The Rebellion Page 11

  The pens were Grallik’s priority, and he’d use whatever spells he could muster to impede the slaves running amok.

  “Damn me,” he cursed under his breath. “Damn me to the bottom of the Abyss for not trying to recast the wards.”

  The goblins bolting from the pens all appeared to be heading in a wave to the east, where the bulk of his wards and glyphs had been painstakingly and precisely cast … and obliterated, two days past, by the churning earth.

  Steel Town—Hell Town—had gone berserk. Steam spewed up from a wide rent in the earth to the south. Behind him a woman screamed shrilly. A man called to her, then both voices were silenced after a thunderous crash.

  Goblins dashed past and around him, terrified shouts mixed with repeated words Grallik couldn’t understand. To the south, in the farthest pen, he saw the mother goblins huddled with their babies. But there weren’t as many as the previous day, when he had helped set fire to the pile of dead goblins. So some mothers had already fled, with or without their caterwauling offspring.

  Grallik had always feared the greater number of the slaves. He had had nightmares about the slaves rising up and crushing the Dark Knights, and dread gripped him as he neared the closest pen. There were still plenty of goblins inside, but many others were gone and the remaining ones might swarm him. He nearly stumbled as, again, the quake shook the ground.

  The quake … one of the red-skinned goblins had warned there would be another one. The female goblin with the narrow-set eyes. He looked for her as he went, spotting several with dark red skin but none that he recognized.

  “They all look the same, damn them!”

  He guessed that well more than half of the goblins were already running away from the camp. He’d stop as many as he could using fire. Fire was his best weapon and the only significant magic that came to him instinctively. Reaching inside himself, Grallik searched for the magical spark that would release one of his more powerful enchantments. Closer, though, he needed to get closer. The mass of fleeing goblins was too far away. Just a little closer, he thought, just a—

  The ground rocked violently again, and Grallik fell, the spell disappearing from his mind as he plunged into a crevice. Heart pounding in his chest, he flailed about with his arms and called out for his men. But his voice could not be heard over the noise of the earth, and he was drowned out by the shouts of everyone else in Hell Town. His fingers gripped the edge of the crevice, his body slammed against the side, and the air was knocked from his aching lungs.

  Grallik’s chest felt as though it had dented from the impact, and his heart continued to pound thunderously. He tried to pull himself up, but the continuing quake made that impossible. His fingers felt numb as he hung on; he could see nothing but blackest night and dark dirt in front of his face. He’d swallowed a mouthful of earth, and spit and spit trying to get the remnants and the taste out.

  “I … won’t … die … here,” he hissed. “I won’t! Damn the quake!” Suddenly he was seized by a coughing fit that made him feel lightheaded. “A spell, a spell …” There were reliable enchantments in the precious tome the first quake had swallowed. One, he knew, would have been just the right antidote, making him as light as a sheet of parchment and letting him float above the bedlam and out of the crack of earth. If he could just remember it. But he couldn’t; he needed his spellbooks with their many spells that would have captured the goblins in invisible nets, that would have trapped them in cages materializing out of thin air.

  “Damn my addled brain!”

  He knew for certain that not a single one of the glyphs and wards functioned. No flames from fiery columns snared the runners. No high-pitched alarms were sounding. A disaster was upon the place, and he, the temporary commander, the wizard whose magic had failed, was to blame.

  He coughed again and felt himself slipping, his fingers grabbing at air as he slid down the side of the crevice and landed in a heap at the bottom, painfully twisting his ankle. Grallik had seen some crevices close up, so he did his best to scrabble up the side to avoid the fate of other victims. He forced himself to focus on his magical skills, searched again for the arcane spark within himself, found and nurtured it, sending the eldritch energy into his fingers.

  “Like fire,” he breathed. “Be like fire.”

  Grallik felt his fingers grow warm and sink into the dirt, giving him a better purchase. It was one of the simple enchantments he used to heat the rocks and leech the ore. He used it to heat his fingers so they could bore into the hard earth. Using the spell in that manner was painful to his flesh and reminded him of his youth when he was burned in the home fire. But dying would be more painful … and eternal.

  With great effort, he began climbing and soon climbed high enough to poke his head above the crevice. A moment later, the rumbling abruptly ceased, and the earth began to fill up the hole beneath him. He struggled over the side, rolling away just as the ground heaved and settled again. Then he forced himself to his feet, crying out when he had to put weight on his twisted ankle. His ankle might be broken, he realized, but he must walk on it. He had to force himself.

  “The slaves …” Above all, they were Grallik’s priority. In charge of Hell Town, he couldn’t afford to let any more of them escape. The camp could not function without the goblins. The stain on his career would be permanent.

  Suddenly, he felt a renewed purpose. He felt revitalized. He stoked the magical furnace within himself, calling another fiery spell to mind, a cruel but useful one.

  “No farther!” Grallik shouted at the slaves as loud as he could. In the same instant, he released the magic, calling up a sheet of flame that rose at the edge of Steel Town and cut through the wave of running slaves, instantly roasting a dozen of them and sending others scattering in a panic.

  Grallik didn’t enjoy killing the slaves; if nothing else, he sorely required their future labor. The camp didn’t need any more charred bodies. But if he did nothing, they all would escape, the camp would wither, and the failure would be his.

  The stench from the burning goblins filled his senses, and he had to fight to keep from retching. He coughed harshly as he concentrated on making the wall of fire longer and higher, stretching south to the pyre of corpses, joining with that fire, and turning the area into an inferno.

  “I said no farther!”

  The wall lit up the whole camp, revealing the scale of the destruction that Steel Town had suffered from the second quake. Nothing stood, not a single wall or post. A cloud of dust, bigger and higher than that from the first quake, shadowed all the knights and laborers who were picking themselves up and shuffling around the camp. Grallik imagined that was what the Chaos War in the Abyss must have looked like.

  “Hell,” he said. “Hell’s come to Neraka.”

  The fire wall continued to blaze, holding hundreds of goblins back and keeping them from joining their fellows, who were racing away on the other side of the conflagration.

  Tears streamed down the wizard’s face from the acrid scent of burning bodies and the billowing dirt and the death- and dust-choked air. He glanced over his shoulder: not even the rubble of his workshop remained. All of it had been swallowed up by the angry earth. The mountain path, which he could see illuminated by bright starlight, had great gaps in it, as though a huge beast from below had clawed at the rocks and cut deep swaths in the path. The three entrances to the mine had disappeared, leaving no trace that they had ever been there.

  He turned back to his flaming wall and limped in that direction. In the crush of goblins, he saw one of the Skull Knights thrashing about violently. The priest was grabbing slaves and pounding on them with his fists. Grallik spotted two other knights on the ground near the priest, and as he drew closer, he could tell they were drenched in blood, probably dead.

  Grallik, limping, called another spell to mind. Words he’d learned in his earliest years in the Conclave spilled from his lips, and in response darts of flame flew from his fingertips and struck the goblins nearest the priest.

  “Away from him!” Grallik shouted. “All of you, back into the pens.” Where the pens used to be, he decided, seeing only posts and rails strewn on the ground. It would be a challenge just to corral the goblins and find a means to contain them.

  The crowd of goblins backed away from the Skull Knight, who knelt by his two fallen attendants. “Wellon is dead,” the priest called to Grallik. “Slaves will die for this, these miserable creatures. They will—”

  “There’s been enough dying in these past few days,” Grallik said firmly. He kept a wary eye on the mass of trapped slaves, continuing to focus his spell on the flaming wall.

  Footsteps behind him signaled the approach of a contingent of knights. No matter how many were coming, it wouldn’t be enough, Grallik thought. No standing pens, no working wards, too many goblins, half already gone.

  “Guardian N’sera!” The out-of-breath voice came from Marek. “The slaves, what should we—?”

  Grallik raised a hand to silence him. What should we do? the wizard thought. I have no idea. Instead, he answered: “Bring the other Skull Knights here. I know we have wounded brothers, but they’ve spells that will help quell this slave revolt now.” Then, softer, he added, “And this must be our priority, Marek. We cannot afford to lose any more of these slaves.”

  “Contain the goblins, then see to the wounded,” the Skull Knight said, echoing Grallik. “As you command.”

  “Aye, Guardian! I will summon the other priests!” Marek’s footsteps retreated as he shouted for the other Skull Knights.

  Grallik concentrated on maintaining the wall. The stench from the burning bodies continued to assault his senses, and coupled with the pain throbbing in his ankle, the wizard was having a difficult time keeping his focus.

  “Wellon and Hayson are dead,” the Skull Knight reported bitterly. “Both dead to these little butchers. And we were trying to help them! Heal them! Ungrateful monsters.”

  The goblins were milling about, keeping their distance from the wizard and the Skull Knight but talking too, in their odd language, cut through with clacking sounds and hand gestures. Some wailed at fellows they’d lost to Grallik’s fire, and some merely shook their little fists at the Skull Knight.

  Grallik suddenly spotted the goblin he’d been looking for, the red-skinned female who had tried to warn them of the coming quake. She had squatted, hands splayed atop the ground, her skin looking molten in the glare of the fire wall. Her lips were moving, but, of course, the wizard couldn’t hear her words with all the other racket. As he watched, his concentration divided between maintaining his spell and glancing at her, another goblin came to her side, one with a dull yellow hide and over-long ears.

  His mouth dropped open when he saw the yellow goblin squat next to her, putting his hands on the ground too and speaking quickly and anxiously to the red-skinned one. Grallik’s flame wall clearly illuminated the little scene, though at first he thought the flickering light played tricks.

  The ground seemed to bubble around the two goblins’ hands, then a hollow formed that stretched to the wall of fire and, to Grallik’s astonishment, tunneled under it. The hollow was just big enough for a goblin to squeeze through, and that was what the yellow-skinned goblin immediately did.

  “No!” Grallik yelled, intensifying his spell. The fire filled in the hollow and rose higher, turning white with intense heat. All the other goblins edged past him, trying to escape the intense heat, and he watched with some satisfaction as they clustered in the remains of their former pens.

  He looked around for the red-skinned goblin but couldn’t spot her. There were just too many goblins, a mass of shifting little bodies interspersed with the occasional taller hobgoblin. Had she escaped through the hollow path too? He prayed to his dark god that she hadn’t.

  “Guardian N’sera! I need help moving these men.” The Skull Knight stood near his fallen attendants.

  “You’ll have help, but be patient,” Grallik returned. He heard footsteps behind him again, at least a dozen armored men from the sound. He ordered the knights to pull the priest’s attendants to the center of the camp, to escort the priest away from the goblins, and to gather whatever wood they could find to try to reconstruct the pens.

  Only one man questioned his order, a common laborer who’d joined the knights. He wondered whether ramshackle wood would hold the slaves if they saw another opportunity to escape.

  “We must try,” Grallik said in harsh, hushed tones. “Do your best to build something strong. We have to keep the slaves penned in and keep alive the hope of rebuilding this place.”

  The laborer nodded without enthusiasm. “Hell this place is,” he said. “Hell’s come to Steel Town.”

  “Aye, that it has,” the wizard returned.

  15

  WANTING THE BETTER AIR

  Direfang had not run so far or so fast since his youth, not since those days long ago, before he was captured by a band of minotaurs braving ogre lands and was sold to the Dark Knights. Once the ground stopped trembling and he was certain the quake was past, he still ran hard and fast, with all the strength he could summon. The ground was relatively flat there, and the sky was clearing, though there were still clouds, especially to the west, where Steel Town and the mine were behind him. Dawn was still hours away, but the lightening sky made it easy for him to avoid holes and cracks in the earth and the rocks that lay strewn in his path.

  His legs were much longer than the goblins’. They couldn’t keep up with him, and he had long since passed them by and stopped worrying about tripping over them. He still cradled Graytoes, and she still whimpered to him about Moon-eye.

  “Stop, Direfang. Find Moon. Please.”

  He kept running, offering her no reply, wanting nothing more than to put more distance between himself and Steel Town.

  He heard voices strung out behind him, goblins arguing about how long it would take before the Dark Knights would ride out on their surviving horses and search for them.

  “Long while,” a goblin with a high-pitched voice declared.

  Direfang agreed with that sentiment. Though slaves were crucial to the operation of their detested camp, the second quake had caused enough problems in Steel Town to keep the knights and their horses busy back there for some time.

  So Direfang continued to run, stretching his legs and delighting in the dull aches that centered in his thighs and in the backs of his calves. His legs had not been tested in that manner for years. His side began to ache after a while, and he held his right arm close to one side while at the same time making sure he kept a good grip on Graytoes.

  The young goblin wouldn’t stop babbling about her missing mate. Still, Direfang ignored her, kept running.

  Foothills loomed ahead to the northeast, where he was heading. There were ogres in those hills—there were ogres in many parts of Neraka—but he intended to hunker down there long enough to rest and think and talk with any of the other goblins who had kept up with him and who wanted to keep following his lead. He would seek Mudwort’s counsel in the foothills. He would linger there so she could catch up.

  Behind him, sounding like a chorus of whispers because the pounding of his feet and the pounding in his ears were so loud, he faintly heard the frightened calls of goblins and hobgoblins. When the cries diminished and became so soft that he could no longer hear them, he finally slowed his pace and looked over his shoulder. The horde of slaves looked like a brown wave rolling toward him, dirt billowing around their feet, but none moved very fast anymore. He saw two small ones in front stumble and watched as they were trampled by their fellows.

  Finally, with a deep sigh of weariness, Direfang stopped and waited for the wave of escaping goblins to reach him.

  So many had fled from Steel Town that their movement sounded like a thundering herd. Direfang closed his eyes for a moment, inhaling deeply and registering the scents of blood—Graytoes’ and his own. But the sweet air didn’t carry a hint of the odor of burned corpses. He didn’t smell humans either—the Dark Knights and the laborers and their children. The scent of men was not particularly offensive to him, but he rejoiced in its absence. He opened his mouth and tipped his head back, howling in glee and inhaling deeply again and again as the thunder of goblin feet drew closer.

  Within moments, his howls were echoed by the mass of goblins who yelled and screamed with joy to be free of their terrible labor camp. After a few moments, however, several goblins shouted to be heard above the others, one finally successful in catching the crowd’s collective attention.

  “Quiet!” screamed a pale gray-brown goblin called Spikehollow. “The Dark Knights will hear! The ogres will hear!” He jumped up and down and finally climbed up on the shoulders of a stocky goblin of a similar coloring. “Quiet!”

  The throng fell silent, though there were still murmurs from some. They circled closer to Direfang. The hobgoblin guessed there were maybe a thousand goblins there, maybe half of the slaves who had survived the quakes. He tried to spot Moon-eye, Saro-Saro, and Mudwort, but there were simply too many to sort through. And though the stars were shining down through gaps in the clouds, the goblins were like one thick mass. Direfang didn’t recognize any of those he looked for.

  “Where do the clans go now, Direfang?” The question came from Spikehollow. His voice was raspy, having used all his energy running and shouting. The question was instantly repeated by other goblins nearby, acknowledging Direfang’s leadership.

  “Moon-eye, where?” Graytoes craned her neck over Direfang’s shoulder, trying to locate her mate.

  “South, maybe,” Direfang answered Spikehollow. “Maybe all the clans should go south. But right now, let’s head to those foothills to the east to rest and plan. Later, south …”

  “Graytoes!” It was Moon-eye, alive, trying to push his way through the crowd of goblins, but not many knew him or were willingly giving him room to pass. “Moon-eye’s Heart!”

  “South?” Spikehollow asked. “Why not south now?”