The Sludge Pits

When he had still been very small, Gesbiek had decided to commit sacrilege by walking out past the Bone Perimeter.

He had failed. Badly, and in front of an audience. He got four paces beyond the last skull-post before old Hunn caught him by the ankle and dragged him back through the mud by one leg, after which the clan made an entire afternoon out of the consequences. Yet the part of that day that stayed lodged in him was not the switch, and it was not the laughing. It was the four paces. The grass out there had been a different green, cool and unbroken under his feet, and none of it had smelled of the pits.

Many seasons had passed since then, and Gesbiek was standing in mud again. This mud was considerably worse, and there was a bucket in it.

The bucket held a week of the Red-Tooth Clan's refuse, all of it heaped into one cracked wooden container by goblins who had clearly enjoyed the heaping. Gesbiek wrapped both hands around the handle and lifted. His arms shook. The bucket weighed almost as much as he did, which, to be fair, was not a demanding standard.

The yellow haze over the Sludge Pits smelled exactly as bad as it looked, and it looked terrible. Sulfur first, going down the throat like a swallowed coal. Then the rot underneath it, sweeter and worse. He had stopped noticing it years ago, in the way a person stops noticing a sound, and then it came back in unguarded moments to remind him it had never actually left.

Ten paces to the disposal trench. He could manage ten paces. Probably.

He shifted his grip, and the Grey Shard did the thing.

It was not a glow. He had watched glows his whole life and this was not one. It was a half-beat of something behind his sternum, a cold stutter like a word starting and then losing its nerve, and for the length of that stutter there was text.

[ ]

Nothing in the brackets. There was never anything in the brackets.

Every goblin in the Red-Tooth Clan got their words. Green ones woke to [FORAGER] and a number telling them how much they could carry. Snarl had [SOLDIER, TIER 2]. Gesbiek got an empty pair of brackets, roughly twice a season, always when he was carrying something heavier than he was, and he had stopped mentioning it to anyone after the last time, when old Hunn had laughed until she had to sit down in the mud.

He had decided it was a symptom rather than a gift. Something inside him was trying to speak, and in all the years he could remember it had never once managed a syllable.

The stutter faded. His arms kept shaking.

Time to chant. Low, quiet, a rhythm only he could hear.

"One count. Two count. Three count. Four."

Each syllable was a footstep, and each footstep was a small argument won against the weight. The handle bit into his palms and left red grooves that would take days to fade. His shoulders had caught fire somewhere around the third count, and every muscle in him was submitting a formal request to drop the bucket and lie down.

Request denied. Spilling meant attention. Attention meant Snarl.

"Five count. Six count. Seven count. More."

Bare feet squelching. Sweat running into his eyes. He blinked it away and painted a streak of filth across his own forehead, which was fine, because there was no one out here to impress and nothing on him left to ruin.

"Eight count. Nine count..."

Cold blue light cut through the yellow fog.

Gesbiek stopped. He did not need to turn around to know what that colour meant. Blue meant Soldier Tier. Blue meant strength, and rank, and the freedom to do more or less anything to anyone standing below you. Blue meant that nothing good was about to happen to a goblin named Gesbiek.

The light grew. Boots came through the mire, iron-shod and unhurried, moving with the confidence of someone who had never once needed to check what was behind him.

Gesbiek hunched. Made himself small. Made himself a shadow among shadows, exactly as he had been taught.

The light found him anyway. It always did.

Snarl came out of the fog like something a nightmare had left behind, which was not far off the truth. He stood a full head taller, with shoulders that twitched under scarred green skin, and the Blue Shard set in his chest pulsed hard enough to throw shadows that reached.

Gesbiek's eyes went to the shard before he could stop them. They always did. The shard was the whole world compressed into a stone the size of a thumbnail, the thing that decided what you were before you had a chance to be anything. Snarl's was a piece of captured sky.

Gesbiek's own sat in the same place on his own chest, dull and cold, a pebble that had never once answered him.

Snarl stopped three paces away and drew his lips back off a set of yellow teeth. "Well. The Grey runt still breathes."

Gesbiek said nothing. Words drew attention to the fact that he was occupying space.

"Look at me when I speak, waste-scraper."

Gesbiek raised his eyes. Not to the face, never to the face. To the patch of air just below the chin. Close enough to be obedience. Far enough not to be a challenge. There was a great deal of technique involved in being nothing, and he had spent years refining it.

"That dead stone on your chest." Snarl began to circle, boots sucking at the mud. "You insult us, Grey-skin. Every breath you take mocks this clan."

The bucket trembled. Gesbiek did not set it down. Movement invited reaction.

"Green means life. Blue means strength. Red means leadership." Snarl spat. "Grey means the world broke while it was making you. You are a mistake, runt. An error that will not die."

There were several things Gesbiek could have said. He had not chosen the shard. Nobody had consulted him. If the world had broken while making him, then surely the world could take that up with itself, and leave him out of the discussion entirely.

He said none of it. Snarl had not come here for conversation. Snarl had come here for an excuse.

The kick arrived without any announcement.

The boot took the bucket square, the wood came apart, and a week of the Red-Tooth Clan's refuse went up into the air and came back down on Gesbiek from directly above. The force lifted him off his feet. For one brief and almost peaceful moment he was airborne: a skeletal goblin suspended in filth, entirely weightless, free of every obligation he had ever had.

Then gravity remembered him.

He landed in the disposal trench on his left side, and the air went out of him in a gasp that tasted of rot and blood where he had bitten his tongue.

Above him, Snarl laughed. It was a barking sound with nothing warm in it anywhere.

"That is where you belong, Grey-skin. Down in the muck with the rest of the waste."

Gesbiek lay still. Every instinct he owned was shouting at him to curl up and show his belly, but he had worked out a long time ago that submission only delayed a beating. It had never once prevented one.

So he did the other thing. He slowed his breathing. In. Out. In. Out. He made himself limp, made himself heavy, made himself an object rather than a goblin. The turtle technique, he called it, in the privacy of his own skull. Not an impressive body of work as martial traditions went. It did, however, have a flawless survival record, which was more than he could say for any of his other ideas.

Through slitted eyes he watched the boots shift.

He understood what was happening up there better than Snarl did. The Blue Shard was flooding its owner with something that demanded dominance, and the Grey Shard was answering it with the one signal it reliably produced, which was *prey*. Snarl was not looking at a clan member. Snarl was looking at a sickness that needed cutting out of the pack.

Violence was only satisfying when the prey acknowledged it.

Gesbiek gave him nothing at all.

The seconds went long. The silence got heavy. Eventually Snarl made a noise of pure irritation.

"Next time I see you outside these pits, runt, I put that Grey Shard back in the mud permanently."

The boots turned. Squelch. Squelch. Squelch. The blue light thinned and went out somewhere in the direction of the warrior tents, and its owner had almost certainly forgotten the whole incident before he arrived there.

Gesbiek counted the footsteps out of habit. Twenty. Thirty. Forty.

Then he moved, and his ribs informed him, at considerable length, that this had been premature.

* * * *

There was a pool of stagnant rainwater a little way from the trench, brown with runoff from the camp above, and by the standards available it counted as luxury. Gesbiek crawled to the edge and put his whole head under.

Cold. Clean cold, shocking and total. He came up gasping and went straight back down, scrubbing at his face, his arms, his chest, watching the filth come off him in slow brown ribbons.

His thumb found the Grey Shard, and his hand kept going on its own.

He rubbed at it. Gently first, the way you check whether a stain has any give in it. Maybe under the dullness there was a colour. Maybe the grey was only a crust, and if he cleaned hard enough, long enough, there would be green under there waiting.

He scrubbed harder. Then faster. Then he got his nails into it.

"Change," he whispered. "Please."

The shard sat in his chest, cold and indifferent, exactly as it had every other time he had asked.

He kept at it until his thumb split and a bead of blood welled up and dropped onto the stone. For one full heartbeat the shard looked red. Alive. Then the water took the blood away, and it was grey again, and it had never really been anything else.

Gesbiek slumped against the bank.

The clan carried on around him, invisible in the fog. Voices. Laughter. The clatter of practice weapons on a drill ground he had never been permitted to stand on. Hundreds of goblins living their lives, not one of whom would have been able to name him.

His fingers found the river stone on the cord around his neck. Smooth, cool, worn down by a thumb that had held it long before his did.

* * * *

Zog had given him that stone on a bad night, one of the worst.

Gesbiek had come home bleeding from the ear and had asked, in the flat voice of a very small goblin who had thought a matter through and reached a conclusion, whether it might not be simpler for everyone if he just died.

His grandfather had not reacted the way he expected. Zog had gone on sorting his herbs for a while, one twisted leg stretched out in front of him because it did not bend any more, and then he had said, "No."

"No?"

"Simpler for them. Not for me. I would have to find someone else to eat all the food I cannot chew." Zog had held up a root, squinted at it, and set it aside in the pile of things that were technically edible. "Sit down. You are dripping on the herbs."

Gesbiek had sat down.

"Do you know why they hate the Grey?" Zog asked.

"Because it means nothing."

"Wrong." Zog tapped his own chest, where a Green Shard sat, dim as an old coal. "Green means life, they say. Look at me. One leg, no teeth, and I have not gathered anything but firewood in nine years. If green means life then the shard is a liar, or I am, and I know which of us I trust." He shrugged. "The shard tells you nothing about what you are. It only tells everyone else how to treat you. That is all it has ever done. The problem is that everyone else does what they are told."

"That is not comforting."

"It was not meant to be comforting. It was meant to be true. You are welcome."

Then Zog had leaned over and put the river stone into his hand and folded his fingers shut over it, and his voice had changed. Soft, and underneath the softness something with no give in it at all.

"Stay in the shadows, Gesbiek. The light burns the weak. Do not try to shine. To be seen is to be eaten."

Those five words had kept him alive for five years. Stay in the shadows. He had built an entire life out of them, a small grey life lived at the edges of rooms.

* * * *

Sitting in the filth with his ribs blooming and blood under his thumbnail, Gesbiek found himself wondering, for the first time, whether staying alive and living were quite the same activity.

His stomach chose that moment to twist. Hunger, the permanent kind. He could not remember his belly being full. He got scraps: fish heads, bread with a history, roots so bitter they made his eyes water.

Three days, he thought. Four, if the clan was feeling generous, which it was not. That was roughly how long he had before the hunger stopped being painful and started being nothing at all.

He looked east, past the tents, past the Bone Perimeter with its line of skull-posts.

The Darkwood stood there, a wall of old trees that swallowed light and breathed out shadow. Forbidden to runts. Full of Green-Tier beasts that would open him up out of professional curiosity. Last spring a worker had got drunk and wandered past the perimeter, and the Darkwood had returned him in pieces over the following week. Nobody had buried him. They had swept him into the disposal trench.

But the Darkwood also had food in it. Real food, not garbage. Meat. Plants that had never been anywhere near a pit.

And somewhere in those trees there were creatures walking around with Green Shards in their chests, glowing, full, the exact thing he needed.

Gesbiek got his feet under him. His legs shook and then, grudgingly, held.

*Stay in the shadows. The light burns the weak.*

The trouble with the advice, he thought, was that the shadows were killing him too. Slower. Politely. With no witnesses. If he stayed invisible much longer he would simply finish the job of being nothing, and the clan would burn what was left without ever having learned his name.

He looked down at his hands. Skin stretched so tight over the bones that he could count every knuckle.

He was already dying. All that remained was deciding which death to walk toward, and that, at least, was a decision that belonged to him.

He took a step. Then another. The ground went from muck to packed earth to grass, the yellow haze thinned, and the noise of the clan fell away behind him at the rate noise falls away behind a body that is not turning around.

The last skull-post came level with his shoulder.

Four paces, he thought. He had managed four, once, before a hand closed on his ankle.

He passed it, and the air changed: cold, thick with old growth and the musk of things that hunted here. Moss came up under his feet in place of grass. Somewhere ahead of him, deep in, something very large shifted its weight and went quiet.

Five paces. Six.

Gesbiek did not look back.