YAZ

  A hobgoblin burst forward, encouraged by cheers. He raised a woodcutter’s axe overhead and aimed at Yaz’s head.

  The hobgoblin was as tall as Yaz and much heavier. It wouldn’t do to match bdes with him. The retionship between force and mass meant that it would push the skeleton away easily enough, maybe destroy his sword. Yaz feinted right, then stepped left. The axe came down where he no longer was. Chopping with the sword, Yaz crushed the hobgoblin’s wrist and then drove the point into the surprised creature’s throat.

  The hobgoblin colpsed, blood spurting around the bde.

  Yaz felt the sword slipping from his grip before he could extract it. Letting go, he shoved the soon-to-be corpse into an open space on the ground and grabbed the axe from the ground where it had fallen.

  Goblins howled with cruel ughter at the fate of their comrade.

  Testing the axe, he found the head was loose and the wooden handle old. It was a poor weapon and wouldn’t st long. Should he try to get the sword from the dead hobgoblin?

  A roar momentarily quieted the crowd, turning heads. Then a big cheer went up.

  A very rge hobgoblin pushed through the masses, knocking others aside like nothing. He was armoured in studded leather and carried a hefty two-handed cymore in one fist. It had been kept in much better condition than most of the weapons hereabouts. This was a warrior who had won many fights. The hobgoblin stopped at the edge of the ring and looked down at Yaz, for he was a little taller. A malicious grin spread over his ugly features.

  Yaz looked down at his flimsy woodcutting axe. Then he looked at the cymore and armour. Not good.

  The hobgoblin casually circled past the corpses at Yaz’s feet. He easily weaved his heavy cymore through the air, the metal catching the light of the bonfire and nearby torches.

  The crowd chanted, “Jyug! Jyug! Jyug!”

  Yaz eyed his new opponent. Apparently, this particur creature was important enough to warrant some kind of name, something most goblins never bothered with. ‘Hey you’ or descriptives like ‘big nose’ or ‘wart face’ are more common. Tells you a lot about a species when they don’t even care enough about each other to have names. Like how short-lived they are that they don’t bother. There was something tragic in that, even though they were monsters.

  Jyug suddenly reached down and grabbed a regur goblin at the edge of the ring by the head and threw the startled creature at Yaz.

  Yaz dodged, then had to move fast to escape the incoming downswing of the hobgoblin’s cymore. He leapt over one of the corpses, smacked the back of the axe down on the thrown goblin’s head, cracking the skull, and backed up towards the prison door to keep out of reach of the hobgoblin.

  Jyug was in no hurry. He continued to grin and milk the enthusiasm of the cheering crowd, taking zy pokes at the skeleton.

  Yaz let him have his fun. There was no hurry. He was a magical construct and didn’t get tired, no matter how many enemies he fought: one of the benefits of being undead. Yaz had also noticed that Arwin was no longer in the prison. He needed to give the young man time to escape. And the longer he entertained the goblins like this, the longer he kept them from swarming him, which he would have no defence against.

  It seemed like the hobgoblin in front of him didn’t have much of an imagination when it came to entertaining the crowd. He howled soon enough and came at Yaz hard, swinging the cymore back and forth, intent on decapitating his foe. That was how you usually dispatched a skeleton; the typically flimsy constructs were weak at the neck.

  Yaz waited without flinching. As the meter-and-a-half length of steel cut the air, he easily tapped upward with his own bde, sending the cymore harmlessly high, then chopped down at the hob’s right knee. The blow broke off the head of the axe and did little damage to the monster’s armour.

  But it caused the hobgoblin to back up a step, putting it off bance.

  Yaz smoothly picked up a knife dropped by an earlier enemy and drove it twice high between the hob’s legs.

  The crowd winced in sympathy at the hob’s scream.

  The hob instinctively dropped his weapon and reached for the horrid wounds. He screamed.

  Casually standing, Yaz cut the monster’s throat, turning the scream into a short-lived gurgle before death cimed the hob.

  The mood of the crowd turned ugly. It seemed they’d had enough fun. Now, dozens of goblins took a step forward and brandished their weapons, ready to end the fight.

  A cry brought them to a halt before they could tear Yaz apart.

  The goblins looked over their shoulders. Grins returned, and the crowd split in twain to admit a newcomer.

  The biggest goblin of them all had appeared: a chieftain, muscled and taller than Yaz by a fair bit. He wore steel half-pte and wooden greaves. He came to a stop at the edge of the mob and studied the skeleton. There was no sense that this one was as stupid or foolish as the others. This one was a veteran fighter — and smart.

  A pretty, human woman demurely walked up behind the chieftain, wearing only green rags. Her bare feet had bckened soles from going without shoes. An iron colr had been snugly fitted around her neck. She submissively and sensuously draped herself against the chieftain. Her head only reached his muscur chest. She looked up at him with adoration. From the way her eyes lingered over the chieftain’s ugly features, it was shocking to see that this woman seemed wholly willing in her svery. As far as Yaz could tell, no shaman was maniputing her with magic. Although, maybe she’d just been subjected to it so often that it had permanently taken root.

  One less person to save, Yaz figured. He’d seen people like that before and tried to rescue them from their captors, only to discover that they quite preferred the vilin they served.

  Then came a truly unpleasant surprise.

  The chieftain gently pushed the besotted sve aside and drew his bde. Unlike the mob, he carried a weapon that even thousand-year-old Yaz found remarkable: a double-curved, one-handed sword beautifully crafted in an unmistakably elven style. A dark orange jewel twinkled in the crossguard, and an orange haze wafted from the steel. It was certainly a magical sword, the kind of thing you’d expect to find in the hand of a very lucky and experienced adventurer or elven soldier. That haze might paralyze, poison, corrupt, shock, or any number of things. And the bde itself was probably honed to a razor’s edge, unlike the nearly blunt knife in Yaz’s hand.

  Yaz frowned. Where had the monster gotten a weapon like that? That was the kind of thing that would probably go through his enchanted bones like a hot spear through a water slime. His grip tightened on his knife.