—Goblin captain (name unknown), shortly before his death by multiple stab wounds to the back.

CHAPTER 1 - Muck Duty

CHAPTER 1

Muck Duty

Jig hated muck duty.

He didn’t mind the actual work. He liked the metallic smell of the distillation room, where week-old blood and toadstool residue dried in their trays. He never complained about having to scrape the pans as clean as possible and mix the residue with boiled fat, spiderwebs, and a dark green broth that smelled of rotting plants. He liked the way it all went from a lumpy soup to a smooth, gelatinous slime as he forced his stirring stick around and around in the giant bowl.

Walking around with the muck pot hanging awkwardly from his shoulder as he doled out gobs of the slow-burning stuff wasn’t so bad either. True, if he got careless, it would be easy to splatter a bit of muck onto his skin. Even when it wasn’t lit, the mixture could raise blisters in a matter of seconds. When burning, the yellow and green flames were almost impossible to extinguish, which was why they used muck to light the lair. But Jig was careful, and unlike most muck workers, he had survived for several years with all his fingers intact.

Jig would have been perfectly happy if he weren’t the only goblin his age who still got stuck with muck duty. It was a job for children. Goblins Jig’s age were supposed to be warriors, but the few times Jig had gone on patrol had only sealed his reputation as the clumsy runt of his generation.

He adjusted the thin handle on his shoulder. The goblin lair held forty-six fire bowls. Each one was little more than a hole in the dark red obsidian of the walls, with a palm-size depression at the bottom to hold two days’ worth of muck. Jig squinted at the fourth fire bowl, the last in the corridor that led out of the distillation room and into the main cavern.

To Jig the flame was nothing but a blur. He could bring the fire into better focus by squinting, but that required him to put his face closer to the fire than he liked. The triangle of flame flickered as his breath touched it. The bowl was nearly empty. Whoever made the rounds yesterday had been lazy, and Jig would have to relight many of the bowls before he was done.

“Lazy children,” he muttered angrily. He dipped a metal spatula into the muck pot and carefully scooped out a large blob. This he scraped into the dying fire bowl, where the flame whooshed and grew as it touched new fuel. He scraped as much muck from the spatula as he could, then extinguished it in the sack of sand on his belt. It wouldn’t do to return a still-burning spatula to his pot.