JET 8.6: THE SERVANT OF THE ENEMY
“I am the messenger-bird that bears unknown tidings. I am the journey and the one who journeys. I am the breath and the breather. I am Lord Storm.”
– from the Orovic Creed
It wasn’t until I stepped into the otherworld that I remembered the true extent of my injury. It was easy to forget, when you were joined with an eldritch whose gift granted not just flight but weightlessness. The horror of Zyger was far behind me now. I’d been subconsciously keeping myself in a deeper wraith-state than I’d realised, and it was only as I performed the portal-stepping trick, letting go of my eldritches upon the very threshold of Etherium, that my all-too-human solidity returned with a crash.
Despite my prepared posture I fell face-first to the ground on the other side of the gateway, but the scrub-covered dirt of the material plane gave way to lush blankets of supernaturally-huge daisies. I took an extremely fragrant nose-dive, and it required the combined might of both my (rather distracted) siblings to extract me. Thankfully, the jadeway closed quickly behind us, preventing my satyrs from getting a glimpse of my prostrate form. That would’ve kept the pair in jokes for weeks.
I needed a break. Just the three of us. We needed this.
At first I tried to rise, but that just served to bury my hands in the flowers. Jaid came right to my rescue when I started yelling, but even she was pulling back at half-strength. Jaroan didn’t bother to grab my flailing hand until my muffled cries became panicked, and by then it was too late: there were at least two strange, luminous millipedes in my hair (or, more scarily, one extremely long one), and something was starting to chew into my scalp behind the ear.
As I was unceremoniously hoisted out of the massive daisies, I belatedly fixed my shields, and watched not one or two but half a dozen dimly-glowing critters go sailing off through the air, expelled for daring to menace the disabled sorcerer drowning in a flowerbed.
“Serves you right,” I grumbled once they had me back on my feet… foot. Standing braced on my right leg, knee-deep in the bright, sharply-scented flowers, I raised a hand to the weeping welt on the back of my head where one of the otherworldly worms had taken a chunk out of me. I could feel a tiny hole where its miniscule teeth had drilled into the super-tender flesh.
“Everything wants a piece of the sorcerer,” Jar commented laconically, still looking around at our surroundings.
Jaid wouldn’t even speak, just staring at the otherworld in awe.
“Everything gets a piece of the sorcerer, it seems,” I muttered.
I joined them in casting about, but with a more suspicious eye, using my senses more than my eyes, seeking potential threats.
The grass was springy, every blade blunted, parted at the top into a kind of many-leafed clover. There were but few trees around. I’d never before seen Etherium so empty-looking, which was a boon for my paranoid nature, and despite the relative desolation of the vista, it retained a savage, raw beauty that startled even me.
The grey crags of Materium that had loomed so near as tunnel-walls on either side were now somehow moved far aside, and were replaced with arches of marble rising like mountainous bridges, their fluid shapes of such grace that they bespoke an intelligence in the winds which lovingly carved them. Between here and there, soft dells lay, deeply-carpeted in rich blossoms that ran like rainbow rivers in the course of the breeze. Each gust had different notes to the nostril, but the cherry-flavour was ever-present, now muted, then suddenly spiced, and then almost creamy…
Above us, the sky was as white as a sheet and yet not blindingly-so. A thick tangle of shimmering green clouds was to be found on every horizon, and directly above us too, muting the pearly brilliance with their eerie, intriguing shadows. More so than ever before, I felt I was peering through a green glass jar, the emerald lens of a native eldritch.
“Is it safe?” Jaid asked in a stilted sort of voice, as though her mouth formed the words automatically. She didn’t actually sound concerned.
“As safe as it’s gonna get, I think.” I rubbed at my scalp behind my ear one last time then lowered my hand, resolved to let the irritating pain run its course. “Let’s move out a ways.”
“What are we even doing here?” Despite the sharpness of his words, for once Jaroan didn’t sound like he was complaining – it was his voice that carried genuine fear. “I mean… what’s the point if time works so differently.”
“Not just time,” I said, wading out of the huge daisies towards a clearer patch of ground. I had trouble with every step, first finding my balance and then dragging my left leg after me. “Space, too.”
“Well, exactly.” Jaroan was following our sister in my direction; I could tell without looking by the swooshing of the flowers. “I mean, ten steps here could be just one there, you said –”
“Maybe even less.”
“So –”
“We aren’t here to speed things up.” Jaid’s taut voice answered for me. “It’s hard to be a person.”
I reached the shallower ground, and spun around awkwardly to shoot her a glance.
What in Celestium does she mean by that?
She met my eyes suddenly, and I could see how she balked, mouth gaping, like a criminal caught in the act.
“What –”
“Ohhhhh, like, without things like this!” She threw up her hands and gaze me a sickly, quizzical smile. “I think… It just makes me feel better, you know. Being here. Away from… that.”
She’d perfected the smile, now. It looked real, as she picked her way out of the expanse of flowers in my wake.
I let me tell myself I thought it was a real smile, even though I knew better. She hadn’t meant to say what she’d said, not at all.
It’s not them, I thought, returning my gaze to the distant lowlands where the many-hued blossom-river was running. It hasn’t happened, and it won’t. It can’t, now. We’re no longer there.
We no longer exist.
“We’re here,” I said, as much for my own sake as theirs, “to find a fairy.”
I trudged on awkwardly, going the same direction as I had in the material plane. North. Downhill, at last.
“Still trying to replace her?” Jaroan sounded unimpressed. He ranged out slightly ahead of me, my stumbling pace clearly irritating him.
“I know,” I muttered. “Next time I get danger-sense, I swear, I’m never letting it go, even if it secretly serves the kings of hell.”
“Who did she serve?” Jaid was overdoing the curiosity in her voice as she came up behind me. “Did you ever find out, the name of Zel’s master?”
I felt my mood souring, just hearing that combination of three otherwise-innocent letters.
“We don’t even know her name,” I reminded the twins. “I doubt you’ll see her again but if you do, don’t believe a word she says.”
Whatever the faerie queen had done to earn my trust, whatever she had done to make me feel the twins were secure in her presence – all of it was suspect. Every semblance of sincerity, a deliberate malicious act, created to insinuate herself into my counsel.
Every time we connected – every time I felt in her a genuine note of affection for me…
At least Zel knew what she was doing. At least I can hate her.
With Emrelet… all of it was saved for Henthae. In a few years, once the Crucible was an old legend and Feychilde just another passing name in the champions’ records, I’d slink back and have some choice words with that old lady.
It was still strange. Especially being in the otherworld, one of the places I felt we’d shared… To be missing Em… To be in a state where even missing her was wrong, almost criminal…
I still couldn’t face it. I thought I’d dealt with it, thought I’d put her behind me, but all I’d really done was to put things on hold. Magicrux Zyger hadn’t been some relaxation resort, hadn’t exorcised my metaphorical demons like it had my eldritches. It was more like… being frozen in ice. My demons might’ve been frozen along with me, but they thawed at the same rate. Once survival and escape were realised, the less-imperative needs came knocking at my mental door, demanding their own share of attention.
Emrelet…
I stood there in the cherry wind, closing my eyes and trying not to wobble, remembering her one more time.
It wasn’t her touch, her kiss. It wasn’t even her devotion, her cunning, her wilfulness.
It was her smile. Seeing her genuine smile directed at me. The currency of the universe was minted in such moments.
The memory shattered. I wobbled too much, staggered and winced, and ended up chuckling at myself for my self-grandeur.
How many of the epic moments of our history were supplemented by an unrecorded breaking of wind, a random misstep, a stubbed toe?
“You okay?” Jaid asked as she walked past me, all the absent-mindedness back in her voice.
I sighed, and moved to follow.
As we descended, some trick of the light brought the streams of blossom beyond us together into lakes and pools, until after just a few minutes it seemed as though the cosmic artist had drawn the brush horizontally across the canvas, smearing a delta into existence, a convergence and splitting of the rivers…
It occurred to me then, just how wide and deep those blossom-rivers had to be, just how many trillions of petals and leaves and other bits of random detritus I had to be looking at.
“I wouldn’t mind seeing that up close!” Jar cried back, pointing.
I nodded to myself. “Looks dangerous, though!” I yelled in return.
I saw him simply flap his arms in response, like I’d said something so brain-dead there could be no appropriate verbal answer.
He was right. It was a stupid thing to say. Of course the damn river was dangerous. Did I really have to say it?
Wasn’t it dangerous, taking a blade onto the streets? Wasn’t it murderous –
I stopped myself before I took it too far, before the cold edge of disappointment bit too deep into me. Had I been much better? Had I had a better reason to be out there breaking the law when I’d been younger?
It was the fashion of the years he bore. The twins were soon to enter a tumultuous age. It pained me to admit it, even to myself, but to some dark degree I’d just thought of them as things – precious beyond all else, of course – but still just props. Often, obstacles. Impediments. Pets to feed and teach and keep secure. I was guilty of making my life easier by refusing to look at them as people. But they were – complex, clever people, and much more so than I’d been at their age. I was beginning to realise just how much I’d bitten off, raising them alone like this. Maybe we shouldn’t have come here today. Maybe it wouldn’t work. We’d have to find somewhere to stop soon, or at least some other actual humans to mingle with, before the three of us drove each other crazy.
If it wasn’t already too late for our sister.
“Jaid,” I said as we walked along, her pace slowed to match my lopsided lope. “Jaid.”
She looked around at me slowly, as if reluctant to tear her attention from the otherworld; but there was a dull glaze in her eyes even when they met my own.
“Jaid!” I said sharply.
“You gained,” she murmured, and then in the very next instant snapped out of her reverie. She brought a hand up towards her lips as if to reach back in time and stop her tongue before it started.
“I gained?” I looked at her critically, then put my hands to my waist and posed a little, sucking in my waist to accentuate my stringiness. “I very much did not, thank you. But it’s nothing week-old pastries won’t fix.”
I couldn’t coax the smile out of her. She was looking at me in terror.
I approached her, or tried to, but she could see the concern on my face and she drew away more quickly than I could follow. She backed up towards a bank of sparkling heather –
“Jaid,” I remonstrated, “Jaid, what’s up? I mean, really…”
Her boot pressed down into the heather, and a goblin sprang out of it at her, arms and fingers spread wide to grab her and drag her back with it.
I’d let the millipedes get the better of me – I was out of practice, my old habits forgotten – but I’d relearned my lesson. The simple shields I’d placed about the three of us in the wake of the attack on my scalp were plenty to protect us against all normal attacks. I watched with at first surprise and then amusement as the greyish hands closed on the air, long, dirty nails scratching at the azure force-lines only I could perceive.
His kidnapping attempt ended with him sliding down the invisible barrier, falling face-first in the gorse. A great cloud of scintillating sparks exploded about him, rising up from the bushes and then drifting back down upon his recumbent form.
“You’ve got me, haven’t yer,” it grumbled, not even raising its head.
I was suddenly uncertain of its gender. Its voice was less gravelly, softer and higher in pitch than I was used to. Blodg and Graggag… no, Glodb and Gradagh… they’d been blokes for sure, but with this one? I was pretty sure I’d never even thought about the existence of female goblins before, but if there were ever a candidate – this was her.
“You must’ve been desperate,” I observed, casually snaring her inside a diamond hanging off Jaid’s shield.
“The queen wants children,” the goblin wailed, not raising her head. “A nibble on a unicorn’s horn an’ a kiss from an elf, for every mortal babe delivered! Look at yer, just walkin’ by!”
“An elf!” Jaid burst out randomly, some degree of shock in her at this sudden attack, and revulsion at the thought of this scabby creature receiving the intimate favour of such a noble fey. She took an instinctive backwards step, trying to put some distance between herself and the monster, but she only succeeded in dragging my captive along with her.
I chuckled a little, letting the brittle force-lines elasticate somewhat, so that if my sister tried again it would let her back off. Behind her, I could see Jaroan as he came sprinting back, hollering and pointing at the goblin.
“Yessss, yes an elf!” The goblin finally drew back, sitting on her haunches and letting her manky hair hang down in knots to cover her angular face. “The gorgeousest bit o’ flesh in the realm! I’d kiss ‘is lips, oh yeah I would.” The wretched, deranged way she crooned made me pity her. She sneezed as sparks drifted down about her huge nostrils. “Achoo! Just one minute with ’em, an’ that’s all it’d take to make me better. Blimey.” The back of a hand was raised to wipe tendrils of snot from her face, and I suddenly felt sick, seeing the silvery strands glistening there atop the loose folds of greyish skin. I could make out the green veins or arteries beneath the hanging wrinkles, like webs of tree-sap pumping away under a layer of grease-soaked paper.
“You’re ill?” I asked.
“I’m a goblin,” she replied, and wailed some more.
Jaroan had thought better of approaching across the glittering heather, eyeing the tangled patch of ground like it might at any moment start birthing dozens of fey beasties; he circled around instead to view my latest acquisition from our side.
I caught his eye, then he hurriedly looked back down at the eldritch, as if ashamed to have been spotted casting me a glance.
All this was beginning to grate on me.
I returned my attention to the goblin along with him; Jaid was asking it a question.
“Doesn’t the unicorn mind you… nibbling her horn?”
“Him,” the goblin hissed, glaring balefully at my sister suddenly. “Bircanos. Favoured o’ the Riderless One, scourge o’ the Thousan’ Marches. Oh, so pure! Oh, the light!”
Jaid squealed. I couldn’t recall hearing of Bircanos, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t found some obscure reference.
It had my curiosity piqued, and I had to slow my thoughts to get a handle on what she was saying. “You don’t want to be a goblin?”
“Who’d wanna be a goblin.”
She beat at the ground with her bony-looking fist.
Since when do things hate what they are?
As far as I was concerned, goblins were supposed to hate (and envy, I supposed) everything else, not their own kind.
“What’ve unicorn horns and elf-kisses got to do with it?” I pressed.
She didn’t answer – just pounded at the earth some more, ejecting an army of tiny yellow ants or termites from their hiding place in the grass.
“Who’ wanna be a goblin?” Jaroan echoed her, muttering as he came to stand between me and Jaid. “I didn’t think they got much choice in the matter.”
It was an interesting way to put it. He was right about that, as far as I knew at least. Fey came into being in much the same way as mortals in the material plane, and, I guessed, like mortal souls entering Nethernum; they would be born into a shape, their fate sealed from the moment they first breathed the floral air of the otherworld. Nothing I had ever read mentioned anything about fey transformation and yet it was a typically-astute line of inquiry from my brother, even if he’d started by rejecting it as a possibility.
I tried another tack, and in spite of my efforts to sound relaxed, I heard the cold edge to my voice:
“Your name?”
I noted the way her head jerked, her eyes pulled inexorably to meet mine.
I stared into their dark pits, finding the emerald depths twinkling within, and I knew her name before she voiced it.
“Blofm,” she croaked, and a shudder passed through her as she closed her eyes.
“Welcome to my coterie, Blofm.”
Her trembling stilled.
“You’re mine, now. You’ll do as you’re told.”
She met my gaze once more.
“And you can start with this: stop hating goblins.”
* * *
Blofm elected to come along. The more-gruesome fey I encountered often seemed to fall quickly into curiosity – perhaps it was just that they were lonely. Seeing the continued intrigued looks on the twins’ faces (and knowing I surely looked just the same to them) I let it happen. It wasn’t like the sibling bonding-time was going well anyway, was it? We needed something to do. Seeing the twins, after Zyger – I’d thought it would fill me up, I’d thought it was all I’d ever wanted. But now I had them again… I was at a loss. I was suddenly floundering.
A new eldritch was at least something to provide us a topic of conversation.
“What’s it like, being a goblin?” Jaroan asked as we strolled along.
She glanced at me before replying; I smiled to indicate my intent, doing my best to drag my damned foot and keep up.
“Gruelling,” Blofm said. “We wait, without patience. We take, but never keep. We are the lowest of the low.” She grimaced at me toothily. “But I don’t hate us.”
“I don’t get it, though,” he muttered. “Why can… why can he control you, when you’re under the control of a goblin-queen?”
She glanced at me again, and I sighed through my nose.
“You wouldn’t be the first of my fey to have second thoughts about coming along, once exposed to mortal inquisitiveness.” I remembered that early morning, that first trip to Etherium. “I’ll introduce you to Zab, later. I’m sure the two of you will have a lot to talk about.”
I turned to Jaroan. “The way I think it works is – correct me if I’m wrong, Flobm –”
I felt her glare at me.
“– that they have a king or a queen or whatever, just like a human might… But that ruler doesn’t control them – not like a sorcerer does. Right?”
The wretched creature nodded cautiously. Her eyes were burning with a muted green fire.
“It’s different, somehow, with the ones they call their lords. Fey-lords. Demon-lords. Undead-lords. They come in different shapes and sizes. The undead ones are sometimes former people. Not just the lich-lords.”
I noticed as my goblin looked away.
“Or am I wrong, Blofm?”
She looked back.
“Oh, I don’t know much about undead.” She growled a bit. “Or them lords, as you sayin’. My queen ain’t hardly her own boss, don’t yer know.”
I stopped. I needed another break, already, anyway.
“What do you mean?” I asked sharply. “She’s being controlled?”
“Well, how else you gonna get loads of us to do what yer want?” She acted like it was the simplest thing in the universe; the straightforwardness of it all to her terrified me. “Not like that many can be dominated all at once, oh no… an’ it’s easier that way, ain’t it?” She scoffed a little, a horrid, snuffling sound. “I mean, ain’t like even Her Majesty could kidnap a unicorn, is it? Pretty sure she got given him…”
The dreamy quality returned to her voice, just the same as when she first discussed Bircanos, and she seemed to lose the flow of her speech.
I was, however, frozen in a sort of horror.
Of course she meant that all along. How stupid are you to have not seen it?
The elf and the unicorn… they’re prisoners.
“And you know where this unicorn is being kept? The elf, too?” I thought I did a pretty good job of keeping my voice level.
“Well, o’ course!” Blofm sounded offended. “They’s in the queen’s dungeon. Third floor, behind the waterfall.” She seemed to catch herself. “Now, hang on… You wouldn’t be wanting to go there, would yer now? Thatter be dangerous! Very, very dangerous!”
Maybe this goblin wasn’t so lonely as she might’ve appeared.
The wind picked up, spiced cherry almost searing my nostrils. In the distance, the blossom-river bucked and broiled.
“What do you think, Jaid?”
I looked at my sister, and she looked back.
“Me?”
“Her?” Jaroan blurted.
“It’s… a unicorn, Jar.” Gilaela, screaming, a single endless note as she hangs there in the air, punctured by the thorny vines. “I don’t think we can… we can just leave it.”
“So why’s it up to her? I don’t want to leave it, in fact if –”
“Both of you, then!” I wanted to sigh, I wanted to cry all of a sudden. “You both decide – I don’t know what to do, always know what to do…”
What did I let that guardian thing do to her? Gilaela…
My mouth was still running. “It’s – if it’s dangerous –”
“It’s what the gods would want.” Jaid’s composed voice cut through my wittering. “If we are to die… so be it.”
“Yer… yer all mad!” Blofm’s wispy eyebrows shot up, like excited little strands of spider’s-web. “Whatter you sayin’? You wanna go into the dungeon?”
“I…”
I wanted to grab Jaid, shake her, shake not just answers but this whole damn mood out of her –
Jaroan was trying to hide his exultant grin.
But maybe she’s right.
“I think we do.”
The goblin started to cackle, until she was hacking laughter.
“Oh… oh this is rich. She’s clever, ain’t she?”
“Clever? Who?”
“The queen!” Blofm started turning around as if to lead us back up the hill. “The Queen o’ Moths! Sent me out here for kids. Said it’d be easier ‘n it looked. An’ now! Yer blummin’ walking right in!”
She stopped, swinging her filthy hair around as she looked back at us.
“Well? Are yer comin’?”
* * *
My goblin led us back to the patch of ground in which we’d first found her. At first we were confused, but when she stepped into the sparkling heather and simply waved for us to follow, it seemed none of the three of us wanted to appear the coward. We simultaneously waded out into the bushes, and gradually they came up to my knees – the twins’ hips – mine –
The heather was far deeper than it was supposed to be, the stems of its stalks going down to an unknown distance. I suddenly fancied that we were floating above an abyss, an infinite Zyger-pit of ethereal madness out of which these strange plants extended up, the tendrils of some vast ancient intelligence.
“Ouch!” Jaid chirped, reaching down to rub at her side where a twig must’ve poked her. There were, mercifully, no thorns to be found. The vivid flowers dancing atop the shrubs, glittering in magenta-red and pink-white, had a cloying, almost bitter pungence which overtook the sweetness of the wind as they came closer to our faces. The silver-gold dust coating their whorling leaves seemed to sparkle in and out of existence, twinkling almost like stars right in front of my eyes.
When we got so deep the twins were submerged up to their armpits, I started to get suspicious. I’d taken Blofm into my power and I knew, fundamentally, she was mine. She couldn’t bear me ill-will, and she’d been quite casual when explaining that the goblin-queen knew of our presence here in her queendom. But that clearly didn’t mean Blofm still couldn’t draw me into a trap…
Never mind. Springing traps was my speciality. Things always worked out. Nentheleme saved my ass in Zadhal. Nighteye saved my ass from the Rivertown heretic, Aramas. Maybe it was Zel’s turn to show up out of nowhere and lay my enemies low for me, reject her former master, abase herself before me in tearful apology…
As it was, all I felt as we descended were the happenstance intrusions of insects on my tripartite shielding, the continual tapping of malicious bugs into whose spaces, and bad books, we were trespassing.
“I don’t know if I like this,” I called. The twins were keeping a resolute silence; I hoped I was speaking for the three of us.
“This is the doorway.” Blofm moved similarly to a swimmer in water, treading the heather and spinning around by swirling her arms. “We get in here, an’ out there.” She waved vaguely at the other side of the shrubs, a softly-rising slope some forty or fifty feet away beneath a pearly ridge of rock. “Then yer’ll see, aha!”
She dived down into the heather, clearly unconcerned in every way.
Gritting my teeth into a grin, I flashed my smile at the twins, prayed silently to Yune, and dived after her.
I did my best to walk-swim-crawl for a few yards – so long as I kept my eyes shut it really wasn’t so bad, other than a bit of burning in the nostrils. I surfaced again to wave my brother and sister on, but when I looked back I spotted only Jaid floating there.
“Jar?” I said. “Jaroan!”
He surfaced with a rustle behind me and I whirled to find him, cursing my unusable foot.
“Come on!” he berated us, diving down again.
By the time we emerged on the far side of the heather, everything had changed. Where before there had been only an outcropping of white, translucent stone above us, there was now something else entirely.
A tower, of sorts, stood there in its place, backlit by shafts of green and golden light. From our vantage below, it was difficult to make out the detail but I could see that it was surrounded by a wall, enclosed in what must’ve been a narrow courtyard by the ten-foot barrier of piled, mismatched stones. Behind the wall, the tower itself rose up to perhaps sixty or seventy feet, more prism than cylinder. There was nothing neat to any of it. If it weren’t for the crude attempt to imitate mortal architecture with the inclusion of an outer wall and the occasional window, I would’ve taken it for nothing more than a random feature of the otherworld, a big work of art created by a bored bunch of fey. But it was clearly a habitation.
A… palace?
Slowly, I made my way up the slope, the twins just ahead of me, all three of us following our guide. The gateway through the boundary was a tunnel, almost as long as the wall was tall, and, emerging on the other side, I cast about the thin strip of land between us and the tower proper. Where before the grass underfoot had been buoyant and bouncy, tips covered with clovers, the tunnel brought us into a circle of dead plants, their pale, skeletal stems knitted into a kind of mattress.
Strangest of all, the wind died. Not just died down, but stopped in its entirety; the difference was startlingly noticeable. I could still hear it, outside, as it coursed through the rushes and bushes. Yet not a breeze touched a hair on our heads, the goblin’s lank, sweaty locks hanging unmoving like matted vines from her pale scalp.
“Are you good with this?” I asked the twins quietly. “I can drop you back into Materium, or –”
“No way,” Jaroan said, striding off faster than I could follow. Jaid simply continued in his wake; she moved more slowly than our brother and her head was bowed, but there was nothing hesitant about her posture, no doubt on the fierce face I glimpsed as she turned.
Once their backs were to me I tested the portal anyway. There were no natural seams in the dimensional fabric around here, but if my power had been dulled I couldn’t tell – I opened an artificial gateway without trouble.
Shrugging, I continued limping after them. It was pretty much as I’d expected. The demi-plane of the goblin-queen was far less restrictive than the nightmare of the slumbering guardian beneath Mund. Doubtless this Queen of Moths was powerful in her own right – she could see us coming, to one degree or another – but there was power, and then there was someone-ancient-installed-me-to-kill-renegade-archmages power.
The tower’s door didn’t face the entry, so we trailed Blofm around the big stony edifice for about a minute until the ramshackle wooden portcullis came into view. Why exactly a portcullis was being used, when it was clearly hinged on the side like any other door, was quite beyond me. The spiky teeth along the bottom, sunk into the soil, were hardly going to give an invader any trouble – but they had to make it a right pain in the backside to swing open.
Before the mesh of wooden beams serving as the last line of defence, protecting this queen’s dubious palace from the open otherworld, stood two of the least-fierce looking sentinels I’d ever seen. One of the goblins was sitting in a daze, his tin-pot helmet pulled down over his eyes, and a sharp word from his colleague wasn’t enough to rouse him; a pointy shoe in the ribs, however, brought him clattering to his feet.
The pair of goblin guards, armed and armoured out of a rusty kitchen, eyed us in alarm.
“Yer nah…” the more alert of the two started “… nah ‘upposed ter bring the growed-up!”
“Shut it,” Blofm said promptly, and quickly covered the ground between them, finally coming to a proud slouch before the guards. “He’s a saucer. I belong to ‘im now. Lookit, or yer’ll join me.”
“Indeed.” I used a lofty tone, a touch deeper than my usual voice. “It’s difficult to think of a reason not to take you.”
It made sense, didn’t it? If I left them here to raise the alarm – wouldn’t I just be making things harder for myself? Why should I have to take the high road when the stakes were suddenly so high? I couldn’t send the twins home without some overt danger as an excuse, but inviting it made even less sense.
Their beady little goblin eyes met mine, and I realised just how easy it would be, how tempting, to just, snatch out their wills… They were so weak! Their names started to swim into view before my inner eye…
I looked away before my subconscious desire to own them could override my own willpower, casting my gaze over their heads instead. I put on a haughty expression, as if they meant nothing to me.
Maybe they’d felt how close it’d been just the same way I had. Or not just the same way: the near-miss appeared to send them into fits of terror. They wrung at the portcullis, whimpering softly and keeping their heads averted, tripping over themselves and almost getting their feet trapped in the gate’s row of teeth as they heaved it open.
I said nothing, letting the others fall into line in front of me as I dragged my leg in the rear-guard. I could keep a better eye on the twins like this.
We entered the palace of the goblin queen, and whatever I hoped to achieve here, I could only pray to the gods I wasn’t putting the twins on the line for it.
* * *
There was no great hallway, no sweeping staircases to greet us as we entered. Glass jars filled with glowing moths cast the only light upon the scene: an unsteady-looking ladder standing against the rocks, and a dark, uninviting hole descending steeply around a bend. Blofm led us downwards, rather than upwards, and the dank tunnels of earth into which we plunged were so low that even Jaroan had to stoop; I was forced to bend back at the waist, and before too long I was huffing and puffing at the exertion of trying to keep upright without falling after them. Radiant jars of various hues were embedded into the walls of soil here and there, just often-enough to prevent us being entirely eclipsed as we rounded sloping corners, going ever-deeper into the warren. Most of the time, the light emitted by the bugs was vibrant green – or perhaps it was due to the jars themselves – but at times the ethereal luminescence gave way to glass gleaming with a soft, sky-blue radiance, or warm amber… though I had misgivings as we turned at a junction, entering a demon-red zone. It was almost like being back in Henthae’s hell-hole.
We passed eight or nine of Blofm’s kin as we went – for all that they were low, the maze-like slopes were broad-enough to accommodate two men or three goblins abreast. They kept a wide berth from us, and as they pressed themselves into the soily side of the dirt tunnel while we passed them by, I saw fear on their faces when they looked upon me. The edges of my shields were no impediments to them. They bore me no ill-will.
Not yet, at any rate.
We passed through an earthen cave, and then another. By this point we were largely being ignored, too deep in the complex to be taken for a threat. The inhabitants of these places were busy. Goblins were scrawling notes on reams of parchments of dubious origin, parchment I could fancy in passing to be infinite in length as it trailed off a table… Some were drinking a slimy green beverage from assorted cups and conversing loudly, the hot topic appearing to be whether or not Zagagom would win the evening’s eating competition… One was standing on a shoddily-constructed bench, arms aloft with a jar of moths in his left hand and a cup of green froth in the other, crooning a disjointed poem:
… down the tube
Softer ‘an rain, it came comin’ down
A hiss o’ th’ mos’ fantabulous sound
We sat on our asses and what’ll it be
A score o’ them screamin’ kids, all in fer me
I took ’em and one be one shoved ’em right in
They wails in me sack, a deligh’ful ol’ din
The last one, ‘e says, “Yer a bad ‘un, yer’ll know!
“Right inter th’ fires o’ Hell you shall go!”
I push ‘im right down, as deep as I can
I growl at ‘im, “Lissen, I’m ‘Ell’s biggest fan
“If takin’ yer’s all I can do to be free
“Of this stinkin’ ol’ palace, make room there, yer’ll see!”
I dragged ’em…
Jaid pretended not to notice the topic of the song, her mouth set in a resolute line. Jaroan, on the other hand, seemed to be coming to appreciate the perilousness of this environment. He slowed his pace to better accommodate my limp, and Blofm at the front slowed in turn.
“How much longer till we reach the dungeons?” I asked after another minute or more. My left hip was starting to tire from the continual twisting; my left knee was seriously aching, on the back where the thigh tendons stretched down to the calf.
“That where yer wanna go? You sure?”
Blofm stopped to let us catch her up, in a shadowed region between two of the glowing jars, and her shadowy eyes again twinkled green in the darkness.
“Well – I’m not going in there as a prisoner,” I clarified, suddenly realising the possible bent of her thoughts.
“Aww.” Jaroan’s bravado was barely masking his relief. “But it’d be just like Terrible Twostaff and the Black Jail of Jakarr!”
“No, it wouldn’t.” Terrible Twostaff was a fictional mage, not archmage, and his imprisonment had a sense of drama only offered my kind by Magicrux Zyger. “I don’t plan on being here for two weeks, and I don’t plan on recruiting an army of rats to escape!”
“Rats?” Blofm cocked her head, and her pale, rough-looking tongue darted out, sliding luxuriously across her lower lip.
“I really wonder why we haven’t seen any rats down here,” Jaid drawled.
I glanced at her sharply, noting the way she now seemed to be more alive than I’d seen her in ages. She wasn’t brimming with excitement, but at least her eyes were alert, and the corner of her mouth twisted in a sardonic smile.
She’s learned that from me, I realised. It troubled me, for some reason.
All the same, seeing her strength and hearing the levity in her voice served to bolster my resolve.
I turned my gaze back on my goblin.
“We’re riding out of here on the back of that unicorn,” I told her, then, realising there was absolutely no way a unicorn was fitting in these tunnels, added lamely, “metaphorically…”
“Well there’s ways an’ means.” Blofm shrugged at us. “Nobody’s gonna bother till we’re down there, but if yer wanna sneak in proper, yer gonna have to get invisibled. Real good, like.”
“Zab?” Jar suggested, looking smug at his own cunning.
“No.” I shook my finger at them, shook my head. “Some of them could have traits that let them see right through eldritch glamours, isn’t that correct, Flobm?”
She nodded sagely. “An’ more. Yer know me real good, don’t yer, Master?”
“And I’m done with sneaking,” I went on, ignoring her question; “I’m done with all the lies. I think we ought to have a word with your monarch. Flobofmy.”
Her tongue lolled out again, staring at me like a confused dog.
“Right…” I pointed onwards “… now.”
* * *
Where before the tunnels had largely been empty, devoid of traffic, as we approached the goblin-queen’s chamber we began to see more and more of her subjects. The corridors broadened and even grew loftier, achieving such heights that I could stand up straight, and we were challenged twice by armed and armoured posses of guards.
When they didn’t immediately back down, I brought them with me, under the merest touch of my influence. They came clattering along behind us under strict instruction to be as raucous as possible. By the time we came to a third gang of rake- and shovel-wielding goblins, we were a slowly-moving ball of baudy songs and general insanity.
One member of the third group elected to join us without me suggesting anything, throwing down her bin-lid shield and getting right into the groove with the others.
It was with some genuine reluctance that I left them at the throne room doors, but I realised I had to put my serious face on when I saw them. The doors at the end of the ‘hall’ were planes of living wood and vines which withdrew into the dirt walls, the floor and the ceiling as we came near, as though the knots of strange, leafy branches knew of our approach.
I reminded myself where I was and what I was doing. I stepped within, the twins just in front of me and Blofm just in front of them. We three mere mortals peered left and right as we moved down the aisle. I felt perturbed, and strengthened our shields just in case, trying my best to make out our surroundings in the muted rainbow gloom of a hundred radiant jars.
There were no rows of courtiers, no supplicants or revellers. The audience was comprised of trees, columns of dark pillars with their upper sections buried in the earth roof, casting long shadows across our path. Their branches swayed, their leaves rustled, although there was no wind my skin could discern. Huge white spiders the size of dinner-plates were the only true inhabitants I could make out, vast webs, thick like a ship’s rigging, coating almost every surface in sight. Thankfully, none of the webs had been permitted to cross the aisle – whether by virtue of some edict or simply due to the fact too many goblins traversed this path for the ropey strands to stay in place, I was unsure.
“Why does it always have to be spiders?” I muttered, hauling my useless leg behind me.
“Not afraid, are you?” Jar asked me without turning. He did a remarkable job of keeping the fear from his own voice, but the tremor of it was there, underlying the bravado.
“Not a bit,” I lied.
“Good.”
It wasn’t that spiders bothered me, but they reminded me of all my failures. Fintwyna, the headless heretic girl, and her paramour whose fury had almost ended my family. The descent into the eolastyr’s tower filled with demon-spiders, on that first fateful Incursion where Dustbringer had lost his life and his soul. I was carrying enough guilt, enough loss, that I was certain I could’ve found a portentous symbol anywhere I looked, if I only looked hard enough. But these creeping creatures, translucent under the myriad lights, were too close for comfort.
Walking was such a chore. The wraith was like a drug, and I was suffering withdrawal. But it wasn’t like the drugs used by lesser men. The change was at once both more profound and less insidious. Joining with it allowed me to ignore the woes of the flesh… yet it didn’t affect my mind, didn’t impose anything on me. If anything, it simply let my mind be itself, uncluttered by physical distractions, setting my true self free… The sheer length of this chamber was far greater than I’d expected, and I was almost at the point of calling for a break when the scintillating brightness in the distance came into sharp relief. Finally, I could make out the far wall of this throne room in all its lovely detail.
It was, of all things, the mural of a unicorn’s beautiful head, comprised of a thousands of white and yellow jars. The huge glowing depiction of Nentheleme had over a dozen goblin attendants. One was atop a tall narrow ladder, carefully removing a dim-looking jar from its place and replacing it with the one he carried under his arm. The two goblins at the foot of the ladder, ostensibly tasked with holding it steady, were instead competing with one another, sniggering while they kicked at its poles and lower rungs. Others still were employing their unique abilities to cling effortlessly to the wall, or to reawaken with a simple touch the radiance of the lightless insects brought down into their care.
Close to the wall beneath Nentheleme’s head was the throne – if it could be so-called. It was more like a ruined building than a single piece of furniture. Wooden slats, piles of stones, mounds of earth – everything beneath and around the queen added to the effect. She appeared to sit upon the broken roof of a long-since caved-in hovel, her cushions black soil, the arms of the seat unsmoothed oaken planks bristling with rusty nails.
If this queen was a goblin, I might as well have been one myself. She looked more like an overgrown fairy, or an extremely exaggerated elf. Certainly not what I’d expected. She was almost beautiful.
Why such a nubile and elegant sovereign had chosen such a poor dais, I had no answer. This wasn’t just her throne, really – this was her centre, the crux of her plane and her power. And yet she’d evidently saved all the lavishness afforded by her station for her personal attire. Earrings like pearly raindrops, a necklace of jade in shades of deep-sea green – these few delicately-wrought pieces complemented her silver-turquoise gown. Her chin tapered almost to a point, like her nose and her ears and the corners of her eyes – not green, those curious orbs, but a cool sky blue. Two diaphanous dragonfly wings were draped across her shoulders, their surfaces glistening like starry pools as they protruded out in front of her. The final touch, a circlet upon her brow, wasn’t ostentatious – a simple ring of shaped white stone, glittering with golden flecks of mica.
Was I supposed to bow? To introduce myself?
She made the first move.
“Welcome unto my sorry home, lord sorcerer.” There wasn’t a trace of apprehension in her voice; she adopted a conciliatory smile. Highborn were all the same, no matter what world you found them in. “Wouldst thou and thine deign to rest awhile? I fear I possess not the proper quarters to befit one of thy kindred – and yet more do I fear thy journey hence hath been a long and ungentle one. Thou shouldst, at least, sit whilst we converse, no?”
She sat forward, gesturing, and between one blink and the next a bench appeared in our midst, looking relatively smooth and splinter-free when compared with her own mess of a chair.
“I think I’ll stand,” I said, teetering.
Her smile hardened somewhat. Perfect white teeth were bared.
“I understand the legends amongst your peoples concerning mine own. Let it be said that I will not count it as a favour owed unto me in return, shouldst thou accept mine offer.”
I stared at her for a few seconds. Thankfully the twins were smart enough to wait for me to give some signal.
“Let it be said, then,” I prompted. “I’m dying to park my cart.”
She looked taken aback for a moment, then burst into laughter. Not cold, or shrill. Pure mirth.
“Ai! Ai! it is too much.” She wheezed for breath. “Very well, lord sorcerer; I shall dispense with all pretence. You and yours may sup freely of my wine!”
She beamed, and waved her hand eagerly at the bench.
“Errr.”
I looked at the twins – Jar gave me a puzzled glance in response, while Jaid was staring off at the unicorn’s image.
“What is this delay! Seat yourselves at once!”
I returned my gaze to the suddenly-petulant queen of the goblins. She stood, and the wooden boards creaked beneath her as she moved.
“Well, frankly, I don’t want your wine. I don’t want half-sentences. I need a guarantee…”
“Master.” Blofm spoke in her sovereign’s presence for the first time. “Master, she’s sayin’ it as formal as it gets. Suppin’ freely on ‘er wine – it’s like sayin’ –”
“I get it.” I heard the nervousness in my own voice, and squashed it down as best I could. “No… I won’t take anything from this place, anything, unless it’s to free it.”
“Free it?” the queen hissed. “The host who in all good grace doth deign to satisfy her guest shall not suffer blame when he asketh of her blood – nay, to tap of the very marrow in her bones – only to cast it carelessly aside. What wouldst thou of me? Tell me now, how durst thou so slight me, I who have been so contrite before thee?”
“She owns a unicorn. Bircanos!”
Jaid folded her arms and spun on her heel, facing away from the fey queen and screwing her eyes shut.
No fear of reprisal on my sister’s face. Just a scowl of fury.
The ruler of the demi-plane matched it with a scowl of her own.
“And you own one of my subjects! Impudent wretch, don’t you dare turn your back on me!”
As she shrieked, pretence finally giving way to emotion, the queen lifted her hand and made another gesture. I felt something rake at Jaid’s shields, gouging deep into the outermost shell and splitting it into tatters of residual blue lines. It was only as it withdrew that I perceived a huge green shadow, like the paw of a gigantic unseen panther retracting back across the space towards its creator.
Jaid swayed, as though she wanted to spin back to face this strange, subterranean monarch – but Mortenn stubbornness won out. She clenched her jaw, kept facing away.
“Bircanos,” was all she muttered.
Blofm was still wittering, so I waved her into silence while I stepped in front of Jaid, covering her with my own shielding.
I cried out: “Nevael esai vi alim merreine elim tindamor!”
Do not speak so to the sister of the sorcerer.
The queen drew back her hand, well-scolded, bringing it close to her chest.
“I don’t care about your rules. I won’t be tricked, and I won’t sit.” I shuffled, bringing my feet closer together so I could draw myself up to my full height, and used my most imperious tone. “Now show me your true face. Show me, before I rip off your mask.”
The queen seemed to shiver, and melt –
And became the goblin she had been all along.
She wasn’t fat, not in any ordinary sense. The loose jowls of skin hanging down the sides of her face, the dripping earlobes – these pointed to the notion that she’d once been a far larger goblin. Or perhaps it was just age. The arms and legs poking out from her vast tattered garment were thin, almost emaciated. And yet – the stomach…
The stomach was like a demi-plane all of its own, barely connected to the rest of her body, grey surfaces bulging out of the bedraggled fabrics all over the place. It was as though a giant worm were coiled about her midriff, and it squirmed and rolled even when she wasn’t moving.
I saw now why the throne had creaked and bent beneath her when she’d stood. She hadn’t extended her illusion to cover her surroundings, either through a lack of perceived need or simply a lack of practice.
“I’m goddamn sick of illusionists,” I muttered.
“And I’m sick of sorcerers!” she whinged, her voice robbed of its former delicacy. “What are you doing here? Leave us alone!”
“I hear you have a unicorn for sale,” I said. “You’re an entrepreneurial folk, right?”
She sat down, cushioned by the tremendous belly. Ugly lips creased into a grey, smug smile, but there was dread in her gaze now.
“And what will you offer me, eh? My life?”
“Your queendom.”
She threw back her head, and now the tense laughter was as shrill as it came.
“My queendom? What – you’ll destroy all this? All of us?”
I psychically checked he’d recovered from his encounter with Lyanne’s zombie-giant, then let the crimson light cascade, placing my hand on Khikiriaz’s flank. The queen shrank back on her fleshy bulges, eyes popping. One of the goblin assistants almost fell from its perch once it copped a look at my ikistadreng.
“If need be, yes. You’ve got the face of the Goddess of Freedom up in lights shining down on you, and to make it you’re capturing things! What you’re doing –”
“Is no different to what you, to what any of you do!” The queen pointed at Blofm with a long, quivering finger, her eyes still on me. “We don’t have anything, any place except this! You think you’re different to me? We only wanna get better. We worship her. One day – one day we’ll be elves!”
“Who told you that?”
Jaroan’s voice shook me. He was staring at the queen like she’d just told him up was down. I was glad to see I wasn’t alone.
“Yeah,” I backed my brother up, “what in the Twelve Hells…?”
I felt Khikiriaz press his not-quite-fur into my hand at the mention of his home. The infernal substance of his being was like blurry hair on the surface but it swiftly condensed into a flesh tougher than lead.
Would the ‘fur’ hold a shape?
“It – has – been – promised!” The queen was all-out wailing now. “You think – you think you will get better? You will get worse! You will be like us, looking for something good to gnaw on!”
Something good? I’d left behind everything good about life already. There was no getting worse, not from here. No downwards when you were at rock bottom. Emrelet was the good. The dragon’s victim. My victim.
“But you won’t get better eating bits of a unicorn or kissing an elf.” I felt like I could pity her, suddenly. “You won’t heal. You’ll only hurt. You’ll hurt the light.”
“You think I don’t know that?” she hissed.
Her stomach rippled.
I trapped her gaze –
Nothing swam into my consciousness. No sense of essence. No feeling of control. No name.
After a few seconds she tossed her head, breaking eye contact, evidently feeling little more than a faint glimmer of the agony which should’ve awaited her.
“You’re stronger than any I’ve met in a long time,” she conceded, a devious smile splitting her haggard face, “but you’re nowt to my master. He isn’t gonna be pleased with you, wrecking the whole operation –”
“Of course, of course.” I waved an impatient hand. “Your powerful master – I suppose I should look out for his challenge. What’s his name, again?”
She cackled at that, saying nothing.
“Speak his name, or by Kultemeren I’ll see your throne levelled.”
Her glance met mine again, and finally, finally she was afraid.
“No!” she yelped, trying to sit forward and failing on the first try. “No! You don’t get it. I can’t say his name, I can’t tell anyone!”
“I’ve said my piece.” I was starting to feel irritated, watching her claw her way upright on the throne. The compulsion to end this foray into the otherworld and return to the comforts of Materium had been enhanced by my oath. “You’re a goblin-queen. If anyone can find a loophole, it’s you. Can you write it down? Tell a worm?”
Amongst her other abilities, I had a suspicion Blofm could speak to worms…
“It’s – it’s been so long.” Our host tugged at her spindly hairs as she moaned. “So long… But I –”
She suddenly straightened a little.
“Outta here! All o’ yer! Now!”
When she swung her arms to gesture at her attendants the huge ephemeral paws returned, batting them out of their perches. The glinting panther-claws sliced through the ladder, snicking it into wooden twigs, and the goblin atop it went tumbling like a leaf from a tree. Fortunately for him, he had some power that let him land as lightly as a leaf too, and he went sprinting off.
Seeing their queen’s fury, it didn’t take the attendants long to scurry out of sight, entering tunnels hidden in the shadows of the corners.
When she was satisfied they were gone, she sighed.
“I could tell you who he ain’t.”
“Who he isn’t? And I could infer…”
She raised a hand to stop me, looking thoroughly terrified now.
“I can tell you who he ain’t.” She spoke more loudly, with more firmness in her voice, but she was quivering worse than ever. “He ain’t an Ord, or a Nil. An Ulu, or a Tyr. He’s –”
“A Mal,” I breathed.
Mal… Malas?
“Like Prince Deathwyrm!” Jaroan muttered under his breath. “For real?”
“I didn’t tell you!” She was back to shrieking. “I said nothing!”
“I understand,” I called out.
For once, I really did. Working against the edicts of a master like him… How was she even capable of such a feat? His will should’ve overridden any loopholes in his wording. She should have obeyed.
Zel’s real master had been more capable…
Unless that was the point. Driven to the brink, the Queen of Moths might reveal this much. Enough to deter a potential aggressor. Enough to make someone who already wanted to leave turn tail and run, ushering his kid brother and sister along in front of him.
“But children?” Jaid said suddenly, looking at the queen in disdain. “What would he want with children?”
Blofm looked up, as if she were about to answer, but her former ruler held our attention. The distended monarch shook her head vigorously, loose jowls swinging left to right.
“They’re not for him – they’re for me! He told me… I have to grow my power! I have to stand strong for him when he calls for me!”
“What does she mean, for her?” Jaroan’s voice was quiet. I could tell he was feeling nauseous.
“It’s the only way to be free!” She patted her vast stomach with both hands, an action made almost comical by the sheer amount of tumourous skin extending out from her midriff – she could barely encompass a tenth of it in the span of her spindly arms. “I swallow them,” she almost whispered, reverence in her tone. “And their bits don’t get to go out. They stay in me, forever. They have such… such imagination…”
She never said the name.
I smiled as my mind was made up. At least I would soon be far from here.
No responsibilities.
I looked down at Blofm and addressed her directly.
“Why you ever thought she could tell you how to get better, I’ll never know.”
I scratched my mark in Khikiriaz’s substance – it wouldn’t last long, I knew, but he wouldn’t need long.
I released him and, still looking down, murmured, “Khalor.”
It was a foregone conclusion. She might’ve been the mistress here, might’ve been at the very eye of the storm of the energies she owned and manipulated. But the oath of Kultemeren was stronger. The will of the archmage was stronger. The cause – the need for justice – was stronger.
My demon went charging at the throne, moving faster and more eagerly than I thought I’d ever seen him move, and the Queen of Moths panicked. She swung her arms wildly, fingers splayed. Two green-tinted shadow-paws swept down at the ikistadreng to maul him, bat him aside, but he tossed his great black-antlered head to and fro, absorbing the first attack entirely, and deflecting the second so that it only struck a glancing blow at his flank. He barely lost any speed, his trajectory back on course in a split-second. Only a little blurry blood streamed behind him as he ran.
Her panic became absolute hysteria, and she let down all her walls.
“Vaylech, save me!” she screamed.
It almost took her too long to summon her moths from their hiding places in the riven wood and crevasses of her seat, thousands of the bugs coming streaming out to settle swiftly upon her misshapen body and coat her in their wings. These moths did not glow. They were dark grey, dark brown, black. Even beneath the second skin of living critters, draped like vast itching curtains across her distended stomach, I could make out the way she was shaking.
Khikiriaz laughed gutturally as he connected, head lowered –
The demon’s destructive force went rippling out, turning a vaguely throne-like mess of materials into a literal garbage-dump.
It didn’t stop there. The kinetic energies went through the piled dais and slammed into the back wall, cascading up and out, throwing earth and glass everywhere.
When the storm of splinters and dirt finally settled, the Queen of Moths was nowhere to be seen, and a thousand or more jars had been shattered, their lights set free to drift down across the throne room.
“She escaped, Master,” Khikiriaz growled glumly across at me in Infernal, tossing the detritus with one end of his antlers.
“Grel kasond oroz. Daugn sa kasagren! Kherem.”
I sent him home, then looked back at the others.
“We have a dungeon to find,” Jaid said firmly.
“Indeed we do. Lead on, good Flombom.”
My goblin visibly winced at that, but otherwise kept a thoughtful silence, leading the three of us away from the chaos of this creature’s lair, towards the tunnels through which the queen’s attendants had fled.
As soon as we were moving again, I was immediately reminded of my need to sit down and give my leg a rest.
“I should’ve taken her up on the bench thing, in spite of everything,” I grumbled. “How much could it’ve cost me, really?”
“Quit moaning and keep up,” Jar called back over his shoulder.
Jaid had well and truly surfaced out of her dazed state in her keenness to aid the lord of unicorns, the noble eldritch imprisoned somewhere around here by Mal Malas, and even she abandoned me, skipping ahead with the others towards the tunnel entrance, leaving me to drag my leg alone, wincing as I crossed the wreckage-strewn ground, beneath the dappled lights.
* * *
The dungeon itself had only the two residents of whom we’d already heard, and somehow news of the queen’s defeat spread faster than we could approach – by the time we’d reached the weird fences marking the entrance to the palace jail, the goblins who’d seemingly been set here to guard the place had long since passed us in the passageway, three bends earlier, their wails of glee or despair impossibly to properly discern. We walked unhindered around the gates and into the dank, mouldy cavern of bland brown-white rock. From the high vantage it offered, we looked down into the pit where they’d been chained. Blofm and Jaid alike loosed whimpers at the sight of Bircanos, but where my sister made a sound of dismay, the goblin’s was more one of lust, hunger.
This place might’ve been used as a latrine from time to time, and the goblin-drop was pooled in the basin at the bottom of the pit, where the two prisoners lay. The once-proud unicorn was coated almost hoof to horn in stinking muck, his eyes closed, chest rising and falling rapidly. Atop his head, the glittering horn’s light was untouched by any grime, and yet its golden radiance was dimmed to a muted, burnished glow. The elf, not ten paces from the unicorn, looked no less broken in both spirit and body. This was no elf of Materium, born of mortal flesh, but a true high elf, his otherworldly nature made plain by the extreme length of his fingers, his tapering ears, the impossible cheekbones. As if to spite his inherent perfection in form, his autumn-red hair had been roughly shorn short, his body left almost naked, just a tattered bit of fabric fastened into a loincloth to protect his modesty. Both of the prisoners were emaciated, their ribs protruding as they breathed.
Both appeared to be sleeping.
“Blofm… thanks for today, but I’d like you to leave us now, please.”
Against her will, my goblin suddenly started to backpedal, and, with a brief grunt of annoyance, she was soon out of the jail and out of my range.
The steps cut into the side of the cavern let us down to the edge of the fetid pool. Close up, it challenged even our Sticktown-trained stomachs – I felt no less pale than the twins turned right before my eyes.
“Twelve Heavens.” I chose my swear-word with some care. “Cover your mouths.”
Even Jaroan acquiesced to my order, which I suspected said more for the noxiousness of our environment than it did for a change in his attitude.
Our scarves pulled tight across the bridges of our noses, we went right up to the edge.
“Good morning!” I called. “Erm… Lord Elf? Lord Unicorn?”
“They probably think this is some trick,” Jaroan murmured.
The elf’s eyelids fluttered open.
“You mean… you mean… it isn’t?” he moaned in a strange, high accent, the words stilted but nonetheless comprehensible Mundic.
“No…” I really didn’t know what to say, or how to reassure him. “My good man…”
Seeing him looking back at me, his gaze cool and blue despite the goblin-drop literally everywhere – in his eyelashes – I felt more sick than ever.
We have to get them out of here.
The Queen of Moths and her bellyful of plane-locked children could wait. This would suffice. This would strike a blow for the gods of light.
“Show me the chain,” I muttered, breaking eye contact with him and looking instead at the collar about his throat, the links leading to the fastening in the rock…
Everything was so soiled it was difficult to tell at first, but there seemed to be an amethyst tint to the steel no amount of muck could occlude. Something only my eye could pick up.
Malas’s magic…
“I can’t… move,” the elf gasped. He did his best, clutching at the chain-links nearest his throat with trembling hands.
“Oh… never mind.” I saw the patterns now, becoming ever-clearer as if rising up to meet my eyes as I studied the matrices embedded in the links. “It’s draining your energies, and using them to reinforce the binding instead.” I looked down at the pool in thought. “Erm… I think I can do something about that, actually.”
If I could remove the ensorcellments, the chains would probably be no more durable than ordinary steel. I could have my bintaborax rend it easily… It was just a matter of pulling the force-lines through each other, against their natural inclinations. Like inverting a shield.
I crouched down beside the pool, reaching out a hand to the chain binding the elf –
“Hold.”
Everyone’s gaze was pulled to the unicorn as Bircanos spoke, though the word was in Etheric.
His eyes were still closed, but the light emanating from his horn brightened just a touch.
His words weren’t for us.
“Do not believe him. Do not go with him.”
“What’s he saying?” Jaroan asked sharply.
I stared at the unicorn.
“Why?” I asked bluntly. “What did I do to you?”
Bircanos’s equine eyes opened, flaring, white-hot coals.
“Do not speak the tongue!” he snarled. “Apostate! You I should very much like to destroy. I warn you – should you free me, once I have pulled down this demi-plane I will spear you through the heart and bear you as a trophy to my Lady’s side, show them all what becomes of infidels!”
When he spoke of destroying me, of spearing me, spittle came flying from his mouth. I could hear the emotion in his voice. The elf was staring at me in trepidation, and I could feel the twins’ confusion without having to see the expressions on their faces.
“I don’t know what you think you know,” I said slowly, “but it’s not true. I’m a friend to fey – see, I’ll summon my sylph –“
“You bound my sister, and now where is she?” he choked. “I know of her fate. Lost, forever, to that child of Illodin! She came before me. You cannot lie to me. And I cannot lie to you! I will destroy you, Feychilde! You are mine!”
Gilaela… came before him?
I had no retort.
“Please –“
My lame attempt at remonstration was interrupted as he tossed his body violently, in what must’ve been a show of incredible strength given his drained state. He dragged back on the chain, kicking muck so that it spattered all over us, causing a din as he smacked and slapped his flanks in the pool and against the very stone.
“He’s insane,” I muttered quietly in Mundic for the benefit of the twins.
Hoping he wouldn’t hear, wouldn’t correct me, wouldn’t explain to Jaid what I’d done to Princess…
Please, Bircanos, I prayed silently. Nentheleme –
I caught myself.
Yune, don’t let him tell. I don’t know how much it’d take to break her, and that…
I still remembered what I’d done to one of my most faithful followers, remembered it so clearly I could see it in my mind’s eye even now –
The thorns, entering her –
The shiver of absolute, unutterable agony –
The nausea overcame me and I threw my scarf off, retching.
I only brought up a few mouthfuls of phlegm, and, shuddering, I replaced my scarf. Jaid and Jaroan weren’t saying anything. I sensed them backing away, fear overtaking their young minds. The lord of unicorns was still thrashing about, writhing like Gilaela in my imagination.
This was no place for them. What had I done? I thought this would be some merry adventure. Instead I brought the twins face to face with one of Mal Malas’s personal servitors, brought them to the rancid heart of a goblin fortress to bear witness to the shattered souls kept trapped within…
I stood up to my full height as Bircanos finally settled down, his last fitful throes truly pitiable. He lay there quivering in the waste of his goblin captors, mouth half-submerged, the exposed nostrils spraying drop across the pool with every heavy breath.
“Maybe you want to destroy me,” I said, “and maybe that’s what I deserve. Gods know, you’d find a lot of people who agree with you where I come from.”
The one eye above the surface of the drop opened again slightly, a slit of white light seeping through the crack as he regarded me again.
“So we’re going. But first, I’m going to free you. Because that’s what I have to do.”
I sent the twins back first, depositing them in the cave-system which was Materium’s analogue of the demi-plane we’d entered. Leaving them in the care of Avaelar and the satyrs, Zabalam there to light the air, I couldn’t help but hold the desolate look on Jaid’s pale face in my mind as I traversed the gateway back into the goblin queen’s halls.
I started with the elf. A swift spell, and a word to Junior Cuddlesticks while I gingerly held onto one of the demon’s spikes – and it was done.
“Can you make do from here, or would you like me to bring you with me?” I asked him in as tender a voice as I could manage, while I worked on the spells binding Bircanos.
The high elf just shrank back from me at that, his leaf-shaped eyes full of horror, thin fingers clutching at the pulverised links of the chain still fastened to the collar around his throat. He wouldn’t stop staring at me, wouldn’t change the look on his face from one of fright.
“I don’t need to keep you!” I paused, waiting for him to react, but he either didn’t believe me or couldn’t properly understand me. “Or do you want me to help you with that?”
I put a hand to my throat to indicate the collar about his neck. He just shook his head violently.
“No – no – please…” he whimpered. “No. I’m – no.”
I sighed, going back to my spellcraft.
I could just take him. Calm him down on the material plane.
Then I cast my gaze back down at Bircanos’s one open eye, its gleaming glare still fixed on me.
No. Best not.
I finished breaking the spell, and decided it was time for me to put out a hand, to call back my fiend –
In the very instant the nethernal essence-sapper gave way beneath my sorcerous fingertips, before I could even move my arm to beckon across the planes to Junior Cuddlestick, Bircanos stirred.
This time, in a single savage rearing-up, he wrenched the entire chain loose of the rock, its fastening exploding from the stone with a loud pop! while the rivets went pinging across the chamber.
Golden light rippled over him in waves from horn to hoof, moving ever-more strongly, brighter and brighter – and with the sudden scent of burning grease every wound, every mark, every stain and smudge was washed clean.
His hair and mane shining as though they had been woven from threads of pure pearl, Bircanos stood now not in the pool but hovering above it, marble-like hooves poised nonchalantly on the air almost twelve inches over the slop.
I was paralysed at the glorious sight, so amazed that I forgot his promise.
If I had thought my hand in his rescue, that my persistence despite his threats, would go some way towards changing his mind, I had been sorely mistaken.
The unicorn leapt, finding more than enough purchase on thin air to bear down upon me, thrusting his head at me as a swordsman thrusts his sword-arm.
I fell awkwardly through the jadeway, stumbling backwards, only just closing the planar boundary as the tip of his horn plunged down at my upper chest.
Avaelar caught me, and, as far as I could tell from the speed and angle of my re-entry to Materium, none of them should’ve gotten a glimpse of my impending glittery doom.
“Is all well, Feychilde?” the sylph asked at once. “Why didst thou not call upon mine aid?”
I straightened up, thanked him with a nod, and heaved another sigh.
“Well, it’s done.” I peered up at the shadowed cavern ceiling, just beyond Zab’s reach. “I guess we’re going to have to go wraith if we want to get out of here sometime this week. What’s the betting we’re ten times deeper-down than we should be…”
The sylph’s weren’t the only questions I avoided, shedding the burdens of mortal flesh and donning the spectral cloak of my undead minion. I rejoined with the others, and I promised the twins I’d try summoning Blofm later, supposing she survived the unicorn’s wrath – and that I’d try to get some explanation out of her regarding Bircanos’s insanity, his apparent hatred of me.
That night it didn’t rain, and the wind wasn’t quite so cold as the previous night, so we made our camp in the arch of a shallow cave opening. I hovered enwraithed beside the campfire while the twins pestered Blofm for almost half an hour, looking for answers the goblin could never give them. Finally, feigning exhaustion, I dismissed the eldritch and turned over horizontally on the air, as if to fall asleep.
They didn’t talk between themselves while they sorted their bedrolls, and they didn’t even sleep close to each other for warmth as I’d told them to. Five minutes after they both stopped making sounds, I swivelled around to check on them and found them lying on opposite sides of the cave mouth, barely able to touch one another’s fingers if they’d both stretched out their arms.
Jaroan had nodded off almost instantly, but Jaid’s eyes were still reflecting the starlight. She was staring up at the sky like a corpse. If she noticed me turn over, she gave no sign of it.
I gently flipped back, and resumed my own sky-staring. I supposed if she looked like a corpse, I must’ve looked like a ghost.
I’m sorry, Gilaela, I said to the stars. I wish I’d been able to think of something different I could do. But I had to get home. I had to get back to them.
Or had I? Was all this, any of this, really necessary? Were the twins better off here with me than they’d been with Xan and Orstrum? Wasn’t it just base selfishness driving my actions, my mindless, murderous urge to escape Magicrux Zyger at all costs?
The stars held the answers, but they held them back, like a smiling sorcerer wrapped in shadow at the edge of the campfire’s smoke.
And when at last I plunged into them, it was not the stars but the darkness, the darkness in my dreams that held the answers, held them and displayed them with fingers spread, so that my naked third eye might drink in the sights, the names of my guilt writ large in subcutaneous ink upon every parcel of skin, suspended there between seven executioners’ swords.
It wasn’t just Gilaela I’d betrayed. Not just her I’d failed.
I’d failed everyone, everyone I’d ever known.
The hands closed. The names expunged. Lost to the darkness, lost forever.
This was my redemption, wasn’t it? This self-imposed exile. I had to run from my doom. I had to, didn’t I? For their sakes?
I awoke the next morning, and, if I’d grasped at some celestial acknowledgement of my doubts during my slumber, the gods’ fingerprints left impressions on my mind like the imprint of falling feathers upon stone, images and words evaporating faster than dew under a bright sunrise.
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