Jean Rabe - Death March

All of it was gleaming angles and planes. All of it caught the torchlight and birthed a rainbow of colors that flitted around the walls like maddened fireflies.

Mudwort barely noticed that all the goblins in the chamber were as captivated as she. Some turned this way and that, their eyes trying to follow the lights. Others simply stared, entranced, at the entire mass. That’s what Mudwort did, stare, forgetting to breathe, and finally shaking her head and gasping to jolt herself back to consciousness.

She wished Direfang could see this amazing, beautiful thing-the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen in her entire life. She wished Boliver was with her, dipping his senses down along with hers and catching sight of this cavern and this crystal. But a part of her was glad she was alone and did not have to share this experience. She could show Boliver later. For the moment, she would keep this remarkable scene all to herself.

Mudwort drifted closer until the crystal cluster filled her vision. She saw the reflections of several goblins in the facets, their grinning visages looking broken in all the angles and planes. There was a wildness in their expressions, they looked primal. She hadn’t paid attention to their faces before. Now she studied them. They were goblin faces, clearly, but they looked different than her kinsmen. More frightening somehow. More savage. More willful and powerful. They had thick ridges above their eyes and wide noses with snuffling nostrils. Perhaps they were not so quick or bright, but perhaps they were better in other ways.

This tribe was to be envied, she thought … because of their more powerful faces and stances and seeming fearlessness; because they were beneath the earth where the air was better. Because they were staring at this mass of beautiful crystals, some of them tentatively reaching out to touch it, when all she could do was look at it wistfully, seeing it and them magically from a distance.

She imagined feeling the coolness of the crystal shards and suspected they would be smooth against her fingers, like polished granite. She tried staring inside the cluster and was practically blinded by the vortex of rainbow colors. Mudwort blinked furiously and willed herself to float back and up until she looked down on the goblin tableau from the top of the domed ceiling.

The cluster of clear and milky crystals was not magical, she recognized; she was certain she would have sensed any magic about it if that were so. Still, the cluster was breathtaking.

But there was magic somewhere in the chamber; she could feel the unusual magic. And after a few moments of searching, she realized it was in the young female goblin who wore all the necklaces.

Mudwort watched her approach the crystal and saw the goblins grudgingly part to allow her passage. The young goblin’s fingers played over the segments of one of her necklaces then stretched out and touched one facet after another on the crystal.

“A shaman,” Mudwort realized. “Like Boliver.” And like herself, she added almost as an afterthought.

But the young goblin was not as sure of herself as Mudwort and Boliver. Her movements were timid, skittish like a squirrel.

“Learning magic, maybe,” Mudwort guessed. “Using the beautiful rocks to help. The rocks are a focus.”

Mudwort knew that her own senses moved more easily through certain types of stones and not at all through others. So the young goblin was not yet proficient in magic and was using the crystal cluster to augment whatever skills she had. Mudwort wondered what powers resided in the crystal and how the beautiful rock might help her.

“But where exactly is this cave with the wild-looking goblins? And the dome? And the young shaman?” Mudwort’s brow knitted, her lips forming a needle-thin line. “Where, where, where?”

Mudwort watched the shaman for quite some time, not fathoming what she was attempting with the crystal, and finally deciding to leave the chamber. It was time to find out more, time to learn just where that cavern sat so she could physically go there. She willed herself to drift up through the dome then through one sheet of rock after another. She felt herself splinter when she passed through a thick layer of sandstone, just as the images of the goblin faces had broken apart in the facets.

Pieces of her consciousness skittered all over like bugs running from a disturbed nest. The sensation was unnerving, and as it lengthened, she briefly became terrified and could not tell where she was or where she was going. Her mind spun while she continued to splinter and splinter again. She felt like she was spiraling down, down, not rising to the surface.

Drowning in the stone.

“Mind going sour,” Mudwort said. She only faintly heard her own words, as if they were spoken by someone else a long distance away. “Mind running away. Mind is shattered and broken and-”

She gasped, her head jerking back from the shock of someone roughly grabbing her shoulders. The slight shift she wore-a shirt that had once belonged to a human child in Steel Town-was thoroughly soaked and plastered to her slight frame.

“Fever,” pronounced a voice, breaking into her thoughts. It was Horace. The priest and Direfang hovered over her. “She has a fever, Foreman, but no physical injury that I can see.”

Mudwort crawled away from the pair. “Am fine,” she told them, thumping her thumb against her chest and waggling her fingers.

Direfang looked concerned. “The skull man will-”

“Do nothing,” Mudwort finished for the hobgoblin. “Fever will leave soon. Am fine.”

The hobgoblin knelt, his eyes locked on hers. “Did Mudwort find something in the ground?” Direfang asked.

“Nothing,” she replied. “Found nothing at all.”

Grallik had told Direfang that the trees in the Qualinesti Forest were so thick in some places that their leaves blocked the sunlight. The hobgoblin had a difficult time imagining such a place, but he tried. Although he wasn’t born a slave, he’d never lived far from the aridness of Neraka. All he’d known was scarred, scabrous land and a hard life. There’d been a few trees, but not a single one in Steel Town proper. He was looking forward to seeing so many trees that he would not be able to count them all.

Many days past, Mudwort’s magic had told her that the Qualinesti Forest would be a good homeland for the goblins and hobgoblins who had escaped from Steel Town and followed Direfang through the mountains. He’d earlier believed that the Plains of Dust would be best. When he was a slave, he’d caught glimpses of the Dark Knights’ maps, and the Plains of Dust to the south had always intrigued him. From listening to the knights, he knew the Plains were not as arid as their name implied, and he envisioned plenty of land for the goblins to spread out on. He heard more than one knight say there were few ogres in the Plains.

But he trusted Mudwort and had grown fascinated with the notion of the huge, thick trees of the former homeland of the elves. As he walked at the head of the long goblin column, he tried to picture such trees. The daydream occupied him and kept his mind off the events that had killed so many of his kinsmen-the earthquakes, volcanoes, ogres, and most recently, the tylor. And it kept him from worrying about Graytoes, whom he carried.

His legs ached from traveling so many days with little respite. The soles of his feet were like leather from working in the mines for so many years. Still, they gave him much pain. The mountain trail had so many sharp shards that they cut through his thick pads and made him dread each step.

Many of the goblins and hobgoblins had boots that they’d taken from the Dark Knights during the escape from Steel Town. Others had taken sandals and shoes from the ogres in a town they’d sacked high in the mountains. They’d obtained their clothing from both of those places, though Direfang thought shoes were the most important acquisitions. He had not taken any for himself, though he had been quick to take a tunic off a dead ogre. He’d left the shoes for the other, weaker ones, but he regretted not grabbing a pair for himself. His weary feet hurt.