The Rover

by Mel Odom

  Maybe some of them retained the knowledge from those days, Wick thought. But for so many of them to be here now meant that Orpho Kadar had purposefully sought them out and brought them to Hanged Elf’s Point. That likelihood left Wick frightened. The goblin pirate king was raising an army and a navy perhaps only a month’s sailing distance from Greydawn Moors.

  The little librarian wanted to believe that was only ill luck, but he realized he couldn’t afford to hope that was true. Arghant had told Captain Farok that the goblinkin were intentionally sailing more deeply into the Blood-Soaked Sea. Do they know the Vault of All Known Knowledge lies in that direction? Wick worried. The possibility started his stomach churning, reminding him that he hadn’t even gotten his half ration of pasty gruel that morning.

  He turned away from the clangor of the goblinkin forges. The hiss of heated metal in water behind him sounded like gigantic snakes.

  By the time they reached the stockades, Wick and Harran were practically carrying Minniger, and they weren’t doing very well at it. Both of them staggered even under the old man’s slight weight.

  High stone walls ringed the stockades, which were, for all intents and purposes, holding pens. Goblin guards patrolled the walls, all of them armed with swords and crossbows. Broken glass and pieces of sharp-edged metal embedded in the walls offered proof against any would-be climbers.

  On two of the walls, narrow slats had been cut that offered viewing inside the pens. Wick quickly realized that the slats offered hand- and footholds, but the expanse of wall above the slatted area was still too much to climb up even if the guards hadn’t been on patrol.

  When they reached the double doors in the front of the stockades, the goblin crewman who’d overseen their transportation to the area halted them. He pulled his sword from his hip. “Down on yer knees with ye, then, and quicklike. I got me a powerful thirst on an’ ain’t the likes of ye a-gonna kept betwixt me an a schooner or two of ale real soon.”

  Some of the dwellers in the front row hesitated. Goblin crewmen quickly stepped in and beat them down with cudgels, leaving bloody heads and faces in their wake. Keening and moaning echoed around Wick as he dropped to his knees. Grit covering the hard stone bedrock of the area ground into his flesh. During the harsh journey on Ill Wind, the rot and mold that infested the lower cargo hold of the slave ship had infested his clothing. It hung in tatters about him, offering scant protection and only a modicum of modesty.

  “If ye want to go into this bloody,” the crewman roared, “because ye ain’t a-willin’ to listen to reason, that’s fine.” He grinned cruelly. “Them what buys ye ain’t a-lookin’ for sightly slaves. I puts a few knots on yer head for ye before I leaves ye here, why they’ll just think ye’ve had a little sense beat into ye.”

  Wick felt his blouse for the journal, shifting it so that it was less likely to show in case they had to submit to some kind of inspection. I should have thrown it into the harbor when we were being brought ashore. The little librarian felt certain that if the book somehow made its way into Orpho Kadar’s hands that the goblinkin pirate king would understand what it was soon enough.

  And if it is found with me, Wick suddenly realized, it will mark me. They would torture me to find out everything I know about Greydawn Moors and the Vault of All Known Knowledge. He felt beaten and helpless. His family, the Vault, the city where he’d been born and loved all his life, all of it lay vulnerable now because of his selfishness. The book he had once been so proud of was an object to despise and fear—ashes to the taste. He was so smart he’d outsmarted himself.

  A group of goblinkin marched from the front of the stockades. They quickly set up tables on either side of the entrance. Peering at them, Wick saw they had pliers with powerful jaws. Each table had a crate of glistening metal bits.

  “Ye’re gonna be marked before ye’re turned loose inside the holding pens,” the crewman said. “Ye’ll get an earring that carries the seal of Ill Wind cargo, showing who owns ye before ye’re put up on the slave block. That’s ye. If’n ye resist, I’m a-gonna beat ye bloody an’ senseless. Mayhap I’ll even kill a couple or three of ye to show ye I mean business. Have it yer own way, ’cause I’ll be a-havin’ mine after that.”

  The slaves were quickly divided into two lines, and the rest of the group was herded into one or the other. Wick tried not to listen to the cries of pain that came from the front of the line. He waited his turn, knowing anything he could try to do would be futile. Crossbowmen waited eagerly at the top of the wall, and everyone there knew what would happen if they tried to run.

  When it was Wick’s turn, one of the goblinkin grabbed him by the chain between his wrist manacles, pulled him forward, and tripped him. The little librarian couldn’t help struggling when the man fell on top of him as he had every other person that had been marked. The goblin smelled sour and foul, and he giggled as he punched Wick in the back of the head.

  Sharp metal bit into Wick’s left ear. He tried to struggle, but the goblin holding him down wrapped an arm over his head and jammed his face into the ground with bruising force. The little librarian’s senses spun for a moment and he almost hoped he would pass out. Then he heard the pliers ratchet as they closed, curling the metal marker thought the top of his ear. He cried out in pain, unable to stop himself. Warm blood flowed into his ear canal, making him temporarily deaf.

  Before he could recover, two goblins swiftly yanked him to his feet. He stood woozily between them, trying to comprehend everything that was happening to him. Blood dripped from his split lip as well, and he tasted the coppery flavor against his teeth.

  Another goblin sloshed liquid over Wick, drenching the whole side of his head. His ear burned terribly, and the acrid scent was definitely alcohol, perhaps some cheaply made homegrown vintage the goblins made.

  “Keep that ear clean, halfer,” the goblin warned, sounding strange since Wick could only hear him with one ear and that one was on the other side of his head. “If’n ye let it get infected and go rotten, I’ll take the ear offa yer head and mark ye through the other one.”

  Wick looked at the goblin, working to comprehend everything he was being told.

  “Ye run outta ears,” the goblin warned, “then we start putting markers in the side of yer face.” He grabbed Wick’s shirt and yanked him toward the entrance to the stockades. “Keep movin’ or they’re gonna bury ye where ye stand.”

  Barely able to keep upright, Wick staggered to the next goblin. He was forced to his knees again. Senses swimming, feeling as though he were in some kind of nightmare that he couldn’t wake from, he saw motion from the corner of his eye. He turned just in time to watch a hammer swish down. He closed his eyes, not wanting to see it hit him. Instead, the hammer struck the collar around his neck. The steel collar drove hard against his flesh, promising deep bruising. Then it burst open, freed from the pin that held it together. Two more swift strokes freed him from the wrist manacles as well, but they left him in the ankle manacles.

  He was yanked to his feet once more, then thrown through a door he barely had time to see. He smashed against the crudely made iron bars, curling his hands around them just in time to keep from falling.

  “Come on, Wick,” Harran whispered. “You can do this. Don’t let them see you weak.”

  Wick remained against the bars. “They know I’m weak, and if I move, they’ll know that I’m only trying to fool them.”

  “Then do it for yourself,” Harran said. “Do it for those dwellers who are going to have to walk around you when they’re barely making it themselves.”

  Feeling ashamed, Wick pushed himself from the bars. He stood, swaying, and glanced at Harran.

  Harran looked horrible. Blood dripped from his mangled ear and stained his shoulder. Dark shadows hung under his eyes. “Let’s go.”

  Wordlessly, Wick nodded and followed the other man. The entrance turned out to be a long corridor that followed the inside walls of the stockades, curling three-fourths of the way around the holding p
ens. By his count, there were twenty lots inside the stockade, and each of them had its own entrance from the corridor. Goblin guards walked across the close-set bars overhead and opened the succession of gates by unlocking them and pulling them up, allowing entrance into lot eighteen.

  Sullen and dispirited faces of dwellers peered at them from the other pens they passed. All of them were bedraggled and filthy.

  Lot eighteen was an open barren space with worn stone as a floor. Nasty pallets lay scattered over the ground. Waste buckets sat in all four corners. The dwellers that had been processed early already started lining the walls, sitting or lying where they fell. And over it all was the same stench that had filled the cargo hold and given Ill Wind her name.

  People have died here, Wick suddenly thought as he entered the holding pen. He went numb inside, chilled to the bone though he could now feel the sun’s embrace streaming from above. Angry throbbing filled the whole side of his head, threatening to make him sick. If I had known this was what was going to happen to me when I surrendered myself from One-Eyed Peggie, could I have done it? He seriously doubted it at the moment, and that made him feel sad. A hero would, he told himself. Was that what you were thinking you were when you volunteered to go with the goblinkin?

  Hurting, Wick eased himself down beside a section of the wall with the slats that peered outside over Hanged Elf’s Point. The breeze helped wash away some of the stench, carrying the sharp tang of the ocean. Then the breeze shifted, drawing the stench from the inside of the stockades, burying the little librarian in miasma.

  Minniger staggered into the pen and crumpled only a few feet from the entrance.

  Wick looked at the old man, unable to see if he was breathing, not knowing if Minniger was alive or dead. He tried to push himself up, thinking that he should go check, but he couldn’t get up.

  He thought of his father then, of how Metterin Lamplighter had picked him up after he’d fallen. He didn’t know how many times his father had come to him in the dead hours of the night to comfort him when he had a bad dream induced by the stories he’d read while studying at the Conservatoire of Literature. His father had shown him how to tend to the glimmerworms, how to milk them for the lummin juice. And when Wick’s interest in lanterns had dawned, his father had trained him then.

  Now, when an ocean separated them and he was bound in a slave pen, the little librarian suddenly realized how much his father had really been there to help him become everything that he had. And the best that I have ever been able to do, Wick thought, was become a Third Level Librarian. The worst thing I ever did was accept that and tell myself it was enough.

  What would he do different if he had the chance, he asked himself. Everything. He’d been selfish in some ways, and he’d been arrogant thinking that he might contribute in any way to the Vault’s real work. That was why Grandmagister Ludaan had never moved him up, and why Grandmagister Frollo found so much fault with him.

  Memory of the Embyr and how he had hurt her by revealing the murder of her parents and brothers and her own enchantment by Lord Kharrion’s foulness stirred Wick’s mind. He grieved for her and remembered the child’s beautiful face etched with the pain he’d caused.

  There were so many, many things he’d done wrong.

  Desperately, he tried to think back to the last happy moment he’d spent with someone.

  Other slaves kept filing into the pen, filling up the space around them, but he fell into a deep slumber long before the last of them made it through.

  Night lay over Hanged Elf’s Point. Jhurjan the Swift and Bold raced in his scarlet glory across the dark, starry heavens while Gesa the Fair hid her lovely smile.

  Wick stood at the slats and peered out at the city from within the holding pen. Despite the lateness of the hour, the city remained awake and alert. Goblins and humans walked the streets or rode horses beneath huge braziers that served as street lamps.

  Wick’s father had told him about such braziers that had burned in Greydawn Moors during the earliest days of the Building Time. They were the size of bushel baskets and held firewood that had been presoaked in oil. At the time, the glimmerworm production was small due to the few worms the first dwellers had brought with them. It was years before lanterns had been built and the glimmerworms were in satisfactory numbers to fill them.

  A cart drawn by two donkeys made its way slowly down the side of the street. A goblin drove the cart and three dwellers in the back pitched firewood from the back of the vehicle into the braziers. Bright orange sparks climbed into the air from each brazier they fed.

  Wick looked up involuntarily, drawn by the footsteps of a guard on the wall overhead. Braziers marked the stockades as well, stripping away most of the shadows in the pens. Still, nearly all of the people in Wick’s pen were asleep, curled up and sleeping against each other for mutual warmth as the cold night air blew over them. Neither bedding nor new clothes had been offered, and Wick knew that provisioning those would have come from someone’s profits.

  He wished he could sleep. He knew he was tired enough, but his mind—as it so often did—wouldn’t cooperate. He’d woken, roused by thoughts running through his head that he couldn’t turn off. At first, he’d hoped everything he’d been through these past several days was just a dream, but one glance at the stone walls around him shattered that hope immediately.

  “Can’t sleep?” Harran asked.

  “No,” Wick replied quietly, not wanting to disturb those around them who’d found that healing balm.

  “It would be better if you could.”

  “I know. I’ve tried.” Once he’d woken, Wick’s thoughts had turned immediately to the threat Hanging Elf’s Point presented to everything he held dear. How long would it be before a goblin ship inadvertently discovered the island that had been so long lost in the fogs of the Blood-Soaked Sea, guarded by monsters and the dwarven pirates? He didn’t know, and that uncertainty worried at him constantly. “I can’t believe I’m seeing humans walking down the street with goblinkin.”

  “They do here,” Harran commented.

  “Before the Cataclysm, the goblins stood alone from all the other” races.

  “That was a long time ago,” Harran said, “if those stories are even true.”

  “They’re true.”

  Harran leaned back against the wall and stared up at Wick. He looked like he might have wanted to say something further but he kept his own counsel. “Things are different here, Wick. Different than I guess they must be from wherever you’re from—Orsin’s Saucer.”

  “Yes,” Wick said, regretting that the lie was between them. Harran seemed intelligent enough, too intelligent to believe what he was being told.

  “Here in Hanged Elf’s Point, I’ve been told,” Harran said, “anything goes. There are human, dwarven, and elven villages on the outskirts of this city as well as those of the goblinkin, and all of them want the free labor provided by owning dweller slaves.”

  The thought horrified Wick. “Humans, dwarves, and elves around here keep dwellers as slaves?”

  “Yes. Even the people in Lottar’s Crossing know that.”

  “I didn’t,” Wick said contritely. He examined the thought, finding it appalling. “The humans, dwarves, elves, and dwellers united to eradicate Lord Kharrion during the Cataclysm. How could they condone enslavement of our people?”

  “Along the Shattered Coast,” Harran said, “most people believe the dwellers are no more than pests that need to be controlled. Enslaving them is one way to accomplish that.”

  “So the humans, elves, and dwarves in town at the moment are here to buy dweller slaves?”

  “Yes. Hanged Elf’s Point is still restricted to goblinkin settlement. Orpho Kadar is very rigid about that. However, he’ll take gold from whomever has it.”

  Raucous laughter came up the street outside the holding pen. Humans and goblins and dwarves stumbled out onto the street, hollering and shouting at each other. The elves that came from the tavern tended to stay a
mong themselves.

  “That’s not what the Old Ones made the dwellers to do,” Wick protested.

  “You’re referring to the legend of Daghuan the Survivor,” Harran said.

  Wick nodded, repeating the legend his father had first told him that had become one of the founding edicts in the Vault of All Known Knowledge. “The Old Ones created the dweller races to live in the small places of the world. In their wisdom, they had known that the dwellers would be necessary to prevent the loss of knowledge during the Cataclysm and the battles against Lord Kharrion. And in dwellers, the Old Ones knew they had a race who could survive any hardship and yet remain humble enough not to reach for the power they were given custody of.”

  “They can’t survive any hardship,” Harran stated softly. “They die in the mines around here and elsewhere easily enough.” There was a trace of bitterness in his voice.

  “It’s because of the goblinkin,” Wick said.

  Harran shook his head. “It’s not just the goblinkin who enslave us these days, Wick. There are humans and dwarves and elves that have fallen into selfish ways. They conquer each other occasionally, but they conquer us all the time.”

  Unable to continue making eye contact with Harran, Wick looked away. He knew the man was telling the truth as he knew it, but that couldn’t be true, could it? Human, dwarf, elf, and dweller had always stood against the goblinkin. That was one of the things that Lord Kharrion had underestimated. He glanced back out at the street, watching people who should be enemies strolling casually by each other.

  These people have forgotten more than the evil of Lord Kharrion, the little librarian thought. They’ve forgotten how close this world came to extinction even though they’re living in one of the greatest graveyards left by the Cataclysm.