Toede awoke with the taste of ashes in his mouth. Had he gotten drunk again and slept too close to the dying embers of the hearth? No, that was years ago, another lifetime and half a continent away, in a crude cavern with his fellow hobgoblins. Before the dragons came. Before opportunity knocked and showed him a dream of great power. Much had happened since then.
Then there was another dream as well, more current, stemming from his recent slumber. Great and powerful figures-giants or godlings-striding the landscape, speaking to him. He was bound for greatness. No, not that. Nobility. He was bound for nobility. The rest of the dream tore away in small, forgotten strips as dreams tend to do, but that was enough. He liked dreams that promised good things in the future.
But where was he? Toede looked around and saw he was perched at the base of a comfortable maple tree overhanging a quietly gurgling stream. On three sides-north, east, and west-the tree-clad hills rose sharply, cloaked in the brilliant green of new foliage, but the ground of the valley floor was flat and dotted with brush. The sky was as blue as a paladin's eye.
The maple was in full bloom, and thin yellowish flowers streamed down around him on the soft breeze. Toede's nose twitched from the blooms, and he sneezed, explosively, expelling gouts of dust from each nostril.
No doubt about it, thought Highmaster Toede, sniffing. I'm in the Abyss.
Toede rose and padded down to the bank of the stream, kneeling over it and splashing water in his face, wiping the dust and pollen from his eyes. He drank a bit from his cupped hands. The water had that bitter, cold taste of freshness that always made Toede queasy, but any refuge is a relief, as his departed mother always used to say.
As the water stilled from his libations, he looked down and saw himself full in the face: a weak chin tucked beneath two blubbery lips that ran from ear to ear; a pallid complexion that would make an undead look positively perky; limpid, saucerlike eyes (now rimmed in red) placed against a sloped forehead and topped by a hairline that receded all the way to the back of the neck, bracketed by drooping ears tufted with stringy gray locks. Toede smiled, and his teeth flashed in sharp triangles, filed in the traditional hobgoblin manner.
'You handsome devil, you,' said Toede aloud.
It was then he noticed his clothing. Worn finery beneath a chain and plate shirt stretched over his portly, malformed frame. Huge shoulder plates imitated the fashions of the dragon highlords. The armor had been specially made, modified from a suit that had belonged to a dwar-ven tax-dodger.
His hunting clothes. He had been hunting? Somewhere along the line he had lost his weapons.
And with that Lord Toede remembered the hunt, the final hunt.
It had been Groag's idea, really. Highmaster Toede, master of the city of Flotsam, had been bored with life at court, bored to tears. Nothing seemed to hold his interest, not feasts, nor entertainment, nor even the occasional interrogation of suspected rebels. Groag had been one of the hobgoblins of the court, a preening, spineless little flunky with the talent of agreeing to everything Toede said. In a rare moment of independent thought, the smaller hobgoblin had suggested a hunt.
And so they went hunting. Toede, Groag, and most of the highmaster's hobgoblin retinue, along with some human servants. Toede had left his normal mount, Hop-sloth, behind and was mounted on his jet-colored war stallion.
A pair of kender were the prey, Toede remembered, Kronin and Tal-something. Rebellious poachers. Led them on a merry chase through the woods south of Flotsam, too. Kender were a miserable, dangerous breed, and kender poachers doubly so. Toede's party had shackled the two together and still the kender ran rings around them. Over the hills, into the briars, through the woods, and at last to the cave.
A cave. That thought stopped Toede for a moment, and his brow furrowed. And what happened next?
The kender were in the cave. They went in to flush them out, and…
And…
Then it hit him, rocking his memory like a large stone dropped from a balcony. A dragon. There was a dragon in the cave. A wild and feral creature, not one of the pets the highlords kept. They had sent the dogs in, thinking the kender were within, and they had awakened it.
His bodyguards scattered under the dragon's assault. Toede tried to rally them, but by that time the dragon had overtaken him. The beast reared over him, there was the sudden white heat of the dragon's breath, and…
And…
And nothing. Absolutely nothing. Blackness, darkness, an Abyss of lost memory.
No. There was the dream-great and powerful figures looking at him, talking in unknown tongues, a gibberish of godspeak. One message. 'You shall live like a noble.' Then dawn at the edge of this unpleasantly pleasant stream.
What happened? Had he fainted? Perhaps he blacked out from the intensity of the heat and lay prone as the dragon passed over him? Or even wandered off in a daze? Maybe Groag, or some other faithful retainer, seeing his meal ticket endangered, had dragged him to safety, then went looking for help.
Maybe. None of the options felt exactly right. The mental block, a great icy black chunk of lost time, remained in place, resistant to any attempts to pry it loose.
Toede thought about it for a full two minutes, a long time in hobgoblin terms to be devoted to anything not directly connected to violence. Well, nothing to be done about it at the moment, mused Toede. It would come back to him, probably when he least wanted it.
Besides, if Groag had gone for help, there was a good chance that the courtier had become lost. Even by a hobgoblin's standards, Groag was a waste of a spot at the dinner table. All that fancy finery, the rings, the jewelry, the snuff, was like gilding the pig, in Toede's opinion. Groag was still a hobgoblin beneath it all. If it were not for the fact that Groag had been so good at groveling and fawning, Toede would have tossed him to Hopsloth, or to the sharks, a long while ago.
Toede sighed and looked at the sky. Still plenty of daylight. His gaze fell on the stream. The sharks had made him think of the sea. And all streams run, eventually, to the ocean. By following this one he should reach something that resembled civilization.
Heaving himself slowly to his feet, he began padding south along the low grass of the stream embankment, pausing only occasionally to kick the petals off a clutch of wildflowers.
Near the sea is where my throne lies, Toede thought. Ignoble Flotsam, a city-state of bandits and pirates and rummies, humans and kender and less-polite races, a clearing house of corruption and thievery. Home. The first building block in what the highmaster already thought of as the Greater Toede Empire.
Long ago there had been the cavern encampments, the brawls, the savageness of his youth. He had survived by his brains, back then, by pitting one rival against another until he was regarded by all as the next natural leader of the tribe… after his mother died.
Toede slowed for a moment in his walk. Poor Mother. He still remembered the day when the representative of the dragon highlords had arrived, seeking battle-fodder for their wars against the outnumbered human kingdoms. Mother wanted nothing of it. 'Hobgobs live free on their own and die free,' she kept repeating, as if it meant something of import. The highlord's man said he would wait until dawn for an answer. They argued long into the night, Toede, his mother, and the rest of the tribe. Toede wanted to take the offer; his mother was adamant against it. At last they settled their disagreement in the traditional hobgoblin fashion.
Toede closed his eyes and imagined his mother, standing there in that ancient, uncleaned cave with a bone- handled knife jutting out beneath her heaving right bosom. Her porcine eyes had gone wide; her mouth, already filling with blood from a punctured lung, gurgled a curse. Then she pitched over backward.
Toede opened his eyes and laughed to himself loudly. A half dozen frightened frogs leapt into the stream in surprise. The look on her face! Hilarious!
Well, of course the tribe entered into the service of the dragon highlords, with the condition that Toede himself be trained to lead them in combat. This meant that most of the tribe ended up thrown away in some forgotten battle, while Toede groveled to the higher muckety-mucks safely behind the lines. A little bootlicking, and some character assassination, and soon he was one of the top flunkies in the chain of command.
It was then he noticed that most of the successful humans were like successful hobgoblins-they chose their lackeys from those who would be unlikely or unwilling to replace them. The same political skills that had served him so well in the tribe he wielded here, and wielded them so well that he became the chief aide-de-camp of a highlord himself, Old Verminaard.
Toede sighed at the memory. Those were the days. A little murder, a little spying, a little slaving-no, that
