G'lin dog

A G’lin dog is a dog. The name belongs first to G’lin, the tongue of the goblin-kin, and the breed carries it secondhand, from the people who keep it, so a question asked about a G’lin in the wrong company will be answered with a language. It is a mutt to look at, built something like a dingo, with nothing in it bred for the look of the thing. It is kept for one job.

It sees in the dark and it smells better than it sees, it is naturally hard to sicken, and it is held to be cleverer than the goblins who keep it. All of which makes a good sentry, and a sentry is what it is for.

At Wraithblade Keep the dogs were the watch. The Zarkhi goblins holding the walls kept them in the towers, and one tower room the company opened was a den: filth, and a carcass torn apart in the middle of it. At midnight the company raised a figure of light outside the wall and shaped it into a spectral form, because the goblins holding that keep had lived alongside its wraiths and were afraid of exactly that. The dogs panicked with their handlers and went howling away west, which is how three people got over a wall unseen. Two of them charged into the river-gate room later that night and were put to sleep and subdued rather than killed, then tied and muzzled beside the goblins and shut in behind a jammed door. That was the company’s practice through the whole keep, and the dogs were given the same terms as their handlers.

Where the breed came from was never written down, nor whether anyone else in Idir keeps one, nor what one is worth to a household with no wall to watch.