Chapter 2: No Goblins in the Scrub

Godwin found the fortieth goat track an hour short of noon and sat back on his heels.

"Goat," he said. "Goat, goat, and —" he turned a stone with the spear-butt — "more goat."

Leofric had the ridge above the cemetery, a spine of scrub oak and crumbled limestone above the coast. He was not tracking. He was on a boulder with his spear across his knees. Gulls brawled over a fish-head in the harbor below. "We've been out here since dawn and the most dangerous thing we've spotted is your cooking."

"My cooking didn't kill you."

"Give it time."

Erlich worked his own line fifty yards east, bent over bare clay where the wind had scoured the topsoil off. He hadn't spoken in an hour. He tracked without fuss, discarding what didn't matter. Nothing had mattered since first light. The scrub south of Magyar was generous with its emptiness.

This was the work the crown paid for. Not the killing — the killing was irregular, a thing that happened when the tracking paid off. The King's Rangers drew their stipend from King Gerold's coffers to walk the forests and scrublands of the Matorral, counting game for the royal foresters, marking the spoor of beasts before they grew into problems, mapping the territories of anything that hunted men. A creature detected at a distance was a village still breathing. A monster mapped was a monster half-slayed.

And the coin that bought their arrows and their bread? That came from the capitol's wizards, who bought monster corpses with a miser's hunger for gold — bones, hides, glands, anything that had ever channeled mana. A Ranger detachment that came home with a kill came home funded. Erlich knew the trade. He'd sold troll carcasses and harpy wings and once the intact skull of a wyrm-kin juvenile that had cost three arrows and a spear through the orbital bone to put down. The wizard who'd bought it had barely glanced up from his mortar. The skull was dust by now, stretched thin across a decade of spellcraft.

Erlich was a Certified Dragon Slayer, the only credential the crown issued for his kind of work and the only one he'd wanted. The kill that had earned it — a juvenile, twenty feet of scale and fire, hoardless and starving — had put his name on a short list in the capital. The commission that followed was a lieutenant's rank, crown-paid, answerable to the crown, sent to the baronies where local lords had run out of their own answers. He didn't care about rank. The rank meant he chose his men and his assignments. The rest was politics, and politics bored him.

"Leofric," he said.

The Ranger on the boulder straightened.

"The taverns. Waterfront first, then inland. Somebody knows something about dead men walking, or knows someone who does. Find the thread."

Leofric's face lit — a man handed the one task he genuinely loved. "I am a fountain of thread, Lieutenant."

"Don't cheat anyone I need."

"That barely narrows the field." He was already moving down the trail toward the harbor with the easy stride of a man who preferred crooked streets to open scrub.

---

Baron Volker's hall stood above the docks, a stone box with a salt-bleached banner and a door that had needed new hinges for a decade. Volker met them in the yard, wiping his hands on his jerkin — a thin man, forty and fraying, with the look of a lord losing a campaign against his own luck.

"Rangers. Thank the gods." He clasped Erlich's arm too quickly. "My man told me about last night. The fisherman. Come in — I've wine."

The wine was red and sour and Volker poured it himself. A baron was the lowest rung of the nobility, and Magyar had bled through what little he had.

"They won't put out," he said, pacing. "Three mornings the boats have stayed tied. A dead man walks up Fisher's Row and nobody wants to cast nets in the dark. The coasters won't tie up at all — they bypass Magyar entirely for Westmark. The fish-smokery's idle. The chandler talks about closing. Trade is wounded, Lieutenant. Nerve and coin both."

"We'll find the source," Erlich said.

"The town says goblins. I've had men beating the scrub since the first of the dead. Nothing. Not a print." Volker's voice frayed. "What else could it be?"

"Not goblins." Erlich's tone shut the door on it. "We walked every yard of ground south of town this morning. If there were goblins here, we'd have found them."

The baron stared at him and didn't ask again.

They ate bread and salt-fish in the yard while the afternoon bled toward evening. Godwin stroked a whetstone down his spear-blade in slow, even passes. Erlich stood at the wall, watching the harbor where the boats bobbed empty and the gulls had gone quiet.

The screaming started at evening.

It came from the west end of the waterfront — a woman's voice, splintering high, and then a door breaking inward. Erlich and Godwin were off the wall before the echoes died, Volker behind them with his sword half-drawn and his face already bloodless. Brunner materialized from a side lane with his shield up and his spear leveled, dour and silent.

The walker was a townsman — dead a fortnight, buried Tuesday, fresh enough that his face still held its shape. He'd crossed a widow's front room and nearly reached the back door before she'd trapped herself and started screaming. Brunner took him in the ribs with the spear and Godwin came around the flank and drove a second shaft through the base of the skull. The corpse pitched forward across the threshold, one arm outflung, fingers curling and uncurling against the floorboards.

The gravedigger had followed the noise. "I sealed that box," he said, high and cracking. "Myself. The lid nailed, the earth packed, the turf laid proper. I sealed it."

Erlich looked at Godwin. "Check the grave. I'll watch the body."

Godwin was gone before the gravedigger could protest and back before the man had finished wringing his hands. "Same as the first," he said. "Turf clean, empty box."

Erlich faced the baron, whose sword was still only half-drawn.

"Two in two nights from sealed graves," Erlich said. "That's focused magic, my lord. A practitioner, a working, a will behind it. Not goblins. Not vermin. A necromancer, and he's raising your dead faster than you can lower them."

"Then what do we—"

"My man's in the taverns now. If there's a whisper, he'll hear it." Erlich looked south, into the scrub that had given them nothing. "If there isn't, we push farther. Either way, the goblin hunt is finished."

Behind him, the widow sat on her threshold, silent. No one in the yard could tell her the dead were done walking.

---

Leofric came back after dark stinking of cheap wine and looking pleased with himself, which was his usual state after a night in the low taverns. He found Erlich and Godwin in the baron's yard, slumped on the bench where they'd been eating cold bread and salt-fish.

"I've got something," he said, dropping beside them. "Something good."

Erlich looked up. "Talk."

"A month ago — maybe five weeks, the dates are soft — someone moved a dragon bone through Magyar. On the black market. Sold quiet, bought quieter. A single bone, a finger bone, no longer than my own. Came through on a coaster, went to ground somewhere in the waterfront, changed hands for a price nobody would name. The man who brokered it calls himself Peto — or called himself. Peto's gone. Cleared out his lodgings inside the week and nobody's seen him since."

The yard went still. Godwin set his bread down. Erlich's face closed, sharp and a degree colder — the look when a thing clicked into place.

"A bone in untrained hands with a trinket to draw on it," he said quietly.

No one spoke. Silence settled over the yard and into the dark beyond the wall, where the scrub lay waiting.

"We find Peto," Erlich said. Godwin's bread sat untouched on the bench beside him, long cold.