The Banishment

The whine got there before he did.

Gesbiek came back to himself in pieces, and the first piece to arrive was a high mechanical grinding somewhere behind his eyes, an insect trapped inside the bone and taking it personally. His eyelids had been welded shut overnight by exhaustion and dried blood. His body had been replaced with a quantity of lead. Every breath needed to be commissioned individually, which struck him as an unreasonable amount of admin for something that had managed itself perfectly well for five years.

He got one eye open.

Grey predawn light over the clearing, mist sitting low across the cairn. That much was as expected. What was not as expected was the translucent blue static crawling at the edges of his sight, flickering in time with his pulse, and the faint silver still moving under the skin of his forearms when he turned them into the light.

He was, then, not dead. He decided to be pleased about that later, when he had the resources.

He got his arms under him. They shook and held and shook again.

A boot came down on his back.

It drove him face first into the dirt and emptied his lungs in one go. The weight ground his ribs against the packed earth, and he lay there tasting soil and blood and thinking, with a certain weariness, that he could have guessed.

"Found you, Grey-trash."

Of course. Who else would track a starving runt into forbidden territory before sunrise? The goblin genuinely needed a hobby.

The boot lifted. A hand took him by the scruff of the neck instead and hauled him up into the air with no visible effort, and Gesbiek hung there kicking like a rat that had been caught doing something.

Snarl's face came close. His breath was raw meat all the way through.

"Thought you could slip out? Thought you could hide at this cursed heap of rocks?"

Gesbiek tried to answer and found his throat had been scoured out from the inside by whatever the beetle had done on its way down. What came out was a noise, and not a good one.

"Crossing the Bone Perimeter." Snarl shook him, hard, punctuating. "Without permission. Into forbidden ground, where the beasts hunt."

Two more goblins came out of the trees behind him, 2-Greens with shards like embers going out, and they snickered in the particular way of goblins who want to be present for a spectacle but have carefully positioned themselves outside the range of it.

Snarl's tusk grazed his cheek and opened a thin line there. "You know the law, runt. Nobody crosses without the Chief's word. Not even to sit with your dead grandfather's shameful pile of stones."

The static went white and something spiked through Gesbiek's temples. He shut his eyes and the flickering carried on quite happily behind the lids, and inside it, arriving with an air of considerable difficulty:

[CALIBRATING]
[INTERFERENCE DETECTED]

"Perimeter violation," Snarl said, taking his time over the words the way a goblin takes his time over the last of the boar. "That is a crime against the Chief himself. Against the safety of the clan."

One of the Greens shifted his feet. "Maybe we just leave him out here and say we never..."

"Shut it."

The Blue Shard pulsed. The guard shut it. Sensible goblin.

Snarl grinned with all of his teeth. "I am taking you to Grolm. Let us find out what the Chief does with Grey trash that breaks his walls."

He started walking, and Gesbiek went with him, mostly at ankle height.

* * * *

The camp was arranged, Gesbiek had always thought, like an argument about worth.

At the outer ring the huts were mud with leather flaps for doors, and the goblins inside them peered out and pulled back fast. Not out of any feeling about Gesbiek. Out of feeling about Snarl.

Further in, the huts got bone struts and scavenged iron. Further in than that, the air itself thickened. Ambient mana pressed against his skin like weather, and the blue static in his vision widened out into solid white bars that took most of his sight with them.

The closer to the middle, the brighter the shard. The brighter the shard, the crueller the goblin. It was a very efficient arrangement, in the worst available sense.

The Throne of Skulls sat at the centre behind a mouth of stone framed by the ribcage of a juvenile drake, each rib as thick through as Gesbiek's torso and blackened by fire and time. Heat came pouring out of it into the cool of the morning and made the whole entrance ripple, so that it looked, from any distance, as though it were breathing.

Two 1-Orange Lieutenants stood at either side. Over four feet each, shoulders like barrels, skin the grey-brown of old bark and scarred everywhere it was visible. They looked at Snarl with the flat boredom of creatures who could take him apart between two sentences.

"Prisoner for the Chief," Snarl announced, and Gesbiek noted with quiet satisfaction that a good deal of the bravado had gone out of him on the way over.

One Lieutenant glanced down, worked out how little Gesbiek mattered, and stepped aside.

Inside, the heat doubled. So did the pressure. It was not fear, or not only fear. It was a physical weight closing around his chest and squeezing, and inside his skull the thing that had installed itself last night began to make a noise like a small animal in distress.

Snarl threw him.

Gesbiek hit rough stone and skidded and came up on his knees with his head down.

He did not need to look to know Grolm was there. The presence arrived on its own, an invisible hand flattening him toward the floor.

He looked anyway.

The throne was black volcanic rock with bone fused through it, a seat that resembled violence frozen partway through happening. On it sat a goblin nearly five feet tall, which for a goblin was an event. Grolm's body was a study in accumulated damage: slabs of muscle under scar tissue laid down in patterns across olive skin, none of it decorative, all of it earned.

The Red Shard in his chest did not glow. It burned. Crimson light bled off it into the air around it, and it pulsed in time with the Chief's breathing, and looking at it for more than a moment made Gesbiek's eyes water.

Through the static, Grolm registered as a mass of red. Not a figure. A warning.

The Chief was picking his teeth with a short heavy dagger of human steel, the grip bound in something dark that had been rebound more than once. There was a notch out of one of his ears, healed so long ago that the scar had gone the colour of the rest of him. His bloodshot eyes came round and settled, and the temperature in the cavern went up.

Off to the side, Snarl had put his forehead flat on the stone and was trembling. An arrogant Blue warrior reduced in four seconds to a puddle with opinions. The hierarchy really was something.

[POWER DIFFERENTIAL: CRITICAL]
[UNABLE TO ANALYZE TARGET]
[RECOMMENDATION: RETREAT]

Useful, Gesbiek thought. Retreat. He would get right on that.

Grolm stood. The floor passed the news along through Gesbiek's knees. The Chief came down off the dais one deliberate step at a time, in no hurry whatsoever, and stopped close enough that the heat coming off him made Gesbiek's skin feel tight.

A hand the size of a shovel took him by the face. Claws went into his cheeks and forced his head up.

But Grolm was not looking at his eyes.

Grolm was looking at the Grey Shard.

The Chief's brow came down. One claw traced the surface of the dead stone in Gesbiek's chest, and it was not rough. It was careful, the way you touch a thing you are not certain about.

The claw stopped.

There was a hairline crack across the shard now. Inside the crack something moved, silver and faint, brightening on every heartbeat and going out again.

Grolm let go and stepped back fast, and wiped his claw down his loincloth, hard, twice.

"No colour," he said. His voice came out of him like two stones deciding something. "Not weak. Empty. Cursed."

He turned his back and began to pace in front of the throne, blocking most of the light, and he kept looking over his shoulder at Gesbiek's chest while he did it.

"The Old Rot," Grolm said, to the room rather than to anyone in it. "The elders spoke of it. A shard with no light in it. A sign of what comes."

Snarl's shoulders went tight. He had brought a prisoner here expecting an execution and had received, instead, philosophy. To be fair to Snarl, Gesbiek had not expected philosophy either.

"They said a Grey Thing brings the collapse," Grolm went on, dropping into a growl. "That its emptiness spreads the way a sickness spreads. That whoever kills it takes the curse into himself. That the Old Rot eats Red from the inside and leaves ash."

And there it was.

Grolm was afraid of him. Not of his strength, which did not exist. Not of his cunning, of which he had a little and no way to use it. The Chief was afraid of the hole. The place where power was supposed to sit and did not. The Red Shard sorted every living thing into stronger and weaker and had no third box, and Gesbiek did not fit either one, and now the thing that did not fit had started to crack open with light coming out of it.

Errors, it turned out, frightened tyrants.

Grolm sat back down. The red threw long shadows up his scarred face. He pointed one claw across the cavern and kept the rest of himself well out of range.

"I will not put your grey filth on my floor."

Gesbiek's heart went sideways. Not execution, then. Which left a range of options, most of them worse.

"You are a bad omen, boy. A shadow that forgot where it belongs. Your emptiness offends the Red of this clan." Grolm leaned forward onto his elbows and showed his teeth in something that had the shape of a grin and none of the content. "You crossed the Bone Perimeter. You went into the Darkwood without leave, to sit at a pile of stones with nothing under it. You want to live outside the walls. You want to keep company with the dead."

He spread his hands.

"So stay there. Banishment. Let the beasts eat your curse. Let the forest digest your bad luck somewhere it will never touch us again."

The cavern went quiet.

Banishment into the Darkwood was a death sentence and everyone present knew it. But it was not an execution, and that was the entire point. Grolm would not have to touch him, and no goblin in the clan would have to touch him, and the curse would go into the trees and be somebody else's problem. Goblin politics, working exactly as designed.

Snarl got up off the floor, his fear evaporating on contact with a verdict, and grabbed Gesbiek's arm.

"Wait."

Snarl froze mid-pull.

Grolm came forward once more and stopped short, keeping careful distance from the cracked shard.

"If you live through the night, runt, do not come back. If I see your grey face again I will risk the curse and eat your heart myself."

The Lieutenants laughed at that, a low grinding sound like boulders resettling, and Snarl dragged him out.

* * * *

The morning light came down on him like a second sentence.

Snarl hauled him through a camp that had woken up and found something to watch. Workers stopped and pointed. Warriors sneered as a matter of routine. Children got hold of small rocks and made use of them.

Gesbiek knew most of the faces. The cook who had given him bread with mould on it, which had been the single most generous act of his life to date. The elder who spat at the ground near his feet whenever he passed, with good aim.

And Meska, who had straightened a finger of his once after Snarl stood on it, and had done it out of sight behind the drying racks, and had not spoken to him during or afterward.

Not one of them looked sorry. What they looked was relieved. The bad omen was leaving on its own legs and nobody would have to do anything about it.

Meska, he noticed, turned away before they got level with her, and found something to do with her hands.

Snarl did not take him to the main gate. He took him to a narrow gap in the bones at the back, rarely used, where the Darkwood roots came up thickest against the perimeter, and he unlatched a wooden gate that screamed the whole way open.

"Die quietly, Grey-trash."

He shoved.

Gesbiek stumbled through and his feet came down on damp forest floor instead of packed mud. Behind him the gate shut and the latch dropped with a heavy clunk, and the sound of the Red-Tooth Clan cut off as though a door had closed on it, which was precisely what had happened.

And then something else happened.

The weight went away.

All of it. Grolm's presence, the pressure in his chest, the fog that had been sitting on his thinking since he woke up. It lifted the way mist lifts, all at once and completely, and the static in his vision folded itself down into something clean and still.

[INTERFERENCE: CLEARED]
[CALIBRATION: COMPLETE]
[ADMINISTRATOR MODE: ACTIVE]

Gesbiek stood on the wrong side of the wall and breathed.

His legs shook. His stomach had gone past cramping into a dull ache that never stopped. None of that had changed. What had changed was that he could think, for the first time in a day, without something driving a wedge into the back of his eyes.

He turned around and looked at the gate. Five years of it. Every meal he had not been given. Every kick. Every day of being scrubbed out of a room by everyone in it.

Then he turned back to the trees.

The Darkwood went on in front of him as far as anything went, green and shadow and appetite.

His stomach growled at it.

In the corner of his sight, something new blinked into place: a small green diamond, holding steady, pointing off to the northeast.

[FOOD SOURCE: 47m]
[ENTITY: TIER-1 GREEN | THREAT: LOW]
[OBJECTIVE: SURVIVE]

Gesbiek looked at that for a while.

Not advice. Not a warning about what would eat him. A direction, a distance, and something at the end of it that was smaller than he was.

Nobody had ever pointed him at anything before.

He took a step. Then another. His bare feet found their way over the roots on their own, five years of walking out to a heap of stones in the dark having taught them the trick of it, and this time he was not walking to the stones.

He was alone. He was exiled. He had been sentenced to be eaten by the forest, and the forest had every intention of trying.

But nobody was watching him with contempt. Nobody was laughing. There was no blue light coming through the fog behind him.

Gesbiek followed the marker northeast, and the Red-Tooth Clan got on with its morning, already forgetting the grey runt who had never counted for anything.