Goblin Moon (2 page)

“I heard another story how Karl Wulfhart lamed his
leg, and it weren’t nearly so romantic,” Caleb replied coolly. He
reached into a pocket somewhere inside the capacious folds of his
coat and removed a long-stemmed pipe. Reckoning it was time for a
change of subject, he said: “Heard there was a quake up-country.
Mayhap we’re not the only ones in luck this night.”

When Iune drew near the earth in her elliptical
orbit, the unstable country upriver was prone to seismic tremors
and quakes, and sometimes it was the agitated earth, not the river,
that leveled cities and towns and forests, or, in a ghastly
reversal, swallowed the living as it spewed forth the dead.

“Oughtn’t to speak of luck afore it’s been proved
good or ill—nor afore we’ve learned if our fine country gentleman
took a notion to curse his grave goods,” Jed muttered. He
remembered a time twelve weeks past, in the season of Frost, when
old Hagen Rugen had come into possession of a pair of solid silver
candlesticks, the grave offering of a rural parson—and died not
three days later of the Horrors.

“Superstitious foolery,” said Caleb, as if he could
read Jed’s thoughts. “Hagen Rugen was a drunk and guzzled
hisself
to death on the money he made off
them candlesticks. ‘Dead men’s coin ain’t no worse than any man’s,’
“ he quoted.

Jedidiah set his jaw. Uncle Caleb was a fine one to
scoff at superstition. Wasn’t it “superstitious foolery” that
brought Caleb so low in the first place—him and that old madman at
the book-shop?

“Aye, I know what powers there are to bring a man to
ruin—and how he may bring his own self low with foolish schemes and
crackbrained notions.” Caleb spoke again as if guessing where Jed’s
thoughts were leading him—which in all probability he was, having a
knack for that sort of thing. “What man knows better than me?”

Caleb stuck the pipe in the corner of his mouth.
“I’ve lived off this river for nigh fifty years—a hard life, some
would call it, but I never took no harm from it, though I took
silver and gold from the dead as often as I could. No, and I never
seen no bloodsuckers nor bonegrinders, neither. But when I lived in
a fine mansion, having a respectable post as servant to the family
of a jarl—and was more than a servant, was friend and confeedant to
the son of that noble house—then I knew something and experienced
something of Powers and Intelligences, and all the evil things that
can blight a man’s heart, and twist a man’s soul, and dog a man’s
footsteps wheresoever he might choose to go, and all with no other
object than to bring him down to Ruination!”

Caleb nodded emphatically, took the pipe out of his
mouth, and tapped it on the side of the boat as if for further
emphasis. “When you’ve seen and done and suffered as much as I
have, lad, then you’ll be fit to say what’s superstitious foolery
and what’s just plain TOM-foolery. Until then, you’d do well to let
yourself be guided by wiser heads.”

Jed said nothing, but continued to row.

Jed tied up at a wharf on the eastern bank, just
below a tavern known as the Antique Squid. The upper stories of the
tavern were dark, but the windows on the lower floor cast forth a
welcoming glow of orange firelight, and the strains of a lively jig
played on the fiddle and hurdy-gurdy drifted through an open
door.

Jed scrambled out of the boat and climbed nimbly onto
the stone pier. Caleb followed, his movements slow and stiff. They
used a stout rope and an ancient winch to haul the coffin out of
the water.

At the patter and scrape of approaching footsteps,
Jed whirled around just in time to spot two furtive figures
emerging from the shadows near the river wall. He reached for the
gaff hook, ready for a fight. But then a familiar voice hailed him
from the direction of the Squid, and two burly figures in dark
cloaks and tricorn hats came out of the tavern. The footpads melted
back into the darkness, at the approach of the Watchmen.

“Seems we’re in luck.” Matthias, a big,
coarse-featured redhead, nodded in the direction of the coffin.

The men of the Watch claimed a share of everything
the scavengers brought ashore in Thornburg, offering in return
their protection against the thieves and ruffians who inhabited the
wharf at night, and also against the hobgoblins and knockers who
lived in warrens inside Fishwife Hill and crawled out through the
sewers when the moon was full.

This same Matthias, Jedidiah suddenly recollected,
had claimed a silver-plated figurine from the ill-fated Hagen
Rugen—which argued in favor of Caleb’s contention that deadman’s
plate and coin were as good as any man’s. It stood to reason that
if the parson had cursed the candlesticks, he had not neglected the
rest of his hoard, yet here was Matthias, as big and as ugly as
ever, a full two seasons after Hagen’s demise.

Caleb began to unfasten the latches and bolts that
sealed the coffin. Still thinking of all the gruesome tales he had
repeated earlier, Jed felt that cold feeling grow in the pit of his
stomach. Walther and Matthias, each at an end of the ebonwood
casket, lifted the lid.

“Sol burn me black!” Walther exclaimed, but the
others stared silently, rendered speechless by surprise.

The body of a man in antique dress, and what appeared
to be a perfect state of preservation, lay inside. He was just past
his middle years, with dark shoulder-length hair and a neat beard
streaked with grey. His eyes were sewn shut and his limbs decently
composed for burial, but a faint bloom was in his cheeks and a
fresh color was on his lips, and the whole effect was so entirely
lifelike that it seemed as though he had recently come from the
hands of a high-class embalmer; yet he was dressed in the style of
a scholar of the previous century, in a dark velvet tunic and
breeches, a black silk robe, and a wide collar of delicate white
lace. A pewter medallion lay on his breast, attached to a broad
scarlet ribbon around his neck, and instead of the usual grave
offerings of gold and silver, he had been buried with his books,
ancient volumes bound in crumbling leather, with curious symbols
stamped in gilt upon the covers. On one appeared the same
mysterious sigil that was stamped on the medallion: a two-headed
serpent devouring a fiery disk that might have been meant to
represent the sun.

“Burn me!” Walther exclaimed again. “If that ain’t an
ugly jest—to tog a man in fancy dress, pack him up with a load of
dusty old books, and tip him into the river apurpose!”

Matthias, recovering, made a sign against bad luck.
To rob the dead was one thing—an act, arising as it did from sound
financial motives, which was instrumental to the advancement of the
living—but to make a mockery of the rite of burial
and with no discernible notion of profit
, even to
men as rough and profane as the two constables, this was a shocking
impiety. And by the look on Caleb’s face, the expression of a man
in the grip of some tremendous emotion, it was evident he was as
shocked as the others.

But Jed had conceived another idea entirely. “Look
here, I don’t reckon ‘tis a corpse, after all. Only a wax doll like
the figures they sell at Madam Rusalka’s.

Indeed, the waxen transparency of the skin, the
lifelike color, argued that the body could not be made of any
ordinary mortal clay. Yet no one could bring himself to put a hand
inside the coffin and put Jed’s theory to the test.

Matthias laughed uneasily, rubbing the red stubble
that grew along his jawline. “A wax doll . . . aye. Dwarf work by
the look of it. It may be worth sommat to somebody. Them velvet
togs, too, and that lace collar, they didn’t come cheap—they’ll
bring a pretty price of themselves, if no one wants to buy the
figure.” He turned to Caleb. “Them old books, too . . . reckon we
could sell them to your crony, old Jenk the bookseller?”

With a visible effort, Caleb tore his gaze away from
the coffin and its contents. His voice shook and his body still
trembled with a violent agitation. “Gottfried Jenk . . . aye, he’ll
want to see the books—and mayhap the rest as well. Run along, lads,
and fetch us a cart. I’ve no coin for you now, Matthias, but I’ve a
notion that Jenk will pay us well for this night’s work.”

Chapter
2

Of Gottfried Jenk, his History, and the Temptation
he was subjected to that same night.

Jenk’s bookshop was located at one end of an ill-lit
cobblestone street, in a decrepit building with a high peaked roof
and a gabled front. The shop occupied the lower floors, while the
bookseller lived in a tiny suite of rooms under the eaves.

When the moon-faced grandfather clock down in the
bookshop struck the hour of midnight, Jenk had still not retired.
These nights when Iune was full, strange fancies plagued him,
making sleep impossible. He sat at a queer little desk in his
bedchamber, reading by the light of a single candle: a
high-shouldered old man in a snuff-colored coat and a powdered wig,
bent over an ancient Chalézian manuscript he was attempting to
translate. Every now and then, he passed a pale, trembling hand
over his forehead.

His head grew heavier and heavier; his eyes watered
and burned. The characters he was trying to decipher began to move,
to hump and crawl upon the page, to slide off the edges . . . With
a cry, he pushed the manuscript away. He rose and began to pace the
floor.

A hollow-eyed figure in a tattered frock coat sprang
up to block his path; Jenk threw out a hand to fend it off. The
wraith rolled a bloodshot wolfish eye, tossed back its head, and
howled at him, pawing its narrow chest as if in mortal agony. Jenk
gasped; for the pain was in his own breast, a devouring heat that
ate through flesh and muscle and bone, leaving a dark, burnt-out
cavity in the place where his heart had been.

“Naught but a shadow and a mockery,” Jenk whispered
to himself. With quaking limbs, he returned to his chair and
collapsed. “A shadow and a mockery, which I may banish and be
whole.” At his words, the apparition faded and was gone, and
beneath his clutching hands the old man felt solid flesh and bone,
the pounding of his heart—indeed, it leapt about and banged against
his ribs so frantically that, for a moment, he feared it must
burst.

“I am whole,” the old man repeated, not to himself
this time but to the room at large. In all the dark corners,
hobgoblin shapes groped and squirmed, struggling to acquire
tangible form. Even when he buried his face in his hands, he could
not block them out: visions of his past . . . old hopes, old fears,
old loves, old hates, all of them grotesquely changed, grown
strange and terrible in their altered shapes.

He shook his head, as if by doing so he might clear
his mind. He knew he must remember—must remember who he was and
what he had been—must separate the true memories from the false. In
that way only could he hope to move beyond the tangle of dreams and
visions.

He had been . . . a young man of good family, the
youngest son of a jarl, with a modest fortune of his own. A
brilliant, bookish youth, his name recognized far beyond his native
Marstadtt, beyond the principality of Waldermark, known in all the
capitals of Euterpe—a man admired, courted—his only liabilities (or
so he thought them then) a pretty, spoiled wife and an infant
daughter. Through a series of startling philosophical essays which
he wrote and saw published, he gained the interest of an aged
scholar who bequeathed to him certain rare books on alchemy and
magic.

In those books, he discovered spells and formulas,
diagrams, scales, magic squares: the tenets of a secret doctrine
going back more than eighteen hundred years to the days of Panterra
and Evanthum. Not all that he read there was new to him; he had
some prior acquaintance with natural philosophy and knew of the
Spagyrics, who claimed the pure, unblemished tradition, and of the
Scolectics, who sought knowledge as power, often to their own
destruction. He knew the dangers, but he had not been warned.
Because those books promised him . . . ah, to be sure! What did
those books
not
promise him? Wealth, fame,
even immortality could be his, but most of all the higher
knowledge, knowledge of the universe in its innermost, intimate
workings. He sought that knowledge and lusted after that knowledge
as ardently as ever man desired woman. And what was the price of
this thing he craved with almost a physical longing? A few short
years of study and various expenditures—laboratory equipment
bought, salts and acids and metallic compounds purchased—the fire
in his athenor consuming, consuming fuel day and night—and the
expenses mounting until, his substance gone, he applied to
moneylenders, ran up an enormous debt—and ruined himself in a
fruitless quest for the Elixir of Life, the secret of
transmutation, and the mystical stone Seramarias.

A distant kinsman in trade had provided the money for
him to open this bookshop, and here he still lived and did business
nearly a half a century later. He led a quiet, orderly, scholarly
existence, punctuated the last five years by these periodic fits of
disorientation and confusion, when the teeming products of his
troubled brain threatened to overwhelm him.

As Jenk moaned and writhed in his chair, the sound of
creaking cartwheels and scuffling feet down in the street attracted
his attention. It seemed to him that there was something . . .
something enormously portentous in those sounds. With an effort, he
rose and crossed to a window. He was just unfastening the casement
when someone knocked on the door below.

Jenk opened the window and stuck out his head. The
moon had set behind Cathedral Hill; the lane was lit only by dim,
flickering street lamps set at uneven intervals all down the
street, and by a lanthorn which some demented person seemed to be
waving about under his window.