Cold Counsel

by Chris Sharp

  “Nothing yet, my Khan.”

  Arok frowned and waved them on. He needed to see someone bleed soon, or he’d pass out from the boredom and drink before his next meal. He turned to Long-Pig, still standing there with his sword in his hand like a disappointed statue. “Bring me whoever cooked them eggs earlier.”

  Arok hated a hard yolk. That morning he’d been served two. Long-Pig didn’t even acknowledge the Khan as he left, quiet and emotionless, as always, but Arok knew the killer would soon be happy.

  THE AIR BURNED Slud’s nostrils and throat, every mouthful threatening to make him gag and sputter. He knew that if he stopped to cough in earnest the flames would overtake him in minutes. Long strands of spit clung to his beard and streaked his shoulders. Each thundering step was accompanied by a ragged grunt. The blue sky had been swallowed by thick rolls of black. A hot wind pushed him higher as if with some urgent destination in mind.

  Slud hadn’t slept since he’d downed that last potion the morning before, but Agnes’s brew still kept his muscles going and the fatigue at bay. So he climbed on with the heavy bag slapping at his sweat-drenched back, the strap digging into his neck, no time to adjust for comfort. He’d discarded his broken sword and, in its place, picked up what he could scrounge from the Rock Wolves. The uncomfortable load had shifted again, poking into his kidney, and he threw an elbow in protest that landed with a meaty thud and little effect.

  The flames would erase all evidence of the battle. If he reached a safe haven above, the board would reset for the next game. Slud doubted that the tiny goblin who had called himself Dingle had made it off that ridge alive. Without a wolf to carry him, those puny legs wouldn’t have been able to clear the fire before it caught him—which was just as well, as the troll wasn’t sure that announcing his approach would be the smartest tactic after all. The odds, one against thousands, were steep enough without him calling his moves in advance.

  Still, he’d liked the way Dingle had stared at him. Something about the little fellow bowing at his feet felt right, natural even. He craved more of the servile attention. Burning to death seemed an unfitting end for his first follower. Or perhaps it was the most fitting end of all? Regardless, if Slud didn’t move quickly, he’d be following the little goblin into the flames soon enough.

  His legs pounded up a jagged cleft and brought him to an extended stretch of level ground before the next cliff face. There, through the trees, in the nook of the far climb, a small mountain lake waited, the reflective surface yet unmarred by the coming wind. He ran toward it full tilt as the backward-reaching pine needles of the closest tree started to bend and crackle from the heat.

  Sprinting through the hushed trees, he could almost hear their slow, somber breath, the way Agnes had taught him. They knew it was their time to die; thousands of years of life were at an end, so much history soon to be forgotten. Slud had no time for their sorrow as his eyes settled on the glassy surface before him. He stopped at the water’s edge—the lake looked like a hole in the earth dropping into smoke and oblivion. But then the wind found him again, relentless and uncaring, and the ripples turned the black cloud back to water.

  Aunt Agnes had told him many stories over the years involving dangerous faeries who lurked below the surface of isolated mountain pools like this one: naiads, nixies, kelpies, and banshees, all waiting for hapless travelers who wandered too close. He pressed a soot-covered finger to his nostril and blew gobs of blackened snot into the water, first one, and then the other. His offerings floated for a moment before dropping stringy tendrils to the stones.

  A last glance back found that the fire had leapt up on both sides of the little dell, as if working to block his escape and corral him here. He saw no point in arguing with the will of the mountain. In he went, the soles of his feet finding the smooth pebbly bed below the frigid water. In a few steps the bite had climbed to his knees, and the ache of it made him alert as his eyes scanned for movement. A few steps more submerged him to his waist, and he could feel his nethers trying to retreat into his body.

  Behind him, trees popped and the roar of the inferno took over, but he kept going, the water climbing to his chest. His breath came and went in sharp bursts, and some of the contents of the bag started to float, but the hot wind pushed him on, brushing against his neck, both threatening and encouraging at once. Then he was swimming, unsure of what his destination could be. Slud was not a good swimmer, able to doggy-paddle himself upright and forward, but little else beyond that.

  He was pleased to find the small rocky island that waited just below the surface at the lake’s center, and he climbed up, scraping hands and knees with a fleeting sense of victory. He didn’t shiver long as the flames spread, jumping from tree to tree in a ring around him and turning the dell, surrounded by tall cliffs, into an oven.

  Slud eyed the far wall, almost twice the height of the sheer climb he’d made the previous evening. He doubted that he could make it before the rising heat became too much to bear. Was this what the mountain had planned for him? Bakin’ to death wit’ a wet ass? Fuckin’ grand.

  A silvery shimmer caught the corner of his eye, but when he looked it was gone. He figured that going out with a belly full of fresh fish would be better than dying with an empty stomach but he didn’t have a sharpened stick. He wasn’t about to brave the shore again to get one as the now engulfed treetops started to drop burning branches and flaring pinecones on all sides.

  It was like a scene from one of the demon realms that Agnes had said she’d glimpsed in a deep trance. He found it intoxicating, tranquil even—there were worse ways to go than at the heart of such a profound display of destructive beauty. The heat gathered quickly, the wind stoking the flames higher and sending sparks and ash whipping into little funnels. He began to feel flushed as a smile of acceptance settled across his face.

  But he glimpsed the silvery movement again, and searched the water for its cause. The dance of the flames ringed the pond’s surface, but the reflected picture of the smoke cloud shimmered apart in spots to show the deep rocky floor beyond it—like two worlds overlaid upon each other, both of them mercurial and distant. His mind began to drift once more, but with a gentle splash, something of substance broke the water’s plane and his feverish daze with it.

  At first, Slud didn’t believe that the face before him was real—a delicately featured woman with large, dark wide-set eyes and a silver-green hew to her skin. Her hair was the color of freshwater weeds, and she bobbed effortlessly in place with the crown of her small breasts hovering suggestively just above the waterline. She wore no expression as she stared at him from a stone’s lob out. He blinked and squinted, but she was still there, watching.

  “Oi!” he shouted, his aunt’s words of warning coming back to him. “What’re ya?”

  She immediately disappeared below, but he tracked her shimmering movement as she swam closer—coming to a submerged halt before him with slow undulations of her hands and feet. Though distorted by the water, she appeared more clearly to Slud now. She was long and bony, though oddly pleasing to the eye, with scales instead of skin and fine webbing between her fingers and toes. There was something alluring about her emotionless gaze; the hint of a smile tugged at the corner of her bluish lips.

  She waved for him to join her in the water though Slud couldn’t be sure if was an invitation or a command. The tingle of a charm gathered at the base of his skull, beckoning him to pitch forward and reach out to her, but he shook the impulse away. Still, the heat was building as a rain of ash started to fall around him. Each gray flake that landed burned his skin with a momentary sting. Every inhale made his chest heavier.

  She opened her arms as if to welcome his embrace, just as Agnes’s words echoed back once more. The fae of the water will just as soon drag you down to your death as court your seed. They’re some of the most wicked and treacherous of the Fair Folk.

  Even in the water, Slud was pretty sure he could overpower a skinny girl if she was looking to drown him
. But if she was after the other, he sure as shit wasn’t going to pass up such an opportunity again. He slipped his pack off his shoulder and fixed it atop the highest point of the island, before sliding into the pond. She reached out for him.

  He felt the scaly grip of her cold fingers on his wrist, urging him away from the rock. She gave Slud a backward glance and nodded for him to follow as his eyes drifted down the distorted shimmer of her body. He stepped away from the ground and started kicking with his free hand and feet, pulling gently to raise her back to the surface. Then she yanked harder in the opposite direction. Slud’s head went under before he could take a last breath. She was a lot stronger than she looked.

  EIGHT: Witch Way the Wind Blows

  A STRING OF HISSED WORDS carried on the wind. For astute ears that had been trained to listen to the hidden arts, the flow of arcane whispers could be heard from many miles away, though not even the goblin warlocks would recognize the dead language of their design.

  Black Agnes stood at the edge of the cliff with her chin to the sky and her long arms held above her. The words she wove were of the old giant tongue, last uttered by the great wind-witches millennia before—a call to the elementals of the air, beseeching them to stoke the fire and drive it up and across the slope.

  She’d cobbled together a makeshift frock and headscarf from the trappings of fallen goblins. At the base of the drop behind her, the broken bodies of the Rock Wolf hunting party had seasoned well, lending the reek of death to the squall she sent barreling up the mountain. As she spoke, she closed her heavy lids and listened for the thunder of Slud’s steps.

  He’d climbed far and fast, and Agnes had chanted hard to keep the wind apace with him. Now his steps had gone silent and the fire had overtaken his position, though she could still hear the muffled beating of his heart. He’s reached the lake. Now if he can keep from doing anything too impetuous.

  Agnes’s chant trailed off and the wind went into a lull. Her throat had gone hoarse and she needed a drink to sooth the burn that had settled there. There was still so much left to do. She had to find a way to draw the Khan’s army out, and she had to help Slud get into place for what would follow.

  Her eyes snapped open as the sound of quick footsteps approached from above. She hunched further and shrank into herself, suddenly looking old and frail again—just as a young faun bolted out of the blackened forest with terror worn plainly on his bearded face.

  His goat’s legs stopped fast when he spotted her withered form at the edge of the cliff. His frantic eyes scanned for a way around that wasn’t there before returning to her unreadable watch, hidden behind shadow, cloth, and hair. “Can’t go that way,” he said with a voice turned raspy by smoke. “It’s all burning above.”

  Agnes flashed rows of needle-sharp teeth in a smile. “I do not mind the heat.”

  The faun eyed her warily. His ears twitched. “Is there a way down there?”

  She glanced back to the drop and nodded. “A steep set of stairs in the rock . . . dangerous, but stairs nonetheless.”

  Without her influence, the wind shifted against her, and a snow of ash started to fall over the clearing. The faun caught a gray flake on the back of his hand and smeared it into a streak across his knuckles. He looked back to Agnes and took a few jittery steps. He wanted out of these cursed woods. “Something bad happened here. I’m going, and you should too.”

  Agnes pointed to the ledge beside her, and her smile grew. “Here it is, though I would not wish to go down; I had much trouble coming up.”

  The faun crept closer, trying to decide if he was more afraid of her or the fire. “I’ll be fine. I trust my legs.”

  She turned her shiny black gaze on his furry haunches and couldn’t help but lick her lips. “Those legs are nice, yes.”

  He stepped closer still, glancing between her and the place where the stairs were meant to be. She gestured down again. “Just there. It was a hard climb for this old body.”

  As he leaned past her, craning his neck to see, her claw lashed out and pushed. He went over face first and screaming. Then he landed badly and the screaming stopped. Agnes bent over the edge and admired the crooked splay of his appendages as the blood began to pool across the rocks below. Her stomach had started to feel tight again, but she looked back to the growing field of char and flame. Someone else was out there, another voice chanting into the wind.

  She angled her head to listen. It came from higher up and across the mountain—a wavering scream in an old goblin dialect. A Rock Wolf warlock seeks to turn the flame.

  Agnes looked back to the fresh blood below. First she would drink, then she would give this foolish goblin an ill wind he’d not soon forget.

  THE MASTER SAT cross-legged on the ground, facing downslope with a bone rattle spinning in his hands. His voice alternated between a whisper and a shriek. Fixelcrick stood behind him, stroking the black feathers of his cloak as he watched and listened. The first apprentice did not yet have the knack for charming the wind, but if he was to one day take over as Chief Doktor, he’d have to learn. His innate skill lay in the alchemical arts, and in that he was unrivaled in the clan.

  The cloak he wore had been fashioned over years. 184 grackles sacrificed thus far—fourteen layers of black and blue feathers, rubbed twice a week with cricket oil to keep them supple and shiny. He hunted the grackles by crossbow, bringing them down with bolts tipped in gold. The crickets he raised at home in vast numbers, and their constant chirping had driven some of the lesser acolytes mad.

  He looked up at the swirling smoke cloud that blanketed the sky above, uncertain which way it would blow. The forest fire had crested the wide ridge that marked the mountain’s halfway point. It had been moving too quickly to be governed by its own accord, but already Bone Master had turned back the buffeting wind and stopped the advance.

  Harog and the other scouts were still jumpy. The spear boys had set up in a wide perimeter and their eyes scanned the wood for movement. If there was another doktor out there who dared to work against the Rock Wolf Clan, there was probably an army with him.

  Perhaps the Iron Tusks? The Yellow Fangs? Fixelcrick couldn’t guess which of the lowland clans was powerful or foolish enough to brave such an attack, but he knew it wouldn’t be long before the Rock Wolves marched to war in answer. It had been over a decade since the Bone Shield Clan had made an attempt on the mountain, and now that name was dead among all the goblins of the horde.

  Fixelcrick’s master had been a Bone Shield once, the only of their ranks to survive. He had power to share and allegiance to nothing but the arts he trafficked in. It had been the most important lesson he’d taught the first apprentice—there were no clans, or families, or friends; only the Knack mattered.

  The Big Boss of the scouts spurred his wolf beside Fixelcrick and leaned over to whisper so as not to disturb Bone Master’s flow. “Is there a doktor out there? Working against us?”

  Fixelcrick nodded.

  “Got an idea who? Whole pack of the Khan’s Blades and Fangs are still missing.”

  Fixelcrick didn’t look at him. He didn’t have any answers, and he had no patience for hearing information that he already knew. Instead, he arched his back and waved his arms in tight circles as the feathers came alive across his cloak. Harog stumbled back in surprise as the apprentice shot into the air and landed on a thick pine branch fifty feet up.

  Fixelcrick smirked. He enjoyed surprising goblins with little shows of the power within his grasp, but the sudden strain in Bone Master’s words brought him back to the battle for control of the air. The first apprentice peered out toward the dance of flames in the distance and opened his inner ear to the competing words woven into the breeze.

  He heard the unfamiliar speech of the other like a chorus of hissed echoes about his mind. The language was harsher, more guttural and savage than the old goblin dialect of his master, and there was a vaguely feminine tone to the string of utterances. As Fixelcrick listened, a cold shiver worked its
way down from his scalp. The wind began to shift again.

  Bone Master shrieked with renewed vigor, spit flying from his mouth and the bone rattle furiously shaking a discordant beat. But the black cloud moved toward them across the mountain once more, rolling and angry. The heavy aroma of burning pine was mingled with a faint undercurrent of death. Even the wolves seemed to grow uneasy with the foul air in their snouts—they growled and tucked their tails, and some of the more craven of their number quietly whimpered.

  “Any movement ahead?” shouted Harog from below, no longer concerned with the focus of the master.

  Fixelcrick had begun to develop his own far-seeing eye, almost twice as big as the other and perpetually bloodshot and oozing. He turned it on the stretch of land between them and the fire. Nothing was moving except the swaying branches of the forest, but he sensed something drawing closer. The wind whipped against the treetops, and Fixelcrick had to brace against the rocking of his perch as he peered down to meet Harog’s expectant gaze with a shake of his head.

  The master’s voice began to crack, and the fury of the bone rattle faltered, but the angry voice in the wind did not waver. Fixelcrick’s far-seer spotted the dramatic lean of the trees ahead of him just before the first big gust bent the trunk he clung to with a loud WHOOSH! He dug his claws into the bark until he felt the sticky sap. Another gust bent the crown of the tree even farther, and he hugged the branch tightly, praying both he and it would hold.

  The wolves barked frantically below, and the screams of Bone Master were now tinged with desperation and pain. Limbs and trunks snapped across the slope with sharp cracks followed by dull crashes. Fixelcrick dared to open his eye again amid the tumult. He thought he saw someone running toward them through the chaos, but he lost sight of them and almost came unglued as the trunk whipped upright once more. Back and forth he swung with gust after gust barreling through their position. He clung on desperately and muttered his own feeble prayers to the spirits in the air.