The Goblin Corps (39 page)

“Oh, good,” the kobold said, craning his neck back to follow her gaze. “Ghosts. I was just thinking that I hadn’t really gotten my fill of dead things.”

Roughly eight feet over Katim’s head, where the ceiling sloped inward to form the tower’s peaked roof, a ring of
something
spun through the air. Bursts of a pale luminescence—now an off-white shade of pearl, now of red, now blue—limned the apparitions in a faint aura, invisible unless one were looking directly at them. Gaping holes in the spectral forms vaguely suggested facial features, too lacking in detail to determine any expressions. They spun in an endless path, circumnavigating the room scores of times each minute. Although they moved too swiftly for an accurate count, Katim estimated somewhere between fifteen and twenty of them.

Hovering in the precise center of the phantom ring, a dancing marionette with an epileptic puppeteer, was a collection of bones. Even as they watched, the cracked and pitted skull rotated downward as if to stare at them, until it was knocked aside by a wildly flailing femur.

“I think I’ll just go and see how the others are doing,” Gork said.

Katim glanced down at the bronze brooch given them by Queen Anne. It, too, was glowing, nearly bright enough to wash out the ghostly radiance above.

“Those?” Gork asked.

Katim nodded. The kobold scowled. “Figures. What do you suppose
they’re
all doing here?”

“Perhaps these are…the beings that perished in Trelaine’s…experiments?”

“I suppose it’s possible. Think they’ll let us just take what we need?”

“Feel free to…ask them.”

Gork, apparently, did
not
feel free to do that.

Slowly, keeping a weather eye above, Katim moved to stand directly beneath the floating remains. She yanked at a strap on her belt and allowed her
chirrusk
to fall into her waiting hand with a loud clank.

“I think, using this…I can jump high enough…to reach. I pull them…down; you stand beside me…and catch them.”

“What?
I’m not touching those things! No way! Not a chance. You can just find someone else to—”

Katim lifted the kobold off the ground by his collar. “And
I
am not…willing to turn around and leave…empty-handed after all the trouble…we’ve gone through. Do…you have a better suggestion?”

“Actually,” Gork said, his whole face lighting up, “I do!”

More crawling, more banging of hands and knees, and more cursing in multiple languages finally brought them back to one of the storerooms on a lower—sideways?—level. There, after a few minutes spent searching, they located a large sack with only a few small holes worn through the fabric by the passage of time. Again with the crawling and banging, and they returned to the topmost room, where they commenced a slightly modified variation of Katim’s plan. It took her a few tries before the barbed hook caught one of the bones at the proper angle. (Gork refrained from laughing at the sight of the troll bouncing up and down in the middle of the chamber, since he felt that his internal organs were perfectly fine where they were, thank you very much.) And once she’d snagged it, it briefly resisted her efforts to move it, as if it were jammed in place. With a final tug, however, she broke it loose; the bone tumbled earthward, and Gork caught it in the sack without difficulty
and
without touching the nasty thing.

It took time, far more time than they were comfortable spending, what with their companions (presumably) weathering the siege outside. Each bone had to be snagged at just the right angle, and some were too small or just the wrong shape for the
chirrusk
to hook. Once they’d gotten about half the visible remains, including the skull, they’d agreed that it would have to be enough.

Which, of course, led to even more crawling through those damned stairs.

It was sheer happenstance that Gork chose to glance back as they were roughly halfway back down/through the tower. Katim started at his sudden yelp, cracking her head on the steps. She’d been trying to navigate a particularly arduous twist in the spiral case and wasn’t really in a position to turn and look. “What is it?”

“The ghosts!” Gork whispered. “They’re following us!”

Katim cursed. “Are they…gaining?”

“No,” the kobold said after a moment. “They seem to be keeping a set distance, actually.”

“Let me guess. About…as far as they were circling…from the bones?”

“Uh…Well, yeah, about that.”

She nodded and resumed her crawl. “If they start to get any…closer, by all means, yip.”

Katim felt another surge of panic as they approached the door, hanging open, revealing the green-tinted wall of water beyond. Ruthlessly, she repressed it. The trip up, she told herself sharply, wouldn’t be as difficult as the trip down. Once through the door, she could just climb the curve of the tower; shouldn’t require being in the water more than a few seconds.

She hoped.

Thankfully, she discovered that getting
to
the door was the hardest part. The curve of the wall forced her to climb practically upside down, fingers wedged into tiny stones. Gork made it look easy—she almost reached out and knocked him off the wall, just because—whereas she nearly lost her purchase on three separate occasions. Each time, she found herself hanging precariously, and while the fall wasn’t far, she’d have landed head-or back-first on the stone below.

But she managed, time and again, to retain her hold, to spur herself onward, and finally her fists closed on the doorframe, her fingertips suddenly soaked as they protruded into the murky waters beyond. Taking one last deep breath, she hauled herself out into the swamp.

Maybe the climb up was easier than the journey down, maybe it wasn’t; but this time, Katim kept both her wits and her grip. It was less than a minute later that she clambered, soaked but otherwise unharmed, out onto the uppermost curve of the tower. She breathed deep, sucking in the fragrant miasma of the swamps.

And came damn near to losing her snout in the process, as Cræosh’s blade missed her face by a matter of inches on its way to severing the claws from one of the waterlogged corpses. “Took your bloody fucking Ancestors-damned sweet time about it, didn’t you?!” he ranted as he stomped past, sword falling as he methodically chopped inches off the undead thing’s arm. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you wanted these things to finish us off!”

“It might have been worth it to…shut you up.”

“Whatever!” The orc lunged and split a second corpse, one that was giving Jhurpess something of a hard time, down the middle. The bugbear, in turn, flipped
over
Cræosh, crushing the skull of the one Cræosh had been fighting. They exchanged brief nods and then turned to face the next in the seemingly endless wave. “Did you get it?”

“Yeah, we got it!” Gork shouted from his new position behind the ogre, keeping her tree-trunk legs between him and the enemy. “Not the whole skeleton, but it should be enough!”

“Great! Then all we have to do is find some way to get the hell away from here without being eaten, torn to shreds, disemboweled, or otherwise rendered nonhomogenous. Any ideas?”

“Well, now that you
ask,”
Gimmol said from atop Belrotha’s backpack, where he was launching a sporadic stream of crossbow bolts at the dead things, “no.”

At which point, Jhurpess unleashed his familiar howl.

They thought, at first, that he might have been struck. But when they looked—those, at least, not so hard-pressed that they couldn’t afford even to look around—the other goblins found themselves equally startled as the cowering bugbear.

“Ancestors,” Cræosh whispered breathlessly. “What
now?”

“Oh, yeah,” Gork said from the lee of the ogre, “and there were these ghosts….”

They rose from the water in an unbroken stream, a spout of glowing phantoms. Their moans grew deafening, disorienting, smothering the clash of battle and the ambient sounds of Jureb Nahl. Briefly they flowed toward Katim, as though intending to resume their orbit around the bones of Trelaine, and then they froze. Spectral heads rotated, surveying new surroundings for the first time in centuries. The shambling carcasses halted at the same time, some with arms raised in midswing. It appeared, for a span of heartbeats, as though the corpses…smiled.

One by one, the ghosts winked out. And each time, one of the bodies—finally and truly dead, finally at rest—sank from sight in the waters of Jureb Nahl. In but a few short moments, none but Morthûl’s soldiers remained.

“What?” Jhurpess asked.

Belrotha nodded. “What him said.”

Warily, Cræosh sidled over toward Katim. “Would you—either of you,” he clarified, glancing at the half-hidden kobold, “care to explain what in the name of my middle testicle just happened?”

“Those ghosts,” Katim began slowly, “seemed…to be drawn to Trelaine’s…bones. They must have belonged…to these bodies out here.” She actually shuddered with rage; to bind a soul to this world, to keep it from serving in the next, was unthinkable profanity! “Apparently, the souls…were trapped to bind the…physical bodies to this place. Bringing them…together seems to have freed…them.”

“I suspected it might,” Gork said. “That’s why I suggested bringing them up here.”

Katim glanced heavenward. She was starting to believe that there might just be some sort of higher power after all; Gork
had
to be somebody’s idea of a practical joke!

“Okay, that makes sense,” Cræosh said, his tone making it quite clear that it did no such thing. “If there’s nothing else, let’s get out of this fucking cesspool and back on dry land before something
else
goes wrong.”

It was, though they’d never know it, fortuitous that they left when they did. Even at that moment, a combined force of nagas and troglodytes were dashing at top speed through the swamp, determined to intercept the interlopers before they left the tower. Gork, in his strange little way, had actually put a halt to endless years of warfare. As the nagas and their titanic alligator had launched their attack upon the newer inhabitants of Jureb Nahl, they and the troglodytes had exchanged a bevy of taunts and insults. Over the course of those insults, as each side listened to what the others were saying, the two sides had come to realize that they’d both been used—and in the naga’s case, overtly deceived—by the conniving kobold and his allies. Furious, they’d agreed to put aside their own conflict, at least long enough to return to the nagas’ territory and teach the mammals a lesson!

The squad was long gone by the time they got there, of course, but it seemed kind of silly to resume hostilities at that point. If the troglodytes and the nagas could work together on this, surely they could learn to share the vast expanse of Jureb Nahl? Perhaps even cooperate, for the betterment of both races?

The very next morning, someone hurled a racial epithet, the war resumed as fiercely as ever, and—to the best of anyone’s knowledge—still rages to this day.

I
t’s too soon, Your Majesty! Gods, you’ve already lost
one
squad in one of these asinine ventures. Are you
looking
to lose a second?”

Dororam, King of Shauntille, was largely unaccustomed to being spoken to in such a manner. And there had been a point, not terribly long ago, when he had appreciated Ananias duMark for just that reason: the wizard was clearly unimpressed, and certainly unintimidated, by rank. Dororam had always known that he could be assured of getting the man’s honest and accurate opinions, unsullied by any sycophantic need to impress.

He couldn’t say for sure whether he’d just grown tired of duMark’s arrogance, or if the sorcerer’s attitude really
had
grown more barbed and condescending of late. The practical upshot, in either case, was that Dororam was less inclined to be appreciative of duMark’s attitude, and more likely to find it obnoxious.

“Ananias,” Dororam began entreating for the fourth time, forcing his fists to slowly unclench, “we’ve been over this.”
And over it, and over it, and over it…
“This source of yours does us no good if we fail to act on the information he provides. I will certainly admit, in hindsight, that Lieutenant Kaleth’s mission may have been less than judicious—”

DuMark loosed a single bark of laughter. Dororam scowled. “I fail to see anything humorous in the loss of so many good men.”

The half-elf sneered. “Had they been good men, Dororam, they’d not have been lost, would they?”

“Whatever the case,” the king continued quickly, determined to keep a rein on his temper even if it killed him, “we miscalculated the risks. I acknowledge that, but I won’t make that mistake again.”

“Aren’t you, though? You sent Kaleth and his men with orders only to measure the enemy’s forces along the Brimstone Mountains, and look what happened.” Actually, neither of them knew
precisely
what happened; when Lieutenant Branden had stumbled back into the capital, alone and broken, they’d been able to coax only a few details from him. But it was more than enough to tell them the mission had ended in disaster. “Now you suggest sending a second, larger unit—this time with explicit orders to engage the enemy—and you want me to believe you’re not making the same mistake? Well, perhaps you’re not, at that. This one’s even more foolish.”

“I would thank you,” Dororam practically hissed, “to show me a
little
respect in my own palace!”

“Earn it, Dororam, and I’ll show it.”

Again, King Dororam managed—though it cost him no small amount of effort—to bite back a caustic retort. Instead, after several calming breaths, “You brought me word that the Iron Keep is now
expanding
its forces along the Brimstone Mountains. You told me that a great many additional watch posts and guard towers are to be placed at strategic locations along the border.”

“True enough,” duMark acknowledged, still scowling. “So?”

“So we cannot afford to let these watches stand. The bulk of our forces have to utilize the Serpent’s Pass, and they’ll be spotted days in advance. We’ve no way to prevent that. I
must
send a few units through the smaller passes,
in secret.
If we’ve no forces to harry Morthûl’s defenders, he could keep our armies bottled up in the Serpent’s Pass for weeks!”