The Goblin Corps (75 page)

“Maybe.” Cræosh was clearly unconvinced. “But we did that from
inside
, and we had time to work. You’re talking about doing it from out here, and fast enough that she’s got no time to react except to run. There’s a word for this kind of plan, and it ain’t fit for polite company.”

“When has that ever stopped you?” Gork asked.

“Couldn’t tell you. Near as I can figure, I’ve never been in polite company.”

“Cræosh…” Katim warned, gesturing toward the moon as it sailed slowly across its sea of clouds and stars.

“All right, all right. I suppose I haven’t got any better ideas. I still think this one is bloody fucking stupid, mind you. I just can’t think of anything less so. Gork, make a quick circle of the house and find out—”

“Did it when I was here before, Cræosh. Two doors: one on the north wall and a smaller one leading into what looks to be a vegetable garden on the south. Four windows big enough for a small human to climb through, one on each side.” He shrugged. “It’s a pretty simple design, really. If it weren’t built of stone, on a property big enough for a small manor, I’d call it a cottage more than a house.”

Belrotha frowned in concentration, one finger of her right hand counting the fingertips of her left. “That…one, two, three, four, five, uh, six exits. There am only, uh, five of us.”

“The ogre,” Cræosh remarked, “actually has a point.”

“Besides the one on top of her head?” Gork asked. Then, quickly raising his hands, “Okay, okay, don’t get snippy. The window in front is right beside the door. One of us—one of the larger of us—can probably cover them both.”

Cræosh nodded. “Belrotha, that’ll be your job.”

The ogre shook her head. “Me not as big as me supposed to be. Me not know if me can cover door and window together.”

For a moment, the orc repressed the need to squeeze his head, fighting back the incipient headache. “Belrotha, you
do
understand that I mean to watch them both and knock Lirimas on her head if she tries to come out, and not to
literally
cover the door and window, right?”

“Oh. Yeah, me can do that.”

Yep. Headache.
“Katim, east window. Jhurpess, west. Shorty and I’ll take the door and the window in the garden. Any complaints?”

“Yes,” Katim said. “There a great many more…fleas this far south than there…are in Kirol Syrreth. I find…especially given the irritation caused by…these heavy robes…that the fleas are…” She broke off at the look that had fallen over the orc’s face. “Yes? Was there…something?”

Cræosh’s jaw twitched.

“Ah. You meant complaints regarding…our upcoming endeavor. No, it…all looks fine to me.”

Twitch.

“You might wish to have that…examined by a healer when we return…home,” the troll suggested. “Gork’s eyelid was doing that earlier…in the day. Perhaps it’s…contagious.”

Cræosh, who was beginning to regret having ever developed language skills, retrieved his sword, a skin of oil, and an unlit torch from the squad’s newly augmented supplies. The others quickly followed suit, each pretending not to notice the self-satisfied chuckle floating softly from beneath Katim’s hood.

Cræosh, scowling in contemplation, sat atop the eastern slope of the small hill and looked out over the twinkling lights that were the nighttime city below. Absently, he clenched his left fist around a ragged gash on his right bicep, efficiently bandaged but throbbing angrily.
The bitch was fucking
fast,
gotta give her that.

“You seem remarkably cranky, all things considered,” Gork said from his usual nowhere, dropping down to sit beside the glowering orc. “What’s your problem now?”

“It was…Well, it was too easy,” Cræosh said slowly, trying to corral his jumbled thoughts into some kind of order. “I mean, okay, so she was no pushover.” He flexed his injured arm in testimony. “But shit, Bekay was a lot worse.”

“Cræosh, Jhurpess hit her on the head when she dived out the window. That club’s enough to loosen a constipated dragon; of
course
it slowed her down!”

“Yeah, maybe.” The orc didn’t seem convinced.

Gork’s eyes suddenly flashed, nearly as bright as the torches below. “I know what this is about,” he said abruptly. “You’re just pissed that the plan worked! You thought it was stupid, and you’re angry that we pulled it off!”

“No,” Cræosh said then—though, to his credit, he’d taken a moment to think about it. “No, not pissed. Worried.”

“Worried? About what? The plan worked!”

“That’s
what bothers me. It worked. Totally, completely, one hundred percent, went off without a fucking hitch. One of
our
plans. Without a single fuck-up.” Cræosh shook his head. “It ain’t natural, Shorty.”

“Stars,” Gork exclaimed, bouncing to his feet. “I thought
I
was paranoid! Come on, Cræosh, we’ve still got to get her, and us, past the walls and all the way back home. There’s plenty of time to screw up if you really want to.”

“Put that way,” Cræosh said, also rising, “maybe I can do
without
the usual fuck-up.”

“I thought you might.”

“Just this once, though. Don’t let it become a habit.”

Gork grinned. “Us? Fat chance of that.”

“If you two are finished…playing,” Katim called from around the corner of the (smoldering) stone house, “we’re ready.”

“Keep your tits in a row, Dog-breath! We’re coming.”

They found the others in the midst of the vegetable garden, along with their parcel. Lirimas, her hideously scarred face now a mask of bruises, was trussed up with more knots than you’d find on a two-masted galleon. Hands and ankles had each been tied together, and then to each other, and then both to the prisoner’s neck, bending her back like Jhurpess’s bow. A wadded rag, tied with string, made an effective gag. She’d then been wrapped in a second layer of rope, an amorous constrictor coiled around her entire body, and on top of
that
, she was covered with a number of bedsheets. (The linen closet, thankfully, had been closed up and hadn’t suffered unduly from the sudden rain of burning oil that drove Lirimas outside.) No
way
was their prize escaping them at
this
stage of the game!

Of course, there remained the issue of getting her out of the city and on the road to the Iron Keep.
Boy, the fun never stops.

“Wheelbarrow?” Cræosh asked.

“It here,” Belrotha told him, gesturing behind her.

Cræosh eyed it warily. “Couldn’t you have found a bigger one, Shorty?”

The kobold snorted. “These are humans we’re talking about. Their wheelbarrows don’t come much larger than this. It’ll do.”

Working together, Cræosh and Belrotha pulled aside the tarp that hid the bodies of the six dead guardsmen and then lifted a few of the bodies themselves. Katim and Gork carefully rearranged those that remained, leaving a faint hollow. The unconscious prisoner—after Katim gave her an extra whack on the head to ensure she stayed that way—they dumped atop the heap, and then swiftly replaced the bodies they’d just moved. Arms and legs spilled haphazardly over the sides, and the uppermost corpse wobbled dangerously each time the wheelbarrow moved.

“This isn’t going to work,” Cræosh groused.

Gork grimaced up at him. “You’re such a pessimist. I told you before, people don’t look hard unless you give them reason to.”

“And a night of murders and fires isn’t reason to?”

“Oh, give it a rest. It’ll be fine.”

“Yeah, we’ll have plenty of time to rest when they throw us all in—”

Katim’s fist slammed down between them, emphasized by the crack of bone. Had the guardsman not already had bigger problems, such as being dead, that leg would never have been the same again.

“Let’s just go!” she spat through grinding fangs. “Unless…you
want
to prove yourself right by…getting caught?”

And since no one really had a better option, they went. Trusting one last time to their increasingly worn disguises, they shuffled down the hill and onto the main streets. Cræosh and Belrotha pulled the wheelbarrow awkwardly behind them. Gork led the procession, a lit torch in one hand, a tiny bell he’d picked up from Ancestors-knew-where in the other. Every minute or so he’d chime it softly, announcing their presence without disturbing the majority of citizens who had already taken to their beds.

“Are you sure you know where the fuck you’re going?” Cræosh hissed.

Gork sighed. “For the hundredth time, yes! I saw a cemetery off this way when I was following the guard.”

“This isn’t gonna work,” the orc muttered again.

“Why are you so damn paranoid about this?”

“Because our
last
plan went off perfectly! Now we’ve got twice the bad luck waiting for us!”

Gork shook his head, rang his bell, and kept walking.

Late as it was, a city the size of Brenald was certain to have something of a nightlife. Here and there on the otherwise vacant streets, small groups paused in the midst of their own nocturnal wanderings to watch the passing procession. As before, Cræosh was certain that one of them would sound an alarm at any moment, that the entire watch would come crashing down on the squad’s head like…like a head-crashing thing. (Cræosh was tired, and more than a little jittery, and can perhaps be excused for lacking the mental wherewithal to formulate an appropriate metaphor.) But though their expressions were often puzzled, every citizen stepped aside, bowing or tipping a hat, when the streetlights revealed to them the sad contents of the wheelbarrow. Some recognized bits of armor and saluted the fallen soldiers; others were, perhaps, merely offering respect to the recent dead on the way to their eternal sleep.

And so, ever more apprehensively, they continued. The wheels of the pushcart clattered over every nook in the road, announcing their presence far more loudly than the kobold’s tiny bell. The bodies, just starting to ripen, poked at their nostrils with tiny daggers of scent. Limbs flopped about, smacking Cræosh or Belrotha in the arm, doing even more damage to already frazzled nerves. By the time the cemetery gates hove into view, most of them would have happily traded places with those bodies in exchange for a few hours’ relaxation.

“See?” Gork chided, perhaps a bit louder than he needed to. “What did I tell you? There it is.”

And even better, like so many graveyards, it bordered the outermost wall of the city. They should finally be able to get the hell out of this wretched place unimpeded, since any potential witnesses were already premurdered.

They’d passed beyond the more traditional tombstones, woven their way between most of the aboveground mausoleums of the rich and powerful—trying not to notice how much some of the gothic statuettes atop them resembled the late and unlamented Shreckt—when their hopes of an easy escape were firmly planted in a grave of their own.

“Hey!”

As one, the entire squad craned their necks upward, though not so high that their hoods might fall off.

“Yes?” Gork asked politely.

A lone sentry peered at them from atop the outer wall, crossbow cradled low but steady in his hands. “What are you doing in the graveyard after dark?”

Cræosh began to curse in a very unecclesiastical manner. Gork stepped back and “accidentally” trod on the orc’s foot. “We are strangers to your city, good sir!” he called up. “We just wished to do our part to help.”

“Help? Help with…” They could hear a faint creaking as his hand tightened around the stock of his weapon. “Are those dead
guards
in that wheelbarrow?”

“Yes, sir,” Gork said, making no attempt to sidestep the issue. “They were found, brutally murdered, in an alleyway this afternoon. I am afraid, what with the tragedy that has recently befallen your heroes, that these brave souls would have been forgotten amid the chaos. Though my brethren and I do not know Brenald that well, we recognized that these good men should not be left to the mercy of the elements. Thus, with the blessings of the church, we took it upon ourselves to transport them here, to their final rest, while the city deals with more weighty matters.”

Even before the kobold finished, the watchman’s face clearly signaled his utter lack of credulity. Cræosh, who was furiously wishing that this sword and the other weapons were somewhere more accessible than wrapped in Belrotha’s satchel, allowed one hand to drop casually into the wheelbarrow. The soldiers’ swords wouldn’t prove all that accurate at a distance—javelins they most assuredly were not—but he had nothing else to hand….

“So how come,” the guard challenged, “I haven’t heard a damn thing about this?”

“My good man,” Gork said, his tone tightening, “I certainly wouldn’t know. Perhaps, out here at this lonely post, the word simply hasn’t reached—”

The crossbow rose, the heavy bolt now aimed squarely into the darkness of the kobold’s hood. Cræosh was sure that he could actually
hear
Gork start to sweat.

“I just went on duty a half hour ago, friend,” the guard said coldly. “I should have heard about this. I think we’re going to have to get to the bottom of this before anyone proceeds any further.”

“But sir—”

“Shut up! I—”

Throwing caution to the winds—after all, it wasn’t
his
face sitting in the path of the bolt—Cræosh yanked the narrow sword from beneath the corpse of its owner, hauling back for a desperate throw.

Someone beat him to it. Jhurpess took to the air, bouncing first from the edge of the wheelbarrow with a dull clang, then from the roof of the nearest mausoleum, and then he was near enough the top of the wall for his lanky arms to haul him over. The crossbow thrummed, but the startled guard had started back; the bolt hurtled over Gork’s head, rather than through it. The human drew a single, croaking gasp before Jhurpess reached out with two broad hands and snapped his neck.

The bugbear caught the body as it fell, then dropped into a crouch, lowering the guard carefully to the pathway atop the wall. His robe bunched and twisted as he swept for any further foes.

None yet, no, but soon. Quiet the altercation had been, but not
silent.

“Could you have cut that just a bit closer?” Gork ranted up at him, his voice hovering just below an actual shout. “I have enough holes in my face already, dammit! I don’t need any new ones!”