And this was probably not the worst of Eurilda. When Lenwin of Elg first sent her flowers, it was a touching gesture, but when it became a daily occurrence, Khyte suggested that he take the man’s nose as a subtle reminder that the lady was taken, but Eurilda would not have it; instead, she asked the romantic to bring her a tame Baugn. That there were no tame Baugn, and that the world-beasts could not be brought anywhere unless Eurilda was gracious enough to wait on a mountaintop did not dissuade her follower, and he was found the next week, picked apart by crows and rats at the foothills of the Juntawni. When her pet word for Khyte changed from “legs” to “snack,” he fled.
However, now that it seemed she wouldn’t roll him in a cigar and smoke him, he thought that if—a very, very big if, it would turn out—Eurilda took his side, Nahure couldn’t muster a force that would arrest him upon his exit from the restaurant’s doors. “I’m sorry,” he repeated. “I’m happy to see you, considering ... well, what happened was entirely my fault.”
“I don’t want to hear it,” she said, standing up from her meal. At a head shorter than Khyte, she still looked down on anyone in the Goblin or Human Worlds. “A fine restaurant like this is the last place I’d expect to see you, Khyte.”
“My friends have better taste than I.”
“And you still have the same taste in friends,” she said, making a show of looking around the empty inn.
“They had cause,” he said.
“Cause to flee? Yes. To be angry? Yes. To abandon you? Never. I don’t understand this world’s appeal to you, Khyte. Maybe you are their poor relation, a brother in the House of Hwarn, though you only stand to inherit their gift for cowardice.”
Maybe, Khyte thought, Eurilda wasn’t so happy after all.
A half-dozen goblins entered the Copper Croc, drizzling rain water from their muddy boots and sodden cloaks. On the guards’ thick double mail rested ceramic slabs ornately enameled with the blue and orange horned serpent crest of King Merculo. Each bore a double-bladed pole ax topped with a pike point, and wore a belt with dagger and short sword. Goblins believed fervently in their right to own deadly weapons, and so the guardsmen that policed them were, by necessity, armed to the teeth.
“Begging your pardon,” said the lieutenant, a burly and shaggy brick of a goblin that Khyte had met once, a year ago, and promptly forgotten his name. “You can resume your lovers’ quarrel after we have a few words. We promise to return what’s left of him.” He snorted at his own joke, followed by a peal of sycophantic snickering from his underlings.
“Your apology,” she said, “was prelude to a boast, and your promise insincere.”
“My apology was no apology, and my boast was no crime,” said the lieutenant. “As to my insincerity, would you tempt my promise and share his fate?”
“Nothing would please me more,” she said. “although I’m the current authority on Khyte’s future.”
The lieutenant looked at Khyte as if for the first time. “Khyte?” he said, then laughed, but what was to follow would remain unsaid, for Eurilda took that moment to act.
While her face often masked a winning hand, Eurilda would not have made a good gambler, because she always played her ace even when a deuce would do. As she snapped her fingers, she lunged forward, her arms and legs telescoping and swelling to the size of tree branches, and the goblin lieutenant was carried by her outstretched fist through the wall and across the street, where he was crushed into the bookstore opposite the Copper Croc. Books, magazines, and news sheets fluttered in the air and drifted into the muddy puddles that pocked the street. Passing goblins screeched and howled at the sight of the outflung giant hand that had shattered one building and broken through the storefront of another. A carriage swayed as the saw-tusked boars drawing it squealed; one boar went left, the other went right, and the harness was torn asunder, leaving the two-wheeled carriage to roll backward over the unfortunate driver flung from the box seat.
When the fountaining giant flesh had stopped gushing, a giantess blocked the street on hands and knees, her lush skin now leathery, her blonde braids now as coarse as hempen rope, and her golden eyes, the molten pools that once stirred him to quench his lust, were now mottled surfaces as wide as melons, in which there was as much black, green, and red as gold. As Eurilda rose to her feet, her jetting sigh blasted through the concourse, sending more guards tumbling over each other and buffeting Khyte’s hair.
When Khyte first saw Eurilda snap back to her natural scale, they were scaling the wall of Lady Angwen’s arboretum, and when the guards closed in on them, she grew, swatted them with a pumpkin-sized fist, then swept Khyte up into the air and pumped madly as she sprinted twenty yards a second with that monstrous gait. The shock of her enlargement was more numbing than the pedantic explanation that the giantess was the reality, and the breasts and buttocks he had stroked were a diminutive, mystical veil over her true flesh, in which he would suffocate like a runt in a litter. Illusion, she elaborated, could subtract from reality as easily as add to it; just as she could make a chimera to delude sight, or make roses smell like rotten bananas, so she could remove the pillars of substance, like height, depth, or weight. Not that these ideas, nor these spells, were of her own making. Her master, Otoka the Wise, first taught shape- and size-changing spells so his apprentices might better serve him away from Uenarak, the isle of giants.
The realization that his lover was both giant and sorceress, dwarfing him physically, intellectually, magically, was an emasculating one, and that Khyte did not leave her for six months is no testimony to his character but to the appeal of the illusory sexuality she oozed as a human woman, and knowing that it was only a subtraction of scale, an addition of scents, and the manipulation of his sense of touch made him no less her thrall. Breaking free from Eurilda was a break not only towards freedom, but towards sanity.
The roof creaked, resting more on Eurilda’s back than the buckling walls. When Khyte and the goblin guards made for the hole in the wall, Eurilda seized Khyte with her other hand, and held him close to her abdomen as she stood, cracking the Copper Croc into rubble.
As goblins-at-arms deal with Nahure’s own native monsters, they were not untrained for this scenario. The strategies used for fighting wire giants treated each gigantic limb as one opponent, but rather than sectioning up the over-sized combatant like a side of beef, goblins would gang up on one or the other leg until it was incapacitated. At the sergeant’s coded order, the guardsmen surrounded her right ankle and, as one, hacked into her calf. She kicked out with the bleeding limb, sending one in a high arc over the city block to be pierced on a weather vane. Then she limped away, which, as a twenty-two foot tall giantess, she did as fast as a cantering horse.
“Eurilda,” Khyte whispered, not from discretion but from a squeeze far too hard. “You can’t win.”
“No goblin’s my match,” she said.
“You’re drunk, Eurilda.”
Though Khyte was sloshed and Eurilda a teetotaler, she knew his meaning. He meant she was so drunk with power the goblin city might soon be smashed. But if the giantess was a bull fenced in with tissue paper, she was in a city of toreadors, for goblins forge, own, and wield all known weapons. She would be a target for arrows, bolts, knives, javelins, and axes, as well as chased by goblins armed with poleaxes, broadswords, scimitars, and pikes. And if the Nahurians failed to score with steel, they’d send her to the grave with a nightcap of poisoned missiles or flammable cocktails.
When the ashen-faced Eurilda swayed, her hand shook, and Khyte shuddered half in sympathy for her gory calf, half in fear of being dropped or crushed under a woozy, wounded giant. When she began to babble syllables that meshed despite their meaninglessness, the spell shrunk her so fast that Khyte staggered when his feet touched the road, and she continued to shrink until she could look up to a doll.
Careful not to touch Eurilda’s wound, Khyte picked her up and sprinted do
wn an alley. After three days in the Abyss and crawling up and down mountains, and having overstayed his welcome in a restaurant much too fashionable for him, Khyte felt that he was back in the sordid element of his childhood in Drydana. He leaped over outstretched beggars, stumbled through musicians exiting a nightclub’s back door—causing a commotion of limbs and tinny retorts from instrument cases—and ran through alleys and warehouse lots before stopping at the wall of the gated residential district that held many well-to-do goblins, including the House of Hwarn, which had ancient crests, antique arms, heirloom armors, gargoyle-topped crypts, and two illustrious family members well known to Khyte: Huiln and Kuilea.
As Khyte wondered how to climb one-handed while bearing the wounded Eurilda, the diminished giantess spoke another abstruse series of glyphs, and the world’s weight sloughed away like cast-off scales. Shifting from one foot to the other, as people do while standing still, Khyte bobbed to the right several yards, and, after struggling to keep his feet, laughed like one intoxicated. Though familiar with this enchantment, as it was one of the substance-manipulating spells Eurilda mastered, he had missed the euphoria that freed mind and body. He backpedaled, drifting a yard each step, then sprinted into a running jump. Spell-assisted leaping was a different thrill from riding Baugn, as there was not only the apprehension of trusting to the leap, there was also the panic of gravity reasserting itself in a sudden landing. She had explained the science of leaping and falling until he understood it, so that he was even more cautious while fleeing with the wounded giantess. Since the spell subtracted weight, not mass, a reckless leap could break his arm or crush his face or skull, and mastering it meant falling on his feet, where the calves, shins, and balls of his feet could absorb the impact.
Khyte cleared the wall, landed in a rocky alley, then leaped atop a townhouse. Since goblins favor pyramidal roofs of painted slats, Khyte not only had to stick the landing, but clatter like a goat to the edge of the roof, where he leaped to the next house. When Khyte hoped that rooftop pedestrian traffic would be limited, he lied to himself, as a half-dozen chimney sweeps, thatchers, and painters stared at his rooftop run.
As the hour grew late and the radiation of the Abyss rested on the horizon, he could see street custodians lighting gas lamps with orange-tinted shades that filtered the goodwill out of Kreona. From above, it now seemed not only an evil city, but one cloaked in hypocrisy and falsehood. Not that he faulted the original builders, for they had favored the best available material, the grainy but granitic ilnu stone, for statues, public works, and long-lasting structures. Since good taste is no more common on the Goblin World than it is on any other, however, and as goblins are lovers of ornament, the manors were not naked stone, but ostentatiously clothed in tawdry wooden veneers depicting either a sentimental nature now found nowhere on the blighted Goblin World or other icons venerated only as ideas. Here a mansion had grotesque beasts painted on its walls; there a lord had commissioned a profuse forest that had not existed since antiquity; then there was House Hwarn, which even on Nahure was an oddity.
Compared to the newer foundations of its neighbors, House Hwarn was a colossus that sprawled for two blocks and partially spilled into bordering estates, as if expanding its dominion by willfully encroaching on its neighbors. Moreover, while House Hwarn’s cracked walls would suffer under the weight of any adornment, its anonymous architect was also a sculptor who labored to impress upon both its inner and outer walls a frieze unfolding the myth of the Three Sisters.
In the grooved statue work starting to the left of the gate, Lyspera’s spider body, falling through the Abyss, struck the darkness, cracked in two, and poured out her sisters along with the shadowy yolk, which oozed out from under them to claim the shape of a world from the darkness, a new created egg, Nahure. Although the details had been nearly smoothed away over the centuries, and would soon subside entirely into the decaying stone, by leaning in you could see that the Goblin World, along with four other newly hatched worlds, were fringed with eight legs, and they crawled along the trace of a massive web. This mythic work of mind-boggling abstractions wrapped around the outer wall until it returned to the right side of the gate, then started the second chapter on the inside of the outer wall. While the outside of House Hwarn itself depicted a third chapter about the bloody conquests of its founder, Huiln’s great-grandfather, the inside was left unfinished, and each generation was to engrave their own adventures. That Huiln’s father had not continued the narrative spoke either to his lack of vanity or his lack of respect for the divine and genealogical anachronisms that he had inherited. While Huiln was raised as a free thinker, with nothing stinted in his education, he had become obsessed by what his father had rejected, and knew the inscribed story by heart.
Khyte dropped over House Hwarn’s outer wall to the muddy yard and, seeing the lights off and shutters drawn, entered the veranda, where he laid Eurilda on one end of a wicker divan. As if holding on until that moment, the giantess fell asleep; Khyte’s weight came crushing back and Eurilda expanded to fill the divan. Though he knew her first and best in her human shape, at first Khyte thought it odd that she should return not to her natural giant stature. Why should unconsciousness end one spell and allow another to continue? He was distracted from these musings when he noticed blood soaking his leathers and cloak, as well as Eurilda’s boots, and none of it his own.
Khyte had nothing to treat a wound except water, but in Eurilda’s pack he found bottles of unknown oddments wrapped in cloth to prevent breakage. After he unwrapped them, he removed her boot and pants, washed the wound, then bandaged it with half of the cloth, reserving the other half to redress the wound. Then he sat on the couch’s opposite end, lifting Eurilda’s feet onto his lap. While waiting for his hosts, he considered that while they might have ulterior motives and not be as altruistic toward the dryad as Huiln pretended, they would still be willing to host Khyte, if decidedly less glad for his company after the events at the Copper Croc.
He awoke in the darkness, looked at the still-sleeping Eurilda, then turned away. It seemed only moments later that he smelled the welcome aroma of steak and eggs, and as he opened his eyes, his next thought was how rudely lit the veranda had become. The stormy evening surrendered to the crackling radiation of the Abyss rising in a cloudless sky. Though he closed his eyes, the eyeful of morning emblazoned his eyelids with a purple and red web, and when he opened them, the haze now reddened the yard, which grew in coarse patches besieged by muddy splotches and puddles spawning in clumps from the sinking wall.
Like House Hwarn itself, the grounds had seen better days. The fruit trees continued to yield shrivelled asurpu and seedless beludi as if in spite, for their roots could drink little with only their tips in the soil, and their gnarled, knotty bulk raised from the crumbly earth like spider legs. The shade trees now cast no unblemished shade, but crosshatched the ground with the silhouette of their brooding, skeletal crowns, which nonetheless still summoned nesting birds to their dead joints, where they sat on jellylike eggs, rasping at Khyte, and shaking the stunted wings they flapped ten times harder and faster than the sleek birds of Hravak. It was unlike him to have slept not only through the night, but far into morning.
He was sorry to have missed moonset, one of the few inspiring sights on a planet nearly leveled by its inhabitants. Just as to most in the Five Worlds a sun would be an occult idea roundly denied by all reasonable beings, so would most on Hravak contest the existence of moons, as only Nahure and Alfyria had them. In his youth, Khyte would have been one of the naysayers, until Frellyx led him to Nahure for a month of gambling and he saw the blunt fact of the Abyss-illuminated rock, glowing in the skies. Now he looked forward to moonrise and moonset on Nahure. The illumination of the goblin moon could best be seen in the late evening, after moonrise, and the early morning, before moonset, while during the day its light blended in with the background radiation of the Abyss.
“Help would be nice,” Kuilea said
through the kitchen window.
Khyte thought she must be speaking to her brother, or another of their house—he could never remember them all, only Huiln, Kuilea, and their large-breasted cousin, Veirana, whose name stuck when she contrived to block his way wherever he went in House Hwarn. When Kuilea rapped on the window, he couldn’t read her expression from the veranda’s shade, and didn’t know whether she was happy or resigned to see him.
“My muscles are unbearably stiff, or I’d be at your disposal,” he said. “Also, there’s the locks. I considered breaking a window, but feared my welcome may be wearing thin.”
“You’re always welcome here, brother,” said Kuilea. “But breakfast will be served at the table, not the veranda.”
Khyte mulled whether he should help or heed his plaintive bones. He yawned and looked at Eurilda, who slept restfully. He had expected to see her wounded leg’s dressing stained clear through, but the half-dingy scraps were stained with only a few dribbles of blood, and her unwrapped wounds showed only pink puckered lines. There was the uncomfortable sense he had already made this discovery, though the deja vu was dim, as if he remembered a road only traveled at night.
“I smell breakfast,” said the giantess, and gave Khyte a pensive look, as if she had been only pondering a mathematical proof and not sleeping the sleep of the dead.
A Spell Takes Root Page 5
