Slave of the Goblin

Vashti Valant

Chapter One

Concealed in a cocoon of silence on a bosky prominence overlooking the human village, Laya cocked her bow and awaited her prey. To her goblin enemies, the elf woman was known as Nemesis—or sometimes, even more crudely, as Cock Kicker, because of her habit of taking out goblin warriors while they attempted to rape their battle captives.

This time she stalked the most audacious target of all. Akraz the Terrible, the Goblin General himself.

Once their pants are down, they’re all the same, Laya dismissed the slight frisson of fear she felt. I’ll take him out while he’s fucking, as I did with all the other rutting goblin beasts. She slung her bow and quiver over her shoulder. Just so long as Hunter can marshal these human farmers to fight long enough to keep the rest of his army off my back.

With the exception of her friend Hunter, Laya did not place much confidence in humans. Even now, she could hear their rustlings and whisperings from the other hill. Of course, her elven hearing was superb, but goblins too had excellent hearing.

“Why do they not come?” growled one of the human men. Clovis, she recalled, the leader of the village. He was a farmer trying to be a fighter.

“Quiet. Patience.” That terse command came from Hunter. A human orphan raised by elves, Hunter knew as well as any elf how to be still, even if the other humans did not.

The human village in the valley below them looked peaceful enough in the gentle glow of moonlight. As the minutes built into another hour, even Laya began to fear that Akraz the Terrible was too cagey to fall into her trap. Though he was a brute of a goblin, Laya had learned the hard way not to underestimate his cunning. When it came to war, he knew his business.

Laya mulled over her failure to ignite passion with Hunter. It was not indifference, but fear that made her freeze. Or was it because she did not fear Hunter that she felt nothing in his arms? She gripped her bow all the more tightly. The Seeress had been right. Only by confronting her fear could Laya overcome it. Tonight I will do it, Laya promised herself. Tonight, after I spring my trap, I will make one of the goblin brutes suffer what Taniya suffered all those years ago. That will free me from the fear—and the fascination—of them.

Clouds drifted across the moon, darkening the valley. The goblins at last made their move.

On the other hill, Clovis gasped. He’s never seen real goblins before, Laya reminded herself. To him, they are but stories told by his grandmother on Harvest Eve.

“I thought they would be smaller,” Clovis nearly whimpered. “Little, twisted creatures, with teeth like raccoons. But these—these look just like real men!”

Some humans made the same mistake about elves, thinking that elves were diminutive, cutesy creatures like bunny rabbits, instead of the tall, slender race of demi-human they were. If Clovis harbored any such misconceptions, however, his first glimpse of Laya had cured him of it. She stood taller than Clovis himself, though her build was much more delicate and shapely. Like many elves of her tribe, her long, pale gold hair held a touch of green, while her jade green eyes sparkled with specks of gold.

Hunter must have taken pity on the farmer. Instead of shushing Clovis, he replied softly and grimly, “Look more closely. They have the size of men, but they are more than men.”

As the goblins began to pour into the defenseless village, setting fires as they ran, the flames cast their silhouettes into sharp relief, revealing their powerful chests and ghastly, beastlike faces. A human wrestler or blacksmith might aspire to the muscles that every goblin male casually displayed. Not even a hyena would envy a goblin’s snout.

With a shudder, Laya remembered another distinguishing feature in which goblin men were more than men. As if it were yesterday, Laya saw the tiny woodsy elven hamlet she had lived in as a girl. She saw the goblin horde overrunning it, burning and smashing, just as this army was doing now. But the scene in her mind played at double time, speeding forward to when the goblins had slaughtered all the elven warriors, and rounded up the young women, girls and the sweetest-faced boys to entertain them for the rest of the evening. Their battle chieftain had taken his first pick, then the others had squabbled over divvying up the remainder of the prisoners. One gargantuan, ugly fellow had grabbed both Laya and her best friend Taniya by the hair and dragged them off into the still smoldering ruins of a tree house to abuse them.

Both girls had just entered puberty, which, among elves was usually a long, luxurious length of decades of giggles, shy stolen kisses and gentle explorations with other young elflings.

The goblin warrior had stripped off his armor. Nothing in her sheltered life prepared Laya for the sight of his bulging thews or the huge, protruding male organ that met her eyes. For a frozen moment in time, Laya forgot all else and her first experience of desire, unasked for, unbidden, unwanted, coursed through her veins like wine. Then all was shattered, ruined, tainted. Pure terror shoved desire aside when he forced the throbbing, oversized member into Taniya’s mouth. Sobbing with fear, Laya used the moment of his distraction to run away into the woods.

Later, self-loathing at her own cowardice mingled together with that image, and haunted Laya’s nightmares for a century.

Even though Laya’s escape allowed her to warn the other elves about the goblin attack, she never forgave herself for abandoning her friend. The elves from neighboring hamlets rallied and counterattacked the goblins, wiping out the beasts down to the last man. Many of the elven prisoners had been rescued. But not Taniya. She had been so brutally used they found her dead, blood between her legs, bruises mottling her breasts and thighs.

Like many of the survivors of that night, Laya became a dedicated goblin-hunter. She took a new name, Nemesis, and swore an oath of celibacy until the distant, unknown day her self-imposed task could be completed. It was easy to foreswear intimate relations and other distractions that a warrior could not afford. For her, sex became twisted by what the goblins had done to Taniya. Male had become a hyper-masculine but unspeakably brutal goblin more-than-man.

Only the Seeress had seen the truth. That for one moment, after the goblin male had removed his clothing and stood there, gloriously muscular and stupendously endowed, but before he had ruined it by his cruelty and force, Laya had been fascinated by the sight of him. She had been aroused.

Oh the shame of it.

But the Seeress had told her what to do. Laya had to turn the tables. She had to take control.

The goblins had looted and burned most of the village’s small cottages by now. The brutal beast-men grabbed the women out of the houses and forced them all together in the cobblestone clearing by the well at the center of the burning village. There were no human men or children among them. The women wailed in fear.

“Those bastards are about to dishonor the women,” Clovis whispered too loudly, his desperation growing. “We must move now!”

Hunter kept the human leader in check, but Laya felt a tug at her heart. This was the hardest part of the plan, using innocent women as bait. Even if they had volunteered, Laya knew they had not really understood the danger. However, nothing else would distract the goblins long enough to close the trap.

Officially, the purpose of her trap was to kill the goblins’ wiliest leader, the Goblin General, Akraz the Terrible. He had risen rapidly in the ranks of the dark army and the elves knew him to be the most dangerous of all Zathstragomal’s evil minions. In addition to killing Akraz, Laya had her own plans to take a more personal captive, but she shared her private scheme with no one. Except for the Seeress, none of the other elves would approve of fighting the goblins with a taste of their own fare.

On cue, a new figure emerged from the billowing smoke and flame. Laya drew in a sharp breath. She had seen plenty of goblins before, and she had crossed wits with Akraz the Terrible before, but this was her first glimpse of the goblin commander in the flesh.

As befit so notorious a war leader, he stood out even amongst his burly troops. There was something in his bearing that bespoke his superiority to all those around him. It was not merely his height, though he was taller than most men. It was not merely the amazing physique of his muscular chest, though his pecs and biceps embodied a perfection of male anatomy more befitting a seraph than a minion of darkness. It was the purpose in his stride, the sharp, decisive tilt of his jaw, the utter confidence in his gestures of command. It helped, Laya reminded herself wryly, that she could not see the bestial features of his goblin face, for they were covered completely by the faceplate of his horned iron helmet. Without having to stare into the typical misshapen leering mug of a goblin, she could almost imagine Akraz to be one of the mighty demigod heroes out of the mists of the First Age, rather than her sworn enemy. He may have looked to be half god, but it would be closer to call him half beast.

Everything about him was superbly, excessively, terrifyingly masculine. Laya felt her loins tighten and suddenly she knew.

He was the one. If she could conquer Akraz the Terrible, she could conquer any goblin, and any male. She need never again feel the fear, self-loathing and shame she felt on that night of Taniya’s death. She would prove to Akraz and thus to herself that his kind held no more power over her.

She smiled tightly. Look at him. He expects to taste the fruits of his easy victory, to have first pick of the human village women to use at his leisure. Laya knew something of his taste in captives from rumors of his conduct after previous raids. Akraz the Terrible always chose the youngest, most fragile of the nubile girls for his own pleasure—girls the age Taniya and Laya were that awful night so long ago. While some girls who were captured and raped by goblins were later sold back to their families for a ransom, the girls that Akraz chose disappeared forever. No doubt after he had his way with them, he found it easiest to simply discard them permanently.

Little does he know his worst enemy is about to turn him into a toy to be used and enjoyed…and then discarded. Permanently.

Akraz the Terrible strode into the burning village, sniffing for his enemy. He ignored the stench of smoke, of blood, of fear and lust. He ignored the other goblins who were busy hunting for booty and rounding up human women for “fun” throughout the rest of the night. Akraz wanted to know why the real enemy had not shown up—the elves. The leader of the elven strike force, known to Akraz only by the battle moniker “Nemesis”, had proven sly and relentless in tracking down and slaughtering the goblin bands who strove to overrun the land of Chavana.

This victory was too easy, too rewarding. Why had the human village been empty of men? Why had the elves not come to the aid of their human allies when the two groups had worked so blastedly hand in hand before?

Akraz suspected a trap.

It didn’t matter that Akraz had advised against the raid. Even a high-ranking goblin such as Akraz, who as general, commanded the entire goblin army, was treated with no more respect than the lowest grunt by the master of them all, the ambitious and evil wizard, Zathstragomal the Malicious. After all, Akraz was no more than a slave. Like all the other goblins in Zathstragomal’s army, Akraz had been sold by his own people as a child to the wizard. Akraz wore Zathstragomal’s mark burned into his palm by Zathstragomal’s magic fire from deep in the pit of Mount Murk.

The troops began to hoot at the huddle of female captives in the center of the village. The goblins’ lust would not be contained much longer. The grunts, all slaves, received no pay for risking their lives in battle year after year, except what they could siphon from the general loot pile—and the payoff of having their way with captives. Indulging in torture and rape helped them forget their own miserable lives for a few hours. Even if Akraz could have prevented them from abusing the captives, Zathstragomal would not allow it. The wizard enjoyed spreading terror throughout the countryside through the unspeakable atrocities of his troops. Only villages which surrendered to Zathstragomal without a fight were to be spared pillage and rapine.

Still frowning behind his helmet, Akraz reluctantly went to inspect the captives. He had one prerogative. He might choose the largest number of the captives for his own, to do with as he pleased. He surveyed the women and girls, noting that most of them were more mature than usual, though there were no truly elderly matrons among them.

First, no men. Now no children, no elders. What kind of village was this? His frown deepened. Only half his mind attended to the task of pointing out five of the youngest women to be set aside for him. The rest of his mind worried at the knot of the trap he suspected. When would it spring? Who would spring it? How could he force his troops away from their lust-induced stupor back into battle readiness?

He scanned the wooded hills that overlooked the village on three sides. A hundred human men could be hiding there, and he would not know. A thousand elves, with their better woodcraft, could be hiding in the same woods. Blast and blood!

His palm burned. He held it before him. The face of his master and owner, Zathstragomal the Malicious, appeared in his hand.

“Report!” snapped Zathstragomal.

“Victory, Master,” replied Akraz. Zathstragomal did not react well to bad news. Nonetheless, some stubborn pride goaded Akraz into adding, “But I believe it to be a trap. I think we should—”

Burning pain shot through Akraz’s hand, up his arm, sinking vipers of agony all the way down the rest of his body.

“Did I ask you to think, you lumbering ox? Goblins don’t have brains. Your kind of scum exist to do as I bid!”

“Forgive me, Master,” Akraz said through grated teeth.

The pain ceased. Zathstragomal smiled magnanimously.

“I forgive you. Go enjoy your victory. I want to hear about the villagers’ misery in the morning. It will serve as warning to those other human mudscrappers who think the elves will help them deny me the Crown of Chavana. On the morrow, I shall have new instructions for you.”

Akraz bowed his head. As always, hate lay hard and hidden like a stone in his gut, hate he did not dare show.

“Yes, Master. You are generous, Master.”

The illusion in his palm faded; his hand was his own again. His mood foul, Akraz shouted at his soldiers to bring him his women. At least Zathstragomal would not interfere with what Akraz had planned for them.

Once Akraz the Terrible picked out five of the captives for his own, and began to move off to the privacy of a ruined house to enjoy them, Laya became the shadow that followed him.

She knew Hunter would be readying his ram horn to give the humans their signal as well.

Akraz took the cowering women out of sight of the others. He looked sadly at their pitiful, tear-streaked faces, and thought of his sister.

“This is the deal,” he said. Even to his own ears, his voice sounded harsh. “Run. I will follow. If I catch you, I will rape you, then beat you, then eat your guts one loop at a time while you are still alive to watch. If, however, you run for ten days and I haven’t caught you, then you will be free as long as you never admit that you met me. If I hear that you yet live to boast that you escaped Akraz the Terrible, I will hunt you down and kill everyone you know and then you. Do you understand?”

They stared at him in stark terror.

“Run!” he barked.

They scattered like chickens.

He didn’t follow. He never did. He always gave his captives the same ultimatum, and thus far, he assumed that all of them had been sufficiently frightened of his threats that after their escape they had told no one of how they escaped or whom they had escaped. One day, he knew, his mercy might backfire on him. If Zathstragomal were to find out that his favored commander allowed unarmed women to simply run away, the wizard’s scorn and wrath would be painful to endure. It was a chance Akraz was willing to take. He had to protect his reputation for ruthlessness in order to command the most ruthless troops in Chavana. But though he might be a slave and a warlord and a monster, he still strove in the secret areas of his life to maintain his own sense of dignity and honor.

As long as no one ever found out, he would be safe. Certainly, it would never cross the minds of either his master or most of his subordinates that Akraz hid a secret sentimental side. In battle, he neither gave quarter nor asked it. Against armed opponents, Akraz was as ruthless in fact as in the nightmares of his foes.

For instance, he thought grimly, let him but once meet the elven warrior Nemesis, and what a great reckoning there would be. Nemesis had handed Akraz some humiliating defeats in the past, and Akraz burned to avenge them.

As if summoned out of the smoking darkness by his thoughts, a ram’s horn pierced the night. Instantly, Akraz knew the trap was sprung, and that Nemesis was behind it.

With a roar of rage, he drew the mighty iron sword across his back and charged back toward the village, and the sudden sounds of battle.

Something was wrong. Akraz had sensed the trap before it had been sprung, and hadn’t dallied with his female captives after all.

No matter. The Goblin General stormed right into the range of Laya’s arrows. One, two, three, four arrows left her bow. So perfect was her aim and timing that she hit him exactly as she planned, in each arm and each leg. That should prove enough to incapacitate him without killing him in order for her to capture him.

He tumbled to the ground. Satisfied, Laya ventured closer.

Akraz the Terrible leaped up. His fall had been staged, to lure her near. He shrugged off the prick of arrows that spiked into his armor as if they were of no consequence and commenced to bear down on Laya with great two-fisted swipes of his immense sword.

Fortunately, this time Laya had not underestimated her enemy. She had anticipated both his stamina and strength. Pulling the arrow the Seeress had given her, Sleepmaker, from her quiver, Laya notched her bow and let it fly. The golden arrow soared true, and hit Akraz right in the heart, piercing his armor as the Seeress had promised. The masked goblin lord staggered toward Laya in disbelief.

Though she expected him to collapse any moment, she drew her own sword and faced off with him.

What a sight they must have made, circling one another in the smoldering ruins. He was a figure of towering darkness, his steel and black leather armor further blackened by smoke and ash, his face masked with an iron-horned helm. She was a slender figure in shining leaf-shaped plates of gold, her face also hidden behind a masked helmet of matching gold filigree. She wore the green and white sigil of the True King of Chavana on a snowy white surcoat over her armor, whilst his armor was graven with the twisted runes of the dark wizard Zathstragomal.

“You must be Nemesis,” he gasped. His voice, even rough with pain, was deep and powerful. Laya was amazed he could still stand, never mind talk.

“I am,” she said.

“How fitting we should die by each other’s hands!” he cried, lifting his sword. It had twice the reach of her own slim blade. Her blade rose to meet his, and deflected his blow, but only barely. Laya was an unparalleled archer, and an excellent swordswoman, but she knew that in hand-to-hand combat, he outmatched her.

Oh gods. Despite everything, she had underestimated him. Though he bristled with her arrows, including the Seeress’ enchanted arrow, he harried her to exhaustion with relentless strokes of his sword. The stubborn bastard obviously refused to collapse until he killed her.

Finally, she tripped and stumbled to her knees. Her helm of golden leaf tumbled to the ground, revealing her heart-shaped face and braided hair of palest gold.

“By the Dark God!” He stopped short the killing stroke that would have decapitated her and just stared.

“You—Nemesis—you’re a—”

Then Akraz the Terrible, servitor of the evil wizard, bane of elves and men, commanding general of the goblin horde, collapsed backward with a resounding thud.

Hours later, Laya retired to the private tent she had sequestered away from the rest of the camp. She helped her companions who were wounded, gone to the aid of the human villagers as they finished routing the goblins, most of whom had fled like cowards when their commander disappeared, and spent time soothing the frightened women who had served as bait for the successful trap.

She had held aloft his sword to the gathered elven and human warriors, and announced in ringing tones, “Akraz the Terrible is dead!” She drank in their cheers.

However, Akraz the Terrible was not dead. The enchanted arrow, Sleepmaker, had only cast him into a deep and dreamless state that mimicked death. At Laya’s request, several human males had helped her carry the “corpse” to the place of her choosing, an isolated grotto dominated by a huge, twisted tree. She had them place his body on a flat rock at the base of the tree. If they thought her request strange, they did not question the mysterious elf woman who had led them to victory.

After the humans departed, Laya addressed the tree in the Ancient Words of Making, the language of gods and wizards. “Friend! Awaken from your sleep and come to my aid. Bind my enemy in your branches!”

The tree groaned into animation. The tangle of branches and roots came alive and wrapped around Akraz’s arms and legs. Soon the rope of living wood pinned him spread-eagle on the rock.

She would have to wrestle alone with removing his helm and his armor and his clothing. She wanted him to awaken naked, bound and helpless. However, she was exhausted, and as she stared at his ugly masked helmet and filthy armor, she wondered if she could go through with her plan after all. No matter how splendid his body, he still had the heart of a monster. And, like all goblins, he would have a bestial face, with bulging purple eyes, an over-wide fleshy mouth full of toothy fangs, rough skin covered with warts and crags, and on top of all that, a misshapen lump where a nose should be. Laya did not know why all goblins were ugly, but they were, and the more powerful they were, the uglier they were.

Perhaps she should remove all his clothing except his helmet. After all, he was to be her sex toy, she might take him any way she pleased. What did she need his face for? The thought made her giggle.

With a sigh, she bent over her unconscious captive and removed the helmet masking his face.

Oh. Gods of the Five Lands.