Goblin Corps, The

by Ari Marmell

  Gork was making very faint strangling noises.

  “And how do you know this?” Havarren asked coldly.

  “Gork has been feeding him…all his information.”

  The kobold stopped choking; the kobold, in fact, went completely silent. He might have tried to vanish, but with soldiers to every side, where could he go?

  “Has he now?” The lanky face went as hard as Katim had ever seen it.

  “Of course,” she continued, her tone calm. “It was the only…way to trap him.”

  “What?” And now the expression was one of utter confusion. So, for that matter, was Gork's. “What are you talking about?” the wizard demanded.

  “Ebonwind approached us in the…tundra. We knew if we rejected…his offer, he'd just find someone…less loyal in the ranks. But if…we could feed him just enough to…keep him coming back, we could…maneuver him into a position where…we could determine exactly who he…worked for. Then you or General Falchion could…capture him alive. Gork was…truly distraught at the lives lost…due to the information we handed…over. But better to lose a few…units now because of…this spy than to lose the…war. After the attacks on…the security patrols and the assault…on General Falchion, we could be certain…that Ebonwind was spying for…Dororam.”

  Havarren pondered for a moment, and then beckoned Gork to step forward. “Is this true?”

  Gork shrugged. “It seemed like the right idea at the time.”

  “I will report this to King Morthûl. If you have indeed discovered the spy we've been searching for, you will be rewarded. You should have told us immediately, mind you—you haven't the authority to initiate an operation of this sort—but if it worked, I think we can overlook it. This time.

  “I must go immediately; Rhannik will inform you when it's time to begin your phase of the operation.” A wave of his hand, a few whispered syllables, and he was gone.

  Slowly, Gork sidled over to stand beside Katim. Together they stared at the flaming barrels raining down into the chasm. “Why?” Gork finally asked.

  “It seemed like the right…idea at the time.”

  The kobold scowled. “If you expect me to believe for one tiny, minuscule, insignificant second that you did this out of the goodness of your hearts, you must think I’m dumber than she is.” He gestured in the vague direction of the ogre, who was trying hard to grasp Gimmol's patient explanation as to why they couldn't just fill the entire chasm with oil and light it all at once.

  The troll grinned, a far nastier expression than Gork had ever seen.

  “Just remember that you do…owe me, Gork. A great deal. That…fact might just be relevant someday.”

  Gork stared up at the face of the troll and wondered briefly if a torturous death at the hands of the Charnel King could really be all that bad.

  Another hour died screaming before Rhannik decided that the bombardment had been sufficient, and a couple more after that until the flames below had diminished enough to make a sortie possible. The squad assembled at the edge of the chasm, beside both the general and an insanely thick rope that trailed down into the depths.

  “Best guess is that it's three to four hundred feet down,” he reminded them. “What with the various overhangs and the ruins of the city, there are certainly fires still burning that we can't see from up here.”

  Cræosh sniffed. “We're about to walk into the lair of those fucking worms from hell. I find myself less than concerned about a few stray bonfires.”

  “Hopefully,” Rhannik continued with a glower at the other orc, “the rain of pitch was enough to wipe out most of the resistance. With a smattering of luck, and those elixirs, you might just find Sabryen himself and kill the bastard.” He paused long enough to look each and every one of them in the eye. Katim found herself impressed, despite herself; very few beings—Morthûl notwithstanding—could hold her gaze for long. “This is important,” he said finally, once he was sure he had their attention. “You're on deadline. You have three days to come back.”

  “And after that?” Gimmol asked nervously.

  “Morthûl would prefer to have you kill Sabryen personally,” the general said, “so we can confirm that he's dead. But if you aren't back in three days, my orders are to resume bombardment.”

  Something in the general's tone made the hair on Cræosh's neck stand tall. “For how long?” he asked carefully.

  “Days. Possibly weeks, if we can spare the pitch and naphtha from the war effort. It's not a perfect solution; there'll be no way to be sure if we've gotten Sabryen. Nevertheless, if you don't make it back, my orders are to do what I can to basically cauterize the entire chasm like a fucking wound.” His smile was utterly devoid of humor. “So you might want to consider hurrying.”

  Belrotha was unaccustomed to this sort of climb, primarily because she had never before encountered a rope capable of supporting her weight, and nearly lost her grip more than once. Each time, the entire squad would tense, and each time, she recovered only after slipping several feet down the column of hemp. After the third incident, Cræosh glanced up at Katim. “And you wondered why I insisted that she go first.”

  “I wasn't surprised that you wanted…her to go first,” the troll corrected. “I was surprised that you…had sufficient forethought to think…of it on your own.”

  Still, while harrying, their descent concluded without major mishap. The bottom proved to be almost exactly 350 feet from the top, leaving an additional 50 feet of rope. Cræosh wondered idly what they would have done had the general misjudged the depth of the chasm, and then firmly decided not to think about it.

  Without a word, the squad scattered, weapons in hand. Some crouched against the wall, some vanished into the shadows; all were prepared to meet just about any sort of resistance.

  None presented itself. They'd very deliberately descended the chasm wall some several hundred yards south of Krohketh's ruins—or where Rhannik and Havarren had estimated them to be, anyway—but still, the goblins were half convinced they were going to find an army of singed and seriously pissed-off worms lurking in wait. Only after several tense moments did they meld together again as a group and, after a whispered discussion, set out slowly toward the north.

  Before long, the burning embers and flickering flames of Rhannik's assault began winking at them coyly through the shadows of the chasm's depths. The light cast strange shapes, filtered through the stinking, oily, smoke-tinged air and the rubble of the outermost ravaged buildings. Ever nearer they came to the heart of Sabryen's domain, and still they encountered no resistance.

  “Either that rain of fire was really damn successful,” Gork said, “or…”

  “I have an idea,” Gimmol said from Belrotha's shoulder. “How about we don't dwell on ‘or’?”

  The squad finally reached the outskirts of Krohketh, and all thoughts of “or” now appeared excessive. Rhannik's bombardment had definitely been a success.

  There could be no telling, from this distance, how much was a result of the initial collapse, centuries before, and how much a result of the attack. Most of Krohketh lay in ruins, piles of shattered stone and heaps of dirt that only vaguely resembled the structures they'd once been. Only against the edges of the gap did a few buildings stand—crooked, unsteady, supported by neighboring edifices that were equally precarious, or by the cliff-face itself. Every surviving wall was riddled with faults; the few expanses of stone not thoroughly coated in the dust of ages were now blackened with soot. Cræosh felt the grime permeating the air, settling into his pores. He found himself briefly longing for a bath, then quickly sublimated such thoughts before they could open the floodgates to other sissy desires that might lurk in the back of his mind.

  He watched as Katim sniffed the air, her coarse fur bristling, but he didn't need the troll's sensitive snout to detect the multitude of competing stenches in the air. Smoke, of course, clinging to the walls and emerging in fits and coughs from the fires crackling away in unseen hollows. The earthy aroma of the d
irt that lay beneath the rocks along the floor of the Demias Gap. That peculiar scent of age itself, wafting from the patina of years that lay across the ruins.

  But there was something else, too, something alien to Cræosh's experiences—and, to judge by her puzzled look, outside the troll's as well. It wasn't until something crunched loudly beneath someone's foot—Jhurpess's, as the bugbear wandered off to the side—that Katim and Cræosh both realized what it was.

  Worms. Thousands, perhaps millions of worms, maggots, millipedes—all spread throughout the city, all charred to tiny, twisted crisps. They covered the surviving roads, a sick attempt at paving; they clung to the walls, baked into the mortar and stone. Cræosh swallowed nervously, truly comprehending for the first time just how hopeless it would have been to fight through such a horde.

  “Okay,” he announced, his voice low. “Here's how this is gonna work. We have to split up.”

  “What?” Gork appeared fully prepared to go into one of his near-hysterical tirades until Belrotha leaned over and tapped him on the head. It was, to her credit, a very gentle tap, so it only stunned him into silence, rather than knocking him out utterly (and possibly causing permanent damage in the process).

  “Thank you,” Cræosh said.

  The ogre shrugged. “Me want to know where kobold keep his voice, ‘cause it too big to fit in such tiny body.”

  Cræosh couldn't help but laugh. “It is, isn't it? All right, then. General Rhannik's done a pretty good job of clearing out the critters, but you can be damn sure there's a whole fuckload left somewhere. So what we've gotta do is get eyeballs on as much of this place as possible. The place where the worms start reemerging the fastest, that's where we'll find Sabryen.”

  “Makes sense,” Katim admitted, nodding. The others agreed—even Gork, though he was somewhat slow to chime in, and his words were slightly slurred.

  “So here's what I’m thinking,” the orc continued. “Jhurpess, find a perch somewhere—a ledge, one of the standing buildings, whatever—and get as high as you can without collapsing anything. If you see anything suspicious, or if you see one of the teams getting into trouble, you give a yell.”

  The bugbear nodded.

  “Gimmol, you're with Belrotha. You work well together. You do the searching—eyes or magic, whichever you think best—and she keeps you alive to do it.

  “Gork, you're with Fezeill. Hey! Shut the fuck up and deal with it. The two of you can squeeze into the nooks and crannies, where the rest of us can't reach.”

  “I don't remember anybody putting you in charge,” Gork spat at him.

  “That's because you were practically unconscious at the time.” He crooked a finger at Belrotha. “You want a reminder?”

  “Ah, no. I think me and Fezeill make a wonderful team.”

  “Splendid.” Cræosh sighed. After that speech, he couldn't very well make too big an issue out of this next step. “Katim, you're with me.”

  The troll's snout twitched. “That must have…galled you.”

  The orc shrugged. “Ain't anyone else left, is there?”

  “There is that,” she said.

  “Any of you find anything, sing out. We shouldn't be more than a few minutes away from each other. And for fuck's sake, don't take on the whole lot of them by yourself!”

  They scattered, Jhurpess making for one of the structures that didn't look entirely unsound. The last thing Cræosh heard was Belrotha asking her partner, “Does orc care what song me sing if me find anything? Me not know any orcish songs.”

  Fezeill, in a decision that, though logical for crawling through tiny gaps, lacked all sense of tact, had once again taken the form of a kobold. Gork took that as a personal insult—which, to be fair, might well have been the intent—and for the first hour of their search, he refused to communicate with the doppelganger beyond the occasional grunt.

  The pair of them had just twisted and shoved themselves into a rundown, rubble-filled structure. The spacious interior suggested this might once have been an official or government building of some sort, but the outer walls were so crumbled that ingress had proved nigh impossible for even their tiny frames. They both swiftly relit their torches and scanned the wreckage. Fezeill immediately resumed the diatribe he had begun moments earlier, and Gork realized that his fists were clenching of their own accord around both his torch and his kah-rahahk.

  “It's the same thing I've tried to point out to you before,” Fezeill told him, staring into blackness only slightly diluted by the torchlight. “You take things too personally. I thought you might have learned that after your brief stint in prison, or at least over the course of our travels. You're never going to make a good thief if you can't put your own petty feelings aside. Your attitude right now is a perfect example. Why it should bother you what I…look…”

  The doppelganger's voice dribbled away as both he and Gork stared at the wall before them. A single worm poked its head through a tiny gap in the stones. It very carefully drifted from one side to the other, as though engaged in some reconnaissance of its own. Then it casually dropped off the wall to the dusty ground and began slowly squirming toward the intruders. A second worm emerged from behind it, a third, a millipede and two maggots, another worm…

  It wasn't a large swarm, not compared to others they'd faced. But it was big enough.

  Gork, accustomed to fighting alongside much larger allies, stepped behind Fezeill, putting the doppelganger between him and the approaching vermin. “Fezeill,” he asked, a nervous quiver in his voice, “if you're injured, and you shift form, can you make your wounds heal or close up at all as part of the transformation?”

  “I wish. This sort of thing would be much easier if I could.” Even from the back, Gork could tell that he sneered. “Why, are you hoping I might protect your precious hide?”

  “Something like that.”

  The pommel of the kah-rahahk crunched into the outside of Fezeill's knee. The joint separated with a loud pop and the doppelganger collapsed, screaming. His torch and his sword both skittered across the stone as both hands dropped instinctively to clutch at the terrible injury.

  Gork glided across the uneven floor to the nearest wall. The building was in such a sorry state that even the tiny kobold had little difficulty knocking a section of stones loose, scattering them across the prostrate doppelganger—who, in his agony, had begun shifting back to his natural, repulsive form. They weren't as large or as heavy as Gork might have preferred, those stones, but they would be enough to account for the shattered knee if anyone were to ask. He added a few more anyway, just to make it look good, working quickly as the worms edged closer.

  “Gork, what are you doing?!” The panic in Fezeill's voice was the most beautiful song the kobold had ever heard.

  He didn't answer. Instead, he bent forward and, with the greatest care, plucked the lead worm from the ground. He squeezed it just behind the head, ensuring that it couldn't turn on him—but he held it gently, taking great care not to injure the wiggling thing. And finally he knelt beside the fallen doppelganger, snout split in a wide grin.

  “What…?” Fezeill began again—just as Gork had hoped he would.

  Gork clamped his palm over Fezeill's open mouth and let the worm drop. The doppelganger gagged and then started to spasm, the heel of his one good leg beating hard against the ground.

  “Don't you worry now, Fezeill,” Gork said comfortingly, patting his cheek and then rising. “I'll bring the others back in time to dispose of your corpse properly. You won't be coming back as a shambling mass of worms, I promise.”

  “Gork…” It came out choked, nearly unintelligible. A bubble of yellow ichor burst between Fezeill's lips and oozed down the side of his face.

  “I could tell you that this is for getting me arrested back in Timas Khoreth. Or for any one of a thousand other slights.” Gork's grin was so wide it was astounding the entire upper half of his head didn't simply topple off. “But you shouldn't really care. After all, I’m sure you're n
ot taking this personally.”

  And with that, he was gone.

  For long minutes Fezeill thrashed and squirmed as he felt that thing tunneling through his innards. Nearer and nearer the rest of the swarm crept, and there was nothing he could…

  Yes, there was! The elixirs!

  Each member of the squad carried two of Havarren's vials. If he could reach his, he might survive to repay the kobold for this treachery. Eagerly, questing fingers thrust themselves into the pouch at his side.

  The pouch, he realized far too late, that Gork had deliberately smashed with some of those falling stones. His fingertips tore against shards of broken ceramic and came away coated in both ichor and the last lingering drops of potion that had not yet seeped through the burlap.

  Around the tearing agony in his throat, despite the fact that many of his vocal chords had already separated, Fezeill howled his frustration, his fury, into the uncaring darkness.

  He was still howling when the worms reached him, but Fezeill's final screams were not of rage.

  “Well,” Cræosh said, his face flickering in the light of the burning mass that, moments before, had been the remains of his shapeshifting companion, “I guess that's that. Anybody wanna say anything?”

  Most of the squad just peered at him. A few shuffled their feet. Belrotha—who'd hauled away enough of the wall to allow them access to the structure and was now standing with her hands pressed against the ceiling to ensure it didn't bury the lot of them as it had partly done Fezeill—just grunted. Nobody spoke up.

  “Yeah,” the orc said finally, “me neither.”

  So far, nobody had questioned Gork's wide-eyed account of their battle with the swarming creatures, their lashing out with blades and torches both, the doppelganger's wild swing that had brought down a portion of loose wall right on top of him. Nobody questioned, for there was no cause to question—but Cræosh allowed himself to idly wonder. And the troll's narrowed gaze, fixed on the kobold even as she'd recommended burning the body to prevent it from rising again, suggested that he was not the only one.