The Bell Of Minden's Hall
I awoke with a hangover to the unpleasant and unwelcome sound of the village bell.
You'd expect a bell to tinkle merrily. There was no merriment in this toll – this bell was a locally produced, crudely forged iron affair that lived in a rickety rough stone belltower in the middle of the tiny mountain hamlet that was my home. It had a forlorn, off-pitch ring that you could hear for miles throughout the vales. This close, with this much of a hangover, it sounded like a particularly sadistic pitch demon calling my name . . . Min . . . Min . . . Min . . .
For a bare instant I thought I was back in the jungles of Farise, except that I wasn't pouring with sweat. A misty mountain chill enveloped me instead, and the smells weren't the pungent aroma of rotting vegetation and continual rain, but the clean smells of mountain grass and damp thatch afire.
As I emerged from sleep enough (my mind was still foggy from the previous evening's excesses) to realize that the demon of my dreams was actually the bell, I dully realized the implications: the bell only rang when there was a fire or other emergency.
I groaned miserably into my welcoming pillow, smelling the sweet mountain herbs among the goose down as I tried to marshal my resources. If there was a bell, I reasoned, that meant an emergency, and almost every emergency would call for the assistance of the trusty village Spellmonger.
That's me. I needed to go to work. Damn it.
Once that thought occurred, my feet – still in my boots, it had been that kind of night – swung over the side of the bed of their own accord and hit the floor in a manner that was entirely offensive to my head's delicate condition. My feet had better sense than my head, at the time. An emergency at this time of night was almost always a summons for fire duty or some medical issue or a missing goat or something. I had spells for that.
I encouraged my protesting head to work as I rose and shook myself awake. I could smell smoke. So it was probably a fire. The fire would have to be one of the close-by farmsteads, too, because I had spells on the village as a whole to prevent such things within the bounds of the hedgework. But which farmstead? I tried to clear my head for a moment and summon the energy to do a simple detection spell. It took a moment to happen – magic and alcohol don't mix well.
This sort of spell is easy, and it doesn't take much energy, thank Ishi, because at the time I didn't have much. It's the sort of thing I do all the time – and fire is a lot easier to detect than lost goats. I held my hands about two feet apart and a rough mental map of the village swam before me for my inspection.
It was an image in three dimensions, it could only be seen by employing magesight, and it was a spell that had become a familiar tool during my six-month tenure in the rustic mountain hamlet of Minden's Hall. It had taken weeks of constant study, walking every inch of the tiny village and meeting every person who lived within, but the resulting map the spell manifested was as complete a representation of the village as I was capable of crafting.
Fire is the easiest element to detect, and my wards were a point of professional pride – I'm really good with fire spells, so there should be no fire. While my protection runes were loosely wrought enough to allow for some flame (else nothing inside the village would ever get cooked) the wards should have quickly extinguished any serious-enough fire with the intensity necessary to burn damp thatch.
Unless something had pushed through my wards.
That thought sobered me another measure, and I wisely decided to investigate a bit before plunging headlong into the night. My inspection of my wards in magesight was clear: there were several areas of excitement that should not have been there, had my wards remained intact. Before the implications of that really set in, I heard the first of the screams: a high, panicked, girlish voice – that stopped abruptly.
I had heard screams like that before, in the jungle villages of Farise, thousands of leagues south of here. A scream of fear and panic and terror, of being woken up in the middle of the night to the sight of violence and blood. The first time I'd heard it, it had been when I'd helped attack a village of peasants whose lords were on the wrong side of the war. You don't forget that sound.
My feeble brain knew it was unlikely to be bandits. The village of Minden's Hall lays within Boval Vale, as peaceful a land as I'd ever seen, high in the western mountains and remote from the trade routes that bandits were traditionally attracted to. Any self-respecting bandit wouldn't starve here, but he wouldn't prosper. The local people had little more than cheese and cattle to steal.
Professional soldiers or unemployed mercenaries were also unlikely. It wasn't unknown for mercenary companies between engagements to occasionally sack a village out of boredom and need for loot, but there weren't any mercenaries closer than the next barony, or the town of Tudry, leagues to the east, as far as I knew.
I quickly dismissed the idea of an inter-house war as well. The local lord, Sire Koucey of House Brandmount, was a kindly, mature nobleman who didn't seem to have any enemies that I could see. He and his younger brother, who held the smaller portion of his domain, got along like brothers were supposed to. Nor was the distinguished old knight engaged in a feud, his borders were unthreatened by his noble neighbors.
That left two possibilities: a peasant uprising (which seemed highly unlikely – I'd never seen peasants so pleasantly free and content as those in Boval) or . . .
Oh, crap.
There was only one other possibility. I cursed savagely and reached for my weapons belt. And I was suddenly very much awake.
I hadn't touched my weapons harness in months. The last time was to move it from the foot of my bed to a peg on the wall, and I hadn't even bothered to draw my sword – a slender, utilitarian Army-issue mageblade. It was even getting a little rusty. A spellmonger in a remote mountain village just doesn't have occasion to use a warmage's tools. That's why I was way the hell up here in the middle of nowhere in the first place.
As impressive as a warwand or mageblade might be to the rubes, as tools they were rarely useful for removing warts, discouraging rats from nesting, or finding lost cows – which is how I spent most of my professional time these days.
If I'd had my way, they would have stayed on the wall til the spells faded and the leather rotted. But the leather slipped easily into my hand, and I could feel the tingle of magic from the warwands like I was back in the Army again. And I hated that feeling. I moved out to the country in the first place anticipating a long, boring, prosperous existence capped with a peaceful and dignified death in my sleep. I'd had enough excitement in battle for two lifetimes, and I wanted boredom by the fistful instead. Not ringing bells, burning thatch and screams of terror.
As I strapped on the belt I shouted in the darkness for my apprentice, my head painfully regretting rousing him even as I did it. Tyndal was a good lad, a local boy I'd discovered working in a stable when I'd first arrived here.
He was quite Talented at the art of magic for his age, but he was completely inexperienced at this kind of thing. Indeed, at fourteen summers, he was completely inexperienced in most things. But I knew that if I didn't put his idle hands to work doing something useful he would feel obligated to rush outside to defend his village, and probably get himself killed in the process. And since I had just started getting him trained up decently, that would be a horrible waste of an apprentice.
Considering his weight and size, he was also at least as drunk as I was – a local farmer, Goodman Tilleb, had paid me three big earthenware jugs of the local cider for enchanting his scarecrow to repel cornworms as well, and I had quite generously shared the take with Tyndal. Three quarters of a jug had passed our lips and inspired a long and witty debate about a subject that I could not seem to recall (although I clearly recall being witty about) before sleep took us just a few hours before. We were paying for it now.
Tyndal sputtered and waved pointlessly at the air before the next wiggle of my toe succeeded in bringing him back to the land of the living. He rose from his cot (still dressed and wearing his boots), eyes bleary with sleep, but with expressions of confusion, excitement and fear vying for victory on his face.
"The . . . bell?" he asked, unsteadily.
"Tyndal, get up!" I whispered harshly. "But quietly!"
"Fire? There's a fire?" he asked, his eyes swimming with confusion and alcohol.
"Not a fire – not a serious one – I checked. But something's happening outside, something unpleasant."
I crept over to the window and cautiously peered down from the second story of my shop, out into the dirt track the locals called a street. I saw menacing shadows moving through the moonless night, and heard growls, shrieks, and more muted screams peppering the night. I employed the magesight spell, which had the useful side-effect of letting me see in the dark, though not nearly as well as real daylight did.
I could see the shapes below were moving with organized menace, creeping quietly from house to house, weapons in hand. And there were a lot of shapes down there, lurking in the darkness. I counted ten, and from the screams there were many more. I repeated my earlier curse in a whisper and fell back before any of them could see me.
Tyndal was crouched nearby, wide-eyed with a fear that was magnified by drunkenness and compounded with confusion. I nodded reassuringly to him, and he relaxed a bit. Then he got nervous again when I pulled a spare warwand from a sheath behind my back and tossed it to him. He caught it automatically, and stared at it as if it were a foreign thing.
"It has four charges. If you need to defend yourself, just point it and say the command word: guerestra. Old Imperial for 'camp follower'," I explained. "But you're gonna have to mean it, if you want it to work. Don't hurt yourself with it. Can you use a bow?"
"Huh? Who is it? What is it? Bandits?" he asked, alarmed, ignoring my quesiton. He crawled over to the window and peeked out. Not the smartest thing to do. I should have stopped him, I suppose, but I was too busy getting armed. I shook my head as I crept over to one of my trunks. "Not likely. We're too remote for any serious bandit, much less a band of them. I think it's more likely that it's—"
"Goblins!" my apprentice shrieked, his voice breaking and his eyes white with fear. He had reached the same conclusion as I by the simple expedient of looking out the window. "Master, a whole army of 'em! At least thirty! They're attacking everyone and burning—"
"Keep your fool voice down!" I commanded. "And get away from that window! Goblins might be poor shots and unused to archery, but your fat head will be too big a target to miss!" He dropped down below the sill, breathing heavily, his eyes wide with fear and excitement. "Can you use a bow?" I repeated as I took my short bow out of the trunk and began stringing it.
The boy nodded, wide-eyed. I figured he could. From what I had seen the Bovali peasants as a class were well-acquainted with the bow, if not adept. Most lads up in the reaches spent their summers among the pastures, keeping the cows in order and keeping the wolves at bay with a bow. There was also some incredible hunting this deep in the Wilderlands, and the famed Wilderlands longbow was a notoriously powerful and accurate weapon, in the hands of someone who had the strength and skill to wield it.
I handed him mine, much shorter than the local standard, and pushed the quiver after it. He seemed a lot more comfortable with it than the warwand.
"Goblins!" he repeated in a dazed, disbelieving whisper as he hung the quiver and strung the bow.
Goblins.
Around most places in the West, particularly the Wilderlands regions of Alshar and Castal, they are called "goblins." In other places where their race interacts with humans they're known as "scrugs," "hairy folk" or most commonly "mountain folk." To the ancient Imperials they were known as the casadalain, the "Low People of the West;" they call themselves simply gurvani, "the people."
Standing no more than four or five feet tall, these little little furry black creatures live a crude tribal existence, traditionally inhabiting caverns or crude villages in remote mountain valleys or stony barrens in the Western Wilderlands – like the one I lived in – and to a lesser extent, the mountain chains of the north, the Kuline range to the east, and the jagged peaks of the Farisian peninsula to the south. They will sometimes move into arable land no humans are using to practice some very primitive horticulture, but they hunted and gathered and mined more than farmed.
Ordinarily they keep to themselves, rarely leaving their vales and caverns except to hunt and trade, or for serious goblin business, whatever that might be. Mostly they leave us bigger and stronger humans alone. Occasionally, however, some tribal leader will get them roused up enough to stage raids against human settlements for cattle and swine and loot. Very occasionally, a strong enough leader has risen to lead confederations of tribes against humans in force.
They knew how to fight, after a fashion. The Goblin Wars, which ended almost two hundred years ago, was the last time that sort of thing had happened. Since then they haven't been much of a threat to anyone. Most folk in the East consider them little more than animals, if they think of them at all.
Despite popular opinion, goblins are easily as intelligent as humans and some even have a surprisingly strong talent for magic. I had witnessed the power of gurvani shamans the Duchies had allied with a few times in the mountains of Farise, back during the campaign. They weren't slouches when it came to magic, and some were as deadly as a human warmage.