Beast & Crown

by Joel Ross

  “And you loo-ka very tasty,” the goblin continued.

  “Hey!” Ji said, his hands clenching into fists. “Back off, beaver-face.”

  “Or we’ll vanquish you,” Sally growled, raising her shovel.

  The goblins cringed, making pitiful barking sounds, and Roz stepped forward and told them, “I’m very sorry. My friends are sorry, too. They didn’t mean to startle you.” She shot a quick glare at Ji. “Did you?”

  “Uh, what?” Ji said, squinting in confusion. “He said you’re tasty.”

  The goblins peered at him nervously—like they were afraid of him—and a little one raised all four arms in surrender.

  “That’s a compliment!” Roz whispered to Ji. “Goblins like politeness and manners!”

  “Manners? Them?”

  “That’s what I read in the book,” she told him. “That’s my plan.”

  He gaped at her. Her plan was to ask politely?

  “Now apologize properly!” she said, giving him an un-Roz-like glare.

  “I—I didn’t mean to startle you,” Ji told the goblins, with a tentative bow. “I’m very sorry. I beg your pardon. Please excuse me?”

  After a moment, the little goblin lowered its hands, and Roz smiled at the one-eyed goblin. “You are polite, too,” she said.

  “Very good ka-manners,” Ji said, trying to help.

  The goblin bared its front teeth—and in a flash of panic, Ji thought that it was about to gnaw his eyeballs out. But the goblin didn’t attack. Instead it sort of cocked its head, and a different explanation occurred to him.

  Maybe that was a goblin smile.

  So he bared his own front teeth, and the goblins made another barking sound, a happier one. They were laughing! He snapped his teeth tentatively, and they woofled again. Which didn’t sound polite to Ji, mocking his tiny human teeth . . . but it was better than eyeball gnawing.

  “We wonder,” Roz told the possibly smiling goblins, “if you’d be so kind as to let us into your burrow. We would be very grateful.”

  The goblins stopped woofling and started muttering to one another in Goblish. One of them shook its head. Another waved its belly-arms. It looked like they were arguing about what to do with Ji and the others. Let them into the burrow, or cook them in a creamy worm sauce?

  “Ka-vel?” the one-eyed goblin asked Sally, as the muttering continued.

  “Hello, Kavel,” Sally said, and bowed stiffly. “I’m Sally.”

  The goblin chuffed. “Beg sorry. I mean, why you are holding a ka-shovel?”

  “Oh, this?” She propped the shovel onto her shoulder. “Yeah, well, um, the truth is that I was pla—”

  Ji’s heart clenched: she was going to say, I was planning to club goblins with it. “She loves to dig!” he blurted. “She’s a massive fan of diggery. Tunnels, burrows, lairs, dens. There’s nothing Sally loves more than a hole in the ground. And that’s why we came, to see your digging. Nobody digs better than, uh, Kultultul, right?”

  “Kultultul,” the goblin agreed.

  “Sally is eager to see what you’ve done,” Roz told it. “Isn’t that so, Sally?”

  Sally frowned, unwilling to lie. “Well, that’s not the main reason—”

  “You want to get inside, though, right?” Ji interrupted.

  “That’s true!” Sally said. “I do want to get inside.”

  The one-eyed goblin turned to the others and chuffed in Goblish. After a few final woofles, the other goblins waved their belly-arms toward the entrance to the fake ruined temple, inviting Ji, Roz, and Sally to enter. A bubble of triumph expanded in Ji’s chest: they’d done it! They were heading into the bone crypts!

  Then the bubble popped.

  They were heading into the bone crypts. That was a terrible idea!

  But Sally was already marching into the temple, her shoulders square and her chin high. Stupid bravery. And Roz strolled along behind her, skirt swishing, saying “please” and “thank you” a hundred times.

  9

  ON THE INSIDE, the “ruined temple” didn’t look at all temple-y. Instead, the stone walls enclosed one big room with a dirt floor and a scattering of fire pits.

  A single bonfire flickered, casting a feeble glow on rough-hewn statues of three-beaked birds and knotted pythons. A dozen square nooks were carved into the walls: one contained a heap of eggshells, another overflowed with moss, and a third displayed a single clothespin.

  Ji’s fear faded into curiosity. Why display a clothespin? Roz was right. This was fascinating. In a nonhuman way that brought prickles of unease to his skin.

  “Good evening.” Roz curtsied to the goblins squatting around the bonfire. “What a lovely blaze. So bright, so cheery!”

  The goblins watched her with narrowed, beady eyes.

  “And we’re very pleased to meet you,” Roz said, a hitch in her voice. “Such a treat. Isn’t that right, Ji?”

  “Very pleased.” Ji looked away from a nook packed with butterfly wings. “A very, um, pleasant pleasure to meet you.”

  “What’s that?” Sally nodded toward an earthen ramp that disappeared underground at the far end of the room. “The entrance to the crypts?”

  “Bone ka-rypts,” one of the goblins said.

  “Precisely!” Roz said, with a wavering smile. “And those, um, displays in the walls? Are they shrines?”

  “Shrines,” another goblin said, with a beaver-faced nod.

  “Well, I must say,” Roz told the goblins, “they are quite entirely beautiful. . . .”

  As she complimented the goblins, Ji tried to think of clever ways to get into the bone crypts. The right combination of lying and bowing might work. Or maybe—

  Sally pulled a torch from the wall. “Let’s do this.”

  Two goblins hunched in alarm and gnashed their oversized teeth. “Humans ka-eep out,” one said. “Not go in ka-rypts.”

  “We don’t have a choice,” Sally told them. “Follow me, Roz. C’mon, Ji.”

  Five more goblins crept between Sally and the ramp. She tightened her grip on the shovel, and Ji’s heart shriveled in fear.

  Roz smiled weakly at the goblins. “We’d be so grateful if you’d let us explore just a tiny bit.”

  The five goblins shifted, clenching their digging claws . . . then the one-eyed goblin barked what sounded like a command. The other goblins hesitated, their shoulder-arms tense and their beady eyes narrow.

  “The baron told us to go into the crypts,” Ji told them. “He’s the reason we’re here. He even said ‘please.’”

  The one-eyed goblin spread all four arms and woofled in urgent Goblish, like it was trying to convince the others not to fight.

  Ji didn’t know if his lies were helping, but he kept lying, just in case. “The baron even said ‘pretty please,’ now that I think about it, with a Primstone on top. . . .”

  The one-eyed goblin gestured to a smaller goblin, who turned and ran outside. Ji had no idea why. But a moment later the other goblins lowered their arms and unclenched their claws.

  “Let’s go,” Sally said, striding onto the ramp.

  The goblins grunted but didn’t stop her. Ji exhaled and headed down the ramp with Roz. An upwelling of damp air brushed his face, perfumed with a sweet, sugary scent, and they left the big dirt-floored room behind.

  The sugary smell grew stronger as the ramp opened into a chamber with tunnels heading in five directions. The yellow flicker of Sally’s torch shone on scrape marks—from teeth or claws—that swooped across the walls and ceiling. Most of the marks were packed with dried flowers and grasses, which created colorful swirling patterns.

  It was wild and beautiful and strange. Part of Ji wanted to decorate the chimney the same way, but another part kept thinking, Goblin teeth are strong enough to carve rock—imagine what they’d do to human flesh.

  Roz nodded toward the second largest of the five tunnels. “The mausoleum is that way.”

  “How can you tell?” Sally asked.

  “It’s th
e right size for humans.”

  Sally pointed her torch toward a tunnel with dizzying flower-and-grass-filled grooves. “What about this big one?”

  “Not with all the . . . decoration,” Roz said. “I doubt that priests appreciate goblin art.”

  A faint scritch-scritch-scritch sounded from one of the tunnels.

  “W-what is that?” Ji stammered.

  “Probably nothing,” Roz said, pressing her hand to her throat.

  “It doesn’t sound like nothing,” he said. “It sounds like claws.”

  “Knights always face their enemies head-on,” Sally said, and stalked into the second-largest tunnel with her torch in one hand and her shovel in the other.

  “You’re not a knight!” Ji said. “You’re not even a squire.”

  “C’mon!” she called, over her shoulder. “We have to stick together.”

  “Yeah, like a shish kebab,” Ji muttered. “So they can eat us all once.”

  “Is that worse than being eaten separately?” Roz asked, and took Ji’s hand. “I don’t think they’ll eat us. It’d be quite rude, now that they know our names.”

  The tunnel angled down into the gloom, past jade torch holders fixed to thick wooden beams. The sugary scent faded as the air grew damper, and Ji tried to make himself take slow, calming breaths.

  When that didn’t work, he tried to make himself stop imagining the ceiling caving in.

  That didn’t work, either.

  The tunnel ended at a flight of stone stairs that plunged into pitch-blackness. “I—I wonder how deep this goes,” Sally said.

  “Miles,” Roz said, her voice thin. “Lightless miles underground.”

  A wave of fear made Ji dizzy. He tried to gather his courage, but the chill air seeping from the stairwell raised goose bumps on his aching arms. What if they died down here? What if goblins thought humans tasted better with names? What if someone caught them and they hanged?

  Then he exhaled. Forget brave. Brave didn’t matter. He knew what mattered.

  “If we turn back,” he said, “we’ll never see Chibo again.”

  For a dozen heartbeats, nobody spoke. The light from Sally’s torch brushed the stone stairs with a feeble glow—then faded into shadows.

  “For Chibo,” Sally said.

  “For Chibo,” Roz repeated, and her musical voice lightened the gloom.

  Sally swallowed a few times, then tromped down the stairs.

  Ji followed a little less briskly. His breath sounded harsh in his ears and his sandals scraped the steps. For Chibo. To buy his freedom, to save his life. And because if Ji didn’t do this, he’d end up like his oldest brother, Tomás, disappearing without a trace. Like the tiny blue-bats that swarmed and swirled and died in a single week.

  The stairs finally ended in a circular room with a stone table and rows of glass bottles. Racks of ceramic jars stood in the shadows against one wall, and spiky tools lined a polished marble rack.

  Ji grabbed a torch from the corner. “What is this place?”

  “It’s where they prepare bodies for burial,” Roz whispered.

  “Why are you whispering?” Sally whispered.

  “I don’t know,” Roz whispered.

  “Well, it’s freaking me out,” Ji whispered, lighting his torch from Sally’s.

  “After a noble is buried, the priests bring an urn to the mausoleum, to represent the person’s memory.” Roz pointed toward a second flight of stairs, on the other side of the circular room. “Up there. For souls to rise as high as possible, the bodies are buried as low as possible. That’s how it works.”

  “How what works?” Sally asked.

  “Magic,” Roz said.

  Ji started toward the second flight of stairs. He didn’t care about magic; he just wanted to kill the lotus flower and return to his chimney before the goblins slathered him with salsa and started chewing.

  “Magic always balances out,” Roz explained, as Ji climbed the steps.

  Sally’s voice drifted up behind him. “Like scales?”

  “Yes,” Roz said. “If you strengthen one person, you weaken another. If you become more alive, someone else becomes less alive.”

  “There’s no such thing as ‘less alive,’” Sally said. “There’s just dead.”

  “If you brighten the path ahead,” Roz continued, “you darken the one behind.” Her breath grew ragged as she climbed. “And if the bodies are buried deep, the souls rise high.”

  Ji climbed until his legs burned. The ever-present ache between his shoulders throbbed with his heartbeat. He heard nothing but the rasp of his breath, saw nothing but the glow of his torch.

  Then he caught a whiff of fresh air. Almost to the top!

  When he reached a wide landing with a jade-studded door, he sprawled to the floor. He gasped for breath until Sally and Roz flopped down beside him, then forced himself to his feet.

  “The mausoleum’s through here?” he asked, staggering to the door.

  Roz nodded, too winded to speak.

  “Then watch out, lotus blossom,” Ji said. “Because here I come.”

  The door swung open, and Ji blinked into the moons-lit mausoleum. A jasmine-scented breeze wafted through the holes in the jade wall, which looked like black lace in the gloom. Dozens of urns hung from chains, while others rested on pedestals—all of them twined in desert lotus vine.

  Ji shivered in the fresh air, listening to night birds sing. He suddenly felt wrong. Like he shouldn’t have come. Like he was trespassing on sacred ground.

  “Stay there,” he told Sally and Roz, his voice low. “We shouldn’t all get cursed.”

  10

  WHEN JI CREPT forward, the leaves carpeting the floor crunched underfoot. The braided stems of desert lotus curled around the urns and shivered in the faint breeze. A dozen flowers bloomed, each of them bringing—according to the baroness—a different blessing. Roz said it was just superstition, because the blossoms looked like dragon heads, but that didn’t exactly calm Ji’s nerves.

  He slipped between two urns and found the blossom that the baroness said had bloomed when Brace came to the manor . . . and the night birds fell silent.

  Like they’d heard something.

  Ji’s blood turned to ice. Was someone there? Was something watching? He stared into the darkness beyond the jade wall. The only sound was the chirp of a cricket. After a moment, he put his hand on the lotus blossom.

  The vine trembled, and Ji whispered, “Sorry.”

  He plucked the petals and let them fall to the ground. He checked that he hadn’t missed any . . . and heard voices from the courtyard beyond the jade wall.

  A goblin was saying, “. . . is a child in the ka-rypts. It ka-ame to the pen, yes, very polite.”

  It was the small goblin that the one-eyed goblin had sent away! A noose of fear tightened around Ji’s neck. Why? Why would the goblins tell on them? And who would they tell? Clumsy with dread, he backed into an urn and almost fainted at the clink-scrape as it shifted.

  “Which child, you filthy gob?” Butler’s voice snapped.

  With his heart thrashing like a mermaid’s tail, Ji scrambled through the shadows toward the jade-studded door.

  “A human child,” the goblin said. “All loo-ka the same.”

  The glow of lanterns seeped through the jade wall. Dropping to his hands and knees, Ji crawled toward the door, his vision narrowing into a terrified tunnel.

  “If he got this far,” Butler said, “he’ll hang for desecrating the dead.”

  “Dese-ka-rating,” the goblin agreed.

  The light grew brighter, and Ji lunged through the jade-studded door.

  “What hap—” Sally started.

  “Shhh!” Ji hissed, closing the door. “Butler’s here. The goblins told on us.”

  “That little one that ran off?” Sally snarled.

  Ji nodded, and Roz pressed her hand to her chest. “Did he see you?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Thank summer,” she
breathed.

  Sally frowned. “Is the flower dead?”

  “Yeah.” Ji brushed past her. “And if Butler catches us, so are we.”

  He raced down the stairs, his heart galloping and his sandals slapping. Behind him, Sally urged Roz to move faster, but he didn’t wait for them. If he reached the goblin pen first, he’d trick Butler or distract him. Heck, he’d make ghost noises if he had to.

  He ran across the circular burial preparation chamber. He dashed up the first few steps that led back toward the pen. He trotted up the next few steps. Then he trudged painfully higher, his lungs burning and his thighs aching.

  Finally, he dragged himself to the top of the stairs and stumbled to the chamber with the five tunnels. He staggered to the ramp that led into the “ruined temple”—and a hand grabbed his arm.

  “Ai!” he squawked, his fear of goblin claws sharpening into panic. “No!”

  “Yes,” Butler said, standing over him.

  “Oh! Um! Butler! Hi?”

  Butler shook him fiercely. “You’re in trouble now, boy.”

  The ache in Ji’s shoulders turned into a burn. Tears sprang to his eyes. “I—I’m not—I’m only exploring! I didn’t do anything!”

  “And the lotus flower?” Butler’s nostrils flared. “The one that bloomed when Master Brace arrived just happened to die tonight?”

  “The—the what? Did what?”

  Butler dragged Ji up the ramp toward the temple. “Where’s the stable girl?”

  “I’m alone!” Ji shouted, loud enough to warn Sally and Roz. “There’s nobody else! I’m sorry, Butler! I didn’t do anything, I promise—”

  “You entered the mausoleum.”

  “I stopped at the stairs.” Ji swallowed a lump in his throat. “I got scared and came back.”

  “You’ll hang for this, boot boy.”

  “I didn’t do anything,” he sniffled, trying to make himself sound even more pathetic than he felt.

  “You’re lying to me.”

  “It’s the truth,” Ji lied. “I swear.”

  Butler shoved him across the big room with the bonfire. Ji fell on the dirt floor, and pebbles stung his palms. He blinked his wet eyes toward the goblins shuffling against the rough-hewn walls. They woofled nervously and looked at the ground, like they were afraid of Butler. Ji knew exactly how they felt.