The Goblin Corps (71 page)

“Growing charitable in your old age, Cræosh?” Gork asked sourly.

The orc snorted. “It’s a place to hide. And I’d rather stay near the temple.”

“Gloating over your handiwork?” For some reason, the kobold seemed more bound and determined than ever to pick a fight.

“Okay, oh genius, you tell me how the fuck you were planning to find Brookwhisper, Lirimas, or Bekay.”

“Well, I was…That is, I thought we, umm…”

“Uh-huh.” Cræosh shook his head. “Such planning. Such forethought. Tell me something, are you this meticulous when planning your thefts, too, or do you prefer to trust those to luck?”

“Your point?” Gork asked, his voice sullen.

“My point is that once word of what happened to Father Thomas gets—” The point, then, was made far more eloquently than Cræosh could have managed by the sudden scream from within the temple. Some peculiar property of the hall’s acoustics magnified it until it burst in a torrent from the doors and windows, flooding over the crowd. Voices petered out; hands froze in awkward poses; even the noisy chewing of tough, cheap viands ceased midbite.

The crowd—a living, amoebic thing—drifted a single step toward that holiest of structures, only to flinch away as a second scream, even louder and more distorted than the first, escaped the edifice. Several of the throng’s more excitable citizens began babbling about ghosts and demons, and some few actually turned tail and bolted.

“The watch is gonna be here in seconds,” Cræosh hissed, already drifting toward the shifting crowds, staring as though he, too, was focused morbidly on the source of the screams. “Get the fuck over there, and spread out!”

They sifted into the crowd, subtly, deliberately—not that it mattered overmuch. Cræosh and Katim could have stripped naked and waltzed through the streets, and no one would have noticed, so fixated was the crowd on the temple.

Gork, though he followed, seemed oddly reluctant, his feet dragging stubbornly beneath the hem of his robe. He glanced up only when Belrotha brushed past him.

“What Gork’s problem, anyway?” she snapped quietly at him.

“It’s just…I think I’m allergic to charity.”

“Me understand,” the ogre said sympathetically. “Me allergic to honey. Me get hives wherever me touch it. Lucky that honey not common in Itho.”

“Ouch,” Gork said, commiserating despite himself. “I can’t imagine what getting hives on your mouth and tongue must feel like.”

“Mouth? Tongue?” Belrotha stared as though he’d just sprouted a tuber of some sort from his forehead. “What you
do
with honey?”

“Uhh…” Gork couldn’t help but feel that now wasn’t really the time for this. “We eat it, same as anyone else.”

“Eat?!”
Belrotha’s voice touched registers that the kobold would never have believed she could reach. Several people in the crowd glanced momentarily her way before returning to the drama being played out—or rather, sounded out—before them.

“Well, yes. What do
you
do with it?” His mouth formed the words, even as his face tightened in obvious horror of whatever answer he might receive.

“Not
eat,”
she avowed. Gork had never heard her so revolted. “In Itho, we—”

“Hey!” Cræosh interrupted with a hiss, reappearing before them. “Keep the fuck up, will you?”

Belrotha offered Gork a single shrug and moved to follow the orc. Gork trailed behind, shaking his head and keeping rather more distance from the ogre than was strictly necessary.

And not, as it happened, a moment too soon. Barely had the squad insinuated themselves throughout the crowd when a small contingent of the city watch—perhaps half a dozen, hands clasped tightly on the hilts of their swords—dashed around a nearby corner. Even as they pounded up the steps, their boots clacking dully against the stone, the doors burst open, unleashing a small tide of parishioners. Rather than try to fight their way through, the guardsmen leapt aside at the last minute, allowing the sudden flow of humanity to play itself out. Only then did they proceed through the towering double doors.

A handful reappeared only a short while later, their faces bloodless, one or two wiping vomit from the corners of their lips. (Katim had been particularly proud of her idea to tack Thomas’s entrails to the wall in the starburst pattern of his temple’s holy symbol, and later insisted on taking full credit for the humans’ obvious discomfort.) The soldiers took up post at the base of the stairs, presumably to keep any curious bystanders from barging in. A few of the more belligerent tried anyway, spouting off about the temple being “the people’s property,” but when a particularly irritable watchman clubbed one of said belligerents over the head with the pommel of his sword, the others decided the guards had made their case and backed off.

People shifted, voices muttered, feet scuffed, soldiers scowled, minutes passed with all the alacrity of an insomniac sloth. Cræosh began to worry; the longer this took, the more likely someone would pick one of the “new monks” out of the crowd and associate them with what had happened….

A deafening bellow from behind dug into the crowd, a nigh physical presence parting them down the center to allow a singularly imposing figure to approach the doors.

“See?” Cræosh whispered to his nearest companion—Katim, as it happened. “I knew if we waited long enough…” He paused as the figure passed him by, the ground seeming to shake beneath the newcomer’s sandaled feet. “He’s a big one, ain’t he?” the orc noted.

The man in question was actually only about Cræosh’s height, but his chest, his arms, his legs, even his neck bulged with flesh-wrapped boulders masquerading as muscles. His dark-toned skin—largely exposed to the air, for in addition to his sandals, he wore only leather leggings and an X-shaped baldric on which hung a mighty axe—bulged with every step, every movement, seemingly every
thought.
His goatee, the only hair on his head, bristled ahead of him as though it, and not his voice, were carving his path through the assembly.

This, then, unless Havarren’s description was dramatically flawed, would be Kuren Bekay. Titan among men, ally to the enigmatic Ananias duMark, one of the great heroes who’d thwarted King Morthûl’s previous efforts, and, of most immediate importance, longtime friend to one Father Thomas. The guards, after exchanging a terror-filled glance, fled his path as swiftly as the crowd had, allowing him unfettered access to the temple. No one protested the inequity; no one dared.

“How long, do you think?” Cræosh asked casually, his voice still low.

Katim shrugged, a gesture he was aware of only due to the rustling of her robe. “Two minutes or so to…reach the room in which we…left Thomas. Almost a full minute…of shock and grief. I’ll say three…for him to rail against fate…and the gods, and to threaten…the watch if they do not…quickly find the killers. One more…to get back out here.”

“You gave him two to get in,” Gork reminded her.

“But he’ll be enraged and…he’ll be running on his…way out.” She played the numbers back in her head. “Seven minutes.”

Cræosh shook his head. “Nah, don’t think so. I know his type; he’s gonna skip the shock and grief and go straight to the shouting. Six minutes, tops.”

“Eight,” Gork said, appearing briefly at Cræosh’s other side before vanishing once more into the crowd, lest they be too easily spotted together. “Just for variety.”

It was, in fact, six minutes and forty-three seconds before the large man reappeared in the temple doorway. His fists were clenched so tightly that Cræosh swore he heard the knuckles creaking over the crowd. One of the watchmen appeared behind Bekay and whispered something, only to vanish back into the chapel’s shadows—completely off his feet—with a single shove from the mountainous fellow. Then, staring straight ahead, the warrior descended the shallow steps and, knocking aside anyone who didn’t clear the path fast enough, made for a nearby thoroughfare and disappeared.

“Gork,” Cræosh whispered as loudly as he dared. “Gork!”

The kobold again materialized from nowhere, crinkled the hood of his robe in what must have been a nod, and slipped away after Bekay.

The traffic on this, one of Brenald’s major streets, was less tightly packed than the temple’s surroundings, but heavy enough in its own right. People still scattered from Bekay’s path; even those who hadn’t yet heard rumors of the horror at the temple recognized his expression as an indicator that this was a man better left unimpeded and undisturbed. Gork, however, was finding it difficult to keep up, for while there were fewer legs for him to scramble over, around, or between, those legs were in constant motion. Worse, the farther he got from the temple, the less his robe served as adequate camouflage.

But then, this was Gork—Gork the clever, Gork the formidable (in his own mind, at any rate), Gork the stealthy-as-an-embezzling-rat—and there wasn’t a crowd in the world with enough eyes to keep him from sneaking wherever needed to be snuck. And so, despite being the recipient of the occasional curse here, being smacked in the face by the occasional hanging scabbard there, and finding himself tangled in flowing skirts a time or two, he succeeded in keeping Bekay in his sights until the big man finally moved off the road and bulled through the door of a short and stubby establishment.

Run-down, filthy, and apparently assembled by a drunkard with delusions of carpentry, the building crouched on the side of the roadway as though begging for scraps. The door didn’t entirely fit in its frame; the windows were a greasy parchment that looked to have been used to polish old chamber pots. Through that dull opacity, Gork saw an amorphous shape—presumably Bekay—drift in from the direction of the door and seat himself at the counter that ran the entire length of the far wall.

Gork stepped back, glancing around for any sort of signage, and located it above his head: a thin wooden plank hanging from a rusty metal pole.

It depicted a stylized figure that, if viewed through a tight squint at just the right angle, bore a very faint resemblance to Gork himself. It was capering about, one knee raised above its waist while it balanced on the toes of its other foot. Beneath the image, the name was spelled out for that portion of the citizenry who’d actually learned their letters.

He, of course, couldn’t read a word of it, but it didn’t take more than a few minutes of loitering before he heard the name spoken by passing customers.

The Capering Kobold.

Gork’s left eyelid developed a violent twitch.

His internal debate, as to whether he should go in there and start slitting throats or just burn the place down, was fortuitously curtailed by a barrage of shouts from within. While most was far too distorted to be intelligible from his vantage, he had little difficulty identifying the word
“Out!”
The door flew open, clinging to its cheap hinges by fingernails it shouldn’t, as a door, have possessed, and a crowd of half-drunk patrons exploded from the tavern in a mad rush, the combined weight of their breath sufficient to make Gork himself tipsy. When the
bartender
joined the fleeing crowd, carrying the tankard he’d been cleaning, Gork couldn’t help but grin.

They keep making it
so easy
for us….

He watched and waited for a few more minutes, blending into the shadows of a doorway across the street. The fuzzy shape that had to be Bekay remained at the bar, what appeared to be an entire ale barrel standing on the counter before him. Every so often, a potential customer—either frightfully unobservant or catastrophically stupid—would step through the front door and move toward the seated warrior. Gork still couldn’t make out more than a few words, but he recognized the questioning tone, inevitably followed by an animal bellow, even more inevitably followed by said customer scurrying back out the door in search of someplace less suicidal to drink.

Finally, when he was thoroughly convinced that Bekay wasn’t going anywhere for a good long while—except possibly under the table—Gork wove his way through the packed streets back toward the temple. Several times a ripe, plump coin purse hove into view, and he felt his fingers twitching of their own accord. And yet he forced himself to hold off, cursing every step of the way. He couldn’t afford to take the risk. Getting caught swiping someone’s pouch or picking someone’s pocket, however improbable, would be far more strain than his already delicate disguise could handle. He tossed the coin purse from hand to hand, the repetitive gesture easing his frustration, helping him concentrate so as not to…

Coin purse?
Gork stared with a sinking feeling in his stomach at the leather pouch in his fist. Where had this
come
from?! How dare his hands make that sort of decision without consulting him? A look of unease scribbled across his face, the kobold walked the remainder of the way with his arms firmly crossed inside the folds of his robe, each hand clutching a purse to keep it occupied….

Each
hand?
Oh, dragonshit!

It was a profoundly disturbed Gork who finally rejoined the squad, where they’d assembled a block or so from the temple. There they’d stood for minutes on end, occasionally muttering the name of this or that god and making various pious gestures toward the temple and the guardsmen who were scurrying all over it like ants on a dead raccoon.

“It’s about fucking time, Shorty!” Cræosh snarled, waving politely at a nearby citizen. “You get lost?”

“I need help,” the kobold murmured, his gaze slightly unfocused, clearly having heard not a word the orc said.

“Well no shit, Gork. I could’ve told you that. You wanna tell me where the hell Bekay’s gotten to?”

“Bekay?” Gork asked, glancing up for the first time.

“Yeah. You know, Kuren Bekay? Big man? Muscular? Bald? Dark skin? The man you were supposed to be following? Any of this ringing a fucking bell?”

“Oh!” Gork shook his head. “Right, Bekay. He’s in a tavern about a mile off. By himself, no less.”

“By himself?” Gimmol asked, stepping closer to better hear the kobold’s report. “In a tavern in a city this size? How’d that happen?”

“It may,” Gork said sagely, “have had something to do with the fact that he pretty much walked in and told everyone to get the bleeding hell out. Only a lot less politely.”