“The thunder, I think, kept me restless.” Bera kept her voice down to avoid waking the men. She stepped close.
“It is not loud.” Isaam spoke so softly, Bera could hardly hear him.
“Yet it reminds me of war drums.” Bera gestured with her head, and the two followed a narrow game path that wound between ginkgos and ash.
“But you like war.”
“Aye, Isaam, I do. But I never have liked the drums.”
When they were finally beyond the last of the sleeping men, Isaam tugged on Bera’s tunic. An old friend, he could get away with such a gesture. She stopped and looked down into his fleshy face. The moon emerged from behind a thick cloud, and it reflected off his pale skin. He was sweating, and it wasn’t so warm that evening.
“Isaam, you’re ill?”
He shook his head and wiped at his face with the sleeves of his robe. It smudged dirt across his forehead. “I’ve been using my magic, Bera, to the point where it’s taxed me terribly. I’ve been looking for our absent men.”
“Our scouts.” She nodded and steepled her fingers beneath her chin. “Go on.”
“I accounted for nearly all of them before we stopped. And they’ve nothing to report about goblins. One party did cross paths with a bloodrager.”
Bera cocked her head, unfamiliar with the creature.
“Like an overly large wolf,” Isaam said as way of explanation.
“Go on.”
“But our long-absent force …”
“Donnel and Tannen and-”
“I believe I’ve found them.”
“Then summon them immediately.”
“I cannot lead them to us, Commander. We must go to them. And we should do so quickly.”
Bera had woken the knights promptly, Isaam leading the way and setting a pace slower than usual. It wasn’t until four days later, nearing sunset, that the exhausted army found the clearing where Mudwort had buried Tannen and Donnel.
Animals had unearthed the remains. The dirt in the clearing had been dug up with the efficiency of men using shovels, and bones and pieces of armor were scattered everywhere. Flesh remained here and there; Donnel’s face was easily recognized, though his eyes were gone. Insects were thick, things that crawled on what was left of the bodies and flies that were so numerous they looked like black clouds settled to ground.
The smell was horrid. Bera and many of the knights in the first rank covered their noses with their hands. Some of the men turned away, while others looked on in grim fascination.
“What did this?” Bera was furious, her anger overshadowing any grief she felt for the six men. “The bloodrager you mentioned?”
“A bloodrager certainly would be capable of such,” one of her men answered.
Isaam waved away some of the flies, scowling when they returned quickly to swarm again. “Possibly,” he agreed. “But their bodies were just freshly unearthed when I’d found them. This other damage was done in the time it took us to get here.”
“So something killed and buried them, you’re saying.” Bera stared at a leg bone, maggots thick on a hunk of flesh.
“Or someone.” Isaam walked through the swarm of flies and picked up Donnel’s head. “Let’s find out.”
He retreated to a spot outside the clearing where the insects were not so bothersome. Smoothing at his robe with his free hand, he sat on a patch of thick-bladed grass and crossed his legs, all the while holding Donnel’s head. Isaam set it almost reverently on the ground in front of him, picking a worm out of an eye socket and tossing it away matter-of-factly.
Bera kept a polite distance, Zocci staying behind her and quietly ordering a detail of knights to properly rebury their brethren.
Isaam placed his hands on the sides of the head and leaned forward until his forehead was inches from it. Bera tried unsuccessfully to suppress a shudder. The thing reeked, and her sorcerer friend, so close to it, showed no signs of being bothered by the stench or by the notion of what he was nearly touching.
As she watched, maggots crawled from the scraps of flesh on the head and over Isaam’s fingers.
“They call it the dark side of magic,” Isaam began, “that which lets me speak to the dead.”
Zocci touched Bera’s shoulder. “Is he going to-”
“Shh,” Bera warned. “I’ve seen him do this once before.” That was years past, when she wanted to learn the name of a knight who’d fallen in battle. His wounds had been so grievous that she couldn’t identify him. His blood was still red, and the warmth was just leaving his flesh. She considered that experience far less gruesome than the decomposed head Isaam addressed.
“Perhaps the darkest of magic …” Isaam continued. Then his words became foreign to her. She knew it was an incantation, and the very sound of it sent a shiver down her back. Isaam droned on for long minutes, his voice dropping in tone, and the sounds of men digging proper graves in the earth coming to the fore.
A cloud of insects had followed them there, and Zocci tried unsuccessfully to bat them away from Bera’s face. Despite the stench, Bera stepped closer to Isaam, trying to listen.
When the incantation finished, a new voice rasped. Bera vaguely recognized it; Donnel had been in her company long enough that she knew the sound of his voice. She opened her mouth as if to say something to the grotesquerie that was her former knight. Then she took a step back and bumped into Zocci’s chest. The voice was Donnel’s, but it was emerging from Isaam.
“It was a little, ugly, female goblin, one that had been at the mines. She had whip scars; that was the telling sign that she’d been in Iverton, Steel Town. Her eyes were like little pieces of coal, hard and dark.”
“Defiant,” that was uttered in Isaam’s voice. “You considered the goblin defiant.”
“Yes.” The word was a hiss, like a kettle left too long dangling over a fire. “Despite the pain, defiant. Broke her fingers, her leg, punched her. We brought her close to death-too close, Tannen thought. Should have taken her to Zocci.”
“It wouldn’t have mattered,” Isaam told the spirit.
Bera found it disconcerting not only that Isaam talked to the spirit but that he carried on a conversation seemingly with himself. Both voices continued to issue from his mouth.
“Yes,” the spirit replied. “She would have killed us anyway, the ugly little goblin. She gave up her secrets because she knew we would not live to take the news to Commander Kata. She answered our questions to toy with us.” The spirit’s voice came faster, with Isaam sucking in great gulps of air. “More powerful than you, sorcerer, that goblin is. She ordered the ground to swallow us up. She turned it to quicksand beneath our feet, and it pulled us down like being drawn into the Abyss.”
“Not possible,” Isaam cut in.
“You know it to be true,” the spirit answered flatly. “I can tell no lies.”
Bera edged closer again, cupping her hand over her nose and mouth in a futile attempt to cut the stench. Zocci stayed close behind her.
“Then she turned the quicksand to stone as hard as granite. She crushed our legs and ribs. The pain she gave us was unbearable.”
“She did not kill you right away?”
“No, sorcerer. She asked us questions first, gained our secrets, I say.” The spirit’s voice faltered but continued. “We gave up everything we knew. Gave up Commander Kata. Gave up you. The oath we took meant nothing compared to the pain we felt.”
Isaam looked away from the skull and caught Bera’s gaze.
“You wish more from his spirit? I’ll hold him here as long as you want. He wants to return to the Gray.”
The Gray was the place where spirits were said to meander, close to the world of the living but unable to reach it.
Bera stared at the maggots crawling over Isaam’s fingers. One disappeared up his sleeve. “Yes. I want more. He said the goblin gave up secrets as well. What did she tell them?”
“That she was indeed from Steel Town. That the other escaped slaves are in the woods. She told us where to find all of them, and that their leader is named Direfang. He perches himself above their camp, on a bluff over a river. She betrayed them only because she thought word would never reach you.”