Real fear flared in the troll’s yellow eyes. This was what Piskin had hoped for. The troll might be a resistant creature, but he knew the sensation of being burnt alive all too well. With any luck, the troll would bolt immediately.
It almost worked. The troll levered up the window and put one furry leg out into the sunlight. A gush of heat and smoke swept in, but no open flame yet.
“What of the maid?” asked the troll. “She can’t jump in her state.”
Piskin shook his head with certainty. “Do not be concerned. Her kinsfolk will usher her out of the building. I’ll guide them to the door directly.”
The troll looked back at the maid, who had gotten out of bed by now, propelled fearfully by the flames. In a panic, she threw her belongings into her bag and made ready to flee.
“Hurry,” said Piskin, “Don’t let the humans see you hanging about the window like that! They are sure to think you fired the place yourself.”
The troll’s eyes slid to Piskin and then back to the maid. They narrowed suspiciously. “I’ll not leave her to the very fate from which she saved me. I’ll not leave her to feel the caress of flame.”
“A fine sentiment,” said Piskin between clenched teeth. He headed for the door then, and was followed by the maid out into the hall. He only hoped some guardsman would spot the black-furred bastard and skewer him with an appropriate length of steel. As one of the Wee Folk, he had free passage among the townspeople. They did not trust him completely, but allowed him as an allied folk to move amongst them. The troll, on the other hand, would be slain on sight.
The hallway was full of smoke and coughing humans. Seeing Piskin and the troll, some screeched while others cared little, being more interested in escaping the fire.
The trio was given a wide berth by everyone. Piskin managed to direct them through the kitchens to a side exit. The cook, who worked the ovens to make fresh bread for the Inn’s guests, shouted at them. Her shouts were followed by a thrown pot, which the troll dodged easily.
Mari worked her slippered feet as fast as she was able. They made their way out of the building and into the alleyway.
Piskin noted with some surprise and no small delight that a large number of buildings blazed merrily now. A goodly breeze had gusted up. The winds had carried burning bits of straw from the stables into the air and landed these flying motes of flame upon every roof in the region. The roof of the inn itself was engulfed. Clearly the structure would be lost within the hour.
“This way!” said Piskin, leading them into the heart of the burning neighborhood. “There is a safe place here, I know it well.”
The other two followed, neither knowing what else to do. Piskin had to control his huge smile as they approached the tanners.
“Inside here. It’s full of water tanks. We’ll never burn in here.”
The troll hesitated at the entrance. “What’s that smell?” he said, sniffing at the acrid scent of the vats.
Some warning sense had penetrated his thick skull, lamented Piskin. “I’ve got no time to waste on your fantasies,” he told the troll. “I must save the maid. Her blood is no good to me boiled away to dust. Do as you will.”
The troll looked after him, distrustfully. After another moment’s hesitation, he followed Piskin into the tanners.
“Right here, up on the walkways between the vats, my dear,” urged Piskin.
Mari followed him, eyes wide. The troll did as well, sniffing and eyeing everything suspiciously.
The place was deserted. The Fob workers had left to gather buckets and water. They were wetting down every roof in town to save what they could from the hungry flames.
“What is this place?” the troll asked finally, looking at the stinking vats in growing alarm.
“It’s the tanners,” Mari told him.
A look of horror sprouted upon the troll’s face. He looked around for Piskin, but that one was nowhere to be seen.
A set of tackle on ropes, normally used to lift curing leather into and out of the vats, swung out of a dark corner. The metal pulleys and hooks struck the troll squarely in the back. He pin-wheeled his furry arms, but it was too late. He pitched forward into the acid baths.
“Watch your step!” shouted Piskin from behind him. He put his hands on his knees and watched as the troll struggled, dissolving rapidly in the bubbling solutions.
“Oh, how horrible!” cried Mari. “We must save him, Piskin!”
“Quite right,” said Piskin, gathering up the tackle in his arms. It was such a heavy load he staggered to carry it to the edge of the vat. The troll himself was beyond speech, the agony of dissolution being too great to allow it. Reaching the edge, Piskin dropped his load into the troll’s face, who had just managed to get his white claws sunk into the wooden sides of the vat. He sank back down.
“You dropped it right on him!” shouted Mari in horror.
“What a tragedy! I could not see what I was doing! Don’t look, my dear,” Piskin said, waving her back from the edge. “It is too horrible of a sight.”
Mari turned away from the edge, her eyes wet with tears.
“Come, we must leave this accursed place,” said Piskin.
“But I thought you said we would be safe here.”
“I did not realize these vats were so dangerous. They’ve already taken one of us. The fire is still coming as well. We must escape it.”
“I don’t want to leave the troll. He was so faithful, to leave him in pain—”
“You are a sentimental one! Don’t worry, these creatures don’t feel pain as a human might. Remember, it spent years in a stovepipe and seemed none the worse for it.”
“He might survive then—”
“Pish-posh, girl! Trust your guide. Don’t you wish to save your child? Don’t you wish to see Puck again? Come with me!”
And so Piskin managed to talk her out of the tanners and back out into the streets. He led her to the docks, where they found an untended boat. Piskin explained to her that he knew the owner well and after all, this was an emergency. She climbed in and allowed him to cast off and set sail.
Piskin worked hard to guide the boat onto a southerly course. The girl helped, but she didn’t have the proper sense of urgency. He cast many frequent glances over his shoulder and fought with the luffing sails. He worried that the true owner might catch them if the man were a strong enough rower.
Fortunately, all the townsfolk were preoccupied with the quenching the raging fire that still ravaged Riverton. The boat’s true owner never put in an appearance.
* * *
Many hours later, Telyn finally made it to the Fob tannery. She had been planning a visit to surprise her clan, but had been caught up in the events of the day. Everyone in town had fought the flames, forming bucket-brigades to every well and all the way down to the Berrywine itself. She had joined in, throwing water with the rest, but it had seemed hopeless.
In the end, Tomkin had saved the town from further devastation. He had wielded the Blue Jewel Lavatis, not going so far as to call the marching Rainbow, but instead squeezing fat drops of rain from the clouds.
Brand was still back at Rabing Isle, and knew nothing of the fire. In the morning, Telyn knew she must go there and tell him the news. Before she left, however, she had decided to visit her father’s tannery to check the damage done. There were scorched walls, but for the most part the structure had escaped serious damage.
It was as she wandered the place, reliving memories of her childhood both pleasant and foul, that she found the thing in the vats. Her relatives had been debating about what to do about it. A lump of half-melted flesh clung to the side of the vat. Its curved white claws had dug into the wooden walls, keeping the limp form from splashing back into the brine.
Telyn, having always been a person of action, knelt and pulled out her dagger. It was the very blade the redcap of Rabing Castle had oiled and cared for throughout centuries past. She meant to thrust in the blade to make sure it was dead, but hesitated. Could thi
s be the thing that had lit the fire? Was this perhaps a new enemy, a new threat to the Haven? Brand would be interested in such answers, as would the Riverton Council.
The head shifted slightly and one yellow eye regarded her. The troll fought to form gargling words.
Telyn almost drew back, such was her disgust to see it yet lived. Its legs were gone. It had only half its body intact.
“Why do you hesitate to strike?” the thing managed to ask her.
“I would know if you lit the fire. If your folk are our new enemy.”
The troll slowly managed to bare its teeth in a death’s-head mask. She recoiled from it, but only slightly, not wanting her on-looking relations to say she had quailed in the face of a helpless creature.
“Your enemy has escaped. He goes to find the bloodhound. He has the blood of the maid’s fae-child.”
“What maid? What enemy?”
“Mari of the Bowen clan. He has her.”
“Who does?”
“Piskin,” said the troll, and his head drifted down again.
Telyn sucked in her breath to hear that name. The very Wee One who had tried to wrest the Blue Jewel from Tomkin’s breast where he lie dying. The very one who had lost his hand to Tomkin’s sharp teeth. What new treachery could he be up to?
“Can we help you?”
The troll lifted its head again, with great effort. It made that terrible grin again.
“Catch him, and save the maid.”
Telyn was baffled that a troll, of all creatures, would care with his dying breath more for the life of a human maid than his own. She was also greatly intrigued. Already, she knew this story would have to be taken to Brand immediately.
“What of yourself? Can anything be done?”
“I can’t grow myself anew after the touch of acid. Strike, and let the vats finish their work. It will be a mercy.”
Telyn was moved. She, unlike most of her folk, had learned to appreciate creatures of different natures when they displayed noble traits.
“We will find the maid,” she told the troll, “and we will find Piskin.”
Seeing that he understood, she struck quickly and mercifully with her knife. Then she slashed away the white claws that still clung to the wooden sides of the great vat. The troll’s body slid away and bubbled, dissolving. Soon, he was no more.
None of her Fob relatives who had witnessed the exchange questioned her as she raced from the tannery to find Tomkin and Brand. Their eyes were wide and their mouths sagged open. After she had gone, they whispered among themselves that Telyn had always been a different sort as a young girl. Several claimed they had always seen her as one apart from the rest of the clan. Still, as Fobs, they had to admit she made them proud of their name.
Chapter Three
The Gnome King
Oberon journeyed to call upon Groth, King of the Gnomes. Traveling down through the Everdark to the gnome city undetected, however, was not easy. Not even for a wily old elf. But he knew some tricks, forgotten paths from long ago.
The gnomes, he knew, carefully guarded their territories in the Everdark. Their gates were not guarded by physical guardians, but rather warded to snare incorporeal intruders, and similarly trapped with deadly constructions built to slay the living. Oberon was a being that qualified as both types of intruder. His best course lay in penetration from an unexpected angle, and so it was he had chosen an entry point that was located within the boundaries of the gnome lands.
There existed entry points from the Twilight Lands into the Everdark, forgotten burial spots located deep below the crust of the world. These mounds were far, far below the surface. So deep, so ancient, so forgotten were these places that most of the Fae knew nothing of them. Even the elder things that dwelt beneath the great shifting plates of stone upon which the surface peoples lived, even they barely remembered these places. They were the burial grounds of kings and peoples so far gone in the past as to have been lost to the living memory of almost all beings.
But Oberon was among the oldest, the most ancient of living things that did not grow from the earth or squat motionless in a dark hole. He had lived when the Great Erm itself had been planted in the Twilight Lands, and he had witnessed the rising of Snowdon and the Black Mountains from the land. They had been merely sharp, black spires, like serrated stone dragon’s teeth poking up from the gums of the Earth, when he was young.
Thus he knew of secret ways into the Everdark, secret spots of infamous death. All faerie mounds were exactly that, of course. The mounds were invariably ancient mass graves of powerful peoples. These locations had suffered greatly; they were scraps of land that had borne silent witness to the rending of forgotten spirits as they moved from the state known as life into that known as death. The energies released as these great spirits made their final journeys had torn gaps between two worlds.
Such spots didn’t always exist upon the open surfaces of the world, the forests, plains and rocky mountaintops. At times, they existed at the bottom of dark oceans or even in a dank cavern, sealed beneath the earth in a sunless vault. Such timeless places were few, but they did exist. Some of the most powerful of all beings had passed on in these dismal spots, having been bound by chains far below the world of sun and light for thousands of lost centuries.
It was at one of these lost locations, in a dank, dripping vault of stone, that Oberon stepped into existence. The vault was a cavern that existed beneath the seafloor an underground sea of inky-black brine. Filled with crystalline formations and puddles of water, the pocket-like cavern had never filled with seawater. The Everdark clung oppressively all around, and although his vision, like that of the Dead themselves, did not require light to see, he noticed shadows residing here that even his eyes could not penetrate. He felt a chill, as spirits so old they had forgotten their own names and purposes regarded him in dull surprise. Before they could gather their lost wits enough to take action, he trotted swiftly out of the vault, using the only exit available, and slid down a chute into a pool of liquid as still as glass.
Blind things with transparent membranes for skin took notice of him, and rotated sensory stalks in his direction. Disgusting and alien though they might be, Oberon felt relief at their scrutiny. As bizarre and otherworldly as these creatures were, they were at least alive and sensate. And so he trotted quickly, but without fear, amongst them. A few slashes from his impossibly sharp blade removed their reaching claws and snapping mandibles. They croaked in pain and disappointment and he left them behind in the dark.
Exiting into a passage of circular formation that wound upward, he knew now he traveled an ancient path burned by a finger of magma. Ash crunched beneath his rapid step, and dust puffed up to irritate his fine-featured, boyish face.
Through a labyrinth of such passages and vaults he traveled until reaching the home of the gnomes, an area of cold hard stone. The gnomes, he knew, preferred to dwell in areas of stable stone. They avoided lava areas, which like a home built upon any shoreline, must eventually be consumed by the natural forces that existed in close proximity to it. Their underground villages and shrines were always found among the most ancient and stable of geological structures. Their lives were long and slow and consisted often of centuries of immobile pondering. They had no patience with interruptions such as serious earthquakes, lava floods or inquisitive folk from other places.
He passed by many gnomes, frozen giants of black stone with obsidian eyes that were an even darker, purer black. Most of them were lost in thought, pondering something unknowable for races of flesh and bone. They seemed to take no note of his passage, but Oberon knew this was an illusion. All of them saw him, and all of them would eventually take action to pursue the intruder. How long it might take them to move was impossible to judge. It might be a minute, an hour or a decade. But they would all awaken, each and every one, and they would seek to slay him in their multitudes.
He made haste once he was within their sleeping city. He needed to travel to the king, to Groth’
s chambers. He must awaken the gnome leader and parlay with him before he was overrun by angry gnomes.
Groth was different, Oberon knew. Being a King among the gnomes, he was not allowed to fall into thought and freeze, as so many of his people preferred to do. He was charged with the duty of maintaining vigilance throughout the ages of his reign. Like a man never allowed to sleep, however, it made him cranky and difficult to deal with—difficult, even for a gnome.
In the great spherical chamber of perfectly carven stone that served the gnomes as a royal suite, he found Groth. The other paced, as he had no doubt done for centuries, back and forth across the bottom of the sphere. The stone here was very ancient and very hard granite, but still a path had been worn, cut nearly a foot deep into the floor.
Oberon stood at the entrance, a circle of space opening into the sphere. He stood there, silently, until he was noticed. He had breached every imaginable protocol in coming here this way, so it could do no harm to become respectful at the very last.
After perhaps a minute more of pacing, Groth stopped. He did not turn his head. He did not utter a syllable. Oberon stood as stock-still and silent as the king. He knew he had been noticed, and that Oberon was deciding how to deal with him. It was best not to add further rudeness or insult at this critical moment.
“Lord Oberon,” said Groth at last. He sounded like a being roused from sleep.
Perhaps, thought Oberon, that was exactly what he was.
“King Groth.”
“You surprise me. You insult me.”
“I meant no insult.”
“You embarrass me, then.”
Oberon said nothing to that.
“How came you here to my inner court? You must have come through my guards and my wards and my deadliest traps as though they meant nothing to you. Why do you slip here, to my royal chambers like an assassin? If you are here to slay me, know that you have also ended your own very-long life.”
Haven 5 Blood Magic BOOK Page 2