Broken Rule | Chapter 50

This post is chapter fifty 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 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49

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Trapped inside the buried library, Rattlebones was furious. Two of her wizards had been allowed to escape by the bungling humans, and a third had died in the attack. She had only been able to enslave one of them, although he seemed to be the one with the most useful abilities when it came to warping and reshaping flesh, the power that she had hoped to find when she first came to the Forbidden Place. Even if she knew how to decipher the tiny markings in the books he brought from the shelves, she knew she wouldn't be able to learn the abilities before they ran out of air to breath, so she had to settle for a servant that could do the learning for her. Her wizard was reading, learning new arts to supplement what he could already perform, but was pathetically slow about it. No matter how many times she had beat him with her staff he had been unable to figure out a way to escape from the earth, so she had to wait for him to learn more, to increase his powers so that he could free them. Until then she must wait. Wait and pace and scream and vent her anger on her human slaves. So stupid! How could they be so stupid? It was easy to forget that their brains must be as unformed and primitive as their bodies.

After days of waiting, the wizard seemed to have finally come up with a solution. He likely would have arrived at it sooner if he hadn't been so lazy. Rattlebones felt like she was forever poking him with her staff to wake him up. It wasn't easy to understand what he meant. She had tried to teach the humans proper goblin speech, but even the best of them were like babbling infants. She listened intently to his mind and eventually puzzled it out. He wanted to use the flesh of her human slaves to create something new, something strong, capable of digging them out. She indicated her assent and perched herself on one of the tables to watch.

He began with the tall thin one, Joszua. Orso had managed to heal most of Joszua's wounds from his final combat with the fat one, Petro, but Joszua's spine had been severed and he had been unable to move his legs since. Orso dragged him to the center of the room and stripped his clothes off.

Petro had died from the wounds the goblins inflicted, but Orso had used his arts on his body anyway, to keep him from putrefying in the sealed room. He had been on the floor ever since, breathing shallowly, but utterly devoid of any mind or spirit. Orso stripped him as well, and dragged his body over and heaved it on top of Joszua's.

Using his knife, Orso cut several deep gashes in the palms of his hands and began rubbing his blood over the two men's bodies. As he did so, they began to change, their flesh seeming to melt. Joszua cried out in pain. He might have used some of the low moans that passed for language among the humans, but Rattlebones didn't care one way or the other. She was far more interested in seeing the magic work. Petro's bulk sank slowly to the floor, around Joszua, and the two bodies started to become one, an amalgamation of each. When Orso was finished, the new creature sat up. It was larger than either man alone, but the merging hadn't been perfect. It had two noses, side by side, and two eyeballs fought for space in the grotesquely enlarged right eye socket. A single eyelid tried to cover them both, and a constant stream of tears leaked out from the raw, red flesh between them. It had two left arms, an extra thumb on its right hand, and its right leg split apart at mid-calf to give it two feet on that leg. As awkward as it was, it was clearly strong, and Rattlebones could tell that it retained the loyalty she had burnt into Joszua.

“More!” she cried. Orso likely didn't understand the words, but he got the meaning. He waved one of the other soldiers over and helped him strip off his clothes. Orso cast his spell and the man melted into the creature, making it bigger and thicker of limb, but barely altering the form that seemed fixed by the original joining. Orso, weakening from the blood he was losing with each casting, called for food and water and also called for more soldiers to step forth. One by one they melted into the growing giant.

Rattlebones danced on the tabletop. Ever since she had enslaved them with the magic she had learned from the Whisperer in the Dark she found that the humans had been little more than stupid beasts. Now they were being improved, brought closer to perfection. Not the same kind of perfection that the goblins had been pushed toward long ago in this place, but a different kind of perfection. They were becoming the perfect beast, the perfect brute to enact her revenge against the humans that had slaughtered most of her kind. Joy and excitement had replaced the rage she felt, and her dance became ever more frantic and energetic.

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With all of her human slaves combined into it, the giant stood twenty feet tall. It seemed no smarter than the humans that it had been built from, but it was just as obedient, and seemed better able to hear the thoughts that Rattlebones pushed into its mind. It stomped its way to the entrance, pushing tables and chairs aside with ease as it passed. It ripped the double library doors off their hinges and started to use one as a giant paddle, shoveling aside the sandy earth that poured in through the doorway, hurling massive quantities of dirt across the library. Rattlebones had to cover her nose and mouth with her hand to keep the dust out.

The giant worked feverishly, tirelessly, shifting tons of the loose soil out of the doorway as more and more slipped down to take the place of the sand that he had just moved. Eventually, the tiniest pinprick of light appeared at the top of the doorway. The giant redoubled its effort and the light expanded. The giant lifted the goblins up one by one to let them scramble through the hole and up the sides of the loose sandy pit to the surface. He pushed Orso through roughly and followed behind him. The giant's mighty arms cracked the doorframe as he pulled his enormous body through. The cracks from the frame spread through the walls, and they buckled under the tons of sand that still sat on the library's roof. The collapse sent a shockwave through the sand, setting off another major slide. The giant was half buried, but he managed to pull himself free.

Free now, and with the power she had craved, Rattlebones was ready to exact her revenge. She had learned from Joszua that Gavril, the human responsible for nearly exterminating the goblins, was already dead. He wouldn't escape her wrath so easily, though. There were still things she could do to him. He had kin, a mate and offspring that she could destroy just as he had destroyed so many of her goblin kin. The mate and offspring lived at a place called Thornwood, and now it was Rattlebones's turn to hunt her foes to their nest.