Fallowblade (35 page)

As she moved to examine another section the flicker of an unlikely shadow on the opposite wall startled her. Hearing a low moan she turned around quickly, raising the cresset high, expecting to behold some stooping, limping trow that had been stalking her.

A human man was standing there.

The man cringed from the torchlight, squinting as if unaccustomed to brightness. Asr
ă
thiel’s sudden indrawn breath was a hiss that echoed in the tunnel’s quietude.

‘Who are you? What are you doing here?’

This was indeed an unexpected meeting. Aside from the two miserable hostages of Zaravaz, the damsel had presumed she was the only other human being in the citadel. This man was fair-haired, with watery eyes the bluish hue of diluted milk. Stringy was his visage, gaunt his slouching frame. His short-cropped hair was flaccid, greasy and wispy. He might have lived through forty Winters, perhaps, but they must all have been exceptionally hard. Beneath the ingrained filth his flesh was as pale as the tentacles of a deep-sea cephalopod. He was dressed in dirty rags, and his hands—his hands! Those appendages were no longer anything partly human. Hard and blackened, they looked like charred hen’s feet.

‘Who are you?’ Asr
ă
thiel questioned again, somewhat in alarm.

‘The light, the light,’ murmured the man, lifting his elbow as if to ward off an attack. He stepped backwards.

Likewise Asr
ă
thiel retreated with the torch, so that a veil of twilight shifted and settled around the fellow. ‘Is that better? Tell me who you are.’

After a few abortive attempts to form words the man mumbled, ‘I am hardly recalling my name.’ He drooled, speaking disconnectedly as if he were half-asleep, or as if his tongue had thickened in his mouth, or he had forgotten how to talk. Asr
ă
thiel thought his accent sounded familiar.

‘Are you a captive of the goblins? Do they keep you imprisoned?’

‘I cannot find the way out.’

The fellow’s whining, unctuous tone made Asr
ă
thiel’s skin crawl. He was less a man than some horrid wormlike monster, a sham of a human being slithering in the nethermost regions of the underworld. She thought he might be partially blind; his eyes had a burned and weeping look. Stains of old blood dribbled down his cheeks.

‘Are you human?’ It was wise to make sure.

‘Once I was.’

‘If you once were, so you must still be, for it is not possible to change that.’
At least
, the damsel thought,
I have always believed that it is not possible. Am I still human?

‘I have not seen the sky for many years,’ mumbled the creature with the hands of an aged corpse.

‘Who brought you here? Was it the goblins?’

‘No, a man. A vile man. He buried me alive.’

‘But you survived!’

‘Yes I survived,’ said the pale fellow. ‘And I delved. And I found something.’

He might be deluded. He might have dreamed he found some item of importance, though alighting on a stone. Still, in a place like this there must be plenty of secrets to stumble upon.

‘What did you find? Bones? Jewels?’

‘I found
them
.’ Wrapping his skinny arms about his chest the man whimpered, ‘Cold. My ribs be a-cold.’

‘Come near the flames. They will warm you.’

The fellow stole closer, timidly, and Asr
ă
thiel extended the cresset towards him, but he made a sudden lunge and she threw it at his feet, recoiling in disgust. A pool of burning pitch spilled. The man squatted on the floor, warming his mummified hands at the guttering fires.

‘If you try to harm me,’ said the weathermage, ‘I will hurl you along this tunnel and outside, right through one of the windows.
Then
you will feel the cold. I can do that—never doubt it, for I am powerful.’ Dispensing threats was a form of self-defence. Ironically, Asr
ă
thiel felt supremely vulnerable, alone with this creature in the jewelled pipe-tunnel, in the heart of an eldritch fastness.

The fellow moaned. ‘What year is it?’ he mewled.

She told him. Perhaps, she thought, he was simple-minded. ‘How did you come to be in this pipe vein?’ she asked. ‘Have you been following me?’

‘The hilltings came crowding from a doorway. Then you were coming after. Yes, I was following you. I have not seen you here before.’ He added vaguely, ‘You look like someone I once knew.’

Between pity and revulsion, the damsel was burning with curiosity. ‘How came you here to this citadel? Tell me your story,’ she invited, seating herself on the floor at a cautious distance. ‘Tell me. Maybe I will be able to help you.’

The wretch’s teeth chattered, he shuddered, he rocked back and forth and spoke syllables of nonsense. Despite all that, gradually he revealed his tale.

After the ‘vile man’, his persecutor, had buried him alive beneath the mountains, he had been faced with a choice: either stay where he was, alone in the darkness, or start moving and try to find something better. He chose to become a burrower. He told Asr
ă
thiel that he had spent years digging in the ground and shifting rocks, breaking through from cavern to cavern, traversing from tunnel to tunnel, trying to find a way out of his lonely dungeon.

Years?
she wondered, sceptically.
What is there to eat down there in the darkness? Did you dine entirely on cave lice? Or is your story all delusion?
But she nodded, and said nothing to interrupt his fascinating narrative.

He was lost, he said, for he did not know how to find an exit to the outer world. As he delved and blundered through the underground, he unintentionally disturbed certain manifestations that had been lying dormant. Some began to waken.

Working his way blindly along beneath the mountains, miraculously unscathed by their sudden flares of volcanic fires, improbably clinging to life despite lack of proper nourishment, the man with dead hands had accidentally tunnelled his way into a remote region where, unbeknownst to him, twenty-five thousand deadly and immortal warriors were entombed within a shell of bullion; a great cavern meticulously lined with gold leaf, and thickly veined with the precious ore.

‘You found the golden caves!’ exclaimed the damsel. ‘Weathermasters imprisoned the wicked ones there when the Goblin Wars ended. They sealed them in for all time, that they might nevermore cause mischief to the human race.’ Open-mouthed with incredulity she stared at the cowering creature. ‘And
you
set them free!’

‘Forgive me, lady!’ snivelled the misery, grovelling. ‘How could I be knowing? I was digging. I sought only my own freedom.’

‘Go on with your recital,’ Asr
ă
thiel said. She found it difficult to tolerate this woeful toady, yet at the same time she sympathised with his plight.

‘It was the Silver Goblins there, but the knowledge was not at me,’ repeated the fellow self-pityingly. ‘I was only pushing big rocks, and scraping gravel, and hand-scratching. And then I shifted a stone, and punched a hole, and the terrible light was spearing through.’

‘What light?’

‘A shining of silver—the power of the goblins maybe, caged all those centuries. And I was being drawn to the source of it, and I squeezed right into the cave. Then they seized hold of me.’ The man squeezed shut his eyes, as if trying to shut out a sight too horrific to behold. He refused to continue his tale until Asr
ă
thiel persuaded him with much coaxing. Eventually, little by little, it was revealed in incoherent fragments, which the damsel pieced together.

It had been impossible for the captive goblins to slide themselves through the narrow aperture created by the man they had lured to their aid. They would necessarily have come into contact with the gold in the surrounding matrix. Persuading the burrower with threats, they forced him to move the gold-veined rocks that they themselves and their kobolds could not touch. In terror, he obeyed. Being a weakling, he was only able to widen the gap by degrees, while the imprisoned horde chafed impatiently, unable to hasten the process but tormenting their thrall whenever he slowed. It took the labourer weeks to widen the breach enough for goblins to pass through without brushing against the gold that would have seared them.

In the meantime hosts of kobolds began to converge on the golden dungeons from the deepest mines of the mountains where they had bided quiescent; some eldritch sense had informed them the instant their masters gained their liberty, and they swarmed in their thousands to greet them.

The fair-haired man had been unable to find his way in the underworld, but the goblins knew their location exactly. Swiftly they passed through the passageways that honeycombed the Northern Ramparts, dragging the burrower with them, until they came to the extensive network of underground chambers where their daemon horses were housed. The steeds languished in a kind of torpid trance, deprived of their symbiotic partners; there had been no need to gild the trollhäst caves, for once the knights were locked away the creatures had no will to escape. As his captors blasted the rock with jolts of unseelie energy to get at their steeds, the bur-rower, never permitted to rest, was put to work clearing away rubble. After the trollhästen had been freed, the unseelie warriors ordered their kobold slaves to unlock and set to rights their long-abandoned mountain halls, for at that time few trows, or ‘hilltings’ as the storyteller called them—the willing servants of goblins—haunted the Northern Ramparts. While order was being restored in Sølvetårn, Zauberin presided over a goblin moot.

‘Zauberin, the first lieutenant?’ Asr
ă
thiel broke in. ‘What of the goblin king? Why did he not conduct the moot?’

‘That one was not with them then,’ the pallid man replied. ‘He was never enclosed in the cavern of gold. It was later that he came.’ He hugged his knees to his scrawny chest as if recollecting an old terror.

‘Then where was he?’

‘The knowledge is not at me.’

That particular phrase,
the knowledge is not at me
, kept jolting a distant memory. Someone Asr
ă
thiel had once known had occasionally employed that expression, but she could not call to mind who it had been. ‘Go on,’ she prompted her informant, whereupon he told her that, initially, the goblins sent kobold spies into the world, to find out what had been happening since they had been incarcerated. While biding their time they began to conduct incursions into the northern villages—Silverton and surrounds—commencing their spate of nocturnal assassinations. Ultimately they set forth on the path of war. After their first full-scale assault on the human armies at the Wuthering Moors their triumph reached a new peak when their king returned.

The fair-haired man knew little else.

‘That is the end of my tale,’ he said. ‘They have no further use for me, and have discarded me, but I am in their power now.’ He began to babble. ‘The blue gnomes cut off my hair when I was captured. Why should they do such a thing? I cannot understand it! Fain would I be escaping from this place but I cannot leave through their portals, for I fear the kobold sentinels. All I do is go wandering through their halls, avoiding them whenever I can.’

And a wasted, pallid, terrified thing you are
, thought Asr
ă
thiel, not without compassion, as she endured his plaints. She found several aspects of his narrative perplexing, and quizzed him to find answers.

‘How could you dig amongst rocks without any mining equipment? You would have torn your own flesh apart and cracked your bones.’

‘I heal again and again.’

But you heal awry
, she thought.

‘How long is it since you were buried alive?’

‘Many years.’

‘Methinks you have lost track of time! It is impossible for mortal men to survive for years without sunlight and nourishment. Under durance, time seems to stretch; perhaps that is what has happened. You are mistaken.’ Just then, it came to Asr
ă
thiel that her own mother had sometimes used that unusual phrase, ‘the knowledge is not at me’—an expression favoured by subjects of Slievmordhu. Indeed, his accent was of the southern realm.

‘I am not mistaken, lady. The knowledge is at me of how long it has been. It was the year 3472 when that base weather-master entombed me.’

‘Weathermaster? What weathermaster?’ Asr
ă
thiel shot back. A silent bell was ringing.

‘The one who tried to cheat me of my dues. He never succeeded, you know.’

‘What was his name?’

‘That is one thing I shall never be forgetting. His name was Stormbringer.’ The knave peered at the damsel from rheumy optics. ‘Your eyes are blue,’ he said. ‘Very blue.’

Asr
ă
thiel felt a throb of heat surging to her temples as she stood up. ‘By rain and deadly thunder,’ she said enunciating every word slowly and clearly, ‘I know who you are. Your name, may it be blasted to oblivion, is Fionnbar Aonarán.’

As a child at her father’s knee she had learned the history of this person. The greatest calamities that had fallen upon her family were the fault of him and his murderous half-sister. He had drunk of the Water of Immortality, just as her own father had done; yet he had stolen the draught. His vindictive sister, Fionnuala, had tried to slay Asr
ă
thiel’s mother and almost succeeded. That attempt had resulted in Jewel’s sleep without waking.