Jean Rabe - Death March

“Hurry,” she urged herself. “Find the goblins.”

She wound her way through one tunnel and the next, sometimes dipping down, other times rising toward the surface, occasionally doubling back. The maze reminded her of the tunnels in the Dark Knight mines in Steel Town, where she’d toiled for too many years. But the stone in the earth tunnels was different than that in the mines. There were more of the gray, bumpy rocks shot through with blue and green crystals, and sections of granite along the floor had been worn smooth and shiny by many passing feet. Yet there were none of the rocks the Dark Knights had coveted to turn into their steel swords and knives. And there were no slaves.

But there were goblins. She continued to hear them.

Mudwort better understood the words; they were coming louder. Krood, dallock, slarn . Hunger, dance, sleep. Hunger was repeated the most often. Krood, krood, krood , she heard. Goblins were always hungry.

The tunnel she glided down widened ahead, opening into a chamber filled with goblins and lit by guttering, fat-soaked torches that had been rammed into crevices. The air was not pleasant; it was filled with smoke from the torches and the sweaty odor of goblins. But it was better than the air around the tylor, so Mudwort pretended that she was breathing the underground air.

The goblins down there were all of the same clan, likely, as their skin was the same color. It was red but much darker than hers, the shade of dried blood, almost black in places. One goblin had a gray patch on her back that Mudwort found curious. A mark from birth, perhaps?

The goblins milled anxiously as Mudwort observed them, and she grew anxious too. Thirty, she counted, or close to that number; they constantly moved, so it was difficult to know just how many there were for certain. They walked with shoulders back, proud like the Dark Knights who once paraded around Steel Town. Their chins were tipped up, faces set in grins, nostrils quivering. And their hides were relatively smooth; Mudwort could not spot many scars or a single sign of injury. Not one walked with a limp. Clearly, from their tall, full frames, they were not oppressed slaves. Not one of them was skinny. And not one of them wore a scrap of clothing or carried a weapon.

She saw the one with the gray patch look straight up, and Mudwort followed her gaze.

“Amazing,” Mudwort whispered to herself. The chamber they were in had a natural domed ceiling that she guessed was more than a dozen goblins high. It was covered with crude drawings and symbols, or perhaps they were words in some sort of language, the etchings darkened here and there from the smoke the torches gave off. Had the goblins made the drawings? she wondered. And if so, how could they have climbed the walls to make them? The chamber looked at the same time primitive and elaborate. The flickering torches placed at their odd intervals chased shadows around the dome and made the drawings move, which made her dizzy.

She wished she could be there in body, not just in mind, to join with the fat, happy goblins and feel the smooth granite beneath her feet. It would be so much more pleasant than walking on the hurtful trail where she led Direfang’s army from one meal to the next and where the air was so foul. She wanted to talk to the goblins, mingle with them, learn more about them.

What did they eat, those fat goblins? And where did they live? Certainly not in that chamber; it was too clean, and there wasn’t a single animal skin for them to sleep on. Two more tunnels led away from there, and maybe the answers were down one of those tunnels. She would explore the tunnels later, she decided. All of her attention was directed to watching the red-skinned goblins, clearly larger than any in Direfang’s army.

Her belly rumbled, and she cursed. Thinking about what the goblins ate made her remember that she was very hungry. She smelled something strong and pleasant in that instant-nothing from aboveground, where she still sat, but from the chamber below. The smell wasn’t instantly recognizable, it was something …

“Delicious,” she said. “What smells so wonderful?”

A loud bong suddenly sounded, and four goblins brought in a large wooden platter with the cooked carcass of a boar. They placed it in the center of the chamber, and Mudwort watched as the goblins crowded around it and fell upon the meat.

Despite their full frames, they acted as ravenous as her starving kinsmen, pulling loose the flesh and skin and stuffing it down their throats. Their manner was wild and frightening as they pried hunks off and barely chewed the flesh before swallowing it, some of them pushing their fellows out of the way and arguing over the largest pieces.

Mudwort could hardly believe the scene. She’d seen her kinsmen argue over the meager rations doled out in Steel Town before but never in such a barbarous fashion. There was a ferocity about the red-skinned goblins that excited and disturbed her. Their behavior seemed extreme, exaggerated, and she thought perhaps she was sleeping and that it was a dream. But when she concentrated, she could feel the dirt she’d burrowed her fingers into and could hear the crows cawing overhead. So she realized that what she watched in her magical vision was in some fashion real.

One of the four goblins who had brought in the tray-a tray she realized was a shield-wore a necklace of teeth and tiny bones. He thoughtfully chewed on one of the boar’s ears and distanced himself from the others, leaning against the wall between two torches. He tilted his head to one side, as if listening for something. Mudwort listened closer too, hearing an annoying pounding in her head and, under the pounding, singing. It was good singing, in a female goblin voice, enjoyable and not at all like the discordant tune Moon-eye used to wail.

It was a song about the earth and magic and old, powerful things. And it grew louder as another goblin came into the chamber, a female. She was the singer.

The female was young, and she stopped singing when the feasters turned their attention toward her. Like them, she wore no clothes, but she had several necklaces of carved wooden beads and bats’ feet that draped to her waist. She also had a wooden bracelet on her right wrist, cut with marks that resembled those Mudwort had seen carved into the dome.

“Little more than a youngling,” Mudwort pronounced. “But one honored, it seems.”

Indeed, the other goblins backed away from the boar, save four who removed it after making sure no scraps remained on the chamber floor.

The young female stood next to the male with the bone-and-tooth necklace.

“Those two with the necklaces wait for something,” Mudwort guessed. “But wait for what?” A part of her wondered where they had taken the delicious-smelling boar. There was still a little bit of meat left on its ribs, and she suspected it would taste much better than the raw tylor meat. It had been many years since Mudwort had feasted on something that was cooked in such a style. Again her stomach growled, and again she cursed.

“Waiting for what?” Mudwort repeated to herself. Her curiosity nearly overwhelmed her, and she held her breath in anticipation. “Waiting for something important,” she said when she finally released her breath and sucked in another gulp of air. “Something …”

Four goblins returned with the shield-tray, the boar carcass gone, and a skull-sized mass of crystals on the middle of it. Mudwort had seen crystals numerous times on her magical, mental forays into the earth, and she’d seen crystalline jewelry adorning some of the women in Steel Town. But it was the most amazing crystal she’d ever seen. Its base was a bowl-shaped chunk of the bumpy, gray rock, which had the green threads running through it. Dozens of finger-sized crystals sprouted from the rock in all directions. The crystals were iridescent like quartz, but not so common as quartz. Clear at the tips of each protrusion, like water struck by the sun, they were milky at the base.