Reckless (Free Preview) (2 page)

One mistake.

Jacob stepped through the arched doorway in which the
scorched remnants of the castle’s main door were still hanging on the warped
hinges.
 
On the steps in front, a Heinzel
was collecting acorns from the cracked stones.
 
He quickly scampered off as Jacob’s shadow
fell on him.
 
Red eyes
above a pointy nose, pants and shirt sewn from stolen human clothes.
 
The ruin was swarming with them.

“Send him back!
 
That’s
what we came here for, isn’t it?”
 
The
impatience in Fox’s voice was hard to miss.

But Jacob shook his head.
 
“Bringing him here was a mistake.
 
There’s nothing on the other side that can
help him.”

Jacob had told Fox about the world he came from, but she
never really wanted to hear about it.
 
What
she knew was enough:
 
that it was the
place to which he disappeared far too often, only to bring back memories that
followed him like shadows.

“And?
 
What do you
think will happen to him here?”

Fox did not say it, but Jacob knew what she was thinking.
 
In her world, fathers killed their own sons as
soon as they discovered the stone in their skin.

He looked down toward the foot of the castle hill, where the
red roofs were fading into the twilight.
 
The first lights were coming on in
Schwanstein.
 
From a distance, the town
looked like one of the pictures printed on gingerbread tins, but over the past
years, railway tracks had begun to cut through the hills beyond, and gray smoke
rose from the smokestacks of factories into the evening sky.
 
The world behind the mirror wanted to grow up.
 
However, the petrified flesh growing in
his brother had not been sown by mechanical looms or any of the other modern
achievements but by the old magic that still dwelled in its hills and forests.

A Gold-Raven landed next to Will on the cracked tiles.
 
Jacob shooed it away before it could croak one
of its sinister spells into his brother’s ear.

Will groaned in his sleep.
 
The human skin did not yield to the stone
without a fight.
 
Jacob felt the pain as
his own.
 
Only his love for his brother
had made him return to the other world, even though he’d done so less and less
frequently over the years.
 
His mother
had threatened him with social services, she had cried, but she had never
suspected where he vanished to.
 
Will,
however, had always wrapped his arms around Jacob, eagerly asking what he had
brought for him.
 
The shoes of a Heinzel,
the cap of a Thumbling, a button made of elven glass, a piece of scaly Waterman
skin
—
Will had hoarded Jacob’s gifts under his mattress, and soon
he began to regard the stories Jacob told him as fairy tales his brother
invented only for him.

Now he knew how true they had all been.

Jacob pulled the coat over his brother’s disfigured arm.
 
The two moons were already in the sky.

“Keep an eye on him, Fox.”
 
He rose to his feet.
 
“I’ll be back soon.”

“And where are you going
?
Jacob!”
 
The vixen jumped into his path.
 
“Nobody can help him.”

“We’ll see.”
 
He pushed
her aside.
 
“Don’t let
Will
climb into the tower.”

She looked after him as he walked down the steps.
 
The only footprints on the mossy steps were
his own.
 
No human ventured up here.
 
The ruin was thought to be cursed, and Jacob
had heard dozens of stories about its demise, but after all these years he
still didn’t know who had left the mirror in its tower, just as he had never
found out where his father had vanished to.

A Thumbling jumped at his collar.
 
Jacob managed to grab him before he could
steal the medallion he was wearing around his neck.
 
On any other day, Jacob would have followed
the little thief at once.
 
Thumblings
could hoard considerable treasures in the hollow trees where they built their
nests.
 
But he had already lost too much
time.

One mistake, Jacob.

He would make it right again
.
But
Fox’s words followed him as he climbed down the steep hill.

Nobody can help him.

If she was right, soon he would no longer have a brother.
 
Neither in this world nor in
the other.

One mistake.

3

Goyl

The field over which Hentzau and his soldiers were riding
still reeked of blood.
 
The rain had
filled the trenches with a muddy sludge.
 
Behind the walls both sides had built for
their protection lay abandoned rifles and bullet-riddled helmets.
 
Kami’en had the horse cadavers and the human
corpses burnt before they began to rot, but the dead Goyl still lay where they
had fallen.
 
In just a few days, they
would be all but indistinguishable from the rocks that protruded from the
trampled earth, and the heads of those who had fought valiantly had already
been sent to the main fortress, as was Goyl custom.

Another battle.
 
Hentzau was
tired of them, but he hoped that this would be the last one for a while.
 
The Empress was finally ready to negotiate,
and even Kami’en wanted peace.
 
Hentzau
covered his mouth as the wind blew the ash down from the hill where they had
burnt the corpses.
 
Six
years aboveground, six years without the shelter of the rock between him and
the sun.
 
His eyes ached from all
the light, and the air was again growing colder with every day, making his skin
as brittle as chalk.
 
Hentzau’s skin
resembled brown jasper
—
not the finest color for a Goyl.
 
Hentzau was the first jasper Goyl to have
risen to the highest military ranks.
 
But
then again, before Kami’en the Goyl had never had a King, and Hentzau liked his
skin.
 
Jasper provided much better
camouflage than onyx or moonstone.

Kami’en had set up camp not far from the battlefield, in the
hunting lodge of an imperial general who, together with most of his officers,
had died in the battle.

The sentries guarding the destroyed gate saluted as Hentzau
rode past them.
 
The
King’s bloodhound.
 
That’s what
they called him.
 
His
jasper shadow.
 
Hentzau had served
under Kami’en since they had first challenged the other chiefs.
 
It had taken two years for them to kill them
all, and for the Goyl to get their first King.

The drive leading up to the lodge was lined with statues, and
not for the first time did Hentzau note with amusement how humans immortalized
their gods and heroes with stone effigies while loathing his kind for their
skin.
 
Even the Doughskins had to admit
it:
 
Stone was the only thing that
lasted.

The windows of the lodge had been bricked up, just as in all
the buildings the Goyl had occupied, but only when he descended the steps to
the cellars did Hentzau finally feel the soothing darkness that could be found
belowground.
 
Just a few gas lamps lit
the vaults that now housed, instead of supplies and dusty trophies, the general
staff of the King of the Goyl.

Kami’en
.
In their language, it meant
nothing more than “stone.”
 
His father
had governed one of the lower cities, but fathers did not count among the Goyl.
 
It was the mothers who raised them, and
by the age of nine Goyl were considered grown up and had to fend for
themselves.
 
At that age, most of them
went to explore the Lower World, searching for undiscovered caves until the
heat became too much even for their stone skins.
 
Kami’en, however, had been interested only in
the world above.
 
For a long time, he had
lived in one of the cave cities that had been built above-ground after the
lower cities had become too crowded.
 
There,
he had survived two attacks by the humans, and that’s when he began to study
their weapons and their tactics, snuck into their towns and military camps.
 
He was nineteen when he conquered his first
human city.

The guards waved Hentzau in.
 
Kami’en was standing in front of a map showing
his conquests and the positions of his enemies.
 
The figurines representing their troops had
been made to his specifications after he’d won his first battle.
 
The Goyl were carved from carnelian, the
imperials were cast in silver, Lotharaine wore gold, the eastern lords donned
copper, and
Albion
’s troops marched in ivory.
 
Soldiers, gunners, snipers,
riders for the cavalry.
 
Kami’en
scrutinized them as if he were searching for a way to beat them all at once.
 
He was wearing black, as he always did when he
was out of uniform, and more than ever his pale red skin seemed to be made of
fire.
 
Never before had
carnelian been the color of a leader.
 
Onyx was the color of the Goyl elite.

Kami’en’s mistress was wearing green, as usual, layers of
emerald velvet that enveloped her like the petals of a flower.
 
Even the most beautiful Goyl woman would have
paled next to her, like a pebble next to polished moonstone, but Hentzau always
impressed upon his soldiers not to look at her for too long.
 
Her beauty was like a spider’s venom, and not
for nothing
were
there many stories of Fairies who,
with a single glance, had turned men into thistles or helplessly wriggling
fish.
 
She and her sisters had been born
of water, and Hentzau feared them as much as he feared the seas that gnawed at
the rocks of his world.

The Fairy gave him a cursory glance as he entered.
 
The Dark Fairy.
 
The darkest of them all.
 
Even her own sisters had cast her out.
 
Many believed that she could read minds, but
Hentzau didn’t think so.
 
She would have
long killed him for what he thought about her.

He turned his back on her and bowed his head to his King.
 
“You summoned me.”

Kami’en took one of the silver figurines and weighed it in
his hand.
 
“I need you to find someone
for me.
 
A human who is growing petrified
flesh.”

Hentzau cast a quick glance at the Fairy.

“Where should I start?” he replied.
 
“There are already thousands of them.”

Man-Goyl.
 
In the past,
Hentzau had used his claws for killing, but now the spell of the Fairy let them
sow petrified flesh.
 
Like all Fairies,
she could not bear children, so she gave Kami’en sons by letting every strike
of his soldiers’ claws turn one of his human enemies into Goyl.
 
Nobody fought with less mercy than a Man-Goyl
fighting against his former race, but Hentzau despised them just as much as he
despised the Fairy who had created them with her sorcery.

A smile had snuck onto Kami’en’s lips
.
No
.
The Fairy could not read Hentzau’s thoughts, but his King
could.

“Don’t worry.
 
The one
I want you to find can be easily distinguished from the others.”
 
Kami’en placed the silver figurine back on the
map.
 
“The skin he is growing is jade.”

The guards exchanged a quick look.
 
Hentzau, however, just sneered.
 
Lava-Men who boiled the blood of the earth,
the eyeless bird that saw all, and the Goyl with the jade skin who gave
invincibility to the King he served — stories told to children to fill the
darkness underground.

“And which scout told you that?”
 
Hentzau rubbed his aching skin.
 
Soon the cold would have given it more cracks
than fractured glass.
 
“Have him
executed.
 
The Jade Goyl is a myth.
 
Since when do you confuse myths with reality?”