Realms of infamy

hearing my death sentence pronounced. 'I am loyal!' I pleaded, much louder than I wanted. 'You wrong me, Your Darkness!'

I bit off my words. Skralang wronged no one. He was the law, and there was no other. I sat frozen, half expecting that his response would be my execution. A swift death was better by far than a slow one, and I prayed for the former.

Instead, Skralang drank from his cup and sighed. 'You are loyal, yes,' he said, staring at the cup in his fingers. 'You are neither coward nor traitor. You merely seem… disenchanted, not impure in spirit. You do not carry yourself like a true goblin lately.' He was silent for a moment, then looked up at me. 'But then it sometimes seems to me that none of us do.'

I could not have been more amazed than if he had informed me that he was actually a halfling. I was at a loss for words for several moments. 'I do not understand,' I finally said. 'We are all true goblins. We are not tainted like-'

Treacherous tongue! The words had no sooner left my mouth than I would have cut out my tongue to have them back! Skralang flinched when he heard it, and his aged face became like steel.

'We are not tainted like a certain one among us, you say?' The shaman's eyes were icy yellow orbs shining from the depths of his face. His fingers gripped his cup like a web grips prey. For one awful moment, his cup became me.

Then-without warning-the old shaman's face softened and melted. He looked away as he set his cup on the table. 'Tainted. You are right. No one has spoken that word to me since the birth of my grandson, but there is no hiding it.

When I call him my kin, it is like swallowing daggers. He is tainted, tainted with the blood of a human.'

The ancient visage looked my way again, but in sadness, not anger. 'Everyone must talk about it. It is a disgrace, and there is no atonement for it. None but death.' He sighed deeply and looked off into the darkness of the room.

I knew better than to say anything more. Everyone knew of his half-human grandson, the child of his mutilated daughter and her human attacker. Both child and daughter had been hidden from all other eyes for over a decade, but we knew from rumor that they yet lived. And that we could not understand. Had the daughter belonged to any of the rest of us, we would have slain both her and her infant before birth, and thus removed the shame from our line. What had happened to prevent this?

The shaman looked back at me as if he could read my every thought. ' 'As the gods will, we do without question,'' he said, quoting the maxim in a tired voice. 'They spoke to me as I held a knife over my daughter's belly, eager to cleanse our honor, and their words turned my knife aside. It was their will that Zeth be raised among us, in my daughter's den, though they would not say why. I had the girl and her bastard walled up, as the gods did not forbid that. I feed them once a day, give them a candle or two for light, but keep the taint away from the rest of our people. It was the gods' will, and I obeyed them, as would any of us.' He rubbed his face with a skeletal hand.

I did my best to hide my surprise at this revelation. The gods' will? He said so but still lived, so it must be true. The sharp, clear eyes turned away again, and the old one refilled his cup and stared into it for a long moment, chewing his lower lip in perplexity.

The old shaman drank again and set the cup down. The ghost of a smile came to his withered lips, but there was no humor behind it.

'I am older than old for our people,' he said softly. 'If I see another midwinter's day, I will be forty-six. I ache ceaselessly. I pray for death before I sleep, yet the gods want me to live a little longer.' His cold eyes looked across the table at me. 'Can you guess why, Captain?'

'Why what, Your Darkness?' I asked after hesitating. I had lost the way of the conversation entirely, and I now considered every word I spoke so I might live the longer.

'Why the gods have kept me alive when I have strived so hard to die,' he said patiently. 'I rot from within, yet awaken every evening and draw breath into my bleeding lungs. Can you guess why the gods still want me to live a little longer?'

'No, Your Darkness.' A lesser person would have offered an opinion-a worthless way to risk one's soul.

The shaman's lips pulled back as if he would laugh. 'This last day, the gods spoke to me again,' he said, as if the other topic were now forgotten. 'They came to me in a dream. It was time, they said, to free my grandson and send him out from the caverns with a force of true goblins at his command.' The old shaman drew in a deep breath through his nose, staring at me. 'I've seen fit to end your disenchantment, Captain Kergis. I've already given orders for three sergeants to assemble their squads for a foray this evening. You will go with them, led by my grandson. Draw rations and equipment for a mission far from our Nightbelow, among the lands of humans.'

I believed for a moment that I had gone deaf, so incredible was the news. Goblin warriors led by a half- human bastard?

'What is our mission, Your Darkness?' I managed.

'Zeth will let you know,' said Skralang. 'Obey his every word as you would mine. It is as the gods command.'

The wrinkled face suddenly leaned close to me, and I caught a whiff of the drink he had prepared for himself. It was ale mixed with a pain-deadener made from the blossoms of the corpse lily. I knew its scent from the battlefields, where warriors chewed such blossoms to subdue their pain. Sometimes, if badly wounded, the warriors chewed too much and fell into a sleep from which they never awoke. We left them for the dogs to eat.

'The gods have ordained that Zeth must go out,' said the shaman steadily. I shuddered at the smell of his breath. 'They ordered nothing more. For my part, when he is gone, I am finally free to clear the taint from my family. I will cleanse my line with my daughter's blood, but there is the fear in me that even this will not bring me a long-deserved death. The gods want one thing more of me, and I cannot see into their plans.'

Skralang sat back. 'My other dreams have all been troubling of late. The gods are unhappy, I fear, with the way the lives of our people have fallen into quarrels and tedium. You are bored, Captain Kergis, because you sense it, too. We have not gone out as we did in the old days to remind the surface world that we exist. We've gotten old in our heads, old and petty, and we hide in our caverns and complain about the dark. We are not the children of our fathers, not fit to be their lowest slaves.'

The old shaman's gaze fell, and his face grew slack. 'I believe the gods are especially unhappy with me, their servant, for allowing such deterioration to come about. I have favored rest and ease over struggle, against their teachings, and the rot of my words has spread and ruined us.' He looked back at me, and his eyes gleamed. 'Did you ever wonder in your private moments, Captain Kergis, if the taint among us reflects a greater taint? If Zeth's coming, and the manner of it, was purposeful?'

The old goblin had long ago strayed into territory that not even the greatest fool among us would have tread. I wished now I were back in that stale cavern room, listening to my clan head shriek about his worthless honor.

'Never,' I said truthfully.

The shaman's smile deepened. 'You will.' He dismissed me with a wave and drank again of his cup of poison, swallowing it without so much as a tremor at its bitterness.

There was much that Skralang had not told me. He hadn't said that Zeth's skin was the color of a dead toad's belly, white and dry like the face of the moon. Or that Zeth wore no armor and carried no weapon, and knew nothing of how to use either.

Or that Zeth was blind.

I shivered when I saw the shaman's grandson led out of the mouth of our Nightbelow into the evening air. He was big and long-limbed, no doubt from the human blood in him, but his muscles were slack. I could have thrown him down with only mild effort, had I dared.

And he had no eyes. His eye sockets were dark holes in his face, half-covered by sagging skin that made him appear sad faced. He wore only a short, pale robe, belted with a thin rope. It was the sort of thing only a prisoner or slave would wear, and entirely the wrong color for a warrior at night.

Skralang brought Zeth to me as my warriors looked on with surprise and curiosity. In the failing sunlight, the withered shaman seemed to have deteriorated even more since I had seen him, only hours before. Splotches of blackness dotted his face and arms, marks of a curse on him. I was terrified he would touch me.

'Zeth,' said the old shaman with a prompt at his grandson's elbow. 'Here are your warriors. Go forth, as the gods have commanded, and carry out their will.'