Azira had no idea how Melissa had wrangled the tickets to get back to the Kingdom, but with only half a day’s ride left until they arrived in the middle of Howlie, a fair-sized village in the eastern province of the nation, the goblin skirmisher found that he didn’t ultimately care. Copies of The Reach, a multi-national paper, had been magically delivered to the train’s porters, and Azira found himself staring at the second story on the front page, just below the fold:
‘Magical Advisor to Crown Prince Terrance Ousted’, read the headline. Azira swiftly scoured the story, banging on the door to Bruce’s sleeper cabin less than five minutes after having finally gotten out of bed himself. The retired constable, bleary-eyed and wearing only a pair of pale blue sweatpants and a long-sleeved shirt, blinked mutely at the goblin as Azira held the paper up for him to look at.
“What am I looking at here, Az,” Bruce asked muzzily.
“Look at the headline for the second story! Below the fold,” Azira added. A moment later, the paper was snatched violently out of his little green hands, but he didn’t care; the shine of jubilation on Bruce’s face more than made up for it. “She did it, Bruce. Gods know how, but Melissa got him tossed out on his ass!” Bruce’s excitement seemed to fade after a moment, and he suddenly stood up ramrod straight.
“I know how she did it,” he said, handing Azira the paper back after folding it properly. “And I suspect she doesn’t feel the least bit good about it.” Bruce reached into the compartment, pulling on a bathrobe that matched his sweatpants, and he motioned Azira ahead of him down the narrow passageway of the passenger car.
Soon, they arrived at Melissa’s compartment, and she didn’t look much more awake than Bruce had minutes earlier when she slid the door open and waved them on in. Bruce and Azira sat on the bench across from her little fold-down bunk, which she folded up with a broad yawn. Bruce motioned to her, and Azira offered up the paper. She let out a harsh snort, a wry grin pulling at the corner of her mouth.
“It worked,” she muttered.
“I know you don’t like how it happened, but yes, it worked,” Bruce said. The humes locked eyes for a moment, and she let out a sigh, nodding. Steve and Azira looked back and forth between them, confused.
“I’m clearly missing something here,” the goblin skirmisher interjected.
“It’s not a very well-kept secret that certain members of the Royal family have some, less than desirable character traits,” Bruce offered.
“They’re bigots,” Melissa clarified bluntly. “They’re bigots, and they don’t trust illecks, and we found information that suggested almost unequivocally that Toka Mano is half-illeck, and therefore not to be trusted. I suggested as much in my letter to the Royal Office of Petition.”
Silence fell over the quartet then for a couple of minutes. Azira knew well how Melissa felt about such things; the guilt she must feel at capitalizing on the Royal Family’s own prejudices had to be brutal. He finally quietly offered, “We can leave you alone, if you want.”
“No, it’s fine,” she replied with a sniffle, eyes cast down toward her own feet. “It’s repulsive, resorting to something like that, but I just didn’t think there were any other good options for us to deal with Toka Mano. In a head-on confrontation, he would likely turn us all into so much ash. Just like Harip.” She cleared her throat and continued. “I don’t know about you guys, but I think our jobs here are just about finished up. The only person left for us to deal with is Jack Ressling, and I don’t think I have a good enough reason for us to really keep this thing going.”
“They lied, Melissa,” Bruce said. “Not to just you, and me, and Azira and Steve. They have deceived the entirety of the realms, painted themselves as heroes.”
“They did do a lot of good, though,” she replied. “Pel Droma’s forces caused a lot of damage, killed a lot of people. They weren’t innocent, and someone had to stand up to them.”
“The whole Kingdom stood up to us,” Azira shot back. “Don’t forget, Mel, I started that conflict on the other side of things. It was war, though, and in war, nobody comes out clean. Anyone who tries to make themselves out to be a saint in the aftermath deserves to get taken down a few pegs, and that’s precisely what we’ve been doing. We’ve got one person left to deal with,” he said, hopping off of the bench and stepping over to the compartment door. “We take a bite out of Jack Ressling, and then we can be done with this whole business.”
He didn’t wait for any kind of reply, sliding the door aside and making his exit. After he was gone a minute, Bruce remarked, “You have to forgive his fervor, Mel. He was raised and trained as a skirmisher, a front-line combatant. He’s not used to taking in victories that don’t result in dropping bodies.”
“So what does he do when this is all over, Bruce? For that matter, what do any of us do,” she asked, putting her face in her hands, elbows on her knees as she slouched forward. Bruce put a staid hand on her shoulder.
“We live on, Melissa. As best we can, we live on.”
**
When he set the stool down, Jack found Oblat K’To sat up on his bunk, a newspaper of some kind in hand. The hobgoblin war chief rustled the paper and swung his legs over the side of the bunk and smiled at the swordsman. “Fascinating reading here, today,” the greenskin snarked.
“Still your tongue, Oblat,” Jack snapped back, seating himself on the stool. “I need some information from you today.”
“And what do I get in return for that information, Jack,” the war chief asked, setting the paper down on his bunk as he stood up and approached the bars of his cell. He grasped the bars tightly, trying to shake them a little. “Behind these, I’m not exactly able to enjoy much of anything you could give me.”
Jack took a deep breath, eyes closed. He hadn’t wanted it to come to this, but he had seen few options remaining to him. Talya was on the run now, an official arrest warrant signed off by the High Council of Ja-Wen city-state for her involvement in the Darong Kri’s activities over the last decade. This, of course, had been kicked off by numerous witnesses at a bookstore relating to authorities that the rogue had used a noxious smoke bomb in an enclosed space, which was a violation of local law in the city.
Jarek Ko’s mercenary company had been forced to completely dissolve, because all of their protection contracts had completely dried up thanks to some very bad press coverage.
Toka Mano had been ousted from his post as Royal Magical Advisor to Crown Prince Terrance of the Kingdom of Graneck. Jack had no idea where the mage had disappeared to in his disgrace.
Finally, he opened his eyes and looked up at the war chief of Pel Droma’s forces. “I will have you released, Oblat. I offer you your freedom,” Jack said quietly. The hobgoblin took a step back from the cell’s bars, and stared mutely at him for a long minute.
“What do you want to know, Ressling,” the war chief finally asked.
“Firstly, do you still have allies in the Kingdom from your days of the campaign? I may be your only visitor, but I know you get correspondence here, letters.”
“I do still have some cohorts here, yes. They’ve managed to adapt to life as citizens of the Kingdom. Why?”
“I’m going to want you to use your influence to get them to help me with something,” Jack said. “Can you do that?”
“Without question,” the hobgoblin replied immediately. “What else?” Jack came up off of the stool then, and pulled a pouch of coin off of his belt, and a key from his pocket, sliding it into the lock on his cell door.
“I may have to ask you to help me tell a few folks a story.”
**
The soldier raised an eyebrow at the broad old constable, taking in his two companions and the rat sitting like a parrot on the goblin’s shoulder. “Your request is rather unusual, sir,” the soldier noted, scratching a spot under his lupine chin. He was one of the Kingdom’s few lycanthrope troops, a red tribe werewolf in loose-fitting boiled leather armor, a spear held in hand. “I’d ask you to wait over there for a minute,” he said, pointing toward a kind of picnic table situated some thirty feet away from the gates of the base.
The township of Howlie was only a half hour’s walk from the base, which was itself a smallish and less-than-impressive location unto its own. Primarily, it served as a deployment center in the event the King decreed that forces were required along the eastern border with the Greenskin Nation. No training or production specializations were housed at this location.
However, public record revealed that this base was where one sergeant Trent Acker, veteran field commander of the Pel Droma Conflict, took up residence. Bruce led the group over to the picnic table, Azira and Melissa sitting down while the dark-skinned constable stood facing the base gates, his arms folded over his chest.
Bruce had gone through Acker’s book several times, and despite the professional and military tone utilized by the sergeant throughout the text, Bruce had been able to pick up on a general feeling that was conveyed in the cadence of his narrative recollections- Trent Acker didn’t care much for the Saviors at all. In point of fact, it had taken several re-reads for Bruce to realize that Acker had only, in fact, once in his book referred to the quartet of Ressling, Mano, Ko and Jacobson as the Saviors of Graneck. He referred to them in most of the text by their individual surnames, and nothing more.
Bruce had decided that it was time to approach certain of their objectives with plain honesty, and the morning of their arrival in Howlie, he told the others that he was going to be direct with the troopers of the Royal Army. “I see no reason to dissemble with them. We want to speak to sergeant Acker, to ask him about his experiences with the Saviors during the campaign, find out if there’s anything he didn’t include in his book. It’s pretty simple, and shouldn’t really cause us any trouble.”
Azira, he could tell, had been forced to bite back a smarmy response to this.
After ten minutes of quiet waiting, Bruce pushed himself off of the picnic table, having been leaned back against it for a couple of minutes. A trio of soldiers came their way, the red tribe gate guard, a lizardman in the standard chain armor of most of the Kingdom’s soldiery, and a human in the same, but also wearing a black travel cloak clasped shut at the neck.
The trio of soldiers came to a halt ten feet from Bruce and company, and the hume, a set of four blaze yellow stripes sewn into a patch that partly covered his left arm, nodded to the lizardman. The reptilian fellow made a few brief gestures with his hands, a shimmer of purple force flickering from his fingertips; Bruce felt a queer tingle run through his head, a brief but unpleasant sensation. The lizardman nodded to the hume, who then flapped his hand at his subordinates, sending them back toward the base’s gates.
“I am sergeant Trent Acker, His Majesty’s Royal Army,” said the human tightly, his hands clasped behind his back. “I’m told that some citizens wanted to speak to me regarding my book. I don’t do autographs.” Bruce, Azira, Melissa and Steve all exchanged looks, and could not but break into snickering, which seemed to irritate the veteran soldier. “It comes up more often than you might think,” he grumbled.
“Look, no offense, tin man,” Steve piped up, sitting on his haunches on the edge of the picnic table, which caused the sergeant to take a brief double-take. “That ain’t what this is, not in the slightest, though we did have a couple of questions about your book.” The sergeant appeared to relax a little, bringing himself around toward one side of the table’s benches. Azira swept around to the opposite side, sitting squarely between Bruce and Melissa so that they could face Acker as a group.
“Pray, ask your questions, then,” Acker said with a sigh. “I seem to be doing a lot of that lately.” He scoffed a little and looked aside from the raised eyebrows of Bruce and Melissa, then let out a low sigh. “I had a visit recently from another curious citizen, though not of our fair Kingdom here. A vulpesin fellow,” he said.
Azira felt the vibration through the bench seat as Bruce involuntarily flinched just a little. “Smarmy fellow? Likes to use contraptions,” he asked. Acker just blinked rapidly at him, then gave a fractional nod.
“Aye, and I assume by your questions that you’ve had some dealings with the man,” said Acker.
“Just myself,” said Bruce. “What was he after with you?”
“At first, he had questions for me,” Acker replied, looking away from the group, his eyes unfocused. “But over the course of his, visit, to my home on base here, it turned from an interrogation to a relaying of information from him to me, a revelation that I haven’t quite figured out how to grapple with.”
After a brief pause, Acker collected himself and proceeded to explain to the humes, rat and goblin what the vulpesin had effectively explained to him, that Pel Droma had been dead before the Saviors of Graneck got into the captured castle of the Royal Family.
The sergeant left the quartet sitting there in stunned silence as he returned past the base’s gate guards. After what felt like an eternity, Steve broke their quiet by asking, “Well, what the hell do we do with this?” Nobody had an immediate answer, but when it came time to give a momentary one, it was Melissa, whose reading had gone beyond just the memoires of Acker and Jacobson, who gave it.
“The war chief who served as the leader of Pel Droma’s ground troops and his right-hand man was another hobgoblin, a man named Oblat K’To. He’s been locked up in the cells at Ruby Outpost, south of Bronze Pot by a couple of days’ walk. He’s been right there, all along,” she said. “And we went right past him.”
**
He could have forced all manner of promises from K’To before releasing the hobgoblin, could have compelled him to vow before the eyes of his ancestors never to speak of what he knew to be the truth of the last days of Pel Droma. Such an oath was never broken by his people; the hobgoblin species was peculiarly honorable that way, Jack found.
When he’d started fighting against the rebel sorceror’s forces, he had been confident that not only was he more skilled than most of them, but that he was on the side of righteousness. As the campaign had worn on, however, the young swordsman had become less and less certain of that. Yet Jarek, Talya and Toka had never wavered in their surety, never questioned aloud whether or not Pel Droma might actually have a legitimate grievance against the Crown.
For the most part, if he was going to be honest with himself, Jack Ressling hadn’t thought about the idea either, not during the conflict. But afterwards, during his visits and conversations with Oblat K’To, the greenskin war chief had put forth observations that forced the young human to put genuine time into thinking about the possibility that the Kingdom of Graneck might not be so holy and pure.
Further evidence that the greenskin peoples were more noble than they were usually given credit for stood behind him at that moment, a hodgepodge gathering of goblins, orcs, hobgoblins and one ogre, a massive, lumbering mass of green muscle barely restrained under loose animal skins. They had been waiting for him where Oblat’s letter suggested they would be found, a dozen assorted folken of the greenskin races. Only kobolds and trolls had no representative among their number, but Jack was impressed nonetheless with their discipline in answering to his simple commands.
One of the orcs approached Jack where he sat against the base of a pecan tree, situated atop a stout hill a quarter of a mile from the main trade road. Dressed in much-hammered copper half plate, the warrior scowled down at Ressling, his brutish hands hooked by the thumbs through a gear belt. “Striker just spotted them, heading south on the road,” the orc reported. “Dall and Korta could easily take some early shots if you want them to move to the next hilltop, give us six hundred yards or so advantage space.”
Jack sighed and pried himself up off of the springy grass. “No. We stick to the plan I gave you,” he said, and the orc grunted his acceptance, moving off back toward the clutch of his people.
**
Azira felt the rat’s claws digging into the rough leather covering his shoulders, and slowed his pace. “What’s the matter,” he inquired.
“Something’s up,” Steve rasped, darting his head this way and that. “I think we’ve got trouble coming.” Azira turned to look to Bruce, and found that the veteran constable’s hand had dropped to the hilt of his sword.
“He’s right,” said Bruce, slowing his pace as the group drew level with a low hillock on their right to the south, and a sloping wild wheat field on the north. “I can feel eyes on us.” Melissa had drawn an arrow from her stock and had it notched, though not drawn yet. Azira saw this, and as Bruce drew his blade, the goblin skirmisher felt the old familiar chill drop over him.
His blades were in hand in the blink of an eye. Yes, he thought, his inner voice an excited hiss. This is what I’ve been waiting for! But when the moment of truth seemed like it was about to arrive, he found himself locking up, unable to decide what to do.
Around a bend in the road some seventy yards down the trade road, a group of four hobgoblins, wearing dense beaten chain armor and carrying short swords, came into view. The moment they drew into full view in the road, they halted, one of them pointing his weapon to the group’s south. Azira wheeled that way, and spotted a pair of goblins with long bows drawn and trained on them from elevation.
Azira looked back to the hobs, and the sword-pointer now had his weapon aimed south. Towering over the heads of the wheat, he spotted a lone troll, a massive stone club crooked up against its neck and shoulder. Completing the circle, Azira looked back the way they’d just come, and found himself staring at a line of orcs, dressed for battle in copper half plate, axes and spears held ready.
They were trapped in a ring of green death.
“This could go very badly for us,” Bruce commented, sounding oddly calm as he slowly knelt down and set his sword on the road.
“What the hells are you doing,” Azira snapped, moving without thinking into a defensive posture. Melissa had set her bow down, and stood with her arms raised above her head, her eyes full of terror as she spun this way and that to look at their potential assailants. “You’re just giving up?”
“Azira,” Bruce said through gritted teeth. “I don’t think they’re here to fight us.” The skirmisher took a moment to more carefully consider his fellow greenskins, to observe the way they stood. The men ahead of them had a relaxed posture, despite their weapons in hand. The orcs with their axes and spears didn’t appear ready for a battle. The goblins up on the hill may have had bows in hand, but their strings weren’t drawn.
Azira would not drop his weapons, but he did put the blades back in their sheathes. As soon as he did, the hobgoblins ahead of them parted down the middle of their ranks, making way for a lone, easily recognized human fellow to stride forth from behind them. Jack Ressling, dressed in simple black leather armor, his famed saber clanking on his left hip, approached at an easy pace, a strangely friendly grin quirking his lips.
Azira had seen the hume at a distance before, and seen plenty of portraits of him around the Kingdom, but before this moment, he’d never noticed the raw pink scar that ran from his right ear down under the shoulder padding of his armor. He hadn’t been as flawless a swordsman as portrayed, it would seem. The hume stopped a few yards away from them and stood with his hands on his hips.
“I think we have some things to discuss,” he said amiably. He extended his right hand to his side, and Bruce, Azira, Steve and Melissa looked that way, spotting a kind of improvised cooking firepit situated a few yards into the wheat, roughly hewn logs arranged around it. Ressling began heading over to the ring around the pit, not waiting for the others to follow him.
Several minutes later, they were all seated around the pit, steaming cups of coffee in earthenware mugs, a queer air of tension wafting off of all of them. Ressling cleared his throat after a sip and swept from one to the next among them with a sharp look. “You three have been very, very busy, it would seem,” he began.
“Four of us,” Steve chimed in, causing the swordsman to flinch back.
“You’re a rat,” Ressling said. “A talking rat.”
“Yeah, and you butchered my entire family to practice how to swing that sword of yours,” Steve shot back. Ressling seemed once again non-plussed, shaking his head.
“I probably did, yes,” Ressling admitted. “There’s been a lot of things that I did that weren’t, well, great. Melissa,” he then said, looking right at her. “I think I owe you more apologies than just about anyone I’ve ever known, growing up. I’m surprised to see you’re a part of this, whatever you guys are.” She had no response for him, and to Azira’s surprise, she seemed the calmest among them all, even given the looming presence of the other greenskins nearby, obviously waiting for a kill order if necessary.
“There’s an unflattering term for what we are,” Melissa began after a minute’s quiet. She shifted on her log beside Bruce, seated directly across from Ressling, Azira on the log to her left. She looked to him then, giving the goblin skirmisher a nod. “It’s actually a term that came into common use among the goblin clans some two-hundred years ago, during an inter-clan conflict between Clan Batang and Clan Toriska. They used it to describe castoff fighters and people who didn’t have any particularly impressive skills to make them stand out from the crowd of commoners.”
“What’s the term,” Ressling asked.
“Fodder squads,” Azira answered. “They called them fodder squads, because in a mass battle, they were the first people thrown into the fray to soak up the worst of the initial damages.” Ressling set his mug aside and let out a snort of a laugh.
“I don’t see how that applies to you four,” he said.
“My family was a used for a beginner’s practice,” Steve replied.
“My friends were used as training dummies for your sexual prowess once you were a celebrity,” Melissa added.
“My hometown was burned to the ground because your friend Toka Mano never figured out how to control fire magic,” Bruce provided.
“And my clan was wiped out to give you your start as a Savior of Graneck,” Azira finished through clenched teeth, eyes narrowed on the human swordsman. “I am Azira, of Clan Batang, and I am the last of my people. And you, Jack Ressling,” he snapped, jabbing an oft-broken green finger at him. “You will answer for that some day.”
**
Ressling had stalked away from the group after Azira’s threat, and the four of them remained seated on their logs, waiting for the hobgoblins standing behind them to swing their weapons and do them in. Ten minutes they waited, until finally the young hume returned, easing back down onto his own log with a heavy sigh.
“I have a great deal to answer for, it would seem,” he said gravely, not looking any of them in the eyes, but staring down into the fire pit. He pulled a small pouch off of his belt, sprinkling a fine red powder over the logs situated there, and with a drop of water from a canteen, the logs burst into a warm, inviting fire. “But you guys don’t know the whole story. You don’t know why you need to stop doing what you’re doing.”
“We’re doing what needs to be done,” Bruce replied. “You and your friends, the Saviors of Graneck, you’re a bunch of frauds! You need to be made to answer for it, and gods know the four of us could never take you on directly! That’s why we have done what we have done, Ressling. We all knew there was no way to do that and survive. You need to be exposed to the public.”
Ressling just shook his head, still staring into the flames. “You don’t get it. You can’t understand. I certainly didn’t, not at first.” He finally raised his head and looked Bruce dead-on. “Do you think it was our idea? To call ourselves the Saviors of Graneck?” Bruce tilted his head to one side, curious to hear the much younger man out. “Let me tell you a story, folks. It may help you understand exactly why you need to put this mission of yours to bed.”