Where was Leesil?
Furred flesh tore in Chap’s teeth. He wheeled around his target as the beast stumbled, spinning to slam the cudgel down at his head. He ducked under as the weapon broke the earth and lunged up into its face. His teeth closed on the top of its muzzle and ground through fur and flesh into bone. For an instant he stared into its sickly yellow irises.
The creature screamed, thrashing its head up and back.
Chap’s teeth ached sharply as it tore its face out of his jaws. The force slung him aside, and he tumbled and rolled to his feet to go for its throat. It wailed, its own blood spattering across its beastly face and into its eyes, but it had not gone down. It shrieked at him as it groped for its fallen weapon.
A white-blond blur dropped out of the dusky sky from the branches above.
Leesil landed hard atop the creature’s shoulders with his knees. It toppled, and its head and shoulders slammed to the earth. With that momentum, Leesil drove one of his winged punching blades point first into the back of its neck.
Another muffled crack of bone filled Chap’s ears as he saw a third beast charging in. He spotted Magiere, now at the clearing’s center and back-to-back with the dwarf. The two faced the rest of the pack all around.
Chap bolted and leaped into the face of the third one. As it dropped its cudgel, trying to claw him, he bit through and tore one of its peaked ears. Before it could stop screaming and grab him, he pushed off with his rear legs and hit the ground running. Leesil would have to deal with that one, as Chap needed to make sure no more got through.
A strange cry, almost like some foreign word he did not understand, filled the clearing.
Six of the twelve beasts remained on their feet and hands. All suddenly wheeled, loping for the nearest trees around the clearing. They vanished into the growing darkness, and the clearing grew quiet but for the panting of those who remained.
Chap still tasted fur, flesh, and blood in his mouth, but he looked about for his companions.
Magiere stood with her back to the dwarf and watched the tree line for movement. Her breaths came deep and rapid. As for the dwarf, he did the same while facing the other way. Three bodies lay around him, and beneath his heavy right boot he held down the head of one creature, though it didn’t move. Leesil passed into Chap’s view as he trotted toward Magiere, but Chap’s gaze had caught something lying nearby.
He trembled—not from exertion or at the severed head of Magiere’s first opponent. It was those lifeless yellow eyes in a beastly face that made him grow frightened.
That thing was familiar to him now.
Years ago, when the three of them had traveled to Magiere’s dark homeland, he’d been lost inside a phantasm cast upon him by an undead sorcerer. In that nightmare vision he’d seen a feral version of Magiere dressed in black-scaled armor. It was only a sorcerer’s trick that played upon his worst inner fears, but he’d never been able to shake it.
In his vision she’d stood in a night forest with skulking and hulking silhouettes all around her. Among them, at the forefront of those she led, these same kind of creatures appeared. She had led an army of the enemy’s minions into the forest of his nightmare ... and everything living shriveled and died in her wake.
He also knew of these creatures from Wynn’s tales on their long journey across the continent to Calm Seatt. They had passed through barren, wild regions devoid of civilization. A part of that route was called the Broken Lands. Wynn had spoken of these creatures, among other monstrosities, said to roam there. But neither Chap nor Magiere nor Leesil ever saw anything while with that large, guarded caravan.
Here they were, what Wynn had called gôb’elazkin: the “little gobblers” or goblins, for they ate anything that lived. And they were not so little.
What were they doing so far west, moons away from their territory, in a place where they just happened to encounter Magiere?
She did not appear to see them as anything more than savage animals too humanoid in form. Neither did she recognize them for what they were, as she had never seen them before. But Magiere and the dwarf suddenly took off for the far tree line.
“They’re gone!” Leesil shouted at her in Belaskian. “It’s over!”
Something in his voice got through to Magiere, and she halted. The dwarf also paused, and they both stared back at Leesil. When Magiere reluctantly turned back, the dwarf growled under his breath, kicked a clot of sod from the earth, and followed. For a moment everyone stood silent except for the sounds of their panting.
The dwarf straightened proudly and slapped one hand against his chest.
“I am Fiáh’our,” he announced loudly in Numanese. He appeared to think this should mean something to them.
Magiere blinked uncertainly, still breathing hard, but her spoken Numanese was passable.
“Your name is Fee-yaaah ... ?”
“Fiáh’our,” he repeated, and then laughed at her stumbling over his name. “Most of your kind call me Hammer-Stag ... of the family of Loam, Meerschaum clan of the Tumbling-Ridge tribe. I thank you for adding your sword to my axe this night.” Glancing toward Leesil and Chap, he drew his shoulders back. “Even though it was not necessary, and I would have preferred to kill all the sluggïn’ân before they could flee.”
Magiere studied him—and then saw the thôrhk around his neck.
“Slug-and-ay-en?” Leesil parroted back.
Hammer-Stag chuckled. “Sluggïn’ân ... what you Numans call ‘goblins.’”
“I’m Magiere,” she put in. “That’s Leesil, and this one’s called Chap.”
Chap wondered how much of this exchange Leesil could follow, considering his spoken Numanese was not as good as Magiere’s. He appeared to listen closely as he inched in behind her.
“Well met!” the dwarf barked, and then frowned a little as he eyed Magiere in puzzlement. “Your accent is strange. Not Northlander or Wastelander ... perhaps Witenon or from somewhere further south?”
“Farther off, to the east,” she answered, and, jutting her chin at one of the corpses, she changed the subject. “Why were these things attacking you?”
“Because I am hunting them,” he answered.
Everyone paused at that.
“Hunting?” Magiere echoed. “Are they just animals of some kind?”
Hammer-Stag uttered a “tsk-tsk” and shook his head. “From your lips to the Eternals’ ears, I wish ... for they would not be so worrisome if that were true.”
With a great, growling sigh—far too dramatic for Chap’s taste—the dwarf took on a stern expression.
“They tried to raid the village of Shentángize one night past,” he continued. “No one there dared step beyond the stockade at night. I had no choice but to set out, with only my axe for company.”
Magiere blinked again and glanced over her shoulder at Leesil.
“You ... hunt ... ?” Leesil tried to say. At a loss for the next word, he nodded to a severed head beyond the dwarf.
Hammer-Stag squinted, his eyelids closing around his small black irises like iron pellets.
“Of course! They are cunning, vicious, and eat anything alive.” He peered more closely at Leesil’s face. “Ah, I should have known it was a Lhoin’na dropping from the trees.”
Both Magiere and Leesil fell speechless at the dwarf’s blustering words. Neither of them corrected him concerning Leesil’s true heritage. Hammer-Stag’s gaze dropped, and his eyes widened in wonder.
“By the Eternals!” he breathed softly.
Leesil blinked and looked down. Chap had already followed the dwarf’s gaze to the winged punching blades still in Leesil’s hands.
Made from shining white metal, their forward ends were shaped like flattened steel spades but with elongated tips and sharpened edges. At the blades’ heads were crosswise oval openings, allowing him to grip their backs. Each weapon’s outer edge extended in a wing that curved back along his forearm’s bottom to protrude beyond his elbow. Arcs of rounded metal came out halfway down the wings and around his forearms to hold the weapons in place.