by Greg M. Hall
asy Money
By: Greg M. Hall
Copyright 2011 by Greg M. Hall
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First appearing at Kings of the Night
This book may be reproduced, copied, and distributed for non-commercial purposes, provided this book remains in its complete original form and proper attribution is given the author.
This is a work of fiction. All characters, places, and events portrayed in this novel are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to persons living or dead, locales, or events is entirely coincidental.
Traffic Control (Action)
City of Light (Fantasy)
Closure (Fantasy)
Rick’s Hostage (Horror)
The Gig (Horror)
My Pal The Bug #1: For They Know Not… (Sci-Fi)
My Pal The Bug #2: The Haunted Drug Lab (Sci-Fi)
That Stupid Kid (Literary)
Booth had been the only one of the four to argue against dealing with the Lothians. To add insult to injury, he was the group’s best negotiator, so it fell to him to speak with the commander while the others sat in silence, looking as uncomfortable as their chairs were intended to make them feel.
Booth considered the Field Headquarters tent as stereotypical Lothian, spare and efficient, the same as the man that sat behind the desk opposite Booth.
He'd introduced himself as Major Prawl, given them a rote expression of gratitude for taking up his invitation, and had gone right into business. His hair, silvery gray in contradiction to his apparently young age, was still quite thick; he kept it brushed efficiently back over his square-jawed head.
"I'd imagine you have a degree of curiosity about a number of things," he said, in an unremarkable but clear voice. "However, I intend for the amount I'm offering your group to ameliorate any question you'd have about our motivations."
Booth shrugged. It wasn't like he expected a Lothian to be effusive. In their society, conversation followed a pattern of ‘here is your task; do it; yessir.’
Prawl unrolled a map and jabbed a finger at some of the shapes. "There's an old keep on this hill, just southwest of our camp. Our scouts tell me it's infested with goblins. I need it cleared out."
"Simple enough," replied Booth. Too simple. A couple of Prawl's squads could handle a few goblins in a far thriftier manner.
"May I be presumptive enough to ask why? I'd like to know if we're to avoid damaging anything besides the goblins."
"That would be presumptive of you, but... I wish to establish a command post there. Don't worry about damaging anything; I doubt the four of you will employ any onagers."
"Of course not; we find trebuchets much more effective.”
The Major raised an eyebrow in a deadpan expression. Humor impacted Lothians the way a light breeze might sway a mountain.
Booth cleared his throat. “May I ask why you need us for the task, when you have so many soldiers at your disposal?"
"You may ask all you’d like, but don’t expect an answer; in doing so I might give you information useful to our adversaries. Suffice it to say that I don't want my men up there. Until you've done your part, of course."
Booth tried to read Prawl's muddy brown eyes, and got nothing. "Well, will you at least indulge me by answering some tactical questions?"
"My adjutant can serve that purpose." The Major nodded toward a lean, sloe-eyed officer standing in the corner of the tent. "That must mean you're willing to take the job."
Booth held a hand up. "I wanted to get a better picture of what we'd be up against before giving you that answer. I can’t agree to any payment we'd be too dead to collect."
He expected that answer to annoy Prawl, but instead the Lothian gave a quick, head-lunging nod and waved his hand toward the adjutant. "As you wish. Just don't take too long. If you're not the group I'm looking for, I need to continue my search as soon as possible."
"Thorold's stones, Booth! What was all that about?"
Chambard stood half a head taller than Booth, but then again he was half a head taller than most. While the group had no leader, strangers saw the proud Gammon warrior and automatically assumed him to be the Alpha. He certainly looked the part, with his azure eyes, flowing hair, lantern jaw, and perfect teeth.
"Yeah, Booth. We could have had that toast a lot sooner." That was Scones, who never met a drink he didn't like. "That Prawl served some of the best wine I've ever tasted, and you made me wait for it."
Booth hazarded a look over his shoulder at Prawl’s tent before responding. At the distance they were at, it would have taken magic to hear them now; the type of magic better suited to the Elven Triads than the Lothians.
"Gentlemen, I appreciate a good payday as much as the rest of you, but didn't it strike you as odd that they'd hire us to go in and chop up a few goblins? I'd imagine each Lothian soldier is more than a match for three or four of them."
Scones answered before Chambard had a chance. "The man said the gold should clear up any of those questions, and it does for me. Don't overthink an easy bag of coins, Booth. If we waited around for the perfect job, we'd starve to death."
"Pfft. We'd eat," said Wolter the Archer. He was a man of few words, but they were well chosen when he used them. "I can put an arrow through a hummingbird at fifty paces. But he's right, Booth. We can afford to be more selective about our work when our reputation precedes us."
"Hmmph. Well, we took the job, didn't we? So what are the three of you all bent up about?"
"Making me wait for the wine, of course," repeated Scones.
"Right, and didn't that make any of you..." Booth let the sentence go unfinished after looking at the rest of the party. He could tell that the fact that a Lothian had any sort of wine, let alone good wine, wasn't going to be something they wasted any energy wondering about.
Booth was glad to leave the Lothian camp, even if it meant they had an hour’s walk to skirt the massive refugee camp that had grown along the main road to Fenburg, the nearest town.
To avoid the refugees, they had to walk alongside the Lothian field fortifications. None of them relished the long walk under the stony gaze of archers who wouldn't mind a little target practice to break up the boredom, but it was a necessity.
They’d tried to use the main road on the way in. Scones, at heart a people person, had made the mistake of giving a coin to a particularly pathetic looking child with a club foot and an eye that was completely swollen shut. For his generosity, the entire party had been rewarded with a pressing wave of humanity, all convinced that these were people who could be persuaded to part with another coin.
"And that," said Wolter, as they hastily retreated from the swarm of outstretched arms, "is why you must be judicious with your generosity. Unless, of course, you have a coin for every one of them."
None of them debated taking the long way around to get out of the Lothian camp.
Even at a distance, the smell hammered at them, a living thing that not only crawled into their nostrils but assaulted every pore of their bodies. They had to watch their footing to keep from slipping in the muck that flowed out of the tent city, a thought made all the more unpleasant by the fact that it hadn't rained in over a week.
"What is with all those people, anyway?" asked Scones.
Booth didn’t understand that the question was probably rhetorical. "They're from Kestring. The Lothians took their land under the pretense of needing a buffer between Gadrung and themselves. They weren't a warlike country; it was inevitable that one of the two kingdoms would annex it. Some of
the younger Kestringers, unreasonable as youth can be, felt that because they weren't warlike, they deserved to be left uninvolved. They almost immediately began to resist."
"Oh, like an insurrection? I thought they weren’t warlike."
"No, something much different. Very polite. They’d mass themselves in a marketplace, or a mine that supplied iron to the Lothians, and just sit down. They didn't push anybody, or accost any miners. They'd just…get in the way."
"What did that achieve?"
"Well, for one thing, it withered the commerce that made the region so attractive to the Lothians in the first place. Soldiers would clear out these people, and jail the leaders, but the next day even more of them would be sitting in their way."
"Did they kill any of 'em? That would have discouraged some folks."
"No, that's where it gets complicated. Too many eyes were on what was going on there. Kestring’s pacifist history attracted a lot of people of other nationalities. The Lothians have a well-trained army, but it's pretty small. They could fend off an invasion from Gadrung. But if other nations aligned against them, probably not. They found themselves in a position where international opinion mattered."
"So how'd they get all these people to flee and come here?"
"A plague started making its way through the population. Then wildfires in the hills, which wiped out a lot of homes and left the ground bare, so when the spring rains came, mudslides swept through the countryside and wiped out more homes."
"One catastrophe after another."
"Right. Catastrophes that could have happened by themselves, or, if you believe in the darker side of humanity, ones that could have been manmade."
The gates of Fenburg stood shut in stony defiance to any refugees hoping for mercy, but Booth's party didn't have to dodge warning shots or respond to verbal challenges. No refugee would have visible weapons and armor. If one was lucky enough to have a weapon, or really anything of value to the merchants inside, they'd probably be let in to trade it at a loss for half its value in food.
The guards at the gate must have been fairly new, because they only required a token bribe.
Inside the town wall, conditions weren't much better than they were outside of it. The smell of the refugee camp was fainter, to be sure, but it was still present. The burghers, for the most part, barely had more money than the refugees outside. Fenburg didn’t have much in the way of merchants or artisans, but at least there was an inn with an available room.
It was in this room, poorly lit by a pair of rancid-smelling tallow candles, that they discussed the coming day's work. Booth, trying to draw the layout of the keep on the bare planks of the floor with a piece of charcoal, couldn't concentrate. "Why is it so much for just a bunch of goblins?"
Chambard, who had every right to rebuke Booth for his continued complaints, didn’t. "You're really bothered by this, aren't you?"
"It's one thing for them to offer us fifty Lothian Crowns each. I mean … what would we need to kill to earn that kind of money? Minotaurs? Beyond that: there's got to be at least two legions stationed at that camp. That's over seven thousand men. They need to hire four mercenaries, when probably six thousand of the men in their camp are just sitting around, waiting for the next order to march? And what was with that toast Prawl gave us? Have you known Lothians to ever offer any gesture of gratitude beyond a purse of coins? What's so damned important about that keep? Command Post? Lothians always command out of their tents; their officers take pride in living conditions as sparse as those of their men."
Chambard didn’t answer until Booth finished. "So, because of your misgivings, you'd recommend we'd…what? Walk away from enough money to buy ourselves horses?"
Booth held out his arms. "I don't know."
Wolter set down an arrowhead he'd been sharpening. "Shall we look at this issue from the other end?"
Booth and Chambard both turned to the archer.
"Consider me a Lothian Commander. I've hired four men to kill some goblins. Maybe I'm some sort of sick pervert that wants horrible things to happen to these four. How's that going to come about as a result of this mission?"
Chambard, despite being squarely in the camp of doing the job and earning the money, still ventured a guess. He’d always been one for riddles, after all. "Perhaps the keep in question has no goblins in it, but a maniple of Lothian soldiers waiting to ambush us?” He shook his head. “Of course, we were in the Lothian camp, and they could have neatly disposed of us right then and there."
Booth considered the archer’s words, even more unhappy at the sense they made. "That's what I hate about this whole thing," he said, looking at the floor, idly etching sets of lines with the charcoal. "There's no reason not to do it."
There was no point in waiting for the cover of darkness. Goblin night vision was far superior to that of humans, and they had no discernible circadian rhythm. Instead, the group rose at dawn, ate a light breakfast, and walked out the front gate of Fenburg. The guards were too apathetic to even ask for an exit tax.
The plan was simple enough. The vegetation around the old keep allowed ample cover for their approach. Chambard and Wolter would scale the wall at one corner, near the tower, while Booth and Scones scaled the other. If either pair was detected, the other could take advantage of the diversion. As long as nobody was trapped in a dead end, or in a position where goblins could get above them, they'd be able to fight their way out.
The Lothian adjutant had told them to expect two clan groups, which only meant eight to ten fighting adults. The whole operation should be over before midday. After removing a sufficient number of right-ear proof, and salvaging what they could, the party would return to Fenburg to meet the courier that would deliver the balance of their payment.
Easy money.
Goblins weren't especially fond of bright sunlight, so it surprised Booth to see one stationed on the keep's curtain wall about twenty paces from where they'd intended to scale it. Scones wasn't as good of a shot as Wolter, but skilled enough to bury a shaft into its torso as Booth threw the grappling line over the parapet.
It let out a shriek, and Booth could only hope that the noise would draw attention away from Chambard and Wolter.
It took half a minute to scale the wall. Years of weathering had rounded off the stones, making footing difficult, and requiring more arm strength. If one of the goblins thought to pull the grappling hook free while Booth and Scones were climbing, they’d have nothing to hold onto.
Right as Booth let the thought cross his mind, a goblin looked over the parapet, straight down at him. It was a smaller one, he could see, possibly an adolescent. It shrieked over its shoulder, confused and...scared?
Did goblins get scared?
Holding onto the line with his left hand, Booth pulled a throwing knife from his belt with the right. He let it fly in a motion made awkward by dangling from a rope halfway up a wall. It missed the wretched creature's head as it retreated from the edge. Seizing on the narrow window of opportunity, Booth gave the rope three more strong pulls and cleared the parapet.
The young goblin ran for it, and before he could ponder why, Booth had another throwing knife on its way. This one didn't miss.
He’d climbed onto a walkway used by defenders behind the parapet. It was wide enough to accommodate two people, and in some areas a rickety wood handrail was still attached to it. The Lothians will have that back up in no time, thought Booth as he made his way to the rendezvous point. Behind him, the unmistakable cadence of Scones and his mild limp thumped along the walkway.
It was unnervingly devoid of goblins. Surely some of them had heard the commotion.
The guard tower in the southeast corner held a set of stairs that led down to the ground level. This was where they found Chambard. "Wolter and I agreed that he should stay on the rampart. There was a plac
e where he could see almost everything, and he can provide covering fire."
Booth nodded; it wasn’t the time to argue the importance of sticking with a plan, especially with a Gammon.
The wooden stairs let out protests of agony under their feet. "Nothing like sneaking up on 'em, eh?" jibed Scones, who like usual was in the rear behind Chambard and Booth. At the bottom, a doorway led out into the courtyard.
Which was completely empty.
"Move with caution!" Chambard whispered, as if it were necessary to say so. While goblins, impatient to a fault, usually preferred direct attacks, there had been stories of them hiding and ambushing an opponent that wasn't clearly inferior.
They rounded every corner with weapons ready to strike. Every doorway they passed was kicked in and rushed. But all that greeted them in these rooms were motes of dust and the occasional scurrying rodent.
After so many dry attempts, Chambard paused and closed his eyes in front of the sixth door they tried. It was wider, and appeared to lead to what had once been a great hall.
The warrior opened his eyes, nodded once, and thrust his shoulder against it. It resisted, but the sickened splintering of bone-dry wood indicated it wouldn't hold back someone that really wanted in.
Chambard and Booth stood next to each other, counted three, and planted a simultaneous kick at the midpoint of the door. It shattered inward, gouting dust and wood fiber.
It took their eyes a second to adjust to the darkness inside.
In the center of the great room stood a lone goblin warrior. A human warrior would have wielded its weapon two-handed, as a greatsword. In the goblin's hands it was comically oversized. Behind him, a dozen more goblins, male and female, some adult and some adolescent, huddled together in fear.
Booth looked at the lone defender, then at Chambard, who poised to charge. "Wait!"
The taller man didn't look away from the goblin. "What do you mean, wait? There's no way he can swing that thing effectively. I'm surprised he can even hold it up."
"What I mean is: why aren't the others jumping for our throats? Have you ever seen a goblin cower in fear, to say nothing of a whole clan of them?"
"The leftover of some spell by a wizard they were dumb enough to accost. How should I know? All I see in here is an easy payday. Are you telling me you're feeling sympathy, for goblins?”
"No. I just don't like being handed strange gold so easily. Something about this whole exercise stinks."
Wolter, apparently tired of waiting for targets, took up a position alongside the fighters. "What are we to do, Booth? Just walk away and leave a swarm of vermin infesting this place, because it doesn't feel right?"
Before Booth could answer, the goblin swordsman spoke. The words were heartfelt, and not exactly a plea, because the tone of voice was too proud and full of a willingness to die for a
