The stone of the earth was ancient, and its memory long. Mudwort guessed she was borrowing those memories by looking in on the cavern.
Another shiver passed through her. It amazed even her. So she could use her magic to look not only across distances, but across ages. She could peer through time.
Just what else was she capable of?
She’d become distracted by her realization, and the image of the shaman and the cavern started to fade. Mudwort fought to retain the images, feeling the pulse of the mountain quicken against her back. She focused on the shaman, on those dark, magical, and mysterious eyes. What had they witnessed through the years? What did Saarh know? How long ago had she lived?
What did the cavern look like in the present? Not ten years earlier, or twenty, or whenever Saarh breathed. But at that very minute.
Seizing on that impulse, Mudwort turned her attention to the cavern itself, the decorated walls and the dome. She put all of her energy and efforts into bolstering her seeing spell and was promptly rewarded with blackness.
Mudwort raged and raged. She thrust her head back, striking the rock and hurting herself. There was nothing there at all. Nothing … she concentrated harder. Her mind was still in the cavern, she could tell that, but she was staring at darkness. Then shadows began to separate as her keen eyes probed. At the same time, she listened, hearing nothing, no snoring goblins. She heard only her own breath and, after a few minutes, the flutter of bat wings.
The cavern was empty of goblins.
The markings were still on the walls, more numerous than when she saw them before; they stretched nearly to the floor in places. It wasn’t so much that she could see them as that she could feel them, her mental fingertips tracing the various cuts and curves made in the stone. She let her senses drift to the granite floor.
It was smooth and polished but more so than before. The feet of decades had made the floor cool and pleasant to the touch.
Mudwort searched and searched, finding only the small crevices where the torches had been, no traces of the wood that once burned. Guano was thick directly under the highest point in the dome; bats had lived there for quite some time.
“Where is the shaman? Dead?” Mudwort wondered. Dead and burned a long while ago?
“When was the shaman?”
Mudwort finally ended her spell.
She was exhausted, as if she’d walked miles and miles and miles over the ugly terrain of that ugly land.
She opened her eyes and looked up, expecting to see the moon with its rain ring.
Instead she saw the lightening sky.
Mudwort had passed hours inside her seeing spell.
SARO-SARO’S SCHEME
Direfang awoke shortly before dawn, carefully picking his way through the sleeping goblins to the head of the column. Mudwort had said the pass would end soon, but she’d found a trail of sorts that wound up the western ridge that they could follow to the other side to reach the river. Direfang decided to take his charges along that trail and follow the river to the New Sea.
He walked south alone for a short while, seeking rare solitude. He was far enough ahead that he could no longer hear the snores of those still sleeping or the chatter of the ones just waking up. All he could hear was the whisper of the wind edging over the ridge and stirring the dust at the bottom.
How many days had he walked? How far had he come from Steel Town?
Hell Town-he’d heard the wizard call it that once.
Indeed, the Abyss could have been no worse than the Dark Knight mining camp. Direfang wore the years he’d spent there in scars. They were so thick in places on his chest, arms, and back that no hair grew there, making him ugly, a grotesquerie as far as humans and hobgoblins alike were concerned. He scratched at the left side of his head, where his ear had been; a small, jagged piece of flesh remained. His appearance and size had helped make him a formidable foreman in the mine. His arms and legs were thick with muscles from the hard labor in the camp, his hands and feet callused. He’d hoped to find shoes in Reorx’s Cradle, but he’d not had the opportunity to look through the homes. His first responsibility had been to keep an eye on all the goblins, keep them from rampaging or squabbling.
Besides, his feet were not hurting as badly as they had been earlier. Either the calluses were growing thicker or he was becoming used to the constant dull pain.
A large bird flew overhead, banking slowly and circling. It was a hawk of some kind, dark brown and with white tail feathers. There were other birds higher up, black specks seen against a pale gray sky. Direfang watched them for a few moments and savored the sweet air. There’d been birds around Steel Town, mostly scavengers. The large one that still circled was a predator.
Direfang dropped his gaze and opened the book filled with the dwarf’s charcoal maps. He guessed at where he was in the range, not far out of Reorx’s Cradle. He saw where the pass ended, probably a few hours of walking ahead, and there was a thin line indicating the trail that would take them over the western range. Mudwort had confirmed the authenticity of the map with her spell the previous night.
The Plains of Dust? He’d been thinking about that place lately, wondering if they should go there.
Mudwort had tried to convince him the Qualinesti Forest was a better destination. She and Moon-eye and Boliver had delved into the earth and searched for a good goblin home for the long-term future. They’d agreed on the Qualinesti Forest. Mudwort was undoubtedly right about the forest, Direfang mused. The forest would be the goblins’ best opportunity to build their nation.
But it was so far away. He tried to picture it on the maps the Dark Knights had stretched out across their long table. The forest was a world away.
Direfang had slept little the previous night, thinking about the long, hard journey ahead. He’d come to a difficult decision just a little while earlier-not one that would sit well with Mudwort. They would travel around the fishhook of mountains to the swamp, spend some time there hunting and resting to recover from the arduousness of their trek thus far, then they would head to the Plains. It would take them weeks and weeks to get to the Plains, maybe a few months. But the Plains were not so far from the forest … if he recalled the Dark Knights’ maps correctly.
That way, he could investigate the Plains, and Mudwort could have her way too.
Direfang closed the book and gave a last look up at the hawk, which still circled, but farther west and higher. He headed back to his charges, his twisted leg not bothering him as much anymore and his vision much improved over the previous day.
As he drew closer, he stared at the rag-tag army, all of them waking up-more than eight hundred, less than one thousand. There had been more before Hurbear’s clan broke away many miles earlier. About half of his charges wore clothes and scraps of armor taken from Dark Knights, ogres, and, just yesterday, the dwarves.
Few of them had been afforded the luxury of clothes in Steel Town. Neither had any of the goblins there had possessions. Since then, many wore clothing and all coveted various things they’d hauled away from Reorx’s Cradle and the other places they’d looted. The possessions had given them pride.
It was almost funny, Direfang mused. One goblin had claimed a stool half as tall as he was. It was awkward to carry, but he’d stubbornly refused to part with it or to trade it for smaller and perhaps more valuable things. Other goblins bore empty flowerpots, pans, ceramic mugs too big around to comfortably hold in their hands, books they could not read, vases, gardening tools, sacks of seeds and bulbs they probably would never plant, toys they’d snatched from dwarf children’s beds, sacks of flour, and many other things that Direfang had no names for. One old goblin led a pig on a leather leash; some held chickens and geese they’d stolen from the dwarves, and others tugged stubborn goats. A few of the bigger, plumper goats were protected from slaughter, and they were in the Dark Knight Kenosh’s care.