Again the ambience gave her away, and Rap felt a surge of hope. She was not quite as implacable as she was trying to convey. Moreover, the limber anthropophagus at his side seemed completely unworried. He was studying the trolls, wriggling his nose thoughtfully to make the bone in it wiggle up and down.
“What do you think of the odds, Tik Tok?” Rap asked cautiously.
“Mouth watering!”
If one’s taste ran to such beef, there was certainly a year’s supply in view.
“The lady can overpower us,” Rap said, fishing for information.
“But it would be unwise under the circumcisions.”
“What circum . .. To what do you refer, exactly?”
Tik Tok smiled his nightmare smile. “When the Covin invaded my homeland, I was not the only one to allude capture. Several of us made our escapade in a large canoe and came in search of her Omniscience. My companions are not far off, and are aware of my thereabouts.” “And how many companions do you have?”
“Nineteen sorcerers and five mages.”
God of Battle! Rap felt a rush of relief and excitement. The witch was outnumbered! . . . but was she any worse than a cannibal chief would be?
Only Thrugg was still sitting, munching noisily on the stub end of a branch. ”You will have to repeat your proposal, faun. They were behind the shielding.”
Rap glanced at Grunth but she made no move to stop him. Quickly, in case she changed her mind, he repeated the story he had related earlier, outlining the new protocol. The trolls listened with stolid faces, unmoved.
But Tik Tok beamed and slapped him powerfully on the shoulder. “This is a preposition of hysterical significance, your Majesty! I should like to hear our meaty friends’ reactants.”
“Well, Mother?” Thrugg asked, picking splinters out of his teeth with a claw.
“They don’t approve!” she snapped. “Trolls do not make war.”
Rumbles of agreement echoed through the great chamber, momentarily drowning out the rush of the waterfall. “But their views cannot differ from yours,” her son said. He rose to his feet, moving lightly despite his enormous bulk. Then he could look down on her. “Why is what you have done to them better than what the imps do to us?” Amen! Mother and son bared teeth at each other as if this was a long-standing dispute between them.
“Both would appear to be invaluable solitude,” Tik Tok murmured.
Failing to move Thrugg, the old woman turned her anger on Rap. “I repeat that war is not our way. And suppose I did agree? I could loan them to you, to aid your cause. If I free them, they will just vanish into the jungles.”
“No!” Rap said. “They join of their own free will, or not, as they please. They will not need to use violence. If they wish to limit their help to defense, I will still welcome them. We do not seek to destroy the usurper’s agents, but to liberate them.”
“There is much to be said for violets,” Tik Tok muttered.
”Mother?” Thrugg demanded. He towered in the mundane chamber as a column of muscle, and in the ambience he was still the most solid of them all.
Grunth sighed and waved a great paw. “Do it then.” The ambience blazed as the young sorcerer stripped away the loyalty spells. For a moment the released votaries just stood and stared, mumbling with surprise as they adjusted to their new thinking. Then, with deafening roars, they converged on their liberator, men and women both, some even leaping down bodily on him from their higher perches. Thrugg disappeared below a bellowing, squirming riot of monsters. Dust rose in clouds.
Tik Tok sighed and licked his lips.
Speech was impossible in that din. “Well, your Omnipotence? ” Rap sent. “You seem to be mistaken so far. Will you also join our cause?”
The witch nodded sourly. “I suppose someone must keep you from blundering into disaster.”
Incredible! Rap yelled in glee and, when he could not hear that himself, flashed a blaze of rose-pink joy in the ambience. He had founded an army—a small army, but a start on something greater. His sufferings had not been wasted after all. “Thirteen trolls and twenty-five anthropophagi?”
“And a faun for dessert.” The bone in Tik Tok’s nose wiggled. “That makes thirty-nine of us, if my calcifications are correct. An impassive display of millinery power!”
3
The horde had enjoyed an unusually good day. As was his custom, Death Bird had deployed his men in two columns. When they converged at sunset, they entrapped a large band of refugees. Camp was pitched earlier than usual to enjoy the spoils: women for rape, horses for food, men for sport—everything a goblin’s heart could desire.
For Kadie it had been an exceedingly bad day. The weather was unbearably hot now, bringing dust and insects, but in the last few weeks she had learned to endure those. Her cramps and nausea did not come from weather alone. Even goblins came down with fever, and why should she expect to be tougher than them? Trouble was, sickness was weakness in this army. The ones who couldn’t keep up were killed by their friends. Sympathy was about as common hereabouts as killer whales. By afternoon, she was barely managing to stay on Allena’s back. Running alongside as always, Blood Beak naturally noticed her distress, but he jeered much less than she expected. Indeed, he seemed almost concerned.
The goblin army camped by totems. The prince himself was a Raven, but his bodyguards came from a wide variety of tribes. The little band would attach itself to a different group each night. Blood Beak was gaining authority. The men had begun to regard him more as their leader than their ward, and would generally do what he said, as long as he did not try to overrule their standing orders. This night he insisted on joining the Beavers, who were setting up alongside an unburned barn. He got his way, probably because it was a good campsite, near a well.
With the magnanimous air of an imperor bestowing a dukedom, he told Kadie she could have the barn. Shelter and privacy were rare treats, and she was grateful. Then he ordered one of the guards to unsaddle the mare for her, and again was obeyed, although not very willingly. Blood Beak could be quite pleasant at times, for a goblin.
Ignoring her own light-headedness and aches, Kadie first established Allena in a corner by the door with hay and water, and only then made a nook for herself at the far end, behind some bales of straw. She had no desire to eat, but she felt even more sticky and filthy than usual. She must wash before sleeping, she decided.
That was when she discovered what the trouble was. Her mother had warned her, of course, that such things would happen. Most of her friends had started long ago, and back in Krasnegar she had been quite worried that she was taking so long. Lately she hadn’t thought about it. Well, now it had started. It should be an exciting milestone in her life, the start of womanhood. Thousands of leagues from home in the middle of a barbarian host, it was a very unwelcome development indeed. Fortunately she had some spare garments to use as rags—there was no shortage of such plunder and it wasn’t really stealing because anything she did not rescue would just be burned by the goblins.
As the sky grew dark, she settled down to try to sleep, sore and unhappy. She laid her magic rapier within reach as she always did and pulled a tattered old cloak over herself for warmth. More than anything, she thought she would like a hot brick wrapped in a blanket, just to cuddle. She had barely closed her eyes before a nerve-curdling shriek rang out close by. It was followed at once by another, even louder. The goblins had begun the evening’s entertainment, and the Beavers’ fire was right outside her barn. She was used to it by now, of course. Even Allena hardly flicked her ears any more at the sounds or smells of torture, but it was rarely so close. There was rarely so much of it.
Every time Kadie began to settle, another scream would jar her awake. The night outside was bright with moonlight and campfires, and loud with torment, far and near-agony and raucous merriment in Evil-spawned choruses.
Tonight of all nights she needed to sleep. She needed her mother, whom she had not seen in over two months. In fact, she had not spoken with any woman in that time. She spoke to hardly anyone except Blood Beak.
Blood Beak, her future husband, the goblin prince. By his standards, she supposed, she would now class as nubile. The wedding could come any time now. She wished she had a breviary, to know the right prayers to say and the right Gods to invoke. But she would not be able to read it in the dark, and probably there was no proper prayer for this situation. Mom had told her that exact words didn’t really matter. She hoped they didn’t, because she’d done a lot of very unorthodox praying lately. She’d even prayed to the God of Rescues, and she wasn’t at all sure that there was a God of Rescues. Perhaps she had prayed wrongly—to the God of Battles to send the legions and kill all the goblins, for example. The God of Battles had not heeded her appeal. And the God of Rescues, if there was one, was not rescuing those poor men and women outside. At least nothing that bad had happened to her, at least not yet.