Fallowblade (56 page)

For a long time she sat in silence by the canopied couch, her thoughts having turned from visions of her father in the north to pictures of the Argenkindë crossing those same remote lands, travelling further and further away from the four kingdoms. Eventually, with a sigh, she bade farewell to the two waiting-women and descended to the rooms below.

Fallowblade was back in its cradle above the mantelpiece. After retrieving the golden blade from the battlefield, the Storm Lord had cleansed it of the blood of Gearnach and goblins. His granddaughter stood on the polished floor of the dining hall, looking at the great weapon—the instrument with which she had struck down her eldritch companion, the urisk. She reminisced on all the events that single blow had brought to pass, but did not reach up to touch the heavy scabbard; did not even step towards it. Instead her musings strayed to the silvery blade she had carried from Minith Ariannath;
Rehollys
, sword of moonlight. Avalloc and William disliked the eldritch weapon, so she kept it in a chest of cedarwood, out of sight.

For a week the damsel remained at the Mountain Ring, after which she returned to The Laurels in Lime Grove and resumed her duties, for there was much weatherworking to be done, and too few hands to do it. None of the druids had invented anything to take the place of the weathermasters; their much-vaunted oracular workshops had failed to produce anything of greater use than an unreliable method of predicting short-term variations in the weather.

Asr
ă
thiel’s world had changed.

It was difficult to accept the changes. War and the advent of the Kobold Watch had altered everything, in ways both subtle and obvious. Most heart-breakingly, her kinsmen were gone. The urisk, too, was gone.

She missed that one. Sometimes she felt as if he had never existed. Other times she felt as if she had never left his side. Either way, she could take no joy in anything. The world seemed a drear and hollow place, hollower than the cavernous silver mines beneath Sølvetårn, soon to be empty and idle and returned to their original darkness.

A dazzling wheel of beaten silver, the equinoctial full moon shimmered in the sky on Lantern Eve, Sun’s Day, Otember the thirty-first. Even then Asr
ă
thiel could not quite believe that the goblin knights would really depart. On the following night huge numbers of kobold slaves issued from the northern ranges by night, and crept across the land. The smelly wights with their tapered ears, malignant grins, spreading snouts, barbed tails and long grooves of eyes, began to pop up all over the place, enforcing goblin law with unremitting exactness. In King’s Winterbourne it was officially acknowledged that a new wave of kobolds was furtively infesting the alleyways.

Too, the trows of Tir returned to their old haunts. As they had set forth, drawn to the outbreak of moon-bright glory beneath the Northern Ramparts, so now they came gliding back. Between sunset and sunrise they passed like shadows, by ones and twos or half-dozens, along byways and hedgerows, with scarcely a sound but for a faint tinkling of silver bracelets. The human citizens of Tir kept their youngest and fairest under close watch, for fear that the Grey Neighbours would steal them.

It was not until the return of the trows that Asr
ă
thiel finally let go all suspicion of prevarication on the part of the Argenkindë. She gave up all doubt, all hope and dread, and allowed herself to accept the fact that the goblins had departed. Their brief renaissance was indeed over. They had ridden away from the four kingdoms, as they had declared they would, and the halls of the Mountain King stood abandoned; silent save perhaps for the beat of an owl’s wing, the song of draughts through pierced rock, and the soft footfalls of the last trows padding here and there in search of forgotten silver.

Zaravaz was gone.

In rifts torn through Asr
ă
thiel’s reality hovered the outline of a tall man with blowing hair; merely a vacuous silhouette of someone who was no longer there. The damsel, chained beneath the burden of forsakenness, wondered how it might have been if she had gone with Zaravaz to the mysterious lands of ice and snow in search of her father. Yet of course, she owed it to her countrymen, to her calling, to her grandfather, to remain and work in Tir . . .

She was immortal, therefore there was plenty of time, she told herself; plenty of time to go roaming in later years . . . In private, however, she vowed that when Avalloc’s life was over, and when a new generation of weathermasters had arisen to perform the tasks of the old, then, if her father had not returned, she would follow him over the mountains. And if during her quest to seek her father she should chance to meet any of the Glashtinsluight, why then she might enquire after Zaravaz.

Her longing for his presence was so intense, she felt it drain all blitheness and vigour from her life.

Since the covenant at the Wuthering Moors and the advent of the punitive Kobold Watch, extensive changes had begun to take place across the four kingdoms. Pastures were left to turn into wild meadows, or else ploughed and planted with Winter root-crops. Pheasants, ptarmigan and partridges grew numerous on the moors, no longer in danger from the arrows of hunters. On the upland slopes, cloud vapours raced against the swift shadows of deer and leaping hares. Forests jubilated with birdsong. Horses, pigs, goats, fowls and cattle had been turned out into the wild places, to roam free. Many, accustomed from birth to domesticity, perished. The strongest survived and banded together in herds or flocks. A new generation was produced; a wild-born, free generation that would prove cleverer and stronger than the preceding one.

Creative human cooks, utilising beans and nuts, invented new recipes. Butchers, leatherworkers and silkworm farmers went out of business. Nobody was, as yet, daring or foolhardy enough to explore wight-infested caves in search of svartlap, the goblin fabric; fortunately, however, a couple of old herbalists revived the knowledge that the tough and flexible bark of goat willow and paper mulberry made an excellent substitute for leather. Spinners of flax were in great demand. People began trying to harness the power of wind and sun to replace horse power. Druids invented useless clockwork horses. Cunning artisans made solar-powered vehicles that moved slowly and wind-powered ones that moved erratically. Lamps were fuelled by vegetable oils. Some enterprising farmers struck bargains with certain Marauders, hiring the strongest amongst them—who were far more powerful than an average man, if not as shrewd—to be labourers. Blacksmiths ceased to make horseshoes and increased their output of man-driven ploughshares.

Discomfiting to Asr
ă
thiel, and to a large part of Tir’s human population, was a cult that had grown up amongst adolescents of the four kingdoms. Rebellious schoolgirls were declaring themselves in love with the goblin king, whose reputation for wickedness, prowess and beauty had reached every corner of the land. They claimed they would like nothing better than to meet him, even if they promptly swooned at his feet. Forming little cliques they met in secret to discuss him, draw pictures of him, compose songs, stories and poems about him, act in plays about him, share their dreams of him, and generally ignite the fury of their elders for idolising the enemy.

‘I do not know what the world is coming to,’ muttered their parents. ‘We were never so foolish and feckless in our day.’

Infatuated gentlewomen begged Asr
ă
thiel to tell them every detail about Zaravaz, but she firmly declined. ‘I do not wish to relive the memories of my time in Minith Ariannath,’ she said, for once glad that human beings possessed the ability to tell untruths.

Despite the fact that women of all ages clandestinely sighed after Zaravaz, and even though it was generally thought that the goblins had left the mountains for good, there remained a strange reluctance on the part of most people to venture to the Northern Ramparts. The memory of lightning-lethal unseelie warriors was fresh in their minds, and the mountains seemed tainted by a lingering terror. Besides, the gwyllion still haunted the high paths, and unknown numbers of trows possibly wandered in the tunnels, and no one could guess how many kobolds continued to infect the underworld. Those who were inquisitive about the Northern Ramparts decided to let the mountains wait awhile.

Except for one man.

Prince William was zealous in his efforts to restore his father’s kingdom after the war. He wished to recompense those Narngalish families whose men had fallen in battle; to ensure that the loved ones the soldiers left behind did not suffer from want. Tirelessly he worked towards this goal, and as he did so it came to him that an untapped source of enormous wealth lay within the very borders of his own realm. The goblins had probably taken away with them all their silver and jewels, but they would not have touched any of the gold.

The caves in which the unseelie knights had been incarcerated were lined with a veneer of gold. It could be harvested and sold, and the proceeds used to help the bereaved families. In addition, there was the gold that had been cast into the pit of the Inglefire. Asr
ă
thiel had told William the tale of the goblin lieutenant, Zorn, and how he had perished in those witchy flames, and how, long ago, before the original Goblin Wars had commenced, the horde had commanded their human slaves to cast great quantities of gold into the weird conflagration. The stories had ignited the prince’s interest in the elusive and legendary pit of werefire, and he was determined to try to retrieve some of that bullion.

Perhaps, also, he threw himself into his endeavours with some extra zeal, to consume some of his thwarted energy; to divert his attention from the withdrawn, reflective damsel he longed so ardently to love. And perhaps there were elements of anger and hatred behind his plans, for he had witnessed the beauty of Zaravaz, had seen the way the goblin king had gazed upon Asr
ă
thiel, and more than ever he wished to plunder the mountains of their gold and keep some of it for the royal arsenal, that Narngalis might become unconquerable by goblinkind.

Since the forging of Fallowblade the knowledge of the fire’s whereabouts had been lost, but many people, including William, had heard the madman Fionnbar Aonarán ranting about a pit of flames he had found while roaming in the dark beneath the mountains. The prince made up his mind to mount a gold-gathering expedition to the Northern Ramparts, taking Aonarán as his guide to the werefire.

When he informed Asr
ă
thiel of his proposal she was dismayed, and begged him to reconsider. ‘Go nowhere with that fiendish creature Aonarán, the deathless one,’ she cried. ‘Whatever he touches he brings to ruin. It is because of him and his schemes that my mother sleeps forever. It is he who freed the horde and caused this war in the first place!’

William, however, insisted that he could deal with Aonarán who, he said, had made of himself merely a harmless gibbering idiot, with all his damaging attempts to die. The damsel would not be persuaded. She was so set against the idea of the prince’s adventure that eventually William decided to set off on his quest for the gold without informing her. In fact the quest was kept secret for many reasons; not least that King Warwick thought it best for the denizens of the other kingdoms to remain forgetful of the masses of unclaimed treasure beneath the Northern Ramparts. Even though the mountains were within the borders of Narngalis and therefore belonged by right to the Narngalish Crown, some pirates might take it into their heads to become salvagers themselves.

Fionnbar Aonarán was fetched from the Asylum for Lunatics, and brought into the presence of Prince William and his father. Upon seeing the immortal madman they could not help but reel with shock. His numerous attempts to slay himself had wrought appalling disfigurements upon his person; he was reduced to a wreck that had once been a man. Black-charred with white scars, his flesh was peeling, suppurating and ulcerated. His head was bald, his fingertips burned to rounded stumps. A single wobbling tooth remained in his gums. Only his eyes, his pale-blue, swimming eyes like marbles set in cinders, were not ugly and ruined. The wretch moaned and wrung his horrible hands and sighed and whistled. Scant sense could be had out of him, and no one could be certain how much he understood of what was said to him, but he made no clear sign that he refused the scheme.

As soon as his expeditionary party was ready William took his leave of his family and set off northwards. They went on foot; William’s most esteemed advisor, Sir Torold Tetbury; a column of knights and men-at-arms, including the Knight-Commander of the Companions of the Cup, Sir Huelin Lathallan; a band of miners and engineers; explorers learned in cave lore, and a chirurgeon-apothecary. Aonarán was under close guard, for he could not be relied upon. Several carts accompanied them, drawn by hired teams of monstrous Marauders, strong as oxen, large as bears, chosen for their dimwittedness and lack of cunning. One vehicle carried the expedition’s equipment. It was intended that the other carts, which were empty, would be filled with gold on the return journey. William also brought a couple of cages of pigeons, well hidden from Kobold Watchmen, so that he could send a message to King’s Winterbourne as soon as the party re-emerged. It was a risky venture, for if the Watch found the avian contraband it would go harshly with the Narngalishmen.

Without horses they plodded slowly; it took more than three weeks to reach their destination. Ninember was waning and the skies were thick with cloud as Aonarán at last guided the party to the high, thin mouth of a cave that opened into a flank of Storth Cynros. Above them towered a sheer rock face with tumbled boulders piled at its foot.