The priest moved too slowly to satisfy Grallik, and so their course had been plodding as they pursued the goblin army. Fortunately, the army moved slowly too, no doubt because of its size and because it stopped to feast and rest.
One day earlier, Kenosh had discovered the remains of a herd of mountain goats far off the side of the trail. They had covered good ground and found the goblins.
The goblins did not kill them. But, Grallik reflected bitterly, the goblins put them in chains.
“Slaves.” Grallik spat the word aloud. Above and behind him, Grunnt made a noise that could have passed for a chuckle.
“Slaves,” Grunnt repeated. The hobgoblin pointed his knife at Grallik then at Horace, Kenosh, and Aneas. “Slaves.” That was followed by more noises that were a goblin’s laughter.
“I’ll wager that’s the only word in the Common tongue you know,” Grallik said, noting that the hobgoblin’s eyes showed no hint of understanding what he was saying. “Aye, you stinking, hairy beast, we are your slaves. For now.”
Grallik closed his eyes, trying to sleep, but sleep evaded him. His feet pained him. His eyes burned from something toxic in the air. In general he ached all over. Perhaps if he’d felt well, and if his mind had been functioning properly, he would not have rushed off after the goblins. He would have decided on a different course of action. Leaving the Order? Probably, certainly, that was inevitable, though it was all he’d known for decades.
Going after the red-skinned goblin was a shrewd strategy, he’d concluded. She might offer a possible path to a different future. He tried to find her, peering out across the ogre village through narrowed eyes. There were hundreds of goblins, more than one thousand, he guessed. They filled the basin, most of them sleeping. But many were awake-talking, arguing. Mothers suckled babies. Guards patrolled. From time to time, small groups of goblins, young from the looks of them, came close to the pen to ogle and point and chuckle at the human slaves. But he didn’t spot the red-skinned goblin.
Quite some time had passed, and the wizard wondered if it was nearing morning. Then he saw her.
Grallik’s eyes snapped wide open, and he moved to the railing. There she was, sitting in the middle of one of the roads that bisected the village. She was with another goblin, a brown-skinned one with an odd-looking, milky eye. He’d seen her with that goblin before, in the slave pens in Steel Town. Friends or family perhaps, Grallik guessed, maybe mates. Clansmen? He knew the goblins came from various clans throughout Neraka, Khur, and farther distant. He’d learned that much from listening to Marshal Montrill talk about the slaves and where the ogres and minotaurs had captured them. But Grallik knew nothing about the goblins’ coloration and that skin hue usually marked them as being from one clan or another.
He stared intently, not caring if the two goblins noticed his attentive gaze. The one with the milky, useless eye glanced at him briefly. They were both interested in something on the ground. No, Grallik realized after a moment-not something on the ground, they were studying the ground itself.
“Interesting,” he said aloud and considered waking up the priest so he could observe the two goblins too. But Horace was busy snoring, as was Aneas-the two seemed to be making a contest out of it. A glance over his shoulder told him that Kenosh slept too, though more quietly. The man’s chest rose and fell so lightly, a casual observer might think him dead. How could they sleep in such filth? The pen stank of goblins and waste and garbage. He had tried to fall asleep but found the situation all too unsettling.
Grallik couldn’t see precisely what the two goblins were doing. The light from the lantern didn’t stretch that far. But he could tell that the red-skinned goblin-Mudwort, as the big hobgoblin had called her-was tracing patterns in the dirt in front of her and the milky-eyed one. He remembered Horace drawing the symbol of a turtle shell and wanted desperately to know if Mudwort was drawing something similar.
A symbol of her god? Just what did goblins worship?
A symbol of her clan?
He watched her trace designs for another few moments then saw her tip her head back, eyes closed and mouth moving. It was quiet enough in that part of the basin that he could have heard her, except she wasn’t speaking audibly. The milky-eyed goblin placed his hands over the area Mudwort had disturbed, palms flat and leaning forward so all of his weight was on his hands. He cocked his head, as if listening to something, and Grallik wondered if perhaps Mudwort was indeed talking in a hushed tone that didn’t carry to the pen.
Then the milky-eyed goblin looked up, sniffing the air, and a moment later sucked in great lungfuls of it.
The very thought made Grallik gag. The air reeked. The wizard smelled his own filthy body, his sweat and that of his companions. And the stench of the goblins-like wet mongrels, they smelled. The scent of blood was heavy in the air too, and many things worse than blood. Animals and ogres had been gutted, and goblin flesh had been burned. Ogre bodies were piled here and there, starting to rot.
Grallik had watched them burn the corpses of the goblins, though they did nothing but pile up the bodies of the dead ogres. And the surviving goblins had performed some sort of ritual over the dead goblins they burned. He didn’t understand their chanting, but he’d participated in enough Dark Knight ceremonies to know a ritual when he saw one. Come to think of it, he remembered the goblins doing something similar in Steel Town after the quakes, when all the bodies of the dead slaves had been piled high and lit on fire.
So the goblins were more interesting, complex creatures than he’d first believed, and the two who sat on the road pondering the ground were the most interesting and complex of all. They had magic abilities. Grallik could smell their abilities over all the horrid, disgusting odors that hung in the village and that were held cloyingly close by the thick cover of clouds. He could smell the magic.
“Come closer,” he whispered. “Please, please, come closer.” Finally, the two goblins raised their voices loud enough that their words carried faintly to him. But they were talking in their guttural goblin tongue, and Grallik understood none of their words. Still, he continued watching, his fatigue forgotten as his mind churned.
“By the memory of the Dark Queen’s heads!” he breathed. “What they do is not possible! They work together! They combine their abilities! They combine their magic!”
30
What does Moon-eye smell?” Mudwort still had her head tilted up, eyes closed not because her magic required it but because there was something in the air that made her eyes sting. She leaned forward and breathed into his face then stretched back and stared at him. “What smell, Moon-eye?”
“Fire,” he answered, though the funeral pyres had been extinguished for quite some time. “Fire and stone. Stone smells, Mudwort. The rocks with ore smell different than this rock all around the village. The village rocks smell beautiful, but the rocks deeper and farther away smell as if they are in pain. Pain smells too … and suffering.”
Moon-eye fumbled for words to better explain everything he was sensing to Mudwort, but she waved him off.
“Understand fine,” she said. Then she thrust the fingers of her left hand into the small stretch of dirt between them, her nails plunging in effortlessly, as though she were driving them into warm butter instead of the hard-packed earth.
“The earth itself suffers,” she told Moon-eye. “Not right here, but it will suffer bad here soon. Farther away, it feels pain right now, like Graytoes felt pain when the skull man took the baby. And that pain will come closer, move through the earth like worms wriggling. Deeper there is intense suffering pain. Layers of pain and suffering.”