The Goblin War Read online

  “If I can,” said Jeriah cautiously. It was one thing to pretend he was going to report on the condition of the army. It would be another entirely to do it. “But anything I say will be weighed against all the official reports.”

  “And unofficial ones too, no doubt,” said the commander. “But you have the Hierarch’s ear, correct?”

  The Hierarch liked Jeriah and would remember him kindly. He could get a minute with the man and say whatever he needed to. “I suppose so.”

  “It’s the land,” said Commander Malveese. “Or rather, the lack of it. Only a landholder can appear and speak in council, so in the last barbarian attack many Southland lords lost not only their homes and friends, but their voice in the Realm as well.”

  His face twisted, and Jeriah suddenly realized that Commander Malveese might be one of those men.

  “But surely . . . they didn’t strip landholders of their titles just because the barbarians conquered their lands?”

  “They did,” the commander confirmed. “The law decrees that the title comes from the land itself. Though some of us see a difference between losing your land through gambling and bad management and losing it to enemy attack.”

  “But that’s—that’s wrong!” Jeriah protested.

  “So I think, and so do many Southland lords whose estates are still within their grasp. They see that their time will come. But with the loss of almost a third of our number in the council, the Southland lords are a small minority, and the others . . . The land a man is granted in the north is to be based, as a percentage, on the land he owned before the relocation. So the fewer landholders there are when the relocation officially takes place, the more land there will be for the rest. There are some Southland lords who think that way too.” Cold anger lit his face at the thought of his neighbors’ betrayal. “They are sabotaging our efforts to obtain justice for those who bore the brunt of the first attack.”

  “I’ve been gone for a while,” said Jeriah. “But I don’t think the Hierarch knows anything about this. Lord Brallorscourt is the one who controls the largest faction on the council—”

  “Lord Brallorscourt knows all about it,” said Commander Malveese. “But he’s one of those who is perfectly content to seize more land for himself. Will you help—”

  A man screamed. Jeriah spun just in time to see one of their soldiers topple from the saddle with an arrow in his side. Then the brush around them erupted with screaming, white-painted bodies, and Jeriah had no time to notice anything.

  He was still fumbling for his sword hilt when one of the barbarians rushed him. The clay-covered face, surrounded by spikes of stiffened hair, was set in a wild grimace. He was close enough for Jeriah to see his eyes brighten as he realized that his surprised opponent wouldn’t be able to get his blade free in time, and Jeriah felt a flash of piercing despair. Then Commander Malveese’s blade flashed out, raking the barbarian’s face, and blood welled from a deep gash across his cheekbone.

  The barbarian screamed in pain instead of battle frenzy, and Glory leaped aside.

  Jeriah yanked his blade from its sheath and turned Glory back to the wounded barbarian, but the man had vanished in the chaotic sea of struggling forms, and two more barbarians were closing in on the commander.

  With a battle yell of his own, Jeriah kicked Glory forward, and one of the barbarians turned to him, raising his sword.

  The clash of steel on steel numbed Jeriah’s wrist, but he’d practiced often enough with Tobin, and with his father’s master of arms, that going on to the next parry, then the next, was automatic. Glory, better trained for battle than he was, circled to keep anyone from coming up behind them.

  Jeriah was so focused on trying to break through his opponent’s guard—and on keeping the barbarian from doing the same to him—that he didn’t even see the Southlander who crept up behind his enemy until the barbarian’s face froze in a sudden rictus. The man tore his gaze from Jeriah’s face and looked down.

  His leather breast plate was being pushed away from his chest from the inside, and Jeriah looked behind him in time to see the Southlander pull back a blood-covered sword.

  More blood flooded from under the leather, dripping to the ground, and the barbarian collapsed. The sword must have cut right through his heart, Jeriah realized. But it was an absent, almost distant thought, for Jeriah was already whirling Glory to look for a comrade who needed his aid.

  The fighting had spread out over the slope, and Jeriah saw that the Southlanders outnumbered the barbarians by maybe a third. He wondered that the barbarians had dared attack them at all!

  Was that why so many called them madmen? Even though they’d taken down several Southlanders with that first flight of arrows, it was still easy for Jeriah to ride up behind one of them who was already engaged in the fight. Jeriah soon discovered that if he yelled as he drew near, the younger barbarians would often turn toward him, and the Southlander they’d been fighting could launch whatever blow he wished at his enemy’s back.

  The older barbarians disengaged from their duels and fled when they heard Jeriah approach, but those close to his own age died—too caught up in the fight, too inexperienced, to know how to break off a combat and withdraw. Jeriah wasn’t sure he could have managed that himself. He made a note to learn how as soon as possible.

  He was roasting in his armor, sweat running down his body, but when an arrow raked Glory’s shoulder and pinged off his thigh guard, Jeriah was profoundly grateful that the Southland troopers hadn’t let him leave off even one piece.

  More arrows fell, and the remaining barbarians broke off their fights and ran down the hillside. A few minutes later they were galloping out of the small canyon at the bottom.

  For a moment Jeriah wanted to follow, but the Southlanders were already stringing their bows and he’d only get in their way. Then exhaustion struck like a lance. Jeriah slid out of Glory’s saddle and opened his breast plate, letting the fresh air rush over his heated skin. He wanted water with a desperate thirst, but his arms were too tired, his fingers too stiff, to reach up and untie the skin from his saddle.

  And it wouldn’t be nearly enough. He needed a river that he could plunge into, cooling his whole body while he drank and drank.

  Dark spots were dancing in front of his vision when a hand grasped his shoulder and pressed him down.

  “Fighting in the heat,” a voice with a Southland accent said. “It takes Northers like that, for a while. Just sit here and sip on this. You’ll recover soon enough.”

  A waterskin was thrust into Jeriah’s hands, and he took a sip before he found the strength to murmur, “I’m from the Midlands.”

  His stomach was rebelling, but Jeriah refused to be sick after his first battle.

  He’d just fought a battle. But that realization was distant too, compared to the urgent stresses of his body.

  If the Southlander said anything else, Jeriah didn’t hear it. Eventually the whirling chaos in his stomach and head subsided, and he was able to sit and watch the aftermath of the fight—though he didn’t feel like helping yet.

  He had just fought in his first battle, and though he hadn’t killed anyone, he’d helped several other men do so. He shivered, suddenly glad that his own sword, though it had picked up several nicks, wasn’t coated in blood.

  The Southland troops were gathering the corpses, both the barbarians’ and those of their own men—the barbarians’ to be buried now, in a trench grave, and their men to be carried back to camp and buried with proper reverence. Though only four Southlanders had been slain, there were at least half a dozen barbarian bodies.

  We should get their amulets. The church had forbidden the Realm’s soldiers to wear them, since their making involved human sacrifice. But they did collect them and allow them to be worn by the insanely brave men who scouted behind enemy lines.

  And Jeriah had sent most of the Realm’s supply of amulets into the Otherworld with the goblins, so he’d better make sure that these were gathered up.
r />   He stood slowly, and after one lazy spin the world steadied under his feet, and he approached a man who was dragging one of the enemy corpses over to the place where the others had begun to dig.

  “Are you taking their amulets?” he asked.

  “What for? The priests won’t let us wear them, and the few who tried it anyway found they didn’t exactly work like the stories said.”

  “What do you mean?” Jeriah asked. “I thought the barbarians wouldn’t fight a man who was wearing one of those amulets. That’s why scouts and spies are allowed to wear them.”

  “That’s what they said,” the man told him. “But I’ve seen barbarians attack men wearing those amulets just like anyone else. In fact, they seemed to go for the soldiers who wore them more than those who didn’t.”

  “But I thought . . . I’ve heard of scouts and spies who survived because of those amulets,” Jeriah said.

  The soldier shrugged. “Maybe it’s different for them, somehow. If you want any amulets, they’re yours for the taking.

  He dropped the corpse he was dragging near the rest and walked away.

  Jeriah fought down a surge of revulsion. He’d helped kill these men. You could call them barbarians all you wanted, but they were still men. Men who were trying to conquer his Realm and slaughter its citizens. And then eat them.

  Jeriah took a deep breath and knelt to lift the dead man’s head and remove the amulet from around his neck. He tried not to look at the man’s face. He couldn’t help but look.

  Jeriah froze, his hand clenching in the clay-stiffened hair. It was the barbarian who had first attacked him, the one from whom Commander Malveese had saved him, cutting open the man’s cheek.

  There was blood on the dead face, staining the white clay, washing some of it away . . . but the skin beneath it was whole. The cut was gone, leaving not even a scar behind. Completely healed.

  “Yes, they heal themselves,” Commander Malveese confirmed. “Almost instantly, in the midst of combat. And it’s not those amulets you gathered that causes it. We’ve done some experiments, despite the priests’ orders.”

  He reached out and added another log to the fire, keeping his eyes on the blaze. Jeriah had waited, storing up question after question, till they’d returned to camp and he could talk to the commander alone.

  “They also don’t tire the way we do,” the commander went on. “I’ve seen battles in which the numbers were even to start with, where we were forced to withdraw simply because our people were exhausted, and they fought on and on like . . . like an incoming tide. But I’ve killed enough of them to know they’re flesh and blood. Any stroke that kills too swiftly for their healing power to act will slay them. But that’s the only way to do it, and that’s why we can’t win.”

  He looked up, for the first time, and met Jeriah’s eyes. “The official inspectors, safe in Helverian, they say that’s impossible, that we’re making up wild tales to excuse our failures. But look at today. We outnumbered them by a third, and that let us kill seven of them to the four men I lost. But I have two more so badly injured they may never fight again, and another eight who will take weeks or months to mend their wounds—which makes it fourteen of ours to six of theirs, at least for a time. And numbers like that,” he finished grimly, “is how they’re taking the Southlands.”

  “But what can we do?” Jeriah asked. “If they always heal like that . . .” He’d seen it himself, and he still had trouble believing it.

  “The first thing is to get the Hierarch and the council to listen to what we tell them,” said Commander Malveese. “That the barbarians cannot be stopped. Myself, I think they’ll take the whole of the Southlands in the next year, and the rest of the Realm within five. And the only reason it will take them that long is that there aren’t more of them. Will you go to the Hierarch for us, Jeriah Rovan? And convince him and the council that no matter what else Master Lazur did, he was right about one thing: The relocation must go forward. Every month, every day it is delayed will cost more lives.”

  Jeriah thought about his father, rebuilding the dike because “now some other solution may be found.” About the countryside he’d ridden through, where as far as he could tell all plans for relocating had simply been abandoned. As if all over the Realm, people had made up their minds that now Master Lazur was dead, it didn’t have to happen.

  “I’ll try,” he said. “No, I’ll do it.”

  Because Koryn had been right. In exposing Master Lazur, in bringing him down, Jeriah himself had single-handedly stopped the relocation in its tracks. If he couldn’t get it back in motion, the barbarian conquest of the Realm would be entirely his fault.

  “I’ll do it,” Jeriah repeated. “I have to.”

  Chapter 4

  Makenna

  TWO WEEKS AFTER THEY SENT Tobin back to the real world, Makenna cut off her hair.

  She woke from a nightmare, sitting up with a jolt, gasping for breath. But the familiar ceiling of the tent looked just as it always did in the dim moonlight. It wasn’t buried in drifting sand, summoned by the howling wind to smother her, as she had dreamed.

  The wind was real. It had been blowing since the night after they’d trapped the water spirit, leaving everyone edgy and tense. The spirit had kept her promise not to harm the humans herself. She’d made no promise about her friends.

  Makenna reached up to run her fingers through her sweaty hair, and they stuck in snarls right next to her scalp. She swore. The last time—in fact, the last four times this had happened—it had taken her and her goblin helpers hours to comb out the long, dark red-mass. And Makenna wasn’t the only one. Several of the goblin women who slept alone had received visits from the same taunting spirit, and one little girl, Onny, had been particularly troubled. If they didn’t tangle your dreams at the same time, it wouldn’t be so bad.

  Makenna was tired of being the spirits’ victim. Tired of food that now rotted only hours after it was picked, and tents sinking in mud puddles that hadn’t been there when they were set up that evening.

  Enough! Kneeling on her bedroll, Makenna drew her knife, its copper blade honed almost as sharp as steel by the goblin smiths. She cut the hair a scant inch from her scalp, so the tangles fell in long, matted hanks onto her blankets. She had to feel her way carefully at the back of her head, to keep from cutting herself, but soon she could run her fingers through the short pelt without catching a single knot. Her head felt as if it was floating on her shoulders. Her heart, also, was oddly light. Unencumbered, ready for the next phase of the fight. Dark One take the spirits! It was time to go on the offense, and let them defend for a while.

  Cogswhallop found her over an hour later, sitting in the remains of her shorn hair, with a spell book in her hands.

  There hadn’t been much in the priest’s books about spirits, particularly about catching them or getting them to leave you alone.

  The few references Makenna did find made tantalizing comments about something called the Great Outcasting. Had the priests once driven all the spirits out of the Realm, as they’d later tried to drive the goblins out? If so, it must have been a long time ago. None of Makenna’s mother’s teaching had even mentioned them.

  In fact, the only hint she’d found that might be useful was something one of the hedgewitches Master Lazur had abandoned here to die had told him: that spells worked best against the spirits “when I put myself into them.”

  To Master Lazur, that had meant a rune that represented you worked into the casting. But Makenna knew more about hedgewitches than he had.

  He’d been a cold man, all in all. Reading his books and notes had given her more insight into him than fighting against him for her life. She’d once told Tobin’s brother that she pitied the man, so lost in his obsession that he’d lost his humanity. Reading about some of the things he’d done had shrunk that pity to the vanishing point—but his mind had been keen.

  Makenna felt as if this trap—using her own interpretation of a clue he’d missed—was a way
of fighting against him as well as the spirits.

  “It looks complicated enough,” said Cogswhallop, eyeing the mass of chalked runes and the fragile cat’s cradle of silver and copper chains. Every goblin woman in the camp had sacrificed bits of jewelry for this. Makenna hoped she’d be able to return it.

  “I’ll admit,” the goblin went on, “if we were still fighting settlers in the wood, and they set up something like this, I’d make it a target.”

  “The more reason for us to be watching it, then,” said Makenna with a confidence that was only half feigned.

  Her magic had been so much weaker than her mother’s, weaker than the magic of the goblins she lived with, that Makenna hadn’t realized how much a part of her it was till the Otherworld had drained it to the dregs. Those amulets were all that prevented their power from being leached away right now. But they were preventing it, and Makenna felt like her power had come back even stronger, in this magic-rich world. Her will to fight had returned with it.

  It made the first stage, which was to go quietly off to bed, harder than anything she’d done for a long time. At least she didn’t have to sleep. Makenna lay awake, her clothing concealed under a blanket, tossing through the passing hours. She heard the first shift of goblin guards trade off with the younger, less reliable-looking shift that Miggy led. His confidence had grown since he’d left the wood, and she had no doubts about putting him in charge of this second, vital step. The departing shift warned the youngsters not to forget to wet down all the chains when the moon was high. It was nonsense, of course, but it looked like magic, and that was all she needed. It also gave her helpers a chance to mingle and chat for a bit before they separated to their stations and drifted into feigned sleep. If it wasn’t feigned, she’d have their hides off!

  The first sign that the trap had been sprung was a crash that shook the earth beneath her. Makenna had bounded out of her blankets, then out of her tent, before the guards began to shout.