by John Barnes
"Even the one you shot first is still twitching," he breathed.
Slitgizzard nodded, a gesture that Wassant felt more than saw, for he had let the muzzle flashes blind a bit of his peripheral vision rather than put the great burning spots in the center of his sight. "If I could think of a way it could be possible, I would say that the heads are eating the bodies."
Then the ring of hooded figures took another step, and then another, and another, now almost at the pace of a slow walk, always closing in.
"This will be the real business, then," Wassant said. "You might as well do what you can with these—here's the last of them reloaded."
The burst of six shots seemed to raise the dead, and the pismires tore out an arc of sixty degrees among the foe, so that there was a gap directly in front of them, but Sir John and the Duke had not run two steps toward that gap before it was closed up by reinforcements, and they were forced to step back to where they had been, back at the center of the circle. After a few more steps it was clear that the circle was herding them, and at first each thought that perhaps they would be forced to wherever they were to be taken prisoner, but then it became clear that for some reason they were being separated from the carriage, so that the circle around them could be truly perfectly formed.
"How can they care? They will have us anyway," the Duke muttered.
"Perhaps they are just so stupid that having been told to capture us in this way, they must do it in exactly this way," Sir John suggested. The two of them were back to back now, and the Duke had repeatedly sounded the Prince's silver whistle, but they knew no one from the castle guard or the city watch would dare to enter this part of town after dark, and so it gave them no sense of hope, only one of completion—they had truly tried everything.
The figures closed more tightly around them, and now they should have been able to see something in the dark hoods, but they could not. What they could see was that the hoods were not shaped like the heads of men.
Another two steps brought the hooded crowd shoulder to shoulder, at just the distance at which tips of escrees might touch if both opponents were fully extended. The two men could feel each other's breathing through their backs. There was no sound.
Very slowly, little hairy snouts began to poke into the light from the darkness thrown by the hoods; hairy snouts with yellow incisors. The heads themselves seemed to be collapsing and folding under the hoods.
"What—" the Duke muttered, and then he saw the red, tiny eyes flash, and the gray bodies leapt at them.
"Rats!" they shouted, to each other, and their escrees flashed through the foul night air, streaks of silver in the dimming moon, cleaving tiny bodies in the air.
Each of them knocked down half a dozen rats, cut into various sized pieces, in that first stroke, and many of the ones that landed did not land anywhere they could cling, so that they fell to the pavement and died under the stamping boots of the men. A few managed to get a grip and a bite before being flung off into the darkness, hurled against walls or over the rooftops to die far from the fight and plug the gutters or perhaps drop down an empty chimney.
They were not too many by themselves, but in fending them off, the men had gotten bitten, with all the threats of poison and sickness that that promised, and they had gotten pulled apart and thus did not guard each other quite so well when what had been under the cloaks rushed them, escrees pointing inward.
They were goblins, by their distortion and their mad eyes, but not as Sir John remembered them, for they were focused and disciplined, they sought to kill rather than to eat, and most of all, they plainly supported each other . . . when one was wounded, the others bore him out to safety and stepped into the breach, whereas in the old days a wounded goblin, like a wounded shark, was swiftly eaten by its fellows.
All of these thoughts crossed Sir John's mind in the little space he still had left in which to think in words. His left arm, roughly, was at Duke Wassant's left, so that they did not perfectly guard each other's backs, and they were so hard-pressed that they could not close up the difference.
The Duke fought just as desperately, and the odds were just as wretched, but his keen mind could not quite turn off. He noted that one slightly taller goblin seemed to move around the edge of the fray without ever quite closing into it, and seemed to carry his escree more as a precaution than with any sense of threat. Moreover, the escrees were not half-eaten by rust, as he would expect of anything that came out of a goblin trove, but rather were bright and seemed newly, if cheaply, forged. The goblins themselves were curiously well-dressed, and it was more odd that they were well-trained.
The only thing saving Slitgizzard and Wassant, the Duke thought grimly, was that whoever had trained the goblins had taught them only to obey orders, not to fight well. Indeed they often got in each other's way. When they did so sufficiently, Wassant or Sir John could lunge forward to pierce an eye or a throat, and even then the goblins pressing inward did not relent, so that their dead comrade would remain upright for some time because there was nowhere for him to fall.
Yet if they fought no better, only as if well controlled—Duke Wassant almost had a thought about that, but it was gone in the instant that moonlight glinted off a low-thrusting escree, which the Duke slipped to the outside before striking its holder dead with a blow direct to the heart.
It was at about the moment he received his third small wound—apart from the rat bites—that made Sir John realize that they might well not win. He'd never had a thought like that before.
The thought did not slow his arm—there was little in the world that could do that—but he found himself striking more fiercely and his heart sinking further at the same time, for he was the sort who would die well by instinct.
The Duke, who was the sort who would die well on principle, had reached the same conclusion some time before, and thus he struck and slashed with abandon as well; all around them the goblins were gathered in ranks six and ten deep, far too many of them to dream of bursting through. As the more subtle of the two, he knew how desperately important it was for Cedric to know what had become of them, and to know that goblins were involved and more capable than ever before, and so he fought just a bit harder, because he needed that split second he might gain in which he might—if he but had an idea—leave evidence behind.
Four long clouds, black as coal underneath and silvered with moonlight on top, like long low ships on some other errand, were headed for the moon. The two men and dozens of goblins locked in battle in the forgotten part of Wend Street were far too busy to look up.
But if the goblin leader saw it his heart must have been rejoicing, for goblin eyes are keen in the dark, and goblins are used to it and fight more fiercely when they have its cover. It must have seemed to him—and would have to anyone else who watched—that when the first dark cloud sailed across the moon, the end would come in a flurry of clashing steel (which would sound much like pots and pans being thrown down the stairs), the thuds of bodies on pavement (which would sound like bags of corn being dropped), the oozing of blood (which would make no sound), and the high mad cacophonous uproar of goblins cheering with their mouths full (which would sound like something best left unimagined). So as the rooftops that had glowed silver under the moon began to wink out, the cloud-shadows crawling toward them in a long single file, perhaps the goblin leader allowed his heart to surge upward, and even to imagine those sounds already in his ears.
He surely never heard the Twisted Man's omnibus, which tore off the goblin leader's head, sending him down to the gunge-wet cobbles, stone dead before he landed.
As the first foul finger of the black cloud stroked the clean white face of the moon, the Twisted Man fell upon the goblins from the rear with his great double-bladed ax, and laid into the press of goblins as if he were clearing weeds. Gallons of goblin blood, black in the blue moonlight, spurted from stumps of necks and limbs, welled in greasy pools onto the pavement, or spattered through the air in droplets blacker than coal. There w
ere screams, but they were almost drowned out by the heavy thudding whacks of the Captain of the Guard's ax.
At first they stood to fight, almost as if they were men, but the death of their leader; or the sheer ferocity of the assault; or even the thought that was passing through Wassant and Slit-gizzard's heads at that moment, that whatever or whoever the Twisted Man might have been he was not human now; or all of these and things that only goblins know besides, drained their courage from them even faster than the blood drained from their dying fellows, so that they turned to run, slaying their fellows in their path.
And since the Twisted Man had begun to slash his way in a great arc around the two besieged men, this meant that the wave of panic ran in a spiral around the two men as well, the goblins in the innermost ring racing in a circle and slashing into the backs of the goblins in front of them, so that more goblins died by goblin hands than any other way, and the few survivors fled madly as a wooden horse thrown from an out-of-control merry-go-round.
Their repulsively reptilian bodies lay in heaps and piles, and the air was thick and sickly as a summer sickroom with the sulfur smell of their black blood. The two friends, hardly daring to believe their good fortune, wiped and sheathed their escrees and extended their arms in a courtly bow to the Twisted Man.
He returned their bow, and lifted their hands.
"How splendid of you," the Duke said at last, when he was feeling less overcome by his feelings. As he said it, the black mist pulled back from the moon, and the gunge on the slippery stones shone again, only slightly more appealing than the black voids the goblin blood made in the street.
"We owe you everything," Sir John Slitgizzard added.
The Twisted Man nodded. Perhaps he was not human enough to say that it was nothing, or perhaps he was too human. So he spoke only of business. "We must convey word of this to Cedric, King Boniface, and Prince Amatus. Goblins, well organized and armed—and out of their dark holes at all—this speaks of intervention, and not by any power we find friendly, nor necessarily by any that I know aught of. But first we must tend to your wounds—things this foul often fight with tainted weapons. You are both of such immense value to the Prince that I cannot allow you to become ill through anyone's negligence, least of all your own."
The three walked together, then, through that dark and abandoned part of the city and said little or nothing, but the two nobles felt as safe in the Twisted Man's company as they might have in the castle itself. After a long while Wend became a street that was merely dangerous, and they walked more easily; then one that was shady and slovenly, and their concerns lightened still further; and at last it was again the old familiar major thoroughfare, still crowded with people even at this hour because it was a fine spring night with a beautiful moon. It was as if they were only going down to the Gray Weasel.
The noise of the crowds on Wend had swelled enough to permit free conversation with little danger of being overheard, and so Sir John chose to ask, "Do you like us, Captain?"
The Twisted Man's hand went under his cloak, to a point just below his grayed and rusty mask which must have been his chin, and after stroking there for a moment, he said, "I remember 'liking' from long ago, and I suppose that I could safely say that I like you as much as I like anyone. I do not like to lie, I know, and I am comfortable in saying that much."
Duke Wassant, clever man that he was, saw some of what Sir John was getting at, and attempted to extend the question, "Could you say, then, that we matter to you?"
Was the Twisted Man's voice grim or bitter? Neither man ever recorded that crucial bit of evidence, but both wrote down his words in letters to friends: "All men matter to me. Too much. Far too much. This is part of what it is to have a curse."
The Duke nodded, though, not being cursed, he did not understand. "You feel all our suffering?"
"Feel it, feel how each of you feels his pain more than his fellow's, feel how all of you want someone to touch you compassionately and how none of you ever find that someone, feel the pain that all this causes . . . and . . . and . . ." Here the Twisted Man's voice fell to a dark whisper, like a soft breeze that was just enough to make corpses sway on a gibbet. "Feel the pain in you all, and enjoy it. And feel what it is that I am that I enjoy it."
There was a long silence, and then, so shyly and cautiously that afterwards both men wrote that their memories might have been altered by a dream, the Twisted Man said, "Still, I was not glad that you were in danger, and I was glad that it was to you that I could be of service. That is all I know of friendship nowadays. I hope it may meet your approval."
"It does," they said, quietly, together, and the three walked close to each other for a long walk more, but what errands they ran on, though dark and bloody and in the service of Amatus, were much of a piece with what has gone before. By dawn the city, if there had been some carrion bird that could smell the difference, stank of spies' blood and goblins' guts. And Duke Wassant and Sir John slept late the next day, for Cedric ordered that they not be disturbed.
It might be thought odd that they slept without dreams, or woke smiling to the bright afternoon sunlight, but the ways of the human heart are peculiar.
3
A Lengthy Interruption in a Council of War
It was some weeks later, and word was down from the mountains that the snow had begun to melt in the Isought Gap. In that time the spy hunts had been fierce, and Waldo's agents had been killed or captured in great numbers, so that the city was already a battleground of sorts. Moreover, there had been two goblin uprisings, both serious, and Amatus himself had finally taken a punitive raid down into their tunnels to slaughter goblins, destroy their dwellings, and scatter white magics about.
There were more of them and they were better organized than ever before, but they fought less well and died more easily. When captured and tortured, all they would reveal now was that there was a new goblin king, and he was different.
"He must be, to keep them obedient so far away from himself," the King said grimly to Cedric, as the two of them climbed the winding back stairs to the Throne Room. "They have never before been able to follow orders once separated from their army—indeed they've barely had enough concentration to obey while they were still in their ranks. This is bad news, indeed, and would be even if Waldo were not on the move, or not in league with them—and I'm sure that he is both."
They swept by a long, graceful tapestry, woven by Psyche, depicting the history of the Kingdom since Boniface had assumed the throne. She filled in a new section every year, showing some event of the year, almost always including Boniface, so that as Boniface walked by the tapestry, Cedric noticed that his face became more and more like the one on the tapestry, until finally the resemblance was perfect.
"I have always found it odd that this castle is so snug and warm," Cedric said, the thought springing from who knew whence. "It seems untypical and not at all like a story."
"I am glad you did not say that it wasn't real," the King said, "for the whole power and strength of the Kingdom rests in its questionable reality. But there is wisdom in your question. Now, in most stories, there is a wicked usurper, which is why the castle is cold and drafty—for atmosphere, as it were. After he is overthrown—"
"Yes, I see," the Prime Minister said, "it is always said then that the castle rings with joy and warmth and love, and that they live happily ever after. But that is not this castle either—great sorrow has been known here."
"But never great sorrow without a point," the King said, "for if that were ever to be, the Kingdom would be merely real, and vanish to where your lap goes when you stand up."
There was now but one flight of stairs remaining for Cedric to ascend with his King, and he knew that he was being given hints of secrets that normally were only known to the Royal family, so with his mind on his diary for that night, he asked, "And how do kings come by this knowledge?"
"We read," Boniface said, and they were at the door of the Throne Room.
Most of
the Council of War was already there waiting for them, milling around and chatting nervously under the War Flag, the giant Hand and Book that hung in the Throne Room in time of national danger. Boniface elected to get a glass of wine and a little cheese, and to greet some nobles from outlying areas, before plunging into business, so after the burst of chatter when the King, Prime Minister, and General of All the Armies (counting Cedric in both roles) had entered, no one settled into seats.
Many of the nobility were there, especially those of the country south of Iron Lake, where the invasion would first thrust if it carried through the Isought Gap, but from all over the Kingdom as well. The old Count who had pretended for so many years to be Calliope's father was there as well, a brooding sadness about him which made Cedric wonder if he would carry out his part. Others wandered about, some trying to be effete and decadent and talk only of art and gardens, some trying to be bluff and hale and talk only of the hunt and the theatre, and a few quiet sad ones watching it all, thinking mainly of lives to be lost and lands burned, and wishing only to be themselves.
Duke Wassant and Sir John Slitgizzard were there, naturally, for they were widely known to be the Prince's men, and it was expected that whenever Amatus became King they would hold high offices, do his bidding, and help to keep his throne steady. They were so well suited to the job that there was little envy extended toward them, and much relief that the wild comrades of the Prince's younger days were now the steel-true friends of his maturity. They sat next to each other, the Duke polishing off a fine pastry he had been unable to resist, and Sir John sipping a strong brown tea of a kind that had only recently come in across the Great Desert to the east.
"I wonder whence this comes into our story," Sir John said, "for it seems to me such stories must be older than tea."
" 'Anything really old—not just in years—can have any number of times within it,' " the Duke quoted, licking the cream from his fingers surreptitiously, and wishing he did not desperately crave another pastry. "Golias always used to say that. I've no idea what it meant, but it seems to answer your question."
