Nowhere to Run

by Elliott Kay

  “I thought we might leave these lands altogether. Find somewhere else that doesn’t hate us.”

  “You want to buy a ship?”

  “What? No.” Shady Tooth scowled. “Don’t be ridiculous. I figured we’d find some assholes with a ship and steal it from them. Something nice and big. Still need sailors for that, though. You have to pay sailors.”

  Though Teryn wanted to laugh at Shady Tooth’s manpower solution, the concerns that drove her to it were too real and too sad. She listened.

  “DigDig isn’t wrong about goblin folk moving on. Why not go all the way? Someplace warm where the trees and the food and the weather are all different. Like one of those islands or maybe a mild desert across the sea. I’ve never been, but I’ve heard stories and seen pictures in books. It sounds good to me. And it’s far from here.”

  Her words hung in the air. Dew slid from the leaf of a nearby tree, oily and grey like so much of the rest of the grove. “You and DigDig are both from Bak’Nor, aren’t you?” Teryn ventured.

  “Yeah. Not really anything to go back to there.”

  “His parents are here.” Teryn risked a glance at her friend. “You haven’t looked for yours.”

  “No.”

  Teryn nodded. She said nothing more.

  “Don’t tell anyone about the ship,” Shady Tooth repeated.

  Teryn shook her head. “Not a soul.”

  “Thanks.” Shady Tooth stomped back into the broad pit with its rune-covered platform muttering, “Friendship is weird.” Her departure allowed Teryn to release the tension in a heavy sigh before she followed, eyes downcast.

  “Scars, are we almost done with this?” asked Shady Tooth. She looked skeptically at their work crew. “I think some of these guys are milking this job.”

  “Joke’s on them, then. We paid up front,” he answered.

  “Who buried all this in the first place, though? And why?” asked Teryn.

  “Flood channel from the river,” said DigDig. He gestured to the ridge along the edge of the grove and a more or less parallel rise on the other side. “Water used to come through here. Might spill over some years when the river is high enough. Probably did it again and again.”

  “They built it in a flood channel?” asked Shady Tooth.

  “Maybe not intentionally,” said Scars. “Maybe they thought it was safe. Maybe someone saw an opportunity and dug a cut in the river to wash through here to screw with them. A cult can fight its enemies but fighting a flood is a different problem. Seems smart to me.”

  “Then years pass and floods bring in sediment, plants take hold and here we are,” Teryn finished, thinking it through. “It makes some sense. It also means Zition had goblins settled in a flood channel.”

  “Someone always gets the short end of the stick,” said DigDig. “Usually goblins.”

  “Orcs and goblin folk hardly enjoy the gentlest of societies,” Scars agreed. “Dostin’s attacks are an external problem. We have plenty of issues all on our own.”

  “Like this nonsense here?” Shady Tooth reminded him. “What are we doing?”

  Scars pointed to Yargol and War Cloud at the center of the platform. “It’s up to those two. I don’t know any more about what we’re dealing with here than you do.”

  “Not sure that’s true,” said Shady Tooth. “Yargol told us about you and the druids. Sounds like you’d know a lot about this sort of nonsense.”

  “I know Dad’s stories,” he sighed. “Mom’s, too, but she usually cut to the funny parts. Didn’t try to use stories to teach as often as he did.”

  “Think I like her better.”

  “I dunno, you might have liked my dad. He was a charming guy. Got an orc warrior to fall for him, after all.”

  “We’re not gonna give that a lot of thought,” said Shady Tooth. “Anyway, what did he have to say about stuff like this?”

  “Not much. Only that it always goes bad and it’s always the worst. You’ve got your undead, your dragons, your evil wizards, your personal feuds...and he said any of it is better than this sort of extradimensional tentacle shit. You can’t always hack and slash your way through it. There’s always another tentacle. The worst part is, sometimes these things offer crazy magic powers to anyone dumb enough to accept. It always knows how to find the one idiot in the party who can’t leave bad candy on the table even when it’s got a label and it’s covered in mold and everyone else around the table is dead.”

  “Candy’s still candy,” said DigDig.

  Scars slapped his hand over his own face. “Damn it. DigDig, no.”

  “Could just brush it off. Maybe wash it.”

  “The candy is made of lies.”

  “Usually is. Still candy.”

  “This candy eats you and all of your friends and when you die everyone hates you.”

  DigDig frowned. “Think you’ve got the wrong idea about candy. Were your parents mean?”

  “Oh, for the love of...”

  “Scars, I think we are ready,” said Yargol. He waved the others over to join him with War Cloud. “The platform is clear enough to see consistency in the runes and the design. This is dedicated to a being whose name I will not say out loud. I think its purpose is clear.”

  “Is it a portal?” asked Scars.

  Yargol hesitated. He looked to War Cloud, then back again. “How did you know?”

  “It’s always a portal.”

  The magician’s hooded head turned downward to his feet. “I studied all my life. I memorized ancient languages unspoken by any living society. This took hours. I did so much math.”

  “Then we’ve got more to go on than the crazy stories my dad told me.” Scars patted Yargol on the back. “I’m assuming there’s some reason we can’t just destroy it, right? There usually is.”

  “Oh no, we can absolutely destroy all of this. The question is whether to do it now or wait for first light.” Yargol gestured to the runes all around. “The runes tell of a ravenous Devourer in Shadow. An endless reign of darkness, all who oppose shall be consumed, that sort of thing. This whole stanza here is about swallowing the sun and moon. Mortal enemies or some such. I can’t detect any active magic, but clearly something is getting through given the effect it has had on the grove.

  “Destroying the portal will sever the gateway, but it may also unleash whatever part of this Devourer and its power are closest to our world. We may have a magical trap on our hands, or a fight against another shadow entity. It seems to me whatever is released will be at its weakest in the light of the sun. Conversely, it may be strongest in the sun because it will be in direct view of a mortal enemy.”

  Scars nodded, sighing. “Could be weakened. Could get extra pissed off.”

  “Precisely,” Yargol admitted. “Sometimes these things are a coin toss.”

  “I’m guessing this thing sat here for some time without devouring the sun and moon before it was buried,” said War Cloud. “Otherwise history might have noted it.”

  “So, what?” Shady Tooth grunted. “This is a portal to some terrifying nightmare realm and we just stand around talking about nothing until it’s time to destroy it?”

  Scars looked up to the dark horizon. “If we wait ‘til sunrise, yeah.”

  “And if not?” she pressed.

  The crew’s ostensible leader fished a gold coin from his pouch. “Castle says we do it now, crown says we wait ‘til dawn.” He looked to War Cloud and then Yargol, but saw only shrugs. Scars sent the coin into the air with a flick of his thumb.

  Something tugged at his foot as he reached for the coin again. He thought it no more than an exposed root by the toe of his boot, but he missed the coin on its way down. It bounced twice against the masonry, then spun along its edge until it came to rest over a crack in the grey stone with its castle side showing.

  Then it popped over onto its other side. A shadowy tendril jerked back into the crack in the masonry where the coin had first lain.

  “I didn’t imagine that,” said Ter
yn.

  “No,” Yargol breathed.

  “DigDig, now,” ordered Scars. “Do it now!”

  He’d already been waiting for his cue. DigDig stabbed his shovel into the platform, splitting the masonry at his feet. A shockwave ran through the platform and the ground beyond in every direction. The crack widened, revealing nothing but darkness and stronger tremors. The runes took on an eerie green glow.

  An unearthly noise gurgled from beneath the ground, wet and hollow and deep, seeming to provide its own echo from beneath the soil. More cracks split the masonry. Shadowy tendrils rose from each opening, twisting and turning as if probing the air. Every worker who hadn’t left already abandoned the site with haste.

  “Damn,” muttered Yargol. “Maybe this wasn’t the best time.”

  “Maybe there isn’t a good time,” said Shady Tooth.

  The gurgle diminished, replaced by a louder and clearer note: horns blew out warning notes not far away. A light shot into the sky over the camp, orange flames trailing burning oil and twine from a flaming arrow.

  “Shit. The army is here. The camp is under attack!” shouted someone just outside the grove.

  “The wall!” yelled another. The hired hands quickly scattered. “We have to get to the wall!”

  “Now?” asked Shady Tooth. “Seriously? Now?”

  “They were bound to attack at dawn, but I didn’t think it would be today,” said Teryn.

  “We don’t have time for this now,” said Shady Tooth.

  “We don’t have time for anything else!” War Cloud countered.

  A thicker tentacle reached for Scars. Yargol blasted it with one of his fiery ice daggers.

  Horns blared their warning again. Shouts and cries rang out in every direction around the camp as the broken masonry seethed.

  “We can’t leave this unfinished,” said War Cloud. “We’ve only just started. This will get worse fast.”

  “They need us on the line,” said Teryn.

  “You’re both right,” said Yargol. “Scars, this is a matter of magic and other worlds. Blades without enchantment will do little good here, anyway.”

  “We’re not leaving you alone,” said Scars. Another warning note sounded. He winced. “Who do you need?”

  “This is still a demolition job. I need War Cloud and DigDig,” the magician replied. “I don’t know if the rest of you can help, anyway.”

  “Damn it.” Scars winced. At a questioning look from War Cloud, he came out with it: “This isn’t a fight, it’s a battle. It’s war. You’re the one who should be out there rallying people.”

  “These are goblin folk with their backs to the wall. There’s nowhere to run. It’s fight or die. Nobody needs to be rallied. That’s a problem for the other side.” War Cloud’s eyes flared with a sudden thought. “But I can tell you what to do about that.”

  War Cloud’s words didn’t carry to the shadowed bushes and trees at the edge of the grove. The call of the horns did. “We gotta go,” grunted an orc.

  “Prag is right. They need everyone at the wall,” agreed a hobgoblin.

  “No, hold on,” counseled the larger figure. He kept his voice down and crouched low to go unseen beyond the bushes, but he took up more room than any of his followers. “There’s only the handful of us. Hardly enough to make a difference. We don’t even know what’s going on out there.”

  “Yeah, we do. It’s an alarm.”

  Chatter sighed. “You think I want to get killed off by some human army, Jolko? Prag? Any of you?” Only a pair each of hobgoblins and orcs lurked behind the tree line with him, all quiet and on edge from the alarm. “If it’s a battle, we’ll know soon enough.”

  “We’ll be missed on the wall by our people,” Prag hissed. “Everyone is supposed to go.”

  Chatter tilted his head toward the crew across the grove. “They’re not. Something important is going on here. Something worth spending all that money. Gotta be something powerful.” He looked to his collection of malcontents with a toothy grin. “Listen to that little voice whispering in your ears, boys. Don’t you hear? It’s asking, ‘Do you want to trust them with the power they’ve uncovered? Or do you want it for yourselves?’” His eyes narrowed and darkened. “I know my answer.”

  Chapter Nine

  “This will start with arrows. At least we know where they’re coming from. Get the young to cover behind the trees at the far end of camp.” Karana barked out orders as she stomped through orcs and goblins rushing to and fro. A dark grey helmet rested atop her head with scale mail hanging from its brim at the back and sides of her neck. The rest of her armor was mostly leather and worse for wear, but it helped her stand out. “Spread the word. Stay on the far side and don’t try to be clever. People will look there for their kids when this is over.”

  The goblins near her side split off in different directions to carry her message. She spotted a particular orc on her way to the wall with an axe in hand. “Hey! Brinduth! Tell all your friends we’re not hurling severed heads or any of that terror bullshit.”

  “What? You want us to play nice?”

  “I want you to win the fight, not show off for your friends. No human trophies. You got me?”

  “Ah, fine.” The orc waved Karana off and continued on her way.

  “Karana,” Scars called as he caught up with Teryn and Shady Tooth at his side. Fear and preparation made for heavy traffic throughout the camp. Thankfully, he hadn’t seen any sign of panic. “We’re here. Where do you want us?”

  “Near me and out in front where everyone can see you,” she answered. “The whole camp knows who did all the heavy lifting on the last attack. Hold on.” Karana looked around. “Where are the rest of you?”

  “It’s just us. We uncovered an old shrine to whatever dark power is active under the camp. The others are dealing with it now. Can’t leave it alone or it’ll get worse fast.”

  “How much worse? We’ve got an army bearing down on us.”

  “Shadow tentacles and devouring the sun worse,” said Shady Tooth.

  Karana scowled. “Hell of a time for that nonsense.”

  “If we’d known the attack was coming we might have rescheduled,” Scars grumbled. “What do we know?”

  “They have lots more cavalry and infantry, but not a lumbering siege force.” Karana trudged on toward the berm. “Sentries in the woods saw the main body and came running. No trebuchets or any of that big stuff, at least. I guess the garrison was already on their way through the pass when you found out about them. They’ll be here any minute.”

  “I’m surprised we got any warning at all,” said Teryn. “Barret’s riders are trained to catch any sentries ahead of the larger force.”

  “Yeah, that checks out,” said Karana. “Not all of our sentries made it back.”

  Orcs and goblin folk swarmed at the foot of the berm with whatever weapons and gear they had. Some called out orders and got organized. Others worked to get supplies into place or clear other material out of the way. More than one goblin hurriedly carved sharp ends out of sturdy branches and passed them off to waiting hands. The crowd was thick enough that Scars couldn’t see everything going on.

  The berm had grown more complicated overnight, too. Tall wooden platforms leaned against the inside, reaching from the base to near the top. He wasn’t sure if they were meant to brace it or hold the dirt steady, nor where the flat wood even came from. Above it, the wall boasted a long walkway along the top that could cover a goblin to the shoulders. A handful of such goblins and hobgoblins watched from there, most of them armed with spears and shields.

  “So what’s the plan?” asked Shady Tooth. “We stay out of sight until they’re at the trench? It’s not like we’ve had much time to prepare.”

  “We’ve had a night’s warning to work on this.” Karana threw them a grim smile before she got to the foot of the berm. The slope allowed for an easy climb on this side. Movement up and down had created many stable footholds. “You don’t think we sat on our as
ses, did you?”

  The companions saw what she meant from the top of the berm. Sharpened stakes jutted out of the mound from bottom to top. A scattering of goblins waited in the trench below, huddled in hiding with little in the way of arms and armor but some apparent plan. Scars spotted Zana among them by virtue of a red band tied around her dark hair to keep it back. Fregg stood with her. Out beyond, nothing seemed different about the meadow between the wall and the forest except for the remaining detritus from the previous battle. Most of the good loot had been scavenged already, leaving only trash and blood stains. Then Scars noted small bumps in the grass hiding little flags of colored scraps that could only be seen from this side of the meadow. “Why the flags?”

  “They’re range markers,” answered Karana. “We’re shy on bows and arrows. We need to make every shot count.”

  “And the goblins in the trench? Aren’t they exposed and vulnerable?” asked Teryn.

  “They’ve got a couple of tunnels running under the wall that they can collapse on their way back in if the enemy reaches the trench.”

  “What’re they doing down there at all?” Shady Tooth wondered.

  “What’s with all the extra work at the base of the wall?” added Scars.

  Warning shouts rose up from along the top of the berm before Karana answered. Others called out orders to make ready. Noise from the camp fell, an emptiness soon filled by the low but steady tones of hooves and boots not far away.

  Men on horseback and on foot emerged from the shadows under the trees across the field. Banners in the colors of Theralda, the king’s house, and Fort Greyfalls flew on standards raised by leading horsemen as they came out into the open. The force emerged with slow and orderly purpose to assemble not far from the edge of the trees. Archers and crossbowmen came forward along with the riders as the groups sorted out their lines, with more in the back likely made of common foot soldiers.