Eurilda interrupted. “We’re happy to have you as guide or observer, if it does not alter my terms with Ambassador Eidular.”
“He is the one who ordered me to assist you,” said Azuri.
“Where is this ladder? And is it a stepladder, a rope ladder, or an extension ladder?” Though Eurilda played nice, it was hard for Khyte to halt the momentum of his belligerence, and he still wanted to put Azuri through his paces.
“It’s a foot above your head.”
At first Khyte saw nothing—then, just above his upturned face, the diaphanous, nearly invisible, bottom rungs wafted into sight like floating smoke. Having reached overhead to grab the rungs, he glimpsed the entirety of the ladder, like a towering string, and in a semicircle behind it, the silhouettes of the other four worlds. The tower top, the black Abyss, and all of the Goblin World were engulfed by the incalculable magnitude of the ladder’s destinations. No longer certain if the embassy stones were under his feet, he let go, and fell flat on his back.
“You’re not ready.” Azuri stood over him. “If you had climbed one rung, you would have been long gone.”
Khyte wanted to ask, “How does it work?” but all that came out was:
“How?”
Azuri was either as unsophisticated as he looked or too honorable to have fun at Khyte’s expense. “I do not know,” he replied.
Khyte composed a scowl as he regained his feet. “Though it looks like a ladder, we move as fast as thought.”
“Faster,” said Eurilda. “Or we would die before we reach our destination. Even though that great speed transports us into the Abyss in a single second, it will take more than a day of constant climbing to reach Ielnarona.”
“No,” said Azuri. “Alfyria.”
Eurilda regarded the elf like something to clean from her boot, and as the tower roof had no ceiling to rein the giantess in, she had only to undo her diminishment to make this a reality. Though just as annoyed, Khyte watched her cautiously. Eurilda once flew into a rage when Khyte ordered her a drink, and he could only imagine what presumption on this scale would wreak. Even with a giantess on his side, he neither wanted to battle the Alfyrian embassy, which was less a political institution than a military fortress, nor to enter any fray with Azuri on the opposite side. Although the Alfyrian was not as large as the giantess in her natural state, Khyte felt the force of many battles in the way the elf glided in seventy pounds of armor as if in formal attire.
“For your sake, I hope you’re misinformed,” said Eurilda, “We’re returning Princess Inglefras to Ielnarona.”
“That is her ultimate destination,” said Azuri calmly, “but this ladder points to Alfyria, where the High Tzhurarkh will parade, fete, and pamper the princess before she blesses the prized flower of our realm, the Gulidian Cuoruch.”
“I’ve promised this young dryad she shall see her mother tomorrow,” said Eurilda.
“Forgive this deception,” Azuri said. “It was ordered. I could have lied, but chose the path of honor.” As soon as the elf said ‘deception,’ Khyte grabbed Inglefras’s hand and moved towards the stairwell entrance.
Just as he reached the door, another armored Alfyrian opened it. He was smaller and of lower rank, as if the Alfyrians doled out authority based on shoe size, but still a sight taller than the barbarian. “Commander,” the elf said, “goblins mob our doorstep.”
“How many?”
“I did not stop to count, commander. Dozens.”
“What do they want?” asked Azuri.
“They know we’re here,” said Khyte.
“Merculo has many spies, and that may be so. Climb. There is no time for instruction.”
“It’s a little too convenient,” said Eurilda. “If these spies have eyes on us, why not the ladder?”
“With the exception of my cook,” said Azuri, “whose loyalty I vouch for, we hire only elven staff. Undoubtedly, Merculo’s hirelings saw you enter, and now lay siege to demand your release. If we leave now, they may occupy our halls, but they will find nothing, leave empty-handed, and give the bureaucrats cause to file a grievance and collect some petty favor from Merculo.”
Khyte agreed with Eurilda that this seemed a contrived incentive to depart. But he preferred a forced vacation on Alfyria, inhospitable as the Elven World was, to an uneven battle and quick death long before the giantess succumbed to a hundred swords, whether they faced elven or goblin blades. Because of these considerations, Khyte lied, “I doubt they’d make that up. Let’s go before our heads are on the block.”
“I don’t think so.” Eurilda pointed at Azuri, who shrunk to less than ankle high. Then she stooped to pick him up and ripped his miniature sword from his belt. The shrunken elf’s squeaks were silenced by the grip of the sorceress, though he still tried to mouth his rage with breathless words, then gasped through the fear contracting his tiny, purple face.
Khyte counted the elf lucky, for Eurilda stomped her enemies flat whenever convenient, whether by shrinking them, or when she could get away with casting off her illusory humanity, by snapping back to full height and crushing them with her four-foot feet, as nature intended. If she spared Azuri, she either liked the elf, or thought to put him to use later.
When Khyte punched the other Alfyrian in his square jaw, the elf fell slack. Inglefras whispered and huddled against Khyte, and at the press of her body, he smelled the faintest trace of the bordello musk, tinged with a warm but wintry cinnamon, and an acrid hint of green onions.
Eurilda put the tiny elf in her pouch, double knotted the strings, and gave Azuri’s shrunken sword to Khyte. “Point it away from you. And me, fool!” When he did as she bade, she restored it to its natural size. This was not wholly good, as Azrui’s sword had a despicable edge and was ungainly slag compared to Khyte’s old blade. Though it would cleave armor better than a broken sword, at that moment Khyte wished for a sleeker weapon—to hurl at Eurilda.
He belted on the ugly sword. “What now?” he asked. When Eurilda brushed past Khyte into the stairwell, he stumbled into the doorjamb, and told himself that the next time she turned her back, he would slash free from his lingering enthrallment to the sorceress. When he steeled himself to this choice, he saw no reason to postpone this future, and reached for his sword hilt.
But as Inglefras’s eyes locked on Khyte’s, his hand stopped halfway, and the tension fell out of him, as if he stood waist-high in a glassy pool. In that moment, he felt a liquid connection, as if his mind and heart had melted, losing the shapes of his desires in the rush.
“Help me,” Inglefras whispered. “If you die, Eurilda will kill me.”
Unmanned, then armed, by his own terrors of Eurilda, Khyte’s will ebbed away, caught between the dryad’s musk and the shadow of the giantess. While Khyte had known women, he was a stranger to love, and did not understand this self-sacrificing urge to hurl himself at Eurilda, to cover Ingelfras, thinking only of her continuance, to fight not so that he could see a ripe old age but so that a weakling could see tomorrow. To slay himself for one so feeble and craven, who would surely die in her next mortal crisis, was less a good deed than a meaningless act. To Khyte, heroism felt like oblivion, like he was slipping away. It must be lust, he told himself, an attraction so strong that he did not know his own mind.
“I won’t allow it,” said Khyte, wishing his thought was deed, and the sorceress dead. As he imagined it, the giant corpse lay at the dryad’s feet, as if he was a pet fawning before its master.
“You can’t stop her,” she whispered. He was kneeling before the dryad, as if his daydream and his flesh were on the same strings.
Eurilda called up the stairs. “I hear fighting. That clod spoke true.”
“We must flee,” said Inglefras softly.
This tall order snapped Khyte back to himself; the only ways out were a stairwell crammed with elves and goblins or the tower’s half-dome open t
o the insanely crowded architecture of the Alfyrian embassy and a sheer drop.
Eurilda ran back up, with armored elves backpedaling behind her, as they furiously fought against an ascending wall of goblins. While the Alfyrians were armored and had the upper ground in a narrow stairwell, the Nahurians were many, favoring spears and halberds, which they used to grind against the elves’ advantages and gradually push them onto the roof.
Had Inglefras not told Khyte of her impending death at Eurilda’s hands, he would never have rested so much on such a slender hope. He climbed onto the narrow rim of the half-dome, pulling Inglefras with him.
“Stop!” said Eurilda.
I trust you, Eurilda,” Khyte lied, then grabbed Inglefras’s hand and jumped.
As wind gusted past, blood rushed into Khyte’s head and the taste of fear sprang into his mouth, and then they were spinning like maple seeds. As they were dropping when Eurilda’s lighten spell hit them, the energy of their fall had to go somewhere, so they skidded like skipped stones high above the embassy grounds, then were buffeted like snowflakes as they descended. The pinwheeling of their limbs and the spinning in his head made it impossible to see anything, and once they were on the ground, sprawling on all fours and panting with the struggle to regain their senses, it took Khyte nearly a minute before he could see what had happened to Eurilda.
Through a haze of wind, sprinkling rain, and his reeling vision, he saw the giantess, having abandoned her diminishment and boomed to her natural twenty-two feet, throwing and kicking goblins and elves alike from the roof, to fly through the air like cannonballs. The sky thickened with whistling, screaming bodies, and as her feet thundered, the tower shook and swayed. Though the clouds had only brought rain, Eurilda brought the storm.
When two armored elves flew past Khyte and Inglefras, barely missing them, it seemed the giantess not only regretted saving them but hoped to kill two birds with one stone. Khyte seized the dryad’s hand and sidestepped the lethal arc of hurtling elves, whose faces, still wrinkled from the shock of the blow, when new ripples of fear were blotted by the splash of elf on stone.
“Don’t look,” said Inglefras, but Khyte was already laughing at the elves’ brief careers as missiles with a mixture of gleeful schadenfreude and good-humored pity., He then met the dryad’s gaze and forgot all about them. In this sobering stare, Khyte remembered that sorcery rarely outlives a sorcerer, and determined they should exploit Eurilda’s lightening before she was slain in battle or by the collapsing tower.
“Inglefras,” he began, panting, “while this spell is on us, we can not only fall with little harm, but also leap extremely high.”
“Why must I know this, when you will carry me?”
Khyte picked up Inglefras and fled. Despite their negligible weight, their size and mass remained, and running and jumping while carrying a dryad was an awkward and unbalanced effort until he found the trick, which was not to carry her flopping over his shoulder, but to hold her in a close embrace, running nearly face to face, so that their combined mass became an asset for sticking his landings.
When solving this problem cleared his mind a little, he wondered why he was doing her bidding. He couldn’t call it love, never having been struck by that ailment, and yet there was a persuasive vulnerability about Inglefras. More likely, he was ensorcelled. Not that it was the first time—he had long suspected Eurilda made him her fool not with natural attributes, of which she had none, given that her human dimensions were fabrications, but with enhanced allure and added charms. She hadn’t attracted him so much as summoned him into love, and even though he loathed her, he still felt this unnatural undertow. Knowing more than one sorcerer by reputation and one giant sorceress by long acquaintance may have ruined Khyte for others’ company, as now he was likely to suspect every perception and every feeling were revisions of a sorcerous hand.
Goblins that had been running from the hail of elves now pointed towards the embassy. Still carrying the dryad, Khyte turned to see the giantess midair. As the embassy’s topmost tower was several hundred feet high, the leap should have ended in a fatal plunge even at Eurilda’s stature. However, compounded with enchanted near-weightlessness, the leap stretched over a long row of manors, and when she landed, the ground only trembled. While the stunted city was spared the wallop of a falling giant, the goblins reeled from the impact of witnessing her sorcery, and when she shrank from view beyond the walled manors, their hushed gossip began to roar with speculation.
It was dizzying to watch the giantess, who had such authority over the real world that she could shrink herself or a foe, enlarge, discard her weight, and vanish. How could she remain rational, immersed in this mutability? The clay of Khyte’s mind had been squashed and reshaped once too often by arrogance coupled with magical and giantish manhandling, so that his heart had hardened into obdurate hatred, and he had nearly put his sword in her back. Those that did not know her, like the Kreonans agog at her impossible feat, could easily revise their memory to call it a cloud, a flock of Baugn, or a trick of the Abyss, but Khyte had to accept that he did not have a grip on reality in the face of Eurilda’s pervasive manipulation. He’d had enough: sanity demanded satisfaction.
“Where is she?” asked Inglefras as they pushed into the crowd. If not for this princess, he would have slain Eurilda; thinking this, his affection for the dryad increased.
“Eurilda changes scale like we change shirts,” he said. “She likely went down a size.”
“I doubt she changes a shirt quite like I do,” said Inglefras
When Khyte stifled a snicker, she seized his wrists and pulled him down a side street with surprising strength. In the dark alley, the flaring petals of her eye blossoms fluttered, and Inglefras clung to Khyte, her touch climbing like a vine up forearms, ribs, chest, the soft flesh of his neck, his furling, ruffled hair, and everywhere she touched stirred as if by a warm breath, flushing or shivering, snared by lush, pliant dryad. At his quiver, she swooned in to be clasped by his shaking arms.
“Why do you wait?” she asked. “On my world you will rest. In my grove you will be satisfied. In me you will have your reward.”
“Inglefras—”
“Now that my time is short, I will trust only you.”
If her voice was dulcet, it was less honeyed than saccharine, one too many spoons of sugar, and if he was not in tune to her every step, stirred by her every whisper, and so snarled by desire that his head swayed tracking her every gesture, he might find her cloying tones nauseating, her mincing steps tedious, her subtleties overwrought. Even enflamed by lust and magic, Khyte could see she was a vain, silly flower who on Nahure could only hope that the next goblin who potted her cared more for exotic plants than for exotic women. “Your time will not be cut short, Inglefras,” he replied.
“Even a queen in spun silk is a cobweb to the gods,” said the dryad. “I will live until I am brushed away, and there is nothing you can do about it.”
“If you believe that, what do you want from me?”
“My fate is on Ielnarona, Khyte. You must take me home. And do it quickly. The giantess must not find us.”
Khyte was torn: though loathing and fear overwhelmed his friendship for the arrogant sorceress, she was once his world, and leaving her battered and scarred to fend for herself was faithless to this remembrance. “Are you sure she intends you harm?” he asked. “Great strength can be useful in an escape.” Inglefras did not notice when Khyte led her down a cross street that bent to parallel with streets in the vicinity of Eurilda’s fall.
“Yes, I’m certain,” she said.
“Where’s your proof?”
“Though that word is not native to dryad language, we imported it as a slur to mark double-talk. To dryads, what is in us is the factual, and we need not measure the world to be certain of our senses and feelings. As you also act from your heart, you might have a lot in common with dryads, Khyte.”
“My heart does nothing without my strong sword arm, and desire is nothing without strength of will. Though many lose what one wins in the battleground of desire, the fool follows his heart. And the war of desire is unending, so that the conquered battle over the consolation after the conqueror takes home the prize. What do you do when two dryads feel differently?”
“This rarely happens, as the lowborn model their feelings on the highborn. While on Nahure or Hravak, everyone desires what is best for themselves, on the Dryad World, the lesser desire to better the greater.”
“And a princess presumes how the lowborn feel. Are they really happy to receive their opinions from above, or do you have rebellions, revolutions, and wars?”
“Rebels we call iconoclasts, and uproot those whose lies become seditious.”
“Uproot? Is that exile or death?”
“To a dryad, it is one and the same. As with war, a word in our tongue that can be nuanced to mean “nature.” As we hold war to be in our nature, our conflicts are smaller. When two highborn disagree, their peoples go to war, and the remaining highborn await the outcome.”
While it seemed repellent that the lowborn might die to settle a grudge between two aristocrats, Khyte understood how disagreement led to bloodshed, as Drydanan thanes, earls, and kings committed warriors to whatever cause they wanted—often with very little cause. That said, it was rare for a thane not to take vengeance with his own fists when there was only one laughing head to punch. It was simply a matter of scale: the Drydanan code accepted dueling and boxing as an honorable way to establish justice, while the Dryad World magnified infighting to the grander, pettier level of institutional feuding.
“Your rescue might cause war,” he said.
“Why?”
“Those who benefit from your absence will resent your return.”
A Spell Takes Root Page 12
