At twenty winters I was a guard captain and assistant to my clan head, a young fist among the many hands of the goblins of the mountains. I had fought on the surface against human intruders on our lands since I was twelve, and had been captured once and held prisoner for a year until I had escaped. My captivity taught me to never let it happen again. I knew humans well and feared none of them, but Skralang was not a human, and some said he was not a goblin, either.
The old shaman's door opened automatically when I reached it at the end of a black, web-filled tunnel. Skralang greeted me with a nod from his bed. He carelessly waved me to a chair at a table on which a lone candle flickered. I steeled myself and entered his den.
I picked my way across the tiny, litter-strewn room. My iron-shod boots crushed bits of bone, bread crusts, and other debris beneath them. Skralang did not seem to care about the filth. The world meant less to him every day, it was said. How he could stand to live in such vile conditions was beyond me, but it was not my place and not to my advantage to say so. Who insults a mouthpiece of the gods?
I sat and waited as the shaman took a small bottle and earthen cup from a box by his bed of rags. He carefully swung his feet off the ruined bed and got up, shuffling over to pull up a stool and take a seat by me. I stiffened and almost stood to salute, but he seemed not to care. His familiarity was astonishing; it was if I were an old and trusted friend.
Even more astonishing was Skralang's appearance at close range in the candlelight. His robes stank of corruption, as if death were held back from him by the width of an eyelash. The skin was pulled tight over the bones of his face and hands; open sores disfigured his arms and neck. Yet even with this, his pale yellow eyes were clear and steady. He gently poured another drink for himself, but did not take it right away. Instead he sat back and regarded me with those cold, clear eyes.
"You are bored, Captain Kergis," he said. His voice was no more than a whisper. In the silence, it was like a shout, "life here has no appeal for you. You long to be elsewhere."
I almost denied it, but his eyes warned me off from lies. I nodded hesitantly. "You see all, Your Darkness," I said. I knew that with his magic, the old goblin probably did see all within the Nightbelow-even the hidden places of the heart and soul.
The old one toyed with his cup. His spidery fingers trembled. "Has the security of our home begun to wear on you? Do the petty ravings of the clan heads lull your blood to sleep, rather than stir it with fire? Or do you have plans of your own for advancing your rank and position, and your boredom is merely feigned to cover your intentions?"
To be accused of treachery was not uncommon, but hearing it fall from the thin lips of our shaman was like hearing my death sentence pronounced. "I am loyal!" I pleaded, much louder than I wanted. "You wrong me, Your Darkness!"
I bit off my words. Skralang wronged no one. He was the law, and there was no other. I sat frozen, half expecting that his response would be my execution. A swift death was better by far than a slow one, and I prayed for the former.
Instead, Skralang drank from his cup and sighed. "You are loyal, yes," he said, staring at the cup in his fingers. "You are neither coward nor traitor. You merely seem… disenchanted, not impure in spirit. You do not carry yourself like a true goblin lately." He was silent for a moment, then looked up at me. "But then it sometimes seems to me that none of us do."
I could not have been more amazed than if he had informed me that he was actually a halfling. I was at a loss for words for several moments. "I do not understand," I finally said. "We are all true goblins. We are not tainted like-"
Treacherous tongue! The words had no sooner left my mouth than I would have cut out my tongue to have them back! Skralang flinched when he heard it, and his aged face became like steel.
"We are not tainted like a certain one among us, you say?" The shaman's eyes were icy yellow orbs shining from the depths of his face. His fingers gripped his cup like a web grips prey. For one awful moment, his cup became me.
Then-without warning-the old shaman's face softened and melted. He looked away as he set his cup on the table. 'Tainted. You are right. No one has spoken that word to me since the birth of my grandson, but there is no hiding it.
When I call him my kin, it is like swallowing daggers. He is tainted, tainted with the blood of a human."
The ancient visage looked my way again, but in sadness, not anger. "Everyone must talk about it. It is a disgrace, and there is no atonement for it. None but death." He sighed deeply and looked off into the darkness of the room.
I knew better than to say anything more. Everyone knew of his half-human grandson, the child of his mutilated daughter and her human attacker. Both child and daughter had been hidden from all other eyes for over a decade, but we knew from rumor that they yet lived. And that we could not understand. Had the daughter belonged to any of the rest of us, we would have slain both her and her infant before birth, and thus removed the shame from our line. What had happened to prevent this?
The shaman looked back at me as if he could read my every thought. " 'As the gods will, we do without question,'" he said, quoting the maxim in a tired voice. "They spoke to me as I held a knife over my daughter's belly, eager to cleanse our honor, and their words turned my knife aside. It was their will that Zeth be raised among us, in my daughter's den, though they would not say why. I had the girl and her bastard walled up, as the gods did not forbid that. I feed them once a day, give them a candle or two for light, but keep the taint away from the rest of our people. It was the gods' will, and I obeyed them, as would any of us." He rubbed his face with a skeletal hand.
I did my best to hide my surprise at this revelation. The gods' will? He said so but still lived, so it must be true. The sharp, clear eyes turned away again, and the old one refilled his cup and stared into it for a long moment, chewing his lower lip in perplexity.
The old shaman drank again and set the cup down. The ghost of a smile came to his withered lips, but there was no humor behind it.
"I am older than old for our people," he said softly. "If I see another midwinter's day, I will be forty-six. I ache ceaselessly. I pray for death before I sleep, yet the gods want me to live a little longer." His cold eyes looked across the table at me. "Can you guess why, Captain?"
"Why what, Your Darkness?" I asked after hesitating. I had lost the way of the conversation entirely, and I now considered every word I spoke so I might live the longer.
"Why the gods have kept me alive when I have strived so hard to die," he said patiently. "I rot from within, yet awaken every evening and draw breath into my bleeding lungs. Can you guess why the gods still want me to live a little longer?"
"No, Your Darkness." A lesser person would have offered an opinion-a worthless way to risk one's soul.
The shaman's lips pulled back as if he would laugh. "This last day, the gods spoke to me again," he said, as if the other topic were now forgotten. 'They came to me in a dream. It was time, they said, to free my grandson and send him out from the caverns with a force of true goblins at his command." The old shaman drew in a deep breath through his nose, staring at me. "I've seen fit to end your disenchantment, Captain Kergis. I've already given orders for three sergeants to assemble their squads for a foray this evening. You will go with them, led by my grandson. Draw rations and equipment for a mission far from our Nightbelow, among the lands of humans."
I believed for a moment that I had gone deaf, so incredible was the news. Goblin warriors led by a half-human bastard?