Bera turned and passed by Zocci. “Let his spirit go, Isaam. Zocci, see that the head is buried with its body. We have a priest in our midst who will give the proper rites.” More softly, she added, “And soon Horace will also give rites over Grallik N’sera’s corpse.”
She hurried around the clearing where the knights continued to dig deep, even graves. The flies persisted as she made her way. She was looking for one knight in particular.
“Zathor,” she said to one group of knights after the other. “Where is Zathor?”
A lieutenant caught her attention and directed her to the north.
“He should be near the front, not the back,” she cursed. “He has the maps.”
Finally she found him. “Your maps, Zathor,” she ordered brusquely.
He nodded and swung his pack off his back. She motioned to a knight with a torch. “Light it. The sun is gone, and I need to see.”
Bera was impatient, and after a few moments, she grabbed the torch from the knight and lit it herself. Zathor spread a series of maps across the ground, holding them in place with rocks. She looked from one to the next, studying terrain features and straining to read tiny marks about elevations.
“Some of these are older than others. Things have grown and overgrown,” Zathor tried to explain. “But they’re all I have to work with.”
“Too many streams and rivers,” she said. “This damnable forest is too damn big.” She reached her free hand to the back of her neck and scratched it then crouched to get a better look, careful to keep the torch from catching anything on fire.
“Commander?” Zathor set down the final map and placed rocks on top of it to keep it down in place. “What are you looking for?”
“Goblins,” she muttered. “Damnable goblins in this damnable forest.” After a pause, she added, “And a traitor.”
She told him about the bluff and the river. After a few moments of scrutiny, he pointed to a spot on the closest map.
“This could be it, Commander. I don’t believe we’re far from here. Less than a day or two’s march.”
She straightened and thrust the torch into another knight’s hand. Zathor took great care refolding his maps. “Give that one map to Tavor,” she told him. “He’s our best scout, and I want him to follow this as best as possible. Move out soon!”
“Aye, Commander.”
“Horace!” Another knight gave her directions to where the prisoner could be found. She came up to him with a fierce expression. “Your prayers over our fallen brothers had best be short.”
MUDWORT’S OBSESSION
Mudwort was sitting, touching the ground, and after a moment sinking her fingers in, looking for her obsession: the spear.
Mudwort had never been taught magic, as she knew Grallik had. She couldn’t read a spell book or a magical scroll even if she desperately wanted to; she couldn’t read. She accidentally learned of her inner arcane spark several years earlier, shortly after being captured by the ogres and sold to work in Steel Town. When her hours in the mine got longer and longer, she started imagining the stones talked to her. At first she thought her mind had gone sour, but eventually she discovered the stones really were speaking and that she’d merely discovered a way to listen to it. It wasn’t language in the way one goblin talked to another, but emotions and impressions she learned to understand.
It took her a while to steadily and secretly hone her skills, and in the process she learned to sense where the richest veins of ore were, discovering places where the stone was either weak or especially strong, and finally discovering how to send her senses through rocks to see other places and creatures. Mingling her magic with others, such as Thya and Grallik, came later, much later. Steel Town seemed a long time in the past.
Since coming to the forest, she had become obsessed with the shaman from the long-ago time-that shaman and her clan and the spear. That was why Mudwort had come to the forest to begin with.
Her name had been Saarh, and when first Mudwort glimpsed her, she was little more than a youngling holding court deep in a cave in the mountains. That was before Mudwort realized she was looking through time as well as through the earth and that Saarh had been dead more years or decades than Mudwort could count.
The ancient clan had a form of writing, but no goblins she knew of wrote. They were learned. Their leader was wise. Mudwort had tried to follow them through the stone and years.
When last she had looked in, Saarh had wrinkles at the edges of her eyes, and her face was pockmarked-she was well into middle age. Her nose carried a thin scar, and another scar ran from her ear to her jaw. There was a bone hoop in her right ear, recently put there, as it was crusted with blood, and there was a feather and a bead on a string hanging from her left ear.
It was clear all the goblins around Saarh treated her with respect and followed her orders. Most of those goblins were red-skinned, like Mudwort, but there were some brown-skinned goblins too, and a few were tinged orange.
Mudwort thrust her hands in deeper, her fingers undulating like thick earthworms. “Where?” she said. “Where? Where? Where is Saarh now?” She remembered back to the clearing that the ancient goblins had come to after leaving their caverns. It was near the spot Direfang might try to rebuild his city … if the Dark Knights didn’t get him first. She would try to go there.
The years and miles melted in a heartbeat as Mudwort sought out Saarh. At the same time she kept a hold of the thread that connected her to the spear. The greens of the woods swirled in front of her in a dizzying mix. When they stopped spinning, dozens of goblins stood around her. But they weren’t really there, she knew; they were all long dead with shattered pieces of bones. Their images were not real; they were inside her head.
Several of the ancient goblins wore necklaces made of wood and stone and the teeth of small animals that lived underground that were strung on thin cords. Some had feathers and claws on thicker leather cords, bat ears and wings; and other goblins had pieces of bone pierced through their cheeks and nostrils.
Saarh had worn eight necklaces the last time Mudwort had glimpsed her; at that moment she had nine. The longest necklace hung to just below her waist. It was composed of carved wooden beads, most of them round, but a few that were cut to look like bats. The beads of another necklace had been painted with dyes made from lichen; Mudwort guessed that Saarh favored that one, as she worried at the beads with her slender fingers.
Mudwort gasped when she noted the most beautiful necklace. It was also the shortest one, barely fitting around Saarh’s head. It displayed irregular-shaped beads the color of the full white moon that shone overhead. The beads were smooth, and along their surfaces streaks of blue, pink, and green glistened.
Opals: Mudwort knew the name of the gemstone only because a woman in Steel Town had a brooch made of the stones. Mudwort found it interesting and listened to the woman tell another what the stone was called and that it was both precious and brittle.
Mudwort had a few necklaces too, including a thin, gold chain festooned with sapphires. She tugged one of her hands free from the ground and reached into a pouch at her side. Tiny sapphires filled most of the pouch; they were among the treasures she had taken from a dwarf village south of Steel Town. Grallik had used a great many of the stones to buy ships to bring them to the forest and to purchase supplies. But he didn’t use all of them, and she’d never shown anyone her secret necklace. Her fingers probed to the bottom, and she felt the chain. She gently pulled it out, careful not to lose any of the loose sapphires, and draped the treasure around her head. Somehow the necklace made her seem more important and happy. She wouldn’t wear it around the goblins in Direfang’s ruined city; she didn’t want to risk someone stealing it.