Chapter Nine:
History Lessons; Associates
“Jym, you mentioned meeting Davien’s Mentor at a bar? A morning cup or some such?” Leira patiently waited for his response. The two had only just left the crumbling remains of the city to which they had tracked Oren Gray and the Fiend he served. The once sturdy stone buildings were giving in, far more quickly than simple disuse could explain, to the decay that follows the path of Fiends.
Leira had expected a few, if not several, of the locals to have turned up at the sounds of the battle. “Perhaps they are still scared.” She muttered this, not expecting a response as it was not a question, and Jym responded quickly.
“Every single one of them was food for the beast Leira. That pit was filled with broken skeletons, the promise of a free meal and warmth. For hundreds of people, in what we just left, that was the end.” Jym looked at his friend’s mother with an unusual intensity. Despite the magically welded goggles, and his usual attitude, he seemed genuinely aggrieved by such loss of life.
“I did not meet this Mentor, though now I know who you meant, at the Mornin’ Cup.” To Leira the sound of his voice now clearly suited him, with the croaking, gasping and wheezing it seemed to accentuate what he chose as his profession. Death always lingering just at the edge of our existence, she imagined, might have to rent the goblins’ voice. “I met your son there.”
“You said, ‘the other day’.” The tone of her voice was incredulous as she had, herself, met Jym several months prior when her son returned with news of the Fiend.
“Yeah, I mean seriously, just meet him and see what he does? Goes and gets himself poisoned.”
“My son?” The incredulousness had turned to one of confusion.
“No. No, no.” Jym blinked his eyes, first one then the other, in slow succession as he appeared to think. “Yes. Wait. Now hold on just one minute, I met you months ago. I met your son even before that.” He bared his teeth and continued, “He found me, you know that? I finally found the ‘heroes’ that killed my family but they were too much. Seriously, like, a garrison of them.”
“A garrison? That cannot possibly be right.” The road ahead of them might be long, but Leira knew she did not have time for this nonsense.
“Yes. Exactly. People kept yelling, ‘defend the garrison!’ and they just started coming in. If the first guy had stayed quiet it would have been just the people in the room. Then I had to expand my plans.”
“I still do not follow what you mean, any of it really, and it feels like I will not be getting to the heart of this anytime soon.” Jym nodded his agreement as Leira spoke.
“Yeah, it feels like something is just keeping us from talking about it. Weird.”
Leira wanted to shout that the only thing keeping the conversation from moving forward was the goblin himself, but she held her tongue. With Davien grievously wounded, and sleeping, in the back of their large wagon, Leira was unwilling to push Jymgreen too far. She still felt that he was unpredictable, in the extreme, despite his usefulness in a fight.
Leira settled on gruffly saying, “Yes, Jym, it does feel that way. Very much.”