The Cutting Edge

by Dave Duncan

  Blood Needle introduced Silver Flash of Salmon Totem and Busy Tooth of the Beavers ... more bone-grinding hugs and stomach-turning whiffs of rancid fat. Although they must have ordered the fire lit in the nearest cottage, they were not inviting Rap into the warmth. That meant the negotiations must be completed quickly.

  "Have seen trade goods?"

  "Trash! " Blood Needle unhooked his mask for a moment so he could spit in disgust. Rap thought he saw the spittle bounce on the ice.

  "Good salt!" he said. "Fine glass. Rich spices. Useful buckles . . ." He paused, running through a mental list of the goods he had left stacked in the cottage the previous fall. His feet were chilled already.

  "Need swords!" the goblin said, stepping forward a pace. "Axes. Many many heads for arrows."

  This was where things always got sticky. Krasnegar was bound by treaty with the Impire not to give the goblins weapons. If Rap abrogated that pact, then the Imperial trade would be shut off and the town would soon wither away, even if it did not starve in the first winter. If he angered the goblins, on the other hand, then Krasnegar might vanish overnight in a storm of blood. Long ago, as a sorcerer, he had made the causeway goblinrepellent, and goblins disliked water, but that did not mean they couldn't grit their big teeth long enough to charge across the ice.

  Whatever geography might say, economically his kingdom lay directly between the two sides.

  "Have no swords. Imps keep swords." His goblinish was rusty. "Not trade us swords." He went back to extolling the virtues of his offerings.

  Blood Needle kept calling them trash and offal and worse. "Wolverine scats!" he concluded definitively, folding his arms. "Are not. Will not speak more." Rap folded his own. Despite all he could do, he had begun to shiver.

  The goblins' angular eyes flashed. "Will keep trees and take trash, too!"

  "Are thieves? "

  "Will take trash and chief, too! Trade back to town for swords."

  Blood Needle was a hard bargainer, obviously. Kidnapping and ransom and next he would be threatening to bum the town, no doubt. Rap decided he had played the stupid game long enough. His teeth were chattering.

  "Will ask Death Bird if thief!" He spun around on frozen toes and crunched off to the cottage where the fire burned. He marched in and slammed the door. It was only a box of four stone walls with a hearth and a couple of small windows. It contained nothing except Death Bird and a tub of grease.

  Stripped to a rag, the goblin king was sitting on the dirt floor, anointing his feet with bear fat. The stench of it would make a man's eyes water. On the hearth a driftwood fire blazed and crackled cheerfully. He was staying well away from it, but its glow made him shine slickly green all over.

  "Playing tricks!" Rap said, by habit stamping his boots to remove the snow. Even in here, his breath smoked. He moved over to the fire and stood as close as he dared, gasping with relief as he thawed.

  The goblin chuckled, a low, brutal sound, full of menace. "Are not sorcerer? See through walls?"

  "Not see through walls ... Oh, let's speak impish, you big lunk! I didn't need sorcery. I knew you must be around somewhere because Raven Totem owns the trees and there was no spokesman from the Ravens. How are you, you ugly green horror?"

  Death Bird laughed at the compliment and scrambled to his feet. He was big for a goblin and growing bigger year by year. He was shorter than Rap, but with the muscles of a troll. His black hair was greased into a rope that hung over his left shoulder, dangling to his bulging belly, and he had much more mustache than most. His eyes seemed almost square, although that was partly an effect of the tattoos around them. Grinning a set of tusks like a timber wolf 's, he strode forward to embrace his old friend. Rap threw all his strength into the hug, but he felt his ribs creak.

  The first king of the goblins.

  A man with a destiny decreed by the Gods.

  Reflecting that he would have to burn his soiled furs as soon as he got home, Rap squatted down by the fire and smiled at his former slave. Death Bird moved away from the heat to begin replacing the grease he had deposited on Rap.

  "You're getting fat!" Rap remarked smugly, aware that his own midriff was well concealed.

  The angular eyes narrowed. "Want to try a best of three?"

  "Not likely!"

  "You put some beer in with that junk you want to palm off on me? "

  "No, but I'll send over a few bags of beer for you." Rap knew who would drink it when it was thawed out. Nobody else would get as much as a sniff at it. "Mostly I gave you alum."

  The goblin grunted, although that might have been less a comment than just the result of trying to reach an awkward part of his anatomy. "Why alum? I got no use for alum. Don't know what anyone does with alum!" He shot Rap a suspicious glance.

  "Something to do with dyes. But I'm told the dwarves prize it highly, and who makes better swords than they?"

  The goblin interrupted his toilet to stare at Rap with an obvious anger that would likely have terrified anyone else. And even Rap had known more pleasant experiences.

  "You still claim you're not a sorcerer?"

  Warned by a smell of burning fur, Rap edged away from the fire. "No sorcery. I hear the imps are building a wall across Pondague Pass. "

  Again the big tusks flashed. "Keeps them out of mischief."

  "While you trade with Dwanish! Come on, Death Bird! It's obvious. You've been feinting at Pondague all these years until you've got the Impire convinced that there's no other way across the mountains. But you'll never persuade me that you haven't scouted out a few more passes by now! Moreover, the dwarves are your natural allies. That's no big secret, either. When do you strike?"

  Death Bird was glaring. "You're the one who told me of my destiny. Prophesy for yourself. "

  Rap had not really expected to be taken into his confidence. It could not be long now, though. Death Bird had picked up just enough impish culture to become a deadly foe to the Impire. He had spent seventeen years uniting his people and preparing his war. All the border struggles that the Impire had considered important had all just been training for the big one. This year? Or next? Or the year 3000?

  Rap shivered. "It so happens I do have a prophecy for you. There's an old belief that Emine's Protocol will fail at the end of the millennium. That's in two more years. I am informed on excellent authority that there's something to it. "

  The goblin chortled, giving away nothing at all. Satisfied with his grease coat, he began pulling on his buckskins. "Be nice to see Hub again. Throw a party for them. Er, with them, I mean."

  "You just may. But it means sorcery trouble."

  "Bright Water's dead, you know that?"

  "No. Hardly surprising." The mad old loon had been witch of the north since 2682. "Who's her successor?"

  Death Bird's square eyes twinkled amid their tattoos. Somehow his face seemed even greener with the rest of him covered in buckskin. "A dwarf, named Raspnex. "

  "The one we met?"

  "Zinixo's uncle," the goblin agreed, grinning like a hyena. Of course he would be pleased to have a dwarf on the White Throne if he'd been making treaties with the dwarves. North's official prerogative was the jotnar raiders, but Bright Water had favored her goblins, also, although shed been too crazy to be reliable.

  Rap thought back to his days of sorcery. "I wouldn't have judged Raspnex's heft to be quite up to warlock standard, but he's not a bad man. He was the strongest of Zinixo's votaries in Faerie. After I broke Zinixo and went back there, he hadn't tried to imprint any of them. I was impressed."

  South, of course, was an elf. Elves and dwarves were born enemies, so there would be trouble within the Four again. Face it-there was always trouble within the Four! The witch of the west was a troll, Grunth. She was not especially powerful. Nor was Olybino, warlock of the east. Lith'rian was probably the strongest now, so it was odd he'd agreed to Raspnex ...

  Rap shrugged and left the matter to simmer on the back of his mind while he tackled other things-like his
smoking left leg, for instance. He shifted around.

  "How's that little lovely you had with you last summerBluebell?"

  "Fine. Not so little now. "

  "How many wives does that make?" Death Bird became cagy. "Several."

  "How many children?"

  The goblin grinned. "State secret. How is your woman?"

  "Oh, she's fine," Rap said. "Just had the cutest little son. We think he's going to be sort of fair-haired impish, which is fine because we have a jotunn son already and one of our daughters is impish and the other is jotunn and thank the Gods none of them really looks like me, but just let me tell you what Kadie did the other day . . . "

  Death Bird waited with ill-concealed impatience until Rap's tale was complete. Without even a smile at the punchline, he launched into a dull and pointless account of how his oldest son, Blood Beak, had killed his first bear.

  2

  Even a pixie could be lonely, and a pixie with no place of her own was a lost soul. As the dry season grew drier and hotter, Thaile felt the call of the faraway College more strongly every day. Already it seemed to have stolen her from her friends, her family, and her familiar surroundings. Already it had enfolded her in its own occult, invisible embrace. She could make no plans; she could think no farther ahead than the onset of the next rainy season, because by then she would be sixteen and somewhere else and a different person, leading a wholly different life, which she could not even now imagine. The Gaib Place was no longer her home. The road ahead disappeared over a cliff.

  Before the recorder came, she had just begun to join in the preliminary steps of courtship, the shy exchange of gifts to indicate interest. Jain's visit ended that. The neighbors all knew of it. Suddenly she was a stranger to her friends, excluded from those rituals. No man was going to waste a sample of his handiwork by giving it to a woman who had to go away soon. Thaile, likewise, need not spend time crafting hats or gloves or any of the usual garment gifts that women produced for men-they would merely be refused with the traditional kindly fiction that they did not fit.

  Only three of the boys she knew were of any interest, anyway, and they had all gone off on their explorations already.

  Even her parents had reacted to her new destiny with a sort of rejection. It was certainly not deliberate and Thaile might not even have noticed it had she not had Feeling, but somehow Gaib and Frial seemed to have accepted that she was lost to them, as their other two children were lost to Places of their own. They had moved closer to each other in some subtle way, as if filling a gap. That might be just a part of life, a form of self-defense for the old, who should not spend their declining years in fruitless pining. But in this case, the lost child had not gone yet; she had no Place of her own for shelter and no replacement love.

  Thaile had reluctantly concluded that her old life was ruined; she might as well embark on the new as soon as possible. To leave soon might be kinder to her parents than hanging around until the last minute. The coffee harvest was the busiest part of the year. She would stay and help with that and then depart. Meanwhile, as the beginning of summer was an easy time and her help not needed, she would start her farewells by going to visit her sister. It would be the first time she had ever been to the Wide Place, and almost certainly it would be the last.

  As a father should, Gaib reacted to her announcement with predictably ponderous protests about the dangers of getting lost, raped, or eaten by bears. Frial considered the problem in her usual matter-of-fact way and said she didn't think anyone with Thane's Feeling could ever get lost and would have to be incredibly stupid to get herself raped. And there weren't any more bears there than there were here. Gaib reluctantly acquiesced in her decision, as he always did.

  Thaile's problem then was that what they said wasn't what they felt. Underneath their affectionate concern, they felt guilty at having failed their child, angry that they didn't know what they had done wrong, relieved that she would not be around for a little while to remind them of that failure, and then much more guilt for feeling that relief. At close quarters, with all their worries showing, people were unbearable.

  The visit was not a success. The Wide Place was fair enough in itself, lurking in dim coolness below massive boughs. The air was heady with the smell of cedars, and nowhere could have been more private. The necessary compliments came easily.

  And yet, within two minutes of her arrival, Thaile knew that she would not be staying long. Sheel was far more interested in her newborn second son than in a half-forgotten sister, and Wide was far more interested in the sister than he should have been. His fingers were all round her like mosquitoes. His erotic cravings seemed to fill the air like the aromatic scent of the trees or the warning hum of bees.

  Within an hour Thaile knew that her sister regretted her choice. Wide had turned out to be a poor provider, lazy and shiftless. He hunted when he should have been harvesting, chased women when he should have been planting, and most of the rest of the time, also. Sheel admitted none of this, but her emotions did.

  Later on the first evening, things turned even worse. Thaile mentioned the College. Apparently Sheel had never told Wide that her family was Gifted. He was not pleased to learn that his children would have to keep a Death Watch one day and might be stolen away by the College if they displayed Faculty.

  One good thing-when he heard about Thaile's occult talents, he stopped pawing her thigh under the table for a while.

  Thaile withstood the head-splitting tension for two days and then said farewell. Even home was better than the Wide Place.

  Noon on the second day of her return journey found her trudging along by herself through long grass by the Big River. There was no real path to follow, because pixies seldom saw the need to go anywhere. She wandered between thorn bushes and tufty thickets of bamboo. The sun was brutal.

  Some distance off to her right, behind a hedge of tall reeds, the river oozed back and forth across the plain, dark and mysterious, broad and oily, reputedly full of deadly crocodiles. It also contained snakes. To her left, the edge of the forest seemed even more sinister, but over the treetops loomed the rocky peaks of the Progistes, blue in the haze. They were the only landmark familiar to a hill-country girl here in the muggy lowland.

  The previous night she had stayed at the Shoom Place, granted shelter by a friendly old couple with no children still at home. Tonight she wanted to sleep on her own pile of ferns, at the Gaib Place, and she had far to go.

  She was hot, she was tired. Her feet ached, her legs ached, and the flies were driving her mad. The highlands were hot in the dry season; noon in the valleys was an ordeal to be endured. All sensible people would be lying under a tree somewhere with no clothes on.

  A pouch at her belt held some slices of heavy bread and a fat leg of chicken, generously provided by Shoom and his goodwife, but Thaile was too hot to think of eating. She was haunted by the problem of the College. She had the other problem, too, of what to tell her parents about Sheel. No one could lie to Frial.

  However, at the moment she was very intrigued by a Feeling. There was someone ahead of her, coming her way, someone who was bubbling over with good cheer. She had Felt her-or possibly him-for over an hour now. She wanted to meet whoever this happy person was and find out what could possibly be so pleasurable on such an airless, stifling day. That was a more attractive puzzle than her own worries.

  It was unfortunate that they were not traveling in the same direction, so that they might walk together and she might share the other's bliss. But if they had been going the same way they would not have met, of course.

  Strangers could be dangerous. A young woman traveling alone was never truly safe, not anywhere. Thaile knew the risk as a theoretical thing that in practice never applied to her or anyone she knew, like being struck by lightning. She ignored such absurd concerns as being beneath a woman's dignity.

  The unknown's feelings drew close and then seemed to stop. Most likely the woman-or man-had halted for a noontime rest, which would g
ive Thaile a chance to creep up unseen and inspect her. Or possibly him. Feeling was not directional enough to use for stalking, but straight ahead stood a single tiny clump of exactly three trees, apparently all alone in this wasteland of grass. There would be shade there. That would make a good place to aim for.

  Abruptly there was change. Rapture became rage, howls of pain came drifting through the hot air from the trees. Thaile teetered for a moment on the lip of flight until she realized that she was not Feeling fear but fury. A bear or a lion or even a snake would have provoked much worse than that. She ran to help.

  The screams guided her. She dashed around a last high clump of bamboo and stopped dead. Her quarry was dancing madly around in the nude, beating himself with a cloth that was probably his pants, yelling incoherently. A straw hat and a pair of sandals and some lunch lay forgotten in the trees' shade. Even at that distance, Thaile could see the ants streaming over thembig red ants.

  The victim came to a panting halt and began inspecting himself with care. His emotions settled down into a lower range, anger mingled with regret and a dash of self-contempt. Satisfied at last that he had dislodged all his assailants, he looked up and discovered his audience. He shrieked in horror and jumped vertically, while attempting both to turn his back and put on his pants before he came down again. In consequence, he collapsed on the ground in a squirming heap of extreme embarrassment. Thaile gave way to helpless laughter.

  In a few moments she realized that the mortification and some real physical pain she was Feeling from the man were mixed with amusement, also. Apparently he could see the joke, and that seemed an unlikely male reaction under the circumstances. She choked down the rest of her laughter as he came over to her, respectable in his shorts but still breathless, streaked by dust and sweat from his exertions.

  "I'm Leeb of the Leet Place," he announced, "and ... and ... Oh, my! Oh ... my!" He fell silent, staring at her open-mouthed. A wave of astonishment and happiness almost knocked her over.