Goblin Corps, The

  “Ih? Niva ith ira. Adaba birru?”

  “Yes, my little friend,” Ebonwind whispered, voice too low for even the troll's sensitive ears. “I couldn't agree more. Doing it now would attract too much attention though—and besides, she may just want in on the deal.”

  “Diburi,” the tiny creature avowed firmly.

  “Then we'll kill her. We can afford a little patience.”

  “Ib eyda.”

  They awoke the next morning to find that someone had shit in Gimmol's hat.

  The gremlin never could prove who did it, but given the previous day's arguments—and Gork's comment, over breakfast, that “I guess someone didn't need any instructions”—no one had any real doubt.

  Shreckt had ordered Gimmol to store the thing until they reached the River Krom, where he could wash it thoroughly. The others had reacted primarily to laugh uproariously at the various spiky tufts that the gremlin called “hair,” heretofore concealed beneath the hat. All in all, not Gimmol's best day.

  It got a little better, however, on the following morning, as the entire squad awakened to the kobold's anguished screams. At some point during the night, someone had taken the thinnest of his wire lock picks and twisted them together into a useless knot.

  Again, no one doubted who the guilty party might've been. But what Gork and the others couldn't figure out was how he did it; those picks never left the kobold's side, remaining in one of his many pockets even while he slept. And Gimmol just wasn't that stealthy. The mystery kept Gork brooding for the duration of their journey—which also had the unexpected but welcome side effect of heading off any further salvoes in this private little war.

  And finally, after a march that lasted several lifetimes, the Demon Squad arrived at the River Krom where it emerged from the icy waters of the Sea of Tears.

  The city of Sularaam sat on a small island in the river's headwaters. Ingress to the city was made possible solely by boat or by bridge, and those bridges were monitored very carefully. As the squad set foot on the eastern span, several of the ubiquitous black-garbed soldiers stepped forward, swords and halberds held at the ready.

  “State your business in Sularaam,” commanded a droopy-eyed fellow with a shaggy mustache.

  Cræosh grimaced and Jhurpess fingered the butt of his club. But Shreckt floated into view and said, “Demon Squad. We're to report to Castle Eldritch.”

  And the guards stepped aside to let them pass.

  “Jhurpess not understand,” the bugbear confided quietly, falling into step beside the orc.

  “Gee, there's a shocker,” Cræosh said. “You don't understand? I’m flabbergasted. Tell Shreckt to stop the march so I can lie down.” Then, as the furry creature stepped toward the imp, Cræosh yanked him back by the collar. “Never the fuck you mind. What don't you understand this time?”

  “Guards here are nicer than guards at Timas Khoreth.”

  “Not nicer, hairball. More professional.” The orc gazed approvingly at the great walls, the structured and orderly streets beyond. The armor worn by the patrolling guards was spit-shined, and several keeps stood within the city's center. “Timas Khoreth may have a garrison bigger'n my daddy's middle leg, but Sularaam's actually a military city.

  “Um, you ain't gonna take two steps in there and collapse again, are you?”

  “No. Jhurpess not do that anymore.”

  “Good.”

  There was a brief pause. “What ‘Sularaam’ mean?”

  They'd barely reached the far side of the bridge when the carriage appeared. Hauled by four horses so pristinely white that snow would've stained them, it traveled so smoothly that it seemed to float over the cobblestones. The windows were curtained, preventing even an ephemeral glimpse of who or what lay within. The driver, too, was hidden, wrapped in a shroudlike brown robe, a corpse awaiting interment in some musty crypt.

  Cræosh found his teeth clenching. He heard an almost subvocal hiss from the troll and saw the fur on her neck standing up.

  “You feel it too?” he asked.

  Katim nodded once, tightly. “Magic. Listen!”

  Listen he did, and his hackles rose farther still. He heard the low roar of the crowd around, the muttering of his companions, the methodical whispering of the river—but the carriage itself rolled along as silent as a fog. If the great, gold-plated wheels made even the slightest thump, Cræosh sure as hell couldn't detect it.

  “This,” he murmured, “is less than good.”

  And then Belrotha stepped forward, her gargantuan hip bone knocking Cræosh completely out of her way. “Me see this before,” she told them. “Queen Anne use it to find me in Itho.” She frowned briefly as a thought, starving but determined, crawled across the open expanse that was her mind. “Hope Itho doing okay without me,” she pouted. “Many ogres in Itho stupid.”

  “Embarrassing, isn't it?” Shreckt chuckled from atop the giant figure. “The ogre's smarter than you are. We're in Sularaam! Who else would've sent the carriage?”

  Cræosh scowled. “Just being cautious, sir. You never know—”

  “You never know. The rest of us know at least once in a while. Now shut up and fall in!“

  They stood side by side in perfect military stance (the occasional glower at the tiny sergeant notwithstanding) as the carriage drifted to a smooth halt before them. The brown-robed driver immediately dropped—flowed?—to the ground and bowed.

  “Greetings and good day to you, sirs and ladies. On behalf of Her Majesty, Queen Anne, I bid you welcome to Sularaam and wish you only the most enjoyable—”

  “Stow it, lock it, shove it. Where's Queen Anne already?”

  Katim grunted in exasperation. The rest of the squad—Shreckt included, for a change—stared at the orc in slack-jawed horror.

  “Diplomacy,” the troll rasped at him. “D—I—P—L…”

  But the robed figure chuckled, the sound strangely muffled within the depths of its hood. “I take no offense, friend troll. Indeed, I was warned that some of your companions might prove impatient. If you will all kindly step inside, then, I shall happily take you to Her Majesty.”

  Cræosh looked askance at the carriage. “What are you, stupid?” he asked.

  But again, Belrotha pushed past them, pausing only briefly as she reached the carriage. Then, with a sigh that resembled nothing so much as an earthquake on tiptoes, she pulled the door open.

  The entire squad gathered around, gobsmacked at the opulent chamber.

  “Me not like this,” the ogre said to them, “but me do it before.”

  “Jhurpess want to go home,” the bugbear wailed.

  “How the fuck?” Cræosh asked.

  “Has anyone here actually heard of grammar?” Gimmol lamented.

  “I believe I can answer that,” the robed driver said—responding, presumably, to someone other than the gremlin. “As I've heard Her Majesty explain it…Ahem! ‘A simple matter of the bending of space around a fixed position. The magic creates a confined area in which the actual size is not limited by the restrictions or the shape of anything else around it, although the apparent size remains subject to natural laws.’”

  The entire squad blinked in unison.

  “Oh,” said Gork.

  “Yeah,” Cræosh added. “What he said.”

  The imp, however, had had quite enough. “All right, quit staring, pick your jaws up off your damn toes, and get in the carriage! Queen Anne's waiting for us, and I, for one, do not intend to be the one to explain why we're late!” And just for emphasis, he sent a crackling blue bolt of lightning from his palm to slam, sizzling and popping, into the dirt by their feet.

  There was something of a bottleneck as Belrotha and Jhurpess attempted to leap through the door at the same instant. As they did finally squeeze through, and as the bugbear resumed breathing on his own after only a few moments of treatment, there were no further problems.

  Robe, as Cræosh had already come to think of him, watched as the various soldiers planted themselves
in whichever chair they found most comfortable (and assuming they were large enough to remove whichever of their companions had chosen the same seat first). Then he said, “If you require anything during your ride, just pull on that rope there.” He gestured toward a thick, knotted cord that hung down from the ceiling directly by the thick wooden door.

  Um, door?

  “And please do not attempt to open that door,” he added, as though reading their minds. “It leads to Queen Anne's private chambers, and she has certain precautions in place to discourage unwanted visitors.”

  “Wait, wait, wait,” Cræosh said, one hand half raised. “You telling me that the queen keeps a private chamber in her carriage?”

  “She most certainly does not.”

  “But you said that door led to her chambers!”

  “It does.”

  Cræosh decided firmly not to ask any more questions.

  “Very well. If that is all, I must resume my post.” Robe stepped outside, gently but firmly shutting the door behind him, and the carriage began to move.

  “I,” Gork told the room at large, “need a drink.”

  The orc nodded. “Make that two, Shorty.”

  Grumble, grumble, “Yeah, whatever,” grumble. Rather sullenly, the kobold yanked on the rope. Then, at the rather resounding lack of a chime, he hauled on it again.

  “Well, how about that?” he said, stepping away from the rope. “All this splendor, and they couldn't be bothered to keep the bellpull workiaaagh!!”

  He staggered, one hand on his kah-rahahk, the other pressed tightly to his chest, as a black, shimmering something slid up from the floor. Vaguely human in size and shape, it stared into his eyes, its burning-ember gaze scorching a hole through the recesses of his mind.

  “A—ba—dah? Wha…?”

  Cræosh laughed, though there was a faint twinge in his voice. “Relax, Shorty. It's one of King Morthûl's wraiths.”

  “Oh. Oh!” The kobold drew himself back up to his full height and swallowed hard. Twice. “What do you want?”

  Silence, not so much a pregnant pause as a dead one. Then, “Well, yes, I did pull the rope. But I didn't hear—No, I guess I wouldn't know if—Nothing major, I just wanted—Listen, can I finish a bloody sent—” But the wraith was gone, dropping through the floor from whence it came.

  “So?” Fezeill—in human form, at the moment—asked from the divan across the room.

  “I’m not sure it likes me,” Gork said.

  The doppelganger and the gremlin exchanged looks of utter shock. “No!” Fezeill protested.

  “Really?” Gimmol added. “How unreasonable!” Gork glared at them both.

  “You didn't answer the important question, Shorty,” Cræosh said. “Hmm? Oh, no, I’m fine, Cræosh. It just yelled a bit, I think. It didn't actually hurt—”

  “No. I meant, is it still bringing my drink?”

  Gork gave up and went to go stand in the corner. The wraith did indeed bring their drinks eventually, but the kobold's was warm.

  The gently swaying room finally drifted to a halt, and Robe hauled the door open. “My friends and honored guests,” he said, bowing low, “welcome to the Castle Eldritch.”

  Katim, who had remained standing by the door for the entire ride, was first out. She took two steps and stopped short.

  The towering edifice had been home to the royal family of King Sabryen, a wizard of no small power in his own right before Morthûl overthrew him. Once the Charnel King realized that a bride and groom would require their own space if the marriage was to survive for multiple centuries—particularly when both were often involved in rather delicate experiments—he'd granted the old king's castle to his wife.

  All this, Katim had known, but she'd never been here. She had assumed that the appellation “Eldritch” was pure melodrama.

  A tangible sense of ages clung to the walls, suggesting not so much the passage of years as the passage of lives. A thick hedge of thorns served in place of a moat, but otherwise the castle's five towers appeared traditional enough.

  Until one drew near enough to recognize that while the outermost buildings were whitewashed stone, the central towers were composed of solid white jade! That the thing didn't collapse under its own weight was a testament to the magics that gave the castle its name.

  Robe ushered the bewildered company through a gate in the hedge, a second gate in the outer bastion—both gaping wide open—and into a well-landscaped bailey. A procession of minor functionaries, merchants, and petitioners flowed in a living stream (or perhaps a parade of ants) through those portals. Small but far more ornate portals of carved jade, allowing access to the interior of the castle proper, swung open at their approach.

  Cræosh glanced at Katim as they passed through that last doorway. “I hate magic.”

  “You hate everything…you can't comprehend.”

  “So?”

  “So it's a wonder…you can function at all.”

  Cræosh swallowed a retort. The damn canine had been snippy ever since they left the Steppes, but he reluctantly decided that the halls of the Queen's castle weren't the best place to have it out.

  Despite the preponderance of doors and side passages, their brown-robed guide kept to the central corridor. Plush red carpeting cushioned their feet. Mounted suits of gleaming plate armor, joints welded shut, polished to a blinding sheen, stood three rows deep along both walls. Gork, his curiosity ever aroused—and his gaze flitting about for any smaller adornments that might not be immediately missed—casually sidled over for a closer look.

  When he rejoined the marching squad, his face was so pale that even Jhurpess couldn't miss it.

  “What bothering Gork?” he asked, his voice hushed.

  “Just…don't go near the armor, okay?”

  Jhurpess gave a halfhearted shrug and returned to picking the lice from his fur and flicking them into the thick carpeting. Gork shuddered once more, trying not to contemplate the agony and the terror those men must have felt as their armor was welded shut around them, trapping them helpless inside metal tombs. For the first time in his life, he felt a brief surge of sympathy for members of that disgusting, arrogant race.

  He was also a little curious as to how Queen Anne had managed to keep the corpses from decomposing and stinking up her castle—assuming, he realized with another shudder, they were actually dead. Gork decided firmly not to think on it any further.

  Mercifully, the corridor made a sharp bend to the left, leaving the horribly occupied suits of armor behind. Not that this hall was lacking its own warped splendors.

  The walls were covered, end to end and floor to ceiling, in tapestries, murals, and friezes. Each was of the utmost quality, the work of master artisans, and portrayed a tranquil or pastoral scene, the world at its grandest. Here stretched miles of emerald forests, the browns and greens so rich that the passersby could almost have climbed the nearest tree and smelled the earthy aromas. There, depths of ocean stretched from towering cliffs, the white foam climbing halfway up the rock face before falling back to vanish in the waves. Verdant fields sprawled beneath the watchful gaze of a single pristine tower constructed atop a shallow hill. Every last one of them a landscape of peace, contentment, wonder.

  Except for the rotting, bug-encrusted visage of the Charnel King, who appeared in each and every image. He strode regally through the forest, his long cloak leaving a trail of swirling leaves in its wake. He towered atop the seaside cliffs, arms outstretched, commanding the elemental tides. And the fleshy half of his visage peered, partially cloaked in shadow, from the upper window of the watchtower. The lord of all, gazing down on the very least of his holdings. A single beetle—a real one, no part of any image—crawled across the surface and vanished behind the fabric, as though the Dark Lord were somehow present even in this very hall.

  Finally, they neared another set of double doors of a thick, rich wood, carved just as ornately as the jade had been. Even as Robe reached fabric-wrapped fingers toward the latc
h, they heard the sound of Gork dry-heaving behind them. Cræosh glanced back as they passed through the doorway.

  “What's the problem, Shorty?”

  “Don't look up,” the kobold said, still gagging.

  Cræosh, of course, immediately looked up, but he was already through the door, the ceiling of the hall blocked from view. “What's up there?”

  “More frescoes of the queen's lord and husband,” Robe said.

  “So?” Cræosh asked Gork as the little creature stepped into the room.

  Gork shook his head. “They're the erotic ones….”

  Cræosh had always been green, but not that particular shade. Resolutely, the orc determined to find another way to leave the castle once their audience was complete.

  She sat upon a golden throne, atop a shallow dais and between two censers of pungent frankincense. Servants and seneschals stood at her side, and Robe quickly moved ahead and took up a position at her left shoulder. The audience chamber—a huge, egg-shaped place—was lined in more white jade and adorned with intricately etched marble pillars. A small line of petitioners—made up primarily of older, flabbier men who appeared to represent the city's successful merchant class—wound from the dais. A few muttered angrily as the Demon Squad moved past them to stand directly before the queen, but none protested.

  “Ah, dear children,” the queen greeted them, beaming down from atop her throne, “I’m delighted that you could accept my little invitation.”

  Invitation? Cræosh scoffed inwardly, but even he wasn't that undiplomatic. He dropped to one knee, hoping his companions would take the hint and do the same. “It was an honor, Your Majesty, to—” He gasped as a bolt of lightning (a small one, thankfully) arced into his side. Cræosh glowered at the imp, who was glaring right back, and promptly shut his mouth.

  “My apologies, Your Majesty,” Shreckt said—actually standing on the ground, for a change!—and spreading his arms wide. “Sometimes my charges speak out of turn. I command this squad, and I will speak for—”

  “Tell me, imp,” Queen Anne interrupted, “are you ranked so highly that you hold yourself aloof from matters of protocol?”