Fallowblade (33 page)

Perhaps they heard not, but they felt the blast of the freezing wind that came rushing out of the north, smiting them all like the breath of absolute Winter. It quelled their hot battle rage. Then the conflict ceased, for the warriors of goblinkind left off their battering and the kobolds followed suit. Fighters both mortal and immortal drew apart—the former carrying their wounded with them—leaving the ground littered with the fallen.

Asr
ă
thiel let the summoned wind go barrelling away, and as the roar of it died, she sighted the goblin king. He looked at her steadily for an instant. Meeting his cruel violet gaze without unflinching she cried passionately, ‘Let them be. You have done enough!’

She said it with some confidence, for, during the brief conflict she had been thinking quickly and had arrived at the same conclusion as Conall Gearnach; namely, that there was a chance that even if their human foes broke the terms of the covenant the wights would not revenge themselves as drastically as they had implied.

Then came another hiatus when nothing moved except the wind-stirred heather and a meteor sizzling across the black heavens. Even the piteous groans of the stricken seemed to grow fainter. At the third and possibly the final juncture, the representatives of humankind and the prosecutors of unseelie wickedness waited upon the verdict of Zaravaz.

He made no comment in answer to Asr
ă
thiel’s plea, but instead swung himself upon the back of his daemon horse and rode up to her.

‘Spare them,’ she repeated.

‘Will you go or will you stay?’ he enquired.

‘I will go with you. I have promised.’

He smiled.

At this, the urgency of the situation unaccountably fled from Asr
ă
thiel’s consciousness. ‘But have you,’ she said, growing dizzy and unable to think with clarity, ‘no quiz for your third guest?’ as soon as she uttered the words she wished she could unsay them. She thought,
I am raving like some discomposed flirt, like some infatuated idiot! And on a bloody theatre of war, and to this unpardonable avenger!

Leaning from his trollhäst, Zaravaz stroked her hair. A stab of unspeakable intensity speared through her, and whether she had spoken foolishly or not ceased to matter. This close, his breath was so fragrant that the winds must be in love with it.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I have just asked it.’

Then his steed, and hers, wheeled and sprang forward, and the unseelie horde followed, and without causing any further harm the Silver Goblins with their living booty passed from the view of humankind into the shadow of night.

After their departure, William and his comrades hastened back to their fortresses and armouries. They prepared in secret to ride in pursuit of the goblin contingent, their purpose being to rescue Asr
ă
thiel. Much of the populace mourned the fallen, while others celebrated with wild delight, for the unseelie threat had apparently vanished, and the Marauders had dispersed to their remote caverns, and a fragile peace seemed ready to settle upon the four kingdoms at long last.

But Zaravaz the goblin king, whose hair was blacker than calumny, led the unseelie hordes northwards at preternatural speed; past the dim marches of the Wuthering Moors, across the River Clearwater at the ancient stone bridge, through the town of Paper Mill, and over the Harrowgate Fells to the foothills of the Northern Ramparts. Ahead of them the mountains, great, strong, enduring bones of the land, were flung up against the sky. So high they loomed that the clouds settled about their shoulders and their snowy peaks were lost to view. Further that cavalcade pressed onward into the bitter north, for they passed beneath the shadows of the mountains and climbed beyond, and ultimately Zaravaz led them high into the icy fastnesses of the high latitudes, to the fabled halls where he reigned as Mountain King.

A
cross the entire sky constellations, heart-piercingly pure, glittered against a ceiling of hyacinthine mystery, as if caught in some intricate mesh. The stars silently radiating their splendour sparkled as brilliantly at the zenith as at the outer fences of the world. Presently a glow opened on the horizon behind the ranges, like the radiance from a city lit with white-flamed torches. Soon it brightened, impossibly, as if an argentine bonfire of gigantic dimensions had been kindled. A tiny arc of silver ascended, growing to become a semicircular disc. The moon had risen. Outlined against its pure luminosity, frozen mountain peaks raked the night sky, jagged as smashed crystal.

The journey across many leagues seemed hardly to take any time at all. Asr
ă
thiel was aware only of a billion sidereal lamps wheeling above her head, while all else moved slowly, as if the world fell gently through a syrup of dark wine spiced with scintillants. She slept or dozed, at whiles, fastened by gramarye upon the back of the daemon horse, lapped by the cool aquamarine lambency of its mane, rocked like a child in a cradle. She had never imagined such refined movement; fluid, elegant and mellifluous, gentle as a breeze caressing blossom, but nimble as light. All the momentous events that had recently occurred and that currently unfolded seemed distant in time and place. As before, a type of detachment overwhelmed her. Temporarily, at least, inquisitiveness seemed to have drained from her conscious mind. The effects of the past anxiety-fraught weeks—the nights of scant sleep, the conflicts, the responsibilities, the urgency—had caught up with her. Now it was all over. Behind her lay places to which she no longer belonged, and people she had lost; before her lay places and beings unknown, but she was numb to all that. Her exhaustion of spirit was such that she must succumb to the opium of drowsiness. Lulled by the rhythmic gait of her steed, she accepted the ride amongst the eldritch chivalry, without any urge to ask where they were going or what would happen when they arrived. Let the future wait—it was out of her hands in any event.

They had reached the Northern Ramparts. Supernaturally surefooted, the trollhästen galloped thousands of feet up the steep and pathless mountain slopes as if they negotiated a level plain, finding purchase where no purchase could possibly be, climbing slopes at impossible angles; surely their hooves must be as adhesive as their hides. Slender and fine were they in build, but their eldritch energy seemed inexhaustible.

Amidst soaring crags the goblin knights rode in procession across a level terrace that gave onto an extraordinary bridge. Slender and transparent, it seemed fashioned of glass. Asr
ă
thiel wondered how such a fine, attenuated structure, whose stanchions resembled icicles dripping from a twig, could hold the weight of such a considerable cavalcade. Beneath the bridge a crevasse plunged to unthinkable depths: there cloud-spectres twined with entombed shadows in valleys never touched by sunlight. A ravening gale blasted out of that chasm, so powerful and swift that any mortal horse would have been blown aside like thistledown.

She looked up.

High amongst the gables of icy Storth Cynros—the tallest and most central of all the mountains—a fabulous semi-subterranean city concealed its marvels from the world. Built in ages past, this citadel of the Silver Goblins was all spires and starlight, eyries and lofty halls, glittering with ancient jewels delved from beneath the mountains. Its turrets were wrapped in mists, its roofs spangled with snow; its gorgeous walls hewn from sparkling basalt. Its galleries broke through the heights where the views were most breathtaking. To this remote and secluded fastness the goblin horde and their haughty chieftain were bringing their three human tributes.

Ahead of them loomed a pointed archway as high as a fully grown poplar tree; a grand entrance into the hillside.

‘What is this place?’ asked Asr
ă
thiel.

‘Sølvetårn,’ said a voice nearby, although she could not tell to whom it belonged. ‘Though mankind’s legends name it Minith Ariannath, the Silver Mountain.’

Halfway across the bridge, the knight Zauberin, who was riding beside the kobold that bore Uabhar on its back, tore something from the dethroned king’s belt and tossed it into the abyss. Asr
ă
thiel watched a leather purse go hurtling down, to be quickly swallowed in the steaming cauldron.

‘That was the Sylvan Comb!’ she murmured, half aware.

Zaravaz rode a short distance ahead of her. ‘I daresay ’twill lie in some forgotten niche until the end of time,’ he said over his shoulder, ‘or else some human fool will find it, and cause more mischief. Either way, I care little.’

It seemed an ignominious fate for such an improbable thing.

Their road passed beneath the archway and on into the mountain’s interior. As they travelled deeper into the citadel, Asr
ă
thiel, roused by wonder, stared about. The ingenious engineering, the delicacy of architecture, the spectacular ornamentation, the grace and vastness and cold splendour of Sølvetårn astounded her. Never had she imagined such a sight. Stairs of hailstone spiralled to lofty pinnacles. Glittering cobwebs draped pointed archways, apses and traceried windows. Fire and water adorned the caverns: columns of flaming gases flaring up to ceilings too high to be descried; cascades of chthonian water streaming down to the many levelled floors, their tumult echoing from wall to wall. Deep dived the caverns of Sølvetårn, yet they were airy and elegant, upheld by fluted columns, traversed by airy, suspended ways and seemingly fragile spans and stairs. Cleverly positioned mirrors conveyed reflections of moonlight therein, and torches flamed like luteous flowers. It was an architecture of translucent glass and ice, pale limestone and stalactites, flashing diamonds and crystal, laced through with waterfalls, lakes and underground rivers.

Presently the weathermage’s attention was drawn to the two other human captives, who were being carried away down a glistening vaulted corridor in another direction, their wails ignored.

‘Where are they going?’ she asked Zaravaz.

‘To a place of sighs.’

Envisioning her fellow hostages suffering some appalling torment she said, ‘I ask you, sir, to grant them clemency.’

‘Daughter of Rowan Green,’ said her host, concentrating his violet gaze upon her, ‘it is twice that I have shown extraordinary mercy, of recent times; thrice if you count my asking ransom for your kingdoms. Once when the man William Wyverstone, perhaps blinded by an excess of philanthropy, attempted to negotiate terms against my express wishes. Again when the man Conall Gearnach, perhaps blinded by a misguided sense of honour, assailed my
graihyn
as we departed. It has not been easy for me to show such unwonted tolerance. Do not ask it of me a third time.’ He smiled dazzlingly at her. ‘Besides, how can you know what fate I have in store for you? Would you not rather make a hoard of your clemency pleas? You yourself might soon need to beg for my leniency.’