by K. J. Coble
Despairing for the nap he knew he’d never get with the gnome around, Vohl groaned and sat up.
Ahead, ruins flanked the river, crumbling stonework overrun with vines that looked like so many gnarled arms sprouting from the earth. Shards of a once-impervious arch protruded overhead as the River Imp slid into their shadow. The ages and elements had carved away most detail, but if one looked closely enough, shapes that might once have been faces became evident, shadows giving them a sinister aspect.
“Elders’ Crossing,” Vohl said, “the ruins of a Vullian toll bridge, most think. There was an old highway through these parts. You can still quarry some of the cobblestone from just under the surface loam.”
“Where did it lead?” Dodso’s voice took on an uncharacteristic hush.
“No one knows.” Vohl suppressed a shudder. “This place always makes my skin crawl. Jayce once told me that the Tyrants mixed the ground-up bones of the slaves who built the roads into the mortar.”
“Nice.” Dodso snorted. “Just the kind of upbeat tale I’d expect from a wizard.”
“They’re remembered as Tyrants for a reason.”
“Just another empire,” Dodso said. The gnome grinned at Vohl. “Like a few others I could name.”
“Stop.” Vohl laid back and closed his eyes.
“What?”
“I’m not in the mood for your politics, all right?”
“Who said I was going to bring that up?”
“You’re Dodso.”
“Humph! You’re getting boring in your domesticity. You’ve got your tavern business and your river trade – its all a pretty, little landowner’s setup, isn’t it?”
“It’s not boring to grow up, Dodso. I had my wild days after I—” Vohl couldn’t help the momentary drying of his mouth at memories best left buried “—I left the Legions. They were squalid and dangerous and desperate times.”
“And free.”
It was Vohl’s turn to snort. “Yeah, a pauper’s freedom.”
“Better that than what Kodror Aigann has in store for us all.”
“Maybe...” Vohl shifted to get more comfortable, though Dodso’s prattling was making that increasingly impossible. “But I’m not going back to that life.” He opened his eyes to glare at the gnome. “And don’t think I missed that ‘landowner’ crack. I am not one of those greedy bastards!”
Dodso looked out over the water, half-smiling. “You do a pretty good impersonation of one, these days.”
Vohl bolted upright and stabbed a finger at him. “Look, you little turd, you want to restructure social hierarchies so bad, but the order of things doesn’t just change without a fight! I’ve seen enough of such wars! They are bloody, uncertain things where all the wrong people die and none of the right ones!”
Some of the crew looked up at the outburst and Muddle turned from the bow with concern creasing his face. One of his hands fell to his hip where a long knife dangled in its sheath.
But Dodso was laughing. “See, I knew you were still fun.”
Vohl balled his fists, felt rage tremble through his body as a flush rose over his face. But the gnome’s cackling continued, the little being tilting his head back and putting a hand to his ample, bouncing belly. Little bastard got me again. Vohl couldn’t help it as his fury subsided, hands relaxing as he sagged back.
“I hate you. I don’t know why I keep you around.”
“Because I keep things interesting,” Dodso replied.
“Well, I could do without interesting. Look, laugh at me all you want, but I’m serious. You want to agitate for political change then you’d better be ready for the consequences when you win.” He locked gazes with the gnome. “And you’d better be ready for folks to resist that change.”
Dodso shrugged, the laughter still twinkling in his eyes but a hint of something more focused creeping in. “Things do change, Vohl, whether you like it or not.” He glanced down the river, to the Vullian ruins the ship had now passed. “They always do.”
THE STATUE OF SAINT Reniburn had stood at the heart of Candolum since the settlement’s founding in the early ages of Thyrrian expansionism, a talisman to its peoples through times good and bad. It lay in a pile of shattered limestone, now, somehow like a corpse left to blacken in the sun as Sarcha’s expedition crossed the bridge spanning the Aleil River and filed into the heart of the town.
Sarcha stopped her horse. The dwarven column shuddered to a halt behind her, their visages hardened behind sweat-dampened whiskers as they looked upon the wreckage.
Old women clustered about the fallen statue, wailing, wringing their hands or casting them up to the sky with wild prayers. Younger girls with their children hung back with haunted eyes, some drifting into the arms of equally disturbed-looking husbands. A priest from the Reniburn Shrine, a spectacular mass of spires and cupolas that more resembled a fortress, offered consolation to the distraught mass. His crimson silk robes shimmered like fresh blood in the sunlight.
Clegg Greatclub strode to Sarcha’s side, gripping and fingering her mount’s bridle, apparently to hide dread. “I heard some of them talking,” he said in a hush. “There was a strange storm last night, lightning tracing faces in the clouds. Then the statue fell down, right in the middle of morning services.”
Sarcha eyed the crowd. Most attention remained on the spectacle, despite the troop of armed and heavily-loaded dwarves in their midst. “We need to book passage downriver. You’ll see to it?”
Clegg nodded, though his eyes remained fixed on the collapsed statue. “I’ll need those funds we spoke of.”
“Naturally.” Sarcha reached into her saddlebag and drew forth a heavy purse. She tossed it to the dwarf foreman. His gaze glittered with his kind’s characteristic greed at the touch of so much wealth. “I’ll expect none of that to go into improving the local economy,” she told him.
“Of course not,” he replied, some of the gleam leaving his face. He glanced again at the gathering. “Some of their women-folk claim to have seen visions in the wells, images of fire and doom on the waters.” He shook his head. “It’s a bad omen.”
“Omens don’t concern me.” Sarcha nudged Clegg with her foot. “And they don’t concern Thane Ironforger, do they?”
Clegg looked up at her sharply. “No, Lady Sarcha.”
“Then get to work,” she snapped. “I don’t want to be in this hovel tomorrow morning.”
“That makes two of us.”
The dwarf strode away, a pair of particularly-menacing toughs detaching themselves to accompany their foreman. Orders issued from other leaders and the rest of the column began to break up, some dwarves settling into small clumps that produced pipes and set to smoking while they relaxed, others drifting into side streets where trouble assuredly awaited them. Some of the locals were finally taking notice and hucksters started their solicitations, waving fruit, trinkets and other odds and ends their squat, stoic visitors were unlikely to desire.
The priest of Saint Reniburn paused in his ministrations to kneel beside the detached head of the fallen likeness of his deity. He murmured something, some weak-willed prayer probably, and pressed fingers to the carved features of a beautific, full-bearded smile. Stone split at his touch, a crack running down the center of Reniburn’s face until it fell into halves. The priest leapt back with a howl joined immediately by onlookers.
Sarcha could not help a grin. Bad omens, some would say. She caught the gaze of a little girl, whose wide eyes went glassy. The pitiful creature buried her face in her mother’s cloak, bawling. The woman looked up to glare at Sarcha in outrage and dawning horror. A sign, others would say, Sarcha thought, grinning all her hate and exultation at the simple country peasant’s impudence.
A sign of things to come...
Chapter Five
Shadows Advance
The source of Howling Gap’s name was not hard to surmise with winds wailing down out of the craggy Labyrinthines into the narrow gorge. Groon Blood-Drinker pushed his threadbare cowl ov
er his nose and leaned into the gale, cursing fingers of chill that wormed under ice-limned scale armor to pierce his flesh. At his side—kept there now, always—Akrak, clad in only rags and seemingly mindless of frostbite, muttered and occasional chuckled in puffs of condensation and drool that froze before it hit the ground.
Groon shook his head and glanced over his shoulder.
The war band strung out through the Gap behind him, hobgoblin warriors hunched low with snow-capped shoulders and fanged faces lined with frost. A scattering of human slaves—the only real haul of months on the Chillwater—dragged improvised baggage sleds, near-starvation and brutality having reduced them to pack of feral-faced, shivering skeletons. Groon paused to watch the sleds pass over a rise, eyeing the column that followed for deserters. Vraka had the rear with instructions to “inspire” any stragglers, but one could never be too careful. A quick count satisfied him and he strode to catch up to jabbering Akrak.
A warrior appeared at the top of the next rise, shouldering past the column’s lead party at a sprint, hollering something Groon couldn’t make out over the wind. He waved to one the warriors near the lead, Shazz, with the war horn, signaling for the warrior to sound the halt. The messenger neared as Shazz’s call blared.
“What’s the buggering hold up?” Groon snarled.
“Deadly One,” the messenger shouted, “there’s a barricade ahead at—”
The hobgoblin stiffened, eyes bugging out, and dropped at Groon’s feet with a quivering arrow in his spine.
“Ambush!” Groon barked. Shoving Akrak ahead of him, Groon lunged for the sheer face of mountain to his right. “Everyone get to the side of the road! To the rocks!”
The air whistled with incoming projectiles. Blood-Drinkers glanced around in momentary confusion, unable to hear their lord or see in the driving snow what had happened. Another hobgoblin dropped howling with an arrow in his shoulder and the message got through, warriors scattering for boulders on the left side of the Gap or the cliffs on the right. The humans looked about in pack animal confusion until two lay in the snow, staining it with blots of their crimson blood.
Arrows showered down but the wind caught most, carrying them lazily off course. Akrak cackled endlessly at Groon’s side. Frustration and the nearness of death seared away Groon’s patience and the warlord punched the shaman in the throat, folding the creature over to choke at his feet. Another wave of arrows speckled the snow in front of him. He reached out and plucked one up to eye its make; sloppy fletching from crow’s feathers and serrated flint tips. Tightened fingers snapped the shaft and Groon cast it aside with a grimace of disgust.
“Goblins!” he bellowed down the column as her dropped his pack and put his arm through the loops of his shield. “We’ve got fleas, lads! Get ready to brush ‘em off!”
The Blood-Drinkers bore fangs in response and threw off their cloaks, tightening armor fastenings, throwing helms onto knobby skulls and drawing heavy, curved swords as the rain of arrows thinned to a spatter. For an instant only the wind’s howl and the bleating of the wounded hobgoblin filled the Gap.
Airy calls blasting through poorly-crafted horns split the pass and the rocks above boiled with knobby-jointed, red-black figures. The hobgoblins roared in answer, Shazz’s horn blaring in accompaniment. Blood-Drinkers driven torage exposed themselves too early and caught a few last-second arrows from crafty goblin archers. Then the smaller goblinoid kin were all over their larger betters.
A hide-cloaked goblin leapt from a boulder. Groon stepped back and swung his shield, smashing the smaller creature out of the air with its spiked boss. A second goblin slid down to the path between rocks and lunged for Groon with a spear. Groon took the point on his shield, drew his sword and pivoted into a swing that cleaved the little brute from shoulder to hip. The goblin fell squalling in a bloody, black pile of gore. Groon stepped over it, savoring the squish under his boot.
A pair of goblins emerged to assail Akrak, still clutching his bruised throat—and still cackling, damn him! Swearing, Groon got to the shaman first and interposed himself between the creatures and their prey. One feinted left and hacked at the warlord, forced Groon to accept the blow on his shield while the other lashed into his exposed flank. The rudely-forged tulwar skittered across Groon’s leather scale. He answered with a slash that left the goblin’s head dangling from its neck by gristle. Groon turned to deal with the second but found the brute had scuttled past his other flank to his back.
“The problem with you little shits,” Groon barked as he spun and knocked aside a stab with his shield, “is the way you get under my feet!”
The goblin lunged under Groon’s shield and put his blade into the warlord’s belly. The point caught in the armor there, the creature lacking the strength to force the steel through. Groon guffawed at the shock quivering on the goblin’s beady eyes and rocked forward, his forehead smashing in the other’s with a spongy crackle. The goblin splayed across the snow, quill-tip pupils crossing as black hemorrhaged from its mouth.
Wiping goblin ichor from his brow, Groon frowned at the tingle of a forming bruise. “Forgot the damned helmet again,” he muttered. He shook off the pain and glanced around for more fight.
Howling Gap ran with the curdled-porridge gore of slaughtered goblins. Everywhere Groon looked his Blood-Drinkers proved why they had been the pride of Glittra’s mercenary companies. Hobgoblins strode over twitching piles of slain foes to wade into fresh attackers, swords splashing fountains of blood as high as the rocks above, gauntleted fists caving in fiendish faces, arms gripping smaller forms in bone-pulping embraces then throwing the disjointed corpses back into their comrades. Only a few Blood-Drinkers lay among the fallen, and those mostly from the initial surprise.
Goblin horns sounded and those that still lived flowed back from the hobgoblins into the shelter of the heights. The Blood-Drinkers sent catcalls and cold laughter after them, bawling for another go.
It was likely the best any of them had felt in months.
Groon eyed the crags above, noting the stooped forms crowding until there was no more room. Sparsely-haired skulls and disproportionately-large ears infested the rocks, tiny eyes flashing malice between gaps as the nasty creatures tittered amongst themselves. Groon sheathed his sword and lifted Akrak one-handed to his feet by the throat. “How many are there?” he asked the shaman.
“Many more than us,” Akrak croaked. “Release...and I might tell.”
Groon opened his hand and Akrak sagged against a boulder, sobbing for breath. “Hurry, you fool!”
“Something...not right...” Akrak looked up.
A single horn sounded above. Groon frowned, recognizing the crude approximation of a cavalry call he knew. “They want to talk?”
“Talk...” Akrak blinked, that maniac fire back in his eyes, and nodded wildly. “Yes...talk! The drums...the horns...her voice...she wants us to talk!”
Groon glared at the shaman then shook his head. “Is this a joke? Talk to the bottom-feeders?”
“Do it, Groon Blood-Drinker.” Akrak’s voice pitched low to the near-gurgle it’d achieved when his decapitated corpse had come back to life and sought its own head.
Groon looked away, suppressed a shiver as the worms of terror squirmed anew. He spat and looked up to the boulders. “All right, you carrion; send someone down!”
A figure appeared from behind the crags and scuttled to the edge of the path. The goblin wasn’t big, even by his kind’s standards, armor meant for a human bobbing comically from narrow shoulders. Twin tulwars hung in sheaths crossed at its back. Scar tissue made an already sharply-boned face craggy. When it spoke, a particularly livid gash knitted in a ridge from the bridge of its crooked nose to the jaw line. “We had to know.”
“Know what, boot-licker?” Groon spat at the goblin’s feet.
The goblin messenger glanced in amusement at the splash of phlegm. “We had to know if you were the ones our witches warned of.”
Groon bit back another curse, glanc
ing at Akrak, who nodded like an idiot. The worms managed an extra twist in his stomach. “You knew of our coming?”
“The shock troopers of our new glory,” the goblin replied. It grinned, exposed gapped but razor-sharp fangs. “She calls us all to destiny...Blood-Drinker.”
Groon took a step back, refused to look at Akrak again, though he could sense the shaman’s jubilation. How? In all his service to Glittran wizards and petty, barbarian princelings, never had Groon been so picked out. He and his had always been fodder—albeit, the most formidable fodder scheming sorcerers had ever flung against one another—but fodder, nonetheless. But he’d always felt there was something more to his future, some glimmering vision of him leading a horde to conquest like the warrior-sires of goblinoid ancestral memory.
“Do not question, Groon,” Akrak said. “You know this was to be.”
“And I will be at your side, Deadly One.” If the goblin intended sarcasm in the title, it was only a hint. The creature bowed. “I am Brathug Foulstench, and my folk are yours.”
Taking a breath for the first time in what must have been several minutes Groon winced at the rotting-meat odor from which the goblin leader got his surname. Glancing at Akrak, Groon said, “Then you know where it is we go?”
Foulstench grinned like death. “We were on our way there when we encountered you.”
THE SKINNERS ATTACKED Edon Village at dawn, surging downhill in an avalanche of hammering drums, blaring horns, howls, and glittering steel. The barbarian mass split as it passed into the low point between the ridge and Jayce’s hill, a sizable portion breaking off to flow into the village. Smoke boiled from Edon’s rooftops as torch fire feasted on thatch and wood.
The main body shuddered, Skinner chieftains bawling at subordinates to restore order. Enough succeeded to preserve the formation, guide it up the slope towards the tower and the villagers crouched and shivering at the low wall. A handful of Edonites loosed arrows from bows that had only seen work on deer and fowl. Two or three Skinners went down, swallowed in the current without being noticed. Horns of the Hunt sounded and a cry rose from the barbarians who broke into a mass sprint as they neared the crest.
