No, the most disgusting Nahurian food animal was so foul that Khyte had allowed himself to forget about them until now. In the stalls radiating around a domed factory shining with steel warehouse doors, were ooiro, huge worms, studded with teats, that resembled nothing more than soft, fatty, goosepimpled skin that had grown into cucumber shapes nine feet long.
This cheesery tapped them with a dozen brass siphons and the disgusting beasts collaborated by rolling different patches of swollen nipples to the sucking pipes to release their pent-up milk. On the rustic farm Huiln and Kuilea had taken him to on his previous journey to Nahure, the farmer had worked each teat painstakingly by hand, until he had filled three black iron cauldrons.
“Huiln—what are they?” Khyte had asked.
“The ooiro.”
Khyte had repressed an urge to gag, for the literal translation of ooiro was “milk-beast.”
“Please tell me you’re joking.”
“Is your stomach so weak, Khyte?” Huiln had said.
While the leaner ooiro tangled in the torturous dairy machinery before them now were so responsive that they sought out the sucking pipes energetically, the ooiro on the farm had been grossly obese, smothered in mud, and dead to the farmer’s hands. They looked more like jiggling gray jellies than living things. As nausea had washed over him, so had confusion, because he hadn’t understood what made his gorge rise.
“By now, Khyte has drunk gallons of ooiro milk, and eaten heaps of ooiro cheese.” Seeing Khyte’s discomfort, Kuilea had smiled and continued. “Perhaps it is only his niggling human tastes that shrink from our delicacies, brother. I have always found them delicious served in a broth of their own milk.” Even in this reminiscence, the thought of worms stewed in their own milk was so nauseating that Khyte nearly lost his breakfast. While he wanted to disillusion the giantess so that she might share his discomfort, surely a princess need not know the source of the offensive smell, nor the grotesque purpose of the ooiro. He held his tongue until they had passed the food district, and they stood overshadowed by the gigantic building of interlocked towers erected on a series of terraces.
“No goblin lives here.” Khyte’s eyes followed the lines of the structure to be thwarted by tower roofs connecting in flagrant disregard of their parallel foundations. Having often been to Alfyria with Frellyx, elven architecture no longer astonished him, but he remained puzzled by the impossibilities that their buildings posed. While goblins built in three dimensions, they only built to one story, and would build in two creeping dimensions if they could satisfy their fears of heights and open spaces, by slicing away the depth that made all things grow; while humankind built monsters of wood and stone, these gigantic castles, temples, dams, and bridges respected their own lines, and did not breed with their architectural neighbors the way the elves did.
At first, the architectural colossus seemed an acropolis, with each of its towers taking a foothold on a series of terraces, but as he drew nearer, the layers dissolved, and the embassy unfolded before his bold but incredulous stare, defying not only the limits of vision but the rules of reality. Though each tower seemed built to the same scale on neighboring terraces, each of which jutted several feet higher, the staggered structures nonetheless stretched to a point of union as if they followed another line of depth that he could not see. Somehow, these vertical and parallel towers were knotted in the same space. It was as if the laws of nature were skewed on the Elven World, and here, on their embassy grounds.
While the fragmented space was the primary difference, the elves’ grounds contrasted with Kreona in other ways, such as the glimmering pool excavated at the base, and the fragrant trees joining the smell of stone and metal. What was not unreal in the embassy was very real, and in the place of false trees there were real Alfyrians ones, which sprouted strangely in the goblin soil, mazes of branches filling bristling, leafy cubes.
While the vast edifice no doubt sent the weaker-minded running in flight—goblin foot traffic was very light—on any world, it would be an ostentatious architectural achievement and a mind-boggling brag of intellectual gifts. Having traveled to the Elven World, Khyte knew Alfyrian architecture when he saw it. Unlike the goblins, whose cultural shortsightedness was limited to family bonds, food love, and fulfilling their urges, the vain and petty elves believed those on other worlds their crooked reflections who needed straightening by examples of superior conduct.
“I’ve only ever liked one elf,” said Khyte.
“And you’re the only human I can stand, and only about half the time,” replied Eurilda.
Inglefras’s face had dulled, like damp bark, and her floral eyes and eyelashes—a pistil and stamen structure that baffled and fascinated Khyte, who only knew the nomenclature of plants as far as seed, stem, and flower—looked half-wilted, but she had stopped mewling. “If humans fight this much,” she murmured, “I prefer goblins.”
“I am not human,” said Eurilda, her voice high and shrill, raising Khyte’s hackles.
“Aren’t you the same? I mean apart from your seed apparatus.”
“My what?” Eurilda and Khyte blurted simultaneously.
“Never mind. Will I like them?” asked Inglefras.
“No,” said Khyte. “Alfyrians are snobs, opiate dealers, and slave traders.”
“Alfyrians outlawed slavery fifty years ago,” said Eurilda. “Khyte doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”
“Though they honor the letter of a treaty, they have other ways of trading in freedom, Inglefras. If they offer you refreshment, don’t partake.”
Inglefras laughed. “You know little about dryads.”
“I don’t deny it.”
“The dryad body on our world needs no solid food; like trees, those bodies sustain themselves with soil, light, water, and air.”
“You don’t eat,” said Khyte, thinking that this peculiarly verbose dryad reminded him of his other friends. Since all he had for his pains was a half-crushed crown that might sell for the metal value, and the ruby-tipped wand that Sarin Gelf mentioned was likely equal parts rumor and fantasy, Khyte hoped her grand manner corresponded to a rich payoff.
“Here my rootless body enjoys more frequent meals to replace what dryads take from the soil on my world. Not that I eat at the human or goblin pace—where do you put so much food in so little time? It’s a wonder Nahure isn’t nibbled away. In any event, as I ate the day before last, Alfyrian delicacies won’t tempt me.”
When Eurilda led them to the embassy gate, and the guards waved them in without identification or introduction, Khyte brooded that not only must the giantess have an abettor at the embassy, but the barbarian had played into her plans to rescue the dryad.
“I’m uncertain how it will play out,” said Eurilda, as if reading Khyte’s mind. “While your efforts are appreciated, you may have little more to contribute.” When the elves flanking the door bowed with elegant comportment, sweeping their arms in a flourish that swung the double doors inward, Khyte’s brooding shifted. While he hated Alfyria, his dislike didn’t extend to individual elves. Not only was his best friend an elf, but he might have served as a study in the elven figure, for while Frellyx was built just above the elven norm—a head taller than Khyte and half again as broad—he was a peerless exemplar of elven arrogance and aloofness.Khyte had rescued Frellyx from Lord Ryggion’s dungeons, and surely death at Khyte’s own hands, for all whom Ryggion imprisoned there soon fell under the blade of Khyte’s headsman’s axe. Frellyx’s crime in Ryggion’s eyes? Being his arrogant and overweening self. Khyte could not help but laugh at the insult, less in its content than in the panache of its delivery, which showed that the elf had mastered not only the Drydanan language but its idioms in a few days. Languages were the simplest of puzzles to the elves, who thrived in cities where parallels touched, triangles had more than three sides, and a cube was nothing but an atomistic multitude of spheres.
Individually, elves were not only fascinating, they were admirable; elves not only knew everything, they did everything well. As a species, however, or even only as an embassy, elvenkind was like a reef crawling not only with its own incomprehensible, higher-order symmetry, but with radiant sharks stuffed so full of their own superiority that they might not deign to see you, much less devour you. While Khyte had never felt threatened or intimidated on the Elven World, neither had he ever felt safe. Everywhere he looked, madness was crowding in the corner of his eye.
An Alfyrian guard led them up flight after flight to the top of the terraced towers. More than three Alfyrians could walk the stairs abreast, with ascending and descending traffic. Those in robes moved gracefully, and those in armor clanked along more surely, clearing two or three steps with each stride. While the guards were helmeted or hooded, the dignitaries and functionaries wore their long emerald, violet, golden, or azure hair in various styles, from coifs to braids. There were those greener than dryads or goblins, some of a rich golden hue, and others a peach white both paler and livelier than the whitest humans or giants, As Nahure spun to the night side of the Abyss, emerald green rods in sconces illuminated the stairwell. Khyte hadn’t seen this kind of everyday magic since his first and only visit to Alfyria, and he wondered not for the first time why elves guarded the trick of illumination as jealously as the secret of prolonging life. Although it was marvelously useful for intellectual work in a sleepless embassy staffed by scribblers and their vigilant guard, the spell itself, Khyte imagined, could not be anything so remarkable.
While the embassy was an orderly web of stone outside, inside it was a tangle, for upon entering one room you would leave through another, as if navigating not rooms but a pure geometry unfolding a union of space only elves could perceive, a unified work and living place only they could appreciate. The route took precedence over the room, as if the architect only allowed them reluctantly as termini from which the route branched, circulating the occupants through a web of steps, ramps, and corridors that they technically never left the stairwell but followed a meandering path that embraced the entire series of terraced towers. When Khyte looked down from the crenellated crown of the third tower, he had no recollection of crossing from the first or the second.
The walkway circled pools serving no purpose other than beauty, being mere vessels of lambent, pellucid water and nothing more—no fountains, no plants, and no swimming creatures. Would an elf understand an aquarium? Khyte wondered. Or would their eyes dart past the fish and seaweed to the water and the glass? If this insane building measured the elves’ values, then they focused not on life, like humans, but on the material universe.
Elven harpists. lutists, and enchanted automatons serviced every corner with lilting music, with the loudest and most persistent melody stemming from the monstrous, humming steam organ that pierced through three levels of the fifth and sixth towers. This appeared to be serviced by the Nahurian vikiri network, the system of steam pipes that goblin operators manipulated to send messages.
“I have to admit,” Eurilda said with a tone of grudging admiration, “they’re using all of the goblins’ public works with more efficiency, then going on to repurpose those systems for art. The pools were filled by the Nahurian waterworks, and those quartz sculptures in the first tower were suffused with their steady glow by siphoning the goblins’ gaslamp network.”
“Won’t that cause a risk of fire somewhere along the line?” asked Inglefras. “And won’t these tunes disrupt the goblins’ messages?”
“Who’s afraid of a little noise? Not the elves,” said Eurilda.
“What does that mean?” said Inglefras. “Must you speak so obliquely?”
“I mean only that they’re not King Merculo’s subjects,” Eurilda said with a scornful sneer. “Neither am I yours. While I have a weakness for an excited audience, don’t think that I answer to you, either here or on any world.”
While Inglefras kept her chin raised high, her eye blossoms contracted as she shrank from Eurilda. As she huddled against Khyte, she shook and shivered, but from fear or frustration he could not tell. When her step quickened as they continued down the milling halls of the Alfyrian embassy, it was the surprisingly strong dryad that soon pulled Khyte along.
Ferried on at a half-run by the milling diplomats, they passed through facing rows of desks manned by scribes, some rustling scrolls while others jotted and scribbled at an elven speed, as if the strange dynamism of the building compelled them to urgency. Khyte was bewildered—had they intruded on some quiet work station? When he stopped in bemusement, the hustling crowd shot past him, carrying Inglefras and Eurilda several strides before they turned to Khyte. The corridor bridge, seemingly made of windows welded together end to end, continued to a distant door. Not only the walls were fused windows, but the roof, through which the Abyss light shimmered, and floor, through which the roof of the third tower rose to meet the smudged, well-trodden glass. Having economized every inch to serve this glass and steel web, the architect left no private place in the entire embassy, and the elves had do work while mobbed by passersby.
Khyte snorted at the ridiculousness of the elven work ethic, which elevated work but did not respect the workmen. In making their scribes part of the visible “machinery,” so to speak, they could never do quality work, but only ever be engines of productivity.
“It’s marvelous,” said Inglefras. Despite her praise, her tone was even and matter-of-fact, and she gazed at the awesome architectural array with calm aplomb, as if numbering it in a private catalog of wonders.
“You would like it,” fumed Eurilda.
“Don’t you? It’s quite an accomplishment.”
“An accomplishment in arrogance.”
“Those who don’t feed ambition feed baser appetites. I don’t need to tell you that feeding is the only absolute.”
“What is that supposed to mean?” Eurilda demanded.
“Only that we must live, so there is nothing wrong in living beautifully as the elves do.”
“Should we be shouting at the dryad princess?” asked Khyte.
“She hasn’t heard shouting yet,” groused Eurilda. “She’d wilt if I shouted at the top of my lungs.”
“My name isn’t ‘dryad princess,’” said Inglefras. “Should I call him ‘human swordsman’ and you—well, whatever are you, if not human; how about ‘angry witch’? Not very flattering, is it?”
Khyte ignored the dryad and glared at Eurilda. “Huiln or Kuilea don’t figure into your endgame?”
“They didn’t figure into yours.”
“I had cause: Their scheme with Sarin Gelf doesn’t include me.”
“Don’t you mean either of us? Even so, we know their objective. Gelf the moneygrubber only counts coin.”
“Or Huiln played him, too,” said Khyte.
“Are they all so big?” Inglefras asked, as they strode through a hall bustling with towering, robed functionaries. Even these sedentary elves were a head taller than Khyte, and the Alfyrian guard that led them was a hand taller than that and twice as broad. All were long-haired, with wispy beards dotting their chins, but there were violet-, emerald-, and golden-haired Alfyrians, as if they bred out any mundane color that occurred in nature.
“They aren’t so big,” said Khyte, laughing. “Our monster could crush them flat.”
Inglefras frowned. “Having seen your handiwork, human, I won’t make light of your prowess, but why brag when anyone can see that Alfyrians dwarf goblins, dryads, humans—and whatever she is.”
“Yes, whatever she is,” said Khyte. “I never said I was the monster.”
“The monster,” said Eurilda, “would find these stone towers a tight fit.”
“My lord,” called out their escort, as they walked onto the roof. Though the topmost tower was crowned with a half-domed amphitheater open to cold, starless night, they could see b
y the emerald green torch-rods ensconced in the curved half wall. The Alfyrian lord’s arms may have rippled less than Khyte’s, but the difference in proportion was so great that the elf’s muscles bulked much larger. His goatish chin beard was hacked short, unlike the others in the embassy, and, along with his shoulder-length hair, was shock white.
“I am Azuri. I will provide the guidance you seek,” he said.
Khyte considered this. “Just us? You’re short in students because you tutor in ladders, long-shanks.” Though he only wormed a snort of laughter from Eurilda and the elves and the dryad remained impassive, Khyte enjoyed every chance to belittle an elf.
“There are dangers when using our ladders,” said Azuri, looking down his nose at Khyte.
“I’ve traveled the Five Worlds,” returned the barbarian. “I know the Abyss.”
“On Baugn, yes? Not by ladder.”
“I’ve climbed ladders, stairs, cliffs, and trees—no innuendo intended about present company,”—here he glanced at the dryad—“and the principle can be no different with your magical ladder.”
“Infants that climb stairs cannot scale mountains,” said Azuri. “Just as an articulate wag may not be intelligent.” Eurilda and Inglefras snickered. “A Baugn’s back beneath you, and its head before you, are reassuring fixed points in the hurtling Abyss. But the Ladder flings you rung to rung as fast as Baugn fly, and this plays tricks on you: up looks like down, climbing feels like falling, and the unending, hypnotic rungs bring exhaustion and euphoria. Physical stamina alone will not get you to the other side; you must also armor your judgment and arm your wits.”
“Consider me advised,” said Khyte, “but still, now that I know these things—”
“You still know nothing,” Azuri interjected. “Think of the road between Kreona and Julaba like a scroll laid flat, and the migration of Baugn between worlds like the scroll rolled up, bringing the most distant points near by virtue of their blinding speed. In climbing an Alfyrian Ladder, you wad up the scroll, so every point on its crumpled surface touches at once.
A Spell Takes Root Page 11
