The Goblin Reign Boxed Set

by Gerhard Gehrke

  “No you won’t. That’ll just get us killed once Lord finds out the book is gone.”

  “But it’s the same result if I run away with it.”

  Rime smiled. “That’s where you’re wrong. Because then he’ll see you’re missing and have you to chase down. If he knows he might get the book back, she lives. Maybe we all live.”

  “Then…then what if we actually help them get what they want?” Spicy asked.

  “I thought you wanted to be an apprentice sage. Are you really that dumb?”

  More of the raiders were done with their search and had come closer. All appeared glum. Spicy tried to reinitiate the conversation with Rime, but his friend only got close enough to hand him back the pliers before returning to sit with the children.

  Chapter Twenty

  Spicy’s arms and legs were sore. He had drawn up enough brackish water from the goblin village’s well for the men and horses. But once his work was finished, he plopped down on the ground near the horses and was given no further tasks.

  Food was being wasted.

  The men dumped trays of shellfish into the dirt along with baskets of gathered mushrooms without taking any of it for themselves. Meanwhile the hens were being plucked and skewered and placed on spits over a cookfire in the center of the village.

  Spicy’s stomach gave an angry growl as he watched the foodstuffs get trampled.

  “All possibly poisonous for us,” Lord said.

  He hadn’t seen the leader of the raiders approach. Lord towered over him. As he watched his men, he smoothed his hair back over his head. “Mussels. Snails. Mushrooms. We daren’t take the chance. But your kind has no such limitations, does it?”

  “But that food isn’t poisonous.”

  “Not for goblins. But humans die when we eat the wrong thing. We get tumors from age, from the sun, from things that grow in our bowels and brains. I’ve never seen a sick goblin.”

  Spicy had. Everyone caught the sniffles. But tumors? Sometimes the game went through a bad season where the meat couldn’t be eaten, according to the huntmaster or Sage Somni. But one sniff and the odor would repel even the most inexperienced hunter.

  “We get sick sometimes,” Spicy said.

  But Lord walked along, moving over to the cooking fire. His men immediately became more attentive to their duties. Lord inspected their work, but Spicy noted no displays of camaraderie or warmth.

  “We bed down here, then,” he said, his voice soft. “The more time we waste on detours like this, the harder this will go. Our path takes us inland towards the mountain.”

  There was a murmur from some of the raiders.

  Lord nodded solemnly. “That is exactly what you signed up for. Our treasures come later. You’ve trusted me this far…”

  “You killed the troll,” Black Tooth said. “At least we could have sold him.”

  “And maybe it was his scent which attracted the troll that attacked us. I explained this already. And we seem to be overburdened. Take only what you can carry on your person. We have too much baggage. Time to lighten our load so we can ride faster.”

  Spicy felt his chest tighten.

  As if hearing his thoughts, Blades asked, “What about the gobs? With all them in tow, we’re going to be slow.”

  Lord looked straight at Thistle. “I’ll think about it. But for now we need them.”

  Blades nodded and then looked straight at Spicy and gave a wink. His fingers drummed on the handle of his knife.

  The crimped pin that held the collar on Spicy’s neck was essentially a bent nail. Spicy worked at it whenever no one was close. The men had settled in by the fire, but more than a few of them had wandered off to sift through the wreckage of the building, as if fresh wealth had been restocked by some random act of charity of their god.

  The pliers kept slipping as Spicy’s hand grew sweaty. Each click of the metal jaws on the pin made him freeze. After each pause, he would gently begin to work again until the next slip of the pincers. But when Blades began to pace about nearby, Spicy put the pliers away.

  Blades’s antagonistic manner had evaporated. The man was groaning. He kept a hand on his midsection. Finally he trotted off into the darkness.

  Rime crept closer. “Are you going to wait there all night?”

  “I’m working on it. The nail won’t bend straight. Give me a hand.”

  There were concealed well enough in the shadows, but Spicy was nervous as Rime worked with the pliers at his collar.

  After a few failed attempts, Rime backed off. “We need better light.”

  “What’s wrong with Blades?”

  “Before the boat ride he was complaining about constipation. But now it sounds like he’s having the other problem.”

  Spicy positioned himself so he was sitting in the firelight. “I’m sure we can find some herbs that would cure that.”

  “I’ll be sure to offer him some bitters and salt porridge in the morning. Now hold still.”

  The pliers clicked again and then snip. Both halves of the nail fell to the sand. The collar almost fell away, but Spicy held it in place until he could sit up and resume the pose of a dejected prisoner. His heart was thumping hard.

  Rime gave him the pliers back. “I can’t chance that they’ll find it.”

  Spicy didn’t want to argue. Rime settled back down next to the goblin children.

  A few of the men had gotten closer and were laying out their sleeping rolls. Blades showed up but after five minutes at the fire had to retire again to the darkness. His audible moans caused the men to chuckle.

  Lord no longer had his tent. A blanket was laid out near a row of demolished huts. Alma carried a bright lantern over and set it down. Lord brought out his map and satchel of books.

  A clump of dirt struck Spicy. “Go!” Rime mouthed.

  Spicy searched for Thistle in the shadows near Lord’s horse. One last glimpse, a wave, a nod of encouragement, something. This might be the last time he ever saw her. But this was his chance. He adjusted the journal, now tucked into the back of his pants.

  Time to leave.

  He pulled the collar off and crawled away from the horses. They had posted two guards Spicy could see, and they weren’t far from the fire. But he knew there might be more. With his sharp eyes he scanned the road that led up the hill. The trees had many shadows, but crawling through the underbrush would be painstakingly slow. He listened.

  A man was rubbing his hands together and exhaling hard. The sentry was standing next to an empty pen near the entrance to the village. Spicy avoided him easily. The campfire was far enough away that it only threw flickers of orange into the trees above him.

  The dog started barking directly in front of him. He crouched lower. Each sharp sound of the beast hurt his ears. The whole camp would hear.

  “Shh,” its handler said from the dark. “Easy, girl.”

  Spicy didn’t dare move. He got down so he could crawl. Gravel pinched his knees and hands. Traces of whatever pungent herb the man smoked hung in the air. Spicy cursed himself for missing it.

  He could have headed the other direction, gone down to the shoreline, and found another way inland. But it was too late for that. The dog had heard him or caught his scent. And if the handler released the animal it would be on him in seconds. He prepared to run. But he had seen the dog and how fast it moved.

  Then, from even closer by, there came a rustling from the undergrowth.

  “Shut that animal up,” Blades said from the shadows.

  “She’s doing her job,” the handler said. “How’s the collywobbles?”

  “It’s not funny.”

  The handler spoke softly to his dog and it fell silent. “Of course it’s not. But don’t mind us if we move ourselves away from downwind.”

  The guard and his dog moved to where the other sentry stood. The dog obediently sat between them. The men shared a whisper and a snicker.

  Blades began grunting and there followed more sounds Spicy didn’t want to thin
k about. But he couldn’t wait any longer. He crept forward. Just as he began to rise, his foot found a dry patch of leaves.

  Crunch.

  Again the dog started up, and this time the handler didn’t silence it.

  “Will you keep that animal quiet?” Blades shouted.

  “She’s not barking at you.”

  Spicy ran. He crashed through the brush as he made it out onto the gravel path that would lead up to the road. The light of the moon shone down on him. His feet slapped the earth. And behind him he heard the dog.

  It was running free and heading his way.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The dog let out a low growl as it charged.

  Spicy considered his options.

  The clear way forward was up towards the road. The dog would catch him. He would be torn to pieces.

  He could also climb a tree. He was a good climber and was certain the animal couldn’t follow. The humans would then find him. They would murder him or set the tree on fire and laugh as he burned.

  The only other way was to run through the scrubs and brush and hope it would slow the dog down.

  Sharp branches and twigs stabbed at him as he darted off between the trees. The dog was coming up behind him fast.

  The handler shouted, “There’s a gob loose!”

  Other men called out in reply. The whole camp was now alerted.

  Spicy continued to plunge through downed branches and brambles. The dog panted as it crashed through the forest after him. All Spicy’s instincts told him to move faster, that even the temporary reprieve of climbing a tree would be better than being eaten alive. He scrambled forward, his feet slipping in loose dirt.

  The dog got close enough to snap at him. He turned to kick at it. His hands flailed for something, anything. A small branch made for a poor club but he swung it anyway. There was too much brush around him and the branch caught on other tree limbs, so he thrust it forward to keep the animal away. The dog was snarling now. Its eyes shone in the light of the moon.

  The slope only got steeper. Spicy kept trying to back away but had nowhere to go. The animal pressed at him. Its teeth clacked as it bit at the branch. The piece of wood broke. Then Spicy’s foot thumped into something solid.

  It was the body of one of the villagers. It had an arrow in it. He pulled at the shaft and yanked it free even as the dog lunged.

  He drove the tip of the arrow upward into the animal. The dog immediately yipped and sprang back, but it didn’t retreat. But Spicy was able to begin to claw up the slope, the arrow in his teeth.

  Lights were glowing behind him. The raiders had lit torches and were heading his way.

  Once he made it to level ground, he looked both directions down the road. Through his panic he tried to remember Sage Somni’s map of Athra and the lands beyond. Mother Mountain lay to the east of the Inland Sea. The road he was on ran approximately north and south following the shore. East would take him towards the mountain. Perhaps there would be a trail he might find. The going would be slow until he did.

  The men were coming, the barking dog now with them. But they were on foot. For now.

  He hiked up the side of the roadway and was soon moving through the trees. His best bet would be to find as treacherous a route as possible so their horses, when they came, would be impeded. He’d also need to find some aromatic plants to cover his scent. With the moon in view, at least he had an idea of his direction.

  East he would go, as fast as his short legs would take him.

  By morning he was exhausted and he took an hour to rest on top of a bed of moss and pine needles. The chill in the air along with his perspiration made him shiver. He clamped his eyes shut and tried to will it all away, to turn back time to when he would wake and have little else to concern him except trying to fit in with One Stone, Preemie, and all the other young hunters.

  He hadn’t been good enough for them.

  Not smart enough for an apprenticeship either.

  But now he knew there were worse things than being a worker in the rice fields.

  Enough dew formed on the leaves of some scrubs that he could wet his throat by lapping the water up. He found sorrel he could chew on for more moisture and then ate clean a tiny gooseberry bush.

  The air blew downhill and its chill promised snow within the week. But Spicy heard no sounds of horses, men, or dogs. He pressed on until he found a patch of sun on a boulder where he could warm up and study the book still hidden in his shirt.

  He ran his fingers over the worn cover. Had his entire village died for what was inside the book? Spicy leafed through the stained pages. The brittle edges of the paper appeared ready to crumble. Each page was cluttered with lines of the old script. Lord understood none of it and needed a sage or an apprentice to understand the symbols.

  Spicy couldn’t read it, either. At least with the book in hand, its knowledge or wisdom would remain a secret.

  As he closed the cover, he saw a set of faded symbols, yellowed impressions almost invisible on the red leather spine. He looked closely.

  The markings weren’t the letters or words of the old script but glyphs. The old script had an alphabet and individual letters, even as these were difficult to read. Meanwhile, each glyph held its own meaning, a self-sufficient statement wrapped in a prayer, desire, or dream that might bring about some supernatural benefit. Superstitions, his mother would say. Man-magic. None of it had done their race any good. Yet even he had sensed their power, from the few used by the sages.

  Boarhead’s sage had his eye watching every coming and going from his library.

  The sage from Thousand Groves had his raised finger set in a rectangle.

  Both symbols were on the spine, along with others: an ear, a pair of lips, and a raised rock. Together they formed a nonsensical sentence that would be dismissed even by anyone familiar with the old script.

  But what if the glyphs could be read when placed in proper order?

  His mind raced.

  He had spent so many hours staring at the master map in Sage’s library. It too had held glyphs. Spicy had always dismissed them as decorative. Where the labels of places were few, the glyphs were numerous. And was Lord’s map similar, or had he taken the master map from Somni’s library?

  The book was leading Lord somewhere. Now Spicy had to figure it out with only his own memory of the map.

  Spicy picked up a tiny stone and scratched at the rock. An X for where the eye had marked the map, the location of Boarhead. The second, indelible in his memory, was the nearby raised finger. Thurten’s home. Thousand Groves. To the north of the Inland Sea went the glyph of the ear. And to the northeast, the pair of lips and the raised rock right next to it.

  He surveyed the marked stone and then looked at the spine of the book.

  “They match.”

  He had drawn it all from his head, and he wished he could see the map again as doubt flooded his mind.

  What if the markings on the map were just fanciful doodles placed there by a bored cartographer more intent on art than accuracy? But the Spirit Rock Sage Somni had spoken of before his months-long journeys had to be real. And the glyph of the raised rock, if it was a location, marked a point northeast of the Inland Sea.

  Someplace perhaps not far from where he was.

  He made more X marks on the stone, one for each village he knew or at least had seen a label for on the map, and then drew a rough oblong oval to represent the sea. Most of the villages were clustered near Boarhead in the hills of Athra to the northwest. None of those had been marked with glyphs, so these were unimportant. He added a mark for the two villages he had seen on the shores of the sea.

  Then he drew a line to connect the glyphs from Boarhead to the raised rock.

  The lips and the raised rock were just north of Mother Mountain, which had been the easternmost labeled point on the map. Lord was on the right track. It was where Somni had gone, if the book was indeed the key to finding him.

  Spicy had a direction to
go. Whether Lord knew enough to find Spirit Rock was uncertain.

  While the true scale of the map had always eluded him, he had counted thumb-widths between all the locations, so he knew the approximate distance to the big ocean and those between the villages and outlying communities near Boarhead.

  Boarhead was almost two hundred miles from Mother Mountain. What if there was some isolated goblin village next to the mountain? What kind of people lived in such a place? And if Somni had fled there, would he even be able to help? Did Spicy want to risk leading the humans to another slaughter of his kind?

  Never had he imagined travel would be so cold or lonely.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Spicy wasn’t alone.

  After three days hiking the rocky foothills, he could read the silences like a tell in a game of bluffs and dice.

  Someone hidden was watching.

  He had been walking most of the day from before the dawn, his legs tight from the exertion and his lips dry, as there was little flowing water. He had been singing softly the words to “Ganjo the Goat” despite now hating the song. The melody clung to him, and he didn’t want to think about how it was the last memory he had of many of his neighbors, as they had been belting out the tune when One Stone received his second stud. But when the clicker bugs stopped clicking and the grasshoppers stopped jumping, he went silent.

  The terrain before him was rocky with interspersed trees and rougher ground than any he was accustomed to, and it only got harder the higher in elevation he climbed. But there were plenty of places where someone could be concealed.

  “Gob!” someone yelled.

  He froze. The shout echoed and died. No one had shown themselves. He didn’t reply, only waited. If it was the humans, their horses or dog would catch him.

  “Over here!” the mystery voice called.

  From a cluster of boulders a shadow beckoned. Either a small man or a goblin.

  “Who’s there?” Spicy answered.

  Whoever it was didn’t reply but again waved him over. With a curse his mother would have struck him for, he hurried towards the shadow.