Truesilver tossed another volume into the fire, and another. Sir Hamnet raised a hand to stop him, but a low and rumbling growl from Uther warned him away.

Helpless, he turned to the others in the library, his friends, his fellow explorers. But Sir Hamnet Hawklin found loathing in the faces of the Stalwarts, and disgust, and anger. They stared at him with open contempt, silently cheering the destruction of his life's work.

He tried to shrug off the contempt and shore up the barricades he'd built around his craven heart. But the walls were crumbling now. The society's shared glories fled him like deadfall leaves abandoning a winter oak. The myriad ceremonial blades and trophy shields hanging on the walls had been his to wield. The slaughtered monsters and conquered dragon had been his trophies, too, proof of valorous deeds beyond imagining. No longer. The Stalwarts knew the truth, and each accusing eye reflected that truth back at the nobleman like a perfect mirror.

Sir Hamnet Hawklin was a coward.

The room began to spin, and the nobleman covered his face with trembling hands. He could block out the sights, but he couldn't deafen himself to the crackle and hiss of the fire as it destroyed his journals and turned his maps to ash.

And in that instant, just before his heart was crushed by those toppled walls of borrowed honor, Sir Hamnet heard it-the low, sibilant laughter in the flames. He'd been right all along. It was the vicious chuckle of Cyric, the satisfied sigh of the Lord of Strife as a man's spirit shattered and his damned soul went shrieking down to Hades.

The summons brought me out of a meeting in an overcrowded den where the candles had eaten up the air. My clan head grumbled, but he released me and returned to bullying compensation from an opponent over an imagined slight of honor Such wars of words, often punctuated by drawn knives and brief duels that left the cavern floors slick with blood, were far too frequent these days among my people. I was glad to go.

I would have been happier for the freedom, but the warrior who called me out told me I was summoned by Skra-lang, shaman of all our kind. My stomach grew tight at the thought of meeting the old goblin. I was no coward, but I was no fool The warrior hurried off as I bound up my fears and set off myself through the long, narrow tunnels of the Nightbelow, our home under the Dustwalls.

At twenty winters I was a guard captain and assistant to my clan head, a young fist among the many hands of the goblins of the mountains. I had fought on the surface against human intruders on our lands since I was twelve, and had been captured once and held prisoner for a year until I had escaped. My captivity taught me to never let it happen again. I knew humans well and feared none of them, but Skralang was not a human, and some said he was not a goblin, either.

The old shaman's door opened automatically when I reached it at the end of a black, web-filled tunnel. Skralang greeted me with a nod from his bed. He carelessly waved me to a chair at a table on which a lone candle flickered. I steeled myself and entered his den.

I picked my way across the tiny, litter-strewn room. My iron-shod boots crushed bits of bone, bread crusts, and other debris beneath them. Skralang did not seem to care about the filth. The world meant less to him every day, it was said. How he could stand to live in such vile conditions was beyond me, but it was not my place and not to my advantage to say so. Who insults a mouthpiece of the gods?

I sat and waited as the shaman took a small bottle and earthen cup from a box by his bed of rags. He carefully swung his feet off the ruined bed and got up, shuffling over to pull up a stool and take a seat by me. I stiffened and almost stood to salute, but he seemed not to care. His familiarity was astonishing; it was if I were an old and trusted friend.

Even more astonishing was Skralang's appearance at close range in the candlelight. His robes stank of corruption, as if death were held back from him by the width of an eyelash. The skin was pulled tight over the bones of his face and hands; open sores disfigured his arms and neck. Yet even with this, his pale yellow eyes were clear and steady. He gently poured another drink for himself, but did not take it right away. Instead he sat back and regarded me with those cold, clear eyes.

"You are bored, Captain Kergis," he said. His voice was no more than a whisper. In the silence, it was like a shout, "life here has no appeal for you. You long to be elsewhere."

I almost denied it, but his eyes warned me off from lies. I nodded hesitantly. "You see all, Your Darkness," I said. I knew that with his magic, the old goblin probably did see all within the Nightbelow-even the hidden places of the heart and soul.

The old one toyed with his cup. His spidery fingers trembled. "Has the security of our home begun to wear on you? Do the petty ravings of the clan heads lull your blood to sleep, rather than stir it with fire? Or do you have plans of your own for advancing your rank and position, and your boredom is merely feigned to cover your intentions?"

To be accused of treachery was not uncommon, but hearing it fall from the thin lips of our shaman was like hearing my death sentence pronounced. "I am loyal!" I pleaded, much louder than I wanted. "You wrong me, Your Darkness!"

I bit off my words. Skralang wronged no one. He was the law, and there was no other. I sat frozen, half expecting that his response would be my execution. A swift death was better by far than a slow one, and I prayed for the former.

Instead, Skralang drank from his cup and sighed. "You are loyal, yes," he said, staring at the cup in his fingers. "You are neither coward nor traitor. You merely seem… disenchanted, not impure in spirit. You do not carry yourself like a true goblin lately." He was silent for a moment, then looked up at me. "But then it sometimes seems to me that none of us do."

I could not have been more amazed than if he had informed me that he was actually a halfling. I was at a loss for words for several moments. "I do not understand," I finally said. "We are all true goblins. We are not tainted like-"

Treacherous tongue! The words had no sooner left my mouth than I would have cut out my tongue to have them back! Skralang flinched when he heard it, and his aged face became like steel.

"We are not tainted like a certain one among us, you say?" The shaman's eyes were icy yellow orbs shining from the depths of his face. His fingers gripped his cup like a web grips prey. For one awful moment, his cup became me.

Then-without warning-the old shaman's face softened and melted. He looked away as he set his cup on the table. 'Tainted. You are right. No one has spoken that word to me since the birth of my grandson, but there is no hiding it.

When I call him my kin, it is like swallowing daggers. He is tainted, tainted with the blood of a human."

The ancient visage looked my way again, but in sadness, not anger. "Everyone must talk about it. It is a disgrace, and there is no atonement for it. None but death." He sighed deeply and looked off into the darkness of the room.

I knew better than to say anything more. Everyone knew of his half-human grandson, the child of his mutilated daughter and her human attacker. Both child and daughter had been hidden from all other eyes for over a decade, but we knew from rumor that they yet lived. And that we could not understand. Had the daughter belonged to any of the rest of us, we would have slain both her and her infant before birth, and thus removed the shame from our line. What had happened to prevent this?

The shaman looked back at me as if he could read my every thought. " 'As the gods will, we do without question,'" he said, quoting the maxim in a tired voice. "They spoke to me as I held a knife over my daughter's belly, eager to cleanse our honor, and their words turned my knife aside. It was their will that Zeth be raised among us, in my daughter's den, though they would not say why. I had the girl and her bastard walled up, as the gods did not forbid that. I feed them once a day, give them a candle or two for light, but keep the taint away from the rest of our people. It was the gods' will, and I obeyed them, as would any of us." He rubbed his face with a skeletal hand.