“Draath wants to see under the spire,” Direfang told her. Mudwort didn’t know why she should care. She did not care about the spire or about Draath beyond his usefulness with spells. “Draath is very curious,” Direfang added.
Mudwort shrugged and stretched her arms above her head; the moist dirt on her arms was drying and fell off in pieces like beetles brushed away.
“Work again soon, Mudwort. So much to be done.” Direfang stood over her, his shadow a line that stretched across her and cast a darkness over her, hanging into the most recently dug depression. “Work before the meat is cooked. Work some more.”
She didn’t say anything for a while, didn’t even look up to meet his gaze. Instead she thought wistfully about the spear again.
“The homes will be better for all the work,” he said. “Sturdy to withstand the wind. All of them fine like Mudwort’s.” He continued to talk, but she had stopped listening, wrapping her mind around the spear and thinking about the journey there, which had been arduous, but which was not filled with work and work and more work. She was tired of the journey and the work.
“No more work this day, Direfang,” she said finally. “Tired.” She gestured to Thya, who, soundly snoring, was oblivious to anything around her. “Done today.”
Direfang rubbed at the bridge of his nose. “Too much to do, Mudwort.”
“Ever the foreman,” she cut back. She tried to sound mean, but there was little strength in her voice. “How is this freedom? Same as slave mines. Work. Work. Work.”
“Tomorrow, then,” he said. The hobgoblin’s voice was softer, and for a moment she thought he might apologize for being so pushy. But apologies were a sign of weakness, for him or her. “Tomorrow dig more earth bowls. Many, many more.”
She leaned back on her elbows and felt him walk away and felt the vibrations from Thya’s snores. She was aware of other activities too. Several groups of goblins were hard at work physically digging the earth bowls. Among the supplies Grallik had purchased before their voyage were an assortment of shovels and picks, which at first the goblins had considered a waste. Suddenly they were a treasure. Some goblins were digging at the ground with their hands.
Most had decided to build homes as sturdy and earth-bound as Mudwort’s.
And only she knew that they were building very near the place the ancient clan once called home.
Her spear could not be so terribly far away.
MUDWORT’S QUEST
Direfang did not understand. He simply was not capable of understanding, Mudwort realized, at least not right at that moment.
She dug the ball of her foot into the ground and fumed. Direfang wasn’t stupid; otherwise he would not have proven the champion who won their freedom from their Dark Knight taskmasters, and he would not have led them from Steel Town to their blessed forest.
But he couldn’t seem to look beyond himself and whatever plans he had churning in his brain about their fledgling goblin nation and the city he was building. He was being selfish-even though he claimed to be thinking about the goblins as a whole.
She deserved a turn at being selfish too. “Work.” She cursed. “Work. Work. Work.” Direfang understood only work and ordering the clans around. He’d done that for years when he was a foreman in the Dark Knight mines in Neraka-work and telling others to work.
He was still doing it.
Single-minded and bent on building this damnable goblin city.
“Dig more bowls,” he’d told Mudwort just minutes before. “For goblin homes. Dig many more today. Small and big ones.”
She’d dug plenty already, done more than her share of the work in building the city.
City? It wasn’t a city, not yet. It wouldn’t be a city until a lot of time had passed and a great deal more work was put into it. And too much of that work would fall on her narrow shoulders.
Her magic had made her valuable to the clans, perhaps too valuable.
And yes, she would dig more, for Direfang. Without him she’d still be in a slave pen in Neraka.
But not anymore. Not. Anymore.
Let the other goblins dig with shovels. And let Thya, Draath, Grallik, Sallor, and a handful of others who knew how use magic dig the new buildings with their minds.
She’d more than earned some time alone.
So when Direfang was occupied with Graytoes and Jando-Jando several minutes earlier, she’d slipped away. She’d made sure Grallik hadn’t been watching her-as that seemed to be his sole hobby so he could advance his magic. If he’d been watching, Direfang certainly would have been alerted to her escape.
After a few miles, she paused behind a half-dead oak and peeked around it, just to make sure the wizard wasn’t sneaking along after her-and that no one else was following, for that matter.
No one.
Still, just to be certain, she squatted and touched the fingers of her right hand to a patch of dirt between the tree’s knobby roots. Her senses flowed down her arms and into the earth. She was instantly surrounded by the sensation of husks of dead insects, small rocks imprinted with fern leaves, and thick worms lazily burrowing. The feeling was pleasurable, and she lingered for a moment before spurring her senses on.
“The blame is here,” she said, thumping her chest. If she’d not sent her senses through the earth upon leaving Steel Town, she’d not have helped all of it to happen-the goblins living in those woods; the homes they’d constructed; her being responsible for homes like those ancient ones, which involved digging the bowls in the earth. She’d made herself far too useful and important. “S’dard! Should have stayed quiet.
“Should have stayed quiet. Quiet. Quiet.” She’d managed to stay quiet about precisely why she had wanted to come to the Qualinesti Forest-the thing in the earth had lured her there-and why she, in turn, had lured Direfang and the goblin horde.
“The Qualinesti Forest, Direfang,” she’d told him long weeks past. “That is the place for a goblin nation. Not the Plains of Dust. There are goblins in the forest, goblins elsewhere. Goblins on an island with a stairway of great energy-saw that. Goblins everywhere, scattered, weak.” She also knew of the goblins in Northern Ergoth but had no desire to join them.
There was strength and power in the forest, a great magical power, and that was what she desired.
Chislev’s spear, it was, the weapon of a god for whom she had no respect. Mudwort, like the rest of the goblins in Direfang’s army, had no faith in the gods. But the weapon … she would respect that when she wrapped her fingers around the haft of the spear, which she would do soon. It would be Mudwort’s spear then, not Chislev’s. If the god had still wanted it, the god would have it. The thing would not be buried.
The god had thrown it away.
She knew it possessed arcane powers, she’d recognized that in her earth visions when she’d glimpsed a goblin shaman from ancient times who’d found and wielded the spear.
Soon Mudwort would be powerful too.
She continued to send her senses back in time, intending to look for where the goblins were building their city, wanting to make sure that no one was following her. She expected to feel their feet pressing against the ground, the weight of so many of them crushing her and making it difficult to breathe. But that didn’t happen. Though she looked hard and long, she couldn’t find them, nor their infant city. Mudwort could not even sense Direfang, or Thya and Draath and Grallik.
“Do not understand,” she muttered. Her magic wasn’t working. She should have witnessed goblins digging earth bowls, cutting trees, and tanning hides-goblins acting civilized. She couldn’t even see the river that flowed by the bluff, nor spot the spire stone that Direfang had been obsessed with.
“Should go back,” she said, worried that something might have befallen the entire community. Maybe it was the earth under the city! Maybe something in the ground was blocking her magic, a type of rock that was foreign to her. Or perhaps she had dug so many bowls the ground was angry with her and would not let her senses travel through it.