Book 2 - She Is The Darkness by Glen Cook Read Free Book Online Page A

Presh only
get shorter out there before they finally wade into the ocean.
    Goblin was looking out to sea. A ship rode her anchor inshore.
Boats were plunging in the surf. Goblin was yammering a litany of
complaints. From the faces of his companions it was safe to guess
that they had heard it all before.
    What the hell was Goblin doing out there on that bleak
coast?
    I dropped back in time to listen in from the beginning.
    Goblin was tormented by hatreds. So what does the Captain do? He
sends nobody else but Goblin himself off to chart the unknown
coast. Goblin hated swamps. So naturally the first leg of the
journey took him downriver through the delta, which was one huge
swamp two hundred miles across, without one decent channel,
obviously totally unfit for human habitation because only Nyueng
Bao lived there.
    Goblin hated sea travel almost as much as One-Eye did. So what
did he get after cutting through the swamp, damned near building a
canal to manage that? A goddamn ocean with waves taller than any
self respecting tree. He hated deserts. So what did he find after
he finally got his little fleet past the end of the swampy coast?
Country so barren scorpions and sand fleas could not make a living
there. You baked during the day and froze at night and you never
got away from the sand. The wind blew it into everything. He had
sand in his boots right now . . . 
    “I wasn’t born for this,” Goblin complained.
“Nobody deserves this. Me less than most. What did I ever do
to the Old Man? All right, so maybe me and One-Eye drink a little
and get rowdy sometimes, but so what? It’s just youthful high
spirits if Sleepy does it.”
    Naturally he overlooked the fact that when he and One-Eye get
drunk they always start squabbling and tend to begin throwing
sloppily woven spells around, busting things up far worse than
Sleepy ever could.
    “A man has to cut loose sometimes, you know what I mean?
Nobody ever gets hurt, do they?” That was not an
exaggeration, that was an outright fabrication. “Hell, in a
world where there was any shred of justice I’d be retired
somewhere where the wine is sweet and the girls appreciate a man
with experience. I gave the Company the best centuries of my
life.”
    Goblin hated being in charge. That meant having to think and
make decisions. And it meant taking responsibility. Goblin hated
all those things, too. He just wanted to cruise through life doing
only what was necessary to get by while somebody else did the
thinking and made the decisions.
    Goblin hated hard work, too, and in this desert everybody was
going to have to bust ass to stay alive.
    I had Smoke take me up high, with the eagles had any been able
to survive out there to see what had Goblin so excited.
    He had not exaggerated about the desert.
    Near the coast the Shindai Kus was all golden sand. The surf
brought that in from the deep. Continuous gales carried that sand
inland, using it to scour the skin off hills that, as they grew up
and marched to the east, became the Dandha Presh. On the coast few
of the hills stood more than a hundred feet above the sand. None of
those showed the least sign of water erosion. It had not rained
there for a thousand years.
    I started to descend. Goblin and two others were walking inland
slowly, testing the surface. Something exploded out of the sand
ahead. An impossible something. A monster that could not exist in
this world, a devil thing the size of an elephant but with more
legs and hair than a tarantula plus some squidlike tentacles and a
scorpion’s tail thrown in for good measure. It staggered
around groggily. Obviously it had lain there a long time, awaiting
the footsteps that called it forth.
    Goblin’s companions fled. The little wizard cursed and
said, “Another thing I hate is things that jump up out of the
sand.” While the monster was still woozy he hit it with some
of his best stuff.
    Something like a yard wide, a three legged stained glass
throwing star appeared in his hand.