‘Bitches love their pups, and guard them with their very lives. Adult elephants will take pity on an orphaned rhinoceros and protect it as if it were their own child. Elephants grieve for loved ones too, and weep tears at the death of family members. A bereaved lioness may nurture a motherless gazelle. Whales live in harmony with one another and never wage war. If you speak of love and compassion, plainly it exists in greater abundance amongst nonhumans.’
‘You name creatures I have never heard of—but then, you have lived long and travelled far. What of the other virtues and achievements of humanity—music, literature, art? Do you mean to be rid of them too?’
‘Amongst their own species, birds and dolphins teach songs to one another. With regard to art, what more wondrous work of art can there be than the world itself—a bird in flight, a tree in blossom, a stormy sky? And as for literature, well, what advantage does that bestow on the world at large? It entertains and informs human beings, no more, no less. Being a toy and instrument of the human race, it is rendered redundant if there are no human creatures alive to consume it.’
‘This, then, is the paradox of your race,’ said Asrăthiel in wonder, ‘that you are cruel because you oppose cruelty. Truly, I cannot fathom your ethos. There is an unbridgeable chasm between your culture and mine.’
Was it a flash of pain or of anger she glimpsed in those dark-fringed pools of violet?
‘A scission exists indeed,’ her companion said darkly. ‘Goblinkind is far more highly principled than humankind.’
Asrăthiel wanted to shout, ‘What nonsense!’ But the awareness of being surrounded by a horde of unseelie wights some twenty-five thousand strong clamped her tongue.
‘How can you say so?’ she cried, managing to remain relatively composed despite her indignation.
‘To put it plainly, goblins slay men, but men do exactly the same to each other. One difference of consequence is that goblins do not wage war on one another. Humanity never seems to leave off making war on itself.’
‘We have enjoyed generations of peace in Tir—’
‘While your fellow humanimals, the Marauders, preyed upon you, despite that they are of your race, slaughtering and pillaging, as your travelling armies slaughter each other and pillage the villages of peasants who never lifted so much as an eyelid in rage against them. The very term “humane”, rather than denoting “distinguished by kindness, mercy and compassion”, should mean “characterised by exploitation, cruelty, sadism and ruthlessness”. Not content with harming their own kind, your people also enslave, exploit and torment innocent and defenceless creatures of other species.’
‘Goblins torment the defenceless too!’
‘Usually we allow the mispickels to indulge in such pastimes. And when we punish we are exacting penance for wrongdoing. Any divertissement it happens to afford us is an added benefit.’
‘That alibi holds no water with me.’ The weathermage seethed with frustration, unable to adequately express all the arguments that chased each other through her head. The wine of Sølvetårn was potent; its effects muffled clear thinking, and she knew she must eventually retire from the debate defeated but unconvinced. ‘Goblinkind used to hunt human beings for sport,’ she said, ‘before the weathermasters imprisoned you.’
‘After humankind was declared vermin we merely wanted to have some fun with them, to combine entertainment with just retribution before we dealt the final stroke, which, as it turned out, regrettably, was not to fall.’
‘Not to fall because you would now give up your virtuous quest for a better world, so readily, in return for my company! Flattering to me, but unflattering to you. Is it so easy for you to forsake your ideals at a whim?’
‘Sweetness,’ Zaravaz said icily, ‘you seem to presume that I act without forethought. Believe me, nothing is further from the truth. My views about your race have changed somewhat since days of yore. Unfortunately, due to recent exasperating circumstances, some of my previous convictions have been undermined.’
‘Unfortunately?’
‘I dislike vacillation.’
‘Do you mean you are no longer certain whether or not humankind ought to be obliterated?’
‘Make of it what you will.’
‘You say I am different from the rest,’ Asrăthiel went on. ‘How have you learned so much about me?’
‘Are you truly so ignorant on that matter?’ Zaravaz demanded. When she replied in the affirmative he said, ‘Methinks I overestimated your shrewdness.’ In a moment he added, ‘Perhaps it is better this way.’
‘If I am blind to anything that ought to be obvious,’ she said, ‘it is because you have enchanted and bewitched me, and I can no longer think on a straight course, if ever I could.’
After the damsel uttered those words the goblin king appeared to reflect upon them, but otherwise his expression was unreadable. For Asrăthiel that very impenetrability was somehow profoundly stirring, for she sensed beneath it an explosive impetuosity; vehemence at war with itself, locked behind a barricade of steely resolution.
A trow-girl started playing a merry jig on a whistle, and the cleared floor in the refectory became filled with stamping, jumping trows, while the goblin knights looked on, entertained at their antics.
‘Your knights can be cruel to your kobold slaves,’ persisted the weathermage. ‘I have seen Zauberin holding them up by one ear, and Zande pulling their tails. You enslave another species and tease them—are you not hypocrites?’
‘Goblins made kobolds,’ Zaravaz replied testily. ‘Kobolds are arsenic-based, artificially engendered entities, not really alive at all. To animate them we initially employed a form of spirit or essence that flickers, half sentient, in the deeper strata of the mountains. They are more like organic machines than living creatures, though very cunning at manufacture.’
‘Not alive maybe, but sadistic.’ Asrăthiel’s lids felt heavy. It had been a long time since she had slept deeply. Even the immortal must visit the land of dreams, or so it seemed.
‘Call it what you will. They experience no empathy, only inquisitiveness. It stimulates their nodes of inquiry, to view the reactions of men goaded by the prod of agony. The trollhästen, on the other hand, are true living wights. They have a relationship of mutual benefit with us, as you have learned.’
‘The trollhästen are delightful,’ Asrăthiel mumbled, retreating from argument. ‘Well, I have discovered much this day.’ The liquor that dulled her wits had made her somnolent.
Three goblin knights approached. After bowing to his lord, Aachionard Zauberin murmured, ‘Y chiarn ard-ree, cloie shiu?’
Glancing at Asrăthiel, Zaravaz said, ‘I will play. I will make such music as will soothe this lady like a lullaby to her slumber, for she is about to start yawning.’
He rose from his chair, his wrist lightly brushing Asrăthiel’s shoulder as he withdrew it from behind her head. A sparkle like voluptuous fireworks went though her at the contact, and she gave a start, but already he had strode away.
‘What does it mean, “the little death”?’ Asrăthiel asked a passing trow, but the wight had no idea. She asked the goblin knights lounging near her chair, ‘What is the little death?’ but they merely laughed in a suggestive manner, while Zauberin winked insolently. Nettled, and suspecting she had been mocked for naivety, she let the matter drop.
Zaillian handed his lord a violin and bow, and all the other minstrels ceased their efforts, scattering like leaves. Silence reigned. The goblin king rested the foot of the instrument against his shoulder, instead of tucking it beneath his chin like a human violinist. He turned the pegs to tune the strings, drawing out long, poignant notes under the bow’s caress. Then, with effortless grace, he sprang onto the musicians’ platform and commenced to invoke music.
Conjured from the strings by his art, the music caught fire. The hairs stood up on the back of Asrăthiel’s neck, and an extraordinary feeling pulsed through her—one she could not express. It was as if she had been asleep all he
r life and the music had woken her, or as if she were hearing music for the first time. Three in one was the melody—the Dance, the Lullaby and the Lament, and its frequencies sawed thrillingly at her bones, resonating with the rhythms of breath and blood.
As his fingers danced along the scrolled fingerboard and the bow glided back and forth, he moved subtly, shifting his balance, keeping pace with intricate counterpoints. He was part of those rhythms; more than that, the essence of the music sprang from the nature of his existence. Watching him was like witnessing someone else’s dream. Between passages he transferred the bow to the hand holding the violin, swung across to a plinth by way of a nearby cantilever, and dropped down to the floor with great elegance before seamlessly resuming the performance. It seemed he could not remain still. He passed amongst the audience, cajoling the most moving melodies from the instrument as he went, and they turned their heads to follow him. The single strand of notes began to be interwoven with the sweet, mild voices of violas, the sumptuous tones of cellos and the low rumble of basses, forming harmonies as soothing as cream, as sweet as syrup, and as narcotic as hemlock. Yet no other musician was playing. Zaravaz was a solo performer, a virtuoso who could entice the sounds of many instruments from the strings of one.
Sedated by the lullaby, the wine and the overwhelming sum of recent experiences, Asrăthiel fell asleep with her head in her arms, which rested upon the table. Her own dreams were extravagant: a comely goblin knight was falling through dappled fathoms of water, locked in the embrace of a luscious siren, a drowner; Prince William was burning in a heatless fire; the urisk Crowthistle was sitting on a stump beside a dark pool; and her mother, Jewel, opened her eyes inside a cage made of glass roses that shattered, leaving the roses to bleed.
The damsel awoke at eventide upon a canopied bed in her own silver suite. A couple of trow-wives were sitting by the fireplace rocking their swaddled prune-faced infants and crooning a soft cradlesong. Asrăthiel’s mage-intuition informed her that, outside, the wind was hurtling through the heights of the Northern Ramparts, thunderclouds were rolling across the darkening sky, and the temperature was dropping. Standing at a traceried oriel window, still in her rumpled banquet gown, she watched the sun disappearing behind the mountains, a glistening slash of scarlet, as if the hearts of the clouds had been sliced open. Homesickness stabbed her. What might be happening to her family and friends in the world beyond the walls?
The gale roared and sang like hosts of spectres rushing by, and suddenly the weathermage longed for the touch of open air, the tingle of escalating thunderstorm charges. A door in the wall gave onto a balcony; she opened it, pushing hard against the force of the gusts, and stepped out. It was like plunging into ice water. Air currents slammed against her, blasting up from the valley below. Her tresses streamed back, scattering jewellery, while her gown flapped and billowed as if it would snatch her up like some great bird with blue satin pinions, and carry her off. The howl of rushing air blanketed all other sounds. Gripping the stone balustrade, she narrowed her eyes against the invisible onslaught and looked down across the shadow-drowned valley. A few glowing coals trapped in notches along the horizon were all that remained of the sun. On the opposite escarpment, swathed in twilight, a line of horsemen was charging up the crest of a ridge; marvellous knights riding graceful trollhästen, racing the wind.
It was a perpendicular world that Asrăthiel beheld; all verticals and steep angles and razor-edged shadows. Clean-cut and glistening the basalt bastions towered, barren of any vegetation more sophisticated or less hardy than mosses and lichens. The Northern Ramparts made the aged, weathered heights of High Darioneth, clothed in soft greenery, seem mild and nurturing by comparison. These mountains were young, honed and vigorous; their corners not yet smoothed by the eroding actions of wind and water, still uttering an epochal gasp from the shock of their violent birth from pools of magma bubbling at their foundations. The weathermage was conscious, by way of her brí-senses, of volcanic activity rumbling thousands of feet below.
The roots of her hair stood up. She became sensible of the enormous negative charge that had accumulated on the bellies of the thunderheads above the peaks. As the clouds moved they attracted a positive charge from the ground, which travelled along beneath them. Faint glows of corona discharge danced about the sharpest pinnacles, and a low, crackling hum began to emanate from the entire landscape. Most people would have been terrified by such an ominous buzzing sound, but the imminent lightning strike could not harm Asrăthiel and she remained serene.
The more she gazed at her surroundings, the more details she noted. Slender, exceedingly precipitous stairways twisted hither and thither up and down the precipices, none with banister or balustrade. They resembled goat tracks more than rights-of-way for two-legged creatures. Incandescent eyes in pinched faces peered from burrows and clefts in the rocks. The Northern Ramparts were not so uninhabited, after all; it was little wonder that men shunned them.
From the balcony on which she stood, a steep and narrow stair wound its way down the face of the cliff. The weather-mage took a few steps down the flight of cramped treads. Gusts shoved her sideways, beating at her like powerful wings. Momentarily losing balance, she teetered above the abyss, flung out a hand to steady herself, and fell back against the rock wall. If she tumbled to the floor of the valley she would not be harmed, but it would take a full day or more for her to reclimb that tremendous height. In the meantime if her absence were discovered, the goblin knights might believe she had absconded and set forth on their quest to scrape humankind from the world’s rind. Bearing this in mind Asrăthiel retreated to the balcony, glanced one last time at the crimson ruins of the sun and returned to her chamber, leaving the door open.
Beyond the windows, inky clouds drowned the last of the afterglow. The electrical storm had begun; thunderous crashes tumbled from one end of the world to the other, and sheet lightning blinked like the broken light of a silver sun. The trow-wives squeaked and shrieked, and one scurried to close the door.
As her handmaidens attended her Asrăthiel asked, ‘What am I to do here? How long am I to stay?’ but of course they knew nothing, or would not say, or failed to grasp the question, or pretended to. They brought writing materials for her, whereupon she sat at an escritoire of white marble and inscribed a long and loving message to her grandfather, telling him everything that had happened, and all she had learned since arriving in Sølvetårn. Finally she made a list of names and asked Avalloc to pass on her tidings to them. After she had sealed the letter with red wax, a trow messenger came and took it away, promising to deliver it rapidly.
The damsel left her apartments and wandered through the aerial halls and galleries of Sølvetårn encountering, as she travelled, dozens of grey-clad, limping trows; ten greater kobolds marching in pairs; seventeen lesser kobolds carrying monstrous contraptions; a clutch of scuttling, diminutive, unidentifiable wights that resembled a crowd of little gentlefolk richly dressed in dandelion leaves and other garden weeds; three unseelie gwyllion hags who bared pointed fangs and slunk into the shadows; numerous patient, wary spiders; and twenty-one horned eagle owls shaking out their plumage as they woke from slumber. But no tall, handsome lord with spellbinding black hair that wafted on an illusory breeze.
Evenings passed, and none could tell her where he might be.
After four nights—so quickly! How was it possible?—Asrăthiel received a letter from Avalloc, who told her how he had fallen to his knees and wept with joy upon receiving her communication that she was unharmed and still within Tir, though on the outermost borders.
Albiona found your letter lying on my pillow, he wrote in the correspondence. How it came there I cannot tell, but I had not been to my bedchamber that night, for I have found little rest, my dear, since you have been gone. Alighting on it, your aunt screamed louder than you would have believed possible. She would speak to no one, not even Dristan, but dashed through the house at breakneck speed, to the room where I sat alone, despairing
, and seized me by the hand, and she was crying. Then everyone else rushed in, thinking that there had been some disastrous accident, and when the situation was made clear the whole house exploded with jubilation. All began jumping and yelling, embracing and kissing, servants and family alike.
The news spread swiftly through Rowan Green, and thence across High Darioneth and the length and breadth of Tir, in a wave of euphoria. My dear child, there is dancing in the streets and blowing of horns and ringing of bells as the people celebrate the tidings that their beloved Lady Asrăthiel, wielder of Fallowblade, is hale, and being treated well, and that their worst fears are unfounded—she has not been entombed in some dungeon with no access to the outside world, or insulted, or spirited away to some distant land, never to be heard of again. Since your departure we have experienced the full gamut of emotions—from initial shock, distress and disbelief when you were taken, to this new elation. I can hardly begin to describe how we feel; it is utter relief.
The people of Tir, strong though they be, have suffered greatly from war’s legacy of grief and loss. To add to our woes, since the goblin horde departed, kobolds big and small steal across the kingdoms like a blue plague, as enforcers of their masters’ law. They are increasingly seen, especially by night, heralded by a stink of garlic, wielding whips or three-pronged forks. As they travel they inflict severe retribution upon human beings they consider guilty of cruelty and neglect and the confinement of animals. Our trades and craft guilds are in turmoil. What’s more, now that the people are largely deprived of weathermasters’ assistance they are forced to accept that the elements may now destroy their property and crops at whim, that seasons may be too wet or too dry, that flood or fire may overwhelm them, and there is naught to be done about it, for we weatherlords are too few. To discover that their Queen of Swords, Tir’s champion and heroine of the four kingdoms, has not paid some unspeakable price on their behalf has buoyed the spirits of our worthy citizens as nothing else could.
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