In the meantime hosts of kobolds began to converge on the golden dungeons from the deepest mines of the mountains where they had bided quiescent; some eldritch sense had informed them the instant their masters gained their liberty, and they swarmed in their thousands to greet them.
The fair-haired man had been unable to find his way in the underworld, but the goblins knew their location exactly. Swiftly they passed through the passageways that honeycombed the Northern Ramparts, dragging the burrower with them, until they came to the extensive network of underground chambers where their daemon horses were housed. The steeds languished in a kind of torpid trance, deprived of their symbiotic partners; there had been no need to gild the trollhäst caves, for once the knights were locked away the creatures had no will to escape. As his captors blasted the rock with jolts of unseelie energy to get at their steeds, the bur-rower, never permitted to rest, was put to work clearing away rubble. After the trollhästen had been freed, the unseelie warriors ordered their kobold slaves to unlock and set to rights their long-abandoned mountain halls, for at that time few trows, or ‘hilltings’ as the storyteller called them—the willing servants of goblins—haunted the Northern Ramparts. While order was being restored in Sølvetårn, Zauberin presided over a goblin moot.
‘Zauberin, the first lieutenant?’ Asrăthiel broke in. ‘What of the goblin king? Why did he not conduct the moot?’
‘That one was not with them then,’ the pallid man replied. ‘He was never enclosed in the cavern of gold. It was later that he came.’ He hugged his knees to his scrawny chest as if recollecting an old terror.
‘Then where was he?’
‘The knowledge is not at me.’
That particular phrase, the knowledge is not at me, kept jolting a distant memory. Someone Asrăthiel had once known had occasionally employed that expression, but she could not call to mind who it had been. ‘Go on,’ she prompted her informant, whereupon he told her that, initially, the goblins sent kobold spies into the world, to find out what had been happening since they had been incarcerated. While biding their time they began to conduct incursions into the northern villages—Silverton and surrounds—commencing their spate of nocturnal assassinations. Ultimately they set forth on the path of war. After their first full-scale assault on the human armies at the Wuthering Moors their triumph reached a new peak when their king returned.
The fair-haired man knew little else.
‘That is the end of my tale,’ he said. ‘They have no further use for me, and have discarded me, but I am in their power now.’ He began to babble. ‘The blue gnomes cut off my hair when I was captured. Why should they do such a thing? I cannot understand it! Fain would I be escaping from this place but I cannot leave through their portals, for I fear the kobold sentinels. All I do is go wandering through their halls, avoiding them whenever I can.’
And a wasted, pallid, terrified thing you are, thought Asrăthiel, not without compassion, as she endured his plaints. She found several aspects of his narrative perplexing, and quizzed him to find answers.
‘How could you dig amongst rocks without any mining equipment? You would have torn your own flesh apart and cracked your bones.’
‘I heal again and again.’
But you heal awry, she thought.
‘How long is it since you were buried alive?’
‘Many years.’
‘Methinks you have lost track of time! It is impossible for mortal men to survive for years without sunlight and nourishment. Under durance, time seems to stretch; perhaps that is what has happened. You are mistaken.’ Just then, it came to Asrăthiel that her own mother had sometimes used that unusual phrase, ‘the knowledge is not at me’—an expression favoured by subjects of Slievmordhu. Indeed, his accent was of the southern realm.
‘I am not mistaken, lady. The knowledge is at me of how long it has been. It was the year 3472 when that base weather-master entombed me.’
‘Weathermaster? What weathermaster?’ Asrăthiel shot back. A silent bell was ringing.
‘The one who tried to cheat me of my dues. He never succeeded, you know.’
‘What was his name?’
‘That is one thing I shall never be forgetting. His name was Stormbringer.’ The knave peered at the damsel from rheumy optics. ‘Your eyes are blue,’ he said. ‘Very blue.’
Asrăthiel felt a throb of heat surging to her temples as she stood up. ‘By rain and deadly thunder,’ she said enunciating every word slowly and clearly, ‘I know who you are. Your name, may it be blasted to oblivion, is Fionnbar Aonarán.’
As a child at her father’s knee she had learned the history of this person. The greatest calamities that had fallen upon her family were the fault of him and his murderous half-sister. He had drunk of the Water of Immortality, just as her own father had done; yet he had stolen the draught. His vindictive sister, Fionnuala, had tried to slay Asrăthiel’s mother and almost succeeded. That attempt had resulted in Jewel’s sleep without waking.
This wasted, pallid, terrified thing was in fact the bane of her parents. Knowing this, the damsel despised him with indescribable rancour, her revulsion even now mingling with pity. One thing was certain: she could not endure his presence.
‘Ah yes, that is my name, enlightened lady!’ he cried. ‘Prithee do not be vexed with me, for you are the first mortal woman I have set eyes on this many a year! Besides myself, the only other human creature I have seen inside this place is—’
But already Asrăthiel was walking away, leaving the detested Aonarán kneeling alone on the floor beside the half-extinguished cresset. He rose and began to trail after her, but at that moment a covey of trow-wives, some sniffing at the floor like bloodhounds, entered the pipe vein and spied their wayward charge. They fluttered to surround her, uttering birdlike cries. Descending on her like a flock of grey doves, they began to shepherd her back to her chambers, and she was glad enough to go. Scorn and rage warred in her breast. Aonarán stumbled in her wake, calling out incoherently. Without pausing in her step the damsel snapped at the wights, ‘Get rid of that man!’ Whereupon some of them produced twig brooms and commenced to advance on him, sweeping vigorously and ferociously with shouts of ‘Shoo! Shoo!’ until he slunk away.
‘Dat’s name is Toadstone,’ the trow-wives told her.
‘If I hold any sway in this place,’ declared Asrăthiel, shaking with shock and indignation, ‘which possibly I do, judging by the finery you are showering upon me, I’ll not have him near me.’
The small womenlike creatures nodded their unlovely heads and gazed dismally up at the damsel. At that moment she longed for a close friend in whom she could confide. These little wights were gentle and nurturing, in their way, but their culture was alien to her own; there was much about their eldritch mores she could not fathom. She missed her parents and her grandfather, her aunt Galiene, Ryence Darglistel, and the wise weathermasters whose lives had been so treacherously cut short by the contemptible Uabhar. She missed William, her maid Linnet, Giles the butler, and even Mistress Draycott Parslow. Sorely she missed the companionship of the wilful Crowthistle, who could unravel mysteries, and provoke laughter, and make her forget she was set apart. Pining for those whom she loved, cursing her exile, she descended into a melancholy mood. To be divided from all of them was heartbreaking. It would be her priority to try to send a message to family and friends as soon as possible, reassuring them that she was secure and well. While the little trow-wives dressed her, she wept as immortal human beings must weep: without shedding tears.
A mirror revealed her reflection; her dress of cerulean moonlight was trimmed with sapphires and transparent tourmalines. The boned bodice closely fitted her waist. Voluminous sleeves dripped with a lather of lace, and traceries of blue zircons echoed the colour of her eyes.
The curtains of Asrăthiel’s rooms had been drawn shut, obscuring any glimpse of the outside world. Briefly, the damsel allowed her weathersenses to probe past the walls. They informed her that the outside tempe
rature was rising, by which she deduced that a new day had dawned.
A new day! Asrăthiel fell to wondering what doom this dawn would bring her, which led her to speculate on what was in store for her fellow captives, Uabhar and Virosus. They had been borne off by kobolds—and she had learned enough about the bluish-skinned imps to know they were as merciless as machines. Her instinctive sympathy for the two men vaporised as soon as she recalled their crimes, as witnessed and recounted by the beggar Cat Soup. Between them the king and the druid had slain her weathermaster kindred. Pity gave way to antipathy.
Why did the goblins choose the three of us as their tithe? she pondered. What are the similarities between a weathermage, a druid and a king? We are all persons of influence, to be sure; but there the resemblances end, or at least I hope so. I trust I have nothing else in common with those power-mad, barbarous, loveless betrayers.
As she brooded, the final words of Aonarán suddenly registered in her consciousness: Besides myself, the only other human creature inside this place . . . Her curiosity greatly piqued, she wondered who the other human being could be. Had Aonarán perhaps spied the wretched king, or the druid? Or was he talking about someone else, possibly someone who had existed for longer in this citadel? I had believed myself to be unique in this eldritch haunt, but it is evidently crawling with people! In any event, at last count, five, including Uabhar and the druid.
‘Who is the other mortal being in this citadel?’ she asked the trow-wives, but they adjusted her gown or swept the floor with besom brooms, and some continued rocking their babies. One murmured, ‘Dere be many mortal creatures here. Dey be meeylen an worms an sneeuane ushtey and creeping crooagen.’
‘I was not referring to insects.’ Placing her hand on the bony, bulbous elbow of the wight who had spoken Asrăthiel said, ‘What is your name?’
‘I hight Hulda,’ said the trow-wife.
‘Hulda, tell me what mortal man dwells here, besides Toadstone and the two new prisoners.’ If they are still alive, she amended privately.
‘Dat’s Fehlimy macDall,’ said the wight.
Asrăthiel had never heard the name. ‘How came he here?’
‘Trows stole dem.’
Stealing people or other animals was one traditional practice of trow-folk that Asrăthiel’s kindred abhorred. In many other ways the wights were innocuous enough, but on rare occasions they would abduct human beings or farm animals, leaving a crude effigy, or trow-stock, in place of the victim. Stolen humans would become servants to the trows, caught in their twilight realm and unable to return home.
‘It is wrong to steal people,’ Asrăthiel said, appreciating that such a statement, while it would seem a glaring truism amongst her own kindred, would be unlikely to dent the moral code of the Grey Neighbours. ‘You must release this macDall immediately and let him go back to his family.’
‘Guidlady, he’m be our servant noo.’
Before Asrăthiel could begin an argument, Hulda cried, ‘Da banquet!’ and the wights gathered around, mildly urging Asrăthiel to hurry to the feast. ‘M’lady’m tarrying too lang!’ they squeaked to each other. Vowing to herself that she would not let the matter rest, the damsel allowed them to guide her through the exquisite corridors and lofty caverns, then along a majestic enfilade. A shimmering water curtain drew back and she passed through an archway, entering the great hall.
Vast was this refectory; it seemed the size of a palace. So remote were its boundaries that they were lost to sight. Composed of a series of interlocking chambers, it accommodated seats for many thousands. The ceilings soared more than sixty feet high, criss-crossed by ribbed fan vaults, as if supported on the wings of stone dragons. Hundreds of silver chandeliers depended from the rafters on long chains, each a bonfire of candles. Thin columns of sapphire flame blazed up from flagstones of polished schorl, reaching as high as the roof; slender spirals of water spilled down quartz poles from ceiling to floor. The walls were adorned with carvings of stars and moons, tapestries depicting vistas of fiery mountains, marble reliefs portraying racing herds of trollhästen, flocks of owls, crows, ravens and other beasts, and banners broidered with sinuous interweavings of leaves, vines and trees. In alcoves and porticoes, free-standing sculptures represented eldritch knights with bows and arrows, swords and spears, or kobolds wielding picks and shovels. No repeated, balanced or geometric patterns were to be found; the lopsidedness the goblins favoured in their costume was also evident in their decoration. Asrăthiel suspected that they preferred skewedness of design because it was a novelty, the physical features of their own bodies being so flawlessly proportioned, so exactly symmetrical.
Long tables ran down the length of the main chamber, arrayed with gleaming vessels and cutlery all made of solid silver; cups, spoons, knives, ladles, wine vessels, tureens, jugs, platters, candlesticks and centrepieces. Each piece was decoratively chased, engraved, granulated or filigreed. The chairs pulled up to these boards were fashioned from pale driftwood and inlaid with a form of volcanic glass known as snowflake, or flowering obsidian, black with white inclusions. To one side of the chamber’s upper end the floor was clear of furniture, conceivably for dancing, or wrestling, or other entertainments.
Goblin knights in outlandish attire crowded the hall. It came to Asrăthiel yet again that they were like no race she had ever seen before; always brilliant, beguiling and deceptive, perhaps in some ways ludicrous in the eyes of mankind, somewhat insane, yet possessing such ineffable beauty, grace and style that to set eyes on them was to be both tormented and transported. Trows, both male and female, were serving food and drinks, but there was no sign of any goblin women. Transiently, the damsel wondered where they were—but for now there was too much to see, too much to try to understand, to puzzle over it.
The arch-necked trollhästen wandered about freely, nimbly, with no hint of clumsiness, never leaving muck or jostling the furniture; apparently they were guests also. Their hides resembled rippling metallic pewter, their manes and tails were the colour of sunlight pouring through green stained glass. Knights and daemon horses mingled companionably, at times sharing the same wide-bowled cup. Horned eagle owls perched high upon the chandeliers and candelabra, or on architraves, projecting sconces or banner poles, or the parapets of overhanging galleries.
All eyes turned upon Asrăthiel as she entered; she could feel it without needing to look. What were they thinking, the warriors of unseelie? Did they judge her a lamb in a flock of wolves? A leprous weed in a flower garden? The trow-wives’ panic had proved unnecessary; the dining had not yet commenced, though savoury fragrances hinted of delicious fare undergoing preparation somewhere in the wings. Asrăthiel was reminded that she had eaten nothing since twilight the previous day, but she felt no weakness or hunger. For immortal beings, as she had learned, food was a pleasure rather than a necessity.
Fleetingly she recalled the ancient tale of her ancestor, Tierney A’Connacht, who had ventured into a sorcerer’s domain to rescue his sweetheart. A prohibition had been laid upon him before this undertaking: He who wishes to succeed must neither eat nor drink of anything he finds in those domains, no matter what his hunger or thirst may be—for if he does, he will fall under the power of the sorcerer and maybe forfeit his life. The damsel had heard stories, too, of otherworldly realms in which it was perilous for mortal beings to partake of the fare, lest they be trapped there forever.
‘If I eat your food, will some enchantment befall me?’ she asked the nearest trow.
‘Nae, my lady,’ replied the creature, and Asrăthiel was satisfied with this answer.
A riot of kobolds could be glimpsed through a portal, occupying their own side-chamber, which was smoky and reeked of garlic. They were capering about and swallowing beer in great quantity, their bluish faces painted with simple geometric designs, in gold-coloured or orange pigment. Broken drinking vessels lay here and there. Segregation was clearly the solution to their boisterousness; serious trouble must undoubtedly have broken out had the he
edless and smelly imps begun cavorting amongst the elegantly disposed tables of the goblins. On closer acquaintance Asrăthiel noted that there were two breeds of kobold—a larger variety, and a lesser. Both types wore peasant-style garments, marked here and there with an equal-armed cross.
As a covey of waist-high trows ushered Asrăthiel to her chair at the high table, she scanned the surrounds. They were all present, she judged; all the most eminent goblin knights, save for one. She seated herself, arranging the shimmering folds of her dress, pretending not to wonder where he might be. Other knights attended her, and her gaze wandered over their fantastic costumes, beginning with one who introduced himself as Fifth Lieutenant Zaldivar, whose baldric and belt hung with softly ringing wafer-thin discs of beaten silver engraved with signs or runes. His comely visage was framed by the upstanding, thick furry collar of his cloak, and partially obscured by a half-mask of gleaming silver, modelled like the face of a horned eagle owl. Fourth Lieutenant Zande wore garments of dull and glimmering scales, made from the naturally sloughed skins of snakes which, he explained, had been toughened by certain processes invented by the lesser kobolds. His baldric was decorated with teeth, or fangs, and a thin band of chased silver encircled his head.
They conversed with one another in their own tongue, but courteously addressed their human visitor in her own language; still, it was daunting to be amongst them. Asrăthiel felt nervous, unsure of how to behave or what to say—was she a guest, part of a valuable ransom or a despised outsider?—and she was constantly on the lookout for him, jumping at the entrance of every newcomer to the hall. Her eyes darted every which way in an effort to spy him, though she tried to appear as if indifferent to the matter of whomsoever presented themselves or abstained from the banquet. After a while it became apparent that the goblin knights were treating her like any invited dinner guest, and she supposed, therefore, that they expected her to act like one.
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