Fallowblade (47 page)

Avalloc had taught Asr
ă
thiel about this phenomenon. The Inglefire, he had told her, was no common conflagration, but an ancient, everlasting blaze of gramarye that burned deep beneath Silver Mountain. Its name was a corruption of the old word, ‘Aingealfyre’; ‘Aingeal’ meaning ‘light’. The fire was enigmatic and no man understood it fully, the laws that governed it were not known, and even the weathermaster swordsmith could not plumb its deepest mysteries. One thing was known for sure, however: the blaze was anathema to unseelie things. The horde could not abide it; could not even go near it. Indeed, the phenomenon was perilous to all beings in some degree.

When at last they tired of metal-smithing and enhancing their wondrous fastness the Argenkindë looked south once more. It was then that they first mingled with the human race and learned how mortal men, despite being wise enough to know better, treated other living beings. To begin with, the Argenkindë sent ambassadors and teachers to persuade humankind to change its habits. When this approach did not succeed, the horde, outraged, began to hunt and slay men as punishment for their offences, while declaring to humanity that these raids would cease if they renounced their exploitative ways. When threats also failed to have the desired effect, the
graihyn
decided to conquer the four kingdoms and make them a dwelling place only for goblinkind.

They would do so, nonetheless, at their leisure for, jaded as they had become, they meant to get some use out of the condemned race before they rendered them extinct. Instead of delivering one deadly stroke of annihilation the goblins, in order to amuse themselves and bring cheer to their eternal years, deliberately prolonged their sportive hounding of those who violated the rights of blameless creatures.

Like all the Glashtinsluight, the Argenkindë were hampered in their building and their delvings by one problem—the fact that gold was poison to them, and to their kobold slaves. Whenever the wightish miners struck veins of gold, they must order them to stop digging. So it came to pass that the goblins decided to capture some human slaves, who could handle gold on their behalf.

The Glashtinsluight, in the way of eldritch wights, were arrogant. They considered themselves stationed far above humankind, because goblins possessed powers such as mortal men could only envy and yearn for. Humanity was weak and vulnerable. After passing sentence upon them, the Argenkindë opined they had the right to use these criminals as slave labour. Therefore they stole the able-bodied men, and left the weaklings—the women and children and the elderly. They employed the men to dig out gold ore and hurl it into the pit of werefire, so that it would no longer pollute the world with its yellow shining and its scalding pain.

This enslavement and brutal hunting continued for decades. The human population was powerless to stop it, and their anger and resentment grew, until men decided to move gold from their treasuries into their arsenals and the Goblin Wars began. Massive military offensives, punctuated by skirmishes, continued over a period of several years. The mortal forces were always defeated because they could not match the fighting speed of their foes, and besides, the four kingdoms, being divided by political arguments, would not unite against them. Moreover there was quarrelling over the valuable ammunition. The Argenkindë exacted severe revenge when any of their number was scorched by gold, thereby the wars escalated, and the unseelie forces always had the upper hand.

During the wars, lies and propaganda grew into tales of horror about goblinkind. It was true they slew men, but stories said they inflicted atrocious torments on the weak, which they never did. It was true their looks were exceptional, but human legend twisted their beauty into ugliness, the better to make the enemy worthy of defeat. Those who looked upon their beauty in the mists rarely lived to tell the tale; those who survived thought them monsters and described them accordingly, or confused them with the kobolds.

The Argenkindë failed to suspect that the great weather-mage Alfard
ē
ne possessed the skill to fashion a weapon of gramarye; nor did they foresee that daring weathermasters would steal secretly, by day, into the goblin-shunned caverns beneath Silver Mountain where burned the werefire, there to forge Fallowblade. The unique virtues of that fire strengthened the blade’s properties a millionfold, and the golden sword became pivotal to the downfall of the Silver Goblins. Instead of conquering, the Argenkindë were conquered by the weathermasters, and imprisoned in caverns coated with gold.

Their defeat would not, however, have been possible without one deciding factor. It was a betrayal from within the ranks of the goblins themselves that ultimately clinched their downfall.

‘Tell me,’ said Asr
ă
thiel to Zaravaz. Under snowy crags that glimmered pearly white against the midnight sky she and he glided in a high-prowed boat upon Waterglass Tarn, he standing, graceful and careless, resting one hand on the prow while he looked across the water; she seated, her gaze wandering down the black shower of his hair. ‘Tell me of this betrayal that brought down your kindred.’

Star reflections meshed the shadowy water, and the sky sparkled with sidereal light. It was like being enclosed within a sphere of obsidian studded with diamonds.

‘It was I who was betrayed,’ he said.

And he told her.

The hunting of men was amongst the favourite sports of the goblin king. He took great pleasure in that chase. Furthermore, he liked to capture large numbers of human slaves, because he was keen to ensure the unmaking of as much gold as possible.

His first lieutenant at that time,
Aachionard
Zorn, was of a different ilk. Zorn declared that humanity must be immediately wiped out if the goblins were ever to bring true justice to Calaldor. This would entail destroying all the slaves, and all the men so often pursued as game. Time and again, Zorn begged the goblin king to change his mind and commence wholesale slaughter. Zaravaz, however, would be ruled by no one.

While devoted to his sovereign, Zorn also believed he knew what was best for him, and for the Argenkindë. He was convinced that Zaravaz was blind to reason. To persuade his lord to come around to his way of thinking, the first lieutenant formulated a plan: he would betray Zaravaz to the weather-masters and allow them to capture him. He was confident that the tribulation of being imprisoned by those he despised would persuade the haughty goblin king to hate the human race so viscerally that he would perceive the wisdom of Zorn’s advice. The first lieutenant expected that Zaravaz would employ his considerable powers—which he unhesitatingly used against kobolds and knights who disobeyed him—to escape, thereafter leading the Argenkindë in triumph to extinguish the human race once and for all.

As she listened to this tale of unseelie cruelty Asr
ă
thiel withheld protest. Zaravaz was aware of her opinions; voicing them again would not change anything. ‘How was it done, the betrayal?’ she merely asked.

He replied, ‘Zorn made a secret pact with your forefather, Avolundar Maelstronnar. My faithful first lieutenant avowed he would lure me into a snare, under the condition that Avolundar would let him, Zorn, go free after the event. Though Zorn could not lie, as none of us can lie, he was as adept at prevarication as anyone. He made out that he wanted to be king in my stead, and that once crowned, he would lead the Argenkindë out of Calaldor, leaving the human race to go about its cruel business unmolested. For my part, I was unaware of the clandestine discussions between Zorn and Avolundar. I knew Zorn was loyal to the core, like all of my proud
graihyn
, and I never questioned his motives. I fell for his dissembling, and accompanied him to the place he nominated. There the weathermasters trapped me in a golden cage.’

Zaravaz fell silent, as if brooding, and Asr
ă
thiel pondered on the disastrous effects of gold upon goblinkind. To be caught in a golden cage would surely have caused him unimaginable anguish.

‘And did you not respond as Zorn had estimated?’

‘I did not, for I had not foreseen any of it, and your kinfolk were too swift for me. As I writhed in the prison of pain they summoned every ounce of their energy, bending it upon me in one awful curse. It needed all their combined strength to lay that enchantment on me, yet had I not been discomfited by the touch of gold, they could never have bound me with it. But bind me they did. They could not destroy me; they merely diminished me, warping my shape and stifling my power, until I became harmless to them. Then they set me free. It was by then too late for revenge, for I had been rendered ineffective. To the Argenkindë I was as if dead, for they knew not whither I had gone. Without the head the body is incapacitated. While they had been plotting to ensnare me, the weathermasters had been forging Fallowblade. After my downfall they assailed my brethren, led by Avolundar, their foremost warrior, who wielded the golden sword. My knights, in sudden disarray, were defeated.’

‘It seems to me I have heard this tale before, or something like it,’ Asr
ă
thiel mused. ‘What of Zorn?’

‘Tortured by regret for having brought about the ruin of his captain and kindred, that one plunged into the pit of the
Skagnyaile
, that men named the Aingealfyre, and perished.’

‘The Aingealfyre! That is the furnace where Fallowblade was made; the Inglefire. Does it still exist?’

‘It burns in its pit far below these ranges, even as we speak. Its whereabouts have passed out of human knowledge, and I would keep it secret, lest any more weapons like Sioctíne should ever be created.’

Asr
ă
thiel recalled hearing it said that the Inglefire burned out wickedness; that was why the sword was pure, and smote goblins so well. After the Goblin Wars no human being sought the Inglefire, for it was deemed there was no need to fashion more swords such as Fallowblade.

Little had they guessed, in those days.

An umbrageous breeze of night-time fanned the damsel’s hair with its wings, and ruffled the surface of the tarn. ‘I understand that the Inglefire is a flame of purification,’ she said, riding in the high-prowed boat with the irresistible king of goblins. ‘As a blast furnace refines silver, ridding it of base metals, so the Inglefire decontaminates unseelie visitations, burning away the badness.’

‘Somewhat true, regrettably. More accurately, it destroys us,’ said Zaravaz. He stood tall and straight, directing his lavender gaze across the water as if witnessing some occult circumstance she could never hope to comprehend. ‘Unseeliekind do not perish immediately, but suffer extremes of agony as they wither, becoming a fragment of living ash that flies up to blow about in the atmosphere for eternity.’

‘What is the way of the Fire of Gramarye with mortalkind,’ asked Asr
ă
thiel in horrified fascination, ‘should anyone be so unfortunate as to accidentally topple in?’

‘Mortal men do not perish immediately but fade slowly, without much pain, in some kind of trance. Those who are pure of spirit survive longer than those whose hearts are corrupt.’

‘You are exact in your descriptions. It sounds to me as if you have seen such things happen.’

‘That I have.’

The damsel refrained from asking whether the men he had observed perishing in the werefire had fallen in by chance or been thrown in by kobolds; the answer seemed obvious.

‘A fire that burns out wickedness . . .’ she said instead. ‘Little wonder the Glashtinsluight avoid it.’ This was close to an insult, she knew, but dared it anyway, unable to resist allowing a small but stinging barb to escape from her pent-up arsenal of resentment against goblin savagery.

Her companion merely laughed. ‘What is wickedness?’ he said lazily. ‘Humankind calls genocide “wickedness”. We, too, view the taking of lives as “wrong” in the broad sense, though, like your kind, we believe that if it is “in a good cause” it is justified. The Glashtinsluight are not bad or wrong—far from it—though if “wickedness” refers to the propensity for killing, in particular the
supernatural
propensity for killing human beings, then yes, we are wicked.’

‘And that is what
we
call “unseelieness”,’ said Asr
ă
thiel. ‘If all the unseelieness were scoured out of the Glashtinsluight, what would remain?’ Without waiting for an answer she went on, ‘Ah, but the Inglefire is astonishing. It is the most incredible forge fire, for Fallowblade affects time itself, or appears to. When wielding him I felt as if I were labouring through some viscid substance instead of air; my surroundings seemed to move slowly. In battle this allowed me to pause for deliberation and enabled the swiftest action.’

‘That weapon permits whoever holds it to enter the time stream of the Glashtinsluight,’ said Zaravaz, bending his head to look at her, ‘lending the swordsman the capacity to match our fighting speed. The gravity of Fallowblade is negative, and therefore it accelerates time.’

‘I do not understand.’

‘The stronger the gravity, the more slowly time passes. Gravity slows clocks of all kinds.’

‘How curious!’ said Asr
ă
thiel. ‘But Fallowblade is made of gold, platinum and iridium. They are ordinary metals, I daresay, with ordinary weight and gravity. The sword always felt heavy enough in my hand.’

‘Only because you assumed the same gravity when you took hold of it,’ replied the goblin king. He took a seat beside her—so close that she was instantly intoxicated—leaning back against the prow and negligently resting one booted foot upon the gunwale. ‘In their normal form those three metals are in fact relatively weighty. As the estimable Zwist so often repeats, delighting as he does in numeracy, the specific gravity of gold is nineteen point three, of platinum twenty-one point five, and of iridium twenty-two point four. By comparison silver’s gravity is ten point five and that of arsenic is only five point seven three. Part of the miracle of the accursed
Skagnyaile
is that it reversed the gravities of Sioctíne’s component metals, making them preternaturally slight.’