I could not wait, and so I bade the guards farewell, explaining that I would return within a tenday or two. Then I set off, back the way I had come. Bruenor would have to act.
The return ride was both exhilarating and tormenting to me. The greeting at Silverymoon, so different from what I had come to expect, had given me an almost giddy hope that the wrongs of the world could be defeated. At the same time, I felt as though I had abandoned Nojheim, felt as if my desire to follow proper etiquette was a cowardly course. I should have insisted that the goblin accompany me, should have taken Nojheim from his pain and then tried to mend the situation diplomatically.
I have made mistakes in my life, as I knew I had made one here. I veered back toward Pengallen instead of traveling straight to Bruenor’s court at Mithral Hall.
I found Nojheim hanging from Rico’s high cross-pole.
There are events forever frozen in my memory, feelings that exude a more complete aura, a memory vivid and lasting. I remember the wind at that horrible moment. The day, thick with low clouds, was unseasonably warm, but the wind, on those occasions it had to gust, carried a chilling bite, coming down from the high mountains and carrying the sting of deep snow with it. That wind was behind me, my thick and long white hair blowing around my face, my cloak pressing tightly against my back as I sat on my mount and stared helplessly at the high cross-pole.
The gusty breeze also kept Nojheim’s stiff and bloated body turning slightly, the bolt holding the hemp rope creaking in mournful, helpless, protest.
I will see him that way forever.
I had not even moved to cut the poor goblin down when Rico and several of his rugged cohorts, all armed, came out of the house to meet me-to challenge me, I believed. Beside them came Tharman, carrying no weapon, his expression forlorn.
“Damned goblin tried to kill me,” Rico explained, and for a fleeting moment, I believed him, feared that I had compelled Nojheim to make a fateful error. As Rico continued, though, claiming that the goblin had attacked him in broad daylight, before a dozen witnesses, I came to realize that it was all an elaborate lie. The witnesses were no more than partners in an unjust conspiracy.
“No reason to get upset,” Rico went on, and his smug smile answered all my questions about the murder. “I’ve killed many goblins,” he quickly added, his accent changing slightly, “probably rightly so, too.”
Why had Rico hedged by using the word “probably”? Then I realized that I had heard those exact words spoken before, in exactly the same manner. I’d heard Nojheim say them, and, obviously, Rico had also heard! The fears the goblin had expressed that night in the barn suddenly rang ominously true.
I wanted to draw my scimitars and leap from the horse, cut Rico down and drive away any that would stand to help this murderer.
Tharman looked at me, looked right through my intentions, and shook his head, silently reminding me that there was nothing my weapons could do that would do anybody, Nojheim included, any good.
Rico went on talking, but I no longer listened. What recourse did I have? I could not expect Alustriel, or even Bruenor, to take any action against Rico. Nojheim, by all accounts, was simply a goblin, and even if I could somehow prove differently, could convince Alustriel or Bruenor that this goblin was a peaceful sort and unjustly persecuted, they would not be able to act. Intent is the determining factor of crime, and to Rico and the people of Pengallen, Nojheim, for all my claims, remained only a goblin. No court of justice in the region, where bloody battles with goblins are still commonplace, where almost everyone has lost at least one of his or her kin to such creatures, could find these men guilty for hanging Nojheim, for hanging a monster.
I had helped to perpetrate the incident. I had recaptured Nojheim and returned him to wicked Rico-even when I had sensed that something was amiss. And then I had forced myself into the goblin’s life once more, had spoken dangerous thoughts to him.
Rico was still talking when I slid down from my borrowed mount, looped Taulmaril over my shoulder, and walked off for Mithral Hall.
Sunset. Another day surrenders to the night as I perch here on the side of a mountain, not so far from Mithral Hall.
The mystery of the night has begun, but does Nojheim know now the truth of a greater mystery? I often wonder of those who have gone before me, who have discovered what I cannot until the time of my own death. Is Nojheim better off now than he was as Rico’s slave?
If the afterlife is one of justice, then surely he is.
I must believe this to be true, yet it still wounds me to know that I played a role in the unusual goblin’s death, both in capturing him and in going to him later, going to him with hopes that he could not afford to hold. I cannot forget that I walked away from Nojheim, however well-intentioned I might have been. I rode for Silverymoon and left him vulnerable, left him in wrongful pain.
And so I learn from my mistake.
Forever after, I will not ignore such injustice. If I chance upon one of Nojheim’s spirit and Nojheim’s peril again, then let his wicked master be wary. Let the lawful powers of the region review my actions and exonerate me if that is what they perceive to be the correct course. If not …
It does not matter. I will follow my heart.
The Third Level
The young man’s dark eyes shifted from side to side, always moving, always alert. He caught a movement to the left, between two ramshackle wood-and-clay huts.
Just a child at play, wisely taking to the shadows.
Back to the right, he noticed a woman deep in the recesses beyond a window that was just a hole in the wall, for no one in this section of Calimport was wealthy enough to afford glass. The woman stayed back, standing perfectly still, watching him and unaware that he, in turn, watched her.
He felt like a hunting cat crossing the plain, she just another of the many deer, hoping he would take no notice.
Young Artemis Entreri liked that feeling, that power. He had worked this street-if that’s what it could be called, for it was little more than a haphazard cluster of unremarkable shacks dropped across a field of cart-torn mud-for more than five years, since he was but a boy of nine.
He stopped and slowly turned toward the window, and the woman shrank away at the merest hint of a threat.
Entreri smiled and resumed his surveying. This was his street, he told himself, a place he had staked out three months after his arrival in Calimport. The place had no formal name, but now, because of him, it had an identity. It was the area where Artemis Entreri was boss.
How far he had come in five years, hitching a ride all the way from the city of Memnon. Entreri chuckled at the term “all the way.” In truth, Memnon was the closest city to Calimport, but in the barren desert land of Calimshan, even the closest city was a long and difficult ride.
Difficult to be sure, but Entreri had made it, had survived, despite the brutal duties the merchants of that caravan had given him, despite the determined advances of one lecherous old man, a smelly unshaven lout who seemed to think that a nine-year-old boy-
Entreri shook that memory from his head, refusing to follow its inevitable course. He had survived the caravan trek and had stolen away from the merchants on the second day in Calimport, soon after he had learned that they had taken him along ultimately to sell him into slavery.
There was no need to remember anything before that, the teenager told himself, neither the journey from Memnon, nor the horrors before the journey that had sent him running from home. Still, he could smell the breath of that lecherous old man, like the breath of his own father, and his uncle.
The pain pushed him back to his angry edge, made him steel his dark eyes and tighten the honed muscles along his arms. He had made it. That was all that counted. This was his street, a place of safety, where no one threatened him.