Broken Rule | Chapter 31

This post is chapter thirty-one of my not-previously-published epic fantasy novel Broken Rule, which I'm serializing here on Steemit.

The story so far:
Chapters: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

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Rattlebones settled herself underneath a tiny pine tree so she could watch the humans. Goblins had always been afraid to go to the Forbidden Place, warned away by the voices of their ancestors, but Rattlebones had been getting better and better at figuring out when to listen to the voices and when to ignore them. She had listened to the Whisperer in the Dark and learned great magic from her, but Rattlebones alone among her kind knew to stop listening to the Whisperer when the second army of humans had come. She had enjoyed fighting the weak humans like all the rest, but the strong humans had filled her with fear. She had led her little band of goblins back, deep into the deepest holes in the mountains. Even then it was a close thing.

She had heard it in her head when each of the other shamans were killed. A brief scream, and then silence. Now that the voices of all the other shamans were gone, she didn't have to contend with their squabbling in her head. It was easier and easier to pick out the other voices now. The Whisperer in the Darkness had stopped talking, but she had stopped saying useful things anyway. She had only been interested in war and death. But the quiet voices of the ancestors were different. They knew things. They knew why the Forbidden Place had been forbidden. It was a place of power, and it was there, many lifetimes ago, that the goblins were born.

Since she had learned the truth of the Forbidden Place, the place the ancestors called Loden, she had been fascinated by it. The ancestors said that goblins had once been humans, simple and unformed. Some of the humans in ancient Loden sought to improve themselves with magic, to change their bodies so that they would be better than other humans. The first of the goblins had been the result of those experiments. The goblins were banished, told never to return. The ancestors said it was because the humans hated the goblins, found them ugly and disgusting. But Rattlebones was wise enough not to listen to that. She knew that the humans had banished the goblins because the humans were jealous and afraid. The experiments had worked, had taken the unformed clay of humanity and pushed it along the path to perfection, toward the sublime form that goblins had today. The humans of the time, ashamed of their inferiority and afraid they would be displaced by goblins, sent the goblins away and hunted them so that eventually the goblins themselves began to fear humans, began to believe that they were inferior. Those were the lies that the other shamans had believed, those were the lies that the ancestors were telling Rattlebones, but she could think clearly now and saw the real truth underneath. Some power in Loden had started goblins on the path to perfection, and she would have it. And she would have her revenge against the men of today who had killed so many of her brothers and sisters, the men that she had feared while she had been as lost and confused as the rest of the goblins. Once she had the power, she would give these humans a reason to fear her, the way it should be, the way it used to be when the goblins were new.

Rattlebones waited a long time, but eventually she saw what she was waiting for. One of the men had separated from the others, walked outside of their stone wall. He carried a pair of buckets on a yoke over his shoulders. He must be going to one of the tiny trickles of water that sprung out of cracks in the mountains. She motioned to the goblins behind her and quietly called out with her mind, the way the ancestors did, so that her warriors would know her will.

They took the man from behind. Rattlebones herself shoved the gag in his mouth so that he couldn't call for help. She had to strike some of her goblins with her staff during the fight. She hated to do it, but some of them were getting too excited and risked scratching the man too deeply or tearing his clothes with their claws. That would spoil the entire plan. As her clan struggled to keep the man pinned to the ground, she painstakingly unbuttoned his shirt and bared his chest.

She used her claws to draw blood from one of her goblins. Blood from a human would work better, but she needed to work with what she had available. She drew the symbol on the man's chest that the Whisperer in the Dark had taught her. She focused all of her will on that symbol and called to her clan to join her. She began rattling her bone staff and waved it over the man. He convulsed in pain, but her goblins stayed strong and held him down. She waved it over him again, and she could feel the magic flowing from her into the man, overwhelming whatever will he had. She waved her staff a final time and concentrated completely on a single thought. Obey.

The man stopped struggling. She could see a change in his eyes, a desperate longing to be instructed. She told her goblins to release him, and he twisted around to grovel before her. She swung her staff and struck him in the ear. She needed him to pay attention, not whimper like an animal. She held up a small bag that was filled with sleepgrass. She had been gathering it for months, whenever she caught sight of any, and now would be the time to use it. She held it out to her new slave and tried to send an idea into his unformed mind the way she would to her goblin clan. The men in Loden must eat this. The man opened the bag and tried to dump the contents into his mouth, so she had to strike his other ear with her staff. Not you, fool. The others. The other men. He seemed to understand, but she struck him again for good measure. Working with a slow witted human would surely try her patience, so she focused on the revenge that she would achieve at the end. She could tolerate this temporary inconvenience. She struck the human again.