Fever,” pronounced a voice, breaking into her thoughts. It was Horace. The priest and Direfang hovered over her. “She has a fever, Foreman, but no physical injury that I can see.”

Mudwort crawled away from the pair. “Am fine,” she told them, thumping her thumb against her chest and waggling her fingers.

Direfang looked concerned. “The skull man will-”

“Do nothing,” Mudwort finished for the hobgoblin. “Fever will leave soon. Am fine.”

The hobgoblin knelt, his eyes locked on hers. “Did Mudwort find something in the ground?” Direfang asked.

“Nothing,” she replied. “Found nothing at all.”