Who cares? Words. More useless words, she thought. Only what the earth spoke mattered at that moment.
It spoke of vengeance, she guessed, angry about what the Dark Knights had done to it-digging their wells and digging their mine, reaching into the belly of the world and pulling out precious ore meant to stay safe and buried. Or perhaps it spoke of sadness, that the mountain had been pierced and robbed and hollowed out, that once-perfect tower from ancient times.
Mudwort listened to the mountain cry and the ground far below answer.
The earth spoke of sadness and pain, she recognized, hearing each word emphasized against the soles of her toughened feet. It spoke of retribution against every living thing that walked across its face-the Dark Knights and townsmen and goblins and hobgoblins. The Dark Knights in the camp were driven to their knees, then to their bellies, the earth demanding they stay down and humbly prostrate themselves.
The finest-looking building, the residence for Marshal Montrill and his officers, had fared well up to that point, but Mudwort watched with glee as, finally, the tile roof swayed and rattled to pieces; one of the walls collapsed outward, burying a knight under a pile of stone and boards. The dust swirled too darkly for her to tell if the man was killed.
“By the Dark Queen’s heads!” the knight beside Mudwort cried in anguish. His hand clasped the pommel of his sheathed sword and his gaze flickered from the destruction below to the path he stood on. More spiderweb cracks shot under him, lacing up and down the mountainside. “By all the …”
In that moment Mudwort moved behind him and threw her shoulder against the back of his legs. He dropped off the side of the trail and started rolling down the mountainside. Mudwort grabbed at the edge to keep from following him, spreading her arms and legs flat against the trail as the ground heaved. Her teeth clacked against each other, and she feared her bones would shatter, but she peered over the edge, watching the Dark Knight carom over jagged rocks, bouncing up with arms and legs flailing, coming down and rolling some more. His helmet flew off and his tabard shredded and flapped away like a blackbird taking flight. She thought she saw his sword come free, glinting in the bright sun and disappearing in the dust. He landed unmoving, speared on a rock spike.
Mudwort hated the Dark Knights more than she hated anything, and she wished them all dead. But she hadn’t thought herself capable of killing one of them. Had she been a god-worshiping creature, she thought she might have felt a moment of regret for her deed. She heard some of the gods frowned upon killing and promised punishment for any of their followers who committed murderous acts. Good thing she was a godless creature, she decided, smiling wider when she saw another fissure open up wide down below and turn into a chasm that swallowed another barracks, what was left of a residence, and several futilely-fleeing souls. A heartbeat later the chasm closed, like a great dragon snapping its jaws shut. She struggled to hear the screams, hearing instead the groan of timbers behind her, wood snapping and rocks tumbling. Then there were more screams, but those were goblin and hobgoblin voices, coming from behind her, in the mountain itself.
She looked over her shoulder to see goblins rushing out of the mine, falling as the trail pitched and the mountain shifted. Some of them crawled past her, others picked themselves up and hurried down the trail, dropping sacks of ore as they went and pushing their slower fellows aside. One of them tripped and fell off the side of the trail, arms flailing. A few of them called to her, urging her up. But she stayed on her stomach, gripping the edge of the trail even tighter.
They would probably die in their race down the trail, she thought. Better to die high on the mountain, watching the Dark Knights go first to whatever hell their gods summoned them to. She leaned her ear against the ground, listening to the earth alternately purr and shout angrily. She hadn’t expected the rumbling to stop, not while she still breathed. But it did.
Mudwort was disappointed, preferring that all of Steel Town should have been swallowed, every last brick and Dark Knight. But a small part of her was relieved that the ground was sated, and that she and many of the goblins and hobgoblins she knew were safe. She forced herself to relax then pushed herself to her knees, looking over the side.
The dust clouds thinned and settled, giving her a better view of the carnage. All of the buildings were broken and a few dozen armored knights were dead. Goblins were dead too, the ones who had been sleeping at the northern end of the largest slave pen. A hole had opened up there and sucked them down. Many more goblins were crushed and dead in the mine-she’d heard the screams and the rocks and timbers falling.
Then another tremor shot through the mountain, dropping Mudwort so hard her chin struck the trail and she bit off the tip of her tongue. Blood filled her mouth and she spit it out as she pushed herself to her feet and backed away from the edge. She put her back to the mountain near the mine entrance, continuing to spit out the blood. She cursed at the sharp pain that was strong enough to make her forget her aches from the lash marks from the taskmaster’s whip.
More goblins rushed from the mine, most of them injured, with blood running down their arms and legs. A hobgoblin foreman toted a goblin over one shoulder and cradled another small one to his chest.
“Direfang …” Even as Mudwort spoke his name, she realized the hobgoblin wasn’t her familiar friend. That foreman was not quite big enough, and he had two ears.
“Direfang is below still,” the hobgoblin told her. “In the mine still. Helping still.” The goblin he cradled tried to say something too, but only blood came out of his mouth. He was broken on the inside, and Mudwort knew he wouldn’t live to see the bottom of the trail.
The ground shuddered more fiercely and belched more sulfur into the dirty air.
From far below, she heard a cry that the hatori had been loosed.
4
The Dark Knights called the great digging beast a hatori, but the goblins and hobgoblins referred to it as a dragon of the earth. Nearly thirty feet long-half the size it could eventually grow to-the one at the camp was acquired from ogre merchants two summers past at the same cost as three hundred goblin slaves.
It resembled a crocodile, but it had a scaly hide as hard as granite, pebbled brown and gray in hue, and pupiless eyes the color of eggshells. It looked like a stretch of uneven rock when it rested. The only thing that hinted it was alive were its eyes, which never seemed to close, and the faint rise and fall of its flanks from its breathing.
A thick chain was wrapped around its chest and neck, like an elaborate dog harness, the end of it affixed to a thick post that had been driven deep into the ground. The chain was short, no longer than the length of a big horse. The hatori liked to dig, and if the chain were longer, the beast would bury itself under the ground and be hard to unearth.
It had two handlers: the Dark Knights Ramvin and Ostan. They and a handful of other knights led it by the chain, like a man might tug a fighting mastiff, and they brought it into the mines each day. The knights would not have been sufficient to hold the creature-it was all muscle and teeth-but they teased it along with chunks of mutton and fat rats, both of which the hatori considered a delicacy, and they kept it constantly drugged with elixirs that were concocted by a priest who lived in Jelek. It was drugged just enough to be sluggish, never so much that it could not do its work.
Its claws were harder than the stone of the mountain, and with coaxing and prodding, the hatori dug the deepest tunnels for the knights-excavating more in a few hours than it would take a hundred goblins working several shifts to manage. The beast was treated better than the hobgoblin and goblin slaves, and the Dark Knights were more leery and respectful of it. The hatori never dug more than a few hours a day. The knights did not want to risk drugging it too much and inadvertently killing it. Neither did they want to tax it; the beast was too valuable an asset, and there were more than enough goblins to widen the tunnels the hatori had started.