Fallowblade (52 page)

‘That is a pity,’ said Zwist, ‘for I am sure Prince William will look for you.’

‘William?’ the damsel was astounded. ‘Surely you do not mean he is to be present?’

‘Indeed, he is to be our guest,’ said the knight, smiling slightly, ‘along with many of his officers.’

Asr
ă
thiel’s blood chilled. What new chicanery was this? What horrors had the goblin king inflicted upon William Wyverstone and his men? She must find out at once. ‘Very well, I will come with you,’ she said hurriedly, her pulse thundering.

Zwist responded, half laughing, ‘I will wait for Lady Sioctíne to attire herself.’

Catching a glimpse of herself in a glass, Asr
ă
thiel saw a wild-maned damsel in a torn dress. ‘No, no, my appearance matters not.’

‘Unkemptness can be interpreted as incivility,’ admonished svelte Zwist, and she perceived she would not be able to cajole him.

With all speed Asr
ă
thiel ran back to her dressing table, calling for her handmaidens.

Soon afterwards Zwist accompanied Asr
ă
thiel along gorgeously carved and ornamented galleries to a dining hall she had not seen before. As they walked, the knight was obligingly regaling his companion with arbitrary facts in which she took no interest whatsoever, being overcome with anxiety and preoccupied with what she might soon discover.

‘Although we call ourselves the Silver Goblins,’ said Zwist, ‘
all
the clans of the Glashtinsluight have an intrinsic relationship with silver. It runs in our blood. Pure silver is our most favoured metal; nonetheless, we appreciate other metals with similar colour and lustre. Titanium, for example, and zirconium.’

‘Yes, yes,’ said Asr
ă
thiel distractedly. ‘How has your lord treated William?’

‘With all courtesy due to a guest.’

This conveyed nothing. It was a matter of conjecture, what kind of courtesy, or lack thereof, goblinkind considered to be owing to a human visitor. ‘Are we nearly there?’ she asked.

‘Almost. Platinum,’ continued Zwist, blasé, ‘when mixed with iridium gives a silver-white metal, but when alloyed with osmium it takes on a bluish tinge, not unpleasant. White ruthenium hardens platinum and palladium jewellery. Rhenium, rhodium and nickel are silvery in colour. We are quite fond of pewter, niobium and osmium. Electrum gleams like frost and would be a great favourite with us, but unfortunately, as you know, it contains gold. Ah, here we are!’ He released Asr
ă
thiel’s elbow and bowed once more. ‘Conversation passes the time pleasantly, especially when one is apprehensive.’

And she knew then that he had kindly tried to distract her with his eloquence, and wondered afresh how one so wicked could be so considerate.

They entered a rib-vaulted chamber as large as a museum, its marble floor like sheer ice.

This new feast hall was bright with candles, lamps and bright green firelight from flames of burning barium nitrate and copper salts cavorting on cavernous hearths. Naturally formed silver ores with structures of extraordinary beauty could be glimpsed about this space up and down the walls, having perhaps evolved there. Numinous of hue were they, and wonderful of form; surpassingly lovely treasures of the deeps; delicately branching argent ferns with miniature lobes as fine as misty rain; coralline structures exquisitely formed; tiny jewelled fans and crystal lyres; gemmy birds and lizards of bijouterie; the jewelled silvers of the underground. The skeleton of a tiny raptor crouched in an alcove, fossilised by pure opal; a little rainbow-hued work of art. Crossed swords, axes and other weapons of eldritch make were displayed on the walls, between fantastic tapestries, many yards long.

To Asr
ă
thiel’s surprise the Narngalish were indeed present in the hall; perhaps forty men; a handful of equerries and other retainers, eighteen noncommissioned officers, six captains, two majors, King Warwick’s lieutenant-general, Sir Gilead Torrington, and William himself.

William! When the damsel caught sight of him moving amongst the long tables, she paused in the doorway. Almost at the same instant he spied her, and stopped in his tracks. But only for a mayfly’s wing-beat; then he pushed his way through the crowd of men, goblins, trollhästen and trows, and they approached each another. As they met, she curtseyed.

Here in this place, under the sharp scrutiny of this assemblage of knights both eldritch and human, the proper decorum must be shown. Though the damsel longed to greet William effusively she held back, behaving as propriety dictated.

The prince let his gaze rest upon Asr
ă
thiel. She saw herself mirrored in his eyes; his expression clearly showed that he was recalling every detail. It had always entranced him, she knew, that even when she was in a solemn mood, the outer corners of her mouth curled upward, so that it almost seemed as if her lips curved in a faint, enigmatic smile. His glance took in her gown, fashioned of a web like sea foam and decorated with crystals of transparent tourmaline. Against the pallor of her raiment and jewels, her hair contrasted startlingly black, and her own eyes—it was as though two lucent panes of lapis lazuli had been set in ivory. Her lips were the crimson petals of a rose, her waist pliant as a whip, and slim as a reed.

For her part Asr
ă
thiel beheld a statuesque nobleman, dark-haired, slender and able-bodied, with a grave mien. She noticed a few freckles across the bridge of his nose, and a trifling asymmetry in the set of his shoulders. It was almost imperceptible, but ever since she had dwelled in the company of eldritch flawlessness the slightest disproportion leaped out conspicuously. He had cultivated a moustache, since last they met, and a close-cropped beard sprouted on his chin. Beneath his woollen doublet and trousers he wore a shirt of linen. No sword hung at his side, only a small dagger.

‘Are you hale?’ William murmured, gazing searchingly at the damsel.

‘I am.’ Her throat felt constricted. She wanted to shout with joy at this meeting, but must swallow the exclamations that threatened to spill from her tongue. Nonetheless he read her delight in her face, she could tell. ‘And you?’

‘I too. I am jubilant to see you.’

It was obvious he ached to embrace her, but not here in this eldritch hall, in full view of the assembly, who watched them covertly, casually.

‘How came you here?’ Asr
ă
thiel asked uncertainly. ‘Are you all prisoners?’

‘Unpredictably the goblins promised us safe conduct into Sølvetårn. We have been received cordially, and this feast has been given in our honour, to our amazement and suspicion.’

‘They are masters of equivocation!’ she warned softly.

‘Of that I am aware. Be assured, my captains closely examined the phraseology of their promises before we accepted the invitation. They assured us their victuals would do us no harm and our freedom would not be compromised. Yet, had the goblins vowed to cut us to shreds after our visit, still I would have come to Minith Ariannath. I longed to see you.’

‘You carry no sword, though I see they allowed you small sidearms.’

William said, ‘I brought a blade of gold from King’s Winterbourne. We have manufactured many gold-plated swords during the time since you left us. None like Fallowblade of course. But our hosts made us leave all our bullion outside the doors of Sølvetårn, as a condition of entry.’

The prince looked so unreservedly steadfast and honest, so
chaste
, standing there before Asr
ă
thiel; he who had been courageous enough to enter the lairs of iniquity for her sake, though with no adequate defence. ‘Words cannot describe what a joy it is to look upon you again!’ she said earnestly.

‘Nor can they convey,’ intervened a musical, derisive voice, ‘what joy it gives me to have reunited two such intimate acquaintances.’

Both human beings flinched as a tall figure partially eclipsed the candlelight. Zaravaz was beside them, clad in shadows and dazzle, as provoking as insolence and as tantalising as secrets. As ever, his beauty, stature and bearing exacted attention. He smiled, but not as he had smiled before. It was such a look as might be the last sight a condemned man witnessed before his execution; the expression of a hunter who leans to slit the throat of a fallen deer.

‘Prithee, condescend to grace my table,’ invited the goblin king, glancing from one guest to the other in the manner of some generous benefactor. ‘You shall be seated side by side.’

William frowned, manifestly unsettled, but although the demeanour of the goblin king was fraught with sarcasm and sinister overtones, there was nothing overt in his words to give offence.

When all had taken their places at the tables, the first course was served.

The banquet was the most socially uncomfortable occasion Asr
ă
thiel had ever experienced. Tension was so extreme as to be almost visible. It was as if the veneer of civility were a pane of thinnest glass, so fragile that the merest ill-chosen word might shatter it into a myriad shards of lacerating violence. No one in the hall, not even the most slow-witted trow, could fail to be aware of the barely battened-down hostility between the two warrior corps. To begin with there was no exchange of words between the groups—none could bring themselves to it. The men strained to behave with utmost urbanity, yet ever and anon their trained reflexes were triggered by a suspicion of alarm, or their knife-edge pride took some subtle buffet, and their hands sought the hilts of their daggers beneath the table. The goblin knights, begemmed with black gauds—morion, jet, hematite, obsidian, rutile and black onyx—took pains to conceal their rancour, but it was evident nonetheless. They looked as if, rather than sharing a table, they would prefer to seize their guests and tear out their throats, and were keenly seeking an excuse to do so.

The damsel herself endured the dinner in torment of spirit, unsure as to the intentions of the Argenkindë, expecting every moment that a fight would break out, which would ensure doom for the men.

A low murmur of voices permeated the refectory, but at the table occupied by the goblin king and his foremost officers, William’s company and the weathermage, there was only desultory conversation punctuated by awkward pauses, during one of which, Zaravaz turned to one of his knights and was heard to ask, ‘Is there such a thing as death by boredom?’

Presently Zauberin made some lewd reference, aside, to his fellow diners, whereupon Asr
ă
thiel heard the goblin king say to his first lieutenant, ‘We will have none of your coarse jests tonight, my
rag-rannee
.’ Zauberin, thus reprimanded, fell silent.

Aristocratic trollhästen roamed at will, adroitly, amongst the tables, their glimmering coats washed by the green glow of their manes. As ever, knights and daemon horses mingled amiably. Now and then a trollhäst would extend its expressive head between two diners and delicately remove some viand from a platter. Solemn eagle owls watched over all.

‘They are barbaric and uncultured, to dine amongst their horses,’ whispered William’s knights.

‘I never thought to see the inside of Minith Ariannath,’ others muttered, as they stared about at the magnificence of the hall. ‘I never dreamed of beholding the fabled setting of their wickedness and revelry.’

‘I did not believe it existed!’ said one of the officers.

‘Those are fine weapons,’ diplomatic Sir Gilead Torrington said aloud, surveying the armaments displayed on the walls. ‘Marauders were seen to be scouring the battlefields for eldritch blades, but they could find none.’

Zauberin, his eyelid drooping indelicately, said, ‘No
graihyn
let fall his sword during those games. Even if there had been any blades to find, no mortal
feiosagh
could wield them. In the hands of
sallagh
men, goblin weapons burn and dissolve.’

‘In right sooth, they left very little that belonged to them on the battlefield,’ William muttered to Asr
ă
thiel. ‘No blades, no corpses. We saw the way their fallen were transformed.’

Persisting in his endeavours to engender small talk to fill the difficult lulls, Torrington again addressed the goblin knights. ‘However, there was armour. I recognised your plate; I had seen pieces of it before. People named them “gypsy leather”, and sold them as valuable articles, supposed to bring luck.’

‘What kind of luck?’ Zaravaz asked innocently. ‘Good or bad?’

‘Good, methinks,’ was the sharp reply.

‘
There’s
a fascinating superstition,’ murmured Zauberin, with a contumelious grin which put an end to that topic.

Waving his hand in the direction of an appetising display of provender Zwist said to the human officers, ‘Pray sample all our dishes. We would not stint those who dine at our tables. Here is a great favourite, smothered in a sauce with bite; we call it “Wolves Eat the Stranger”. Over here is a tasty triumph made with blood plums, known as “Abruptly the Fool Blushed”.’

‘You jest, sir,’ William said stonily. ‘Perchance at our expense.’

Asr
ă
thiel touched William on the arm. ‘No, not at all,’ she hastened to assure the prince. ‘Goblin recipes truly have such names. And I am sure those are delicious.’ She took a spoonful of one of her preferred dishes—a fragrant concoction quirkily named ‘Envision an Avenue of Incense-Scented Trees Leading to a Translucent Palace’—and placed it on his plate, whereupon the prince thanked her with a smile.