Fallowblade (48 page)

‘Fallowblade is wondrously fair to look upon,’ said Asr
ă
thiel, ‘yet no doubt the Argenkindë would like him to be thrown into the werefire and destroyed.’

Zaravaz looked amused. Slightly cocking his head to one side he said, ‘Do not presume, witchling, that we reason like mortal men. The thing is a fount of divertissement for us. The slight chance of being extinguished is an unfamiliar novelty, adding zest to life. We seek thrills through risk. Endless existence might otherwise threaten to pall, through monotony. Nothing presents much danger for the Glashtinsluight; your Fallowblade is one exception. Besides,’ Zaravaz added with a smile characteristic of goblin haughtiness, ‘there is scant need to fear some man-cobbled artefact that can only be employed by a rare few.’

As if unaffected by her lover’s nearness Asr
ă
thiel leaned over the side of the boat to watch her own image reflected in the lake, a wistful countenance framed by dark tresses, against a backdrop of stars. ‘I cannot imagine what it must be like for you, to dwell always in a faster time stream.’ She trailed her fingers in the water, vaguely hoping the chill might cool her unwanted ardency.

‘Not always—we can move in and out of it at will. Anti-gravity capabilities are inherent in us; we can summon them or not, as human beings summon adrenalin when instinct tells them to fight or flee.’

‘Gravity is the opposite of levity,’ said Asr
ă
thiel. ‘The Argenkindë are inclined to levity, I have noticed.’

‘Perhaps we do laugh longer and oftener than solemn human beings who, being destined for the grave, wax grave. Yet it seems,’ Zaravaz said musingly, ‘since my return from exile I have lost much of my former jocosity.’ Glancing in Asr
ă
thiel’s direction he added cuttingly, ‘Forgive me for wearying you with tedious exposition, Mistress Stormbringer. You cannot imagine how distraught one would feel, to have bored you.’

‘On the contrary!’ the damsel looked up quickly. She admired his cunning eloquence; that he, an eldritch wight unable to tell falsehoods, could juggle truth and sarcasm with obvious ease. ‘You misread me. I find Glashtinsluight lore intriguing. There is much about your kindred I have yet to learn.’

His marvellous smile never failed to disorient her.

‘I trust I may continue to lesson you,’ he said, gathering himself out of his relaxed sprawl and turning towards her.

She had to look away again, lest she grow dizzy and fall out of the boat. ‘Prithee, tell me more about goblinkind.’

‘Of course, if it please you,’ he said, very softly, his mouth right next to her ear. He stood up once more, fluidly, barely rocking the boat but leaving her forsaken. ‘My kindred are intimately connected with the universe. When we look into the sky we can perceive distant quasars, supernovae and other astronomical phenomena that the human denizens of Tir will never know, though some might observe the nearest through their rude spyglasses.’

‘I should like to see such wonders.’

‘If you wish, a telescope will be built for you on one of the highest crags.’

‘I do wish it.’

Zaravaz turned upon the damsel a look of desire so extreme it might melt basalt, like plutonic fires. Impetuously she reached out to touch him, but at that moment a group of horsemen passed by along the shores of the lake, and when she glanced down she saw the almond-eyed face of some lakemaiden peering up from beneath the water. Disconcerted by these intrusions Asr
ă
thiel drew back.

Her lover smiled again, as if possessing some singular knowledge, and appeared to scrutinise the constellations. A breeze arose. As the boat skimmed across the water, behind him the silken length of his hair streamed like a cloud unravelled by the wind.

A
oust the twenty-eighth was Asr
ă
thiel’s birthday. She had not mentioned the fact to anyone in Sølvetårn, yet apparently it was common knowledge. A party was got up, and the whole of the fastness seemed to be celebrating, or else using it as an excuse for revelry. As time passed the damsel had found ways to make herself more able to endure her yearnings for home, her straitened circumstances, the banishment from the company of family and friends. In her unseelie lover she saw what she desired most of all and least of all. He was with her every day. Before nightfall she would fall asleep, and when she opened her eyes he would always be gone. In the evening when he first set eyes on her, he would kiss her hair casually, but no more than that.

His thoughtfulness was constant, his generosity boundless. Often she would glance up, by chance, to see him watching her with that curious look of intense longing. He laughed and jested; his witticisms could provoke uproarious hilarity; he could evoke the most moving music from the strings of a violin.

Occasionally, when they traversed the underworld together, she would place one hand upon the shoulder of Zaravaz and the other upon a rock of the living mountain, and then he would let her read the geological story of the mineral, and reaching deeper, the story of the making of the world. That way she learned of the ranges’ birth; how they had begun beneath an ancient ocean as layers of pebbles and stones, sand and mud, mingled with the shells and skeletons of primeval creatures, and how the layers had built up until their weight had forced their particles together to become hard rock, one of the slowly moving dorsal plates on the world’s restless reptilian hide. Two plates had collided, grinding together, and the lip of one slid over the edge of the other. Dragon’s-breath heat from deep inside the world liquefied some of the lower plate’s rock to magma, while huge forces produced by the spinning core of iron at the planet’s heart began to lift the seabed. Great slabs of rock along the line of collision were forced upwards. Fiery magma jetted up through fragile spots, forming a row of volcanoes. As the two plates continued to slide together the buckling, twisting layers of rock were forced higher, while the volcanoes also grew, so that the range reared into the skies. The tremendous forces from beneath never ceased their slow violence, transforming the hard-pressed layers of seabed sediment into metamorphic or igneous rock, folding and cracking them to create faults, splitting the mountain range into blocks and grinding them against each other. Every year for millennia the Northern Ramparts grew a few inches taller.

As a weathermaster, Asr
ă
thiel knew that even as the mountains were being born they were being worn away. Rainwater flowed into rocky crevices, turning to ice on the higher slopes. The ice’s expansion thrust the cracks wider, eventually causing bits to break off with a sharp report and fall down the hillside. Broken fragments collected in piles at the foot of the slopes. Spores, too, took root in the hairline crevices that netted the moist rock faces. Lichens and mosses clung, their exploring roots making the rocks crumble.

Wind swept away the dislodged rocks. Rain and snowmelt washed them into streams. As they rolled down the streambeds they scraped away more of the mountain’s flanks, while being ground down to lesser sizes. The rushing waters of rivers and streams excoriated deep furrows and valleys in the mountainsides. Rocks locked into glaciers abraded the land as they slid imperceptibly downhill towards the sea, where the ice would finally set them free to mix with other sands and muds to form new sediments. In the oceans the mountains began their saga and there they would ultimately return, to begin their cycle anew.

Asr
ă
thiel was entranced by the life story of the planet as she received it through the influence of goblin gramarye, though no spell enthralled her like her lover. Unfailingly Zaravaz amazed the damsel. His eldritch gifts allowed him to move with a speed to outwit the eye, and with extraordinary precision. He could spring high and twirl four, five, six times before he landed. She had seen him catch hold of a rocky overhang and easily draw himself up on top of it by the pure strength of his arms. He could vault a high tor with no difficulty at all. While galloping at full speed on his incandescent daemon horse he could jump to his feet and ride standing up, or swing himself down beside the steed to cling sideways, along the length of its body, so that an observer might not know the trollhäst had a rider. Brazenly he flaunted himself before Asr
ă
thiel; flaunted his beauty, his prowess.

Altogether he was appealing, confident and vivacious, yet in her life with him Asr
ă
thiel was beset by doubt and loathing more often than not. She could not countenance the acts of cruelty he permitted to take place within his realm. To survive without losing her sanity she had to develop ways to push goblin atrocities from her mind before they overwhelmed her.

Zaravaz was not always at her side. Often he went away on business he would not give an account of, and she felt it best not to enquire in case it gave her nightmares; then she would walk alone on the mountains, for their strength and grandeur pleased her, and she could watch when goblin warriors went swooping on the virgin snow of the higher ridges, sending up plumes of ice-crystal powder as they plunged thousands of vertical feet in a controlled slide.

One windy night as clouds trailed like smoke across the moon, Asr
ă
thiel was progressing along a narrow path when she spied, on the other side of a ravine, three human men in tattered clothing, lying beneath eaves of lichened rock. One was cowering and ranting, his comrade was coughing fit to burst, and the third was cradling his feet in his hands, whimpering as if they hurt him lamentably. Asr
ă
thiel’s first reaction was astonishment at beholding human beings in the environs of Sølvetårn; promptly she recognised the signs of arsenic poisoning; kobolds had lingered near those men, or had been handling them or mistreating them. The weathermage called out to the trio but they made no reply, perhaps not having heard over the bluster of the wind, perhaps being too wrapped in their private agonies. Wondering how they had arrived there and where they had come from she began to run towards the ice bridge that spanned the chasm, so that she might cross over and speak to them, but on the way she caught sight, through a gap between two boulders, of grinning kobolds riding on the backs of five more men, thrashing them with whips to make them go faster.

Bristling with indignation, Asr
ă
thiel veered off her course in the wake of the kobolds. Translucent orange flames flared behind a bluff of rugged stone; rounding a corner she happened upon a group of goblin knights, amongst them Lieutenants Zauberin and Zwist. They had with them some mortal wretches in chains, who were hobbled, like sheep. Close at hand, kobolds were heating irons in a fire. From a distance, transfixed by horror, Asr
ă
thiel watched as Zwist seized the men by the back of the neck and branded them on the shoulder, one by one.

‘What are you doing?’ she shouted.

Zauberin glanced sardonically in her direction. ‘Killing time,’ he called out.

With a cry of protest the damsel ran forward to help the suffering prisoners, but kobolds bundled them out of her sight. All she could do was engage in serious remonstration with the knights. ‘You ride these men and brand them! Stop this torment!’

‘Lady Sioctíne, these
beishtyn
were selected for our purpose,’ Zwist politely responded, ‘because they are strong and can run fast. And all have been chosen from amongst racehorse owners, horse-breakers, trainers, jockeys.’

‘Not jockeys,’ Zauberin interjected, smiling as he passed by.

‘Nay, in sooth, for jockeys are too small to run swift, so they are, well—’ Zwist said, ‘how shall I put it delicately? I believe the euphemism used by humankind in horseracing is “sold”.’

‘Where did all these men come from?’ Asr
ă
thiel demanded.

Zauberin, returning, said, ‘Some were recently captured, others were taken prisoner during the battles and have just now arrived here, having been herded across the land at their slug’s pace. We allow them to roam the Northern Ramparts, for they are unable to break through eldritch barriers they cannot see—unable to return to the kingdoms of men. They are kept for divertissement. We play with them, hunting the hunters from time to time, fishing for the fishers or letting the kobolds ride the horse-breakers. We keep some in a big glass bowl for entertainment, like goldfish.’ Plainly enjoying the damsel’s reaction to his pronouncements Zauberin went on, ‘Zwist is as enthusiastic about racing as any of us. We watch, we cheer, we bet on the outcomes. Often we give stimulants to the racers to make them run faster, for it adds to the excitement. And after the last race concludes we make men who once owned fighting cocks duel against each other with spurs on.’