The Rebellion s-1

by Jean Rabe

  But maybe the ogres would hunt them and sell them as slaves again.

  Direfang knew that slaves were a precious commodity to Neraka’s Dark Knights and, therefore, a lucrative business for those who caught and sold them.

  Smaller groups would be easier for the slavers to catch and control.

  Many of the goblins had held on to the swords and knives they’d carried away from their battle with the knights. Those weapons could prove useful in fights with ogres or minotaurs.

  Direfang knew there were tribes of ogres in the hills, and some minotaurs had moved in from the east. He’d been captured by ogres years past and sold to the Dark Knights. He knew ogres to be vicious and formidable, three times the size of any goblin, outweighing even himself. Yet at that moment, he didn’t fear them as much as he feared leading more than one thousand goblins.

  He could recall the day he was captured with clarity. He could still feel the steely grip of the ogres’ hands on his shoulders and legs, feel himself being lifted high and tossed onto the ground with others from his clan and chained hand and foot. He remembered the ogres’ pungent breath and their large red-rimmed eyes, their bugcrusted hair and yellowed teeth.

  He trembled from the memory.

  But then, he realized, his band of rebellious goblins-his army-could crush a village of ogres.

  He looked down at them. Their faces were turned expectantly toward him.

  “Together there is strength,” Direfang said finally. He swallowed hard and suppressed a shudder. “Together there is power,” he said. “Together …” The rest of his words were drowned out in a cacophonous cheer of agreement.

  When the cheering subsided, he heard Graytoes talking. She and Moon-eye had climbed higher and knelt on a table rock below him.

  “… to command all of the goblins, Direfang,” Graytoes said. He didn’t catch all her words-the cheering was too loud.

  But he understood what she meant. It was up to him now. He had to hand out orders, command all the goblins, just like the Dark Knight’s Marshal Montrill had ordered around all of the knights in the mining camp.

  “South now!” he called to them. “Find food and water along the way. More sheep and goats penned by men. Together there will be strength and power.” There was more cheering as Direfang eased himself down the slope, Graytoes and Moon-eye fussing over him, and Mudwort following close behind.

  “You have looked to the south?” Direfang asked Mudwort. “What is to the south?” He’d seen her meditating on the rocks and knew she had been talking to the earth.

  The red-skinned goblin pursed her lips. “Freedom is to the south,” she answered, but she did not meet his eyes.

  “Then let us go south now.” Direfang began to march, moving his feet in time with the thrumming in his head, his right leg no longer paining him. It was a slow pace for him but one that allowed him to think and to not worry about the older goblins keeping up as he pondered where exactly to lead his eager army.

  To the south, certainly, and south would take him along the foothills and deep into the Khalkist Mountains-away from Jelek and the city of Neraka and the major roads where they might encounter significant Dark Knight forces.

  Suddenly, Direfang felt thirsty again.

  He stared at the ground as he tramped across it, seeing cracks everywhere as though the entire landscape were a dry creek bed that stretched to the edge of his vision. The unevenness of it could have been natural or caused by the quakes; it made no difference to him. The sun continued to beat down on his shoulders, though after a few miles, clouds diminished the heat. At least he thought clouds were responsible until he heard worried murmurs from the goblins directly behind him.

  The hobgoblin looked up to see a billowing gray mass pass overhead. It carried with it the stench of sulfur, which he knew well from the mining camp. But it was a slightly different smell, harsher and more painful and at the same time more interesting. It was followed by another gray puff, the tail of which led to one of the volcanoes that towered in the southern half of the country.

  The volcanoes belched frequently at night, coloring the darkness with their ribbons of orange, red, and glowing yellow. Sometimes they rumbled, as the ground had done during the quakes. And on more than one occasion, they’d sent so much steam and smoke into the sky that the sun was blotted out for days. There’d been only one significant eruption of the volcanoes during Direfang’s stint in the mining camp, and he wondered if another were imminent.

  The top of the volcano he stared at was glowing as red as coals at the bottom of a goblin funeral pyre.

  “Yes,” Mudwort said, answering his unspoken question. “The mountain is angry now like the earth was angry.” She grinned broadly, her eyes sparkling. “That mountain will break very soon. Good we go south and thread through the angry volcanoes. Dark Knights will not follow us across such angry ground.”

  His goblin friend’s mind indeed had gone sour, Direfang thought. Mountains could not break. Not even the earthquakes had shattered the mountain that the steel mine was in. They had simply collapsed the tunnels. Still, he shivered as another cloud of smoke and ash belched up from the crater.

  “South leads to freedom,” Mudwort said. She cackled and rubbed her hands together-something the hobgoblin had not seen her do before.

  “Hope Mudwort right,” Direfang muttered as he moved ahead.

  24

  A VILLAGE OF MONSTERS

  They could have passed for giants, the eight ogres the goblin army swarmed in the mountain pass. Though they were easily nine feet tall and had shoulders as broad as boulders, they’d been caught by surprise and put up only a token resistance before being beaten to bloody lumps by Direfang’s goblin horde.

  The scene was made more gruesome by the darkening sky and the flocks of birds racing to the east. It had been noon from the position of the sun when Direfang first spied the ogres. But within the passing of a few minutes, all the time it took for the killing, the sky had turned ominously gray and the air cooled.

  Some goblins noticed the quick change in the weather but were not overly concerned. Weather was nothing they could do anything about. They were more curious about the dead ogres and what might be in the pouches dangling from their rope belts. Those goblins and hobgoblins who were farther back in the column-and who hadn’t even joined the fight with the ogres-were more interested in why everyone had stopped and why the scent of blood was so heavy in the air.

  “More vicious here than against the Dark Knights,” Mudwort said of the goblins feasting on their ogre enemies. She had reclaimed her perch on Erguth’s shoulders and was watching her brethren with a certain amount of disgust. “See the blood? More angry at the ogres than at the foul Dark Knights.” She turned Erguth’s head so he could look at the largest ogre corpse, which had been practically shredded. “Much angrier, this fight. See?”

  Ogres had captured most of the goblins in the first place then subsequently sold them to the Dark Knights in the mining camp. Mudwort detested ogres with all her heart for that reason, but she’d not taken part in the slaughter-instead, she and Erguth had allowed the other goblins to surge past them and join the frenzy of killing and feasting. She was tired of blood, tired in general. And she was much more interested in the changes in the dark afternoon sky.

  “It is a good vicious,” Erguth returned, eyes fixed on the massive shredded ogre. “A most happy vicious.”

  “Yes, it is,” Mudwort said after a moment. She placed her bony chin on top of his head and watched goblins smear ogre blood on each other’s faces. They were painting clan symbols, some she didn’t recognize. Some were arguing over choice pieces of the fallen, and over the protestations of others, a barrel-chested hobgoblin claimed a rough-weave tunic that one of the ogres had worn. The garment fell to the hobgoblin’s ankles and was spattered with blood, but it was in better repair than most of the garments looted from Steel Town.

  Mudwort looked at the sky again and nudged Erguth to forge ahead through the crowd.
The mountain pass was relatively narrow, allowing only seven or eight goblins to squeeze through it at one time, resulting in Direfang’s army stretching way back and meandering along the trail like a winding river. Word of the ogre deaths was still being whispered along the line, and she heard Brak and Folami and Crelb and others grumbling behind her that they’d been too far back to take part in the glorious bloodletting.

  Had Mudwort not been on Erguth’s shoulders, the hobgoblin wouldn’t have made it to the very front, so tight was the press of goblins wanting their turn at the dead ogres. But she dismissively waggled her fingers at the goblins who blocked their progress, sneering and glaring when necessary. The goblins grudgingly edged aside, giving her a measure of respect and mumbling again about how she alone had predicted the quakes.

  From up in the front, Mudwort could better survey the bloody mess. A goblin whose name she didn’t know but who had been among those in her pen in Steel Town was using a Dark Knight knife to cut out the heart of one of the ogres.

  “For Saro-Saro!” the goblin claimed, marking him as a member of the old one’s clan.

  Another goblin, a wizened one with a malformed arm, was working on prying open the rib cage of a female ogre and tugging that one’s heart out for Hurbear.

  Mudwort spotted Direfang several yards beyond the dead ogre bodies. He stood with Spikehollow, Graytoes, and Moon-eye, studying something on the trail. She prodded Erguth more firmly, and the hobgoblin carefully picked his way around the bodies, nearly slipping in a pool of blood, just as more goblins closed in to demand a share of the kill. Erguth showed little interest in partaking and averted his eyes after passing a few particularly gruesome-looking corpses.

  “Direfang!” Mudwort called, drawing the leader’s attention as Erguth lumbered close.

  Direfang acknowledged her with a nod but kept his eyes focused on Moon-eye. The one-eyed goblin was sniffing the trail and running his fingers around the edge of an ogre footprint. Mudwort climbed down and joined Moon-eye. She watched him closely then took a pinch of dirt from inside the print and set it on her tongue. Moon-eye looked quizzically at her then resumed his surveillance of the trail.

  Far behind them, the goblin throng had grown noisy, with word spreading farther about the ogre deaths and questions pouring forth about why everyone had stopped. Mudwort shut the noise out and dug her fingers into the earth.

  “This way,” she heard Moon-eye say. “Carry Graytoes now. Please.”

  Direfang obliged, picking up the female goblin with his good arm and cradling her close. She could walk on her own and had been doing just that for hours. But Moon-eye was fretting over her and was clearly annoying Direfang.

  “Smell it? Smells bad. Ogres came from this way.” Moon-eye pointed up a rise, where a narrower trail wound between granite outcroppings. “Scent is fresh and stinky-strong. Smells worse than Dark Knights.” He scampered away from the main trail and headed up the narrower one, Direfang following and Mudwort reluctantly pulling back from the earth and again climbing up on Erguth’s shoulders. She’d sensed something through the soil, a presence perhaps, and she’d wanted to explore further. But the narrow, upward trail curved east. She wanted to know why Direfang had decided to abandon the southern route.

  “Spikehollow, Brak, follow now!” Direfang motioned to those behind him. “Crelb! Forget the dead ogres. Move!”

  “Not going south,” Mudwort said, catching up. “Going east now. Why?”

  He gestured impatiently, pointing ahead. Erguth struggled to keep up with him as Direfang kept moving.

  The column of goblins and hobgoblins, spilling out over the sides of the narrower trail as it crested a rise, looked down upon an ogre village. It filled an impressive egg-shaped basin, the Khalkists rising all around it. Larger than Steel Town had been, some of its crude huts, made from wood and stone, were in a shambles, and the earth around the village was slashed with deep, wide cracks between the piles of rubble. So the quakes had been felt even there and had killed some ogres. Across from the goblins, where another trail led, smooth from all the heavy feet that had trod it, was evidence of a funeral pyre. Fat crows picked at the edges.

  The ogre town had four dirt roads that divided homes from gardens and livestock and a central communal building that was the largest structure most of the goblins had ever seen. Three big beasts, cows or oxen perhaps, slowly cooked over fire pits in front of it. One building was surrounded by a low stone wall. Mudwort could see four wells and a scattering of flowers around some of the still-standing homes.

  “Slaves,” Erguth said to Mudwort in a hushed tone. “See there, those buildings, inside? Slaves there to be sold to the Dark Knights.” He pointed to the narrow end of the basin, where a high wooden fence with spikes around the outside contained several dozen hobgoblins, goblins, and a few humans-the latter huddling together away from the rest. Mudwort hadn’t seen humans enslaved before, and she wondered who-or what-the ogres planned to sell them to.

  “Maybe eat them,” Erguth said of the humans, seeming to read her mind. “Maybe the ogres eat them.”

  Nearly sixty ogres could be seen in the village, doing various activities. They had the shape of men, though their heads were overly large for their thick necks, and there were hard-looking ridges across their foreheads shading their dark eyes. Their arms were abnormally long, and the largest of the ogres had ropelike veins standing out from their shoulders to their wrists. No sentry was posted to warn them of Direfang’s force. They had never felt threatened in those mountains, so they were oblivious to the army on the crest, the many goblin eyes observing them greedily. The brutes moved around their broken buildings, sifting through the debris, trying to reconstruct some of their homes.

  “Rebuilding like the Dark Knights tried to do,” Erguth whispered. “Doing a better job too.”

  “Ugly, stinky ogres.” Mudwort was amazed that the Dark Knights considered goblins ugly. The Dark Knights regularly dealt with ogres, and those creatures were much more hideous! How the knights could call anything ugly after dealing with ogres made no sense to her. Ogres were positively revolting.

  “Toads are beautiful compared to these … monsters,” she hissed. She wrinkled her nose and made a gagging sound, certain that she could detect their noxious odor even high up there on the ridge. Only a few had short-cropped hair, and she wondered if those ogres had become tangled in something or had been demoted in rank and so had to cut their hair. Ogres often were proud of their long, smelly, dirty hair. All the ogres below had matted clumps hanging to their waists or below.

  “Bugs,” she said. “Crawling on heads. Crawling all over.” Mudwort imagined that the ogres’ hair was infested with them. Some had braids festooned with bones and twigs. One had colorful beads woven into a beard. Most had no facial hair, not even eyebrows. “Stinky monsters, the lot. Stinky, mean.” She turned her head and spat, just missing Erguth’s arm.

  All of the ogres were muscular, and their chests and legs glistened with sweat from the day’s heat. Though they wore trousers, only half wore any shirts or tunics. Despite the presence of a small lake at the wide end of their village, dirt streaks, some in elaborate patterns, were conspicuous on their bodies-all over their arms, faces, and chests-and their shoulders were smeared with ash. Mudwort noted patches of ash on the ground and covering some of the rubble. She twisted to look behind her at one of the biggest volcanic peaks. It continued to belch ash and smoke into the air and likely, she reflected fleetingly, was responsible for the gray sky.

  “Don’t think that is the one that will break,” she said to herself. Still, the glow around its crater made her nervous, and she watched a line of lava spill over the side. She couldn’t see the bottom of the lava ribbon because a mountain slope was in the way. “Don’t think so, but don’t know for certain.” Once more she climbed down from Erguth and scampered across jagged rocks to get her own view of the volcanoes. “Know for certain at least one mountain will break.”

  She wrapped her fingers around
a spire of rock, instantly feeling the tingle of it. She knelt and felt the ground trembling slightly, so faint she hadn’t registered it against the tough soles of her feet. It wasn’t the same nervousness or anger she’d noticed before in the mine.

  The trembling felt … anxious was the word she finally put to the sensation. Mudwort thrust her mind into the stone, hurling her senses downward and passing through layers of rock and dirt, tunnels where snakes and badgers and other things had dwelled but were now absent. Things were moving about in the mountain, creatures sharing the stone’s anxiousness and streaming south and east, some burrowing upward and moving aboveground. There were large tunnels too, and Mudwort would have tarried to learn more about them had she not heard the explosion of whoops from Direfang’s army.

  She glanced up in time to see goblins and hobgoblins spill over the ridge and descend on the ogre village.

  25

  BLOOD FEVER

  Many goblins brandished Steel Town knives, and the hobgoblins with swords held them high while letting out ear-splitting shrieks. Mudwort peered over the edge of the rock spire and watched the surprised ogres react in confusion.

  It was a beautiful sight. Mudwort wished she could have watched the battle in Steel Town from such a vantage point. The ogres barely had time to grab weapons-clubs and gardening tools and rocks from the buildings they were repairing-before the first wave of goblins struck. Mudwort cursed the dark sky. If the sun were out, she could see the glorious sight much better.

  There were Brak and Folami, charging ahead of Direfang and Spikehollow and barreling into an ogre holding a hoe. Folami shot beneath the brute’s arms and rammed a knife into his thigh while Brak grabbed the hoe handle and pulled it free. The ogre roared in anger and flailed with its empty hands, finding Folami’s head and wrapping its big fingers tight around the goblin’s skull. The ogre picked Folami up, crushing his skull and throwing his corpse toward the approaching Direfang. The hobgoblin howled, put his head down, smashed into the ogre, and sent it to the ground.