We made it into the hobgoblin camp without incident. We were all nervous though, since we really had no way to avoid walking into a trap if there was one. Maybe the other guys believed the hobgoblin messenger’s pitiful story, but I was simply counting on their lack of intelligence.
The beast men were camped in a large clearing in the trees about halfway down the slope of the mountain. It was nighttime, but even in the darkness I could see the rag-tag character of their camp. They had a few tents, all mended with bright patches apparently cut from old clothing. They seemed fond of fabric, and had a number of banners bearing no heraldry of any sort, apparently just there to billow in the wind. Most of them just slept on the ground, though, and barrels and sacks and casks of supplies were simply strewn about the camp in no particular order. Spears and shields were the only things that seemed to be organized.
There was a huge fire pit in the middle of camp, as if the hobgoblins were using it for ceremony or for cooking something really big. Nothing was lit when we came in, though. There were just a lot of old coals and ashes in it from the night before. The beasts seemed to be getting around okay without fire.
One thing that was obvious was there had been a fight there recently. An effort had been made to surround the camp with barriers, just makeshift barricades of logs and branches, but they were broken through in a couple places. Debris was strewn about with a lot of the supply crates broken. One of the tents was rent in half, just blowing from its stakes like so many more banners. The trampled ground was not unusual for a military camp, but the occasional dark patches and smears told of combat, and recent combat at that. I started to think the bastards were sincere in their plight.
We walked in spread out over a couple hundred feet, not wanting to be caught all at once in an ambush. Junior stayed by Grens, and the more hobgoblins that joined our little party the more it became apparent that they were almost as nervous about the skeleton as the burro was. It made them restless, and that made me restless. I guess Tallow felt the same way.
”Hold up,” he said as we entered the camp. “This is too much. There’s too many of you.”
”Bar we come ar peash!” cried the messenger.
”Yeah, yeah, but on our terms remember?”
”Peash!”
”Look, we’re going to need to even things out before we go into your little fort here. Give us a hostage.”
The hobgoblin just stared at him, and started to shake his head in bewilderment.
Tallow sighed and spoke slower. “Not fair. Too many beast men! One you come with us!”
”I don’t think so,” called a voice from deeper in the camp. We all looked over, but I at least couldn’t make anyone out in the darkness. The voice spoke clear Common, but he had the same throaty accent as the messenger. “You’re already here,” he went on. “And already surrounded. The time to make deals is past.”
”We already made a deal,” Tallow responded. “And the deal was we come on our own terms. These are our terms. Do it or we leave.”
The voice laughed, which sounded more like a snarl. “You humans joke about how stupid we are, and listen to you. You leave, we kill you.”
”Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you’re so smart. Let me make it easy for you. I got two requests—one, you come out where we can see you; two, you get us some hostages over here. You do those two things, you get our healer. If you don’t you can let us leave or kill us—your choice—but either way the healer’s gone in less than a minute. You do what we say or you lose, you got that?”
There was a moment of silence. To their credit, none of the hobgoblins drew their weapons. After a bit we saw a figure within the camp shuffling toward us. He was even taller than the other hobgoblins and wore a very fancy helmet with a mane running down the back. Other than that I couldn’t make out much in the limited light.
“Alright, here I am. And as for hostages, I’ll give you—“
”No, we’ll pick our own.”
”So pick.”
”The guy behind you, for starters.” Another hobgoblin emerged from the shadows, this one just as tall as their leader. He put his weapons on the ground and walked toward us. I stepped forward to tie his hands and check him for any hidden knives.
”And… One of your boys with the bows over there.” This one took a little longer, but sure enough, an unarmed hobgoblin came out from around a tent and I gave him the same treatment. “Thanks for being so fair-minded, Chief,” Tallow said.
”I’m not a chief. We don’t even have chiefs. And what makes you think we won’t just kill you anyway, if we want to? Why should we care about the lives of those two?”
Tallow just shrugged. “Maybe you don’t. But it seems prudent.”
At that point, another hobgoblin spoke to the leader. Not in Common, in their goatspeak. The leader listened and turned back to us.
”I am reminded that the longer we quibble over hostages, the harder your healer’s job becomes. Will you come in now?”
Tallow looked at me. I looked back at the others. Gunther shrugged. Grens scowled at me with a glare that would kill a cockatrice. With that, I knew we were doing the right thing. I nodded back to Tallow.
”We’re all yours, Chief. Just have your men keep their hands where we can see them.”
The chief barked some orders in their language and soon we were following him on a winding course between piles of debris and supplies. A number of hobgoblins hung loosely around us, seeming curious or bored but not aggressive. It didn’t take us long to come to a tent with its flaps pulled wide open. The stench of gangrene poured out and I could see there was at least a little light inside. We had reached their sick tent.
Eight hobgoblins with wounds of varying severity lined the place. They were sprawled on bloody cloaks and blankets, no real bedrolls to speak of. A young hobgoblin sat at the far end with an urn of water and a wet cloth, and a stick was staked into the floor. The top of the stick glowed softly, wrapped in some strips of cloth—it seemed like the cloth was in place to mute the light emanating from underneath. I knew right away it must be magical, but I had a hard time believing my eyes. It was like a torch without fire. How does that work?
Tallow immediately set about disturbing their shit, which is what he does best. Within a matter of moments he had half the tent torn down. The patients were exposed to the open air, but the weather was mild enough for this time of year; more importantly, we couldn’t be surrounded without knowing it.
Grens left the skeleton about thirty feet from the tent and set about walking from beast man to beast man, checking their bandages and feeling their heads and pulses. As I watched him go from one to the next I felt like something was wrong, or out of place—but I couldn’t figure out what it was. No point in saying anything to the others, I figured, since really, what wasn’t wrong with the situation? So I just watched the hostages and kept my hand on my sword.
Grens tried speaking to all of them, but none of them seemed to understand Common. The young hobgoblin eyed the newcomer, eyed the skeleton, and got up and left without being asked. The chief, or whatever he was, stayed nearby. After a while Grens addressed him.
”These guys are pretty bad off. Tonight I can only treat three of them. I can handle more in the morning, but there are more than three that won’t live that long. So do you want to choose, or should I?”
“I’ll choose.” I was surprised how the chief sort of snapped back. This was a guy who was used to being in command. He took a moment to stare at his wounded troops, then pointed out several of them. “The one on the end there… the one next to him… and the one with the missing eye.”
”The one on the end can hold out till morning.”
Grunt. “Alright, the one with the open belly there.”
Grens nodded. “And you know the eye won’t grow back, right?”
”I know.”
“Alright, let’s do this quick so I can start apologising to my god.” Grens went to each of the three chosen men in turn, laying his hands on them and mumbling. One after another their wounds healed up, just vanishing before my eyes. The one with the open stomach didn’t completely heal, but his guts went back into place and he only had a big gash of a wound where he was once split like an exploded soufflé. The three also regained consciousness, and seemed surprisingly unhappy to see their saviour standing over them.
”Can you do anything to make the others comfortable?” Asked the chief.
Grens scowled. “I’m no nurse. Get your boy back in here for that.”
The chief seemed as amused as he was put off. “Truly, you have all the makings to be a fine hobgoblin priest.”
”Your Common is wrong,” Grens retorted. “It’s ‘all the makings of’. The other way sounds funny.”
Tallow cut in quickly. “Let’s not talk about that. We have a message for you, Chief. A message from the count of this fine land.”
The chief rolled his eyes. “A count with thousands of strong warriors, no doubt, each bigger and braver than the one before him, all true of heart accomplished in war. Right?”
”Something like that.”
Suddenly I realized what was wrong. They had a battle big enough to wound eight of their warriors and ruin half the camp. There were no fresh graves around and if the fire had been a funeral pyre it was one of the shortest-lived I’d ever heard of. I decided it was worth it to interrupt Tallow’s peculiar strain of diplomacy.
”Excuse me, Chief, but I couldn’t help noticing… I don’t see your dead anywhere. Did you bury them already?”
The chief looked back and forth at us humans as if he hadn’t expected the question. It was the first time he looked off-balance. He recovered quickly, though, and responded with what must pass for wit among his kind: “No, our enemy took care of that for us. Assuming it is the sort to bury its droppings.”
We stared at him.
”O, you didn’t know. It was a tyrannosaurus that attacked our camp. Ate or carried off six of my finest. This lot barely dragged themselves away. It was attracted by our fire, near as we can tell.”
It took a moment for us to all digest just exactly what we had stumbled into. I was the one to speak first.
”So… it’s attracted by light?”
The chief smiled. “That’s why we had the torch hidden inside the tent.”
The tent that Tallow tore down. I tensed up and cupped my ear, hoping not to hear anything big stalking around in the darkness beyond the brush barricade...
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