Fallowblade (44 page)

‘It is bruited that you are inviolable, Mistress Stormbringer,’ said Zaravaz. ‘How fortunate for you, here in this infernal pit.’

Had he placed some subtle, suggestive emphasis on the word ‘inviolable’?

‘I daresay you would fain be aboveground, weltering in your wind and rain,’ he continued.

‘On the contrary,’ she said, darting a bold look at him. ‘I like it here.’

Zwist took no part in this exchange. His attention was fixed fervently on the silver cupellation hearths. ‘The heat converts the remaining lead to litharge,’ he said, ‘which assimilates any other lingering base metal constituents. Our mispickels drain off the litharge, leaving purified silver in the hearth.’ The goblin knight stepped across the floor. With his bare hands he scooped up some of the cupelled metal, still hot, dripping and fluid as quicksilver. The watching weathermage could not help but cry out. Oblivious of her needless distress Zwist gazed long upon the molten silver before letting it trickle away through his fingers.

When he rejoined them a skin of shining metal was hardening on his hands. ‘The slag is drained off on the other side of the furnaces,’ he remarked, ‘and trucked away to be dumped.’

‘A wizardly trick,’ Asr
ă
thiel said, staring at his hands.

‘Oh, I was in agony all right,’ Zwist assured her. ‘Silver has a low melting point compared to metals such as iron and iridium, but it sears goblin flesh indescribably. Pain but no damage.’ Wincing, he peeled away pieces of the thin film of silver; beneath, his skin remained unmarked.

‘Are kobolds not as immune to the effects of heat as other wights?’ asked Asr
ă
thiel, noting that the imps wore thick gloves and attempted to keep away from the worst of the blasts.

‘Watch,’ said Zwist. He signalled to one of the workers, who ran up to him and bowed. The knight gave a command in the goblin language, whereupon the creature loped away and jumped into the mass of fiery slag spilling like syrup from the far side of the furnaces. A blue light flared and the kobold melted instantly. Tendrils of indigo smoke corkscrewed into the air, then dissolved. ‘You see,’ said the lieutenant, ‘they are not immune.’

Asr
ă
thiel was horrified. ‘You have no compunction!’ she snapped, turning her back on him.

‘The thing was unalive!’ Zwist exclaimed, spreading his partially silvered hands palms upwards in a gesture of guiltlessness. ‘The unalive cannot be killed.’

‘Nevertheless,’ said Asr
ă
thiel.

‘Short spans are standard fare for them,’ the knight said in a somewhat conciliatory tone. ‘This is perilous ground for mispickels. If they avoid falling into a furnace, they might be run over by a train or injured by direct contact with iron. Iron is prolific here, as you can see. Too, salts exist in these ores; sometimes in the form of sodium chloride, most damaging to them. Their existence is short, but fortunately more of them can be manufactured when necessary.’

‘The lady disapproves of you,
aachaptan
,’ said Zaravaz, evidently entertained by his lieutenant’s attempts to vindicate himself.

Railway lines crisscrossed the floors of the refineries. A couple of kobolds whizzed by on a gangers’ trolley, madly pumping the seesawing handles, their tapered ears blowing backwards or forwards with the speed of their passing. On a siding nearby waited long trains of linked freight trucks and other rolling stock. Workers were filling deep, open wagons with liquid slag, then hitching them to a moving cable that ran between the rails. Off they went, clanking up a steep incline that wound its way into a tunnel. When they reappeared on the far side of an underground hillock, they had climbed higher, mounting some distant scarp or embankment that resembled a dully-glowing waterfall in the dark. The heaped contents of each iron pot were incandescent, making the train resemble some mythical beast with long lines of moving eyes. At the top of the luminescent bank the monster halted and the eyes dimmed, but Asr
ă
thiel could make out tiny figures with long pincers in their outstretched hands, with which they seized the lip of each wagon and slowly tipped them sideways, disgorging the entrails of the furnaces. Flaming meteors of red and orange fire sprayed the dim scarp, glimmering brilliant emerald and plunged in feverish amber, wheeling and splattering down the slag pile. Viscous fireballs tumbled, blazing, down over the dump, fanning out to become a surge that exploded over the scalded embankment in gouts of glittering froth.

It was like a vision from the world’s birth.

Beneath the roar of blast furnaces kobold workers were belting out a song, keeping time with the twitching of their barbed tails:

‘By Cleave and Lockridge, that song does so subtly unrhyme,’ Zwist remarked, wincing.

‘And so adeptly does the melody assail the hearing,’ subjoined Zaravaz. ‘Let us depart ere this rhapsody makes us swoon for joy.’

They returned to the upper levels where, at the bidding of his lord, Zwist left them alone.

At the midnight hour, when moonlight laved the heights, Asr
ă
thiel stood with Zaravaz on a cliff-top balcony overhanging a precipitous ravine. The wind had subsided and on the other side of the gorge grey-white vapours were pouring down the mountainsides like thin sheets of water. Near at hand a fountain gushed from a carved stone spout set into the rock, its droplets chiming like a wild music of bells. Somewhere amongst the rugged bluffs a lone flautist, some eldritch wight, was piping an ethereal melody that rebounded from every mineral facet, multiplying until it harmonised with its own echoes.

From the corners of sight the weathermage watched her companion. He had never been from her thoughts since first she had set eyes on him. What was it about him that magnetised her so? Was it his demeanour—vital, untamed, unpredictable; or the look of him—tall and tapered, sculptured, the quintessence of masculinity; was it the way he moved, with a predator’s poised swiftness and a dancer’s grace, swift, lithe and perfectly balanced; or was it those charismatic eyes, shards of dark amethyst rimmed by midnight lashes?

Or perhaps some kind of spell was woven into his hair . . .

. . . which flowed gently down, as black as hatred, to drape across his shoulders the way skeins of silk would caress cast steel. It might have been the contrast of the soft fluidity and the adamant, in such close juxtaposition; like water pouring over rock, like long plumes spilled over armour, or like a veil of shadow let fall upon an oaken beam that seized control of her senses. In that contrast was an allurement that gripped her heart and tore it out by the roots. And when the wind, the fortunate, lawless, imbecilic wind, dipped long fingers into the nightfall of his hair and lifted strands of it, at leisure, into the air while he remained motionless, unmoved, and more beautiful than heart’s desire, she could have wept for jealousy and cursed the wanton air currents, and if she had possessed the power she might have grasped them in her hands and torn them and hurled them over the edges of the world, for daring to venture where she would trade her sanity to go.

It seemed the fixation was mutual, or else he had guessed her thoughts.

‘
Eunyssagh. Aalin folt liauyr
,’ murmured Zaravaz, catching up a wisp of Asr
ă
thiel’s hair as it blew in the breeze. Idly he stroked it. When he spoke, his breath had turned to ghosts.

She stood yielding. ‘What is the meaning of those words?’ she whispered presently, her own exhalations condensing to mist in the cold.

‘Such lovely tresses.’ He smiled down at her, then something caught his eye and, directing her attention to an outflung spur of basalt, clearly visible across the moonlit valley, he said, ‘Look there!’

A daemon horse trotted into view, exquisite, fleet as cloud-shadows.

‘Behold Tangwystil, who brought you here!’ said the goblin king. ‘She chose you on the battlefield, not being mine to give.’

‘I am honoured,’ said Asr
ă
thiel.

‘No human being ever rode a trollhäst, before you.’

Amongst so many eldritch beings, Asr
ă
thiel was beginning to feel unhuman.

Zaravaz called out, his voice ringing clearly in the pure, cold air. The trollhäst named Tangwystil stamped and shook out her gaseous mane, then cantered away, sure-footed as a goat amongst the crags. She seemed limned by emerald pyres.

‘Next time we ride out,’ said Zaravaz, ‘you shall come with us. Do you like the gifts I have sent, the gowns and other fripperies?’

‘I do.’

‘Then I will gift you with more pleasures.’

Taking Asr
ă
thiel by the hand the goblin king led her through a doorway. They entered a large and high-vaulted chamber of gothic loveliness, circular in shape, its walls perforated almost all the way around by unglazed archways exposing the interior to the elements, its ceiling an intricate openwork lattice giving almost unrestricted view of the frozen peaks that towered against star-pitted skies. There was no sense of enclosure. This was a chamber that shut out neither landscape nor wind, neither cloud nor constellation.

In the centre stood a couch piled with sleek and glossy cushions, while to one side a table upheld a jewellery casket of embossed silver. Zaravaz lifted the lid from the casket and a diffuse illumination radiated out. He handed Asr
ă
thiel a globe of light that reminded her of the jewel she had given to the urisk, Crowthistle, yet this sparkled palest blue whereas the other, at its core, had glittered virginal white.

‘It is a frost-jewel,’ said Zaravaz. ‘They are enchanted baubles, quite rare, fashioned from frost, and hardened by gramarye so that they cannot melt, like the ice-fern traceries on some of your gowns.’

‘Once I owned something like this,’ she said.

‘Now you own many,’ said Zaravaz, gesturing towards the casket.

Asr
ă
thiel picked up the jewels and admired them, one by one. Each was dazzling, yet subtly different in colour and lustre from the last. Carefully she let the brilliant ornaments fall back into their padded nest. Beholding them reminded her of her mother, asleep in her cupola of glass and roses. The white jewel had belonged once to Jewel, who was its namesake. Now she had given away that heirloom and it was lost to her, like her mother and father. It was gone, like the little urisk, as some day her grandfather would also be gone.

A sense of desolation and loneliness swept over Asr
ă
thiel at this reminder of past grief, but even as she mourned, she thought a flame of midnight flared urgently at her side. Zaravaz was standing so close that her skin tingled in the dance of eldritch energies surrounding him. He placed a finger beneath her chin, gently tilting her head up so that he could look directly into her eyes. His gaze was calm, evaluative and acutely sensual. Adrift in the violent essence of his gaze Asr
ă
thiel was, yet again, thunderstruck by the terrible beauty of the goblin king. His touch, his look, were erotic in the extreme. He was the most exciting eldritch being she could ever have imagined, yet violent beyond all limits. She utterly deplored his principles, or lack thereof, but was profoundly attracted, in a physical sense, against her better judgement.

It seemed he had divined the sadness that afflicted her when she looked at the jewels. ‘It is time to celebrate life,’ he said, and for once there was no trace of sarcasm in his tone, only tenderness. ‘It is time to cease dwelling on the heartbeat that has stopped, and instead to rejoice in the heart that throbs with vitality, the pulse that quickens to the exuberance of song, the flight of dance, and the thrill of speed, and lovemaking, and power.’

For just an instant, she hesitated, shocked without fully comprehending why.

‘An open book,’ he said, ‘is easily read.’

Understanding with a start of shame and outrage that he knew exactly what net she was caught in, she murmured some excuse, picked up her skirts and ran from the room.

The weathermage found her way back to her silver apartments; it was never difficult, for trow-wives tended to flock around, offering their services as guides. Dawn arrived, but sleep refused to accompany it. Asr
ă
thiel rolled fretfully upon her couch, as if in the grip of pyrexia. She had never fallen ill in her life, but had witnessed other people suffering from fevers; noted the sweat pouring from their flesh, and seen the way they shivered and could not lie still.
I have contracted some eldritch ague
, she said to herself,
or been poisoned by arsenic, or bewitched.
But they were all empty pretexts; she knew it was not so.

She thought it strange that this should happen. Asr
ă
thiel despised everything the goblin king stood for: cruelty, pitilessness, exploitation, and war against humankind. For his part, he was arrogant and contemptuous of her well-loved people. Although her philosophies were identical to his in some aspects, in others they could not be more at variance. Genuine incompatibility existed between the two of them. Politically, they were worlds apart. On a completely different level, nonetheless, it was apparent that a fierce attraction existed between them. She had become obsessed with him, and it was obvious the obsession was reciprocated in full force.