The Black Knight Chronicles (Book 4): Paint it Black

by John G. Hartness

  Chef opened his mouth to answer, then all hell broke loose.

  Chapter 17

  I’M NOT RIGHT often, and usually it happens by accident. Like now. In my bluff to the chef, I’d inadvertently told him a truth. Our friends really were on the way to rescue us, but it wasn’t Marty. Or at least, it wasn’t just Marty. He darted into the tent, jumped up and down with his head-ridge twitching for a second then ducked back out. I heard him shout something unintelligible, and fervently hoped that it was a call to the cavalry. It was.

  Sabrina, her cousin Stephen, Anna, and Abby burst into the back of the tent guns blazing. Or actually, swords and hands blazing mostly. Stephen held my sword, the one I’d borrowed from Milandra the last time we were in Faerieland, and it was glowing bright blue. Apparently my sword liked goblins about as much as I did. Anna’s hands were glowing with a pale yellow light, and there was a similar golden aura coming from her eyes. Given her dislike for me, I wasn’t sure having her super-powered was a good thing, but I knew that Sabrina holding a Mossberg Persuader twelve-gauge shotgun was a very good thing. I’d helped her spec out the mixed silver and cold iron shot she loaded that puppy with, and I knew that if goblins weren’t acquainted with the concept of a “boom stick,” they were about to get an introduction.

  Chef and his bodyguards spread out to try to flank the attackers, but the first one to step forward got blown to chunks by Sabrina’s Mossberg. Little bits of goblin spattered across my face, and I knew I was never getting that smell out of my hair.

  Sabrina racked another shell and said, “If the rest of you want to stay in one piece you’ll lie facedown on the ground and behave while we rescue our friends.”

  Chef and his minions dropped to the deck, and Abby came over to cut us loose. I was able to stand, but Greg sagged against her and she had to half carry him back to where Sabrina kept her gun trained on the chef.

  “You’re making a huge mistake, human,” Chef said from his place on the floor.

  I stepped on the back of his head as I walked past and said, “Wouldn’t be the first time, Greenie. And we came out of those scrapes just fine, too.”

  “I’m afraid that won’t be the case this time, Sir Sanguine. You have been found in violation of the peace of the Market for a second time. The penalty for this, as was explained to you upon your first infraction, is death. Kill them all.” The new voice came from the same faerie guard that I’d met earlier. The good humor he’d shown then was gone, and he had more friends. There were at least half a dozen faeries with him, all armed with swords and long daggers. They spread out to block any exit and advanced on us slowly, swords drawn.

  “Wait a minute, I’m unarmed. And my friends should only get a warning. They haven’t gotten a warning,” I protested. The faeries stopped, looking at one another. Apparently most people didn’t try to talk their way out of a fight here. Honestly, it wasn’t my favorite tactic either, but I didn’t think I had much of a chance to kill all of them and still rescue the Carmichaels from whoever or whatever had them.

  “But you have been warned, and now you are once again in the center of a disturbance in the Market. I am within the bounds of my authority to order you all executed to avoid further nuisance. I so order.” The faeries started in again, renewed in their resolve to make little vampire bits all over the floor.

  “You don’t want to do this, pal. We’re friends of Queen Milandra.” The faeries froze again as I stretched the truth just a little. Technically, we’d done her one big favor, and then started a small war in her throne room, but everything turned out all right in the end, and there were hugs when we left. Really, there were. Anyway, it worked. At least for a minute. I saw several of the faeries look back at their captain, or sergeant, or whatever with concerned glances. Milandra was known to change the color of the sky to match her dresses, and they looked a little concerned that her capriciousness might be turned on them if they chopped up her friends.

  “We conveyed your likeness to Her Majesty after our first encounter with you, Sanguine. She informed us that you were to be left alone and extended all courtesies unless you or your associates violated one of the more serious laws of the Market. Killing goblins is in violation of exactly thirteen serious laws of the Market. And the Market is not under the jurisdiction of the Queen. So I’m afraid your precious lizard-loving queen can do nothing for you now.” Great, all the guards in Faerie and we run into the one that hates Milandra’s sometimes-dragon husband.

  I stepped forward to where the guard captain stood and pitched my voice low so no one else could hear us. “Look, we know you don’t really want a big fight on your hands. We don’t want a big fight, either. I’m tired, and my buddy here is still trying to regrow his legs. So why don’t you just step aside and let us go, and you’ll never have to worry about us again.”

  “If I stand aside you will leave the Market, never to return?” he asked.

  “As soon as we find the chef’s supplier and rescue the humans he’s kidnapped, yes.”

  “That is unsatisfactory. You have violated the laws of the Market. You must now face the consequences.” He drew his sword and came at me, and he was fast, faster than a vampire fast. The only thing that saved me was an inherent distrust of everyone, so I was already diving backward when he started to reach for his weapon. I hit the deck, and his blade whistled through the air where my neck had been.

  Then the fight was on. Stephen leapt into the fray and took on the captain, twirling my sword with an inhuman grace. Stephen wasn’t human, but a faerie swapped in infancy with a human child. His swordwork was pretty spectacular, but the guard captain was a real soldier, with possibly centuries of experience. Stephen put up a good defense, but the soldier quickly proved that he was the better warrior. He deflected a flurry of attacks from Stephen and dove in for a thrust that would have gutted the young faerie if I hadn’t managed to regain my footing just in time to kick the captain in his knee. He howled and went down, and I turned my attention to the rest of the fray.

  Abby was standing over Greg’s prone form, taking on two guards with nothing more than her bare hands and what looked like a soup ladle. She was doing a good job of holding them off, but I could see her breathe a sigh of relief when Stephen stepped up and ran one of the guards through. Abby quickly stepped inside the stroke of the second guard and sank her teeth into his neck. A bit old-fashioned, maybe, but damned effective.

  Sabrina had three guards pinned down behind an overturned table with her Mossberg. Whenever a hint of pointy ear poked up over the table, she let fly with another shell. The Mossberg only held eight, so she was about to need a reload. I stepped up behind her and drew her service weapon from the holster.

  “Reload, I’ll cover you.” She nodded and started pumping fresh shells into the gun from the bandolier she had slung over one shoulder. A dozen Wookie jokes came to mind, but since I was the one being rescued, I decided to give her a break this time. A guard peeked up over the table, and I shot off the tip of his ear. He fell back, screaming, and I grinned at Sabrina.

  “Show-off.” She grinned back. The Mossberg reloaded, she racked a shell into the chamber and blasted away at the table again.

  I turned to check on Anna and my eyes widened. The witch had the chef and all his minions bound with glowing bands of blue fire, and from the howls coming from the goblins, it wasn’t a comfortable captivity. She shot me a nasty smile and pointed a finger at me. I dove for the floor just as a yellow sphere of force came shooting out of her fingertips at me. I heard a gurgling croak from behind me and rolled over just in time to see the top half of a faerie guard fall to the dirt beside me. His legs stood alone for a second, then toppled over backward. The smell of burnt faerie seared my nostrils, and I waved my thanks to Anna. She grinned back at me, and I remembered how much she didn’t like me. I was suddenly very glad she didn’t have that kind of juice back in our world. At least I thought she didn’t. Scratch that. I really, really hoped she didn’t.

  It looke
d like our side was winning the battle handily, despite the lack of notable contributions from me or Greg. Even Marty had a long dagger in hand and was beating the hell out of Abdullah the goblin with the flat of it, wielding the knife with both hands. I stood up, looking around for something that needed to be punched, bitten, or kicked, and saw nothing. I leaned against the center tent pole to watch the carnage, then froze as I heard a thunderous roar from just outside the tent.

  I glanced around, but everybody else looked just as confused as I was. Except for Chef, who grinned like he’d just found a toy in his Cracker Jack box.

  “That would be my bodyguard, Slim,” he said with a smirk. Then the back wall of the tent tore away and the biggest ogre I’d ever seen charged us. He was all of eleven feet tall if he was an inch, with arms that hung almost to the ground. His fists were each bigger than my head, and his thick-browed head sat upon shoulders the width of three NFL linemen. Long tusks protruded from his lower jaw, and his bluish skin looked more like scales than flesh. All in all, he looked like ten miles of bad road.

  I looked around to see what contingent of my army was going to take this guy on, and saw every one of my soldiers was otherwise occupied. “Stephen! I could use that pigsticker if you don’t mind!” I yelled, and Stephen tossed my sword across the tent, bending down to pick up a discarded blade from one of the guards he’d felled. I snatched my sword out of the air and stepped into the monster’s path.

  “Slim, huh? I guess your mom had a flair for the ironic,” I said, hoping to distract him with my witty repartee. The ogre just grunted and charged, his huge arms outstretched to bowl over anything in his path. I dove forward and slightly to the side, landing in a roll that took me under his wingspan and left his huge back exposed. I leapt and jabbed downward with my sword, which glanced off his scaly hide. I crashed into his back, and Slim reached around faster than I would have dreamed possible, snatching me off his shoulders and slamming me to the ground.

  I lay there dazed for a second, then managed to pry my eyes open. I looked up at a huge foot rushing toward my face, and rolled to one side. Slim stomped where my head had been, and the entire tent shook with the impact. My roll put me directly underneath the beast, so I decided to take the lowest of the low roads—I thrust straight up with my sword, stabbing the ogre right in the family jewels.

  Apparently ogre physiology is similar enough to human that certain parts are in the same place. Slim let out a high-pitched keening howl that was sure to have dogs all over the Market whimpering in sympathy. I almost felt bad for stabbing him, then remembered that he tried to stomp my face flat, and he worked for a guy who ate my bicep. I got over my guilt in a matter of seconds, and quickly slid out from under the collapsing monster before the ogre fell to his knees. Both hands were clutching his wound, which gave me the perfect opening to stab him through the throat and put him out of all our misery. I drew back.

  “STOP!” Bellowed a new voice, and all activity in the tent ceased. We all turned simultaneously to see a familiar, and yet still very scary form standing over the tent. Yeah, over the tent. Tivernius the dragon had ripped the roof off and was glaring down at us from some twenty feet in the air. Nearby tents shook with every flap of his giant wings, and his golden eyes fixed me with a look that made my borrowed blood run cold.

  “Put away your weapons or I will incinerate each and every one of you,” the dragon said in a quieter voice. We all hurried to obey. I didn’t have a scabbard for my sword, so I just kinda jabbed it through my belt and tried to look non-threatening. I suppose to the dragon I was pretty non-threatening.

  Tivernius shimmered, and instead of a huge golden dragon floating above us, a handsome man with blond hair and golden armor stood in the middle of the tent. He stalked through the tent in a wide circle, taking in all of the different factions of combatants. The guards knelt and removed their helmets in his presence. Marty prostrated himself before the dragon-man, groveling in what sounded like five or six different languages. Anna released the goblins, who immediately knelt and bowed their heads. Greg and Stephen bowed deeply, Anna, Sabrina, and Abby curtseyed, and even I gave him a nod of respect. I probably would have bowed, but once you’ve been through a cage fight with a guy, he loses a little of his majesty.

  Tivernius came to a halt in front of me and looked at the moaning ogre, who had fallen over on his side and lay there, clutching his sack. Tivernius shook his head at me and held out his hands over the ogre. Golden light flowed down onto the monster, and the lines of pain on its face eased. After a few seconds the light went out, and the beast rolled over and went to sleep.

  “That was not very nice, stabbing him there,” Tivernius said, turning back to me.

  “It wasn’t very nice trying to stomp my head into a pancake either.” I felt no remorse.

  “Still, Jimmy. You stabbed the guy in the jewels.”

  “Dude, he’s an ogre, and he was trying to kill me. If there hadn’t been armor everywhere else, I woulda stabbed him somewhere with a little more dignity. Besides, his boss ate part of me!”

  “That’s not the ogre’s fault.”

  “I am not going to stand here in the middle of friggin’ Faerieland debating a dragon about the morals involved in stabbing an ogre in the nuts! I refuse. I have to draw the line somewhere, and this is it! Now are you gonna kill me, or are you gonna let us go?” I heard the note of hysteria in my voice, but I couldn’t do anything about it. I’d gone from entree to rescued, to battling guards, to stabbing an ogre in the balls, to facing down a dragon. I was absolutely on the edge of losing my cool, and didn’t have the energy left to hide it.

  “Neither. I’m bringing you before the Queen, who shall decide your fate.”

  Well, crap.

  Chapter 18

  I WAS COUNTING on the trek from the Market to Milandra’s throne room to give me time to work on my rapport with Tivernius, to make sure we were still buddies, that sort of thing. I’d gotten along pretty well with the dragon on our last trip to Faerieland, and the meddling Greg, Sabrina and I had done in his love life had worked out pretty well for him in the end, so I had high hopes for getting the Faerie Queen’s scaly husband on our side over the days it would take us to walk to the capital.

  But my luck held, and as usual my only luck was bad, as we were teleported directly into the throne room. We weren’t the first ones to arrive, of course. It could never be as easy as getting to the Queen, pleading our case, and then walking out with all our dangly bits intact, oooohhhhh nnnooooo. We arrived in a rush of air and no small amount of Market-dust just as the guard captain finished explaining his side of events. He seemed to have covered most of the high points, including the part where I kicked him in the knee. He gestured with his cane as he came to that part of his report and almost fell over, which I felt was a little overly dramatic, but I wasn’t the one whose knee bent backward now, so I guess I didn’t get to be all judgy.

  “I have heard your case, Captain, and am ready to levy my decision,” Milandra said. The little Faerie Queen had none of the mischief in her eyes that I had seen on our last visit. She was seated on her silver throne, clad in silver armor, with a gold-and-silver twined circlet on her brow and long, silver hair cascading down her shoulders. Across her knees lay a silver scepter with a fist-sized diamond at the end of it. She raised it and stood.

  I started forward, saying, “Don’t we even get a chance to—” I was going to say something eloquent about defense and due process, but Tivernius wrapped a hand around my mouth and jerked me back. I struggled against his grip, but dragons are strong. I mentally put them on the “things that can kick my ass” list, and stopped fighting.

  “Good. Now behave yourself and watch. We’re invisible back here, but if you get more than ten feet from me you’ll be outside the range of my spell,” he whispered into my ear. I looked around and saw that the others were standing still and watching our exchange. I raised an eyebrow at Greg, and he raised one back at me, as if to say, “Well, I wasn’t
going to run in there and get us all killed, now was I?”

  “You couldn’t have told me that before now?” I hissed back. “And please tell me you have a roll of quarters in your pocket.” He let me go, and I turned my attention back to the Queen.

  I started a little as I saw myself appear and kneel meekly before the throne. I looked around, making sure that I wasn’t really there and that the whole Scooby Gang was still hiding in the dragon’s invisibility spell with me, then watched as Greg, Abby, Sabrina, and Stephen all popped into existence in front of Milandra. The fake us all knelt, then the Queen held her scepter high and spoke.

  “It has been proven beyond reproof that you have violated the laws and hospitality of our land and of the Goblin Market. As follows our treaty with the Goblin King and the other sentient species of the realm governing the Market, you shall be put to death forthwith and without hesitation.”

  She waved her scepter, and it morphed into a glittering crystal sword. The sword flashed through the air, catching light and flashing prisms across the floor as it swung down, parting “my” neck like it was a sheet of paper. It was more than a little disconcerting to watch my head part from my shoulders and thunk to the marble floor, and it was way disturbing to watch my body turn to dust and blow away. I looked at Greg, and saw him turn even paler than normal. Sabrina closed her eyes as Milandra decapitated the rest of the fake us, and I put an arm around her shoulders. Anna was the only one who didn’t seem fazed, and that creeped me out even more.

  “Is that what really happens when you kill one of us? ’Cause it looks a lot like an episode of Buffy,” I whispered to Tivernius.

  “I know. Joss Whedon is very popular over here. And no, that’s not what really happens. But it’s what people expect now, so we have to give them a little razzle-dazzle.”

  Great. I’m standing here in Faerieland watching the Queen of the Fae chop off my head and a dragon is quoting musical theatre numbers at me. I turned my attention back to Milandra, who had finished decapitating my “friends.” I kept looking back and forth between Stephen and Sabrina’s “corpses” and the obviously not dead folks standing next to me. Somehow it was easier dealing with her killing me, Greg, and Abby, since our bodies turned to dust.