The Rebellion

9

It was shortly past midnight, nearly eighteen hours since the quake struck, before a priest tended to Grallik’s eyes. And that had been at the priest’s insistence, not the wizard’s. The Skull Knight had noticed Grallik furiously rubbing his eyes and argued that the man currently in charge of Steel Town needed to properly see the devastation so he could best determine how to deal with the crisis.

His eyes felt much better, and the horrid headache he’d nurtured throughout the day was starting to recede. His ribs still throbbed, and the priest worked on them too; the faint orange glow that had spilled across Montrill’s broken arm flowed over Grallik’s side and chest. The warmth was so soothing that that the wizard had to struggle to stay awake.

“Broken,” the priest pronounced. “Three or four ribs. But they should not trouble you any longer. Go easy, though, lest you undo my work.”

In truth, the pain was gone, as though there’d never been a problem. Again, Grallik was amazed by the divine magic.

“Thank you,” Grallik said. “I appreciate your diligence, brother.”

The priest was mildly surprised at the comment. He was not used to being commended for his healing.

“And I also thank you for the hours you’ve spent with the wounded men. No doubt you’ll be spending hours more before you’ve a chance to rest.”

“Aye, indeed, Guardian. I suspect I’ll drop from fatigue while there are still patients to see to.”

The wizard wondered if he, himself, might keel over at any moment. He had spent hours organizing a better place for the wounded, away from the barracks wall that he feared might topple; ordering the laborers and their families to comb through the rubble for salvageable clothes and furniture; directing the blacksmiths to recover any steel, iron, and raw ore that was salvageable; commanding slaves to get to work on the new well; dispatching messengers to Jelek and Neraka to inform Dark Knight commanders about the disaster of Steel Town. His letters, written on soiled and rumpled pieces of parchment-that was all he could find-detailed requests for men and supplies, especially clothes and wood.

In those hours, Marshal Montrill showed no visible sign of improvement, though the Skull Knights seemed encouraged by his stability and assured Grallik that in time he would indeed recuperate. The priests believed that two knights with even worse wounds would also survive.

“The best medicine is a tincture of time,” Grallik recalled the Ergothian priest saying. Montrill had had a close escape from death. “He will show definite improvement in a few days, perhaps. A week or more at the longest. But he will not be getting up out of bed right away. We all will look to you for orders until the marshal is able to resume his command.”

Days and days in charge of this chaos, Grallik translated the prognosis.

The responsibility he once so craved had dropped in his grasping hands. He watched as a detail of knights and laborers, their clothes dark from sweat despite the coolness of the early day, dug graves and laid their fellows into the ground. Another grave-digging shift would take over later in the morning, and the burials could take some time, given the number of the dead and the protocol the Order demanded for burying knights. One of the Skull Knights was with the burying party, reciting words Grallik knew he would hear far too often before the cleanup of Steel Town was completed.

The bodies had to be washed, as part of the ceremony, and dressed in their finest armor and cloaks. Knights had to be buried with their weapons all polished. But Grallik had ordered the water conserved for the living, and he set even more hobgoblin and goblin slaves to work in earnest on three new wells, supervised by the former tavern owner and his wife. One of the three would have to strike water soon or their situation would become precarious. Water was a priority. The Skull Knights were too fatigued to create any with their enchantments-all their energy had been devoted to the injured. Commanding the men and slaves to perform all those odious tasks was far preferable to working alongside them, Grallik realized. He knew that if Montrill were healthy and giving orders, he would either be aiding the wounded or sorting through the ruins right alongside the others. Montrill could be counted on to give example in dire times.

It wasn’t as if Grallik had been resting, though. He’d been on his aching feet for hours, moving about restlessly, kneeling sometimes at the side of a wounded knight; one of his talon died and another lay grievously injured and likely would not survive his wounds. All he wanted was to sit on one of the chairs or benches that had been pulled from the demolished buildings, close his eyes, and sleep for a few minutes or have something to drink. After all, he was entitled to whatever water he wanted-he was in charge.

His feet hurt from walking over the rubble. His soft-soled slippers were not much protection from the sharp stones and broken furniture and jagged tools. He didn’t wear the hard-soled boots that his fellow knights did; that wasn’t the footwear of wizards. But Grallik had been eyeing the dead, and when he found a man of similar build, he intended to appropriate the man’s boots to cover his own feet, and damn those who thought him ghoulish rather than pragmatic.

He would rest briefly when he was finished there, perhaps sleep an hour or two if things looked in order. A spell that could stave off exhaustion for days was lost at the bottom of a crevice. He could not recall it without his precious spellbook.

He was so terribly, terribly spent.

Grallik walked toward the slave pens, feeling the slaves watching him. There were only a handful of knights standing guard at the pens. The wizard worried that the slaves might figure out that his wards were absent. If they rushed the knights, they would have a good opportunity to vanish into the wilderness.

But up to that point, the slaves had made no move to escape, so conditioned were they to their horrid existence. The wooden slats of the pen were like the steel bars of a prison to them. The slaves probably still believed that all the wards and glyphs were intact and thought they’d be incinerated by columns of flame if they tried to escape.

Fifty yards to the east of the pens was a mound of goblin and hobgoblin bodies, looking like a big earthen hill in the darkness. They were slaves who had died in the pens when the quake struck, had been carried out of the mines by their fellows, or were killed by the hatori. Some had died quickly, succumbing to their dire injuries. The priests would not be seeing to the goblins for a while, so undoubtedly more of the injured slaves would breathe their last soon.

There were hundreds more dead slaves in the mine, Grallik suspected, and some knights among them. Something would have to be done about all their bodies and the stink building up in the shafts. The shafts would have to be reopened, ore production continued. But clearing the mine was a goal to consider after sunrise. Dealing with the mound of bodies there and then, Grallik had to focus on that problem.

“Guardian N’sera,” one of the guards began. “Shall I-?”

Grallik raised his scarred hand. “I need no help with this. Just watch the slaves.”

The odor from the dead was strong and overpowering and threatened to topple the wizard. Grallik was thankful he’d not eaten that day, else he’d be retching as he stood in front of the grisly pile. A haze of insects blanketed the mound, the incessant buzzing of the creatures making it hard for him to think. They flowed out around him, gnats sticking to the sweat on Grallik’s face and neck and flying into his nose and mouth.

He gagged and crossed his arms in front of his chest, ground the ball of his foot against the hard earth, and reached into his mind for one of his easiest fire spells. He closed his eyes when he felt the flush of the magic, a warmth that was comfortable and welcome. The magic sprang away from him to strike the edge of the pile a dozen yards away. He directed the energy to envelop the closest corpse, a hobgoblin clad in a threadbare tunic that quickly caught fire. Flesh was harder to burn than cloth, so Grallik had to concentrate, picturing a column of beautiful flame, of red, orange, and yellow. Blessed color to contrast with the mud brown of Steel Town. He opened his eyes to see a lick of fire begin to dance along the cloth and catch at the hobgoblin’s hair.

The insects were loud, so he couldn’t hear the first few harmonious crackles of fire. But after several moments, the flames spread and the noise of pleasant pops and hisses grew, and the annoying insects buzzed away into the darkness. Grallik felt the heat caress his face, relaxing him. The stench intensified, burning hair and flesh adding to the stink and sending billowing gray-black clouds up in the sky to blot out the stars. The Dark Knights always burned the slaves’ bodies, not willing to go to any effort to bury them and not wanting to give them any measure of respect. The goblins and hobgoblins never protested such treatment of their dead-not that their objections would have mattered.

Grallik circled the pyre, sending small lances of flame from his fingers toward the far side. He saw crushed skulls and ribs, partial torsos, and decapitated bodies. A war could not have been more destructive. He’d so far avoided venturing toward the Dark Knights’ graves, though eventually that would be necessary if he sought a pair of good boots. He could handle the sight of mutilated slave corpses far better than that of his dismembered brethren.

Satisfied that the pile of hob and gob bodies was burning well, he turned away and abruptly stopped in his tracks.

Goblins and hobgoblins were pressed against the fence, watching the fire. More, they were watching Grallik, their eyes wide and filled with fear and anger and sadness. They looked all the same to the wizard, though his eyes registered the different skin colors-orange, brown, red, yellow, and mottled shades in between. All were a bit drab and weathered looking, like old paint that had faded.

Most had wide-set eyes and broad noses, thin lips and sharp little teeth. Some had tall, pointed ears; others had crooked ones with pieces missing or decorated with shards of bones. Most were thin because the Dark Knights fed them just enough to keep them alive, and their ribs and shoulders were weirdly pronounced. A scattering had little pot bellies, and many had real arm and leg muscles from the heavy work they were forced to endure in the mine. Only one in five or six wore any articles of clothing. As in human society, clothing seemed to carry some measure of distinction, with the older or larger goblins boasting garments that came either from children in Steel Town who had outgrown them or women who had gotten tired of a raggedy garment and pitched it into the pen.

The hobgoblins were simply larger versions with more tufts of hair and even wider faces. Some had large enough teeth to be considered tusks. They came in a smaller range of colors, browns and reds, though they were equally drab and scarred. But they tended to wear more clothes because the hobgoblins served as foremen and stood apart from their more unfortunate brethren.

No two of them looked exactly alike, yet all of them appeared beaten down by years of hard work, malnourished from improper amounts of food, dazed by their hopelessness. To Grallik, they were all one and the same-tools for a job, to be treated with as much care as a sturdy pick or a shovel.

Little more than debris.

Many of the ones staring at him were injured, the stink from their dried blood and oozing wounds reaching Grallik as the breeze shifted. One in a corner drew his notice-a skinny female goblin with dark red skin and a lugubrious face etched with harshness. Her eyes were different, dark and small, set close to the thin bridge of her nose. They gave her a particularly angry expression. The others usually gave space to her, he’d noted in the past. Perhaps, like him, they were bothered by her angry eyes. Grallik had heard her two evenings past, hollering to the guards about a coming disaster. Could she have known about the quake?

How smart was she?

There were shamans among goblinkind. Was she one of them?

Huh! He shook his head. It was not likely but not impossible. He’d never scrutinized any of the slaves, only gave them passing glances when they brought the ore down the mountain. He’d never wondered if one of them carried a magical spark.

It was not likely that Angry Eyes was a shaman. And yet …

His throbbing feet reminded him that it was past time to sit and rest. His course took him around the goblin pens and toward chairs lined up where the tavern used to be. Grallik kept his gaze on the skinny red-skinned goblin as he went.

“The earth is not done,” he thought he heard her say.