Realms of Infamy

Vision

The summons brought me out of a meeting in an overcrowded den where the candles had eaten up the air. My clan head grumbled, but he released me and returned to bullying compensation from an opponent over an imagined slight of honor Such wars of words, often punctuated by drawn knives and brief duels that left the cavern floors slick with blood, were far too frequent these days among my people. I was glad to go.

I would have been happier for the freedom, but the warrior who called me out told me I was summoned by Skra-lang, shaman of all our kind. My stomach grew tight at the thought of meeting the old goblin. I was no coward, but I was no fool The warrior hurried off as I bound up my fears and set off myself through the long, narrow tunnels of the Nightbelow, our home under the Dustwalls.

At twenty winters I was a guard captain and assistant to my clan head, a young fist among the many hands of the goblins of the mountains. I had fought on the surface against human intruders on our lands since I was twelve, and had been captured once and held prisoner for a year until I had escaped. My captivity taught me to never let it happen again. I knew humans well and feared none of them, but Skralang was not a human, and some said he was not a goblin, either.

The old shaman's door opened automatically when I reached it at the end of a black, web-filled tunnel. Skralang greeted me with a nod from his bed. He carelessly waved me to a chair at a table on which a lone candle flickered. I steeled myself and entered his den.

I picked my way across the tiny, litter-strewn room. My iron-shod boots crushed bits of bone, bread crusts, and other debris beneath them. Skralang did not seem to care about the filth. The world meant less to him every day, it was said. How he could stand to live in such vile conditions was beyond me, but it was not my place and not to my advantage to say so. Who insults a mouthpiece of the gods?

I sat and waited as the shaman took a small bottle and earthen cup from a box by his bed of rags. He carefully swung his feet off the ruined bed and got up, shuffling over to pull up a stool and take a seat by me. I stiffened and almost stood to salute, but he seemed not to care. His familiarity was astonishing; it was if I were an old and trusted friend.

Even more astonishing was Skralang's appearance at close range in the candlelight. His robes stank of corruption, as if death were held back from him by the width of an eyelash. The skin was pulled tight over the bones of his face and hands; open sores disfigured his arms and neck. Yet even with this, his pale yellow eyes were clear and steady. He gently poured another drink for himself, but did not take it right away. Instead he sat back and regarded me with those cold, clear eyes.

"You are bored, Captain Kergis," he said. His voice was no more than a whisper. In the silence, it was like a shout, "life here has no appeal for you. You long to be elsewhere."

I almost denied it, but his eyes warned me off from lies. I nodded hesitantly. "You see all, Your Darkness," I said. I knew that with his magic, the old goblin probably did see all within the Nightbelow-even the hidden places of the heart and soul.

The old one toyed with his cup. His spidery fingers trembled. "Has the security of our home begun to wear on you? Do the petty ravings of the clan heads lull your blood to sleep, rather than stir it with fire? Or do you have plans of your own for advancing your rank and position, and your boredom is merely feigned to cover your intentions?"

To be accused of treachery was not uncommon, but hearing it fall from the thin lips of our shaman was like hearing my death sentence pronounced. "I am loyal!" I pleaded, much louder than I wanted. "You wrong me, Your Darkness!"

I bit off my words. Skralang wronged no one. He was the law, and there was no other. I sat frozen, half expecting that his response would be my execution. A swift death was better by far than a slow one, and I prayed for the former.

Instead, Skralang drank from his cup and sighed. "You are loyal, yes," he said, staring at the cup in his fingers. "You are neither coward nor traitor. You merely seem… disenchanted, not impure in spirit. You do not carry yourself like a true goblin lately." He was silent for a moment, then looked up at me. "But then it sometimes seems to me that none of us do."

I could not have been more amazed than if he had informed me that he was actually a halfling. I was at a loss for words for several moments. "I do not understand," I finally said. "We are all true goblins. We are not tainted like-"

Treacherous tongue! The words had no sooner left my mouth than I would have cut out my tongue to have them back! Skralang flinched when he heard it, and his aged face became like steel.

"We are not tainted like a certain one among us, you say?" The shaman's eyes were icy yellow orbs shining from the depths of his face. His fingers gripped his cup like a web grips prey. For one awful moment, his cup became me.

Then-without warning-the old shaman's face softened and melted. He looked away as he set his cup on the table. 'Tainted. You are right. No one has spoken that word to me since the birth of my grandson, but there is no hiding it.

When I call him my kin, it is like swallowing daggers. He is tainted, tainted with the blood of a human."

The ancient visage looked my way again, but in sadness, not anger. "Everyone must talk about it. It is a disgrace, and there is no atonement for it. None but death." He sighed deeply and looked off into the darkness of the room.

I knew better than to say anything more. Everyone knew of his half-human grandson, the child of his mutilated daughter and her human attacker. Both child and daughter had been hidden from all other eyes for over a decade, but we knew from rumor that they yet lived. And that we could not understand. Had the daughter belonged to any of the rest of us, we would have slain both her and her infant before birth, and thus removed the shame from our line. What had happened to prevent this?

The shaman looked back at me as if he could read my every thought. " 'As the gods will, we do without question,'" he said, quoting the maxim in a tired voice. "They spoke to me as I held a knife over my daughter's belly, eager to cleanse our honor, and their words turned my knife aside. It was their will that Zeth be raised among us, in my daughter's den, though they would not say why. I had the girl and her bastard walled up, as the gods did not forbid that. I feed them once a day, give them a candle or two for light, but keep the taint away from the rest of our people. It was the gods' will, and I obeyed them, as would any of us." He rubbed his face with a skeletal hand.

I did my best to hide my surprise at this revelation. The gods' will? He said so but still lived, so it must be true. The sharp, clear eyes turned away again, and the old one refilled his cup and stared into it for a long moment, chewing his lower lip in perplexity.

The old shaman drank again and set the cup down. The ghost of a smile came to his withered lips, but there was no humor behind it.

"I am older than old for our people," he said softly. "If I see another midwinter's day, I will be forty-six. I ache ceaselessly. I pray for death before I sleep, yet the gods want me to live a little longer." His cold eyes looked across the table at me. "Can you guess why, Captain?"

"Why what, Your Darkness?" I asked after hesitating. I had lost the way of the conversation entirely, and I now considered every word I spoke so I might live the longer.

"Why the gods have kept me alive when I have strived so hard to die," he said patiently. "I rot from within, yet awaken every evening and draw breath into my bleeding lungs. Can you guess why the gods still want me to live a little longer?"

"No, Your Darkness." A lesser person would have offered an opinion-a worthless way to risk one's soul.

The shaman's lips pulled back as if he would laugh. "This last day, the gods spoke to me again," he said, as if the other topic were now forgotten. 'They came to me in a dream. It was time, they said, to free my grandson and send him out from the caverns with a force of true goblins at his command." The old shaman drew in a deep breath through his nose, staring at me. "I've seen fit to end your disenchantment, Captain Kergis. I've already given orders for three sergeants to assemble their squads for a foray this evening. You will go with them, led by my grandson. Draw rations and equipment for a mission far from our Nightbelow, among the lands of humans."

I believed for a moment that I had gone deaf, so incredible was the news. Goblin warriors led by a half-human bastard?

"What is our mission, Your Darkness?" I managed.

"Zeth will let you know," said Skralang. "Obey his every word as you would mine. It is as the gods command."

The wrinkled face suddenly leaned close to me, and I caught a whiff of the drink he had prepared for himself. It was ale mixed with a pain-deadener made from the blossoms of the corpse lily. I knew its scent from the battlefields, where warriors chewed such blossoms to subdue their pain. Sometimes, if badly wounded, the warriors chewed too much and fell into a sleep from which they never awoke. We left them for the dogs to eat.

"The gods have ordained that Zeth must go out," said the shaman steadily. I shuddered at the smell of his breath. "They ordered nothing more. For my part, when he is gone, I am finally free to clear the taint from my family. I will cleanse my line with my daughter's blood, but there is the fear in me that even this will not bring me a long-deserved death. The gods want one thing more of me, and I cannot see into their plans."

Skralang sat back. "My other dreams have all been troubling of late. The gods are unhappy, I fear, with the way the lives of our people have fallen into quarrels and tedium. You are bored, Captain Kergis, because you sense it, too. We have not gone out as we did in the old days to remind the surface world that we exist. We've gotten old in our heads, old and petty, and we hide in our caverns and complain about the dark. We are not the children of our fathers, not fit to be their lowest slaves."

The old shaman's gaze fell, and his face grew slack. "I believe the gods are especially unhappy with me, their servant, for allowing such deterioration to come about. I have favored rest and ease over struggle, against their teachings, and the rot of my words has spread and ruined us." He looked back at me, and his eyes gleamed. "Did you ever wonder in your private moments, Captain Kergis, if the taint among us reflects a greater taint? If Zeth's coming, and the manner of it, was purposeful?"

The old goblin had long ago strayed into territory that not even the greatest fool among us would have tread. I wished now I were back in that stale cavern room, listening to my clan head shriek about his worthless honor.

"Never," I said truthfully.

The shaman's smile deepened. "You will." He dismissed me with a wave and drank again of his cup of poison, swallowing it without so much as a tremor at its bitterness.

There was much that Skralang had not told me. He hadn't said that Zeth's skin was the color of a dead toad's belly, white and dry like the face of the moon. Or that Zeth wore no armor and carried no weapon, and knew nothing of how to use either.

Or that Zeth was blind.

I shivered when I saw the shaman's grandson led out of the mouth of our Nightbelow into the evening air. He was big and long-limbed, no doubt from the human blood in him, but his muscles were slack. I could have thrown him down with only mild effort, had I dared.

And he had no eyes. His eye sockets were dark holes in his face, half-covered by sagging skin that made him appear sad faced. He wore only a short, pale robe, belted with a thin rope. It was the sort of thing only a prisoner or slave would wear, and entirely the wrong color for a warrior at night.

Skralang brought Zeth to me as my warriors looked on with surprise and curiosity. In the failing sunlight, the withered shaman seemed to have deteriorated even more since I had seen him, only hours before. Splotches of blackness dotted his face and arms, marks of a curse on him. I was terrified he would touch me.

"Zeth," said the old shaman with a prompt at his grandson's elbow. "Here are your warriors. Go forth, as the gods have commanded, and carry out their will."

The big half-human stared over me, his unseeing gaze level with the top of my head, then nodded dumbly. I saw that Zeth had no weaponry, and I started to pull an extra dagger from my waist scabbard. Skralang stopped me with an upraised hand. "Not necessary," the old shaman said. "Zeth has no need of blades or armor. He has all he will need."

With a last look at me, the shaman summoned his retinue of guards and servants, then retired inside the cavern. The great doors were pulled shut behind him and barred. Not even the usual guards were posted tonight.

I swallowed as I stared up at the eyeless sockets of the white half-human. He merely looked off to the west, where the sun had vanished a while ago.

"What is your wish?" I finally asked. If I were lucky, Zeth would prove to be mad as well as blind. I wondered if the prohibition against arms and armor was meant to speed his death in battle. It made sense to me. His quick death would release us from this mission, perhaps allowing brief foraging in the countryside to gain a few pigs or cattle before returning to the Nightbelow.

The big half-human slowly turned his head to the south, as if he'd heard something in the gentle wind. Southward lay the kingdom of Durpar, which we had once raided regularly. He nodded slightly, then set off toward that distant land. After two steps, he almost fell over a log that had been pulled up to the cave entrance as a bench. He stumbled, caught himself, and walked on. No one laughed or moved to help him. We merely watched.

I nodded to myself. With luck, the mission would be a short one.

"Single file, scout fore and back, standard march," I called. The warriors glanced at me, then fell into place. We set off into the coming night.

We marched south for about ten hours by the stars. That Zeth had some ability to sense his path became more evident as the night deepened. He would pause at times, then slowly make his way across a creek or through a rock field. At other times, he acted as blind as he appeared, running into low tree branches or dancing out of thistle. Perhaps his hearing gave him a little help, but I began to think perhaps his eyes were present but merely small and deeply set.

Dawn was coming on when I finally moved up alongside the stumbling half-human. I hesitated over proper forms of address, then ignored them all. I couldn't see that it mattered. "Dawn is near," I said under my breath. "We must pitch camp soon."

Zeth marched on in silence, his blind gaze fixed somewhere over the horizon. Abruptly he slowed and stopped. For a moment he stood, his chest heaving from exertion, then nodded quickly. "We will stop here," he gasped. It was more an animal moan than speech, the words wheezed out and half-mumbled. Was Zeth feebleminded as well? What was Skralang up to?

I gave the proper orders anyway and had everyone in hiding among the rocks and brush of a nearby hillside before sun-up. Zeth wandered away in the meantime, but returned to camp as the meal was served. I thought it politic to sit near him for the first meal and see if I could learn a little more about his plans-if he had any-for this expedition. My concerns grew rapidly that he would lead us straight into a human city or worse.

A plate of beans and dried meat was prepared for Zeth, and another for myself. I glanced at him as we ate, and saw that indeed he had no eyes at all. The blind half-human and I sat for a while on the hilltop in silence. "If you wish any advice," I began, "I am at your service." Zeth chewed a bit of meat for several moments, rocking slowly forward and back. Abruptly he spoke.

"When I was no more than a babe," he said in a quiet, dry voice, "my grandfather dug out my eyes with a spoon." Empty sockets looked at me from an empty white face. "He loved me very much to do that. Did anyone ever love you like that?"

I stared back, a fork full of beans halfway to my mouth. A cold finger ran down my spine. He was as mad as mad could get. I took a bite of the beans and looked around. None of the goblins was close enough to have heard anything.

"It was the only way he had to open my eyes," continued the half-human, looking toward the predawn sky. "Had he not done so, I'd never have seen at all. I hardly remember it now. I was told that I fought him and the others like an ogre, that my screams caused the dead to cry out. I don't recall it" The blind half-human raised a thin hand and stroked his chin. "It had to be done. I didn't understand why then, but I learned."

It was apparent that more than just Zeth's eyes had been dug out by Skralang's spoon. His words, however, showed him to be smarter than he had first seemed. I could think of nothing to say, so I finished my cold meal.

"It will be light soon," said Zeth. "We will rest, then evening will come and we will march. We will find a village." He paused, lifting his head slightly as if listening to something far away. "They will be halflings, farmers. There we will start."

I swallowed the last bite slowly and chased errant bits of food across my teeth with my tongue. "Start what?" I asked, masking my concerns. I knew from past experience that Durpar's warriors were not to be taken lightly. If any gods were leading Zeth, they could not have been our gods.

Zeth looked up. "There we will start our teaching," he said quietly.

'Teaching," I repeated.

'Teaching, yes," said Zeth, with an unmistakable note of enthusiasm. To my great concern, he then looked directly at me. "We will teach them."

"What? Teach them what?"

"Ah," said Zeth. His smile grew broader. "We will teach them what we have forgotten."

Crickets chirped. A sparrow called down in the fields.

What would the gods do to me if I were to kill you? I thought as I looked at the pale, smiling face. What is Skra-lang expecting of me? Will I fail his unspoken desires by letting this abomination live? No, Skralang had been clear: I was to obey his grandson. But he was mad, and he was leading us into destruction.

"I should post guards," I said and got to my feet. I needed to think. Perhaps it was unwise to risk the anger of the gods by acting directly. Nature could take its course, with a minimum of help. The half-human would be easy to dispose of just by letting him lead until he walked into a ravine or a Durpar border camp. His grandfather would undoubtedly welcome the news.

I turned to go but got only three steps when Zeth called my name. I looked back.

The blind half-human had a dagger in his right hand, holding it out to me by the blade. I felt at my belt and discovered a dagger missing. It must have slipped out when I sat down.

"You must be more careful," he said. "We have much to do tonight."

He handed the weapon to me, the handle aimed exactly at my stomach. I took back my dagger and left, looking back several times as I did.

We were on our feet and moving before the sun had vanished behind the low western hills. The half-moon lighted our way. Zeth strode easily through the tall grass that paralleled a cart track a half-mile east of us, to our left. I posted a forward scout and two scouts to the left and right. Yet another scout trailed Zeth by a dozen paces, and the rest of us followed after.

As before, the big half-human avoided most obstacles in his path, winding his way around them with unusual care. If he stumbled, he caught his balance gracelessly but quickly. I wondered whether the gods had made Zeth insane and his eyes simply invisible, or if it was all an elaborate trick, something Skralang thought up to test me. I thought of Zeth staring at me that morning, and a tightness grew in my stomach.

I was growing used to the mindlessness of the situation- a company of goblins led by a blind madman-but I saw its dangers as well. The warriors grumbled among themselves, and some began to treat the outing as a farce. They walked with weapons sheathed, laughed at private jokes, pushed and shoved one another in line.

I did not let this go on long. I dropped back among the file and located one of the worst offenders, who had fallen earlier and scraped his knees and hands. As he complained about the pain for the third time, I pulled the lash from my belt and struck him.

The lash caught him full across the face, just below the eyes. Before he could cry out, the lash came back and snapped across his back like a brand of fire. His cry was cut off by his intake of breath at the second hit, and he fell to his knees, hands covering his face.

The column behind him stopped, but at a gesture from me, continued on around him. I waited with the warrior as the column filed past. After a few moments, he regained his feet and picked up his weapon. I watched as he stumbled on to catch up with the column.

I followed, ensuring that the message had gotten through. It had. Silence was kept thereafter, and weapons were held at the ready.

We marched on for only three hours when Zeth abruptly slowed his pace, head turned to one side, and stopped. The scout behind him looked back at me questioningly. I came forward.

"There they are," said Zeth, pointing ahead. "We must begin our teaching."

I looked ahead and noticed a faint light. We were about two miles from a small community that sat astride the cart path to our left. I detected no sign of any military activity, but that meant little. Enemy warriors could be concealed anywhere and had time to prepare a bloody welcome.

"We are safe," said Zeth carelessly. He was smiling again and wasn't breathing as heavily as the night before. "They don't know we're here."

"How would you know?" I asked under my breath. I gave a hand signal for the troops to stay low and keep silent. Before I could do more, Zeth turned to me and grabbed my shoulder, pulling me close to him. I was too surprised to resist.

His breath was visible in the cool night air. "Gather the villagers together. They will not resist I wish to begin teaching before the night has passed. Our people should gather around and learn wisdom, too." He released me and sat on the ground with a thump, not moving from that spot.

I stared at him, then looked across the dark field. Gather the villagers up for Zeth to teach them? His grandfather had ordered me to obey the mad one as if he were one of the gods. Perhaps the gods would spare me for my obedience if any disaster fell, but I no longer believed it. I obeyed but felt I was as mad as Zeth to do it.

I left the scout with Zeth while I went back and collected the rest of the troops. Moments later, we moved on to the sleeping village.

The attack was over almost as soon as it had begun. Many of the halflings were in their beds when we set fire to their barns. As they rushed out, half-dressed and clutching blankets and buckets, they were shot by our archers. Many were clubbed down and herded together on the road as others of us torched the houses. Some fought back with farm implements-pitchforks, shovels, hammers. Those we killed. The dogs were more trouble than the villagers.

We forced the survivors-about three dozen males, females, and children-to strip and stand naked in the night wind. Warriors surrounded them and amused themselves by prodding bare skin with their spears, laughing and betting as to which of the little people would jump highest. Around us, orange flames roared through the halflings' homes and farms.

I sent a runner for Zeth, but he was already on his way to the burning village with the scout at his side. As I watched him approach, I wondered what purpose there was in this miserable raid besides this nonsense about "teaching." I had always fought armed humans before-guardsmen on caravans, or armored militia at fortified farmhouses on the borderlands. Assaulting such poorly armed and trained halflings was wasteful of our powers. I bit my lip with frustration and tasted blood.

Zeth put out his hands toward a burning cottage as he passed it, his smile clearly visible. He warmed himself thus, then slowed and picked his way with care toward the warriors surrounding the crouching prisoners. The huddled halflings' eyes were like those of caged rabbits. Zeth looked them over, and I believed then that he had to have sight of some kind. Was it magic, then, that let him see? I would not allow myself to think that the gods had anything to do with it. It must be Skralang's doing, though I could not imagine how or why.

Satisfied, Zeth walked to the top of a low mound, then turned to face the troops. There was silence across the area, except for the crackling of dying flames.

"In the beginning of all things," said Zeth, his voice growing stronger, "there was war between the gods and the rebellious earth, and the world was struck down and slain. Darkness covered its face; winds and sea lashed its corpse. Nothing grew on its naked rock or stirred beneath the cold moon. As the world lay dead, maggots were born from the blood shed by the gods in the battle, and the maggots burrowed into the flesh of the world and feasted upon it, celebrating the victory of the gods.

"Then came forces of light, and there arose a sun over the land. The light burned the eyes of the maggots and made them cry out. The old gods heard them and were moved to rage. One of the old gods put forth his hand and said, 'A debt is owed our children as well as to us, and now our children shall claim it.' He changed the maggots into goblins, and he gave them a commandment, that the goblins would always remember the days of darkness when the old gods were victors, when nothing grew on the world, when there was night eternal and deep. And the goblins would remember always to claim the debt owed them and their gods by the forces of light."

Zeth swept a hand toward the flaming cottages beyond the gathering. "Here we are tonight, the spawn of the maggots, and we are still asked to remember what our god asked of us, but we have forgotten it all." His hand fell. "At highsun tomorrow, a band of riders will come to this place, and they will see what we have done. They will taste the ash from the houses and feel the heat from the blackened fields. But will the riders fear us? Will the old debt have been repaid?"

The half-human paused expectantly, though none of us spoke. "No. The riders will have seen burned villages before. They will have seen slain farmers. Why should they fear us-we, the firstborn, who are descended from the maggots who fed on the world?"

Several goblins stirred restlessly, their faces crossed with confusion. Even the prisoners had ceased whimpering to listen.

"Would you fear us?" asked the half-human, pointing at a goblin in the crowd. "Or you? We have only burned a little town. Who is alive in the world who cannot do that? Little pixies could do that." Zeth's face cracked into a shallow grin. "Even humans could do that." There was a pause, then he added, "I should know."

He let the silence grow. I shivered. There was a change in the atmosphere when he said the word humans, and we looked at him and remembered what he was.

"Even humans could do that," he repeated. "We've lived so long under the sunlight, away from the night and the truth, that we've forgotten who we really are. We've started to think-" Zeth leered as if he would laugh "-that we're human."

None of the goblins moved. Their tight faces were like stone. His words were a mortal insult, the basest slander. Yet they rolled off Zeth's lips as if they were a shabby truth at which the knowing world snickered. Only the warriors' knowledge that Skralang was his grandfather kept Zeth from a speedy death.

Zeth's thin fingers reached into the air. "Are we human now?" he called out. "Can we do only things that humans do? Do we remember anything at all that our gods taught us? Has the sun burned it out of us, the memory of where we came from?" He then shouted, his face twisted with rage. "Do you want those riders who come here tomorrow to laugh at our night's work? Do you want them to ride here and see this and say, 'Looks like humans' work, bandits maybe, just nasty old humans, good thing they weren't goblins.'?"

The half-human raised a hand to the black heavens. "My father was a human! He cursed me with his taint! My eyes were not red like yours-they were blue! Blue, like a human's! Blue like the day sky! Where are my eyes now?"

He suddenly pointed at one goblin in the crowd, his white finger like a sword. "You! Tell me! Where are my eyes now?"

The goblin's lips trembled as he mouthed a word silently.

Zeth's face came alive with fury. "Tell me, dog, or may the gods burn you where you stand!"

"Your eyes are gone!" screamed the goblin. He fell to his knees. "They are gone!"

"Yes!" Zeth shouted at once. "They are gone! My eyes were human, and my grandfather gave them back! My grandfather gave back my eyes! These holes in my face are a thousand times better than the taint of my blue eyes! What my father was, his human taint, was cut out of me! I am more goblin now than are you, because my soul is free! My soul is clean, yet yours writhe with the taint of humanity! The proof is among you, there-the farmers you have taken prisoner! You've treated them as humans would treat prisoners! They beg you for mercy, mistaking you for humans! How far have we fallen for them to think we, the children of maggots in the flesh of the dead earth, are capable of mercy?"

The silence was absolute save for the crackling of fire. Zeth trembled all over as if in the last stages of a fever.

His face turned up, looking over the heads of us all. "I feel their eyes upon us. Can you feel it? Can you feel their eyes looking down upon us? In another moment, they will turn away, and we will be lost. Our people will be lost. Our Night-below will be lost. All that we once were will be gone. Will you show them, our very gods, that you remember that you are not human?"

He looked down. His hand swept in the direction of the prisoners. "Prove it now!" he said. "Let the gods see what I cannot."

No one moved. Then one of the warriors silently pulled his long knife, turned, and lunged for the prisoners, seizing one by her hair. He dragged her screaming from the group. Warriors clubbed down two halflings who tried to pull the prisoner back.

The goblin with the knife snarled his left hand in the little halfling's hair and yanked her head back. Her hands tried to ward off the blows as his knife came down once, twice, again and again and again and again, until her hands flopped down into the dust of the road.

The other prisoners screamed with each blow. Abruptly flinging his dagger aside, the warrior seized the body, lifted it over his head as its limbs swung limp, and hurled it into the mass of prisoners, splashing them with gore.

The halflings screamed anew, but it was a sound I had never heard before from the throat of any being. It was mindless with terror, a sound like that made by animals in a slaughtering pen. In that moment, something old inside me awoke and hungered for the taste of blood. I became a wolf in a pack that had seen its prey go down, prey that could not get up and escape, hot prey that would be salty and wet in my mouth. I stepped forward as the rest of the warriors surged in on the wailing prisoners.

But the step was all I took. I held back, not knowing why, as the warriors who had been mine gave in to their hunger and tried to sate it.

Blood-mad goblins murdered prisoner after prisoner in hideous fashion. Onlookers shook their spears and stamped their feet, shouting their approval more loudly and wildly with each death. I watched from the side as if I weren't really there. I was no stranger to cruelty, but what I watched were not the actions of warriors I had raised and trained. They were the deeds of fiends out of Hades.

When the cries and struggles of the last prisoner had ceased, the warriors broke into ragged cheers. Flasks of ale and foul wine had appeared, and many of the warriors drank deeply from them. What had happened to them? I could not even find words to order them to stop, to turn themselves back into soldiers.

"Leave the bodies out," called Zeth. "Let the sun look down on them tomorrow and review our night's work. Let the world see what the children of maggots do to have a debt repaid. Our work has only begun." He swayed, then turned and headed off again to the south, away from the smoldering village.

The goblins followed him easily, the warriors who had once been mine. Not one looked back at me as they went.

When they were almost out of sight, I recovered sufficiently to make my own feet work. I followed their quick pace, my mind cold with shock. We half-ran in this manner for several hours, until the air smelled of fresh grass without the touch of smoke and the tang of blood. The warriors chattered as they went, heedless of the need for quiet in enemy territory, and they passed their wineskins back and forth. I, who was once feared and respected by them all, could have been invisible.

Dawn was almost upon us when Zeth slowed to a stop. As the warriors drew up to him, Zeth collapsed on the ground to rest.

I looked down at the puffing half-breed.

"Captain Kergis," gasped Zeth, though I had made no sound as I had come up, "you do not understand, do you?"

"No," I said, not even thinking of lying. "It is your will."

"It is my will, you say, but I am empty," Zeth returned, still out of breath. "I am the cup that holds the drink, but not the drink itself. I am the mouth, but not the word."

"I don't understand this," I said. "I don't understand any of this. We are warriors. We don't-" I broke off, trying to frame my thoughts. "We fight warriors, not worthless farmers. This is cowardice, to kill the dregs and the helpless! We fight those who can fight back! It's the way to win wars."

Zeth finally caught his breath and sighed as he lay back on the grass, resting on his elbows. He let his head fall back, staring up into the endless night.

"Captain," he said softly, "you are more blind than I am."

I knelt down on the grass a dozen paces from him. Strength seemed to flow out of me into the air. The warriors were drinking and laughing aloud in the distance.

"You wish to kill me," said the half-breed. "I can feel it. Sometimes I can see things, when the gods borrow my head and I see through their eyes for a few moments. But other things I can hear and taste and feel for myself. You would be glad to see me dead."

Zeth cocked his head in my direction, without looking directly at me. "It was the insult, you see, that drove me to this."

When I did not respond, he nodded to himself. "You do not see, then, not even the insult. The taint. My birth. You do not even see that."

"I see it," I said under my breath. I was thinking about killing him right then with my sword, the gods be damned. It would be easy.

"You see only this body. You see that I am different. You see that you wish to kill me. I hear it in your voice. But you do not see the insult. You cannot learn what I am teaching."

Zeth turned his head away in the direction of the warriors. In a few moments, he got to his feet and walked away.

After a while, I got up, too. Goblins milled around the field, aimless and tired. I guessed from the sky that dawn was only three hours away. We had to be off to make camp. Someone would find the massacred village, and the word would be out. I looked back and saw in the moonlight that our trail would not be difficult for vengeful parties to follow. We had to move or else die here.

I found Zeth sitting on the ground, talking to himself in a low voice. He paused and turned his head as I came closer, my boots crunching sticks beneath them.

"We must get out of here," I said flatly. "We have no time to delay."

Zeth turned away again. He was still talking to himself. Or to someone I couldn't see. "He does not understand," he whispered. "He cannot see where they are weak. It is the same place we are weak."

He was motionless for a time, then got unsteadily to his feet.

"Lead us on," said the blind half-breed. "South. We must hurry to our next teaching."

The following night, about twelve miles south of the half-ling village, we attacked an isolated farm. Two of our number were wounded but stayed on their feet. We left the farm a few hours later, after Zeth spoke again about the maggots we came from and the gods who watched us. The dozen humans of the family that had lived there now hung by their feet from the ceiling rafters in the dining hall, butchered like deer.

Those who had been my warriors took some of the meat with them.

"Do you see more clearly, Captain?"

I did not look away from the dark horizon as I marched. "No."

Zeth hummed tunelessly to himself. "It is just as it was with me," he said at last. "They would ask, 'Do you see more clearly now?' And I would cry and say, 'No! Give them back to me!' But that was not possible. They had thrown them out already. They were given back."

"Your eyes," I said after a pause.

"My mother said she would put them back, but she had no hands. My father had cut her hands off after he had attacked her and planted the seed for me. He had cut off her hands and left her to die. He was a human, but it was not a human thing to do. He was a hunter, she said, a hunter who had chosen her as his prey. She went out for water and he caught her. He tried to be a goblin. Surely, now, you see it."

I licked my lips. I had lost my warriors and did not care what happened to me anymore. "No."

Zeth sighed heavily. "The insult," he said slowly, as to a child.

I didn't bother to answer.

The next day, a scout shot a rider from his horse as the latter passed our camp at full gallop. It was a remarkable shot, given that the sun was full and we could barely see. The rider tried to crawl away but was found. Zeth did not even need to make a speech. The goblins knew what to do.

The rider was a human soldier from Durpar. Our doings had been discovered. Someone had sent for help against us.

"We can't go farther south," I told Zeth. 'The danger is great. We've got to head back, or at least go west where they won't look for us right away."

"You do not understand," said Zeth.

We went on south. We caught a farmer on a hay wagon, then two field hands, one human and one halfling. We surrounded a cottage on the edge of a woodlot, but there was only an old woman inside.

"We are cowards," I said, looking at the old woman's body as it swung in the breeze. I did not say it loudly, as goblins were all around. I no longer felt like one of them. They had betrayed me. Death was better than this.

"We are goblins," said Zeth. He stood with his back to the tree from which the old woman hung. He looked high into the branches. "We have been like humans for too long. We did not understand what the gods wanted of us. We forgot their lessons. We forgot the maggots."

"I've been listening to you talk about teachings and lessons and forgotten things, and I am sick of it," I said. 'Tell me what the lesson is, or I will kill you."

The talking among the goblins stopped. Those who had been my warriors were now motionless, holding drinking flasks and cups and jugs pilfered from the old woman's cottage. The goblins were all around me, watching me.

"We have been like humans for too long," said Zeth. His voice was calm and peaceful. "We forgot that the gods made us from the lowest of all life, then gave us the burning inside to become the highest. They gave us the will to gain supremacy at all costs. Yet humans challenge us at every turn. Humans think they are better than we in every way. All know this-goblins, ores, giants, elves, dragons-all know this is true. Humans believe only in humans. None of the rest of the world matters to them. Soon we all come to believe that, and we lose the vision the gods gave us to see our way up. We lose our will, and then we are gone."

Zeth pushed away from the tree and walked slowly over to the hanging corpse. He put out his hand and touched the body, causing it to slowly spin.

"It was only when my grandfather put out my eyes that I began to see for the first time," he said. "The gods gave me the vision. Humans do not understand us and call us evil. They think we do terrible things just because we want to, because we are selfish. They call it evil, what we do, and I will call it evil, too, because the humans hate it so."

Zeth looked directly at me. "We do evil, then, but we do this for the gods. Humans do not see that our evil is like love, in that it is greater than the self. Our evil reaches out to embrace the world and slay it, as the gods did, so that it will be ours. Our evil is as warm and red as love, and it enters the world in the same way love enters the heart- through the least defended places."

The half-breed spread his arms, palms up. "You did not understand what I meant by the 'insult,' " he said. "This body is tainted. I am forbidden by the gods to carry a weapon or wear armor to protect the taint." A cold grin formed at the edges of Zeth's mouth. "My father wanted to prove something when he attacked my mother and cut off her hands. He wanted to prove he was stronger than a goblin. Perhaps he wanted to show that he was more evil than a goblin, too. He certainly knew how we feel about humans and what we call the taint-the touch of humanity, of goodness and weakness. We might wallow in it, but we hate the word. And my father rubbed it in our faces.

"How could a human be stronger than a people descended from the worms that crawled in the wounds of the earth? How could he be more evil? Humans say they are so much better than we, and my father's deed was as if humans had also claimed to be so much worse, as if we were nothing. It was an insult to us all. The gods saw it and were angry, and I was born to repay the insult to our people.

"We are now teaching humans how it feels to be weak. What do the strong fear more than weakness? What is more terrible to a warrior who prides himself on his might than to know it means nothing? We strike at the weak and the helpless, and the mighty humans go mad because they cannot protect the weak and helpless with goodness! The gods and our people are avenged! The old debt is repaid!"

Zeth suddenly whirled on his heel and slapped the swinging corpse of the old woman. It spun around and around in the moonlight. He looked back at me. His face shone like the moon. "Now do you understand, Captain? Do you see now?"

I looked at the corpse as it swung, the old woman's dress ruffled by the gentle night breeze.

And I saw.

Zeth knew it. He felt his way back to the tree. The god who had let him see had now left.

"Let us head south," he said. "Our teaching is not yet done."

Three days later, the humans caught us.

"How many are there now?" Zeth asked. He did not shield his face from the sunlight, as the rest of us were forced to do on the flat hilltop. Whatever god or gods had been using him were now gone.

It didn't matter. The teaching had gone well.

"About a hundred," I replied. There looked to be more, but it was hard to tell in all the light. Many of the humans were mounted, so more troops could have been hidden in the dust behind them. Their battle flags were raised. The colors of Durpar flew.

We dug in as well as we could. We could not outrun them on the open fields where the humans had sighted us. The hilltop was no defense, but it gave us the altitude we needed against the tall folk and their mounted riders.

"A hundred is good," said Zeth. "More would have been better, but a hundred is good."

One of our human prisoners screamed at the soldiers marching toward us. I could not understand what she was saying. A goblin slapped her across the face, then began to beat her.

"Stop it," Zeth said mildly. He didn't turn around. "Let her scream. It is better that way. Let the prisoners scream as much as they want."

“They're splitting up," a warrior said. "Some have bows drawn."

"They won't use them," said Zeth, his face at peace. "They know we have the prisoners."

'They'll charge us," I said, squinting at the distant figures. I made decisions and shouted aloud. "The horsemen will come in first-archers, take out as many as you can. I want everyone with a spear to be ready to meet them. Go for the horses first. Ignore the riders. Once a horse is down, ignore it. Draw your swords and go for the next horses. Cut at their legs and drop them. The riders won't be able to get up right away; we can send a second rank over to finish them. Then get ready to meet the foot soldiers. Use your height and go for the heads and arms as they come up the slope."

"Ever the warrior," said Zeth, quietly so only I heard.

My mouth opened, then closed in silence. Ever the warrior. Perhaps so I was. I had known nothing else. Yet my words were wise, even now. More humans would learn from us as a result. It was better that way.

I watched the humans close in, dust flying against the distant rumble of hooves. Though I could not see their faces, I sensed their hunger for our blood. I could almost smell it. It was natural and right.

"It is a good day," I finally said. It wasn't what I had meant to say, but it was true. I was at ease at last, at peace with all. It would be a good fight on a good day. I looked at the oncoming riders, their pennants flying, and a strange sensation passed through me. It was the purest feeling that had ever touched me. I blinked, forgetting myself, and my breathing stopped.

"You feel it," said Zeth softly. "It is good, yes?"

My lips formed the word yes, but gave no sound. I slowly smiled at the humans coming for us, smiled as a child would do. Welcome, I said without sound, full of that feeling. Welcome to our final teaching.

"They will hear of this in the Dustwalls," Zeth said, as if dreaming. "I can see it happen. My grandfather will hear of this from the gods, then he will teach it to our people, then the gods will release him from his shell of life. We will have found ourselves at last. We will be as we should be."

"It is a good day," I repeated, nodding. I felt light, light and strong, eager and pure. I had struggled so long with such simple things. It was so good to let it go.

The human riders charged at us, heads down, swords and axes at their sides, the hooves of their steeds flying through the tall grass. The world grew brighter, sharper, clearer, but I did not look away.

Zeth turned and made a single motion. Arrows hissed from a dozen bows. Horses and men fell. Behind us, warriors began to kill the prisoners in view of their rescuers. A woman screamed in one long howl that rose over us all like a great arch.

Many, many riders were left. They came on faster, growing in size, faces hard as stone. Zeth spread his pale arms to greet them.

It was a beautiful day. The first riders reached our hill, came up the slope, came through our ranks of spears. I ran to meet them with my people, sword high. The feeling touched me again, and I laughed and could not stop.

It felt just like love.