“Tarduk, Direfang!”
He ignored her, working quickly and clumsily until there was a space big enough for him to fit through. He picked up the lantern again and stared at her.
“Mudwort needs to help with this.” Then he disappeared through the opening. “Mudwort needs to help now.”
The goblin shook her head and rubbed her belly, feeling it slosh pleasantly with the water she’d drunk. “Mudwort help,” she glumly parroted. Then she followed him through.
6
Grallik doubled over coughing, unable to get the dirt out of his mouth. His chest felt so tight and hot, his lungs like charred wood. His eyes were filled with dirt too, burning so fiercely he could make out nothing with his vision. Everything was a blur of gray and brown and pain.
The misery sent his mind back more than sixty years to when he was a child in the great Qualinesti Forest. His parents, both half-elves, lived in the village of Willow Knot, in a small house, in front of which was an herb shop.
It had been a cold night, and a fire burned in the hearth.
Grallik’s parents and his twin sister hadn’t known there was magic in him or that he’d been testing his growing abilities when no one was looking. They didn’t see him crook a small finger at the hearth that night and coax the flames to lick outward and grow brighter and higher. He’d only intended to make the room warmer. They didn’t see him flee when the flames spread to the rug and flowed up the walls, stretched out to burn the left side of him before he fell out the back door, gasping for air as he was gasping at that moment.
He heard his family’s screams that night. They were worse, he thought, than the cries of the laborers caught in the quake. The roar of the fire in his house and his trapped parents’ and sister’s screams were always in his memory, louder than the rumbling of the ground, and had risen over the voices of everyone in Steel Town just minutes ago.
Chaos Town should be the camp’s new name, he mused as his eyes finally watered enough so he could see, though dimly. The dirt that caked his face had turned to a clay muck that stung and felt heavy and hurtful. There was nothing to be done for it at the moment, he knew. But he’d get to a Skull Knight soon and have the man tend his eyes and to his tender ribs.
Grallik was on his hands and knees outside what was left of his workshop. A cloud of dust and dirt hovered around him and above the ground for as far as he could see, as persistent as the early morning fog that usually wrapped itself around the tall grass of the Qualinesti Forest. Shapes moved in the haze; knights, he recognized, by their posture, heads held high. They wore helmets despite the awful heat and the dust cloud, and Grallik imagined that their sweating faces must be covered with dirt that lined their eye slits. He brushed at his face, managing only to smear the dirt around.
Breathing slowly and shallowly, he got to his feet, leaning against the crooked stone and wood wall of his workshop. His fingers flitted across the cracked mortar; his had been one of the sturdier buildings in Steel Town, and he feared the remaining two walls would topple at any moment. He tipped his head up, hoping for cleaner air, but found none. The mountains and volcanoes that ringed the camp were hazed by the dust too, looking faded like an old painting.
He heard a nervous whinny and turned just as a frightened horse shot past him, eyes wide and foam flecking its mouth. A knight chased the beast, the sun glinting off his armor and making his shoulders and arms glow as if he’d been ensorcelled. Grallik watched him catch the reins and saw the horse toss its head, nostrils flaring and front hooves coming off the ground as it fought against the knight.
Grallik stepped away from the wall, arms in front of his chest as if warding off the choking dust and dirt. When the wind changed, he caught another mouthful. He spit it out again and cursed, coughing so hard that his shoulders bobbed. When the spasms stopped, he turned back to see the knight leading the horse behind the remnants of the stable and into a pen that was one of those that had largely survived the quake. At the edge of his vision, the wizard saw the pines on the slope of one of the volcanoes, their branches looking bare and pale, like the skeletal remains of long-dead creatures.
It hurt, physically and emotionally, to gaze upon the wholesale destruction. Grallik stumbled around the wall and into what remained of his workshop. Only the northern and western walls were intact. The front of the building had crumbled and the thatch roof was caved in. He’d hidden a flask of water behind some books on a shelf. He wanted to find it and flush his eyes. He choked back a bitter laugh as he pulled at the thatch to clear the floor, looking for the flask.
His worry always had been the volcanoes. He’d never considered the possibility of an earthquake, and yet it made sense. Land dotted by volcanoes was prone to quakes, he’d heard, and tremors had been recorded in the camp before his arrival. There had been rumors of faint ones just a few days ago. But something of the magnitude he saw that day had never occurred to him.
It took him several minutes to pull the thatch away and several more minutes to find both his breath and the water flask. He held it to his chest as though it were a priceless treasure and then against his face, finding some coolness to it. He kissed the cork then gingerly tugged it free, sniffed the water, and poured some in his eyes, finding only a little relief. Then he took a small mouthful and held it, savoring it as if it were fine, aged wine, finally swallowed it, and replaced the cork. Once more he held the flask against his chest, then he thrust it in a deep pocket so none would see that he had it. He turned too sharply at the pop of a timber and gasped in pain, instantly worried that his sore ribs might be more than bruised and responsible for the heat in his lungs.
His vision slightly improved and he took inventory. His workshop, which also served as his home, was largely destroyed. He was fortunate that the shelf and his precious water flask survived, both being on one of the standing walls. Benches and tables and his prized bookcase carved of walnut were so much kindling, torn apart as if a herd of maddened bulls had trampled them. The frame he heated the ore on was broken, the pans beneath it lost, and behind the frame-where his bed and meager possessions had been-stretched a wicked-looking crevice in the ground. The jagged crack extended south of the building and had pulled men and animals underground, including everything of value he owned-lost in the depths.
Grallik’s throat grew tighter, and he fought for air in his grief and fury. He stumbled forward, kicking aside pieces of wood from a shattered bench and kneeling at the edge of the crevice. Without any roof, the sun shone down brightly over his head and the wizard could see that the bottom of the gash was dozens, perhaps hundreds, of feet below. A mailed arm jutted out of one side, a leg farther away was from a different knight’s body. A piece of tangled blanket was caught between two large rocks, and a post from his bed poked up from what looked to be the deepest point. Everything was charred, with smoke rising from a few pieces still burning.
He’d been heating the ore when the quake struck, and when he ran outside to see what was happening, that ore had caught fire and spread to his precious possessions. He noted that pages ripped from one of his books were burning at the edges, as if someone were blowing on them. A section of the crevice’s far wall had collapsed, but he knew nothing down there was worth recovering.
Grallik eased back from the edge and sat heavily, unmindful of the debris that jabbed at the backs of his legs. Everything he had nurtured and treasured was gone. In his mind, he likened his sense of loss to a close relative dying.
Again he thought of his family.
“Everything.” The word came out as a harsh whisper, his mouth instantly dry again from all the blowing dust. “By the fading memory of the Dark Queen’s heads, it is all gone.”