Isaam’s eyes grew wide. “In all my years with you, I’ve not heard you speak of this.”
“I’ve had no reason to, old friend. We’re not slavers to capture goblins, and so we’ve not left any survivors before. As you say, we’ve burned them before.”
“But we’ve never before camped in such close proximity to the dead either. By all the gods, the stench and bugs-”
“We’ll move on at first light, Isaam.”
The wizard gestured toward the pile. “And so if their bodies are burned, the souls are freed, eh?”
“That is what they believe. Otherwise the souls will return and be trapped in rotting corpses. But when the bodies are burned, the souls are free to move elsewhere and start a new life in a goblin baby being born,” Bera finished.
“What an insipid belief,” the wizard pronounced.
“They are insipid creatures.” Bera wriggled her nose in disgust. “And so the dead ones can draw bugs, and so the two we’ve left alive stare at the mound of corpses in terror, thinking the souls are seeping back and reinhabiting the bodies, becoming trapped.”
The wizard nodded. “A horror story you’ve birthed.”
“The two survivors will be taken to a slave encampment when the Lord Adjudicator is done with them. They’ll be quick to tell the slaves there about the massacre of their fellow escapees. And they’ll tell them that the dead were left intact so the souls would come back to be ensnared forever.”
Isaam shuddered. “I understand the policy now.”
“Use their own beliefs against them.”
“The Order needs hundreds more slaves to rebuild Iverton.” Isaam rubbed at the stubble on his chin. “Perhaps we should not kill so many; we could bring back many more for labor.”
Bera made a growling sound in her throat. “My orders were to spare only a few, so the tale of the mass killing could be spread, so slaves elsewhere will know that escape only leads to death and damnation.” She gestured to the northeast. “Already ogres and minotaurs work to gather more slaves for the Order. They look to the north, where your magic says the escaped slaves did not go.”
“Yes. That is correct.”
“Good.”
Isaam studied Bera for several moments. “I think you are enjoying this assignment.”
“Yes, old friend.” Revenge, Bera thought, vengeance for my father. Vengeance for the Order. “On many levels. Slaves dishonor the Order by escaping.” Bera clenched her hands so tightly that they ached. “It cannot be tolerated.”
“And renegade Dark Knights …”
“They are even worse,” Bera corrected. “No traitors to the Order should escape punishment. They must be hunted down too.”
Isaam pointed toward the fire. Zoccinder stood with his back to it, staring at them. After a moment, he started walking their way. Isaam got to his feet.
“The wizard too,” Isaam said.
“Grallik N’sera,” Bera said.
Isaam pulled an empty bottle from a pocket of his robe. “This is all I have to follow him with, all that was salvaged from where he lived in Iverton. The ink in it has dried, and the top is melted. But Grallik N’sera used it, and so I am using it too.” He replaced the bottle. “It is enough of a link that I can scry upon him. It and my spells tell me he is still with the goblins. In these mountains, somewhere, Commander. These vast, vast mountains.”
Bera stood too, eyes on Zoccinder, who had come up close to them, ignoring Isaam even as she spoke to him. “But not with this group of goblins.”
Isaam shrugged. “Unfortunately, no.”
“Then we resume our search at first light,” Bera commanded. “Would that your magic were more precise, old friend. Would that it could lead us directly to him.”
Isaam took that as a dismissal and headed toward the fire, giving Zoccinder a wide berth. The big knight turned to watch the wizard, then turned back to face Bera.
“Commander?”
“What do you want, Zoccinder? It is late, and the men are settling down for-”
He bent and his warm breath tickled her forehead.
For a moment, Bera considered berating him for his insolence.
GRALLIK’S AIM
Grallik N’sera sat cross-legged on an uneven patch of dirt, staring straight up and trying to ignore the pebbles that bit into the backs of his legs.
The sky looked as flat and gray as the iron he used to leech from the rocks in Steel Town, the same shade as the fine robe that once served as a badge of office, the one he’d given to the goblins as an act of surrender.
There were no clouds or birds to catch his attention, no breeze to tease his filthy, matted hair-just an unending emptiness that cast a gloomy pallor and masked the time of day. It could have been morning or early evening for all he knew; he’d lost track of how long he’d walked before being allowed a respite.
“Was this a mistake?” he whispered. He was on a mountain trail in the company of hundreds of goblins, most of them milling behind him, resting their ugly little feet. He wished they would rest their tongues instead. Grallik could not shut out their galling chatter, which sounded like locusts swarming. He couldn’t fathom their crude language and had no desire to learn it.
His head pounded horribly from the annoying din and competed with the burning ache that suffused every inch of his body.
“Was this a mistake?” he repeated.
Throwing in his lot with the once-slaves? Leaving the Dark Knights? Abandoning decades of work for an Order he’d been unswervingly loyal to?
The goblins could kill him at any time; his magic could not best their numbers, and he knew they all hated him. Had he brought about his own demise by practically groveling to join them?
He dropped his right hand onto his knee and rubbed at the thin material of his undertunic, finding a hole and absently worrying at the frayed threads. The goblins had let him keep the utterly dirty and snagged garment, along with his boots, which he’d taken off the corpse of another Dark Knight. One heel was cracked down the middle and would break soon, and the sole of the other had worn through in places and birthed painful blisters. It hurt to wear them, but he knew it would hurt far worse to go barefoot over the rocky ground.
It hadn’t been a mistake to leave Steel Town, he told himself.
There couldn’t be much left of the Dark Knight mining camp. What the earthquakes hadn’t ruined and what the escaping slaves hadn’t destroyed, the erupting volcanoes had no doubt finished.
Shattered, melted, buried … all of it.
He’d barely escaped the lava himself, following the slaves south into the mountains before magma covered everything that had been important to him. Sulfur still hung heavy in the air, and that, coupled with the stink that rose from the goblins like an omnipresent specter, threatened to send him into another fit of retching.
Grallik worked up some saliva, swallowing hard and frowning when he was unable to dispel the taste of the sulfur and dust and his own reeking sweat. He felt his skin pulling here and there from thick scabs forming, on his left arm in particular, where yesterday he squeezed against a jagged outcropping on a narrow part of the trail. He’d cut himself rather deeply.
Horace, a Dark Knight priest he’d lured along on his mad venture, had tended him, but Grallik had opened the cut again that morning. Grallik focused on his wound, hoping that its sting would take his mind off the rest of his miseries and swearing when the attempt was unsuccessful. He let out a hissing breath and lowered his gaze to the sleeping form of Horace an arm’s length away.
The priest was dressed only in leather breeches, which had been stripped from the corpse of a young ogre and given to him by the goblins before they’d started their march. Like Grallik, the priest had surrendered his Dark Knight tabard, along with his chain mail, which a stout hobgoblin had claimed.