“How much for this?” I inquired of the landlord, idly.
“Not for sale or rent,” he said, in a tone of finality. “That’s an heirloom, that is. My great-grandfather bore it when Phasdreille was besieged by a vast goblin horde which crossed the river to sack the White City. He rode with a cavalry force raised here in the borderlands, and they met the goblin ranks as they lay outside the great city.”
“Oh,” I said, trying to head him off. “That’s fine. . . .” But he had a glint in his eye, and he was going to finish the story whether I wanted to hear it or not.
“The horsemen caught the goblins unawares and routed them,” said the landlord, “though many tall and fair soldiers fell in the battle. My great-grandfather survived, but he was killed shortly afterward. That was the last time he wielded this, his mighty sword. With it he struck down many dozens of goblins, cleaving a path through their ranks until he came upon their chieftain: a huge brute dressed in red and black, great ugly spikes on his helm and a weapon like a vast cleaver in his massive claws. My ancestor faced the beast and, after many blows were struck on both sides, felled him, cleaving his skull in twain. But the goblin was wearing an iron collar and the great sword was notched, as you can see. A diamond was taken from the dead goblin and set in the pommel, see? Like I said, it’s not for sale.”
Well, thanks for that, I thought. I wondered if he would go into as much detail about dishes that weren’t on his menu. Ah yes, sir, tonight we don’t have steak with grilled mushrooms and garlic sauce, which would be followed by sticky toffee pudding, if we had any, but we don’t. . . .
I took what weapons we had, and there we were, wading through the elephantine grasses of the pockmarked valley that led through the marshes to the escarpment, the cinder path, and the mountains. It didn’t seem to make a lot of sense to me, but Renthrette was in charge and claimed to know what she was doing.
“Rather than following the path up and through the mountains,” she whispered, “we will cross the valley floor and then veer off to the right, heading east for half a mile. Then we climb toward an outcrop of rock which is overgrown with lichen so that it looks pale green from a distance. From its top, a few hundred yards to the east, we should be able to see a stone lion. This marks an old guardhouse and a forgotten corridor into the depths of the goblin fort.”
All this was said in a hushed voice with a good deal of glancing about, as if we might be overheard by the enemy. Having seen something of the wildlife in this doubtful region, that was probably wise. I found it hard to be so collected. “And the goblins have never noticed this huge stone lion behind their house, I take it?”
“They have not been in the fort long, by all accounts, and do not know all its secrets. It is an ancient structure locally called the Falcon’s Nest, built long ago to protect the pass from invaders, and the goblins have only expanded this way in the last few months.”
“Oh, I see,” I muttered. “I know when I move into a new place it always takes me the best part of a year to find the back door.”
“Sorrail says the goblins have only been inhabiting the parts of the fortress that open onto the pass itself. They are a lazy and shortsighted race who can’t see past an immediate profit or easy conquest.”
“How convenient.”
“Yes,” she said, missing the irony.
“So if they are so lazy and shortsighted, how did they take the fortress from Sorrail’s pals in the first place?”
“Treachery.”
“Of course.”
“Sorrail says that it’s everything in their nature that makes them so terrible—their delight in causing pain and incapacity of thinking beyond their own swinish desires—that also makes them vulnerable. Where we are explorers and nurturers, dedicated to life and learning, they are destroyers, filled with hatred against even their own kind.”
“Who is this ‘we’?” I wondered aloud.
“You doubt our friendship with the fair folk?”
“The what?”
“That’s how they are termed locally, the ‘fair folk,’ because they are tall and pale and golden-haired,” she said, still forging ahead and refusing to meet my gaze.
“Termed by who? The goblins? I doubt it. By themselves, perhaps.”
“Well, Sorrail says . . .”
“Can we drop Sorrail for a while?” I said. Her admiration for the blond lancer was becoming pointedly and irritatingly apparent. I marched on through the wet grass, avoiding the sucking, water-filled pits with a shudder of remembrance. My shield and axe were in my left hand and my right supported the crossbow, which was slung about my shoulders on a leather thong.
“It’s a good thing Sorrail is so familiar with this country,” said Renthrette suddenly. “He knows this mountain fort like the back of his hand.”
“I had a feeling he might,” I remarked, bitterly. “Too bad I didn’t have chance to cut it off. We could have used a map.”
It took us several hours to cross the reedy vale, then we veered east and began to skirt the foot of the mountain range. Before, the whole range had been visible and the Armored One had been scowling down at this, our foolhardy approach. Now, flush to the steep slopes themselves, we could see nothing but the granite wall in front of us. The ground was rocky enough to prevent much vegetation, and a species of path had thus developed, tracing its way round the almost vertical sides of the peaks, which rose sharply out of the wetlands.
A cold wind had picked up since we left the inn and it tousled Renthrette’s hair and made her eyes water. She proceeded without a word. I battled on behind her, trying not to think about what we were doing, where we were, how we were going to get back, the bloody miserable weather, and so forth. From time to time we would round a crag and a gust of wind would hit us hard and knock the breath from our bodies like some specter barreling down the mountains to ward us off. There were no birds, nor even any bird calls, but I couldn’t decide if that was good or not. There was only the wind, which, just occasionally, seemed to whine up there in the ramparts of the mountain and through its hidden crevices, so that I wheeled and looked up and about me with momentary panic. Renthrette scowled at me and sighed to herself, as if wondering if it had been such a great idea to invite old Liability Hawthorne along for the ride. Ignoring this unhelpful attitude, I kept my eyes skinned for whatever hostile brute was likely to pop up and rip my legs off.
But the journey passed without event. Renthrette gestured suddenly and stood still, smiling. Above was a great rock face like a cliff, smooth as a sea-washed pebble and green as the shoots of spring saplings. The stone glowed with the emerald light that shafts through a wooded glade, and jutted out like it was the knee or elbow of the crouching mountain. Below that it came down, sheer and unblemished as a frozen waterfall on a winter morning. Getting up it was going to be an absolute bugger.
Renthrette, inspired, no doubt, by the memory of Sorrail, all-purpose warrior and romantic hero, was undaunted. While I slumped into the grass and pawed through my haversack for something edible, she paced the ground, gazing up at the lichen-covered rock face, stepping up onto boulders and testing hand and footholds. Then there would be a little shower of stones and she would jump down, muttering irritably.
“Are you just going to sit there, or what?” she said. “I don’t know why I brought you.”
“I did wonder,” I answered, dragging myself to my feet and starting to pace around as she had been doing, as if this was going to help somehow.
“I looked there,” she said, irritably. I moved east along the rock face and tried to look busy.
“Not that far, idiot,” she said. “Try over there.”
I did. “Over there” was a point directly beneath the great green outcrop. It was, so far as I could see, completely featureless. Still, far from wishing to upset the tyrant queen still further, I snuffled about like a lost dog and listened to her whispering to herself as she searched. And then, while my attention was almost completely on her, a remarkable thing hap
pened. I took a step to the left, a spot I had passed over a dozen times, and the rock face changed. I repositioned myself very carefully and it happened again. When I was in just the right position, motionless, and the light was falling on the rock at a certain angle, stairs appeared recessed into the stone three feet from my face. For a second I stood dumbfounded, then I called to Renthrette, not daring to turn away in case I never found the place again.
They were camouflaged so well that it took her a couple of minutes to see them, and she muttered doubtfully the whole time. I suppose she thought I was pulling her chain. When she finally saw them she grew very still, an expression of mute wonder on her face. Because it was more than camouflage. It was an extraordinary piece of engineering and artistry. The stairs were cut to be invisible anywhere but in the precise spot I had been standing, and the rock about them seemed to just blur them away. Perhaps when the sun was higher or casting longer shadows, the edges of the recess would be more sharply defined, but the rock around it sheltered them so perfectly that the face seemed unbroken. I was still admiring this remarkable craftsmanship when a voice came from halfway up the face.
“Come on,” Renthrette was hissing, with more enthusiasm than impatience. “What are you waiting for?”
My flicker of delight was doused, as ever, by her yearning for blood and glory, and I was left with that trembling, dreadful anticipation that came in its wake. In this case, the “wake” I had in mind had less to do with passing ships and more with farewell drinks round a coffin. Of course, were I to perish in this mountain stronghold, it seemed pretty unlikely that the goblins and their hungry mounts would host a wake where my corpse could be mourned by my loved ones. Not that I had any loved ones.
With such encouraging thoughts, I ascended the stairs, wondering all the while if the recess concealed me as effectively as it concealed the flight of steps. I had, till fairly recently, lived a pretty quiet life, much of it with my head down, an eye on the door, and an ear open for the approach of the authorities. But even in my days as an actor the notion of invisibility had always had its appeal, no more so than now. Imagine being able to take this ingenious little recess with me, to melt into the walls or trees around me whenever I felt like it! To just turn into scenery as soon as the audience got volatile! To be able to just slide away until the world forgot my existence: Wouldn’t that be a kind of bliss?
At the head of the stairs we emerged onto a narrow granite shelf that ran onto the greenish outcrop, onto which we crossed. I stared fixedly ahead, trying to avoid considering the drop to our right, which was about fifty feet and quite sheer. Up close the greenness of the smooth swelling was patchy and pale, covered with a carpet of tiny pale lichen, and moss rich and vibrant. I squatted and ran my hand over their surfaces, the one rough and brittle, the other soft as deep velvet.
Renthrette put one booted foot on a rock splashed with a mustard-yellow lichen and looked about her. “There,” she said simply, shielding her eyes from the sun.
And sure enough, only twenty-five yards from where we stood, the head of a stone lion peered out over a boulder as dark as charred timber. Its sightless eyes looked past us and across the wetlands stretched out beyond.
“The world’s most useless sentinel,” I said to myself, “I hope.”
Renthrette was already stroking the beast’s mane absently and peering into what I soon found to be a corridor, the mouth of which was overhung with the dead or dying branches of some twisted shrub. The tunnel cut into the cliff wall in a perfectly straight line, its floor level and paved, its ceiling vaulted, buttresses intricately carved out of the mountain’s living rock. Impressive though this all was, the thing that really struck me was that ten feet inside, a shadow fell across the corridor and from that point on you couldn’t see a damn thing. A chill, moist air condensed on my skin like sweat and I swallowed hard.
“You aren’t thinking of going in there?” I breathed.
Renthrette just gave me one of her blank looks, drew her sword, and edged into the blackness, disappearing almost immediately. Invisibility no longer seemed like such an obvious plus.
“You will get used to the darkness,” she said under her breath. “Just wait a little while before you go farther in.”
“Good idea,” I replied. “I’ll give it a shot when I’m fifty.”
“Quiet, Will,” she answered, drifting off into her adventurer’s world and advancing, sword poised to champion justice, defend virtue, and win honor, all by hacking bloody great holes in whatever came out of the blackness ahead: a scary way to live but, at least for Renthrette, one uncluttered by dilemma.
I fixed my attention on the shifting of her dark, blurred form and followed, swinging the crossbow round and wondering how the hell I was supposed to shoot enemies I couldn’t see. This was a bad idea. I turned to the rectangle of blinding light through which we had come and considered just walking back that way, but then a hand grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and dragged me on.
It was Renthrette, which—in the circumstances—was probably for the best. Sensing the flagging of my barely existent resolve, she had pulled me around the corner where the light vanished. Relief that it was only her who had her claws in my shirt quickly turned into something unpleasantly like terror.
The darkness was complete, opaque. Every sound echoed like rolling thunder or empty wine casks. I stood stock still and lifted the heavy shield in front of me, figuring that it was only a matter of time before something that could see better than I could launched itself at me. I waited, braced for the impact. There was sweat running down my neck and my knuckles were white. Probably. In this light (joke!) I was as likely to see the rooftops of Stavis as I was the color of my knuckles.
“Will you stop that,” hissed Renthrette, making me jump two feet in the air.
“What?”
“That gasping, breathy thing you’re doing.”
“Sorry,” I said indignantly. “I don’t like it here. And I do have to breathe, you know.”
“Debatable,” she muttered, walking away. Of course she started developing her withering banter when I was too petrified to think. I inched blindly after her, my right hand (no longer cradling the useless crossbow) stretched out in front of me.
Renthrette struck a shower of sparks from her flint and steel onto a tiny square of alcohol-soaked cotton: a standard and annoyingly useful part of her campaign equipment. With this she lit a tiny terracotta oil lamp that sat like a perching sparrow in her right hand. The walls around us flared up amber, every detail of their surface flickering tiny shadows as the lamp flame fluttered. Suddenly the tunnel was something quite different and, awful though it still was, it had a dark beauty. This was no natural cavern but a carved passage with a vaulted roof and rows of columns against the walls, rising like perfectly symmetrical stalagmites. So many months, maybe years, of work, now left to the darkness and damp and goblins! What a waste of bloody time.
And did I believe in goblins now? Tough not to, really. I’d seen them, and now I was poking around in their yard, as it were. Still: goblins, for crying out loud? Talk about difficult to swallow, especially for one as brutally realistic as me. And I suppose there, right there in the dark with the threat of these irrational monsters around the next corner, it finally dawned on me that we, or at least I, had been deliberately brought here. I remembered the ambassador’s references to my sense of what was real and I knew that he was involved up to his neck, though where this got me I couldn’t say. All I knew was that I was now living in terror of things which I hadn’t believed in three days ago: no, things that didn’t exist three days before, not in the world I knew, anyway.
I was exploring this seemingly important distinction when Renthrette hissed at me. I turned to find her standing on a great pile of rubble. Part of the ceiling had fallen in (not a terribly encouraging sign in itself), and the corridor was blocked right to the roof. It seemed we could go no farther. Ah, well.
“So,” I said, “back to the pub?”
Renthrette, of course, had other ideas, and had already started clearing the rocks out of the way. She set her lamp down and gave me a wordless look. I helped, but slowly, far from sure I wanted to see what was on the other side.
Predictably enough, the blockage was minor and, after only a few minutes’ work, we were able to clamber over the rubble. Renthrette went first, lamp and sword in hand. As soon as I heard her low, pleased whistle, I knew we were in trouble. On the other side of the rubble was a door, wooden with iron fittings. Judging by the webs across its hinges, it had been undisturbed for some time. Well, it was going to get disturbed now, I thought ruefully as Renthrette put her hand carefully on the latch and set her shoulder to the wood.
“Cover me,” she whispered and, before I had chance to respond, she twisted the handle. With an agonizingly loud creaking and scraping, the door shuddered open and we found ourselves looking into a wall of barrels and crates, all dusty and apparently discarded. The timbers were broken and rotted, the metal bands rusted into nothing. Renthrette pushed a couple of the larger ones aside and we found ourselves in a corridor just like the one we had been in, apparently abandoned to low-priority storage. We paused, listening, then Renthrette stepped carefully past the barrels to where the passage ended in another door. This one was unlocked, and she dragged it open with little effort and almost no noise. For a moment she was absolutely still and silent, holding the lamp back within the doorway. Then she was gone and I was left darkling.
Fear and anger blended, leaving me in a blundering panic. I sprang through the door after her, collided with the hard stone edge of the jamb, and went sprawling on the floor of the corridor beyond. The noise seemed to have been deafening, but when I looked up, there was still only Renthrette, lamp held up so that its warm light made her faintly bored exasperation all too apparent. She motioned at me to get up, turned her back, and trotted silently off down the corridor on her toes. I limped after. God alone knew why she’d asked me to come here; I was obviously more than capable of maiming myself even if no goblins were around to do it for me. Moreover, taking me on a stealth assault was a bit like strapping a marching band to your ankle. We may as well have sent them formal notice of our visit a week ago. At least then they might have laid out a few drinks.
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