One for the Morning Glory

by John Barnes

  "Yes."

  "And will there be seven coming out?"

  At first he was going to answer "Yes," then "No, eight," then he realized, and said, "I have no way of knowing."

  The goblin's eyes glinted with disappointment. "Very well, then. You might say you've passed a preliminary test. All right, advance through the gate, and then go across the bridge where the Riddling Beast will ask you your riddle."

  The bridge swayed alarmingly and pieces occasionally broke off and tumbled far, far down into the black depths of the crevice. "This is the sort of bridge that someone might have to hold in a story," Amatus muttered to Golias.

  "It is—whoops!" The bridge jumped sideways for a moment. "It is indeed. I rather assume it has been before and will be again. But not every prop is used in every story . . . surely you know that rule of magic as well. It may be here purely for atmosphere."

  A bit of railing fell from under Calliope's hand and spiraled slowly downward until it was completely out of sight; two long breaths later, the sound of it whacking against stone reached their ears, and then a series of bangs and thuds as it made its way down into the depths.

  "Enough!" Mortis shouted. They all jumped at the sound, and if the bridge had continued to sway it might have thrown one of them off, but abruptly it had become steady as stone and broad as the King's own highway. Moreover, the murk seemed to dispel, and they could see down into the depths far enough to perceive that the chasm was unpleasantly far to fall but by no means bottomless.

  Mortis permitted herself a cold smile. "Golias provided the clue. This bridge was either important to the story or it was atmosphere. If the latter, it would be dispensed with as soon as there was enough of it. The word of power is the one that finishes a thing that wants to be true. I thought 'Enough' might be such a word of power in this case. One can count on nothing in this place, but some things that do not matter are easily dispelled."

  They advanced across the wide, safe bridge and waited for the Riddling Beast. After a moment, there was a great rumble in the echoing cavern, and a furry head halfway in appearance between a bear's and a snake's, with jaws big enough to crush six men whole, poked around the rock on a long, dark-furred neck. On both sides of the huge rock, the leathery batwings could be seen spreading out. "What is it that goes on four legs in the morning, shaves the barber at noon, and crosses the road at evening, and what does it have in its pockets?"

  "Myself and my own things," Amatus said at once.

  "Your party may pass. Good job, by the way, most people need all three guesses. Best of luck up ahead."

  "Do you suppose he'd have been so pleasant while eating us?" Calliope whispered to Amatus.

  "Not at all," the Beast whispered, grinning. "Human tastes perfectly horrible. I have to force it down and it puts me out of sorts for weeks."

  They proceeded up the road into Goblin Country. Now the corpseworms above and around them gave off a pale green light, and they were able to see more than enough. Goblin lords on litters raced by them, goblin merchants rode by with baskets full of goods, and in general there seemed to be goblins everywhere, though none took any notice of them.

  After a long time, Calliope asked, "How did you know the answer to that riddle?"

  "Practice and training," Amatus said. "Golias told me that whenever you are asked such a question, the answer is always yourself. The question about the pockets was the one that made me edgy."

  "It was well answered in any case," John Slitgizzard said. "And it begins to give me hope that it went so well; plainly this is not the sort of quest I had feared it was, where loyal henchmen perish at every peril."

  Amatus shuddered, for he knew there were such quests, and only then did he realize that this could have turned out to be one of them, and that Calliope and Slitgizzard had come along anyway. Even more than before he felt himself to be the coward of the party.

  They had just begun to wonder if there was a turnoff they should have taken when they came to a sign: "To the Goblin Court."

  "Odd that they use our language," Calliope said.

  "It is the kind of creatures they are," Golias explained. "They make nothing. They only use that which others make."

  The road to the Goblin Court was more trail than road, for it was little used. The goblins relished civil disorder too much to pay taxes to suppress it, and therefore the Goblin Court was less a seat of government than an expensive playpen where prominent goblins sent their less capable offspring in hopes of accruing some political advantage. It was thus the home of every wastrel, ne'er-do-well, amiable idiot, effete malignant prankster, petty untalented sadist, dimwitted flirt, small-minded gossip, amoral boonmonger, and vicious sexual conquistador or conquistadora in Goblin Country, and wiser goblins stayed away from it as if it had been an asylum for the malodorous, which in a sense it was. Had the Terracottas, the royal line in the goblins, not been so erotically insatiable as to litter the goblin population with illegitimate children, they might well have died out long ago, for to be sane enough to rule they had to be capable of feeling what dreadful company they were forced to keep.

  All of this Golias explained in a hasty whisper to Amatus, as they passed through the long row of gibbets from which hung the thoroughly gnawed skeletons—or scraps of skeletons—of men, goblins, and things that might never have been alive at all. The trail stank of charnel. Parts of corpses lay on the trail and they were forced to pick their way among them.

  When Calliope accidentally touched a dead hand with the tip of her boot, it grabbed her toe and had to be kicked off into the mess at the roadside, and when Sir John slipped on a slimy patch and caught himself by stepping on a skeletal forearm, it turned and grasped at him with its few remaining phalanges as if he had stepped on a viper in the forest.

  "Ha," Golias said at that. "I see the game now." From his cloak he drew a short stick of wood with a bit of cloth tied to the end, and a tiny vial which he poured over the end of the little stick. Instantly the stick and its bit of cloth grew into a broom, which stood upright in front of them for one moment, then began to advance up the trail, sweeping fiercely, clearing the path of the corpse pieces.

  "One must be careful how one walks in Goblin Country," Golias explained. "Not so much to walk in any particular way as to avoid walking in a particular way; there's a pattern that sets it all off. In this case some sort of spell laid out in the bare spaces between the disgusting objects."

  The broom, having cleared the trail for some distance in front of them, turned around and bumped up and down impatiently.

  With a guilty laugh, Golias followed it. Amatus chuckled himself, knowing full well that the alchemist might have spent hours discoursing on the nature of pathways of malice and how they were laid out, and of the making and use of magic brooms.

  In a short time, they rounded a bend to find themselves in a great, vaulted chamber, obviously copied inexpertly from some building in the world up above. Their entrance caused a great hubbub, with goblin courtiers and ladies rushing everywhere to be seen to be in the right places.

  The walk up the aisle was worse by far than the trail among the gibbets had been. The goblins at Court were for the most part mad, and entirely vicious, and being goblins they were an affront even to their own eyesight. Moreover the goblins at Court dressed in copies of the finery of the world above, cut and recut to reveal and emphasize whatever this particular goblin's distortion was. Here a cluster of vestigal arms in the middle of the chest had been set off with a decolletage as if the goblin lady were a human woman with a fine bosom; there a ruff graced the top of a hump on a courtier; everywhere, there were ever-flowing sores, the clothing cut away around them and sometimes sewn into the living flesh so that an open spot of raw flesh seemed to stick directly out of a rent.

  Sir John swore softly under his breath, looked straight ahead as much as he could, and kept his left hand under his coat, near the swash that held three pismires and his pongee, and his right hand conspicuously upon the hilt of his es
cree. Psyche knelt a moment to adjust her boot, and steel glinted where she made sure the concealed throwing knives could be drawn in an instant. Amatus himself let his hand fall to the hilt of his own escree, and from the many motions he saw under the Twisted Man's cloak he suspected there was a census of armaments being taken.

  The king and Queen—she was the real Terracotta, he a bastard upstart who had married her because she was his half sister—were not so deliberately or cruelly disgusting to look at, but the horrible mad stare of the Queen, with its mixture of will to hurt and stupid coquettishness, was bad enough.

  "Why do you intrude upon our Court?" the King growled sternly at Golias.

  "My master will speak of that," Golias said, "and you will listen, and then we will have what we seek."

  The words sounded formal, and Amatus wished he had read more about diplomatic protocol, for they sounded more like the sort of thing one had to say in the Goblin Court than like a formal courtesy. But after all, to go anywhere with Golias was to wish one had read more, so Amatus plunged directly into the subject. "You hold among you a human maiden, a subject of the Kingdom, and her family having failed in her rescue, we seek her now."

  "She is no maiden now, for we have raped her until she ceased to fight, then until she ceased to care, and finally till she lies and grunts for more of it like a sow," the Queen said.

  "That is a singularly clumsy lie," Golias replied. "Being what you are, you obey laws more stringent than humans do, and you are not capable of so defiling her, however you may have heaped her with filth and forced her to live in foul confinement. Had your goblins attempted her rape, they would have died in the attempt, for a mockery of real flesh such as yourselves may not touch the real thing of power that is a maiden. This is written down in many books, some of them by me."

  There was a long pause, and a great rumbling as the Queen clenched her shaking fists in fury and the ceiling began to tremble. Stone plunged in among the courtiers and ladies, and with a soft, squashy crunch, one goblin lady was knocked to the ground, her legs and lower back shattered by a boulder. She shrieked, then began to sob in agony; those around her began to point and laugh, except for a few who sat down next to her and wept, having a wonderful time with their sympathy, and a thin one who began to eat her hand. No one made the slightest move to help, until, with a grunt of disgust, Sir John Slitgizzard drew his pismire, cocked the chutney, set the lovelock, pointed it, and squeezed the trigger.

  The pismire made a solid boom, and its heavy ball killed the goblin lady instantly. Amatus felt like coughing from the sulphurous smoke, but dignity forced him to draw breath slowly and carefully.

  "It was bad enough she was suffering," said the Queen, "but now you have slain her." A greasy tear trickled down the Queen's cheek, matting the patches of hair. "I feel this strongly. We could almost be said to have suffered together, she and I, for I am a very tenderhearted queen and I do not like to see such hurts done."

  The king sat up straight and thundered, "Who are you that you dare to slay the ladies of my Court before my eyes?"

  Amatus noted that the ceiling failed to move for the King's wrath. If he had not known already, he would have been quite sure by now where real power rested.

  "The stones fell from the Queen's anger," Golias said.

  Now the Goblin Queen turned entirely white between the clumps of hair on her face, and her hands pounded the arms of her throne, and she shrieked, "I am not an angry person." Rock and plaster fell like lightning into the crowd, but none fell among Amatus's friends or Companions, for they stood near the throne, and none fell upon the King or Queen. Everywhere ladies and courtiers scuttled for cover.

  "You are upsetting the Queen!" the King declaimed.

  "Give us the maiden and we will be gone," Amatus said.

  The Queen's eyes narrowed. "You will obey all the conditions."

  Golias's voice never rose in pitch or volume, but it was steady and sure. "We will never look behind us, never speak, never hold back or cringe, and never draw weapons unless and until one of our number is struck. We accept those conditions and choose to obey them voluntarily, knowing that you are a liar, knowing that you will cheat, because the life of the Prince's subject—aboveground and free—is more to him than the risk of your foul treachery. You but delay the inevitable. Give us the maiden."

  "Turn your backs and she will follow."

  "Show her to us, show her free to follow us, and then we will turn our backs."

  The Queen curled upon her throne and wept that she did not know why she was not trusted, it was not fair, no one understood how hard it was to be Queen, and the King ineffectually patted her shoulders and shouted at them to leave her alone.

  The Queen, sniffling, murmured that if they would all kiss her and say they were sorry, she would be willing to forgive them and to give them the maiden without conditions of any kind, but Golias pointed out that it was not in her power to release them from the conditions.

  Finally, the Queen sat and sullenly stared at the floor, and the king commanded that the maiden be brought forth, but since all the courtiers and ladies had fled, and none was willing to venture back into the Court until they were sure the Queen would have no more outbursts (they could all be heard just outside the doors, hanging on to each other, weeping with fear, and assuring each other that nothing would happen), the king had to go and get her himself.

  While he did, the Queen brightened up a great deal. "We so seldom get visitors here, and it's a shame because we're really nice people when you get to know us. Would you care for anything to eat or drink?"

  "No," Amatus said, firmly. He was hungry and thirsty, but not for goblin food.

  "We have galleries and galleries of paintings, and since we are so long-lived—that lady of my Court you murdered, poor thing, I can still see the look of pain on her face, but never mind that, we won't talk of what's unpleasant—since we are so long-lived, as I said, such a pity she died so young, centuries only, a child really, but we won't talk of that or of the sort of people you bring with you—since we are so long-lived, in those galleries there are no doubt pictures of your ancestors and your origins, really very interesting . . ."

  "I am interested in looking at such things, but only on my own terms, and when it comes time I will come and take them and arrange them as I wish, burning the ones that never happened," Amatus said. He was beginning to itch, and he felt as if tiny apes were crawling over his body, smacking their microscopic lips at the drops of his cold sweat, trailing their miniscule dirty feet upon his skin, probing with little unclean teeth at his soft and vulnerable places as if waiting to bite down.

  "As you wish. You always get what you want, I see. You make me very proud to have known you." She writhed around on the throne, brushing the fur of her face and straightening her gown, for all the world as if she were primping. "I don't see why you have to be so unpleasant when you're succeeding in everything you try."

  The king returned with the maiden. She looked as if she had only been down there a day or so, and since time passes strangely in Goblin Country, that was probably all the time that had passed for her; it must have seemed a scant hour or so since her lover had come to rescue her and found himself wanting. She had probably not even slept since her kidnapping.

  "Hello," she said, with a certain dignity. "You must be my rescuers."

  Amatus moved forward to her, and there on the filthy floor of the Goblin Court, he threw back his cloak, revealing his half body, and knelt in the gunge, letting it stain his knee, knowing the gunge would wash off but the honor would not. He took her grime-spattered hand and kissed it, as if she were a grand lady of his own Court, and not at all as if she were what she was—a plump commoner girl, her face plain, teeth crooked, and nose splayed across her face. "Maiden," he said, "I honor you for what you have borne."

  She blushed a deep red and said, "You can't go calling me 'maiden' all the way. My name is Sylvia."

  "Isn't it remarkable what he's accomplished d
espite not having any left side?" the Queen commented. "And all for a fat girl of—well, let's just say her family is no doubt a challenge she overcame to get to where she is today. I do hope he won't do anything to dishonor her afterwards, though one could hardly blame him if he did, commoner girls really are practically pigs and they do whelp so easily, I'm sure I shouldn't have said that, you'll have to pardon me since I don't really know what I am saying half the time—"

  "Shut up," Calliope said. When Psyche and Amatus turned to look at her, their eyes met across Calliope, and Amatus saw that Psyche, too, had been listening to the Goblin Queen more than she should. It was terribly difficult not to.

  As if Calliope had broken some spell, Golias spoke up. "Sylvia, we honor your endurance, but there are conditions you must endure more. You must follow us, and we cannot look back at you. We cannot speak, even if you cry out for help, and the goblins will doubtless imitate your voice and cry out, even if you do not; you may dispute with them, but we will not be able to tell on which side your real voice comes. We must not cringe or hold back in our motion, so you must keep up with us, and it would be well if you did not cry out when you are frightened, lest one of us cringe because of it. Finally, we may not draw weapons until one of us is struck, so even should you see treachery, do not shout to warn us of it, for we might not be able to resist the temptation to draw rather than wait for the first blow to fall. Should they betray us, their first stroke or shot releases all conditions, and then you must run forward to join our group as quickly as possible."

  "I understand," she said.

  "The conditions are awfully hard," the Queen added, "and I don't think you should even try until the rules are changed. I'm sure you can do it if you feel hope enough in your heart, but the conditions are so unfair that really—"

  "Shut up," Amatus was able to say.

  On the way out, the goblin king walked next to Amatus for a while, urging him to come back and patch matters up with the Queen, for surely they would be safer if they parted on good terms. The king himself was honorable, no question, and the Queen was too, once you got to know her you realized she didn't really lie at all, just told the truth her own way, but some of her courtiers might well misinterpret some remark of hers as a suggestion for something dishonorable, and if they did you would have to expect that they might do something . . .