I sat at the River Run with autumn still on the trees and no intention of going back into the Forest, and I went back into the Forest, because Lotti asked and I owe her.

Four others were at the table. Gotfrit, a high elf, a shadow warrior by his own account. Grandi, a dwarf, a soldier. Lars, a man of the Empire who takes bounties. Tally, a high elf and an arcane wizard. Lotti came to us and asked a favour: a forester had been attacked in the woods a few hours outside the city, and his wife Marta wanted to know what had done it. That was the whole of what she could tell us. Not where, not when, not by what.

Marta was being comforted by a man whose name I was given and cannot now recall. I set that down because it is a shameful thing in a priest. A man’s name is the smallest coin you can pay him and I spent his and lost it. He was short with us at first, and rightly so, for we were strangers asking a grieving woman for directions, but a little plain speaking brought him round, and he drew us a map. Charcoal on a scraped piece of parchment, and worth more than anything else we had. I knew the country on it. It lies not far from where we lost Oskar Venn’s trail last month.

Thank Ulric for the eyes of Lars and Gotfrit. The sign was nothing a man like me would have seen, and between them they had it inside the hour. It brought us to an opening in the trees where the forester had been taken. Goblin arrows lay everywhere, in the dirt and standing out of the trunks. I took that for the answer to Marta’s question and thought us finished before midday. I was wrong twice over, as will become plain.

We searched the clearing instead. One of us found a great armoured orc crouched waiting in the brush. I cannot say who, as I was working the far side. Several of us took the high rock in the middle of the clearing and set ourselves on it. Grandi did not. He went straight at the thing, alone, and buried his axe in its shoulder, and it cried out in pain and then in rage. I had time to think that was brave and no time at all to think it was reckless, because the arrows started then, from every quarter: above us in the trees, level with us in the brush, below us from a gulch cut into the southern side. Goblins. They had let us walk into the middle of it and spring the trap ourselves.

I will not claim I kept my head. I was turned about and useless for a moment. I did see Grandi finish the orc, and I saw his face afterwards, and dwarfs are hard to read but I would call that satisfied.

The heaviest shooting came out of the southern gulch, so I went into it, to put myself between it and the rock. There were three of them down there. I brought my axe over my head meaning to split the nearest and it was not there any more, for the thing moved like a cat, and while I was recovering another put a spear into my shoulder. A puncture, nothing more, and the armour took most of it. But I had been treating them as vermin and they had drawn blood off me in one pass, and I want that written down so I remember it.

I could hear the fight going on above me and could not reach it. So I called on Ulric, and for the second time he answered. A white wolf came, spectral as the first. Whether it was the same one or another I cannot say and do not expect to. It took the nearest goblin in its jaws, opened it, and threw what was left up out of the gulch onto the ground above. The other two ran. They can move, as I have said.

By the time I climbed back the rest had run too, and my allies had two of them tangled in a net. Gotfrit and Grandi were putting questions to them. Grandi caved in the skull of the first, and the second talked quickly and at length. It swore the forester was no work of theirs. It said the beasts had done it, and it told us where the beasts were to be found, and it said all of this with a dwarf’s wet axe in front of its face, which is a poor place from which to judge a creature’s honesty. We walked away and I heard the axe come down behind us and did not turn around.

I have thought about that since. They had put arrows into us from cover, and the dwarf did what dwarfs do with greenskins, and the second had already given us all it had to give. I am not troubled by their deaths. I am a little troubled by how little the manner of it troubled me at the time.

Its directions took us southeast to a smaller clearing, and in that clearing lay a half-dozen beastmen full of goblin arrows. Dead some days. Lars put a bolt into one anyway, which I thought sensible. In the middle of the ground stood a stone, and on the stone was writing, and both Tally and I knew the hand of it. Nehekharan. The same hand as the stone in the camp where the thing came up out of the ground.

Then a goblin showed itself on the ridge above us, a big one, some manner of chief in that country, speaking broken Reikspiel, and it asked us for help. There were undead in a dwarf hold nearby and it wanted them cleared out. It showed us the door, hidden in the mountainside and covered over with the carcass of a beastman. I asked it about the forester before we went in. It gave me the same answer the one in the net had given, that the beasts had done the killing, and it gave it easily, the way a creature answers a question it has already decided about.

I will not pretend I am easy about what we did next. We took a greenskin’s errand and did it. But undead squatting in a dwarf hold is the worse thing of the two, and leaving it so because I disliked who pointed at it would have been pride dressed as piety.

Gotfrit went in first to scout and came back saying roots had reached for him. Grandi took us down. He slipped them and set himself where they would come again, and when I followed and they lashed out at me I got clear and he cut them apart. They went on writhing on the stone a long while after, like worms cut in half.

The stair ended in an antechamber with a raised dais in the centre. Grandi named the place a wayhold, a watch-post on a road the dwarfs do not use any more, and said the dais was where the watch stood to be counted. Ulric knows if that is what it was still being used for. There were two wights in it.

I prayed again, and again he came. Frost crept along the edge of my axe and the air went cold around me, and I felt him standing at my shoulder in much the same way Grandi was standing at my shoulder. I do not know how else to put it.

Then they were on us. Grandi and I held the line. A crossbow bolt went into the chest of the one in front of me. That was Lars, behind and to my right, already winding for the next. The thing came in and swung and I got my guard up and it was faster than a dead thing has any right to be, and it took me in the side. Where its blade touched my armour the metal rusted and flaked away under it. I have seen that once before, on the thing that turned to sand, and I do not like having seen it twice.

With his fury in me I put my axe through its chest and it went down and stayed down. Grandi and Tally had already broken the other badly between them. Gotfrit shot it from cover and it left them and turned on him, and I came off the dais onto it axe-first and that was the end of it.

When it fell the room changed. There is no better word. A pressure went out of the air, something leaving that had been there longer than the wights had. The cold went out of me with it and the frost ran off my blade in water.

There was nothing else in that hold but more of the same writing on the walls. I want to be plain about why that sits badly with me. Dwarfs did not cut those marks. Dwarfs do not write in that hand. Someone came after, into a hold the dwarfs had abandoned, and wrote on its walls in the tongue of a dead country two thousand miles south of here, and then something settled in and the roots grew over the stair.

We went out the way we came in and the goblin chief was gone. We walked back to the city and parted.

I went to Marta and I could not tell her what killed her husband. There were goblin arrows all over the ground where he was taken, and that was my answer until the goblins themselves gave me another. The one in the net denied it and named the beasts. The chief on the ridge said the same. Goblins lie the way other creatures breathe, and two of them agreeing on a thing proves only that both had the same reason to say it. But the beasts in that second clearing had been shot full of goblin arrows themselves, so there was a war of sorts going on in that country between the two of them, and a forester working a wood between two such hosts could have taken his death from either hand. That is what I told her, in fewer words than these. She wanted something to hate and I had nothing to give her but a choice of two.

It is little comfort and it does not bring the man back. Life on the edge of the Great Forest is paid for in exactly this coin, and she knew that when she married a forester, and knowing it is no help at all. I count Lotti’s debt discharged. I do not feel squared.

He answered me twice in one day. I set down last month that the gift was running thin, like water through cloth, and I believed it when I wrote it. It did not feel thin in that gulch and it did not feel thin on that dais. I have no account to give of that. Perhaps it comes full when there is nothing else between me and the thing in front of me, and goes quiet when I kneel alone and ask for proof. That would be like him.

One thing more, which I write because I think it is true and not because I want it to be. Tally said, on the road back, that the dead are stirring more than they ought, that something is waking, and that these things are one thing and not many. I am no scholar. But the lich beneath Garffan’s Rest, the thing out of the ground in the beastmen’s camp, and now two wights in a dwarf wayhold with Nehekharan cut into the walls above them. That is three, in one season, inside a week’s walk of my own door. I can count that far.

It is Kaldezeit now. The cold has come in its proper season and the frost on my blanket in the mornings means nothing at all any more.

I find I would rather have the warning.

Valdenheim Wolfhart