The Master

by Melanie Jackson

  Yes, and the fear was growing. And not just the fear of what Nick would say or do. Something dangerous was on its way. Something huge. It would be there soon. She had to prepare.

  I should have told him about the baby. I should have told him that I love him.

  With hands that trembled, Zee pushed the covers away and got out of bed. She didn’t know what she could do to protect Nick, but she had to do something. It was time to begin.

  The entire rescue party except Farrar wore dark leather and looked a bit like something out of a Hollywood movie set in a trendy s & m bar. Nick had never worn leather before—not right next to his skin. But the clothes were remarkably comfortable, so long as he had no idea what animal the skins had come from and he wasn’t inclined to ask. He was glad to have something sturdy and non-absorbant between his skin and the caustic atmosphere.

  He was also glad of the nifty little nose filter that he had been given, though it felt a bit odd having something jammed up his nostrils. The air around him looked and felt thick, and he was certain that it was semi-toxic.

  Welcome to the lutin empire, his ghost muttered. Please enjoy your stay and come again soon.

  The others were serious and quiet, but Farrar at least seemed disposed to enjoy the hunt. And why not? He was already dead and didn’t have a lot to lose. Anyway, how often did one get to reprise one’s life’s most fabled role.

  And how do you feel? Are you ready?

  Distracted really—not focused on the task at hand, Nick answered: I’m thinking about Zee.

  It was strange: At the moment he’d allowed himself to consider the notion of a life with a wife, kids and a cottage with a picket fence, he’d also discovered that he was fey, his lover was half-goblin and their potential children were—well, who knew what they’d be? And that cottage with a picket fence wasn’t looking too likely, either. Not if he and Zee were now on some goblin hit list. Living in the human world might not even be possible anymore.

  And what about his sister? The thought of the sorts of explanations to his family and friends that such a drastic change of lifestyle would entail was daunting to consider.

  And yet, even with all this, he didn’t regret what had happened. He was ready—anxious, even—to get on with things.

  But first he had to survive the next few hours. And keep the world from going to war. Which meant he needed to get his brain in gear.

  He had to push Zee from his thoughts.

  “Qasim needs the ceremonial ax,” Nyssa said abruptly as she entered the room. Her eyes were wide and her voice breathless. Zee, recalling her dream of the hobgoblin, couldn’t repress a shiver. “It’s in a chamber about half a mile from where the children are being held. It won’t open until the eclipse begins. He’ll either have to fetch it or bring the children there—either way, we have time. We can get the ax first.”

  “Can you contact Abrial?” Bysshe asked, putting down her teacup. Zee followed suit.

  “No.” Nyssa’s brows knit. “I think that he’s shut me out because he doesn’t want me to see what happens to Qasim. He’s put up a wall between me and Farrar as well.” She looked at her mother. “I have to go.”

  “No!” Bysshe said immediately, her lips flattening. “Your time is too close. Tonight is the darkening of the moon—”

  Appalled at the thought of the very pregnant Nyssa attempting a journey through goblin caves, Zee heard herself saying, “I’ll go. I’m used to goblin hives.”

  “Thank you, Zee,” Nyssa said, smiling at her. “But no one else will be able to find this place. I can’t maintain a psychic link to either of you and also keep tabs on those children. Mother, I’m sorry, but you know I’m right. This is our chance to stop the slaughter without anyone getting hurt. I have to go.”

  “He’ll just use something else,” Bysshe objected, her worry plain. “And how can you say that no one will be hurt? What of your baby?”

  “I don’t think he will use something else,” Nyssa answered. “I don’t believe this is just about starting a war between the lutins and the humans. I believe—I know—that Qasim intends to resurrect his hobgoblin brethren tonight. I can feel that he means to do this. He’s going to turn his kind loose on the world.”

  Bysshe paled, as Zee suspected that she herself did. She knew that the childhood tales she’d heard of hobgoblin terror were probably exaggerated, but the thought of more hobgoblins being released into the world was petrifying.

  “He’s going to observe the ceremonial magic. We have to get that ax before he does.” Nyssa took a deep breath. “There’s no one else to do it. Abrial has closed his mind off from me. Lyris, Cyra and Io have already gone. That just leaves us and Chloe, and she . . . She had best stay with the children.”

  Nyssa was right. Fragile Chloe would be no help.

  “Then we all go,” Zee said quietly, rising to her feet. She was glad that her legs held her up, because her knees felt very weak. “And we had better go before the moon rises and the eclipse begins.”

  Nyssa and Bysshe nodded.

  The wind was moaning, and Nick fancied it as miner’s ghost lost forever in the caverns where it had died trying to liberate the giants’ gold. In the Underground, this abandoned goblin world, the wind was a living thing; it carried with it an acrid taint that Nick could not identify, but he smelled it even through his nose filter. It coated his tongue and furred his throat, making it difficult to swallow.

  Occasionally the rescuers heard a rustling noise, like leaves disturbed by a wind or the careless footfalls of a large beast crushing shrubbery as it passed. And once in a while there was another sound— again like wind, but one that chirred and croaked and whispered up from the dark swamps of the world. The cumulative noise had an effect on Nick, making him both restless and nervous.

  Thomas, seeing his unease, had volunteered that it was the smell and sound of an old goblin lair waking. He didn’t seem concerned, so Nick tried to remain sanguine in spite of the hair rising on his arms. He didn’t like the place, though. It was anathema to him, and he wouldn’t voluntarily return. His body and spirit needed air and light. It completely rejected this dark, dank hole.

  The group had flashlights but didn’t use them, choosing instead to rely on the uneven green phosphorescence that coated the walls of the tunnel and caverns they traversed. It struck Nick that, though they were on what amounted to a military mission, this team had no general, no one who wore braid and medals and would direct the troops into battle. They each took turns, silently leading when their talents were needed. Yet they constantly moved in synchronicity, as if given the same commands.

  Abrial was point-man now, and he led them surely and swiftly down Unseelie roads, making only one detour.

  “Quicksand,” he said softly, his nose wrinkling. Nick had the feeling that the words were spoken aloud for his benefit; the others likely recognized the smell.

  “Quicksand?” Nick repeated. It smelled far worse. Perhaps it was quicksand where many, many things had died. Nick had smelled ghastly things in the ER—ruptured intestines, gangrene, rot of many kinds—but this was unlike anything in his experience. It was offal mixed with chemical waste . . . and something else, too, a sort of miasma that caked the membranes of the throat and perhaps the mind as well.

  And you thought I was a bad haunt to have around. The ghost sneezed.

  I’ll never complain again, Nick promised, following Abrial despite his misgivings.

  Nick had always been cautious by nature. For him, prudence was like breathing. But he and his old reality were no longer compatible. He was now on the endangered species list, and the group he was sharing the crisis with was of the fortune-favors-the-bold school. No one was going to be deterred by a smell. Nor could he afford to be; the stakes were simply too high.

  “Remember not to look too closely at things,” Thomas cautioned. “We don’t want this to be a flip trip.”

  “Flip trip?” Nick repeated. Then, figuring it out: “Oh. Are we likely to be flipped out
by something we see down here?”

  “Not really. We’re all fey—though not Unseelie, of course, except for Jack and Abrial. We’ll be fine. Still, there’s no need to dawdle with any of the shades lingering here.”

  Nick had no intention of dawdling—especially not with these smelly shades.

  The tunnel broadened again into another cavern. The sight of a pile of dirty brown-and-white bones with an enormous red-handled sword shoved through them didn’t please Nick, either; though at another time, he might have liked to examine the jumble mounded on the rock ledge serving as a sort of bowl for the abused skeletons. It was obvious even at a casual glance that the bones had suffered trauma. Most were shattered, were so splintered that he could only think that some giant animal had been at them, perhaps sucking out the marrow. And a strange hairy lichen had begun to grow.

  “What the hell is that?” he whispered.

  “Bone salad with a side of mold,” Roman suggested.

  Jack paused for a moment beside the skeleton. He was clearly troubled but wasn’t able to identify the point of the mass grave. It had been a pyre. He shook his head, then suggested Nyssa could come here later to talk to any ghosts that lingered.

  Nick shook his head, wondering why she would want to. The mound was made up of many different kinds of bones—human, fey and goblin. He supposed that was fairly unheard of, all races having an aversion to spending eternity resting with one another, and who were traditionally very careful to separate their dead. Still, nothing they had to say would be positive, and it would probably be variations of Get these other smelly bastards off me!

  Thomas said it looked like a dragon’s larder, but no one could explain the giant sword that topped the pile like a cherry on a particularly sinister sundae. They all agreed it was an old grave, though. Whatever had made it was long gone. Or should be. They moved on.

  After that, Nick found himself looking behind him with increasing regularity. Paranoia had found a crack in his psyche and was systematically looking for a chance to blossom into panic.

  As they drew near the next fold in the mountain where the tunnel turned abruptly, Nick could see that the stone was not as smooth as it first appeared. In places it was fissured with sharply angled clefts, and it looked a bit as if it had been hewn open by a giant ax and then carelessly refilled with rubble— was the creation of some insane creature who cared little for engineered stability.

  Could this be the work of the hobgoblin? Nick had no idea. He actually didn’t know anything about the creature they were going to rob and possibly fight to the death. How had he not asked earlier?

  “What is he? Qasim, I mean,” Nick asked quietly. “I mean, I know he’s a hobgoblin, but what is that exactly—besides big and ugly?”

  “Big and ugly hardly covers it,” Roman answered. He added, “Best not to use his name down here.”

  “I’m not sure this is the moment to go into this . . . ,” Thomas began.

  “Yet, what better time?” Jack said. He glanced at Nick.

  “Tell him,” Abrial agreed. “He has a right to know.”

  “The hobgoblins were a creation of the first great goblin king, Gofimbel, and a terrible mistake that he was warned repeatedly not to make. But, of course, he did create them. It was inevitable really, given his arrogance.” Jack began.

  “All the old ones were arrogant,” Abrial interjected. “The Seelie king, the Unseelie queen, the goblin court. Dynasty builders have to be ruthless visionaries.”

  “Fair enough. But Gofimbel was something beyond arrogant or visionary. He repeatedly messed with the rules of creation—was an insane Prometheus really.” Jack fell back to walk beside Nick.

  “Frankenstein,” Nick muttered.

  “Exactly. He was a goblin Dr. Frankenstein. The first one—there have been others since. Anyhow, it is said that though he created them, Gofimbel feared the hobgoblins from the very beginning, and especially Qasim, because it turned out that they were actually more endowed with the capacity for magic than the goblins themselves. And all three monarchs—Gofimbel, Mabigon and Finvarra— played a role in what happened next.”

  “Why? How?” Nick asked.

  “We can’t know for certain, unless Abrial knows, but it is believed that the goblin king arranged to steal a lock of hair from the Seelie king, Finvarra. It was in retaliation for Finvarra’s efforts to stop the creation of the new, goblin slave race—Gofimbel knew it would enrage the Seelie king to see his family’s blindingly golden hair on the heads of the goblin slaves. Then there was Mabigon’s contribution to this disaster. It is said that she gave Gofimbel a bogey’s fingerbone to include in their first hobgoblin monster: Qasim. She thought that she could secretly influence him this way. But it was that bogey bone that made him more deadly than the others, and Mabigon could not control him either.”

  Nick turned to stare at Jack. “Wait. Sorry, the penny just dropped. You said Finvarra? He was the Seelie king?”

  “Yes, quite a coincidence, isn’t it, your Zee having that name and also fey blood and gold hair?”

  “Damn. I hate coincidence.”

  “And I don’t believe in it,” Thomas said.

  “Anyhow, as I was saying,” Jack went on. “Gofimbel enlisted the aid of the dark queen, Mabigon, and having her own reasons for playing a trick on Finvarra, Mabigon agreed to assist. She sent a succubus to visit the Seelie king, and to cut off a lock of his hair while he slept.

  “But this small act of mischief backfired horribly, because it somehow endowed the already physically stronger hobgoblins with special magical powers. The beasts became goblin, Seelie and Unseelie—something Gofimbel never anticipated. Like Samson in the human Bible, they somehow drew power from this stolen hair. And Qasim did from the bogey bone. Though Gofimbel later chopped off Qasim’s finger and had the hair burned off of all the hobgoblins who shared it— burned the flesh down to the bone and then cut away the scalp to boot—the damage was already done.

  “So, Nick . . . you ask what hobglobins are. They are super-goblins who eventually learned to use many powerful forms of magic against their enemies, forms of magic that would naturally be denied to them. They are Seelie and Unseelie and goblin. And it took the combined will of these three powers—the only time the three races all cooperated, I might add—to lock them up.”

  “But we now have Qasim’s heart—the source of his greatest power,” Abrial spoke up. “And we are only facing him, not an entire army of these creatures. There is no need to panic,” he said, looking at Nick’s white face.

  “Precisely,” Jack agreed. “And if we can take care of Qasim, the rest of the problem goes away. Or at least remains static. Their prisons will hold the hobgoblins for eternity—the three great monarchs saw to that.”

  Nick nodded. The idea that something could be locked up for eternity seemed at once both cruel and yet not nearly safe enough, not when one considered how many successful jailbreaks there were in the mortal world. But the only way to be sure the hobgoblins wouldn’t be a problem would be to kill them, and like Jack, Nick couldn’t quite embrace the notion of genocide. This was a tough one, and it was more of the perpetual balance of power: the duty of the remaining fey that Jack had spoken of. It gave Nick a headache.

  Jack stopped suddenly, his head cocked as he listened. Nick knew that the cavern was speaking to him.

  “They’ve found us. The goblins!”

  “Well, damn,” Roman muttered. “And we were having such a nice, non-violent hike, too.”

  “Okay, it’s time for Plan B. Make haste, my friends. We are now on a short clock. We need to check out our escape routes.”

  They split up, so that each team could take one of the three branching tunnels that led off the main path from the bone repository. They would meet up again at the chamber where the kids were being held. Thomas and Nick were one team, Jack and Roman made up another. Abrial, Farrar and Zayn were the third.

  “Keep your minds open so Abrial can talk to you if Qasim moves, or
if the goblins get tricky and try to surround us. We are enough ahead of them that we should be fine, but better safe than sorry. Good luck,” Jack called, as he headed off.

  “Good hunting,” was Abrial’s reply.

  Nick was feeling slightly more comfortable with the night demon, but he still found him disconcerting. The fey looked hard enough to eat bullets for breakfast. Actually, Nick had yet to see him eat anything at all for breakfast. Maybe bullets weren’t a bad guess.

  “Your shirt’s hideous,” Roman said to Thomas by way of farewell. Nick wasn’t surprised when he added, “It looks like a Smurf vomited on it.”

  “But blue’s my lucky color,” Thomas responded, smiling a little.

  Roman saluted. “Well . . . I hope the luck rubs off on our new recruit. Keep an eye on him. We don’t want to lose the pixie the first time out.”

  Thomas embraced him, and then the pooka punched Abrial, Zayn, Nick and Jack in their arms, and bounded away.

  “Merry we meet again,” Zayn said softly, and Nick was sure it was some sort of blessing.

  “Take care.”

  It was all that Nick could think to add, though he suddenly felt very close to his new brothers in arms. They were good men to be in a fight with—though perhaps not exactly men. At least, not human men. And not perhaps good as he had previously defined it. Most of the good people he knew didn’t carry guns or deal death so efficiently. Still, they were effective and shared his moral outrage at what was being done to innocent children. And they were willing to accept Zee and her siblings in spite of their goblin blood. That was all that Nick asked, and he knew it was probably more than he would get from his own family.

  “Well, once more into the breach,” Thomas muttered, when he and Nick were alone. He sighed. “You know, Roman’s right: I’m really getting tired of dealing with these Assholes of Evil.”

  Chapter Four

  Their travels went without incident. The three teams regrouped outside the chamber where the children slept, slumped bonelessly on the floor. Nick was relieved that the air was relatively clear and the chamber fairly warm. It had grown steadily colder the deeper they went, and he had feared that the children might be suffering from hypothermia, since he could not imagine Qasim stocking his prison with two hundred little coats or sleeping bags or kettles of hot chocolate.