The Doom of Kings: Legacy of Dhakaan - Book 1 (18 page)

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 was a knife in the back.

“The leader, I think,” said Chetiin. “Killed because he took his people into a bad fight.” He began feeling through the corpse’s clothes and grunted. “Tariic was right. They were no bandits. This one was too well fed.”

Geth inspected the hoofprints left by the horses and, interspersed among them, the prints of hobgoblin boots. If it had been daylight they should have brought Ashi—she was an expert tracker. He’d learned some skills himself, though, and the story told in the dusty ground wasn’t hard to read. “They rode in after dark,” he said, “then waited until deep night to approach. There were a lot of horses—the survivors must have taken all of them or let them loose to try to confuse pursuit.”

But the soft sound of shifting hooves drew him up the slope of the well-churned bank. One horse still stood there, grazing on a patch of dry grass, and there was a bundle still lashed behind its saddle. The horse shifted nervously as he approached, probably smelling the blood on him, but it stood still long enough for him to free the bundle before galloping away. Chetiin joined him, and Geth shook the bundle open. Clothes fell out. Good clothes, far better than the pretend bandits had been wearing. Chetiin reached out and plucked one item from the pile, a banner like the ones Aruget and the other soldiers wore as they rode.

This banner was yellow and marked with the crest of what looked like a snarling dog. Chetiin’s ears rose. “Gan’duur,” he said. “Eaters of Sorrow.”

“Another clan?” Geth guessed.

“A clan that has chafed under Haruuc’s rule. Tariic will be interested in this.”

Geth’s eyes narrowed. “The hobgoblin that attacked Vounn knew she was Deneith.”

“I heard him,” said Chetiin. “They knew who we are—or at least who she is. If something happened to Vounn, Haruuc would be shamed and weakened in the eyes of the clans. The Gan’duur would gain strength.”

“They knew we were coming. Do you think they were the ones following us today, somewhere off the road?”

Chetiin shook his head and pointed to the wide path of hoof-prints that led away from the streambed. Geth looked at it again, frowned, then looked again and finally recognized what the goblin had seen.

Only one swathe of hoofprints cut across the landscape. Their attackers had come from and fled into the east.

Their party had ridden out of the west.

“They didn’t follow us,” Chetiin said, “but they knew where to find us.”

T
hey rode hard for the next three days, pushing to reach the Deneith stronghold at the Gathering Stone. Ashi was glad for the speed and endurance of Tariic’s magebred horses and doubly glad of the riding lessons Vounn had made her take—before she’d gone to House Deneith, she’d ridden only rarely and always at a much slower pace. Tariic had taken news of Geth and Chetiin’s discoveries with bared teeth and flattened ears. Vounn and he had agreed: they needed to complete their journey as quickly as possible. If someone wanted to stop them, they had the measure of the party’s strength now. Another attack wouldn’t be so easily defeated.

The thought that there might not be another attack was almost depressing to Ashi. The sharply pitched battle, the smell of blood, and the very real threat of death had roused a spirit in her that had been crushed for too long. She even felt a pang of dread as they reached the Gathering Stone. The place was little more than a tall stone marker set at a crossroads, a seething camp of goblin
—dar
, she reminded herself—mercenaries and would-be mercenaries, and a squat, ugly stronghold. It was no Sentinel Tower, but it was still an enclave of Deneith.

Word of Vounn’s appointment to Haruuc’s court had reached the stronghold. Shortly after they rode inside, almost before there had been time to dismount, Viceroy Redek d’Deneith appeared with words of welcome on his lips and a fear for his position in his eyes. Vounn took one look at him and asked to speak with him in private. Ashi tried to slip away with Geth, Ekhaas, and the others,
but Vounn caught her first and dragged her into the conversation with Redek. Once they were shut up in Redek’s office, though, the only words she had for Ashi were an invitation to remove her scarf—they were back among members of their House, after all.

Redek couldn’t keep his eyes off the Siberys Mark, awed by the legendary power sitting in a corner of his office. He nodded to everything Vounn said, and by the time they left the room he seemed content to accept that he would continue the mundane task of brokering the services of Darguul mercenaries while Vounn handled the larger tasks of dealing with the powers of the nation. Ashi wondered why Vounn hadn’t just ordered her to strip. Had Redek seen the full extent of her dragonmark, he probably would have handed the entire stronghold over to Vounn’s command if she’d asked.

When they left the Gathering Stone, it was in the company of two full squads of hobgoblin, goblin, and bugbear mercenaries. With such protection, speed was no longer important, and they took their time. They couldn’t have ridden quickly anyway. So close to Rhukaan Draal, the way was busier. Merchants and travelers, all heavily armed, shared the road. They passed a House Orien caravan bound along the road back to Breland. The mercenaries who guarded it were hired from House Deneith, but even so they watched the party and their Darguul guards with suspicion until they were well past.

They reached Rhukaan Draal near sunset the next day. The road rose into a fine wide bridge that leaped across the dark water of a deep, fast flowing river. “The Ghaal River,” said Ekhaas. “Ships can come in all the way from the coast, but this is as far as they go. The cataract stops them here.” She pointed upstream to a boiling cascade of white water.

The city that sprawled on the southern bank of the river revealed itself as the bridge reached the apex of its gentle arc and fell again. Ashi’s first impression of Rhukaan Draal was that a bricklayer and a stone mason had collided, spilling the goods of their respective trades across the landscape. The city was a riot of buildings in a range of styles. The remains of human architecture still stood, and it was possible to see the bones of the Cyran town
that Rhukaan Draal had been before Haruuc took it for his capital. The flesh that cloaked those bones, however, was rough and new. Ramshackle structures had been thrown up between and against the old human buildings in a style that Ashi was already beginning to think of as distinctly Darguul. The
dar
seemed to use whatever materials were at hand—wood, mortar, bricks, rough stone, worked stone, even chunk of masonry fallen from older buildings—to erect buildings that were as attractive as a rubbish heap but, to her Deneith-trained eye, looked durable and formidably defensive.

Most of the buildings, old or new, that leaned in upon the narrow, unpaved streets were no more than three stories tall. A few were taller, but nothing approached a single tower that soared up in the center of the city. At first Ashi thought that the red of the tower came from the light of the setting sun, but then she realized it was the stones of the structure themselves that gave it a bloody tint. The Khaar Mbar’ost, the Red House—Haruuc’s fortress. Unlike the other new buildings of the city, it seemed solidly constructed and even attractive in a vaguely sinister way.

Ashi looked around for someone to ask about this, but neither Ekhaas nor Chetiin nor even Tariic was nearby. Aruget, blow to his head mended by Ekhaas’s magic, rode close, and he answered her question before she’d even asked it. “Lhesh Haruuc wanted something special,” he said. “He had it built by craftsmen of House Cannith.”

It was getting easier to understand his thick accent than when she had first encountered him in Sentinel Tower, maybe because of the lessons in Goblin that Ekhaas had been giving her. Ashi tried some of her Goblin out on him.
“Ataa so?”
she asked, pointing in the direction of a milling throng.

All of Rhukaan Draal’s twisting, dusty streets were packed with a range of races nearly as diverse as she’d seen on visits to the cosmopolitan city of Sharn or the monster-dominated Droaamish port of Vralkek, but in that direction the crowd seemed to grow thicker and even more diverse. Among the goblins, hobgoblins, and bugbears, she could see humans, elves, dwarves, shifters, even a few slight halflings and towering warforged. They all had an air of suspicion about them, as if everyone was trying to keep an eye
on everyone else while also keeping one hand near their weapon. A little farther into the crowd, it appeared that stalls had been set up. Those who stood within the stalls looked the most suspicious of all.