When Goblins Rage (Book 3) by Lucas Thorn Page A

turned her gaze back to the cook.
    “What happened to the feller who brought me here?”
    “Pad? He's back on the walls with his Lordship ,” the fat cook said, sneering over the title. Then sobered quickly as he continued. “Heard tell there's Caspiellans on the way. Couple of traders headed through here last week said the bastards were burning towns. Killing any folk they got their filthy hands on. Didn't reckon it was true until Scrab got back to town the other day. Said they'd burned out a farm not far south of here.”
    “Scrab?”
    “One of his Lordship's scouts.” He stared at the doorway as though expecting Grey Jackets to pour through at any second. “Reckon you got here at a bad time, Long-ear. The Shadowed Gates are about to open here, and the Old Skeleton's gonna get his fair share of souls. Gonna feast on this town. Eat more than enough for him to grow his body back, I'll wager. Pad said you saw them out there. You see him ?”
    “Who, feller?”
    His voice dropped as a touch of horror settled on his shoulders. “Storr. They say it's him who's leading them. That he brought his cursed son with him, too. Bastard's supposed to be even worse than his father.” He twisted his neck to look at her, droplets of sweat clinging to his brow. Sweat not from the steam rising from the pot, but from the fear which curdled in his eyes.
    She confirmed his fear with a nod. “I saw them.”
    “Shit.” The word was rasped between his teeth. “True, then. We're fucked.”
    “The General's just a man. A Grey Jacket. Ain't no harder to kill than any other, I'd imagine.”
    The cook spooned some beans into a bowl, shaking his head. “Then you don't know him, I reckon.”
    She suddenly remembered the note of safe passage Chukshene had taken from the body of one of Raste's men. It'd had Storr's name on it.
    She leaned a little further back on her chair and scratched at the scar on her cheek. “Only by name. Something I should know about him?”
    “Only that now he's here, he ranks as the meanest son of a bitch in the Deadlands. Meaner than Lord Sharpe out there. Wherever he's been, he leaves no one alive. And they die horribly, it's said. Like they were touched by the Old Skeleton himself. Fact is, way I heard it, he's even meaner than you.”
    The elf's lip curled slightly at the cook's opinion of her.
    When she'd scraped a living on the street, how mean you were often defined how much the other urchins left you alone. For the longest time, she'd not understood that.
    It'd taken years to fully comprehend the change of attitude needed to survive the alleys of Lostlight.
    Even then, it took longer to harden herself. To mould her heart into a solid ball of granite. A change made complete only in that moment when her shiv penetrated the flesh of a rich man and cover her fist in blood for the first time.
    Sometimes, when she was feeling melancholy, she reflected that it wasn't him she'd been killing at the time. That it was herself.
    For the cook, whose she figured had spent his life observing the cruellest characters the Deadlands could produce, he would never understand the lessons needed to scar a soul so brutally that acts of violence no longer felt alien.
    Instead, each kill felt normal. Even familiar.
    Sometimes as intimate as a lover's touch.
    She wondered what lessons Storr had learnt. Her initial impression of him hadn't been of a man possessed with latent cruelty. Simply a man of a practical and military mind. She'd met plenty of those while serving in the King's Jukkala'Jadean.
    Men who wouldn't flinch from the need to order violence, but who'd never actively participated. She found it hard to believe that Storr would ever hold a sword himself for anything other than to spur his men onward.
    Not that this made him any less dangerous.
    In most cases, it made him more so. Because he was hidden behind an army, making him practically untouchable. Unreachable. A shadowy and ruthless figure who might rise to something