The Exiled Heir (Autumn's Fall Saga)

by Jonathan French

  Faabar’s breathing was shallow and labored. “Keep your temper, Master Loamtoes. You must make them hear you. Remember…they are your kin.”

  Deglan kept his mouth shut. The gnomes were his kin, the rest were squatters.

  “I wish…I… could go with you.”

  Deglan knelt and took one of the fomori’s large hands in his own. “I wish that, too.”

  Faabar looked to the sky. “Do you remember…little Colm? He used to ride on my shoulders. He would laugh…such a joyful sound. He…is buried here.”

  Deglan did remember. The boy had been born sickly and lame. Deglan’s best efforts had not seen him out of childhood. They had placed him in one of these barrows on a day much like this one. Four hundred years ago.

  Faabar spoke and Deglan held his hand, listening. “I am happy…to be here with him…and all the others. We…knew…them all. My sword, Deglan. Please…my sword.”

  Deglan looked around for it and was startled to find the Forge Born coming forward with the weapon in hand. It bent slowly and placed the hilt gently in Faabar’s hand, then rose and drew back. Faabar smiled and pulled the blade close to his quaking chest. His hand squeezed Deglan’s, strong to the end.

  “It has been…my…honor, to call you…friend. Continue to serve. It is…a worthy life…”

  Faabar inhaled sharply and shuddered to stillness.

  Deglan’s face tightened in grief, body rocking with sobs. He bowed his head and wept.

  “May the rain fall and wash you with Water. May the wind blow and take you to the Air. May the grass grow and embrace you to the Earth. May you know no more flames and be free of Fire.”

  It was a long time before he finally turned his head. The Forge Born still waited.

  “You did this,” Deglan accused, unwilling to release his friend’s hand and wipe the ugly sorrow that clung wetly under his nose. “You burned him with your damn hands.”

  “No worse than he already suffered,” the thing answered.

  It was true. And Deglan knew it. He turned back to Faabar and found his blurry gaze resting on the steel blade of the sword. His mind suddenly turned to the empty scabbard on the Forge Born’s back and rage flushed his face, boiling the already hot tears.

  “You cannot have it!” he screamed, not turning, placing both his small hands protectively over the great blade. “I’ll not let you take it from him!”

  There was a long silence. When at last the Forge Born replied it was standing in front of him, cradling a large rock in its metal fingers.

  “I have no use for swords,” it said and bent to lower the stone next to Faabar. It turned without further comment, retrieving another stone from the grass and placing it next to the first. Deglan watched with numb perplexity as the thing worked.

  “What are you?” he asked, knowing he sounded the fool.

  There was the slightest pause. “I am Coltrane.” And then it went back to building Faabar’s cairn. Deglan would have laughed if his heart was not encased in suffocating pain.

  “You did not know him,” he stated.

  “No.”

  “Then why?” Deglan growled. “Why bring him here? Why bury him?”

  The thing with a name stopped then and regarded Deglan with its horribly blank face. “Because it is all I can do.”

  Deglan rose, weary to the bone, but more weary of his own questions.

  “Well, you’ll not do it alone.”

  He looked about for a moment until he found a rock he could lift. He winced as he bent forward, swallowing the groan that tried to escape as he heaved the rock upward. Hobbling under its weight, he placed the stone neatly next to those the Forge Born had already placed. The pile grew steadily and soon Deglan’s back threatened to snap in protest as he set stone after stone. It would have been easier to let the tireless machine do all the work, but Deglan owed his friend so much. The least he could give was a few blisters.

  At last, the cairn was complete; the fomori’s body covered by a simple yet solid pile of stones stacked against the barrowside. Faabar would have approved. Deglan stared at the stones, not wanting to turn his back on them and begin the long journey that awaited him. He felt movement to his right and looked to see the Forge Born marching steadily away. Deglan scowled at its back, glad to be free of it, glad to be free of the temptation to ask it for help. Let it go! Let it fade into the distance until it was nothing more than the tall, moving shape he had first seen that miserable day while eating a turnip with Bulge-Eye. And then Deglan noticed its direction. South.

  “Damn it!” he yelled, running half a dozen paces after it. “You said you were not following the Red Caps!”

  The Forge Born continued on, heedless of his challenge. Deglan pursued, but his exhausted body could not sustain the chase. His legs gave out and he slumped forward in the tall grass, his breath coming in fierce, angry bursts.

  “What do you know of all this!?” he called at the quickly receding machine and then with desperation, “Coltrane!”

  The Forge Born did not stop.

  TWELVE

  Pocket was lost. Every street looked the same and his sense of north had become fuddled several wrong turns back. Maybe if he found the river again he would have some hope. But there were two rivers that ran through Black Pool. He had confused the two on his errand the previous day and did not have much hope he learned enough from that experience not to repeat the mistake. Sir Corc would be cross if he dallied. Only he was not dallying, not on purpose.

  He was lost.

  The city was vast and had filled him with a mix of reluctance and excitement when it first came into view from the deck of the ship. The southwest voyage across the choppy water from Albain had been Pocket’s first experience with the sea. At least the first he could remember. Certainly he had made the trip once before, as a babe when Sir Corc brought him from Airlann to live at the castle. He had not known what to expect upon seeing the land of his birth, hither fore only dreamed of while staring at his old map under the tower stairs. But the sight of the city with its cluttered harbor and sprawling buildings eclipsed his initial vision of the island. So far, Airlann was Black Pool; a chaotic hive of ancient buildings, countless smells and many, many winding streets.

  Pocket turned in place, looking all around the alley in which he found himself. He fought down a rising sense of panic as he realized he was no longer certain from which end he had entered. He looked to the sky for an answer, hoping he might spy the sun, but the tired structures around him leaned so alarmingly that their eaves almost touched, leaving only the smallest strip of open air between them. Pride gnawed at him more than fear. He had memorized every twist and cranny of the Roost, able to get from one point in the castle to any other blindfolded. He had been in Black Pool eleven days now and still he was having trouble finding his way.

  He was looking for the billier’s shop in a section of the city known as Cauldron Town. Sir Corc had made him memorize it; a small shop under the sign of a black axe across from the bell-founder’s. Cauldron Town, Pocket knew, was the metal working district of the city and could be found by following the smoke and clamor…or so the locals said. Pocket had been walking most of the morning, following these assured guidelines, but from what he could tell the entire city was filled with black air and loud noise.

  The alleyway ended in a steep, irregular stair which dumped into the riverwalk. Pocket took a moment to look at the waterway. It seemed to be smaller and slower moving, so he guessed it was the Poddle. The wider Hot Foot was filled with boats and bridges. The deep, brackish pond that formed where the two rivers met gave the city its name. No matter where you stood in the city, the Tower of Vellaunus could be seen standing vigilant over all. It rose from the center of the pool atop an island of cut stones, crooked and leaning from long centuries and the weight of the atrocities committed within its looming walls. It was said to have been erected in a single night by the foul crafts of the Goblin King Vellaunus the Cackler, for which the tower was named. Long aban
doned and reachable only by skiff, the Tower was avoided by the inhabitants of Black Pool as a cursed placed that tempted the mad, calling for them to jump from its uppermost chamber and break their bodies on the fortified island far below.

  Pocket had learned that and a great deal more about the city since their arrival. Some from Sir Corc and more from Old Lochlann, the bent-backed old man who served as steward to the house kept in the city by the Order. The wrinkled villein, like many of Black Pool’s human residents, was of Middangearder stock, descended from the original raiders that took over the harbor after the Rebellion left the city vulnerable. Before that, Black Pool was the seat of the Goblin Kings and had seen many dark periods of oppression, neglect, siege and civil war. At one point, the city was contested by two powerful human sorcerers both laying claim to the Goblin throne. Black Pool was divided not only by loyalty but by construction when the two contenders built a massive wall across the city, scheming on their respective sides against the other. King Sweyn the Third and his upstart rival Hogulent the First and Only spent years enacting bloody violence and murderous plots trying to unseat the other and were eventually both brought low by the woman known to history as the Goblin Queen. The wall no longer existed but the division remained, with half the city known as Sweynside and the other, poorer half dubbed simply Hogulent after its former despot.

  Cauldron Town was Sweynside and if the river in front of Pocket was indeed the Poddle, then at least he was on the right side of town…unless it was the Hot Foot, in which case he could be in Hogulent and therefore very off course. He shambled over to the water’s edge and considered plopping down on the wet cobblestones in defeat, but he was wearing his livery and did not want to return from his errand both unsuccessful and with the colors of the Order soiled. Before his first errand, Sir Corc had told him that if he found himself to be lost, the best course of action was to ask a passerby for directions, but unless Moragh was somehow miraculously living in Black Pool, Pocket did not know who to trust. Any aid, asked or unasked, was not something he was used to receiving and eleven days was not enough to kill those instincts.

  In truth, no one had cast so much as a sidelong glance at him since the day he got off the boat. Gurgs, it seemed, were not so queer a sight in Black Pool. Old Lochlann said there was an entire orphanage dedicated to them somewhere in Hogulent. The city stewed with all manner of folk, each more unique than the last. Within minutes of the boat reaching port, Pocket encountered stern faced dwarf merchants offloading steel from massive barges, and, just beyond, a large cage next to a slaver’s vessel housed a pair of trolls. The male raged against the bars, his long arms corded with muscle, his sloping forehead twisted in fury as he bellowed wordlessly against his captivity, heedless of the soothing sounds made by the diminutive female, who was as fair as her mate was brutish. Insular and elusive creatures, they were a rare sight even in the hoary wastes of Middangeard that was their home. Fascinating as they were, Pocket’s attention was again diverted mere steps from the cage.

  Tall, sinewy beings with pale blue skin and flowing hair the color of seaweed, moved gracefully through the crowds and Pocket had gawked when he saw them. They could be only undine, elementals trusted with the guardianship of Water as the gnomes were with Earth and the sylphs with Air. Before Pocket could marvel further, the bustling traffic of the harbor yielded more wondrous sights. Husk servants bore heavy loads upon straw-stuffed bodies, following closely behind their richly dressed masters who shuffled hurriedly past a rag-tag group of coburn leaning against the wall of a dockside tavern, their weapons near as filthy as their feathers.

  “Sell-swords,” Bantam Flyn said with distaste. Pocket pictured the Dread Cockerel feeling right at home amongst such a rabble.

  Even the humans seemed strange to Pocket who was used to the ruddy, thick-limbed clansmen of Albain. The men from Middangeard were fair of hair and black of countenance, their mail shirts and long axes well-used. The merchants and sea-captains from Kymbru were lean of body and cunning of eye, haggling in their strange lilting language. The Sasanan warriors all strode with arrogant confidence, their long hair and short beards a sandy brown.

  “Mortal men are varied as wildflowers,” Sir Corc had told him. “And their lives are as short. But do not mistake, they are neither fragile nor weak.” Pocket had never considered humans to be weak, but he said nothing and took in the sights as they made their way through the harbor and into the city proper.

  The streets lacked the colorful bustle of the docks, but were nonetheless filled with more comings and goings than the busiest feast days at the castle. Beggars and urchins haunted grimy doorways, staying out of the byways where oxcarts loaded with the harvest plodded forward, urged on by rustics with switches. Shops and stalls of all kinds faced the choked streets, their vendors hawking all manner of food and sundries with as much fierceness as they used to keep the gangs of thieving orphans at a safe distance. And everywhere were the goblins.

  Black Pool was home to the largest population of goblins in all of Airlann. Not even in Toad Holm, where many of them had returned to live in the more civilized culture of their gnomish cousins, could so many be found. Pocket had never laid eyes on one outside the embroidered hordes on the tapestries in the Great Hall, but that first day he saw hundreds of their grey-skinned, bulbous nosed faces. Some pushed carts loaded with tinker wares while others patrolled the streets in the uniform of the city guard. They drank in the taverns and poled skiffs in the rivers, as common a presence as the humans that made up the second largest community in the city.

  So it should not have been surprising that it was a goblin that broke him out of his morose reflection.

  “I wouldn’t.” The voice came from behind.

  Pocket jumped slightly and turned. This particular goblin was quite fat, a prodigious gut hanging over the front of his patchwork breeches from which a fish tail poked out of one pocket.

  A frightfully large cudgel rested on his shoulder, festooned with ribbons of many very faded colors.

  “Would not what?” Pocket managed.

  “Jump in,” the fat goblin replied. He faked a shiver, causing the gold ring in his ear to jiggle. “The Poddle is dreadful cold this time of year. And on this island it’s always this time of year.”

  “Then this is the Poddle.” Pocket was relieved.

  The goblin looked confused. “What is?”

  “The river.”

  “What about it?”

  “It’s the Poddle.”

  “Oh, I dunno.” The goblin gave an enormous shrug. “I never thought to ask it its name afore.”

  “But you just said…”

  “Don’t jump in. And I wouldn’t! Filthy blighter, the Poddle.”

  Pocket found his mouth hanging open.

  “Now if I was to kill meself I would go with…,” the goblin’s fingers dragged at an imaginary beard, “…drowning!”

  Pocket looked at the river and then back at the goblin. “But…”

  “Not by the river! By somewhat more exotic. Keg of ale, no…wine! Oh no wait, the blood of a thousand vanquished foes. No, too terrible. Fresh cream! Ooohhh!” Pocket watched as the goblin did a little jump and pointed at him in excitement. “Teats!”

  “Teats?”

  There was gold in his smile as well as in his ear. “Teats. Only way to drown, I say. In mounds of soft, warm, round, unblemished flesh.” There was an awkward moment where Pocket watched the goblin close his eyes and revel in a pantomime of his preferred demise. The hand gestures were very specific. At last the goblin stopped the charade, but kept his eyes closed and his face uplifted to the sky as if bathing in the warmth of the sun.

  “Sir?” Pocket asked after a moment.

  The goblin opened his eyes and looked at him. “Sire!”

  “Sire?”

  “Are you not a king?”

  “No.”

  “And I am no knight! No more sirs, sire.”

  Pocket was having trouble keeping up. “But I do not kno
w your name.”

  The goblin leaned down slightly. It was not a long trip, he was hardly taller than Pocket, but his bulk made it a bit alarming. “I will tell you it today, since we just met, but henceforth you must guess it.”

  “Alright,” Pocket agreed reluctantly. “What is it?”

  “You must guess.”

  “But you said you would tell me.”

  “Tell you what?”

  “Your name.”

  “What is my name?”

  “I don’t know!”

  “Well guessed! Clever lad, my name today is Muckle. How ever did you know? And what should I call you?”

  “Pocket.”

  “Oh this,” the goblin reached in his pants. “It’s just a fish.”

  “No.” Pocket could not help but laugh. “It’s my name.”

  The goblin straightened abruptly and wrinkled his considerable nose. “Your name is Fish?”

  “No. Pocket!”

  “Oh!” Muckle breathed a sigh of relief. “Thank Girth and Moan for that.”

  Pocket did not know what that meant but was afraid to ask any more questions.

  “That’s why I would not want to drown in the river,” Muckle told him. “You’d be ate by fish.” He regarded the dead one in his hand with intense scrutiny. “Fish are cheeky. They never blink. Nothing cheekier than a bloke who won’t stop staring.”

  Pocket could not help himself. “Why do keep one in your breeches?”

  “I like cheeky.” Muckle winked and tucked the fish away. “So, what do you reckon? A high fall? Poison? Tell a coburn it’s nothing but an overgrown chicken?”

  “What?”

  “For how you want to kill yourself.”

  Pocket shook his head. “I’m not doing that! I’m just lost.”

  “Well,” Muckle placed a broad, thick fingered hand on his shoulder and made a grand sweeping gesture with his big club. “This is the grand city of Black Pool. It rests on the northeastern shores of Airlann, also known as the Source Isle. Cold winds and chilly rains are typical here especially during the current Age. It all began some four thousand years ago when--”