Mark Sehestedt - Hand of the Hunter

"He's saying I have a dirty mouth? What's he? My mother?"

Menduarthis answered, "He's saying in the fight that you ended up on your face in the dirt. You can get your own drink."

All eyes returned to Mandan. He looked down at the skin in his hand. "So this is their way of apologizing?"

The hobgoblins laughed.

"More of a salute," said Menduarthis. "They aren't sorry for the fight. They enjoyed the fight. It's more their way of saying, 'Well done.' "

Mandan looked down on the nearest hobgoblin. "Even you?"

The hobgoblin had taken off his helmet. He smiled up at Mandan, even as he rubbed his chest. "Aye," he said. "Good kick." He nodded at the skin. "Drink."

Mandan handed his club to the hobgoblin so that he could untie the knot in the skin. He spat the kanishta root into one palm then upended the skin into his mouth. Lowering it, he winced and swallowed.

"Gah! That's… gah!"

The hobgoblins roared with laughter. The one whom Mandan had kicked in the chest took the skin and gulped from it. "Puts hair on your ears," he said.

And with that, they set off, going back the way they had come for a quarter mile or so, then taking a smaller side trail up into the heights.

"So tell me," Menduarthis said to Hweilan. "That was your first kiss, wasn't it?"

She scowled. "No."

Menduarthis spared Darric a glance, then gave Hweilan a beaming smile. "I mean your first real kiss, with a real man. Not some boy behind the tapestries after the feast?"

Hweilan's scowl deepened, and a blush crawled up her neck and into her face. "Go away, Menduarthis."

He laughed, gave Darric a cruel wink, then strode ahead to confer with his hobgoblin war chief.

Walking through the woods, Darric managed to stay next to Hweilan, whom the hobgoblins seemed to be giving a wide berth. Menduarthis was the only one of their company who spoke with her, but he had not come back, and Darric couldn't see him at all.

Darric looked around at the hobgoblins and asked Hweilan, "I'm a little confused. Are we captives or guests?"

A hobgoblin winding through the trees to their left said, "For Maaqua to decide."

Hweilan looked sideways at Darric. "Hobgoblins have sharp ears."

Darric knew of Maaqua. Reputed to be a sorceress of some repute, she led the Razor Heart clan, who had negotiated with King Yarin and been granted the right to "tax" the Gap. Never mind the fact that Yarin didn't exactly control the Gap, so he didn't really have the right to grant anything. The treaty meant, essentially, that Damarans could pass the Gap as long as they paid the Razor Heart. And if the Razor Heart happened upon any of Yarin's enemies… well, then it most likely became a matter of how much they could pay. The fact that Darric and his men were Damarans might work in their favor.

But if this Maaqua knew enough, she might know that Darric's House was not exactly high in Yarin's esteem.

"For Maaqua to decide?" said Darric. "What does that mean?"

"It means you should have stayed home," said Hweilan.

Highwatch

Argalath was still trembling when he entered the chamber. Vazhad supported him on one side, one of his acolytes on the other. The stone chamber, deep in the mountain beneath Highwatch, had been darkened to accommodate their master. Only one guttering candle in the middle of the floor shed its flickering glow through the room.

Lord Guric stood along the wall, staring at nothing. But when Argalath entered the room, a tiny tremor passed through him, a slight ripple of the skin, and his gaze fixed on his master.

"Zadraelek?" he said.

"She found him," said Argalath, his voice barely above a whisper. His mind had still been linked with Zadraelek when the arrow hit him. It had taken all of Jagun Ghen's will to sever that link before he was trapped along with his brother.

"He is…?"

"Yes."

Vazhad released his master long enough to unfold the small camp chair he'd been carrying, then set his master in it.

When Argalath was settled, he sighed with weariness, then looked up at his acolyte and said, "Bring her."

The acolyte bowed and ran back the way they had come.

"What are you planning to do?" said Guric.

"The girl is in Maaqua's territory," said Argalath. "We will send the surprise I have prepared for her."

"And what makes you think the old crone will help?"

"We don't need her help," said Argalath. "She just needs to stay out of the way."

He looked down at the chamber floor. The dim light of the candle caught in the symbols and circle painted on the floor.

"The portal is ready," said Guric.

The Razor Heart led them all the rest of that day and well into the night until they came to the hobgoblin's fortress. Much like Highwatch, most of it had not been built so much as carved out of the mountain itself. From a distance, Hweilan suspected one would not even know there was a fortress there at all, mistaking the watchtowers for crags and caves. Maaqua met them in what passed for a courtyard before the fortress's main gate.

As the granddaughter of the High Warden of Highwatch, part of Hweilan's education had been learning every tribe, faction, and leader of the mountain clans. Maaqua was both less and more than Hweilan expected. She didn't look old. She looked ancient. "Older than old dust's grandmother," Scith would've said. Even her wrinkles had wrinkles. She was small for a hobgoblin, and made smaller still by her hunched posture. She leaned heavily upon a gnarled staff, and Hweilan recognized at once her people's kinship with Gleed. Her reddish skin hung loose off her bones, and what little hair remained wafted like stray cobwebs on the breeze.

But the old crone watched them with bright, alert eyes, and Hweilan could feel power radiating off Maaqua like waves of heat from an open oven. Her very bones seemed to thrum with it.

Her clothes and robes were mostly of hide and wool. Hweilan had seen finer on peasants in Kistrad. But Maaqua wore a gold circlet on her brow. Three thornlike barbs rose from it, and two clasped around each temple. Three rubies, only slightly dimmer than Maaqua's eyes, sat in the crown underneath the middle barb.

Maaqua had supposedly once been a disciple of some half-demon whose own ambitions had caused her to get sucked into some dark level of the Abyss. Or so the tales said. True or not, Maaqua led one of the most powerful tribes of the Giantspires, and both the lords of Damara and chieftains of Narfell treated her with respect-or avoided her altogether.

Behind her stood the largest hobgoblin Hweilan had ever seen. Not a bugbear like the one they called Grunter, but a true hobgoblin. He could have easily stared Mandan eye-to-eye. Hard muscle wrapped his frame. He wore no armor-Hweilan suspected he didn't need any, for he had the cold, hard look of a seasoned warrior. During some of her first combat lessons as a child, the weapons master at Highwatch had told her, "If your enemy has the chance to hit back, you're doing something wrong." Advice Ashiin would've appreciated. This goblin looked as if he wore no armor because no enemy ever survived long enough to get close to him. The weapon on which he leaned only deepened this impression. His hands rested on the pommel of a black-iron sword, the blade of which was easily four feet long. Much like her own blades, the sword was decorated with many etchings, but instead of runes, they were in the form of dead or dying demons, and the pommel and guard of the sword itself had been crafted to look as if some demon champion lay impaled upon the blade.

The hobgoblins who had escorted them fanned out into a ring, surrounding them, leaving Hweilan, the wolf, the Damarans, Menduarthis, and the war chief at the center, just before Maaqua and her champion.