Forging the Half-Goblin Sorcerer

by J. Craig Argyle

  The old goblin examines a sprig.

  Chapter 4

  City of Neu Ardonbrae: Butterflies in a Cage

  In the residential section of the Septantrak, the goblin’s holy temple, Myrel sits in the butterfly pavilion. She watches Tinga, her best friend, cringe with her eyes tightly closed. An iridescent-blue insect crawls across her face. The other girls laugh and scream hysterically. Tinga is so beautiful, Myrel thinks as she watches her friend play her customary role of group leader and center of attention. The butterfly zoo that Myrel’s mother built is popular with the children who live in the temple. It is constructed out of copper rods and wire to look like a giant, dome-shaped birdcage. It is filled with tropical plants.

  Each winter her mother orders hundreds of chrysalides from the warm lands to the south and places them inside the cage. When spring arrives, the insectarium crawls with caterpillars and swarms with a dozen types of butterflies. The zoo reminds her mother of home and summers playing in her father’s gardens.

  “Get him off of me. Get him off. I can’t stand the way his tiny feet stick to my skin,” Tinga squeals. Of course, no one comes to her aid; they all enjoy watching her feigned predicament.

  When the girls tire of the cage, Tinga suggests that they go to the baths, and they all rush off leaving Myrel alone. The thought of bathing with the other girls horrifies her. She is too self-conscious to expose her huge, ugly, cross-breed body in front of her friends. Although they have grown up together and say they love her dearly, she is sure they pity her the way one pities a deformed child. She is almost weeping when her mother, Queen Meriem, enters the cage through its double gates and sits next to her. “Why are you not with your friends?”

  “They went to the baths,” she replies.

  The mother knew her daughter well enough to recognize what was troubling her. “Well, you have certainly found an enchanting place to be alone,” she says while scanning all the activity in the cage. She puts her arm around her daughter and holds her close.

  “Mother, my friends are so pretty and I am so ugly. How will I ever find someone to love me and take me out of this place? The sisters of the temple want me to join them in a life of service, but I don’t feel the same about the Spirit as they do. I can’t remain here my entire life.”

  “I, better than anyone, understand what you are feeling. In the world I came from, I was considered beautiful and had many suitors. My appearance hasn’t changed, but no one here thinks I’m beautiful. I have come to believe that true beauty must transcend the opinions of others. I wish for your sake, I could convince you that you are truly one of the most beautiful of all of the Spirit’s creations, different from others in the way that the butterflies in this cage differ from each other.”

  “No, Mother. The butterflies share their beauty with others of their own kind. An eagle and a snake are beautiful in their own way, but if they produced a child it would be a monster.”

  “Actually, you would end up with something like a manticore. I’m sure a manticore is quiet pleased by its appearance.” The mother realizes that her efforts are not improving Myrel’s mood. They are both like the butterflies in the cage, destined to endure a half-life in a goblin world that doesn’t accept outsiders. She looks thoughtfully at her daughter’s face and smiles. “I think that from your father and mother you received the best parts of each.”

  Myrel was born in the temple after her mother came many years ago. She knows little of her mother’s past. Her mother is not a goblin; she is human and the only human female that the temple workers have ever seen. She is tall and regal and towers over the goblins, but through goblin eyes she appears as a troll-like hulk. The temple servants address her as “Your Highness” because once she was a queen in the kingdom of men in the south.

  Her mother once confided to her that she wed an ambitious king that cared only for advancing his power and prestige. He wasn’t mean to her; he just ignored her. Then she met someone that she came to love deeply, and in an act of foolish desperation, she and her lover fled the king’s wrath and came to the temple for protection.

  Myrel doesn’t remember her father; he left the temple soon after she was born. Nor can she understand why her father deserted her and her mother. Her mother always says he will return when he can, but Myrel suspects that her mother is holding on to an empty dream. She has stopped believing her mother’s fantasy that her father is on an important mission for the king. After all, what mission could last seventeen years?

  Myrel has never left Holy Mountain. Fortunately, the Septantrak, as the temple is named, is huge and provides many opportunities. The construction of the temple began a thoudand years ago and is still in progress. Its chambers have been carved out of an extinct volcano that stands two leagues north of the capital. Visitors must climb a long staircase a third of the way up the volcano to reach the front door.

  Twice a year, at winter and summer solstice, the public is admitted to the temple’s Great Hall, a chamber so huge that it is said to be the largest enclosed space on earth. The hall stretches half a league into the mountain. The hall could hold a building twenty stories high if such a building could be constructed. The sienna rock of the volcano forms the temple’s walls. Shafts for light and ventilation have been cut into the rock that forms the vaulted ceiling. The shafts admit enough sunlight to produce eerie, shifting patterns on the floor and on the two rows of blood-red columns that divide the hall into aisles. Mirrors are placed near the ceiling to reflect the sunlight down toward the floor. During the biannual celebrations, the floor of the hall is further illuminated by rows of torches mounted on the walls. Tales of the Great Hall and Holy Mountain are the stuff of legend.

  But this is just the hall, and Myrel, like the rest of the public, only enter the hall during scheduled celebrations. Myrel lives with her mother in the residential chambers that are carved in the rock two hundred feet above the hall. Their royal suite is equipped with a balcony that overlooks the capital city.

  A thousand temple workers and their families occupy the mountain. The daily religious activities of the temple are carried out in chambers deeper in the volcano. On the top of the mountain gardens are fitted into the volcano’s ancient crater, accessible only by passing through the temple. It is in the gardens that Myrel attends school along with hundreds of other children who live in Holy Mountain. The crater is the only contact the children have with the surface world.

  An army of civil servants inhabit the capital and deliver supplies to the temple through an entrance at the base of the mountain. It is here that the queen and her daughter meet the trader who delivers his annual shipment of butterfly cocoons.

  Myrel’s life is one of endless routine. As one of the novice sisters, she observes the daily ritual of Greeting the Sun. Her teachers are the best the temple can provide, but Myrel finds the curriculum dry and spiritless because everything taught is first examined for its religious orthodoxy.

  Like Tinga and her other friends, Myrel assists in religious ceremonies conducted in the carved chambers of the temple. These mostly consist of chanting and beseeching the Spirit for blessings. The temple workers and even some of her friends claim they have significant religious awakenings during these sessions, but not Myrel. She suspects her friends are delusional or inventing religious experiences to curry favor with the clerics. Her mother, who as a child received a very different sort of religious training, reinforces Myrel’s skepticism. When her mother thinks of the one whom the temple workers call the “Thaumaturgist,” she sees only her lover and not the revered religious leader of the goblin world.

  Myrel in her butterfly cage.

  Chapter 5

  Isle of Uisgebeatha: The Sword of Tarnished Metal

  The old goblin knows all of Trak’s boyhood secrets. On the day he discovers the castle’s underground passages, he has to tell someone. The old Spore listens as he describes how, while arranging the junk that filled the broch’s cellar, he uncovered a passage that led under the inner cour
tyard of the castle. Trak entered the passage and, ignoring the fetid smell of decay, probed the darkness by following the wet, moss-covered walls until he grew fearful that he would become lost in a maze of branching tunnels. He returned to the broch to get his bearings and, armed with a lamp, quickly determined that many of the side tunnels were blocked by debris or intentionally sealed. The main passage tunneled directly under the inner courtyard to where a worn narrow stairway ascended within the massive outer wall of the keep. It ended at a wooden wall.

  Trak could peer through the cracks in the dried wainscot paneling into a large room that served during the day as the duke’s audience chamber and at night as his banquet hall. Trak came often to his hiding place to eavesdrop on the duke and his family.

  Since the alchemist spent almost all of his time when he was not lecturing the duke’s children in the upper floors of the broch, Trak could enter the secret passage almost at will. On one expedition, he followed a branching tunnel that angled downhill for two hundred strides before a stone wall blocked the passage. A flicker in his lamp’s flame revealed a breeze passing through cracks in the wall. Trak suspected that behind the wall there was a sea cave that opened in the cliff face below the castle. Exploring other passages proved to be arduous. Trak spent two weeks clearing one passage only to discover that farther on it was blocked once again.

  For weeks Trak systematically sorted the junk he found in the cellar. He would stack what he considered worthless on the broch’s kitchen floor for Krage’s perusal. After Krage had given his approval, Trak burned the combustibles and threw the remainder into the sea. The cellar was divided into several small work areas, and Trak realized after he began sorting through the cellar’s junk there had once been order to the way the rooms were utilized. One corner stored armor and weapons and another rugs and tapestries. The large central area had been a workshop where barrels were manufactured. Trak found a glassblowing workshop to be the most intriguing. He removed all the trash that buried the small oven where the glass was heated. All the blowpipes and bending tools were still there along with chunks of raw glass in an assortment of colors.

  Krage appeared delighted when he heard of the glassblowing workshop and spent a carefree afternoon firing the oven and skillfully softening a block of green glass that he stuck to the end of a long ceramic pipe. He twirled the pipe in the oven until it was molten and blew the glass into a long-necked flask that he gracefully twisted to create a retort. Trak recognized that it could be used in distillation much like the copper worms that Baelock fashioned. The afternoon was the only time Trak witnessed the alchemist enjoying a playful moment.

  As Trak forced the cellar into a semblance of its original order, he made daily trips to the hidden place behind the wall of the duke’s audience chamber. Neither Krage nor Baelock particularly worried when Trak would disappear for long periods. Each assumed that he was with the other or perhaps with the old mother in the forest or talking a stroll with Krage’s small, yellow dog.

  ***

  The duke’s business dealings were tedious. He spent countless hours going over ledgers where he tallied his possessions or reviewed lists of supplies to be purchased from the mainland. While the villagers who lived below the castle were largely self-sufficient, the duke was not. A constant supply of expensive goods had to be imported to satisfy the tastes of his elite household. The duke was preoccupied by money, or rather, his lack of it. It struck Trak that the solution to the duke’s financial problems was to export raw metal made from the copper and tin ores that were abundant on the island. Instead, the duke was forever considering ways to raise rents and charge levies. Trak’s secret visits to the castle’s keep slowed as he tired of hearing about the duke’s expenditures, but occasionally he overheard something that rewarded his efforts, like the conversation between the duke and his niece over her future marriage.

  “I don’t want to marry that pimpled-faced boy,” the niece pleaded. “I’d rather spend my life serving in a temple.”

  “Dorla, let us reconsider your options again at a later time. Your royal cousin may change his mind before he comes of marriageable age.” The duke was clearly frustrated by the conversation.

  One evening Krage joined the duke for dinner, and Trak eavesdropped on their conversation. “How much longer will you remain?” asked the duke. “Your presence puts my family and this island at risk.”

  “Your Grace has been most patient, but I must remain until either the king recalls me or I complete my task. We have done all we can to keep my presence on your island a secret. Believe me, I long to be free of that cursed broch and return home.”

  “It must be hard for you to be separated from your work in the capital.”

  “Yes, your Grace, I have paid many times over for the impulsive decisions I made in my youth.”

  At that point members of the duke’s family entered the room and the subject of the conversation changed. Trak understood only that Krage was involved in some intrigue involving the high king.

  On special occasions Trak sat behind the wainscot and listened to a travelling bard sing of ancient heroes or report on events happening on the mainland. As Trak’s knowledge of the outside world grew, the island shrank ever smaller.

  ***

  After a casual afternoon in the company of the old Spore, Trak hurries back to Baelock’s hut and begins brewing a tuber and mushroom broth. Baelock detests farming and loathes cooking even more. If the old mother hadn’t taught Trak how to collect and prepare forest foods, he and Baelock would likely have eaten grubs and neeps for every meal. When the smith awakes, he begins reexamining the creations of Trak’s previous night’s casting. Trak’s work is truly poetic. Baelock frowns when he recalls Wreen Wormclaw’s endeavors to fluster his apprentice. Trak senses that Baelock’s mood has improved considerably since the disastrous events of the previous night, and Trak decides to press the issue of his origins. “Master, tell me again how I came to be your ward.”

  “There ain’t much to tell,” the smith says. “After the war, several orphans were rescued by the duke’s returning soldiers. They appeared at my front door and told me that ye were my charge.”

  Trak thinks it odd that he has never met another of the orphans brought to the isle, but it is a big island and he knows few people outside his own small village. “How old was I,” he asks.

  “It is hard to say. Ye could walk well enough, and you spoke a bit. So perhaps ye were approaching three years.”

  “Did the duke’s men say where I came from?”

  “No. I doubt they knew. Ye tried to tell me your name, which I couldn’t understand exactly, so I shortened it to Trak. Why the interest in the past?”

  “The old mother in the woods told me that my father was probably a human invader who raped my mother. But I don’t see how that could be since Krage teaches that the war lasted only one summer. I must have been two years of age when the war began.”

  “No—well yes—well I don’t know the answer,” stumbles the smith. “I’m sorry Wreen cause ye so much grief last night. Tomorrow when ‘e has simmered a bit, I will speak with ‘im and make things right.” The prospect elevates Trak’s mood from despondent to hopeful.

  The next morning, Trak is still trying to figure out how he can ask the alchemist about his origins when the eldest of the duke’s children, Farg, shows rare interest in the alchemist’s history lesson and asks Krage if it is true that war is coming.

  “Yes. I’m sure there will always be wars and talk of war.”

  “That is not what I mean.” said Farg. “Yesterday, I heard my father tell his captain that a message arrived from the mainland saying that the men in the south are preparing for a new campaign. Will we be fighting this summer?”

  The alchemist looks wearily in Trak’s direction as he replies. “The war may not come for another year or two. It takes time to train and equip an army. Still, this is unfortunate news, Lord Farg. We are not yet ready.”

  “We will crush their armies
as we have always done,” relishes Farg. “Surely, you are not afraid.”

  “For myself, only a little, but I greatly fear that many goblins will perish and our victory is not assured.”

  “It is our chance to prove ourselves as our father did in the last war,” the second son gleefully blurts.

  “Spoken like a worthy son of a warrior,” Krage responds. “I am afraid that our success in the last conflict has been greatly exaggerated. The truth is the king’s armies were fortunate to achieve a stalemate. In the last war, men were equipped for the first time with weapons made from a metal that is superior to ours which gave them a decided advantage.”

  Farg looks incredulous and is about to argue the point when the alchemist draws his bronze dagger from its sheath and lays it gently on the table. He then opens a wooden box and holds up an ugly, roughly fashioned sword of tarnished grey and rusty metal. While the children fixate on the enemy’s new weapon, the wizard suddenly slams the sword against the dagger and in a shower of sparks, cleaves it in half, burying the blade deep in the wooden table planks.” During the last war, only some of the enemy were armed with these weapons, but I fear next time our armies will encounter an enemy fully equipped with this new metal.”

  Krage’s antics succeed in startling the duke’s children. But while they are rendered speechless, Trak is breathless. His thoughts move quickly to grasp the metal’s vast potential. He says to himself, “If I can master the making of this new metal, I will be the greatest smith in the kingdom. I can leave this island and go where I like.” At that moment Trak’s obsession over his origins is replaced by a need to discover the secrets of the new metal.

  Trak returns to Baelock’s hut excited to share the news of the new metal. Baelock says, “It is true enough. The enemy’s metal is superior to our bronze. It is a thing of dark magic. Some say men be in league with demons.”