by Jim C. Hines
All around him, goblins protested. Some pointed to Golaka as evidence of the intruders’ powerful magic. Others shouted about how the dwarf had slain two goblins before they could even draw weapons. How could Jig say they were nothing? They had come into the lair and killed half a dozen without any apparent effort.
Jig waved the rod in the air and tried to be heard. “I’ve traveled with this lot for days, and I say they’re nothing. Their leader is a frightened child, the dwarf a spineless lackey. The wizard is mindless.”
The last point was true, if misleading.
The goblins were still talking. They hadn’t made up their minds yet. They hadn’t attacked, either, which was good, but Jig knew he still hadn’t convinced them. What else could he say?
Barius’s hand rested on his sword. He studied Jig, as if trying to determine what the goblin was up to. “What are you telling them?”
“I’m trying to convince them you’re too strong,” Jig answered, straight-faced. “I’m telling them of all your battles.”
That was it. Jig turned back to the goblins. “They cowered in fear at the sight of a mere carrion-worm. They tumbled into the hobgoblins’ most obvious traps. When they stood helplessly in the lower tunnels, who do you think was forced to save their worthless lives?”
“Who?” called a handful of goblins, starting to get caught up in Jig’s taunts.
“Me,” he yelled. “A goblin rescued the brave adventurers.”
Sensing Barius’s glare, Jig spun around.
“Why do they laugh?”
Jig shrugged. “I told them how you outwitted the hobgoblins. Give me a few more minutes. They’re almost convinced.”
He continued in Goblin. “Look at them! They dress like beggars, they smell worse than hobgoblin piss, and they eat food even a dog would ignore. That’s all your so-called adventurers are, dogs running around in the darkness, searching for bones.”
Raising the rod, he said, “I’ll prove it. Watch them fetch.”
Hard as he could, he hurled the rod over Barius’s head and past the others. It whirled end over end through the cavern and into the tunnel beyond to clatter against the rock.
The laughter grew as Barius raced after it, followed closely by Darnak and Ryslind. Jig grinned at the jibes and jeers, for once aimed at someone other than him. It felt good.
“I’ll kill them myself,” Jig said as he hurried toward the tunnel. He took his sword back from Riana and waved it overhead. Trying to make his voice sound commanding, he said, “Wait here for my return. We’ll have a feast tonight.”
That reminded him of Golaka. Ryslind’s spell had faded, and even as Jig watched, the huge chef slipped free from the magic’s grip and fell to the ground.
Jig grabbed Riana’s wrist. “Time to go,” he said. Hopefully the goblins wouldn’t follow, and he doubted Barius would bother to return now that he had the rod. Not for a few worthless goblins, at least.
So why am I going toward him? The answer came almost immediately. Because I’m an idiot.
Jig collided with Darnak. The impact bought a huff of breath from the dwarf, and sent Jig crashing into the wall.
“I think I convinced them to let us go,” Jig said once he had recovered.
“Did you, now?” Darnak’s thick brows lifted. “You know, it happens that I speak a smattering of Goblin myself. I couldn’t make out everything, but I picked up a few words here and there.”
Jig swallowed, but his mouth had gone dry. He had forgotten that detail.
“Spineless lackey, was it?” His fingers drummed the shaft of his club. “One of these days, I’ll repay you for that. We dwarves hold a grudge for a long time, you know.”
Fortunately, the two humans hadn’t heard any of it. Barius stood to one side, clasping the rod to his chest as if it were a long-lost lover, while Ryslind caressed it with his eyes. It was a little disturbing to watch, truth be told. Jig cleared his throat.
“You have the rod. Shouldn’t you be on your way? Back to the castle and the king and all that?” Please, he added silently.
Barius nodded slowly, but before he could speak, Ryslind’s voice cracked like thunder. “No! We must free Straum from his prison.”
“You dare to give me commands, brother?” Barius asked softly.
Jig pressed his back to the wall. He had hoped they would simply leave, but if they decided to kill one another, that would work too.
Sadly, things weren’t going to be that simple. Ryslind’s eyes flashed, but when he spoke again, he sounded calm and reasonable. “Think of the reward, brother. Five thousand years of gold and plunder. Straum will have no need of such things once he is free. You could have your pick of his hoard. Enough wealth to buy a kingdom of your own.”
Barius’s lips twitched into an involuntary grin as Ryslind went on. By the end, he was practically drooling. “A good point, brother. But why not use the rod to create whatever treasure I need?”
“The rod can only affect what already exists. Rock can be shifted, animals changed to other forms. You could turn a gold crown into a pile of coins, but you couldn’t make a diamond out of nothing.” Ryslind clasped his hands together. “Imagine our brothers’ reactions when you return with wealth enough to make them look like paupers on the street.”
“We did make a bargain with Straum,” Barius said thoughtfully. “For the sake of our family’s honor, we should fulfill that agreement and set him free.”
Jig and Riana exchanged tired glances. She looked ready to strangle Barius, and Jig wanted to sit down and cry. Home was only a hundred feet away. He was so close. If only they had left, he could have returned to the cavern and joined the others for evening meal. He imagined the laughter as he told them all how he had driven the halfwitted adventurers out of goblin territory. Would he ever be able to go home?
An angry shout echoed down the tunnel. “I’ll have your head on my cutting board, you runt,” Golaka yelled.
Jig hopped to his feet. “Right. Let’s go free Straum then.”
Ryslind led them back to the lake, walking like a man in a trance. Several times he had asked to carry the rod. “As a wizard, I know more of its powers than anyone.”
Barius had refused, insisting that this was his quest, and he would not let the rod out of his hands until he was back at the palace. For once Jig agreed completely. Bad as Barius was, the idea of Ryslind carrying that kind of power was even worse.
But Barius had his own reasons. Jig had to strain his ears to hear the prince’s whispered conversation with Darnak.
“He is not my brother,” Barius was saying. “Straum controls him.”
“If Straum truly controlled him, we’d all be dead, and he’d be taking the rod down himself. He’s still struggling, though there’s little enough he can do against the dragon. He surrendered to Straum’s control all by himself. It was his own greed that did him in.” In an angrier tone, Darnak went on. “It’s greed that will be your end, too. You don’t want to be turning a dragon loose on the country-side, lad, no matter how much treasure you carry away as a reward. You’re too young to remember, but I was around the last time one of those beasts came around this way. That was a small one, and he gutted half the kingdom.”
“I do not plan to release him,” Barius said. “The dragon enslaved my brother, Darnak. Any deal they made is worthless. I will not let this go unavenged.”
“You’ll be the death of me yet.” Darnak stopped for a moment to check his map. “Take the left tunnel up ahead,” he said in a normal voice. Handing the lantern to Barius, he grabbed for his wineskin.
“So you’re planning to use the rod, I take it?”
Jig thought he heard approval in the dwarf’s question.
Barius nodded. “Dragons came from the Rod of Creation, all those years ago. Is it not fitting that the same rod be used to end Straum’s existence?”
“Fitting, aye.” Darnak took another drink. “I just hope you’re not trying to mine more than you can haul. Dragons are a tricky
lot, and a dragon with magic at his command is doubly dangerous.”
“He must pay,” he snapped. “You told me once that Earthmaker requires his followers to avenge themselves upon their enemies.”
“Not precisely.” Darnak picked his next words carefully. “Earthmaker teaches us to maintain balance and justice. In a case like this, where your brother went off in search of his own doom, I’d be hard pressed to lay the blame entirely at Straum’s feet.”
“My brother was a greedy, shortsighted fool.” Jig shook his head at the blind irony as Barius continued. “But Straum will still pay for what he did.”
Ryslind led them to the shore of the lake, where he killed several lizard-fish with bolts of fire. “Perhaps you will change your mind, brother? As a mage, I can use the rod far more easily than you, and its power will make our path easier.”
Barius tightened his fingers until the knuckles went white. “I think not. Tell me what I must do to use it.”
Ryslind absently sent another lizard-fish to a crispy, smoldering death, and said, “The user must impose his will on that of the rod. You must imagine precisely what you want, in perfect detail. If the rod works like most magical artifacts, you will feel a strong tug. The rod will seem to pull you forward as it tries to draw power from you. You must resist. Brace yourself and force the rod to draw on its own stored energy. Do not lose control, no matter how much it pains you.”
“Very well.” Barius stepped closer to the shore and raised the rod. “Be sure these creatures do not endanger me while I work.”
Darnak and Ryslind took positions on either side, guarding him from the lizard-fish.
“I suggest a tunnel,” Ryslind said. “The lake bed is obsidian. Envision the tunnel as a long bubble rising from that stone. Be certain it is waterproof, and large enough for us to move about.”
Jig stood behind the prince and watched as he pointed the end of the rod at the ground. It was hard to split his concentration between the lizard-fish and Barius, but he wanted to see the rod work. They had all nearly died many times over to find this stick, after all. At last Jig would see Ellnorein’s legendary artifact in action.
Compared to the other things he had seen in the past week, the rod was spectacularly boring. There was no burst of light, no sparks or smoke, nothing but a slight humming sound that any tone-deaf child could have duplicated.
“Be careful,” Ryslind said. “Work slowly.”
A tiny bulge appeared in the rock by the shore. As Jig watched, it grew taller and wider. A dark hole formed at the center.
“Jig,” Riana snapped.
He glanced down to see a lizard-fish climbing over the toe of his boot. With a squawk of alarm, Jig kicked it back into the water. A few more steps, and it could have killed him. From then on he ignored the growing tunnel and worked on staying alive and poison-free.
The humming of the rod grew painfully shrill, then cut off. The instant the noise stopped, Barius gasped and clutched his head. “What did it do to me?”
Ryslind gazed into the newly formed tunnel. He tapped the stone, as if to insure its solidity. “I suspect your tunnel intersected the magic that held the whirlpool in place. The backlash will leave you with quite a headache for the next day or so.”
“You should have warned me.”
Ryslind smiled, a picture of innocence. “Magic comes with a cost, dear prince.” Before Barius could answer, he ducked his head and entered the tunnel, vanishing in the darkness.
The tunnel was barely taller than Jig, and he hunched over as he walked. The walls and ceiling were damp and cool, but they didn’t appear to leak. The cold air was eerily still, and their footsteps echoed down the tunnel. He almost refused to follow. The tunnel walls were only a few inches thick, and Jig didn’t see how that could be strong enough to support the weight of an entire lake.
That was another facet of the rod’s magic, of course. Those stone walls were probably stronger than the rest of the mountain. Still, Jig expected the tunnel to collapse at any second. He wondered if the water and rock would crush him before he drowned.
They reached the end. A perfectly round hole two feet across opened into blackness. The sides were smooth and damp. Darnak passed the lantern up to Ryslind, who slanted a beam of light into the room below.
The Necromancer’s throne room was the same as when they had left, empty and foreboding. The corpses were gone. Darnak had insisted on disposing of them when they came back from Straum’s lair, saying it was disrespectful to leave bodies sprawled about like that. They had spent several hours dragging the corpses to what Jig had dubbed the “Pit of Big Bats” and tossing them over the edge. How that was more respectful than leaving the bodies to decay, Jig hadn’t bothered to ask.
“Perhaps a ladder?” Ryslind suggested.
Barius frowned, but didn’t argue. He pointed the rod at the hole, and a bit of stone dripped into the room to form a thin ladder. From the lines on his forehead and by his eyes, Jig guessed he was concentrating harder this time. Sweat dripped down his face by the time he finished.
“Excellent.” Ryslind lowered himself into the room. Once the others had joined him, he said, “I suggest you do the same thing with the Necromancer’s little trapdoor. Or do you require time to rest, to regain your strength?”
Even Jig could see the way Ryslind baited his brother, pushing him to admit that the magic was too strong for him. Every word the wizard spoke positively oozed compassion, as if it were all he could do to watch Barius shoulder this heavy burden by himself.
“We shall proceed,” Barius said through gritted teeth. Again he used the rod, this time melting the throne itself into a ladder. Before he could finish, he cried out and fell. His hands pressed against his temples.
“Such pain,” Ryslind muttered sorrowfully. “You must have triggered another backlash when your ladder pierced Straum’s illusionary sky. A pity, for in most cases the rod’s magic is easy to control. Only when it collides with other art does it cause this kind of anguish, and then only to the unskilled.”
As Barius used the rod like a cane to push himself back up, Jig found that he actually felt sorry for the prince. Then he remembered being led around at the end of a rope, punched in the face, and threatened time and again for the past week. His sympathy faded.
Barius managed to finish the ladder without further problems. The rungs were a bit slippery, having taken on the glassy polish of the throne, but nobody fell off.
At the bottom, another of Straum’s dragonchildren waited for them. “You have the rod,” it said. This one was smaller and darker than the first. Female, Jig guessed. Or perhaps it was simply younger.
Barius drew himself up and forced the fatigue from his face. “I do.”
He saw Darnak glance worriedly at their escort, and he could guess what the dwarf was thinking. Barius might, with luck and a great deal of help from the gods, be able to use the rod against Straum. But did the prince’s plan include a way to deal with Straum’s children? A lot of good it would do to kill the dragon if the dragonchild tore them apart a second later.
They couldn’t retreat. The creature probably had orders to stop them if they tried. The only thing to do was march onward, through the gardens and into the cave, and hope Barius knew what he was doing.
When they arrived, they found that Straum had emerged from his lake. His body stretched across much of the cave, and rows of enormous wet footprints suggested that he had been pacing. His head perked up as Ryslind entered.
“You have it,” Straum breathed. When he saw what Barius carried, he threw back his head and roared so loudly Jig thought his head would crack. The terrible sound went on and on, and when it stopped, the echoes continued inside his skull.
“I think he’s happy to see us,” Darnak said dryly.
Strong clawed hands nudged Jig into the room. He glanced back, wondering if Straum suspected something. Dragons were supposed to be the most dangerous creatures in the world, undisputed masters of trickery. When he t
hought about it, how could Straum not suspect something? With freedom so close, he wouldn’t risk anything going wrong. Barius’s plan would get them all killed.
Jig started to inch closer to Darnak. Maybe he would know what to do. Before he got close enough to speak, Ryslind walked up to the dragon’s side.
“We have it, master,” he said. “It was a close thing.” His thin finger pointed at Jig. “The goblin attempted to betray us and take the rod for himself.”
Jig froze. Maybe his ears were still recovering from Straum’s roar and he had misheard. “I gave the rod to you,” he said meekly.
Ryslind smiled, a cold expression of triumph. The slitted glow of his eyes seemed to burn into Jig’s chest. As he had done once before, Ryslind spoke directly into Jig’s mind.
I warned you that you would pay for humiliating me, goblin. Jig suddenly understood. Whatever Straum had done to the wizard’s mind, enough of Ryslind remained to want revenge. He hadn’t forgotten his promise to punish Jig. He had simply waited for the best time to exact that punishment.
“It wasn’t like that, exactly,” Darnak protested.
“Silence,” Barius hissed.
Jig glanced over. Barius had begun to edge away from his guard. He glanced at Darnak, who tilted his head slightly. They planned to use Jig’s execution as a distraction. A good plan, Jig admitted. The only flaw involved the minor detail of Jig’s painful death.
“Did he?” Straum asked. His neck twisted around until he stared down at Jig. “I’ve always thought goblins to be cowardly, stupid creatures. Betraying me took more boldness than I’d have expected from you. For a goblin, you’re quite the brave fellow.”
Jig didn’t breathe. He couldn’t look away from those huge, gold eyes. He could see himself reflected in the slitted pupils, his body distorted on the curved surface. He watched the mirror-Jig raise his hands, as if to explain. He saw the wide-eyed expression of fear, the frantic trembling in his jaw.
