Chapter 15: The War Drum

Chapter 15: Chapter 15: The War Drum

The goblins came back through the choke like a flood breaking a dam.

Goblins were vicious, but they were cowards. A goblin that lost a hand ran screaming. These didn’t. The first one through took Aveline’s sword through the shoulder and kept coming, clawing at her shield with its other hand. The second lost an arm at the elbow and didn’t even look down. It swung the stump at her face.

Boom. Boom. Boom.

Every beat of the drum ran through them like current. Elias could see it in the Link: with every boom, the red markers pulsed brighter, and the notice beside each one flickered. [BUFF: WAR CHANT — PAIN SUPPRESSED, STRENGTH +20%]

"They’re not stopping," he said.

"I noticed," Aveline said through her teeth.

For the first time since the cathedral, she gave a step. Then another. Thirty goblins were pressing into the choke now, climbing over each other, and the ones in back shoved the ones in front onto her blade whether they wanted to go or not. Her shield arm was shaking.

"Marcus—"

"Working on it."

Crack. A goblin dropped from the pile. Crack. Another. But the drums kept pounding, and for every goblin that fell, two more came up the slope with their eyes glowing.

"The drummer," Elias said. "Kill the drummer, and the buff goes."

"I know. I can’t see him." Marcus’s voice had gone flat and calm, the way it did when something was wrong. "They lit the brush on the ridge. It’s all smoke up there, and the Link can’t paint what I can’t see."

Elias looked up. The ridge above the bone wall was wrapped in grey-white smoke rolling thick off burning thornbushes. Somewhere inside it, the drum boomed, and the whole ravine shook.

Then he looked at the right wall, at the goat track the wolf riders had used, a narrow ledge zigzagging up the red rock toward the ridge. He checked the distance markers: twenty-two meters from Aveline to the top of the track.

Inside the range.

"Marcus," he said. "I’m going to get you a line."

"Rule two," Marcus said immediately.

"You said breaking position to cover a blind side is right." Elias was already moving toward the right wall. "The drummer is our blind side."

A half-second pause from the rock. Then: "Go. Stay inside thirty. Don’t be a hero."

"Go," Aveline agreed, and a goblin’s skull cracked against her shield rim. "I’ve held worse with fewer."

Quick Step carried him up the first switchback of the goat track in three long strides. The ledge was barely wider than his boots, the rock crumbling under him, the drop to the riverbed growing with every step. An arrow clipped his sleeve. He didn’t stop.

Halfway up, the smoke swallowed him.

It was thick and bitter and stung his eyes, and the Link went fuzzy at the edges as the white lines dissolved into grey. He could still sense the markers around him, the way you sense furniture in a dark room. He could sense the range too, a faint tug behind his ribs like a rope pulled taut. Twenty-six meters. Twenty-seven.

He came over the lip of the ridge and nearly ran straight into the drum.

It was enormous, a hide stretched over a truck tire and set on a stone outcrop. A hobgoblin twice Elias’s size was beating it with arms like bridge cables, and two spear goblins stood guard beside it, all three just shapes in the smoke.

One of the guards saw him and opened its mouth to shout.

Elias moved first. Quick Step took him low under the spear, and his dagger found the guard’s throat before the shout came out. The second guard lunged. He let the spear slide past and kicked the goblin off the ridge into the smoke.

The drummer didn’t stop. It just turned its head and watched him with yellow eyes, keeping the rhythm. Boom. Boom.

So Elias stabbed the drum.

The dagger punched through the hide with a sound like a balloon bursting. The rhythm broke. For one beat, the war chant faltered all down the ravine, and Elias heard goblins below scream as their pain came flooding back.

The drummer roared. It grabbed the ruined drum by its rim, swung it up like a shield, and came after him.

Elias ran, not away but out: backward along the ridge, out of the smoke, onto the bare red rock at the cliff’s edge, where the wind cleared the air and anyone on the left side of the ravine could see.

The drummer burst out of the smoke after him, drum raised, mouth wide.

"Line," Elias said.

Crack.

The drummer stopped. A neat hole had appeared just under its jaw, right where the Link had always painted the red point. It swayed. Then it toppled backward off the cliff and fell end over end into the ravine, drum and all.

The drums were silent.

Below, the battle turned in a single breath.

Without the chant, the goblins felt everything at once: every cut, every broken bone, every wound they’d ignored. Their eyes went dark. The pile in the choke collapsed into a screaming, scrambling mess, and Aveline stepped forward into it, then forward again, until the goblins broke and fled up the ravine toward their wall.

"Nice," Marcus said. "Now get back inside twenty."

Elias didn’t move. From up here, he could see what the smoke had hidden.

Past the bone wall, the ravine split around a tall spire of rock crowned with a watchtower of lashed timber. A rope bridge hung between the tower and the ridge where Elias stood: thirty meters of frayed rope and splintered planks, swaying over a hundred-meter drop.

The tower door opened.

The chieftain came out slowly, as though he had all the time in the world. He was a hobgoblin, taller than Aveline, in armor hammered from rebar and car doors, his face a map of old scars. He carried an axe whose head had been cut from an excavator bucket, still flecked with chipped yellow paint.

He looked down at his routed warband. He looked at Elias on the ridge. Then he walked to his end of the bridge and slammed the axe into the post three times.

Boom. Boom. Boom.

Not a drum this time. A challenge.

Aveline came up the goat track behind Elias, her armor streaked with goblin blood, breathing hard but even. She studied the chieftain for a long moment.

"He wants a duel," she said.

"We don’t do duels," Marcus said over the Link. "We do sniper fire."

"If I don’t go, he’ll cut the bridge and run," Aveline said. "Then he’ll come back next week with another warband." She rolled her shoulder, checked her shield strap, and looked at Elias. "Give me your word you won’t interfere unless I’m losing."

"And if you’re losing?"

She gave him the small, tired smile he was learning to recognize.

"Then interfere."

She stepped onto the bridge, and the ropes creaked. On the far side, the chieftain stepped on too.