The Goblin War (10 page)

Makenna ran her eyes down the long lines of waiting goblins. They stood quietly, gazing back at her with a trust this disastrous exile to the Otherworld should have destroyed. But it hadn’t.

She looked at Erebus, who nodded confirmation. Everyone she’d led into this mess was here, along with the brave fools who’d come with Cogswhallop to rescue them. She looked at Cogswhallop, who nodded as well. Everyone was ready.

Makenna laid her hand on one of the trees, on the amulet set into its bark, and felt two small hands pressing against her knees. She began to chant, and power, even stronger than when they’d practiced this, flowed through the goblins’ hands, through her hands, and down the amulets’ linked chains.

The runes sprang to life as if the rising sun shone through them.

Power.
Was this how the priests felt, casting their spells? She was so full of power, it felt as if she could take the world into her grasp, molding it like clay.

The gap between the trees filled with a pane of glowing light, and through that light Makenna saw a forest glade. Once she would have seen no difference between it and the glade they stood in. Now the trees of the northern woods were instantly identifiable, compared to the forests of this alien world.

She checked all the runes once more—no flickering. Even the rune of stability glowed as cool and steady as moonlight. Makenna nodded to Cogswhallop, and the goblins in the first line picked up their packs and jogged through the gate in an orderly file.

It was a far cry from their desperate escape from their own world, with Makenna clumsily casting the spell as she read it, and goblins searching frantically for friends and family as the soldiers who would have killed them all thundered toward them.

The first line went through and the second line followed, without so much as a gap between them. Makenna felt a deep surge of gratitude for both her competent lieutenants.

Even the power that was theirs in the Otherworld began to diminish as the third line went through. The first time Makenna had cast a gate, she had drained the reserve of power that scores of ancient priests had sunk into the great wall. Now, though the gate was much smaller, the power came from her and her goblin assistants, and she felt the drag of it in blood and bone.

The chanting around the circle took on a determined note, and more power flowed down the goblins’ linked hands.

Makenna was vaguely aware of Cogswhallop’s voice shouting at the fourth line to run “Faster, faster, blast you!”

The last of the fourth line ran though the glowing gap, Cogswhallop on their heels, and now it was the spell casters’ turn. They had rehearsed this, sending the weakest through first, speculating about what would happen.

It was less drastic than they’d feared, but that didn’t make it good. As each caster passed through the gate, his strength vanished from the circle, leaving it weaker and weaker.

The last of them, an old Flamer called Mogarty, cast Makenna a worried look before she leaped through—but someone had to be last. Makenna had flatly refused the others’ offers to try to take that part. She was the caster, the anchor who held it all in place.

The spell was sucking power from her body now, fast and hard. Makenna’s temples throbbed, and her bones felt as if they were turning to sand. She had to go now.

She stepped to the far end of the linked chains and wrapped the loose chain they’d made ready for her around her wrist. She had no idea if this would work either, but she had to try.

She took a deep breath and poured every scrap of power she had left into the spell. The runes brightened—it was the most she’d get.

Makenna raced for the gate, amulets bursting from the earth in showers of grit and dead leaves. The last few feet yanked the remaining amulets out of the trees, and she threw herself into flickering gate like a diver.

The flash behind her was so bright, it looked like lightning, but no thunder followed.

Makenna fell to her hands and knees, aching as if she’d been beaten, but from the earth beneath her palms, from the very air around her, she felt the gentle seep of real-world magic. It wasn’t as powerful as that of the Otherworld, water compared to wine, but it felt better; cleaner and more honest.

In the Otherworld, toward the end, she’d felt that she had almost become the powerful sorceress her enemies had named her.

She wouldn’t miss it.

She lay down, rolling to face the sky, wondering where the goblins were. A moment later she heard human voices approaching—coming to investigate the soundless lightning, no doubt. The goblins would appear once they were gone.

There was a time when Makenna too would have dragged herself into the nearest bush and hidden, but her head still ached, and according to Cogswhallop the Decree of Bright Magic had been rescinded. She could deal with humans now. Maybe even live with them, part of the time.

“It’s a girl! Are you all right, lass? What happened here?”

The speaker was a middle-aged man, who helped her sit up, concern in his broad face. His rough clothes might have suited a number of tasks, but a scent of fresh-cut wood surrounded not only him but the two younger men who’d accompanied him. Lumber men. She’d driven a number of them out of the Goblin Wood—or even let them cut there, if they left the goblins alone.

Were they in the Goblin Wood now? In some other northern forest? She would ask, eventually, but more important . . .

“What happened is a long story.” She smiled at them all. It felt odd, smiling at humans. “But I’m well enough. I don’t suppose you’ve heard of a young man, Tobin Rovan, arriving sometime in the last few weeks like I just did?”

They stared at her, the older woodsman with a worried frown that was echoed on the face of one of the younger men.

The last man’s jaw had dropped. “I know her!” His astonished expression turned to fury in a heartbeat. “She’s the sorceress of the Goblin Wood! The one who killed all those folk! Arrest her!”

Looking at him, Makenna recognized one of the settlers Master Lazur had brought north to colonize the wood. They’d all gotten a good look at her, chained to a log as bait for the goblins, before Tobin had set her free.

The rough hands that seized her now were all too familiar, and so were the expressions of anger, doubt, and disgust.

So much for living with humans.

She made no protest as they hauled her off to jail.

Chapter 5
Tobin

W
HEN
V
RUUD SAID THEY’D TELL
the other Duri camps to watch for an escaped prisoner, Tobin hadn’t realized it would be more than two weeks before they returned.

Vruud had produced a pot of oily black sludge and told Tobin to work it into his hair. He went out again while Tobin obeyed, and came back soon with a pile of worn, drab clothing.

The shirt wasn’t too different from Tobin’s. The long trousers that gathered at the ankle were looser than his britches and felt strange, though they weren’t uncomfortable. A leather vest with pockets completed the outfit, along with a pair of sandals. The sandals were uncomfortable, their soles pressed into the shape of someone else’s feet, but a horseman’s boots under the clothing of a chanduri servant would be a dead giveaway. And, Vruud told Tobin, “dead” wasn’t a figure of speech.

When Tobin was dressed, Vruud tipped a polished shield toward him. “What do you think?”

Tobin gazed thoughtfully at his distorted reflection. “I look like me with black hair. A lot of those warriors got a good look at me. This won’t work.”

“Those young louts have the brains, and attention span, of flies,” Vruud told him. “And it will be a while before they see you again.”

But it wasn’t until after they’d crept out of the quiet camp, Vruud riding a mule and Tobin leading a pack mule behind him, that they came to the top of a low rise, and Tobin realized how long it might be before they returned.

The sun had risen. The endless clusters of round barbarian tents spread over the plain, out and out till distance alone shrank them to invisibility. And in the clear air of the Southlands, that was a long way.

It was a sight to strike dismay in any Realm knight’s heart. “How many men do you have here?”

“There’s no precise count,” Vruud told Tobin. “No way to make one, really. But there are eight greater clans and three lesser. A greater clan will have about fifty to sixty camps like ours, and we field about eighty warriors. The lesser clans aren’t that much smaller—say, ten thousand men among the three of them. I’d put the total at around fifty thousand Duri.”

The Duri were their warriors. Fifty
thousand
warriors. Tobin didn’t know the exact count of the Realm’s army, but he thought it was around thirty thousand.

He swallowed, trying to fight down rising panic. This was why the Realm was relocating, after all. Using the great wall to the north as a barrier, a much smaller army could hold off any number of enemies. As long as the relocation went forward, the Realm would survive. But for Tobin himself, the odds were worse than he’d thought.

“How far are we from the border? Are there camps like this the whole way?”

If there were, he’d never make it, even with Vruud’s help. And after the man’s frank declaration of indifference, Tobin wasn’t sure he could trust the storyteller. Or rather, he was certain he
couldn’t
trust him, to do anything except look out for himself. If Vruud hadn’t needed him, he’d have sacrificed Tobin in a heartbeat. At least he’d been honest about it.

“No,” the storyteller answered his question. “There’s about twenty miles of disputed ground between your camps and ours. Both sides patrol their own borders—and for a week or so, ours will be thick with people looking for you. We’d better get going. I need to set that search into motion.”

“Isn’t it crazy to tell your Duri to go looking for me?” Tobin demanded. “With me standing right there?”

“Ah, but I’m telling them to look for an escaped Softer knight,” said Vruud. “It’s my servant who’s standing there. Or better yet, tending the mules, arranging for my dinner, and laying out my bedroll in the guest tent.”

Tobin foresaw dozens of problems with this scenario, not least that while the amulets translated what was said in the listener’s mind, they did nothing to change the words that reached the ears.

But Vruud was right. As Tobin later learned, each of the eight greater clans had a completely different language base, and even within the clans many camps had their own dialect. Some of them were so different that warriors within the same clan often found it hard to communicate. They were all so accustomed to letting their amulets translate for them that they paid no attention to the actual spoken language.

Further, the idea that the escaped knight might be traveling with the storyteller who was spreading word of his escape was so ridiculous that no one thought of it.

The clans, and even some camps within the clans, had different customs too. No one found it odd that the storyteller’s servant wasn’t sure where the mules should be tethered, or which tent housed travelers, or whose cooking pot he should go to for their meals.

And while servants in their own camps weren’t allowed to wear amulets, a servant traveling from one camp to another had to have one if he was to be of any use at all, so both Tobin and Vruud wore their amulets openly despite being chan. If a chanduri in his own camp needed to communicate with Tobin— “Don’t lead your mules past that cage; the Kabasi camp owns a hunting leopard”—he’d simply lay a hand on Tobin’s amulet so he could understand what Tobin said.

Despite some difficulty with the leopard, whose scent made the mules nervous even from a distance, no one even blinked at Tobin’s many mistakes. After the third camp he began to relax into his role—although the Duris’ reaction to news of an escaped Softer was far from reassuring.

As Tobin soon figured out from the comments around him, the camp that had so carelessly allowed him to escape had forfeited half their right to his sacrifice. If a different camp captured him, a complicated negotiation would take place to determine how many warriors from which camp would reap the benefit of his death. The only reason they reported his escape at all was that if Tobin was recaptured by a camp that
hadn’t
been alerted to look for him, that camp would have complete ownership of Tobin’s blood death. The camp that had found him in the first place would have no rights at all.

“If you think that’s complicated,” Vruud told him cynically, “wait till you see what happens when someone locates a spirit. There are strict laws/traditions for possession of an area where an uncaptured spirit lives. After all, you can always find someone so old, or a servant so lazy, that you can afford to give them up. Spirits are a lot harder to come by.”

Despite his own disgust at their customs, Tobin had wondered at Vruud’s willingness to betray his own people. He wasn’t surprised by it now. The Duri generally weren’t bad masters, but the chanduris’ knowledge that the Duri would slaughter them the moment it became expedient colored every aspect of their lives. Many of the servants quietly hated their superiors—especially those who’d seen a loved one’s veins laid open by the sacrificial knife. But few tried to run, for the Duri were skilled at tracking them down. In almost every camp there were one or two chanduri so badly scarred from the beatings the Duri gave to those “blood traitors” that they were almost crippled. And those who were useless were next in line for the knife.