Chapter 1

Daniel Szubarla was three days' ride and a long morning's hike out from Kovar Remeny when Eli finally showed him the Outrider's secret weapon. He'd been told of its existence on the first day of his apprenticeship and that he'd know what it was once he took his oath. That oath-taking had been three days before he'd left the relative safety of the city walls and almost a week ago total and he was trying not to get impatient. Still, it felt like he wouldn't be a real Outrider until he knew about the weapon.

It wasn't that anybody had said he was anything other than a real Outrider. He was partnered with an older man, but he was an actual partner. Last month, he'd been following a pair of Outriders around and his job had been to learn and assist. Now, it was to observe and report, the same as Eli. Still, it wasn't that much different from learning and assisting. Nobody was going to take his word for what he found unless Eli backed it up.

It did feel good when Eli introduced Daniel as "one of our new Outriders" to one of the farmers whose hospitality they'd relied on to get this far. But a few of them had thanked him for his service, which was awkward as he hadn't actually done any real serving yet.

This was real service, though. He and Eli hadn't seen another living soul since they left their horses back at the picket and headed out into the wilderness. They were scouting, looking for any signs of goblin activity. They hadn't found any yet, but they were still close to the picket.

That hadn't stopped Daniel from being diligent in using the skills he'd spent the last six years training in anticipation of this day. He'd moved silently, looked for telltale signs of passage, and kept his ears open. He'd also kept an eye on the weather, which was much more important out here where you had no place to duck into if the twisting rains came and you needed to get a tent up or shelter in place until they passed. The weather had sadly remained perfectly pleasant, robbing him of any chance to demonstrate his preparedness.

He and Eli had eaten a lunch of bread and soft cheese and washed up in a small stream before heading up into the foothills. Some of the goblin scouts could pick up a scent as easily as a dog and even strongly-scented foods could alert them to your presence. The Outriders were there to observe, but also to remain unobserved.

They'd taken up positions on a rise looking down into a green, wooded valley that stretched to a horizon farther than Daniel had ever seen. Even apprentice Outriders didn't venture too far from the fortress during their training. Two and a half days of his three-day ride out had been through unfamiliar territory. He'd studied the map of approved human habitations around Mount Kistestvere for years, but this was the first time he got to see all those little towns and farmsteads he'd only known as names.

Once they're reached the top of the rise, Eli had sat down with his back to a tree and brought out his pack like he'd done a hundred times already on this trip. Only this time, he said, "All right. Everything from here forward is an Outrider secret. You don't talk about it outside the company. Even the captain doesn't know all of it. You ever report to him directly or one of the officers, you tell them what you found, but not how you found it."

Daniel gave a slow nod, hiding his eagerness. "Is this about the secret weapon?"

Eli reached into his pack and paused. "I'm going to show you the secret weapon, but it's about a lot more than that. There are some things it's better off without everybody knowing. And there are some advantages we'd lose if the goblins knew about them. So, we tell as few people as possible."

Daniel really wanted to see the weapon, but he couldn't help ask, "Who would tell the goblins anything? They're the enemy, right?"

Eli nodded. "They're the enemy." He handed Daniel a stoppered clay pot that fit in the palm of his hand. "That's yours. Take care of it like you need it to stay alive. Destroy it if you think you're going to be killed or captured."

Daniel frowned down at the vessel. "What's this for?"

"That's the secret weapon." Eli retrieved a second pot and drew out the stopper with a soft pop, then gestured to a nearby tree. "Sit against that, facing the valley, and open it."

Eli did as he was told and looked down into the pearlescent white substance inside. "Does it ... make you invisible?"

Eli shook his head. "Where'd you get that idea?"

Daniel's smile was chagrined. "I had a bet with Arpad. He thought it was some kind of sword that detected goblins. I thought it might be like an invisibility ring or something."

Eli couldn't hide his smirk. He'd always been a patient teacher and there was a chance he might even be Daniel's father, but every once in while, he gave off a hint of exasperation at his young charges. "Well, you both guessed wrong. Sit back, get a little dollop like that..." He demonstrated, taking a glob the size of a pinky nail. "close your eyes and rub it on the lids. Keep your eyes closed until you start to see again."

Daniel frowned, but did what he said. He'd learned to do what he was told by older Outriders. Anybody who didn't learn that washed out of their apprenticeship long before this. The lotion was cool and minty and tingled a little as he rubbed it over his eyelids, applying it as evenly as he could.

At some point, the lotion stopped tingling and started to feel warm, then hot for a moment - just long enough to be startling before Daniel was seeing from a perspective a few feet over his own head. He drew in a surprised intake of air.

"Keep your eyes closed," said Eli. "But look at me."

Daniel's perspective swung around to his right and he was looking at a space where the air seemed slightly thinner than anywhere else, floating a couple of feet over Eli's head. Daniel found himself "looking" up and down, then letting his perspective swing in a full circle.

"All right." Eli gestured towards the valley with one hand. "Now, follow me."

The thin space in the air above Eli's head shot forward down the hill in front of them and, after an instant's hesitation, Daniel's perspective followed him, trees and brush flashing by on both sides too quickly to be more than a green blur. Just as abruptly, the scene stopped moving around him again.

"Don't worry," said Eli quietly. "Unless they've got a shaman with them and they're looking for us, they won't be able to see that we're watching."

Daniel laughed. "I think I won my bet. We are invisible."

Eli gave a hissing shush. "Keep it down. It's hard enough to split your focus between watching one place and listening at another. We don't want to get snuck up on while we're doing this."

Daniel nodded, a completely useless gesture since Eli's eyes were closed, but decided to let his silence be assent. Eli seemed to take it as such. "Tell me what you see."

Daniel looked around, down in the valley. Their perspectives were on the edge of what looked like a small, neatly-kept village. The houses were tiny and made of green wood, but the paths were clean and clear. A fire burned at the center of town. There was some sort of meat on a spit, but he couldn't identify it on sight and the magic of the Outrider's secret weapon didn't allow him to register smells. Plus, a man crouched in front the fire, obscuring his view.

"We're out past the picket," said Daniel. "There shouldn't be a village here."

Eli said nothing, waiting for more. Daniel thought he should get a closer look and his perspective shifted forward. He stopped it jerkily, but Eli still said nothing, so he moved his line of sight more slowly and deliberately. There was something about the man at the fire pit that seemed wrong somehow. He seemed to be of normal height, but his shoulders were too broad and his legs too short. He had the proportions of a dwarf.

And as Daniel's perspective swung around, his body back up on the hillside stiffened in alarm. "Goblins..." he whispered.

Outrider apprentices rarely if ever got to see goblins in the flesh until they took their oaths. They rode out to check on and repair shelters and water filters, to make sure nobody was collecting water in an unauthorized cistern, and sometimes to help rebuild a farm that had been destroyed in a fire or a raid. Once, Daniel had gone out in the aftermath when one farmer had, in spite of all the precautions they'd put in place, gotten caught out in the twisting rain, lost his mind, and murdered three neighboring families before he'd been stopped.

He'd seen the body of the murderer before it was burned. One shoulder was higher than the other, the muscles of the arm grown to massive proportions. His skin had turned a mottled green-gray and his feet grown to split his boots with vicious, yellow claws where his toenails had been.

Something about the memory caused him to look closer at the man cooking and realize he was a man, not a goblin at all. Yes, his proportions were wrong and his skin was closer to green than it should be, but Daniel knew better than most what goblins looked like. Eleven years his people had come out of the caves beneath Mount Kistestvere and established Kovar Remeny, goblins still populated his nightmares sometimes three or four nights a week.

"Not a goblin, a twisted man," Daniel said, still quietly. "I didn't know there were twisted men outside of the picket."

There was no humor to Eli's laugh. "That's all that's left outside of the picket anymore - just goblins and twisted men as far as the eye can see."

"There are the Calderans," Daniel protested. "They're outside of the pickets."

"Fair enough. But the Calderans are about as far away as it's possible to be - across an ocean on another island, surrounded by their own ocean of goblins and twisted men. I know you love those books of yours, so you must know what an ocean is."

Daniel did know what an ocean was - a vast plain of water even bigger than the valley they were now observing, unfiltered of the silver-gray sludge that turned men into monsters and too salty to drink even if you could filter it. That men had gone to great lengths to cross it in the past struck him as pure madness. He let the image form in his mind of goblins spread out from horizon to horizon as far as the eye could see and felt his heart speed fearfully at the idea. He felt himself grasping at any hope he could. "With their magic, couldn't the Calderans just blast their way through the goblins to us?"

For a few, long seconds, Eli didn't answer. Then, he said, "When the rains started and the waters rose, we had to make a forced march all the way to Kistestvere from ... some place that's now a thousand feet under the sea, I'm sure. There was a man in the Company we called Big Ed. I once saw him take a dozen men down when we used to fight men and nearly that number when we had to fight dwarves. Against goblins - the kind of short, wiry little bastards we faced in the early days, he was like a god. At that point, he was fighting with a ... wait."

Daniel listened up on the hillside first. He couldn't help but notice that his legs were starting to stiffen up and his ass was getting sore. But, then he realized there was something going on in the village down in the valley below. The man who'd been cooking had stopped and was now on his knees, bowing respectfully as a massive gray wolf padded into the circle of firelight. Astride its back was a man-shaped figure, but it wasn't a man. In the same way Daniel knew the man at the fire wasn't a gobin, he knew the goblin riding the wolf wasn't a man. And he wasn't one of those "short, wiry bastards" Eli had mentioned. He was enormous, powerfully built, and had a deadly, graceful symmetry that said he'd been born with the shape he now wore. As he dismounted, more people emerged from the houses around the village, gathered around the fire, and knelt facing the newcomer.

"Open your eyes," said Eli, a real hint of urgency in his voice. Daniel did and the village dissolved, replaced with the green canopy around where they sat. Eli rose stiffly and stretched, looking down into the valley as if he could keep watching from their vantage point, but there was no sign of habitation from this angle.

"Come on. We need to head back to Kovar." Eli was already reassembling his pack.

"Already?" Daniel stretched out his legs. "I thought we'd be out for at least a week."

"The Captain will want to know about this immediately," said Eli. "Nothing we learned in the next week would be this important."

Daniel followed obediently, shouldering his pack, and heading back towards the trail they'd followed to get this far. "I don't understand. Who was that?"

"He's a shaman - and a First Orc." Eli walked quickly as if he could get them home tonight by the sheer power of his legs. "And he shouldn't be anywhere within our riding. The first orcs are supposed to be north and east of here with Kistestvere and Kirali Hegyi between us. They're on the move and coming fast."

Daniel trotted to keep up with him. "What are the first orcs? Are they especially tough?"

"Tough and smart and strong." Eli searched for the turn-off to the next trail. It looked like he'd momentarily lost his bearings, but that was impossible. Most of being an Outrider was learning how to be aware of everything all the time. "Fortunately, there aren't very many of them and they usually keep to themselves. They don't work with other goblins and they certainly don't work with twisted men."

The sun was low on the horizon when Eli explained more. As they crossed over the old stone bridge that had been there since before the rains, he seemed to relax a little, looking back over his shoulder for pursuit less often. "The first orcs don't consider themselves goblins ... or even orcs really. They use completely different words for themselves and other orcs - 'jenchi' and 'orok.' For the whole time we've been here, they've stayed away and we've been happy to let them. They're harder to kill than a man and they don't bunch up and come at you in a screaming, disorganized pile like other orcs. They tend to understand strategy and tactics, which is something we frown on our enemies knowing about."

He stopped walking and looked back at Daniel to add import to his question. "Did you ever wonder why we drive the twisted men out beyond the picket instead of just killing them?"

"The Captain says it's because they're still men, even if the rains changed them." Daniel frowned and thought about it. "Of course, we still kill other men when they do wrong. He had no trouble executing Janos Szuezak for stealing food last year."

Eli turned and resumed walking. They were on a rocky, uphill slope that looked back on most of where they'd walked today. The valley was already an indistinct green blur in the distance. As he often did, he let Daniel think things out for himself. It made Daniel not want to disappoint him. He searched for any reason why it would be better to have the twisted men alive outside the picket instead of quietly dead. Finally, he asked, "The twisted men we saw in that village ... do they usually cooperate with the goblins?"

Eli smiled. "No. They usually fight the goblins as hard as anyone if they come within three days' walk of here."

Daniel was so pleased at getting the right answer that it took him several seconds to stop smiling. He got a clear image of the twisted men back in the village not just welcoming the first orc shaman, but kneeling before him in obeisance.

He stopped dead in his tracks, "Fuck."

Eli nodded. "Fuck indeed. If the first orcs and the twisted men are working together, that's more than enough trouble. But if the goblins get wind of it, they may come in force as well. And that would be extraordinarily bad."

The way Eli had described the goblins out past the picket as an ocean made Daniel think of descriptions he'd read of storms at sea, massive walls of water taller than the Kovar crashing down with unbelievable force, breaking up boats and drowning men. He tried to push the images that flashed across his mind's eye down, but they became increasingly vivid instead - a wall of gnashing teeth and long, spindly arms with yellow nails rising from the floor to the ceiling of the Great Hall of the tunnel complex under Kistestvere where he'd been born and spent the first six years of his life in. He knew it hadn't been like that and it was hard to distinguish what had really happened from the dreams that had plagued him ever since, but he was pretty sure the goblin horde had climbed halfway up the walls in places, five times the height of a man standing.

At some point, he'd stopped walking and stood shaking in the center of the path. Eli's hand was on his upper arm. "Come on. We've got a plan for this. If the Captain believes the goblins will come in force, he'll have the farmers harvest everything that's grown enough to be eaten, pull back the pickets all the way to the outer courtyard of the kovar, and fight them until they give up. Most goblins are basically cowards. Once you show them how much easier it is to go elsewhere, they generally pack up and go. If we can discourage them quickly enough, there will still be time to plant another crop this year. It's been getting warmer every year."

Only a small part of Daniel was listening. The rest was imagining an endless plane of goblins coming in waves, trying to climb the outer walls of the kovar, their bodies piling up until they could climb over one another and take the outer courtyard. Eli's reassurances sounded distant and tiny and false. Still, he wanted to believe them.

"What then, though?" he demanded. "We drive them back. They go somewhere else. We stay here, surrounded. What's the point if we're just going to die anyway?"

Even though Eli was remarkably limber and dextrous for his age, he was still almost fifty and, right at that moment, his face showed every one of those years. "Even before the rains, we were all going to die eventually. Everybody does - even the elves. What was ever the point of fighting not to? You fight so you don't die today and you deal with tomorrow when it comes."

"Gods and saints." Daniel spit on the ground. "That is the darkest fucking thing I've ever heard you say."

"That's why we don't tell people outside the Company everything. The truth is pretty grim. We fight because there might be a chance to get out of this mess in the future. And the only way we're ever going to get to take that chance, we need to stay alive for it. But I won't honey-dip it for you. Between us, the Cenwulf, and the Calderans, we're most damned near the last humans on Tierra. After we're gone, it'll just be goblins and monsters."

Somehow, hearing it laid out so starkly made it easier to take. They would fight and they would survive to fight some more or they would die. He forced his breathing to slow and nodded his gratitude.

"If it makes you feel better, it might all be moot if the oceans don't stop rising," said Eli. "Even if the goblins do win, they could still all drown in the end."