The Goblin War (6 page)
“So I’ll take off the amulet. . . . Oh.” If he wore the amulet, they could use it to find him. But if he took it off and they caught him without it, he would die as soon as they captured a spirit. Or maybe before, if another prisoner was taken and they no longer needed him. And Tobin had no way of knowing if anything he’d just been told was true, either.
“But if I hide in the chest, won’t they sense my amulet and find me instantly?”
“There are half a dozen amulets stored in this room,” the storyteller said. “Hundreds within sensing distance, and thousands in the greater camp, which those with the farthest-reaching senses might detect. I’m told it’s like trying to pick the scent of one flower out of a bouquet, or one voice out of the chatter of a crowd. Whereas if you’re walking through empty country with just a few companions, and a voice comes to you from another direction, you hear it clearly. Do you see?”
Tobin did. “So if I stay here, my amulet will be one of a crowd and not noticeable. But what about the rest of me?”
“I have a plan for that,” the storyteller told him. “We can dye your hair and skin and dress you as chanduri. No one really looks at the chan, anyway. And there’s one other thing I can do. As I said, I’ve been planning this for some time.”
“Why?” Tobin asked again. And this time it was the only question that mattered.
“When we have prisoners,” said One-Eye slowly, “we keep them for making the trusts. Sometimes they dwell in that cage for months, until a spirit can be found and snared. But have you thought about what we do for the human part of the trust if we don’t have a prisoner? We made thousands of trusts before we went to war with you.”
The horror of the only possible answer shocked Tobin even more. It was one thing to kill an enemy, no matter how vile the method. To murder your own people . . .
“I was born with only one working eye,” the old man went on softly. “So I could never be a warrior, never Duri. I became the tradition/history keeper because that’s the most worthy position any chan can achieve. The Duri spoke to me as an equal—superior to the younger warriors when I trained them to honor our laws. And for years, watching those too old to work go under the knife, I thought I’d made myself safe. But I am now over sixty years, and there’s a young storyteller in another camp who listens very carefully to my histories. Softer, if I can get you back to your own people, will you take me with you? And keep them from killing me until I can demonstrate how useful my information could be?”
Tobin considered. If the old man was telling the truth, his motives made perfect sense. Sense enough for Tobin to trust him with his life? A barbarian guide and helper would give him a far better chance to escape. One-Eye hadn’t had to let him out of that cage. If Tobin had found that cracked bar in a few more nights, stiff and weakened by repeated beatings, he’d have grabbed the first weapon he could lay hands on. He sorted carefully through his memories of the barbarian camp—he’d watched them for most of the day—and he didn’t remember seeing any old people.
“Yes,” said Tobin, making up his mind. “If you can get me over the border alive, I’ll take you with me. When do I have to get into that box?”
One-Eye told him not to climb in till his escape was discovered, since he’d have to stay there till the search had moved out of camp, and maybe for some time afterward.
He showed Tobin the trick he’d worked out, filling the chest’s lid with spears and then looping a string through the catch. Tobin could lie down in the box, settle the false bottom on top of him, and then pull the lid closed, tipping the spears into the chest.
They practiced it several times before the old man was certain Tobin wouldn’t pull the string too fast or too slowly. Then the storyteller departed, saying it would be better if the alarm found him sleeping in his own bed than lurking in a weapons storage tent where he had no business.
He took the candle with him, so Tobin pulled the tent flap a little wider and let his eyes adjust to the darkness.
The temptation to snatch up a weapon and run was strong, but the storyteller had no motive for lying that he could see. What would it be like to spend your whole life knowing that when you grew old, your own people would kill you, in a horribly painful way, just so their warriors could steal some sort of magical power? And what kind of power did the spirits’ magic and death give them?
Tobin had spent two winters with the army on the border, and he’d heard plenty of rumors about “invincible” barbarian magic. He’d seen battle only once, when a party of barbarians had tried to raid an area that his troop patrolled. He’d exchanged sword blows with several of their warriors, and though they were very strong, they hadn’t been impossible to fight. Fiddle had knocked their smaller horses out of his way, and they’d bled when his sword got through their guards.
And they could be killed, for he’d seen their bodies on the ground when the battle was over. Not many bodies, not nearly as many as his troop had left there, but they weren’t immortal. His commander said that the sheer screaming frenzy with which they fought protected them, but knowing what he knew now, Tobin wondered. Did this blood trust really give supernatural powers to the barbarian . . . Duri? . . . warriors?
Tobin had always felt awkward calling them barbarians, but he’d known no other name for them. Now that he did, barbarian sounded like the perfect description.
The trick with the chest worked perfectly. The sun was just rising when Tobin heard the first shouts, and it was the work of seconds to climb into the box and pull the string to bring the spears clattering down on top of him.
It was far harder to lie still, with his heart hammering and sweat pouring off his body. He held his breath when he heard voices coming into the tent, though even the amulet’s translation didn’t let more than a few words though the muffling wood and the beating of his own pulse in his ears.
He felt the box’s lid rise and then slam shut an instant later. Other lids opened and closed. The voices left.
Tobin could have pushed up the false bottom and the lid from inside, but it would have sent spears clattering to the earth. He didn’t dare make so much noise in an “empty” tent.
It felt like he spent years in the small, cramped space. But finally someone lifted the lid, then removed the spears quietly, so Tobin knew it was One-Eye long before the false bottom was whisked away.
The slanting sunlight of midmorning was shining through the tent flap.
“Very good!” the old man murmured. “They’re searching outside the camp now, and they’ve sent most of the women out to search nearby, so we’ve got some time. I even managed to get myself assigned to spread the news of your escape. It’s all going perfectly.”
Tobin didn’t think that having every barbarian in the army searching for him was at all perfect, but he’d already chosen to place his life in this man’s hands. And while he’d hidden in that box, waiting, another question had occurred to him.
“What’s your name?”
“Vruud,” the older man replied. “I wonder if it would be safer to dye your hair and change your clothes in here. I’d planned to do it in the woods, outside of camp, but I didn’t expect the place to be this deserted.”
“Aren’t you going to ask what my name is?” Tobin demanded.
“Softer, I don’t care. Did you think I was doing this for your sake? I’ll get you back to your Realm, and you’ll convince them not to kill me when we get there. That’s all that matters to me.”
“D
O YOU HAVE TO LEAVE
so soon?” Jeriah’s father asked. “You’ve only been here a few days.”
It was very different from the last time his father had come to the stable to see Jeriah off. He’d been banished from the estate then—so even this mild protest against his leaving constituted a vast improvement in their relationship.
Telling his father the truth about what both he and Tobin had been doing over the past six months had been the right thing to do, but there was still strain between them.
“I need to get back to the palace, sir. That’s where the goblins will look for me when they get back from the Otherworld. And if Tobin hasn’t turned up in another week or so, I’ll have to go find out why.”
His father nodded, but more slowly than Jeriah had expected. “You mean to go into this Otherworld in search of him? I’ve no mind to lose both my sons there.”
Given that Tobin had always been his father’s favorite, and it was Jeriah’s fault he’d been trapped in the Otherworld in the first place, that was generous.
“The goblins will bring him back.” Jeriah tightened Glory’s cinch. “I wouldn’t have let them go without me if I wasn’t certain. You know that.”
“I know.” His father sighed. “It’s just . . . Never mind. I’ll ride with you part of the way.”
He went to get his own horse, and Jeriah took a deep breath and tried to be fair. It was because of him that Tobin had gotten involved with the sorceress—although she was the one who’d dragged his brother into the Otherworld! And their father had broken his own honor trying to get Tobin off for Jeriah’s crime. The fact that Jeriah hadn’t asked—or wanted!—either of them to do either of those things meant nothing.
I think we’ve all learned an important lesson about telling each other the truth,
his mother had said. As if she wasn’t the biggest liar among them!
Still, she had a point. Telling the truth, most of it, had created a tattered peace between him and his father, and riding together through the sprouting fields wasn’t nearly as awkward as it had been. Jeriah resolved to be more truthful in the future. As soon as he finished just one small deception.
“The crops . . . everything looks good.”
His father snorted. “Do you even know what’s planted in that field?”
Jeriah looked at the rows of ruffled leaves. If it had been late summer, when the plants were bigger, he’d have had a better chance. “Beets?”
“It’s lettuce.” But his father’s face held wry humor, instead of the grim patience that would have been there only a few weeks ago, and Jeriah laughed.
“I’ll never make a farmer. You might as well give up on me.”
“I think I will,” said his father. “Oh, not give up on
you
. Beets and lettuce are very different, but I plant both of them, because both have their place.”
And was he lettuce, Jeriah wondered, or a beet? “Thank you, sir. Soon Tobin will be home, so you won’t have to do without either beets or . . . What’s going on with the dike? I thought you’d decided not to repair it.”
Most of the goblins who’d found a home in the flooded village had followed Cogswhallop into the Otherworld, but not all of them.
“Don’t worry about your friends,” his father said. “After what you’ve told me, they’re welcome to make their homes anywhere on my land. And our people are already putting out goblin bowls, if they ever really stopped, no matter what the priests said.”
“Yes, but you told me rebuilding the dike was too much work, since we’ll just have to pack up and move to the north in a few years anyway.”
“But you said the Hierarch doesn’t favor the relocation,” his father pointed out. “Now that he’s no longer being drugged—I can hardly believe a priest would dare to drug the Bright Gods’ Chosen one! But now that he’s recovering, will the relocation go forward at all?”
It was exactly what Koryn had feared.
“The reason for it still exists,” said Jeriah uneasily. “The barbarian army is still there, no matter what’s been happening to the Hierarch. If anyone’s figured out how to drive them back across the desert to their own lands, I haven’t heard about it.”
“Yes, but the relocation was Master Lazur’s idea. Now that he’s dead, perhaps some means to deal with them can be found.” This from a man who was more inclined to cautious pessimism than most! “In any case, I’ve got some idle hands now that the planting’s finished. If we can repair the dike and drain the fields before midsummer, the houses might dry out before irreparable damage is done to their structure. But I sent Alan to explain all this to your goblins, including my offer to help them build their own homes, before we ever started work on the dike. He said he felt silly, rowing out to the middle of that deserted square and shouting at empty houses, but they’ve heard my message. I won’t leave them homeless, I promise you.”
Now, that was the least of Jeriah’s worries.
Could his father be right?
Koryn had told him that in bringing down Master Lazur, Jeriah had stopped the relocation as well. She’d cursed him for destroying the whole Realm, condemning everyone in it to death with that one act. And he knew that whatever else had passed between them, she’d never forgive him for that. He didn’t need her forgiveness!
Besides, surely she might be wrong, and his father might be right?
She had slapped his face. Of course he’d wanted Mistress Koryn to slap him. A misplaced flirtation had been the best excuse he could come up with to abandon her in that ravine, where her crippled leg would trap her while he exposed Master Lazur’s treachery. She’d been working for the priest, and Master Lazur was plotting against the Hierarch himself! It was only when Jeriah remembered how slender, how frail she’d looked in the moonlight . . . He snorted. Her leg might be crippled, but Koryn was tougher than he was, in every way that mattered.