When sprites are concerned, their hearts glow green, and they give off a sulfurous smell to warn the other sprites not to go farther, and all around, those sprites were burning a hot chartreuse, green as emerald, smoky with fear, queasily circling and buzzing and hissing out protection spells with so many consonants in them that the words whistled and spat like hot fat in a pan. “Bklftttllkprt! Kkllfrkkkfllff! Rkrbptt!!”
For the dead castle seemed to be coming alive again as they entered it and the ears of the sprites could hear the music it was singing and it was a terrible song indeed. “A song without music, a sword in the senses, a storm in the heart, and a fire in the brain…”
The pointed ears of Ariel swiveled to catch the sound. He opened his little forked-teeth mouth and cautiously drank a bit of the air, and his face crinkled in disgust and alarm at the searingly bitter taste of it.
“Lissten…” whispered Ariel. “Taste…”
“I can’t hear anything,” said Bodkin, swallowing hard and holding very tight to his sword.
“Ssstupid humansss…” hissed Tiffinstorm in exasperation, holding equally firmly to her wand, sharp as any thorn. “Your dull earsss can never catch the important sstuff… I don’t know how you have ever sssurvived…”
“Let’s leave now, Xar!” said Ariel. “We must go no farther! Trusst us, trust us, trussst us!”
“This castle wants revenge,” explained Tiffinstorm softly, blinking into visibility beside them. “Every stone is singing of it… every creeper… every broken glass… The hum of revenge is all around us. Can you not taste the bitterness of it? Can you not hear the anger of it?”
Wish peered around. She could hear nothing, but even her dull human senses could feel the savage melancholy of the atmosphere. And then, was it her imagination, or were the creepers, the ivy, the bracken that had with infinite and minute slowness pushed their green vegetative tentacles up through the broken flagstones, were they now… moving? At a rate that was visible to the human eye? Yes… there it was, the ivy was moving like snakes, rustling like serpents, reaching out either pleadingly or menacingly toward them…
“Are any of US doing that?” cried Wish in alarm, already knowing the answer, but the werewolf and Xar and all of the sprites had gotten out their staffs and were performing encircling spells of protection to stop the encroaching plants reaching out toward them.
“Somebody knows we’re here!” whispered Wish.
“We should go back!” cried Bodkin.
And even as he said the words the great broken door slammed behind them, and the vegetation choked up behind, closing the way, great roots and thorns spearing upward like crossing swords.
Xar swallowed hard. “Of course it’s going to be frightening,” said Xar stoutly. “We’re looking for the ingredients of a spell to get rid of Witches, and Witches are not going to be vanquished by a smell of roses. Revenge is going to be a wonderful ingredient for our spell.”
“But we don’t know who the castle wants revenge on,” Caliburn pointed out nervously.
He had a horrible, horrible feeling that he was returning to a forgotten past. It’s a dreadful problem for a raven who has lived many lifetimes. He had some dim memory of the familiarity of the place, but he couldn’t for the life of him recall any of the important details.
“Well, it stands to reason that this castle will want revenge on the WITCHES, won’t it?” said Xar. “The Witches took this territory from the giants, so of course the giants’ castle is going to be angry with the Witches…”
“But Xar, you don’t know that…” groaned Caliburn. “Stories and histories are often more complicated than they look.”
And then they came across the shoe.
It was lying in front of them, on the steps, on one side, as if someone had been in a hurry and lost it. At first they thought it must be some sort of leather tent or house, before they realized it was in fact a gigantic BOOT, a shoe so large it dwarfed even Crusher, the top of the rim of it coming up to the Longstepper High-Walker’s waist. Crusher peered over into the cavelike depths, an expression of mild worry on his face, which was a cause for concern in itself because Crusher did not normally worry about much.
“Impossible,” marveled Xar. “This can’t be true! Giants don’t grow that big… Something that huge just could not exist!”
“The ancient giants were supposed to be much larger than our present giants and ogres,” said Caliburn. “Gog and Magog and their descendants… We are trespassing in lands we do not understand… with mysteries and forces much bigger than we know…”
But Xar was now thoroughly overexcited. “There IS a giant in this castle after all!” he said, drawing both his father’s staff and his sword at once. “So that means we can get the Giant’s Last Breath! And that breath will be the breath of REVENGE!”
“But the giant is HUMONGOUS!” exclaimed Bodkin. “If he’s alive, we’d have to kill him if we want his last breath, and we couldn’t possibly do that because I like giants and so does Wish and so do you! And if he’s dead we can’t get his last breath anyway!”
Xar wasn’t listening.
“We’ll just sneak up on him and check the whole situation out,” said Xar.
“But whatever-he-is already knows we’re here!” wailed Bodkin.
Now Wish knew what it must feel like to be the size of a sprite, for that is how small they were in comparison with this boot.
With shaking steps they inched forward, and the Enchanted Pins, Key, and Fork led them to an enormous door, hidden in cobwebs and darkness. Behind the door was a staircase that led down, down, down underground. Crusher had to lift them all down the steps, and when they got to the bottom of this staircase they came to a hall that was way, way bigger than the last. It was impossible that a room could be that huge. A table so high that each one of its legs was as tall as one of those tree trunks from the High Forests outside. A chair so enormous its existence was beyond imagining. And underneath the table was a boot to match the boot outside, and a gigantic foot, with huge toes that were turning a rather unnatural green color. And above the foot, way, way above, stretched the leg, and out of their sight, must be the body of the giant.
A giant larger than anyone had ever seen before, or dreamed of.
10. The Giant’s Last Breath
It took every single ounce of nerve in their bodies to make them move forward. Bodkin could feel his heart beating so fast it felt like it might leap out of his chest and make a run for it. He wanted to do that anyway…
But then he thought of poor Xar, shivering in the night as the Witch-stain crept up his arm. Xar would have to stay forever locked up in Gormincrag if they could not find the ingredients for this spell. The Witches were not going to go away if they closed their eyes and hoped for it… So Bodkin walked on.
Each one of the toes of the giant came up to Wish’s waist. The toes were absolutely still, unmoving. They appeared to be green, now they got closer, not because of gangrene, but because they had been there so long that moss was growing over them, so they must not have moved for a very long time.
“Is he alive, this giant?” whispered Wish. “Or is he dead?”
“Find out, sprites!” ordered Xar fiercely.
Bravely, Tiffinstorm and Ariel and the Once-sprite flew up to the head of the giant.
Tiffinstorm flew back down first. “Dead,” said Tiffinstorm.
“But he can’t have been dead for very long,” argued Wish. “Because after a while, don’t dead bodies… sort of decay?”
“Yucky!” said Squeezjoos, inspecting the giant for signs of decay with delight. “They’s do! Letsss me look… letsss me look!” The hairy fairy buzzed around excitedly, but returned extremely disappointed. “He’ss just the sssame asss when he wasss alive… No yucky bits… no squidgy bits… The green is just moss…”
“It’s some kind of enchantment,” said Caliburn, shivering. “An enchantment so strong I’m not sure I want to know what it is…”
“Which
may mean,” said Xar triumphantly, “that we CAN get his last breath! The spell to get rid of a Witch-stain must be true! And this giant here must have been waiting for us to come so that he can die…”
“You’re making a whole load of assumptions there,” said Bodkin, terrified. “Maybe he’s waiting so that he can eat us.”
“We keep telling you! Giants are vegetarian!” said Xar.
“Yes but, Xar, we don’t know much about the really, really big ones…” said Bodkin. “Most of them waded out to sea hundreds and hundreds of years ago.”
But Xar wasn’t listening. “Follow me!” he ordered.
The snowcats and the werewolf climbed each table leg as if they were tree trunks, claws gripping either side, with Wish and Xar and Bodkin on their backs. Xar had never been on a giant’s table before. The plates were larger than any he had ever seen, more like enormous silver lakes. The three young heroes steered their way around the massive cups and knives. The Enchanted Fork perched on the rim of one of the spoons, gazing down with admiration at its unfeasibly enormous cousin, a monster in spoon form. The fork shook its head, as if to say, “Will I ever grow that big? Could I?”
Squeezjoos and Bumbleboozle and the baby, always easily distracted, had a great time slipping down the center of the giant’s spoon as if it were some sort of gargantuan slide, until Xar snapped his fingers to get them to concentrate.
“We’re on a mission here,” whispered Xar. “There’s no time to mess about! Once-sprite, you’re the Chief Spell-Raider. How do we get the last breath out of the giant, if there’s still one in there?”
Up above them was the giant’s head, tipped to one side. He certainly LOOKED dead. His eyes were closed. His great wrinkled map of a face was covered in bracken and ivy, and if they had not known that it was a giant and seen that foot down below, they might have thought it was a rock face, or some other broken landscape, covered in a rich tangled mess of briars and thorns as if it wore a mask.
A sad face.
A broken face.
A lost face.
The Once-sprite flew the falcon upward, and leaped from the bird’s back. He swung for a second from one of the giant’s nose hairs, peering up into the dark depths above as if it were some sort of enormous snot-filled cave.
He poked his spear into one edge of giant nostril.
The giant did not move.
“He’s dead,” announced the Once-sprite, dropping back onto the falcon.
“Yes, I know he’s probably dead!” said Xar impatiently. “The point is, how do we get a last breath out of him?”
And then, as if in response to Xar’s question, and making them all jump, there was a reverberating sound like the noise of a muffled distant drum, and a slight wheezing wind poured faintly out of the nostrils above like the breeze in coral caves.
Oh, by green things and white things and mistletoe and ivy…
The giant wasn’t dead after all!
“The beassst isss alive…” whispered Ariel, burning so bright green with alarm that he shone like a torch.
The giant twitched.
“Ohhhhhhhhhhh my! Ohhhhhhhh my! He’s moving!” said Squeezjoos.
Slowly, slowly the great eye above cracked open the mess of thorns above it, and one enormous eye focused grimly on the children—an eye you could lose yourself in, a mighty desolation like the desert of the ocean. And then the great mountain above them jerked upward with such startling suddenness that the plates bowled over, and the young heroes lost their balance on the table, set a-shaking by his sudden coming-to-life. They all forgot that giants are not ogres and that they’re supposed to be vegetarian, even the really, really big ones, and they scattered like scurrying ants across the table, for safety under the plate rims and to hide under the forks.
Their hearts beating like rabbits’, they cowered, Bodkin under a plate rim, Xar flattened behind a salt cellar, Wish under the spoon.
“Don’t move…” whispered Xar.
Was the giant friendly? Or was he unfriendly? Did he know they were there? Had he seen them?
They could hear the giant breathing now, the wheeze in and out of his lungs like some great wind, and suddenly it seemed that their quest might have been a little, well, foolish.
Bodkin held his breath.
Maybe the giant didn’t know they were there…
Minutes passed.
There was silence again.
Bodkin began to breathe a little easier.
And then a very beautiful voice, one that definitely could not have belonged to a giant, said sweetly and out of nowhere: “There’s one hiding under the plate…”
And…
BLAM! The sheltering plate above Bodkin went spinning from above his head and sailing across the room, where it smashed with ear-shattering violence.
That was a little too, well, ROUGH for the giant to be entirely friendly, and when Bodkin looked up at the face looming above him like a great green god, the glowering fury of his expression was unmistakable.
It’s all very well, people telling you not to move when you’re being charged by a forest animal, or if a great desolation of a giant is poised over you, but in those sorts of situations instinct tends to kick in, and Bodkin ran across the table with some considerable speed.
SLAM!!!! A fleeing Bodkin was caught by a mighty force from above that sent him sprawling—OOF!—onto his stomach, and when he scrambled, petrified, back to his feet, an immense hand imprisoned him like a great green cave.
Peering out from behind the spoon, Wish shouted, “Bodkin’s been trapped!” Forgetting all about how much she liked giants, she ran forward and jabbed one of the massive fingers with her sword, and it couldn’t have been much more than a pinprick, but the fingers startled upward, and then all three humans were scurrying and running, and weaving and dodging across the table with the giant and frankly not-very-friendly hand slamming down around them, trying to catch them.
Which it did, eventually…
Xar and Bodkin hid in the salt cellar, but the giant shook them out and pinned them to the table between the prongs of a fork.
And then the giant took a cup and slammed it over Wish. For one horrible moment she thought she would be trapped there forever, but the giant flipped the cup over, picked her up, and dropped her in it. And there she hung, peering with one terrified eye over the rim, into the grim eyes of the enormous and, let’s face it, extremely annoyed giant.
An unintelligible noise came out of the giant’s mouth. It was opening and shutting as if it were making words, but the wheeze of his voice meant it was impossible to hear what he was saying. He paused.
The three children looked at one another, terrified. None of them could make head nor tail of what he was talking about.
The giant spoke again, equally unintelligibly, soft anger in the wheezing.
Caliburn bravely flew up to the giant’s mouth, so that he could hear more clearly.
The giant seemed to be choking, fighting for breath, until from out of nowhere an ethereal little something appeared in a trail of light, something so bright it made you blink to look at it, and the something poured a little potion into the choking giant’s mouth, and the dusty desolation drank it down greedily.
“What is that?” asked Wish, with an open mouth, trying to look at the brilliant little something as it dashed past. It didn’t look quite like any other sprite, or elf, she had ever seen before.
“I am a Frost-sprite who once belonged to the great Wizard Pentaglion,” said the little something, moving so quickly they still couldn’t see what it was, “but you can call me Eleanor Rose… That is not my name, but it’s a very pretty one, don’t you think?”
Eleanor Rose, for that was not her name, had a very beautiful voice that reminded you of running water, or bells. It must have been she who had told the giant where they were. “And this big decaying chap here is Proponderus,” said Eleanor Rose, as if they’d all dropped in for a cozy chat, rather than broken into a ruined castle whose
name was Death. “So, since we’re all here, perhaps you might introduce yourselves? Proponderus and I have not had company for many a long year. And even when we do, uninvited guests tend not to stay very long… particularly if they are burglars…”
There was something a little sinister in the last statement, even though she said it perfectly good-naturedly, even somewhat sadly. They didn’t need Caliburn to whisper, “Don’t trust her…”
Eleanor Rose didn’t appear offended. She even agreed and might have been nodding her head if she had been still enough for them to see her. “Yes, it’s probably wiser for human beings not to trust me… Frost-sprites have no hearts, you see…”
The giant spoke in a wheezy whisper, which was nonetheless very loud to human ears, for he was so very large a giant.
“Who,” said the giant, “are YOU, little ants, little nothingnesses, and how dare you disturb the peace of a giant of the ancient lines who is on the verge of dying? Is nothing sacred?”
“Oh, you’re on the verge of dying are you?” said Xar, without thinking, and heartily pleased to hear it. “Excellent!”
The giant blinked down at them.
Bodkin prodded Xar frantically.
Xar started, suddenly realizing that it wasn’t very polite to be seeming to welcome the imminent death of your host.
“I mean, we’re very sad to hear that,” said Xar hurriedly.
Eleanor Rose laughed again. “Oh, don’t worry!” she said kindly. “You’re on the verge of dying too!”
“A-are we?” stammered Bodkin anxiously.
“Of course you are!” said Eleanor Rose with great humor. “What did you expect? You are entering, uninvited, a castle whose name is Death, with the burglarious intention to steal something infinitely precious from one of the inhabitants within who also happens to be your unwilling host… Don’t bother to deny it!”
For Xar had opened up his mouth in instinctive denial.
“Unless…” said Eleanor Rose.
Twice Magic Page 10
