'Tiep's dumbstruck!' Dru shouted. 'He can't walk.'
The last was an exaggeration. Tiep kept his feet moving under him as Dru hauled him back to relative safety closer to the rock-face, but there was no sense in his movements. Dru slapped Tiep's wet, bloody cheek and shouted in his ear, each to no avail. The youth blinked without comprehension.
Rozt'a yelped. A stone had gotten her. The goblin had climbed down from Hopper's back and was hidden among the restless horses.
'We can't stay here!' Rozt'a shouted. 'Throw him over a saddle.'
That was easier said than done, and no safer for Tiep were Dru to succeed at the task. 'We've got to stand where we are.'
'Impossible!' Rozt'a replied.
Dru was already fumbling with his box. He thumbed a different catch and thrust a rain-dampened forefinger into a compartment filled with ordinary ash. Leaving Tiep to stand alone like a statue, Dru risked the drop-off edge. He thought he had a better idea now where the enemy hid itself, and with his eyes squint-focused on that spot, whispered the Auld Thorassic words for gloom and misery as he rubbed his fingers together.
The stuff of magic flowed away from Dru, confounding time and space. He had a vision of scrawny, misshapen creatures, at least twenty of them, half with tossing stones and the other half shuttling ammunition. The vision faded as the spell completed itself. By design, it worked best on a conscious mind and a mind of conscience. Humans were a good target; elves and dwarves were better. But the mind of a beast, especially a misshapen beast, might not be susceptible at all.
Rozt'a shouted his name and not, by her tone, for the first time. 'Are you mad?'
The rock fall slowed, then stopped. Keening moans and wails poured down the mountainside instead.
'I don't know how long that will hold them. Let's move quick.'
'What about Tiep? The goblin?'
Between the rain and the horses, it was easy to lose track of a head or two. Sheemzher shouted that he was ready for anything. Tiep hadn't snapped out of his vacant-eyed trance. Dru slapped and shook him again. This time the youth whimpered when he blinked and raised a hand to his cheek.
'Walk, lad!' Dru challenged. He gave Tiep a half turn before shoving him forward. 'Walk for your life.'
He kept one hand knotted in Tiep's shirt, steering and prodding the youth toward such safety as the next bit of trail offered. Around his other hand Dru wound the reins and ropes for three horses, none of which were eager to walk forward. With his arms stretched out and his sleeves hanging like wet sails before the wind, Dru made an easy target, but his spell held and none of the enemy accepted the invitation.
Dru congratulated himself for a job well done; he praised himself too soon. The same scrawny enemy ambushed them in the next bog. Against all expectation, they made Sheemzher their primary target, pulling the bedraggled goblin from Hopper's back. Sheemzher had his decorated spear and put it to good use against the more primitive sticks the enemy wielded, but he was badly outnumbered. Rozt'a and her sword would eventually even the odds, but not-to Druhallen's eye-in time to save the goblin.
Weighing his options quickly, Dru gave Tiep a shove toward the underbrush.
'Lay low!' he commanded.
The boy had been coming around as they walked. He hadn't said anything yet, but managed to nod his head before secreting himself in a patch of waist-high ferns. Dru judged that Tiep would continue to survive and went for the length of fire-hardened wood jutting out from Bandy's saddle.
Other mages might carry staves, Druhallen of Sunderath preferred an ax-shaft. His father-gods keep him safe in Sunderath-had taught him how to grip and swing the wood. He didn't bother with the axe head; it was too heavy, too much trouble to sharpen, and unnecessary for a man his size. Against their undergrown enemy, the shaft was lethal and faster than a sword. Dru swung into the gut of the nearest misshapen creature. The force of his blow lifted the critter-Dru couldn't guess its sex or species-off its feet and flung it some ten feet across the bog. It wouldn't be getting up soon, maybe never, if the thing that got the dung-beast was looking for a snack. Dru backhanded his next target. The misshapen enemy collapsed face-down in the old leaves and twigs.
It was butchery, not battle, and they didn't stop until every last one of the misshapen lay motionless on the ground.
'When we've finished at Dekanter, we leave by another route,' Rozt'a said grimly. 'I'd sooner face the Network on the road than this again.' She wiped her blade on a corpse's thigh, but decided that wasn't good enough and cleaned it again with leaves before sheathing it.
Between the dung beast and this lot, Sheemzher's spear had taken a beating. Most of its dangling ornaments were gone, but the flaked stone head was still firmly attached to the shaft. The goblin's hat was gone. Rozt'a retrieved it from the bog. Its crown was crushed, the brim, torn. It would never hide his wispy hair again. Sheemzher took it from her gently, his lips a-tremble as though he'd lost his dearest friend. Dru didn't know if goblins could cry, but the rain left credible tracks down the red-orange cheeks.
The Lady Wyndyfarh might have done her servant a favor when she taught him manners and dressed him up in the manner of men, but if Dru were a competent judge of emotion, she hadn't added any happiness to his life.
Tiep emerged from the ferns. His hands were clapped against his temples and his eyes had the look of cheap wine, but that was considerable improvement.
'Remember how you got here?' Dru asked.
'No.' He noticed the array of corpses and took a backward stride that nearly unbalanced him. 'What-? What's happened? Where are we? I remember it starting to rain, then nothing until I was on my knees over there.'
Rozt'a slipped her hand under his elbow and guided him toward the horses. There'd been no time to tie them properly, of course, but none of the five liked the bogs and they'd stayed close together.
'We got ambushed,' she explained as they walked. 'You took a stone on the head. You're bleeding. That's not rainwater coming down the side of your face.'
'What about you?' Dru asked Sheemzher when the other two were past.
'Demons no harm Sheemzher.' The goblin fumbled with his hat. He tried, and failed, to put it on.
'There'll be other-'
Sheemzher cut Dru off with a stream of words that had to be curses in his own language, then he threw his hat onto the ground and stomped it mercilessly. 'Demons!' he shouted and stomped the nearest corpse instead. When abusing the corpse with his boots couldn't quell his need for revenge, Sheemzher attacked it with his spear. He stabbed it between the ribs and in the abdomen and took aim at its skull.
Dru had seen enough blood for one day and, grasping the upward end of the spear, put a swift stop to the goblin's mutilating rage.
'Demons!' the goblin turned the word into a song.
'Not demons,' Druhallen insisted. 'Cousins, maybe. Your cousins. And they took exception to you Sheemzher, in a big way.'
Sheemzher struggled to free his spear from Druhallen's grasp. When that came to naught, he nudged the corpse with his foot. Its lifeless hand flopped to the ground. 'Count fingers, good sir!' The goblin waved his open hand in front of Dru's face. 'Five fingers. People have five fingers. Sheemzher have five fingers. Sheemzher's mother, sisters, brothers all have five fingers. Five. Five. Five!'
The misshapen corpse's exposed hand had seven fingers, all of them cruelly twisted. It couldn't have made a fist or scratched its head without pain. Its other hand had five functional fingers and was, to Druhallen's eyes, identical with Sheemzher's. Dru mentioned this and other similarities, but the goblin remained adamant: demons and goblins had nothing in common but hatred.
Well, they weren't the only blind race under the sun. Dwarves insisted they weren't related to the duergar and more than a few elves disowned the drow. Dwarves and elves, of course, were justly proud of their heritage. It boggled Dru's mind to think that goblins held themselves superior to anyone else that walked on two legs. He recognized a lost cause, though, and left Sheemzher alone with his delusions.
'Something's meddling with the local goblins,' he said to Rozt'a when she was repacking the medicine chest.
'That would take some pretty potent sorcery, wouldn't it?'
He shrugged. 'Probably, and a twisted mind. You hear about it every so often, someone's trying to make a stronger this, a more docile that. The Thayans do it, mostly with the dead, but they've conjured up some fairly
