The Rebellion

29

They dressed the Ergothian priest in the leather leggings of an ogre child, leaving him bare chested. His chain mail was given to the burly hobgoblin called Grunnt, who had distinguished himself in the battle of Steel Town by slaying six knights single-handedly. It was obvious Grunnt found the metal cumbersome and uncomfortable, but he refused to take it off, considering the outfit a mark of honor. Erguth wore the priest’s tabard. The tattered cloak had been ripped up and used for bandages, as had Grallik’s gray robes.

They let the other two Dark Knights keep their tabards, though Grunnt took their chain mail and the padded armor underneath it, dividing the latter between a few hobgoblins and throwing the armor into the lake-with the knights watching sullenly. The weapons were divided between goblins and hobgoblins, who paraded around with them near the slave pens.

The four knights, fitted with chains and wrist shackles the goblins had found in one of the buildings, were allowed to keep their boots. Grunnt saw how soft the bottoms of the knights’ feet were and allowed them the courtesy of the boots while noting it was a courtesy the knights had never given their slaves.

Then Grunnt and Erguth busied themselves searching the village for shoes, boots, and sandals that would fit the hobgoblins. The bodies of the ogre children already had been looted, with goblins claiming the shoes and many of the tunics. A few hundred of the goblins and hobgoblins wore clothing finally, which had been divvied up by clan and age and fistfights. Nothing fit right, save some of the children’s clothing that had been looted from Steel Town. And only a smattering of pieces, taken from inside the ogre homes, were clean and in good repair. The only thing that kept a war from breaking out over the clothing was the vow by Saro-Saro and Hurbear that more and better clothing would be taken from other villages, from merchant caravans, and perhaps from shops. Some would even be purchased with coin, rather than stolen.

A reed-thin goblin with a dropped shoulder lit a lantern and set it near the slave pen where the four knights sat unhappily. The lantern was for the knights’ benefit, another small concession they’d been permitted because the goblins saw well enough in the dark. It was late, but just how late was impossible to know; the stars were masked by thick gray clouds of smoke and ash. No one had seen the sun set.

“Midnight, maybe, do you think?” Grallik asked, leaning back against a post near the others. The goblins had ruined part of the pen freeing the ogres’ captives, but they’d rebuilt a section and tossed the four Dark Knights inside. Four hobgoblins, including Grunnt and Erguth, stood guard.

“I don’t think it’s quite that late,” the priest answered stoically. “But it is night, and the moon is full. I can tell that much without seeing it.”

Grallik raised his eyebrows skeptically.

“Solinari, Gray Robe, she was nearly round when we left Iverton, and we have marched ceaselessly. So she must be full this night,” Horace said with a sigh, as though tired of explaining something to a child. “Every eight months, Solinari is lone and full in the sky. That night is called the Sea Queen’s Share, and we priests give to her, our goddess Zeboim, nearly all the material things we have collected since the previous Queen’s Share. Well, Gray Robe, all of my material things-my armor and weapon, my tabard, my pouch filled with coins and gems-have been taken from me.”

“And so you think the moon is full and that the Sea Queen has already taken her share.” Grallik gave a clipped laugh that drew the attention of Grunnt. The hobgoblin moved to the post the wizard leaned against and thumped it.

“Solinari is full,” Horace insisted. “If Zeboim favors me, most of my sacrifices will be returned.” He leaned back on his elbows, the chain between his wrists long enough to permit that. The sweat on his ample stomach gleamed in the lantern light. His eyes were closed. He was no longer able to keep them open, and his head bobbed. “I’m just so tired, Grallik. It has been too many days since I slept well.”

“Since before the quakes for me,” Grallik admitted. He also was tired but wasn’t about to complain. Too, he’d not been using his magic, as Horace had, so the priest had his sympathy. “I can’t remember what a feather bed feels like.”

“Only patients in my years before the Order had those.” The priest had healed injured goblins until he couldn’t stand. Two hobgoblins had carried him into the pen. “I need to sleep, Grallik.” Horace eased himself down on his back, not caring that he was lying in mud and waste.

Grallik gripped the railings, his fingernails digging into the old, soft wood. “Horace, you said they would not kill us.”

The priest drew his features forward into a scowl. “My divinations appear to be true, Gray Robe. At this juncture, in any event. I predicted that they would not kill us, and they have not killed us. Not yet. And unless one of us does something to provoke them, they will not kill us.”

“Yet we are slaves, Horace.”

“Aye, that we are. My divinations did not reveal that would happen.” He paused. “But that is a subtlety. I asked only whether we would be allowed to live if we joined with the goblins. That is what you wanted to know.” His words ended with a slur as he fell asleep.

Grallik nodded, his gesture lost on the sleeping priest.

“This was your idea, Guardian,” Kenosh said irritably, continuing to use Grallik’s old title. He was one of the two surviving members of Grallik’s talon, and he nearly had not followed Grallik there. In the end, he told the wizard that through the years he’d become as loyal to Grallik as he had been to the knighthood, and he did not fancy being reassigned to another talon after the wizard was demoted. “You said our best chance was with the goblins, though I think there is more to it than the simple fact of safety in their numbers. You will tell me your reasons in time, I trust.”

The other talon member, Aneas Gerald of Jelek, slept soundly on the far side of the priest. He’d been the most difficult to convince, but he knew that with Grallik’s demotion came his demotion, and that was something he preferred to put off for a while, if not forever. In the end Aneas also decided to accompany Grallik and the other two knights, reserving the right to leave at any time. Grallik believed that Aneas would leave at the first opportunity. Perhaps ultimately he would try to curry favor with another post commander by giving him the location of the goblin army and painting Grallik a traitor.

The priest had been the easiest to talk into their venture. Grallik had never cared much for Horace because he seemed to lack the fierce, blind loyalty of the others. Grallik had noted Horace’s absence on several occasions when the Oath was recited at dawn. But the wizard appreciated the priest’s healing skills and so had set aside that dislike when he asked Horace if he wished to follow the goblins with him.

Horace had said he wanted to return to Ergoth, eventually, but that temporarily he would join with Grallik and offer his curative spells to the goblins. “Healing them, after all, has been my job,” Horace had said mirthlessly.

Sitting in the slave pen, Grallik recalled several nights past, sitting in another place-at the southern edge of Steel Town near where his workshop had been and where his tomes of spells had been swallowed by the crevice. Horace sat across from him then, tracing unrecognizable patterns in the dirt.

Horace had closed his eyes, the lids fluttering unnervingly, cheeks twitching. He mouthed words that Grallik could not discern. All of that went on for some time. Then Horace’s lips formed a tight line. Still with his eyes closed, he reached into a pocket in his tabard and pulled out four finger bones. By touch, he arranged the bones into a rectangle then cupped his hands just outside them.

“Zeboim, mother goddess, lead us from Iverton. Zeboim, called the Darkling Sea, take us from this camp.”

“Steel Town,” Grallik remembered whispering, in case the goddess might not know the given name of the place since it was so rarely spoken aloud. “Iverton, called Steel Town.”

“Our home is broken,” Horace had intoned. “Our brethren dead, our commander dead. Two dozen will leave here in the morning, carrying the wounded. Brother Grallik wishes us to take a different, daring course, mother goddess. He seeks to join the goblins, the creatures we’d cruelly enslaved.”

Grallik had nearly interrupted Horace at the word cruel. Slaves deserved no better, he felt, and how the goblins were treated was not truly cruel. It was what their station called for, the wizard believed. Still, he had held his tongue, continuing to observe the Ergothian priest.

“Brother Grallik seeks my company and that of two more knights. Four of us, too few to risk approaching such a force of creatures, foolish perhaps. But a greater foolishness, I think, to take too many other, unwilling knights with us and risk looking like a party made for war. Foolish because we risk the wrath of the slaves and also the Order.” Horace then had bowed his head, rearranging the bones slightly. “Zeboim, mother goddess, you know my heart is not with this knighthood. Zeboim, called the Maelstrom, called Rann on my home island, my true brothers are now dead, my true family is lost. And so I will accompany the Gray Robe until you lead me down another path, one that might take me someday back to Ergoth.”

Grallik had rocked back and forth, growing impatient with the priest and his religious prattle. The purpose of his magic, the wizard had thought, was to determine if they would live through their first encounter with the angry goblins.

One question!

If the priest didn’t hurry, one of the other knights might see them and grow curious and come to investigate. Grallik couldn’t risk his plan being discovered. Leaving the Order was not an easy thing, especially given everything that had happened at Steel Town. They’d be marked men, all four of them.

Commanders in Jelek and the city of Neraka would demote him surely. Never in his lifetime would he regain the title of guardian, let alone rise higher than that, as once he’d dreamed. In fact, he could be brought up on charges for losing Steel Town. Punishment on top of punishment! He could not stay with the Order. He could not bear the humiliation.

All Grallik wanted was to find the red-skinned goblin and discover what strange magic she possessed. He’d seen her work with another goblin to create a hole beneath his wall of fire-not by digging, but by some sort of spell. The Order was lost to him. All that was left was magic. His tomes were lost to him; he wanted to gain power another way, and the red-skinned goblin offered a new, exciting magic.

“Zeboim, mother goddess, you who are called Zebir Jotun, Zura the Maelstrom, and Zyr, have the goblins scattered?”

Grallik sat rock still. Finally, he mouthed.

The priest nodded, eyes closed but moving rapidly behind the lids. “They are largely together, the escaped slaves, but for a few gone to the winds. The goblins, they hold their army together to stay safe and strong. They go south along the spine of the land, the Khalkist Mountains. They leave the danger of Iverton for other dangers, confident in their numbers.”

Grallik edged closer. “Will we live, priest?” he whispered. “If we reach out to the goblins and seek to join with them, will we survive? Or is this some foolish, foolish gamble I intend? Ask the mother goddess that, Horace.”

The priest grew silent, his hands cupped in front of the new bone formation, muscles in his cheeks quivering. Grallik was about ready to poke the man, but then Horace’s lips started moving again. Grallik watched close and made out a few words: Zeboim, Iverton, slaves, breath. Then the priest leaned forward and traced a pattern in the dirt with his right index finger. It was the shell of a turtle, one of Zeboim’s symbols.

“Zeboim, mot her goddess, the goblin ar my rages. So many of our brethren the goblins have killed. Brutal, as if a blood fever seized them, pools of blood so thick the land here in this mining camp cannot soak it all up. Retreating blessedly, finally, the army took their kind with them to the east.”

Horace himself fell in the fight, next to a horse a hobgoblin had gutted, Grallik reflected. He thought the hobgoblin would gut the priest too and was surprised when the creature moved on. No doubt the priest looked dead or dying and not worth the effort, and it wasn’t until long minutes after the goblins had retreated that Horace finally stirred. The priest had tended himself, the familiar healing glow spreading from his fingertips to his own chest and legs, the cuts and wounds magically closing, repairing.

“We can find them, mother goddess, such an army leaves tracks easily followed. If we listen, we might hear them, as such an army cannot travel silently. But if we follow, wise Zeboim, will they kill us? Will their battle fever take hold again? Will we fall to their stolen weapons and their filthy claws? Will they kill the four of us, as they killed so many, many of our brethren? Or will they accept us into their camp?”

Grallik stared at the bones and wondered who they had belonged to, or what. He wondered how bones helped the priest divine the answers to his questions and if the goddess truly spoke to him. He might not have cared for the Ergothian, but he knew him to be a truthful man and the goddess worthy of respect. Grallik glanced at the turtle shell drawn in the dirt. But there was no trace of it any more, the ground hard and cracked where it had been. The priest’s spell was taking so long …

“They will not kill us, Grallik. The goblins, they will not kill any of us. They will listen to you and to me-though it will require much persuasion, and they will take us into their fold and be thankful for the healing I will give their injured.” Horace’s face was not as confident as his words.

Grallik jumped to his feet, tugging Horace up as soon as he’d replaced the bones in his pocket. “Then we must leave now, Skull Knight. Get out of Steel Town now and forever.”

Horace shook his head. “I am not a Skull Knight, Grallik. Not if I leave with you. Not anymore, so do not call me that. I am, however, always and forever a priest of Zeboim. And I, too, want to leave Iverton and its memories far behind.” He brushed at his tabard, trying to clean a splotch of blood. The gesture futile, he finally gave up. “But you are right, Gray Robe. We must leave now, or there will be no leaving.”

The priest moved too slowly to satisfy Grallik, and so their course had been plodding as they pursued the goblin army. Fortunately, the army moved slowly too, no doubt because of its size and because it stopped to feast and rest.

One day earlier, Kenosh had discovered the remains of a herd of mountain goats far off the side of the trail. They had covered good ground and found the goblins.

The goblins did not kill them. But, Grallik reflected bitterly, the goblins put them in chains.

“Slaves.” Grallik spat the word aloud. Above and behind him, Grunnt made a noise that could have passed for a chuckle.

“Slaves,” Grunnt repeated. The hobgoblin pointed his knife at Grallik then at Horace, Kenosh, and Aneas. “Slaves.” That was followed by more noises that were a goblin’s laughter.

“I’ll wager that’s the only word in the Common tongue you know,” Grallik said, noting that the hobgoblin’s eyes showed no hint of understanding what he was saying. “Aye, you stinking, hairy beast, we are your slaves. For now.”

Grallik closed his eyes, trying to sleep, but sleep evaded him. His feet pained him. His eyes burned from something toxic in the air. In general he ached all over. Perhaps if he’d felt well, and if his mind had been functioning properly, he would not have rushed off after the goblins. He would have decided on a different course of action. Leaving the Order? Probably, certainly, that was inevitable, though it was all he’d known for decades.

Going after the red-skinned goblin was a shrewd strategy, he’d concluded. She might offer a possible path to a different future. He tried to find her, peering out across the ogre village through narrowed eyes. There were hundreds of goblins, more than one thousand, he guessed. They filled the basin, most of them sleeping. But many were awake-talking, arguing. Mothers suckled babies. Guards patrolled. From time to time, small groups of goblins, young from the looks of them, came close to the pen to ogle and point and chuckle at the human slaves. But he didn’t spot the red-skinned goblin.

Quite some time had passed, and the wizard wondered if it was nearing morning. Then he saw her.

Grallik’s eyes snapped wide open, and he moved to the railing. There she was, sitting in the middle of one of the roads that bisected the village. She was with another goblin, a brown-skinned one with an odd-looking, milky eye. He’d seen her with that goblin before, in the slave pens in Steel Town. Friends or family perhaps, Grallik guessed, maybe mates. Clansmen? He knew the goblins came from various clans throughout Neraka, Khur, and farther distant. He’d learned that much from listening to Marshal Montrill talk about the slaves and where the ogres and minotaurs had captured them. But Grallik knew nothing about the goblins’ coloration and that skin hue usually marked them as being from one clan or another.

He stared intently, not caring if the two goblins noticed his attentive gaze. The one with the milky, useless eye glanced at him briefly. They were both interested in something on the ground. No, Grallik realized after a moment-not something on the ground, they were studying the ground itself.

“Interesting,” he said aloud and considered waking up the priest so he could observe the two goblins too. But Horace was busy snoring, as was Aneas-the two seemed to be making a contest out of it. A glance over his shoulder told him that Kenosh slept too, though more quietly. The man’s chest rose and fell so lightly, a casual observer might think him dead. How could they sleep in such filth? The pen stank of goblins and waste and garbage. He had tried to fall asleep but found the situation all too unsettling.

Grallik couldn’t see precisely what the two goblins were doing. The light from the lantern didn’t stretch that far. But he could tell that the red-skinned goblin-Mudwort, as the big hobgoblin had called her-was tracing patterns in the dirt in front of her and the milky-eyed one. He remembered Horace drawing the symbol of a turtle shell and wanted desperately to know if Mudwort was drawing something similar.

A symbol of her god? Just what did goblins worship?

A symbol of her clan?

He watched her trace designs for another few moments then saw her tip her head back, eyes closed and mouth moving. It was quiet enough in that part of the basin that he could have heard her, except she wasn’t speaking audibly. The milky-eyed goblin placed his hands over the area Mudwort had disturbed, palms flat and leaning forward so all of his weight was on his hands. He cocked his head, as if listening to something, and Grallik wondered if perhaps Mudwort was indeed talking in a hushed tone that didn’t carry to the pen.

Then the milky-eyed goblin looked up, sniffing the air, and a moment later sucked in great lungfuls of it.

The very thought made Grallik gag. The air reeked. The wizard smelled his own filthy body, his sweat and that of his companions. And the stench of the goblins-like wet mongrels, they smelled. The scent of blood was heavy in the air too, and many things worse than blood. Animals and ogres had been gutted, and goblin flesh had been burned. Ogre bodies were piled here and there, starting to rot.

Grallik had watched them burn the corpses of the goblins, though they did nothing but pile up the bodies of the dead ogres. And the surviving goblins had performed some sort of ritual over the dead goblins they burned. He didn’t understand their chanting, but he’d participated in enough Dark Knight ceremonies to know a ritual when he saw one. Come to think of it, he remembered the goblins doing something similar in Steel Town after the quakes, when all the bodies of the dead slaves had been piled high and lit on fire.

So the goblins were more interesting, complex creatures than he’d first believed, and the two who sat on the road pondering the ground were the most interesting and complex of all. They had magic abilities. Grallik could smell their abilities over all the horrid, disgusting odors that hung in the village and that were held cloyingly close by the thick cover of clouds. He could smell the magic.

“Come closer,” he whispered. “Please, please, come closer.” Finally, the two goblins raised their voices loud enough that their words carried faintly to him. But they were talking in their guttural goblin tongue, and Grallik understood none of their words. Still, he continued watching, his fatigue forgotten as his mind churned.

“By the memory of the Dark Queen’s heads!” he breathed. “What they do is not possible! They work together! They combine their abilities! They combine their magic!”