The Trials of Caste (6 page)

Trallik was still confused by Trelkar’s generosity
in blindly taking his side against Durik and Keryak.  He didn’t know why
Trelkar had done it, but he could only imagine it had something to do with the
Trials.  Perhaps Khee-lar Shadow Hand and his chief elite warrior saw greatness
in him?  Perhaps they were expecting him to take the competition and be awarded
the rank of elite warrior?  Trallik’s imagination was working overtime on the
options and possibilities for his future.

The more he thought about his future, however, the
less happy he was with his current circumstances.  Like normal, he sat
simmering in his home surrounded by his numerous younger siblings.  It wasn’t
much of a home, of that he was sure, and he would be glad to leave it.  After
all, it was only a tent with a sand floor in the deeper regions of his gen’s
home caverns.  Why did his family live here?  Trallik had often asked himself
that very question, and had long ago figured out who to blame.

When he was a young whelp, not much taller than
his father’s knee, he had listened with amazement as his father had recited to
him, his older brother and younger siblings the glorious stories of their
heritage.  Stories of great warriors and powerful leaders filled his whelping
years.  The fact that these were his ancestors had only made these stories more
wonderful. 

He’d had his mother, who always understood him and
seemed to care as much about him, the second son, as she did about all the rest
of her whelps.  When his mother had died birthing his youngest sister, however,
his father had too quickly taken on that ugly, nagging female who was not more
than a handful of years older than Trallik as his new mate.  Trallik had
resented that, and in the two years since had grown further and further away
from his father.  He had never opened his heart to his father’s new mate.  With
the arrival of her first whelp, she returned the favor and ignored Trallik as
well.

Trallik’s interest had changed to focus on the
power his ancestors had held.  His respect for his father and for his humble
upbringing had waned.  Being his father’s second son, and always in his older
brother’s shadow, had helped to twist his ambitions.  Eventually Trallik’s
rejection of his family made him bitter.  If his father’s ancestors were so
powerful, why had his father ended up as a servant caste?  His father wasn’t
even a warrior, much less a leader of warriors.  No, he was a fungus farmer,
one who smeared sheep dung on the walls of the lower caverns to grow the thick
shelf-like fungus that the poor of their gen ate.  He could only imagine that
his much more powerful ancestors must have never tasted the wretched stuff.

When Trallik had entered his year of training, he
had been utterly determined to do whatever it would take to match, and perhaps exceed,
the power and positions his ancestors had held.  Now as he sat listening to his
father’s recital of the story of Mintraub, Trallik’s great grandfather who had
gone on a quest with the last Lord Kale, and like Lord Kale, had never been
heard from again, Trallik shook his head and stood up.  He had no time or
patience for his father’s ramblings anymore.  He had taken the necessary steps
to ensure his own destiny, and had no use for this house anymore.

 “Trallik!” his father said, “We’re not finished
here.  Get back here!”

Trallik looked around at his younger siblings.  He
could see that most of the younger ones looked up at their father with the same
look of wonder that he had felt at one time, back when life was much simpler. 
But he felt that wonder no longer.  Now, he felt only the shame of what he felt
was his father’s failure in life and the emptiness of a house without his
mother, and the utter determination to leave this past far behind him.  He
shook his head at the naiveté of his younger siblings.

 “Trallik?  Come now, what’s wrong?  Are you
nervous about the Trials of Caste?” his father asked, seemingly oblivious as
always to what Trallik thought and felt.

Trallik looked at his father with nothing but
disdain.  He barely contained his anger and his desire to spit in his father’s
face.

His father saw the look in Trallik’s eyes and
recognized it for what it was; the same fire and hate he’d had at Trallik’s
age.  The old familiar hope welled up in his heart, that somehow the storms
that raged in his son’s soul would pass and that Trallik would not end up
wrecking his life as he had done.  Fearing an open confrontation, Trallik’s father
spoke before his son could, his tone very different.

 “Trallik, you’ve heard these stories before, and
I’m sure you’re still recovering from your adventures in the underdark.  Why
don’t you attend to your preparations for the trials?”

Trallik did not speak.  He threw his bag over his
shoulder and, with effort, turned his mind toward the tasks ahead, even as he
turned away from his family.

T
he
kobold known as Spider watched in morbid fascination as the mass of brown fur
and whip-like tail writhed about on the floor in agony.  In a moment of
reprieve from the intense pain, the large subterranean rat raised its head and
sniffed about, its blind eyes unable to fully reflect the fear and anger it was
trying to unleash on its unseen attacker.

Spider raised his club, ready to strike at the
creature just in case it recovered enough of its senses to be a danger to him.

Suddenly the rat cried out again and fell to the
floor as if skewered by a javelin.  For several moments it lay twitching on the
ground, its tongue lolling out of its mouth as its shallow, raspy breaths
echoed off the walls of the tiny chamber.  After only a few moments, the rat
let out a final gasp, then all was still.

Smiling in cruel satisfaction, Spider poured the
remaining Fang Cap mushroom spores from the little bowl where he had coated the
piece of meat with them into a small leather bag he had prepared for just this
purpose.  Grabbing his club, the bitter young kobold struggled to his feet. 
Even after recovering from the accident this past year during his preparation
for the Trials of Caste, Spider still had a limp.  For that, the master trainer
had not let him back into the year of training.

“Not that I wanted back in, anyway,” Spider
muttered under his breath as he climbed up the walls of the flue he’d used to
trap the rat and over the lip of stone he’d greased with animal fat.  “I can
still climb like a spider anyway,” he muttered. 

He liked his name; Spider.  His long-dead father
had given it to him when he was born.  It was the only legacy of his father
that his mother had kept.  It almost sounded like an honor name.  Of course,
there was little honorable that he’d ever done in his life, but that was beside
the point.  If Trelkar’s promise was true, he would soon have a place to fit
in, a purpose for continuing his miserable existence.  It certainly wasn’t an
honorable one, but it seemed valuable to Trelkar and his master, Khee-lar
Shadow Hand.  And who knows what valuable things he could acquire because of
it?

Struggling again to get to his feet now that he
was at the top, Spider hobbled off in the direction of the main caves, intent
on making the meeting that he was sure would change his fortunes in life.

Gorgon, the strongest of this year-group, was not
concerned with the Trials of Caste.  He knew the others well.  After a year he
knew their strengths and weaknesses entirely too well.  He would perform well
and not make a fool of himself.  Of that he had no doubt.

His concern was about making elite warrior. 
Indeed, just making it to the trials meant he would at least be a warrior.  But
there would be only one from this group that would be chosen to receive the
rank of elite warrior within the warrior caste; just one of seven future
warriors.  If anyone from this group should take that honor, he knew it was
him.  He didn’t feel it was pride that made him think so, just simple
confidence in his own abilities and the attention he paid to the training.  He
easily mastered the weapon skills that the Master Trainer had taught him and
had honed his body to a fine edge.

He flexed his arms and stretched his fingers,
watching the scales on his forearms ripple as the muscles flexed and stretched
in turn.  Subconsciously, he rubbed at the base of his left horn, which was
short, even for a member of the Kale Gen.  His short tail swished back and
forth reflexively as he thought of the upcoming Trials of Caste.  He was born
to be a warrior and a leader among his fellow warriors, honed in the forges of
the training caves.  Soon he would see his purpose fulfilled.  The trials would
be his finest hour.

His regimen complete, light as it was in
anticipation of the events of the coming days, Gorgon picked up the bag of
roots he’d collected earlier in the night from a nearby glade in the forest. 
His mind was rested from the rooting, and his body was loosened by the
regimen.  As he strode toward the entrance to the stony cave, he could feel the
warm current of air coming from the fiery crack that heated the large cavern
complex.  This was the ancestral home of the Kale Gen, but more than that, it
was
his
home.  A feeling of pride in his people welled up in his heart;
pride in the generations of those that had trod the path to warrior before him
and pride in the strength of the Gen, built over these hundreds of years.

They were not as the wild gens to the north, who
were little better than wild beasts of the forest living in dismal, dirty,
smoke-marred caves, subsisting mostly on the moss and lichen that grew on the
roots of trees and in the deepest of moist caves, smearing their own dung on
the walls to grow hairy fungus for their food. 

No, the Kale Gen was strong because it was smart. 
Whereas most of the kobold race had long forgotten their beginnings and their
heritage, having no knowledge of letters and writing, his gen maintained the
ancient scripts and traditions of their ancestors.  Their learning had caused
them to keep their language intact, to the point where it was hard to
understand many of the babbling, unlearned gens. 

This learning did not stop with history and
tradition; it was a standard that was only more amplified with the crafts of
the hand than with the crafts of the mind.  Smiths and weavers were found among
his gen, as were those who worked with wood, trainers of the black-pelted
wolves that their scouts and cavalry rode, makers of crockery, and several more
besides.

Gorgon’s father had achieved his elite warrior
status through several exploits in his younger days, though now he was one of
the best at one of those crafts.  His shop was a black smithy in a cavern of
commerce, with a chimney above the forge that vented through many feet of stone
to the air above.  It was to his father’s shop that Gorgon’s feet took him
now. 

As he passed through the various passages and
chambers emerging from deep within the bowels of the complex he focused
intently on his surroundings.  After two moons in the underdark evading the
various dangers to be found there, he found himself padding up to corners and
peering around, trying to notice everyone before they noticed him.

His preference in dealing with problems had been
to rush in horns first.  But though he could lift a stone the size of a melon
over his head, Gorgon was still a kobold, and kobolds were still rather small compared
to most things in this world.  Indeed, the last two moons of training had
changed him, for a kobold caught unaware often was a dead kobold.

Jerrig was an outsider to most of his peers, never
fully accepted in anyone’s social circle.  Certainly his cousin Durik was kind
to him, always watching out for him and such.  And though he could tell Durik,
and to some degree the other yearlings, were helpful to him, none of them had really
taken him in and included him in their activities or made him their friend. 
Considering his history, however, he couldn’t blame them.

It had not been long since he had passed through a
time of extreme turmoil in his life.  As if the coming of age had not been
enough with the raging hormones and great physical changes it brought, several
other stranger things had happened to him.  It had all started about the same
time the coming of age had occurred, more than two years now in the past. 
About once or twice a day, usually when beginning to relax, he could feel a
surge of energy begin to form in his head. 

At first, he’d not known how to control it, and
after a couple of months of this, the problem only got worse.  One night as he
lay trying to get to sleep in his bed, he had felt a surge of energy stronger
than any other before.  Not knowing how to control it, he had begun to cry out
for his mother.  Instead of sound, however, a pure wave of force seemed to project
from his hand, shredding a hole straight through the curtain that surrounded
his bed in their dugout house. 

His parents had not believed his story, nor did
they understand why their son had ‘become so clumsy,’ breaking pots, chairs,
and on one instance shattering a pitcher of root tea while reaching for it
during a quiet, late summer evening story-telling.  What no one had noticed was
that his hand had been an arm’s length from it.

For a time, Jerrig had not slept except when he
was so exhausted that he could fall asleep immediately.  He had found that,
when exhausted and weak, the energy would not come.  After a couple of weeks of
this, he had been helping his father as an apprentice in his leather shop when
he stopped to rest for a minute.  Almost without warning, the energy had welled
up within him and burst forth, cracking the cauldron his father used to boil
leather and throwing it onto its side.  The hot oil had spilled throughout the
entire shop, scalding two warriors that had been in the shop looking at his
father’s goods.  Jerrig had felt like his world was coming to an end.

Exhausted from the release of so much energy and
frightened by the accident, Jerrig had run from the scene of the accident out
of the caverns and into the wilderness, and continued running until he was far
from home.  For several months he had lived in the forest, using his limited
knowledge of the wilderness to live off the land.  That time in the forest had
taught him much, and the fact that he’d stayed out there alone had gained him
some semblance of self-confidence, despite narrowly escaping being eaten by
giant hunter ants, despite almost having been found and killed by a raiding
party of orcs, and especially despite his poor ability to feed, warm, and
protect himself.

After many moons had passed and the cool winds of
winter had come, he had returned to the gen.  This time, however, Jerrig had
finally gained a measure of control over this power.  As he had explained what
had happened that day in his father’s shop to his father’s warrior group
leader, he had been called a liar and only under condition that he never speak
of this power again was he allowed to enter the year of training and
participate in the Trials of Caste.  From that time forth, there had been only
a couple of instances where he’d not been able to control the energy, both of
which, fortunately, had been while no one else was around.

As time passed, Jerrig not only learned to stop
the energy, but also learned how to bring on the energy.  Practicing alone from
time to time in a secluded glen in the woods, he had learned to focus and
manipulate the energy, slowly at first.  It was not long before he had learned
to amplify the energy and focus it on his favored weapon, the javelin, seeming
to be able to correct the course of its flight from afar and cause it to strike
harder.  Some time after that, he’d learned to bring on greater amounts of the
energy, stripping the bark from mighty trees with his repeated focuses and
shattering young saplings from several steps away. 

The pinnacle of his efforts thus far had come just
before entering his year of training.  As he stood focusing on a tree one quiet
winter afternoon, he had felt to raise his hands and, forming a triangle with
his fingers, he focused on the space between his hands.  From within the
triangle, a swirling flame had begun to appear, growing slowly as he moved his
hands apart.  Cupping his hands behind it, Jerrig had focused on projecting
this flame toward the tree he had been practicing on. 

The flame had sped like a dart toward the tree and
struck it with a loud crack, blasting a hole and causing the trunk of it to
burst into flames.  Fortunately for Jerrig it had been a cold spring and there
was still snow on the ground.  After several minutes of throwing snow at the
fire until it was out, a mentally and physically exhausted Jerrig had gone home
pondering on the power within him.

During this year of training for the Trials of
Caste he’d applied this power in small doses and had learned to manipulate small
portions of it in different ways.  Mostly, however, he had not had the time to
focus on this power, and he could feel it lying dormant within him, awaiting
release, aching to no longer be suppressed.