• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

He could hear sounds of retreat in the gully. The hobgoblins, large as their numbers were, had picked a target too tough for them. He turned to the two hobgoblins still facing him and pointed Wrath at them. “Skiir,” he growled at them. Run.

For a moment it looked like they might have considered it, then the gaze of one of them, a lean whip of a hobgoblin with one scarred ear, moved past Geth. The shifter glanced over his shoulder, following it.

Vounn stood alone and undefended at the fire.

In the heartbeat that he was distracted, the hobgoblin with the scarred ear moved, thrusting his hapless companion at Geth and surging toward Vounn with his sword raised. The startled hobgoblin who had been pushed at Geth flailed wildly with his weapon. Geth bashed him with his gauntlet and felt bone crunch, but he was an instant too late. The hobgoblin with the scarred ear ran past him. No one else was any closer to Vounn. Through Wrath, Geth heard and understood the words the hobgoblin screamed out as he charged: “You die here, Deneith!”

Vounn’s eyes narrowed, and the dragonmark that peeked out from her sleeve on the inside of her right wrist seemed to flash in the firelight. The air rippled around the lady seneschal just as the hobgoblin’s sword fell—and the blade skimmed aside, deflected by the power of the Mark of Sentinel. Left off-balance by the failed blow, the hobgoblin stumbled. Vounn parted a fold of her robes, and with a motion that had the swift certainty of years of practice, pulled a long thin stiletto from a hidden sheath. One precise blow drove the needle-like blade into the soft point at the back of his neck and up into his skull. The hobgoblin jerked, then dropped forward, sliding off the stiletto.

Vounn saw Geth’s expression of amazement and answered it with a thin smile. “I am a daughter of Deneith,” she said. “I can defend myself.”

The last of the hobgoblins fighting Tariic cried out and fled down into the gully to join their retreating fellows. The final two attackers who had been facing Ekhaas and the others tried to do the same, but they didn’t make it. Midian hooked the legs of one with the blade of his pick, then swung the weapon to deadly effect as the hobgoblin fell. The other made it to the brink of the gully before staggering back with his hands over a gash in his belly. Chetiin appeared, curved dagger dripping with blood. Ekhaas grimaced and ended her opponent’s agony with a swift blow of her sword.

Ashi was the first to speak into the silence that followed. “You can fight,” she said to Midian appreciatively.

The gnome shrugged. “I do my field work in Darguun. I have to fight.”

“If these are the bandits you warned us about, Tariic, they’re more bold than you thought,” said Vounn.

But Tariic looked around and shook his head. “I don’t think they were bandits,” he said. “They fought too well. Those fought in formation.” He pointed at the three who had attacked Geth in a wedge. “Chetiin, follow the survivors. See if you can learn anything. Krakuul, Thuun—look for Aruget.”

“Mazo,” said Chetiin. He bent and cleaned his dagger on the clothes of a corpse before putting it away. Geth stepped up beside him.

“I’m coming with you.”

Chetiin glanced at Tariic, who nodded. “Ban,” said the goblin.

The first thing they found, though, was Aruget. The hobgoblin soldier lay along the gully at the end of a trail of blood, almost under a collapsed sand bank. Blood covered his scalp and he lay very still, but Chetiin felt his neck and nodded. “Still alive,” he said. “Lucky.” He whistled to signal Thuun and Krakuul, then led Geth on along the streambed.

They didn’t come across any survivors, though they did find the bodies of two hobgoblins who had succumbed to wounds suffered during the fight. The others had gotten away. Along the streambed, carefully out of sight of the road, they discovered how: the dung of horses, still fresh, and a multitude of hoofprints leading up out of the streambed and into the night. There was one more body, too, but the only wound this one had suffered