Horded - Kingdom Gone Book 2, page 19
“Do you think you are worthy, human?” Now Gutra spoke in a whisper. Her words hissed between them, a foul spell, or a baring wind. “Is your heart bad?”
“Y-no.”
“Ha! You think you can claim the tir talus with a bad heart? You think that you are the first human to try, maybe? You think that you are special?”
“No.” That much she was sure of. There was nothing special about her.
“I thought not.” Gutra sniffed. “A human heart. A thing that knows only fear and betrayal.”
Maera felt the hammer fall. Betrayal. Gutra had her number. She pulled the curtain aside and showed Maera’s evil to the horde. Traitor human. Stupid, stupid girl. If she’d thought to escape her fate here, she’d been far too naïve. The gobelin woman announced her evil out loud, and the horde whispered with it. Maera had a bad heart.
“Yessss. You know it, don’t you?” Gutra stepped in until their faces nearly touched. “You don’t deserve the tir talus. This thing is not for you.”
Maera blinked, and the world blurred. Gutra’s face melted in a wash of tears. She’d have to run now, or maybe just lie down and let them have at her. Either way would end the same, without the heartbeat, without Torg. Alone again.
The gobelin’s hand lifted slowly. Her fat fingers curled like claws and flexed as she reached for Maera’s face. The nails had thick ridges in them. They sparkled in her peripheral, caked with dust and ready to gouge out her eye perhaps, at least to deliver a nasty scratch. Instead, they gripped the thong at her temple and tugged hard enough to jerk her head to the side.
By my hands is this placed…
“No!” Maera grabbed an ancient wrist and squeezed until Gutra released the thong. She held the woman’s arm, held it up and growled straight into the amber eyes. “By his hand or no other.”
Gutra hissed and twisted.
Maera curled up her lip and snarled back. She lifted until the gobelin stood on her toes, and still the woman’s claw struggled to reach the thong in her hair, to pull out the thing that tied her to Torg, the only thing that she’d wanted for herself in the last five years.
She pushed and released the old woman. Gutra stumbled away. Her feet tangled and she fell to the ground, landing with her tunic twisted around her legs and her round ass upended. The pocket was perfectly still. Sound stopped completely. The gobelins held their breath while their matriarch lay with her face in the dirt.
Maera’s breath caught in her throat. She blinked, furiously trying to clear her vision and was rewarded by a wall of blank, green stares. A few jaws hung loose, as if sound might escape at any second. Even the breeze stopped.
Her chest tightened. The ant crawled along its crevasse. A sound like bones cracking, like dice tumbling or teeth gnashing rattled through the camp. It paused, came again, paused. The round bottom shifted and the old gobelin rolled onto her side, laughing.
Laughing. Maera shuffled her feet until the log pressed into the back of her calves. Gutra sat up. Her round head nodded and the laugh sputtered into a dry cough. Around the camp, gobelins began to shift into motion, to wake and whisper.
“Well?” Gutra coughed again and then looked up to the faces nearest her. “Help me up!”
The Sol buta rushed forward, all except Sorin, who continued to gape at the scene much the same way Maera did. The cold shock of what she’d done now, of her latest crime, made her skin prickle. It sent a shiver through her, threatened more. She’d pushed down an old lady. Shoved an old woman into the dirt. She was the devil.
They helped Gutra to her feet, but she pushed them away as soon as she’d steadied. Her head swiveled around and her yellow eyes pinned Maera in place. This time, she shouted her orders in gobelin. Her wide mouth twisted into a grin that proved she hadn’t been hurt by the fall. She grunted, clicked her teeth and spoke Sorin’s name. The language might have been foreign, but Maera understood the gestures. Gutra’s arm swept out her directive, indicating the camp and all their things.
She smiled at Maera and nodded again before switching into the human tongue. The last command, she wanted Maera to hear. The old woman grunted with satisfaction before turning her back on them and waddling away. “Help her pack.”
Sorin’s mouth snapped shut. The Sol buta watched their leader leave, but none of them moved to follow her. Perhaps they meant to guard her, to ensure that Maera’s camp was fully evicted, that she couldn’t return. Once they’d shoved her through the pocket wall, there’d be no chance of that. They should have tried it sooner. Someone should have thought of it.
She’d have thought of it.
“Maera!” Sorin hissed near her shoulder, ripped her out of her self pity. “Maera, hurry.”
The gobelin woman grinned at her. They all did. The Sol Buta had crossed into Torg and Tal’s camp and every last one of them looked like they’d just swallowed one of Tilly’s fruit tarts. She’s missed something significant, and it shone like a merry fire on the green faces around her.
“What?”
“We must pack up your camp,” Sorin practically sang it. “Gutra has moved you.”
“Moved?” Not evicted, moved. Maera frowned and watched the Sol buta descend upon their belongings. The young gobelin, Dotra, who’d given her the gown she wore, now slung the duffle full of clothing over her shoulder and picked up Maera’s spinning. She smiled too, giggled and continued to ransack the camp. “What?”
“Gutra has ordered it.” Sorin clicked her teeth merrily and pressed a hand to Maera’s shoulder, spinning her gently to watch the women tearing down their lean-to. “Your camp will be joined to the Sol Buta’s fire.”
Joined. They weren’t exiled for her assault on the matriarch. Instead, the old woman had endorsed her. Gobelins didn’t make any damn sense at all!
“Come,” Sorin tugged at her elbow. “You and Torg will join the Sol buta.”
The gobelins excelled at camping. Already, the little shelter was down and being neatly rolled into a bundle. The women had bags and straps and goods draped over their shoulders and the remnants of Tal’s fire had been doused. Tal’s fire. If she and Torg joined their camp to the other gobelin couples, to those who held the tir talus, what would become of Tal? This was his camp, his and Torg’s, and now the horde women had decided its fate for them all.
There would be no arguing with them. They already carried their belongings away. The camp would move, already moved, and who would get to live in it after would have to be decided when the men returned. If they both returned.
Maera bit her lip. She didn’t have time for those thoughts. None of them did. For now, she could focus on the Sol buta. She could move the camp, re-create it as if it hadn’t changed, as if they’d all three be sharing it when the battle ended. She could do that much, that and pray the dilemma was something that she got a chance to sort out with Torg and Tal when both of them returned, unscathed, from danger.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
He rushed the enemy horde at his brother’s flank. They reached the lake undetected, but not the town. Rulak’s men met them with full arms at the first charred building. The two forces faced off in the smoking rubble that had been a farm, perhaps the same one where they’d stolen their cantankerous mounts.
Olin and Rulak exchanged the preliminary insults. Their hordes might be the last of gobelin kind, but the old ways still governed them. If none stood when the battle ended, the race itself would pay the price, and yet, neither chieftain faltered. Both knew what Rulak held in his grasp. The hordes lived only to serve the prophecy, and now the Guardian had come.
“Show me, Rulak the lowly, how the gargoyle has chosen you?” Olin shook his head. “Or perhaps, you fear it will abandon you the second its chains are loosed?”
“Olin of the expansive middle, great and powerful flatulence,” Rulak grinned and clicked his teeth. “Come and see it for yourself.”
No speech would convince Rulak to relinquish his claim. Olin spat his response to the dirt and the armies snarled and crashed together.
Torg howled and swung his blades overhead, cleaving his first assailant and showering their path with gobelin blood. He charged forward, bringing his blade up for the next strike. Around them, the fury of both hordes deafened. Tal heard his heartbeat above the noise, heard his breath huff in and out. He ducked an enemy strike and slipped his knife between the man’s ribs, skidding through the slick street behind Torg’s forward advance.
The horde surged, and Rulak’s men backed away. They took a few feet of street and then fell back under a renewed frenzy of defense. The battle would linger. The first blows fell hard and fast, but the warriors grew wary now, positioning and waiting for an advantage. Vrau and Dutat fought to their sides, and with each foot forward, fewer of the enemy fell. With each step back, their blows answered more to block than to bloody.
Tal could see beneath Torg’s swing. He stood far too low to survive an extended onslaught. Torg would bury him afterwards, would weed through the dead for his corpse. Except he had a gargoyle to free. His knife wouldn’t serve the horde enough to affect any outcome in battle. Though it slashed at belly height, it wouldn’t fool the enemy more than a few times before they cut him down.
He needed a path to the courtyard and the road was thick with the enemy horde. The fields and buildings lay in ruin to the sides, but a few more surges forward and they’d reach the few that still stood. He could slip away, then, and take his chances on stealth while the hordes dealt with each other directly.
Blood and magic! But he’d never see the courtyard if he stayed with the fight. As if on cue, a bellow like thunder split the air. It stilled the battle for a breath, for two more as the echo rocketed over them and out toward the lake and the Shadow Mountains. The gargoyle called, maybe to him, maybe only to announce its fury.
It was Olin who howled in reply. The horde rallied and plowed into the enemy. Blades rang and clattered and gobelin innards pooled in the ashen street. They advanced. Torg and Dutat leapt ahead. Tal struggled to keep pace, dodging more damage than he dealt. He caught a flash of Vrau as the man fell behind, locked in a duel with one enormous member of Rulak’s horde. They reached the charred remains of the jail where the witch had helped him to free his brother. Only the building’s face still stood, black eyes gaping at the passing battle.
In an instant, his path opened. A gobelin fell, and Tal had a clear stretch between him and the ruined building. His feet answered. He dashed into the fray and the swarm closed around him just as quickly. Torg was lost in the chaos. If his brother noticed his flight, if he called to him in parting, he’d never have known it. An enemy hammer fell beside him, splattering mud and entrails over his breeches.
He swerved and ducked between legs that belonged to both sides, bursting out again just as quickly beside the charred façade. The battle raged at his back now. Tal leapt around the corner and fled up the slope, behind the buildings, behind enemy lines now.
The horde had raided every home. Belongings trailed out into the streets, smashed furniture, torn cloth. The broken and discarded items littered the town, tossed into drifts by the wind or some gobelin hand looking for a few more treasures in the trash. They’d left more buildings standing here, though. Some still smoldered and a few had crumbled into rubble. What was left provided enough cover for one small gobelin to advance alone and undetected.
The square around the courtyard gapped too. One of their number had burned to the ground, leaving a black hole filled with jagged supports and rubble. He crept across the last street, the opening that might have announced him were there any warriors left behind as sentries. Nothing sounded and Tal slipped up to the charcoal structure and into the maze of fallen timbers.
He heard voices. They’d left a guard upon the beast. He’d expected that. The higher pitch and feminine lilt, however, took him by surprise. Olin always left the women in the camps. Olin never would have risked the gobelin family, the chance of reproduction, by bringing them out of the pocket’s safety. Rulak must have been certain of his victory. He must have expected the gargoyle would take them to the castle if he’d brought his entire horde forth. That they still lingered in the town suggested the beast had not obliged him.
Tal slunk through the rubble, staining his breeches black with each brush against the charred ruins. He slipped to the courtyard’s edge and peeked out between the skeletal bones of a cupboard. Rulak’s women camped around the well. They’d stolen pots and dishes from the surrounding buildings, had made tents of flowery bed linens and a bonfire of the townsfolk’s furnishings.
He counted twenty, fat gobelin females waddling around the camp. Twenty at least—they moved around too much to be certain. Too many to attack directly, and yet, he would have to do just that if he meant to free the beast they guarded.
The gargoyle had been shackled to the well. It hunkered in the center of the camp, a thick metal collar around its neck. The beast’s round head bore the thing as if it were too heavy to lift. The granite muzzle whuffled only inches above the flagstones, and the thing’s wings drooped as if weighted.
If they’d come through the pocket, he’d have had it loose by now. Why would Rulak leave the beast squatting on the lip of freedom? Tal ground his teeth together and cursed. He could have stepped through to it from the mountainside, avoided the entire conflict with a single shift of membranes. Now he faced an impossible mob of green claws and cookery. He could circle, if he was lucky. He could look for something helpful in the next building.
Why would they tie the thing to a pocket? Tal chewed the idea while he slipped toward the nearest structure. More important to his immediate plans, how would he remove that collar? His knife would prove useless against the chain.
An alley separated the buildings, but the rubble had spilled into it. He sneaked across and followed the wall backwards to a low window. The glass, like all the others, had been smashed, and Tal sprang through it to crouch inside a wide room. Shelves lined it, but their contents spilled onto the floor. Heaps of fiber and fabric trailed across the boards. The gobelin women had taken more than they’d left, but enough remained to burn.
He found the remains of a loom, a cluster of wooden parts and a three-legged wheel in one corner. He dragged the lot into the center of the floor, made a pile of his own and began stuffing roving into the gaps.
Footsteps stopped him dead. He held his breath and listened to the pounding of boots, the screaming outside the buildings that said the battle had caught up with him. Would it be Rulak or Olin who entered the courtyard first? He’d waited too long to act, either way. Shapes flickered past his window, shadows and flame. Tal skittered to the wall and peered out.
They fought in the streets to his left. The battle wouldn’t have made it this far if Rulak’s men were winning, and the women in camp must have come to the same conclusion. They poured out of the courtyard, through the alley and the char, carrying pans and daggers and swinging both with equal skill. Rulak’s women did not hesitate to rush into battle, and here was Tal Bonesplint, fiddling with fires inside the building’s shelter, hesitating, stalling when his moment of truth waited just outside.
He forgot his fire. The room had a doorway at the far end, and he bolted to it and ran down a short hallway to the back of the building. The first window he came upon, he leaped through, landing on a long porch with a jolt that rattled his knees. At the well, guarded by only a handful of cooks now, the Guardian lifted its head and howled.
Tal sprang over the railing and dashed forward. He ran in the open, drawing his knife on the fly. It wouldn’t free the beast, but it might defend them both. It might kill the one who held the key. It might earn their way into the pocket. If he could get the gargoyle to follow, perhaps the chain would break of its own accord.
The gargoyle bellowed again and the gobelins guarding it screamed and charged toward Tal. The first one swung a knife not unlike his own, but she hadn’t his experience or his agility. Tal rolled right, dodged and continued without engaging her.
He faced two more, both armed only with heavy wooden spoons. They held in place until the last moment and then parted, leaving him free access to the Guardian. Tal’s feet pounded onward. The gargoyle raised its head, spread both wings up and out as if it meant to fly or to shelter him. He ran to it, as certain as he’d ever been that it waited for him. He would free it. He would show the horde the way to the castle and fulfill the prophecy. It was his task.
The stone haunches shifted as the beast tugged at its chain. The well groaned under the strain of holding it. The gargoyle howled once more and two gobelin warriors stepped out of the pocket. They’d already drawn their knives, stepped quickly out of range of the gargoyle’s talons and aimed their blades at Tal.
Rulak hadn’t left the pocket unguarded after all.
Tal saw the curl of green lips, the points of sharp teeth and the glinting of flame on long, curving knives. His feet stuttered, but his forward advance had too much momentum to slow. He hurtled toward the enemy, toward the Guardian and the well pocket with only his blade and his belief in destiny as a shield.
The gargoyle swung its tail like a lash. The gobelin guarding that side ducked, but his attention diverted to the thrashing spike and left Tal to deal with only one foe. He clicked his teeth, raised his blade and leapt toward the enemy. Both his hands gripped his knife. His feet curled up, ready to extend or kick depending on the foe’s response. The courtyard streaked away and Tal swung down, aimed his strike and screamed as something tore into his shoulder.
He fell on, though his hands failed him and his blade dropped away. A new pain lanced through his hip, another in his leg. His enemy snarled and spun to one side, allowing the arrows of hidden snipers to do his work for him. They pelted Tal now, some grazing, but more than one burying deep into his flesh. The cobblestones lifted nearer and he had only a glimmer of thought left. He had enough sense to hear the screaming, to catch the flutter of the flights streaking past and to see the Guardian lifting up, up with a groan of stone and metal before the impact took him into the dark.
