Word of Traitors_ Legacy of Dhakaan - Don Bassingthwaite [31]
The stick found the cart and she came around it.
“Go away,” growled Makka. She moved to the other wall of the alley but kept coming. “I said, go away!”
Her answer was a thin chuckle. Makka snarled and lashed out at her. He still had strength in his arm, if not in his body. The attempted blow pulled him off balance and he sprawled to the side. His weight fell against the cart, sending it rolling forward a short distance with the protesting squeal of a rusted axle. Makka fell against the ground and lay there choking on a new burst of pain. His arm stretched out across the alley—the old golin’dar was just out of reach.
Her tapping stick encountered his hand, then rapped down hard across his hairy knuckles. “You have fallen,” the old woman said in a shrill voice. “One of the hunters lies wounded. The order of the world is reversed.”
“If you’re going to try and rob me, get on with it,” said Makka. “There’s still enough strength in these hands to drag you into the Keeper’s domain with me!”
Her chuckle turned into a cackling laugh. Makka roared and thrust himself forward, sliding on a slick of his own blood, ignoring the pain in his side. “By the Fury, you’ll meet the Keeper before I will—and by the Mockery, you’ll suffer more too!”
His push wasn’t quite enough. Somehow she was still just beyond his reach, though her cackle was dropping now. Her big ears cupped as if she was listening to something more than his threats and curses, and her wrinkled face creased in a thin smile.
“Oh, you would be a terror at your full strength!” Her stick rapped his knuckles again. He grabbed for her and missed again. Her smile grew tight. “You honor the old ways,” she said. “You wear the muu’kron.”
It was a statement, not a question. An eerie feeling penetrated Makka’s anger. How had the goblin known? She couldn’t have seen the six knotted cords on his belt. Had she guessed? There was too much confidence in her voice. His hands dropped and he pulled back a little bit.
“I wear the muu’kron,” he said.
“You call on the Dark Six. The Keeper. The Fury. The Mockery.” She paused and cocked her head. “The Devourer?”
“When thunder rolls and my belly is empty,” said Makka.
“The Shadow?”
He shivered. “I have little dealing with dark magic.”
“But you honor him?”
“I fear his power.”
The goblin tapped her stick against the ground. “That is as much as honoring him. And the Traveler?”
Makka’s hair rose as stories of the trickster god came creeping out of his childhood. Stories that told of how the Traveler had remained on Eberron after the age of creation, wandering the world to spread chaos and test the faithful, never appearing in the same guise twice. Stories rejected by the adult mind of a hunter that had no room for chance, but broke down on the edge of death. Makka looked at the old goblin woman with new eyes and a growing wariness.
His silence must have given away his thoughts. The golin’dar laughed. “You think I could be the Traveler? Your wounds must be bad! And yet surely the Traveler led me to you.”
Makka found his voice again. “Or the Mockery, to increase my torment.”
She laughed again, a sound like some night-hunting bird, and moved closer to settle down on her haunches. She was close enough to seize now, but Makka didn’t move. It wasn’t just because of the growing darkness that drained the strength from him. There was something odd in this fearless woman.
“I am Pradoor,” she said.
“Makka.” He didn’t add the name of his tribe, partly because he no longer had a tribe, partly because a strange sensation had fallen over him. He stood on a cliff. With one step, such things as tribes would no longer matter.
“You are called, Makka,” said Pradoor. “The change beloved of the Traveler is coming. Haruuc fled to the gods of the Sovereign Host in the belief that it would make Darguun strong, but only the strength of the old ways can make Darguun great. There will be a