She waded gingerly among the twitching goblins, nudging them gently with her boots to make space to step.
Reece knelt over the dear ones, cupping his hands to gather moisture and daubing their smudged brows. "Look at them, Jyoti, so lovely in their smallness."
With the extra harness that she had lugged, she draped Reece and activated all the power wands. The surge of Charm loosened him from the goblin's spell, and his face winced with alertness.
He blinked, at first not recognizing her with her hair sheared and her face smirched. "Jyo?"
He stood and seized her, gaping about at the sprawled goblins, appalled by their slick, dirt-streaked bodies and the miasma that oozed from them. "Jyo! How did you find me?"
Jyoti's mind reeled to hold him in her arms, and at last she could admit to herself that he was not an illusion, not some telepathic simulacrum of the goblins. She pressed her face against the side of his neck and nuzzled him, defying for the moment her fear of where they stood.
“I came to destroy them," she said when she lifted her face, eyes glinting with tears, "and you are here." She pulled him away from the sleeping goblins, guiding him with well-placed steps toward the wall.
He followed gladly, clinging to her, drinking in her voice.
"My weapons master, Nette, told me that Ripcat had been seen in Bryse. That's the last I'd heard of you."
Reece began to tell her about Esre and his abduction in Moödrun, and Jyoti stopped him. She pointed with her chin to one side, and when he turned he sighted a gaunt figure with a face sharp as an ax and small, black eyes. "You!"
Jyoti reached for a firelock, and the grim man in ebony robes shook his hairless head. "There is no need for a weapon. If I had come to slay you, you would never have seen me."
The Strange Creatures Came
“You killed Esre!” Reece pointed an accusatory finger at N'drato. "And you almost killed me."
Impassively, the assassin looked about at the stained, little bodies strewn at their feet, stinking like some reeking issue of death itself. "I was wrong. Margravine—magus. The Brood of Assassins withdraws blood claims on both of you. For the witch's sake, I will make retribution to the Sisterhood."
"What has moved you to turn your knife, N'drato?" Jyoti inquired suspiciously.
The narrow man reached under his robe and amplified the outflow of Charm from his power wands, countering the wicked stench and faint shadow of voices whispering in his head, plaintively chanting songs of the pixie, effervescent voices heating his blood so that fate felt like wine and he grew drowsy.
"Assassins are not mindless killers. I suspected that the one who hired me was not the one I should obey. I noticed that trolls were following me to find the magus. The goblins want you dead, Reece Morgan—and the Brood of Assassins does not serve goblins."
"Shai Malia hired you," Jyoti knew and vainly looked for a glint of acknowledgment in the assassin's hatchet face. "She is a puppet of the goblins. And so is my brother. And so now is your sister."
N'drato's nostrils winced, betraying his surprise. "Nette is with these monsters? I cannot believe this."
"She sacrificed herself to save me." Jyoti stepped closer to the clouded crystal wall and pulled Reece along, away from the ebony-robed man with the small black eyes. "I'm here now because she took my place. This gummy, white ichor that stains me, it's goblin scat. Your sister is mired in it right now."
N'drato hung his head to hide his horror. Nothing in his training or experience had prepared him for this. "I must return to New Arwar at once—but the charmways are burning."
"The Sisterhood is gutting those bridges to contain the goblins." Reece glanced up at rain threading through the cracked dome in shafts of storm-blue light and wondered about Dogbrick and the passage to Earth. "We have to get out of here before the trolls find us."
"Fear not. I forestalled the advance of the trolls for the moment." N'drato sidled closer. "Come with me. The Brood of Assassins has mapped most of the charmways among the dominions, and there is a passage near here to New Arwar that may yet be open. Take me to my sister."
"No." Jyoti motioned to the grotto of dreaming goblins. "I came here to destroy this horde."
N'drato shook his head. "I cannot destroy these creatures of another world without permission from my brood. And if I ask, they will learn of Nette's plight and perhaps deny me the chance to retrieve her. I cannot take that risk. Leave these goblins for now and come with me to New Arwar."
"Why should we trust you?" Reece watched him with obvious fright. "You were sent to kill us."
"Look about you." The assassin glanced at the slumbering goblins. "You fear me more than you fear them?"
Jyoti lifted her chin adamantly. "You go if you must. But we're not leaving until these things are dead."
The assassin's small, black eyes tightened. "If I stay, I must answer to my brood. I will answer for Nette but not for goblins."
He moved closer, a glint of metal in one hand. "As you will not take me to Nette, then give me enough of the goblin's scat to charge my seeker amulet, and I will find her myself."
Jyoti obliged, and N'drato scraped the sticky, cottony purulence from the thigh of her buckskin trousers and packed the lens of his seeker.
He felt the margravine surreptitiously snip threads from his robe as he bent over her. He knew her intent to charge her seeker and follow him to the charmway hidden in the Mere of Goblins, and he behaved as though oblivious of this. When he had what he needed, he pressed an ivory coin into Jyoti's palm. "This will guide you to the nearest charmway."
The assassin departed without farewell, his ebony robes fluttering about him as he climbed the salt shelves to the crack in the dome where he had entered, nimble as a flung shadow.
Outside, the stormy night bore uncountable shapes among the tossing trees and stabs of lightning. N'drato rushed along unfazed. His amulets protected him, and his training guided him unerringly around flashing pools of firesnakes and whip shadows of giant, frantic centipedes—to the margravine's airfoil.
Under sizzling lashes of lightning and blares of thunder, N'drato started the engine and turned the vessel into the wind. Neither Jyoti nor Reece heard him take off.
He flew through the deformed darkness of the tempest, while below the strange creatures came, blind, larval hulks, tentacled chimeras, unreckonable beings stirred up from the putrid depths of the swamp. Their roars rivaled the thunder. The strobing sky above the shuddering treetops silhouetted their fibrillar heads. He winced before these furies into whose path he had committed the margravine and her consort.
Then, the storm claimed his full attention. Deep in the night, he brought the battered airfoil down in a swatch of cleared forest outside New Arwar. Soon, he made his way by lightning glare to the great, jointed sewer pipes that emptied the city's bowels. These he followed like a spider, crawling upside down above the sluicing wastewater.
He crept into vents that, by blind turnings, brought him to the utility ducts serving the manor. Chimes of timeless dripping accompanied him, and presently he barged through an insulation filter panel into a catacomb of exhaust fans and vent holes. From there, the seeker amulet pointed him to air shafts that climbed stone walls to the chamber of the goblins.
Nette hung upside down in a cocoon of webs. N'drato eyed her through the grille of a floor vent gauzed over with gossamer. He forced the grille and slinked into the mephitic chamber. The power wands under his robe began to crack immediately, splitting lengthwise as Charm drained out of them, and the rancid stench pierced his sinuses.
Bald, bloated, pale babies watched him, four, five of them huddled in one corner, each with one of their blood-smoked eyes staring intently, pupils blown wide, and the other droop-lidded, concussed, speckled flesh twitching. Their tiny mouths bent in sad, evil smiles.
N'drato drew his firelock and aimed it at the cowering goblins. He crawled through their creamy sludge, Charm draining from him. His body felt heavy, his arm too ponderous to move, his
fingers too thick to draw back the charge pin and pull the trigger. Fear swung through him. And was gone.
Like a dawn sky of processional pink clouds, joy rose in him. He released the firelock and squatted in the rich and fragrant silk of the dear ones. He laughed at the empty fullness of his own being, his own perfect self.
Angel Fate
The goblins wove their happy threads around N’drato and uplifted him to the ceiling. This took a long time, for they moved slowly in this cold reality far from their home inside the Abiding Star.
They moved slower yet for their melancholy, their loneliness laid bare. They missed their home in the wildwood and their former lives as pixies. The dark father had deceived them into climbing down into his wife's dream. He had said they would be as gods—but he had not made clear to them that they would be as gods among demons.
The goblins perceived people as demons who fought and killed one another for land and Charm. People hoarded possessions for themselves while others of their own kind starved, even to death. No pixie would do that to another creature, let alone to another pixie.
The dark father had tricked them, and now no way back remained. Too cold to climb up and out of the dream, they preferred to sleep, to weave their own dream of happier days among the leaf tops when they had been so full of joy they did not even realize they were happy.
Why has the dark father done this to us? They had pondered this from the time they had arrived so long ago and found themselves in a world among demons. Why?
Because the dark father could. The nameless lady who had authored these worlds believed she prepared a caul of knowledge for the birth of her child. She thought that the baby would be better born in the light, the mother's light that had poured into the void and filled the cold darkness with warmth and energy.
The dark father wanted to rear their child in the deep of night, where darkness took on urgency like the great turtle of time, shouldering its own shadow with perseverance that engulfed every epoch with oblivion, every age a candle snuffed. There, the child would learn to make its own light. The young soul would learn to create its own hope, its own new face of time, with bright mirrors of stars and a road map of heaven self-invented. That difficult way, the way of uncertainty that led to strength—that course gratified the dark father.
Knowing this offered no comfort to the goblins. They mewled with sorrow and smiled at one another sadly, fools aware that they had been duped. With nothing else to do but accept their lot, they strove with all their strength and cunning against the wickedness that possessed this world. Such was the angel fate of goblins, to struggle mightily against the monster fate of demons.
To that end, they strung up the demon N'drato. Clotted with the sleep glitter that had oozed from their bodies, his stenchy skin shone. He hung like a moon weight, a sac of fibrous moonbeams spun together, another dream no one wanted.
Purging egg masses from the orifices between their legs, the goblins prepared to commune with this demon. This grotesque work none of them relished, yet it had to be done to continue their fight. The slick egg cases oozed from their bodies like ectoplasmic bulbs, throbbing with telepathic chemicals.
The goblins hugged each other with dread and waited. Their hearts skittered like small animals. They clutched each other, being brave, each for the others. Since arriving on Irth, they had learned that love did not live in birdsongs and sunbeams as once they had believed. Love was strong-jawed as death itself.
With a popping hiss, a string of eggs released their hormonal burdens. The demon the goblins had most recently captured convulsed briefly as the fumes invaded his skull and twisted new loops in his cruel brain.
Fear gouged the goblins. They studied in N'drato his intrusion into the chalk house of their sleeping brethren, and they wailed. Their cries rang like a bell wandering across glades, traveling through forests and over leagues of sea beyond the forests to their sleeping kin.
Wake! the goblins cried, for they detected the magus and his consort, Jyoti, in their grotto temple. Wake! Wake and defend yourselves! Demons move among you!
The goblins grabbed at each other and pulled themselves into their nurturing aromas, strengthening their telepathic power. With this power, they reached across the world to the mindless beasts whose hollow minds held their commands most snugly. Trolls! they shouted as one. Trolls to the House of Goblins! Go!
Rain dragged its nets across the Mere of Goblins, snaring tree coves and smoky floors of the swamp with the psychic insistence of the goblins. From out of tussocks and bogs, the trolls—bolt-eyed humanoids with metallic skin and fanged faces—emerged.
Lightning swung its lantern. Silver light fluttered, went out, and lit again elsewhere in the swamp. By that crazed illumination, the trolls gathered, slouching through the rain toward the salt dome that housed the rousing goblins.
And within that dome, the sleeping ones stirred. The dreams of haystack clouds and rambling fields of feathery grass dissolved. Speckled eyelids flickered and opened, wincing in the flickering glare of lightning that rayed through the cracked dome.
Other lights bobbed among them, and the goblins flustered with fear to see in their midst two demons.
Their minds reached out as one, terrified of the invaders stalking among them, waving their lux-diamonds, planting in the ground around them their horrible crystals of trapped Charm, rocks of exiled light. And with one mind, the goblins screamed.
Light in the Head
All her life Overy Scarn had been too straitened to afford the Charm that could have made her beautiful, and now that she had all the resources of Dig Dog Ltd. and New Arwar at her disposal, she was far too busy to undergo the laborious glamour-bloodstone treatments that could melt away her fat.
She did, however, have fashioned the spellbinder girdle that endowed her with irresistible sexual allure. The ecstasy-topazes and rapture-garnets alone had cost her dearly, because she required thrice as many for her girth. And the expense for the necessary conjure-wire to adequately encompass her folds of flesh had nearly convinced her to forgo the girdle altogether and take the time instead for the fat melting.
Time now had become more precious than lux-diamonds. Reports from every dominion announced destruction and defeat under relentless waves of troll and ogre attacks. Agriculture had been devastated, and all mining operations across Irth had shut down. In coming days, famine and a poverty of Charm would effectively end the Talismanic Era. People would be forced to live as they had a million days ago, foraging for food, strapping themselves into trees and caves at night to keep from drifting away on the nocturnal tide as they slept. And those who did possess the remaining hex-gems would rule with a might greater than Peers.
Over Scarn’s frantic efforts to direct Dig Dog into acquiring as many hex-gems as currently available consumed all her time. With its headquarters in the industrial capital of Saxar, Dig Dog had already bought up present stocks of talismanic goods from the manufacturers themselves. And with their ownership of New Arwar, the only city unmolested by the Goblin Wars, she had ample natural resources at her disposal for barter.
The only limiting factor was time. The destruction of the dominions proceeded too rapidly, with a frenzy that threatened to plunge Irth into utter anarchy within fifty days or less. She needed more time to stockpile hex-gems and to conclude negotiations for mining concessions from their desperate owners. Yet how did one retard the fury of goblins?
Dressed in a kirtle of flowing orange satin overlaid with networks of blue lace and fastened about her ample waist by beads of levity-pearls that lent buoyancy to her step, Overy Scarn paced before the gallery windows of her suite. Clouds massed above the manor's champaigne. Patterned to diamonds by mullioned panes, silver light poured before her yellow slippers and glared off polished blond parquet.
She stepped to the open wardrobe with its frosted glass panels and dark wood frame carved with dancing satyrs and fauns. She stood behind the spellbinder girdle that hung there. In the window light, its citr
ine starburst patterns of ecstasy-topazes and spiral trim of rapture-garnets glittered with aureate splendor. "You know what you must do, Scarn."
She stepped back from the sparkling girdle and addressed it as though the garment embodied her. "I will know if you tell me, Overy. Don't expect me to do all your thinking for you."
The levity-pearls about her waist allowed her to prance gracefully behind the girdle again. "You're acting coy, because you think you do all the work, Scarn. But were it not for me, we would have no useful information at all. I'm the one who must give so much to find out the truth of things. And soon now the knock will come and I must give again."
"I don't want to argue with you, Overy," she told herself, moving around to face the bejeweled girdle. "Yes, you have used yourself to our advantage. But remember, before we were wealthy enough to afford this spell-binder that gives you allure, I alone moved us from a charmwright's mail clerk to factory manager and then to an executive station at Dig Dog. That was all done by me, with my wits and my indefatigable industry, for who would find allure in the obese creature that we are?"
"That you are, Scarn. Not me," she replied, holding the girdle before her defensively. "So long as I wear this, I am Overy the lovely, Overy the irresistible. And as Overy have we not come to understand why New Arwar endures no blight from the goblins?"
She let go the girdle and paced thoughtfully. "Yes, Overy, we know from your intelligence won by lewd maneuverings that Poch and his shrew wife are goblin puppets. Yet, I have two objections to the hopes you place in this intelligence. First, how can we be sure that what you have learned no others will learn in turn? If the other dominions suspect that we harbor goblins, New Arwar will be smashed to rubble in a torrent of charmfire."
With the resplendent girdle lifted to her chin, she answered herself, “This girdle is a spellbinder, foolish Scarn. My source will not even inform himself, let alone others."
Octoberland (The Dominions of Irth Book 3) Page 21
