The other half of the tent was occupied by beds for Reginal and Devry. Reginal slept on an inch thick, goose-feather bed, just like the rest of his men. He would never have better, nor worse, and that way nobody could ever hold a grudge that their chief had more comforts than them. It was one less weapon to use against him in the next chief elections.
His son, Devry, needed more comfort. Not because he was a demanding child. Nope, he was eleven, and Devry would have loved nothing more than to be able to sleep on the dirty ground. He just wanted to be a child.
But his condition meant that couldn’t happen. He needed to be on a soft surface at all times, so he slept on a five-inch-thick duck and goose feather bed. Next to him was an orb that Chief Reginal had an alchemist make for him.
The orb was made from crystal and had been pure white when Reginal bought it. All through each day, mana seeped from it and into Devry’s throat, snaking to his lungs where it sucked poisons from his body and then brought them back into the orb.
The orb had started transparent but was now colored black with Devry’s lung rot, and Reginal would need another soon. Problem was that those things cost a fortune. Not only would some alchemists not deal with goblins, but the ones who were prepared to do so jacked their prices.
The last orb had cleaned Reginal out. He’d organized a few dungeon raids out east, which he and some of the younger warriors scored good loot from. But that was how he got his limp. He was getting too old to lead from the front.
No, the only long-term solution was to win back the mana springs.
Reginal stood over his model of the tunnels. There were two models, one for each tunnel system. So far, they had never broken through either side, and every attempt made them weaker and eroded support for even trying to claim back the springs.
No, this wasn’t working. Reginal would never say it out loud because that would make it seem true, but he saw a day coming where their last assault failed. A day where he came back to his tent, an utter failure, and he found a pure black orb resting beside his son, but the tent was silent. No rasping breaths.
The thought made tears form in his eyes.
“Dad?” cracked a voice.
“I thought you were asleep, Devry. I was just checking on the plan for the next assault. This might be the one.”
“Is that why you look like you’ve been kicked in the balls?”
Reginal laughed. “Fine. It could be better. But we have something in the works, lad.”
“Did you check my notes?” asked Devry. He then sank into a wheezing coughing fit. The orb on the table beside him buzzed. There was a snapping sound, and a hint of a dark stench, and then the orb turned just that little bit darker.
Reginal handed him a pot of water. “Drink.”
“I’m fi-” Devry began, then coughed again, his green skin turning red. Reginal patted his back and found he was sweaty. Devry recovered himself. “I’m fine. Did you read them?”
His son hadn’t inherited his goblin instincts for battle. Reginal had been a killer in his youth. Only for the clan, though. Not for fun. He’d been strong, fast, and ruthless. His hands had felt empty if he didn’t have a dagger in them.
Devry had been ill since he was young, and he’d never had the strength to practice, so he never knew the weight of a blade. But he’d inherited Reginal’s constant need to improve himself, so he’d focused on the part of him that he could exert; his mind.
Reginal glanced at the inch-thick bundle of papers over by his bed. He’d read through half of the notes, using it as material to help him sleep. In the nicest possible way, of course. He didn’t find them boring, he just didn’t have as studious a mind as his son. Devry had written it in goblin cursive. He preferred reading and writing in some of Xynnar’s more common languages, but he had written this for his people.
“Your manifesto?” said Reginal. “I’m almost through it.”
“It’s not a manifesto, dad. Manifesto sounds like I’m trying to persuade people. I’m not, I’m just offering another option.”
“It’s impressive, lad. From what I have read, half of it is based on us moving away from the springs for good.”
Devry nodded. “There are lots of abandoned freeholds and empty plots of land in Xynnar. Many places where the Crystal Wars spread and people didn’t go back. They still think the war-blight taints the land, but they haven’t read the latest botanist studies on how long Blight lasts, and how much of a contaminator it even is.”
“And for all this reading, which I couldn’t be prouder of my boy, you haven’t read about our own people. You’re talking about leaving a place that has been our home for nearly a thousand years.”
“Sometimes a people have to evolve, Dad. We could swear fealty to a lord and get land legitimately. Fertile land that we could farm and raise cows and sheep on. We would send a dozen of us to cultivation school to learn how to grow crops to maximum efficiency, and they can pass their lessons to the others. We eat what we grow, and we sell the surplus.”
“You’re talking about a whole new way of life for us, and you’re forgetting one thing.”
“The springs.”
“The springs, yes. We have spent decades away from them, and the addiction hasn’t got weaker. But something else.”
“What?” asked Devry. His green cheeks were turning red. Reginal knew it was because he was suppressing an almighty cough. Devry knew that Reginal would end their discussion if it was making him ill, and he wanted to finish it so much that he was trying desperately to hide it. Reginal pretended not to notice.
“What did I forget?” asked Devry.
“Do you remember Grandpa Garron, when he got too old to fight?”
Devry nodded.
“His muscles wasted away. He started to leave his tent less often. Eventually, he transferred back to the main camp, where he never left his bed. People need a purpose in life, or they waste away. Maybe your way of life would be easier, but it could be the death of us.”
“Are you thinking about our people now, Dad, or yourself? You don’t have to worry about what happened to Grandpa Garron happening to you.”
“You’re a clever little bag of horse crap, aren’t you?”
Devry laughed, which was a mistake because he wheezed like a mule with a seed stuck in its throat. Reginal patted his back and gave him more water.
When Devry recovered, he took a sip of water. “Some of the defectors say that the Wrotun are lying.”
“They always lie. They are deceivers at heart, down to the way they fight with their traps.”
“They’re making up history, now. That’s what the defectors say. It’s as though lies were woven into their minds from when they were children. Some of them really believe that the Wrotun has lived near the springs for centuries.”
“A child’s mind is like soil, and you can plant whatever you like if you do it early enough,” said Reginal. “See, when you started showing signs that you wanted to study, I promised your mother I would let you pursue whatever subject you wanted. In fact…”
Reginal stopped talking. Devry had fallen asleep now, leaving the chief to think about the boy’s manifesto, because that’s what it was no matter how much he denied it. The boy could be a leader someday.
Not in times of war where they struggled to win back what the Wrotun took from them. But if Reginal could fight and gain back the springs, then their clan would need a chief prepared for growth, not war.
That meant that there was no question of moving the clan yet. In turn, this meant they were split between fighters and settlers, with many of the clan’s families carved down the middle. All the soldiers were living out here, on the wasteland surface. A desolate place that made them miss their families.
His goblin masons had offered to begin work on crude buildings a mile away from the surface doors, but Chief Reginal had refused. Building homes all the way out here, in this desolate wasteland, would be both stupid and pathetic.
Stupid because nothing
grew here, and it was ridiculous to think about constructing a long-term settlement in a place where even the toughest of weeds gave up trying to grow.
Pathetic because building stone or clay houses here would be like settling down. Like admitting defeat.
At least if they lived in canvas tents, he could pretend that this was only a temporary thing. Forget that temporary had meant decades so far. Forget that the rest of the Eternals clan lived thirty miles to the east, where there was soil that they could plant things in.
Sometimes, he thought that he and the whole clan were deluding themselves. They had their tents in the fertile east, and they had a camp here, near the mana springs. The soldiers and their slaves lived here, where they could quickly access the surface doors. The weakest and eldest of the clan lived east, where they grew food and sent it back here so the soldiers could eat.
Then, every so often, they would make plans and form a raid on the doors, each time trying something new.
The furthest they had ever got was to within a half-mile of the mana spring, but they had lost many, many honorable warriors in doing so. A chief of the Eternals clan earned glory by advancing further into the tunnels than the chief before him. He proved how far he had gone by having his soldiers bring back rock from the tunnels. The closer they were to the mana springs, the more mana was encased in the rock.
So far, Reginal had launched the biggest assault, but he hadn’t beaten the last chief’s record.
He needed a new way, and he had it…he thought. But no matter the method, the goal was always the same; claim back the springs from the people who stole them.
Reginal was the latest chief tasked with doing so, and to be honest, he was beginning to think that it was a lost cause. So many lives wasted in raids that bore no fruit.
“Chief?” said a voice outside the tent. “She’s here.”
Reginal felt a flicker of nerves, but he buried them. He glanced at Devry, who was snoring. Not the pretend snoring he faked to listen to Reginal’s chief meetings, either. That had been a problem, lately. Some of the others were unhappy that they had to discuss sensitive attack strategies with a sleeping kid nearby. Reginal wouldn’t budge on it; Devry had to stay there with his bed and orb.
“Chief?” called a voice.
“Send her in please.”
The girl was tall and skinny. She had a human’s white-pink pallor, but a goblin’s eyes. Yeah, there was definitely goblin in her ancestry some way down the line. Looking like that would get her into trouble in some cities, Reginal thought with a sense of heaviness in his soul.
She wore thin cotton trousers and a shirt, with a tight leather cuirass over it. The leather was scorched, scratched, and covered in all manner of marks that you’d expect from a trapper. Gaining Tavia’s loyalty was a big score for the Eternals clan.
“Tavia?” he said.
“You’re the chief? Not gonna lie, chief, I expected someone bigger. You’re kinda wiry.”
“Goblins are built differently. We’re made for stamina, not strength. We’re made to outlast things.”
“Things like the Wrotun?” asked Tavia.
She glanced at Devry then, and Reginal instinctively moved for his dagger. He stopped himself, but the problem was he didn’t quite trust her yet, and he was way too protective of his boy.
“Relax,” said Tavia. “I must have been searched five times before they let me see you.”
“Five times? They’re getting lax. Take a seat.”
Tavia ignored his request and walked to the model of the tunnels. She paced around it, her eyes widening. “This is really good. It looks just like them. You really mapped it out well.”
Reginal was surprised at her attitude. Most of the older Wrotun defectors had needed several meetings with Reginal before they truly accepted the reality of things. Their mind washing had been so ingrained that it had been like trying to pry a barnacle from a whale’s arse.
The most difficult ones had been the family. Two parents, green-skinned and with three eyes. They had sought the surface just like the rest, but they hadn’t wanted to betray their people. They had seen the light in the end, though.
But this girl. She didn’t seem worried in the slightest.
“How much do you know?” asked Reginal.
Tavia picked up a little clay model of a bear trap and moved it just an inch to the right. “I usually cluster the bear traps around here,” she said. “Just by the corner. See, when people are turning corners they tend to look what’s ahead, not beneath.”
“You talk casually about the tools you used to kill my people.”
“Kill your people? I was defending my home. At least I thought I was.”
“Then you are starting to understand?” said Reginal.
“Maybe,” said Tavia. “But you guys really need to change your approach.”
“How so?”
“The dreams. It’s the wrong way to go about it.”
Ah, the dreams. It was many years ago that the clan decided that mindlessly attacking the tunnels through the surface doors wasn’t going to work.
So, they had made their minds up to infiltrate the Wrotun. The only problem was that the Wrotun were suspicious of goblins, so there was no question of sending someone into the caverns as a spy. This meant they needed someone from within the Wrotun to join them.
To get a Wrotun member to turn on their people, you needed to talk to them. How can you talk to people who live deep underground, rarely come to the surface, and feared you so much they would attack a goblin on sight rather than speak to them?
That was when Mage Acton had an idea. Then again, he always did.
Mage Acton was one of the eldest members of the clan. If you traced the clan’s family trees, he was probably Reginal’s fourth uncle or something like that. Goblin family trees tended to branch a little too close to each other.
He was an illusionist by training, having left the clan when he was ten years old to attend the Westharpeth Mage College, returning when he was twenty-one, a fully-grown goblin with mana in his veins and spells in his head. He had loyally served every clan chief since then, treating each equally. When the chief elections came around, Mage Acton always stayed out of the politics side of things.
Action’s idea was to use his illusionism to cast dreams into the minds of the Wrotun. It depended on choosing the most suggestible of them, which in turn meant picking the ones who might be unhappy with the leadership of the First Branch, or whatever stupid name the Wrotun elder had.
So Mage Acton fired illusions deep into the ground, penetrating the minds of numerous sleeping Wrotun people. He then focused on those who enjoyed the dream fully instead of waking up, though Reginal didn’t understand how he did this. He didn’t try to, either. He both needed magic desperately and feared it greatly.
With their targets selected, Mage Acton then cast more refined dreams, invading their target’s sleep with night-time visages that explained to them how the Eternals clan had been the rightful owners of the underground cave and the springs, and how the Wrotun had cast them out.
Reginal couldn’t believe how widespread the Wrotun elders’ stories were. The first-branches had all been around at the time of the invasion, but the branches after them had been born in the caverns, and they fully believed the propaganda that said it had been their home for centuries.
But dreams are a powerful thing indeed, and it was one year after beginning their plan, that the first Wrotun people left the cavern and sought out the Eternals clan to see if their dreams were true.
Now they had scored one of their biggest prizes yet; the Wrotun’s chief trap maker.
“Are you ready to help us?” Reginal asked her.
“I wasn’t. But I spent time in your camp. I can’t believe you let me come and go.”
“We want your willing service, or we do not want it at all.”
“I wish the First-Leaf was more like you. Maybe it would be different. It can’t go on, the way he’s behaving.”
“Then you will help?”
She nodded. “It is better for both our peoples that we leave. We aren’t suited for living underground, and if it weren’t for the springs, I don’t think anyone would have stayed. We need fresh pastures. Fertile soil. And you need your rightful home.”
Reginal said a silent thanks to Mage Acton. “Then we will begin. I need to know every trap you have set.”
“A problem with that,” said Tavia. “They brought in two dungeon cores, one guarding each door.”
“Cores? What?” He felt his blood grow hot then, and his chest tightened. “Cores can create traps at will, can they not?”
Tavia nodded.
“Then how will we get past them?”
“You won’t.”
“Ah. So you aren’t as inclined to help as I believed,” said Reginal.
“It isn’t that. You won’t get by the cores, not unless you want to lose half your clan in doing so. No, chief. You need something else. There aren’t many ways to get underground.”
“I know that, trapper. It was our home after all. The door to the caverns was built by us to be completely proofed against invasion. At any sign of an attack through that, the steps can be destructed, making it a sheer drop.”
Tavia nodded. “And the mana spring doors are defended by dungeon cores.”
“Then it’s useless.”
“It's useless to keep banging your head against the same wall and hoping that the next time you hit it, the wall will crack, instead of your skull. But what if there was a fourth door?”
“Impossible. We would have known.”
“Not if the Wrotun made it in secret. Not if it was never, ever used, and put there as an emergency escape. What if you launched an attack on both spring doors to keep the cores busy, yet sent the bulk of your force through the fourth door?”
CHAPTER 17
There had been something nagging me from the back of my mind. Do you know the feeling? Like something niggling you, telling you there was something you forgot to do? A chore that you forgot, that kind of thing.
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