Don Bassingthwaite - The tyranny of ghosts

“He’ll think we’re here,” Chetiin reminded her.

She smiled briefly, then looked to the guard officer. “We travel southeast.”

He didn’t react. Her smile faded. Tenquis repeated her instructions, and the officer nodded and went away. Stablehands brought their horses over. They mounted up and rode into the sunlight. A Kech Volaar patrol on mist-gray leopards prowled out of the gate behind them.

“I’m sorry, Ekhaas,” Geth said.

“Don’t be.” Ekhaas’s voice was harsh. “It could have been worse.”

“What will happen to Diitesh then?” Tenquis asked her as they made their way up the road and out of the valley. The duur’kala didn’t answer him, but Geth caught Tenquis’s eye, then nodded to a gang of goblin workers assembling a treelike frame beside the road at the valley’s edge.

“Something worse,” he said.

They followed the foothills of the Seawall Mountains for several days before descending into the lowlands. Once out of the mountains, it was an easy matter to keep their distance from the scattered farmholds and clanholds of southern Darguun. They traveled through a landscape that was mostly barren, studded here and there with ancient ruins from the age of Dhakaan, but also with the remains of much more recent habitation by the humans of the vanished nation of Cyre. Charred, smashed, and overgrown, the rubble of Cyran farms and villages gave mute testimony to the upheaval the region had seen only thirty years before. This was the land where Haruuc had started his revolution before sweeping north. This was the land where the dream of Darguun had been born.

For the first time in her life, Ekhaas rode past the ruins and felt no pull to investigate them or learn their stories. As much as she tried to conceal the wrenching pain in her spirit, she couldn’t fool herself. She wasn’t entirely successful in fooling the others, either. As she exchanged watch duties one night with Geth, the shifter paused before sliding into his bedroll.

“It can’t be easy leaving your clan and your family,” he said.

She held her head high. “My clan exiled me, Geth,” she said, “and I don’t have a family anymore.” The words came out too harsh. She tried to soften them. “I know what you mean. I wish Ashi was here. She knows what it’s like to lose a clan.”

“She found a place in Deneith. You’ll find your place too.” Geth pulled his blankets up over himself. “You already have a family in us.”

She couldn’t help snorting. He turned to look at her, his eyes reflecting the firelight like an animal’s. “I could tell you a dozen stories where someone says just that,” she said.

“And what happens in them?”

“Usually everybody ends up dead.”

Geth propped himself up on one elbow. “Goblin stories can be bloody depressing. Did you know that?”

“Raat shi anaa. ‘The story continues.’” She sat back against the trunk of a scraggly tree. “Sleep well, Geth.”

“Stay alert, Ekhaas.” He lay down again. Within moments, his breathing had fallen into an easy, regular rhythm. Ekhaas leaned her head back and looked up at the moons, closer to her than Volaar Draal.

4 Vult

Two weeks after leaving the towering gates of the City of the Word behind, they passed into the village of Arthuun. The contrast was… striking to say the least, Ekhaas thought. The gates were formed of massive, rough-cut logs hung from walls that were themselves a mix of dressed stone and improvised patches. Tenquis, staring at the walls as they rode through the gates, simply shuddered.

“I’m no mason,” he said, “but I could do better than that.”

“It stands up and keeps things out,” said Geth. “I think that’s all the people here are interested in.”

Ekhaas was inclined to agree with him. Built on wet ground between the broad Torlaac River and the green wall of the Khraal Jungle, Arthuun was a ramshackle place. Like most of the villages and towns in Darguun, it was cobbled together from the ruins of an earlier Cyran settlement and rough structures thrown up by its new Darguul inhabitants. Arthuun seemed to have a particularly transient quality, as if people and buildings alike were just passing through on their way somewhere else.

Fortunately, there were enough non-dar-mostly ragged, tough-looking humans, but a few half-elves and one grime-stained warforged as well-on the muddy streets that no one paid much attention to Geth and Tenquis. Ekhaas had worried that Tariic might have put a bounty on their heads and circulated their description across Darguun. If such a description had reached Arthuun, it didn’t show. Marrow drew more looks than they did, mostly of deep unease and healthy respect. The worg seemed to enjoy the attention, and when they found a grubby building that advertised itself as an inn, she lay down on the porch, putting herself on display like some disconcerting sculpture.

“Be careful,” Chetiin warned her. “These are hard people. Bite them and they’ll bite you back.”

Marrow just whuffed and thumped her tail against the porch boards.

The innkeeper who came hustling across the common room to meet them was a halfling. Although a certificate by the door proclaimed the inn approved by the standards of House Ghallanda, Ekhaas had her doubts that any member of that dragonmarked house had ever set foot in the establishment.

“Two rooms,” Geth told him, “and information. We’re looking for a guide, someone who knows the Khraal.” He flipped the innkeeper a silver coin.

The halfling plucked it out of the air. “You want a hunter, then. Any of them that carry grinders will do.” He pointed to a rusty sword hung on one wall in a feeble attempt at decoration. The blade was wider than Ekhaas’s palm, but shorter than a typical sword and sharpened on only one edge, more like a farmer’s implement than a fighting weapon.

“Grinders?” asked Tenquis.

“Swing one of those against jungle vines for a morning, and you’ll know why.” The innkeeper pointed to another wall, this one hung with a spear. “You see a hunter carrying one of those, he hunts across the river in the moors. You see someone carrying both weapons, you walk away-he doesn’t know what he’s doing.”

“If you were traveling into the Khraal, who would you want leading the way?” Geth asked him.

The halfling squinted and looked them over, then said, “Tooth. He’s a bugbear. You’ll probably find him at the Rat’s Tail over by the east wall.”

“Tavern?” said Geth. The innkeeper just smiled. Geth grunted and tossed him a second silver coin, then a third. “The last one’s for meat,” he added. “Take it to the worg on the porch.”

They found the Rat’s Tail without difficulty. It turned out to be less of a tavern than a kind of open-air drinking hall, the “walls” made of reed mats rolled up to allow the humid air of the village to circulate. Under the roof, though, it was as busy as any tavern Ekhaas had been in, with many of the same features: arguments, gambling, and drunkards.

Only one of the bugbears in the place wore an enormous fang more than a handspan long around his neck. Chetiin confirmed his identity with a harried goblin server just to be certain. It was Tooth.

He sat at a table, playing some sort of dice game with several other dar. Ekhaas studied him as they approached. His thick hair was streaked with pale stripes, and one of his big ears was ragged, a good-sized chunk apparently bitten out. His dark, glittering eyes seemed half-hidden by heavy lids-from beneath which, she realized as they got closer, the hunter was watching them.

They paused a few paces from the table. Tooth’s eyes flicked back and forth between them and the dice. Finally he gave a slight nod, then announced in Goblin, “Last throw for me.” His voice was a rumble. He scooped up the dice, shook them, and rolled them across the tabletop.