Chapter 63 : The Fortress
Evan turned the pneumatic rifle over and considered what Nobi had described. Steam-driven artillery. The principle was straightforward once stated: water heated to steam, pressure directed through a barrel, cannonball launched by thermodynamic force rather than chemical explosion or magical array. He had no doubt it worked. What he didn't understand was how a civilization capable of that had ended up here.
"You can go," he said.
Nobi did not go. His face went grey instead, and he pressed his forehead to the ground. His eyes, in the instant before his head went down, showed something calculating.
"Don't let him leave," Small Shuang said from Evan's hair, with considerable venom. "He almost killed me."
"I'll decide that," Evan said.
He was watching all of them: the goblin prostrate on the ground, the flower fairy radiating hostility from his head, the invisible unicorn somewhere in the trees behind him. Every one of them had their own reasons for the position they were in. He filed that and kept his expression neutral.
The shadow of the Wind Eagle crossed them before any decision was made.
Nobi saw it first — he had reason to be watching the sky — and went from prostrate to clutching Evan's leg in a single movement. The Eagle folded its wings and dove, locked onto the goblin with the focused attention of a predator that has found prey it wanted earlier and lost.
Evan sent Wind Blades upward. The Eagle had a wind-element defensive corona — the blades hit the rotating air in front of the protective sphere and lost most of their force before the sphere itself absorbed what remained. The dive slowed.
He formed an Ice Lance in his free hand. Five or six cubits, held rather than thrown, and when the Eagle was close enough he drove it upward into the dive's momentum rather than throwing against it. The ice went through the corona and the sphere together and buried itself in the Eagle's chest.
The Eagle came down.
Nobi released Evan's leg, threw himself at the fallen bird with an energy completely out of proportion to his size, and embraced the corpse with the happiness of someone whose problem has just become a meal.
"That bird is yours," Evan said. "You can leave now."
"Noble master." Nobi straightened up immediately, the calculation in his eyes suddenly fully visible. "Nobi, by his ancestors' names, most sincerely invites the honorable master to visit our tribe."
Evan considered this. A civilization that had maintained steam technology for some unknown number of centuries in the middle of a forest full of magical beasts, surviving on the structural integrity of their ancestors' engineering — he was genuinely curious. He agreed.
Nobi dragged the Eagle, which was larger than he was, through the forest with impressive determination. Shuang complained continuously from Evan's hair — about goblins in general, about Nobi specifically, about the smell ahead of them, about the philosophical problems with associating with vermin. Evan listened to none of it and heard all of it. Somewhere behind them, invisibly, Small Ling followed.
The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
The valley that held the goblin settlement appeared through the trees as what looked, initially, like a small hill that had grown in a geometrically implausible shape. Then the light shifted and the hill became a steel fortress, half-buried in accumulated earth, vines running over most of its surface. Where the growth had pulled away or been cleared, the metal beneath showed no rust — a deep matte black, a surface treatment more advanced than anything Evan knew from Earth's metallurgical history, achieving permanence that modern engineering couldn't match. The fortress had been mobile once; the mechanisms were still present but had been still for so long that they had become geology.
The goblin guards at the entrance took one look at Evan and Nobi together and made the reasonable decision not to shoot anyone. Evan looked them over as he passed: weapons ranging from pneumatic rifles to bows to knives ground from iron bars to literal sticks. No organizational coherence visible in the equipment. No evidence that anyone had made a decision about how a defensive force should be equipped.
Behind the fortress, in the valley's interior, a few agricultural plots had been scratched out of the soil and surrounded by heaps of loose stone that aspired to be walls. Something grain-like and something tuberous were growing in them, both struggling with the weeds that were winning.
He said nothing. He had read enough of this world's history to know that human civilization hadn't reached the level the goblins' ancestors had achieved, and here were the ancestors' descendants living in the husk of that achievement and calling it home.
Shuang pressed herself flat against his skull and went silent.
Three elders emerged from inside: Elder Taishan — who had a beard reaching his chest and introduced himself with a gravity that his height made comical and his sincerity made not comical at all — Elder Yali, and Elder Yasa. They led him through the interior corridor, left-right-left, narrating as they went.
The goblin god Basa, it emerged, had led an expedition into the stars ten thousand years ago and had not returned. Before leaving, Basa had prophesied a return, and a renewed goblin glory. The fortress was maintained in his honor. The prophecy was believed.
Evan listened and did not say anything about the gap between the prophecy's promise and the current evidence.
The control room occupied the highest internal level. Glass windows on all sides, a view of the valley below, and a floor almost completely stripped of whatever had once stood on it. The operations consoles were gone — removed for materials at some point, Evan guessed, by people who hadn't understood what they were removing. Only the mounting points remained, and one hole in the floor that had presumably once accepted a control column of some kind.
He sat at the table they indicated and reconstructed the original layout in his mind while the elders expressed satisfaction that he had recognized the fortress's movability.
"It's a pity," Elder Yali said, "that our later generations didn't know to preserve things. The god hasn't granted us miracles or divine power. But the fortress keeps us housed — not like some goblin groups who dig in the ground."
"Our group has several thousand individuals," Elder Yasa added. "The largest in this forest."
From Evan's hair, barely audible: "Shortsighted vermin, pleased with their own decline." He didn't respond to this.
"I'd like to see the steam cannon," he said. "And the mechanical warriors, if they still exist. I want to understand what your civilization achieved."
The elders brightened with the particular pride of people who have been given an opportunity to show something they know is impressive.
They descended one level. The door opened on a room built around three massive artillery pieces arranged at one-hundred-twenty-degree intervals, each connected to a boiler the size of a small room by a system of pipes that disappeared into the cannon's base.
Elder Taishan pulled an iron chain. The fortress wall separated along a seam that had been invisible until it moved, and a firing aperture opened, framing a section of the valley beyond.