My goblin led us back to the patch of ground in which we’d first found her. At first we were confused, but when she stepped into the sparkling heather and simply waved for us to follow, it seemed none of the three of us wanted to appear the coward. We simultaneously waded out into the bushes, and gradually they came up to my knees – the twins’ hips – mine –
The heather was far deeper than it was supposed to be, the stems of its stalks going down to an unknown distance. I suddenly fancied that we were floating above an abyss, an infinite Zyger-pit of ethereal madness out of which these strange plants extended up, the tendrils of some vast ancient intelligence.
“Ouch!” Jaid chirped, reaching down to rub at her side where a twig must’ve poked her. There were, mercifully, no thorns to be found. The vivid flowers dancing atop the shrubs, glittering in magenta-red and pink-white, had a cloying, almost bitter pungence which overtook the sweetness of the wind as they came closer to our faces. The silver-gold dust coating their whorling leaves seemed to sparkle in and out of existence, twinkling almost like stars right in front of my eyes.
When we got so deep the twins were submerged up to their armpits, I started to get suspicious. I’d taken Blofm into my power and I knew, fundamentally, she was mine. She couldn’t bear me ill-will, and she’d been quite casual when explaining that the goblin-queen knew of our presence here in her queendom. But that clearly didn’t mean Blofm still couldn’t draw me into a trap…
Never mind. Springing traps was my speciality. Things always worked out. Nentheleme saved my ass in Zadhal. Nighteye saved my ass from the Rivertown heretic, Aramas. Maybe it was Zel’s turn to show up out of nowhere and lay my enemies low for me, reject her former master, abase herself before me in tearful apology…
As it was, all I felt as we descended were the happenstance intrusions of insects on my tripartite shielding, the continual tapping of malicious bugs into whose spaces, and bad books, we were trespassing.
“I don’t know if I like this,” I called. The twins were keeping a resolute silence; I hoped I was speaking for the three of us.
“This is the doorway.” Blofm moved similarly to a swimmer in water, treading the heather and spinning around by swirling her arms. “We get in here, an’ out there.” She waved vaguely at the other side of the shrubs, a softly-rising slope some forty or fifty feet away beneath a pearly ridge of rock. “Then yer’ll see, aha!”
She dived down into the heather, clearly unconcerned in every way.
Gritting my teeth into a grin, I flashed my smile at the twins, prayed silently to Yune, and dived after her.
I did my best to walk-swim-crawl for a few yards – so long as I kept my eyes shut it really wasn’t so bad, other than a bit of burning in the nostrils. I surfaced again to wave my brother and sister on, but when I looked back I spotted only Jaid floating there.
“Jar?” I said. “Jaroan!”
He surfaced with a rustle behind me and I whirled to find him, cursing my unusable foot.
“Come on!” he berated us, diving down again.
By the time we emerged on the far side of the heather, everything had changed. Where before there had been only an outcropping of white, translucent stone above us, there was now something else entirely.
A tower, of sorts, stood there in its place, backlit by shafts of green and golden light. From our vantage below, it was difficult to make out the detail but I could see that it was surrounded by a wall, enclosed in what must’ve been a narrow courtyard by the ten-foot barrier of piled, mismatched stones. Behind the wall, the tower itself rose up to perhaps sixty or seventy feet, more prism than cylinder. There was nothing neat to any of it. If it weren’t for the crude attempt to imitate mortal architecture with the inclusion of an outer wall and the occasional window, I would’ve taken it for nothing more than a random feature of the otherworld, a big work of art created by a bored bunch of fey. But it was clearly a habitation.
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A… palace?
Slowly, I made my way up the slope, the twins just ahead of me, all three of us following our guide. The gateway through the boundary was a tunnel, almost as long as the wall was tall, and, emerging on the other side, I cast about the thin strip of land between us and the tower proper. Where before the grass underfoot had been buoyant and bouncy, tips covered with clovers, the tunnel brought us into a circle of dead plants, their pale, skeletal stems knitted into a kind of mattress.
Strangest of all, the wind died. Not just died down, but stopped in its entirety; the difference was startlingly noticeable. I could still hear it, outside, as it coursed through the rushes and bushes. Yet not a breeze touched a hair on our heads, the goblin’s lank, sweaty locks hanging unmoving like matted vines from her pale scalp.
“Are you good with this?” I asked the twins quietly. “I can drop you back into Materium, or –”
“No way,” Jaroan said, striding off faster than I could follow. Jaid simply continued in his wake; she moved more slowly than our brother and her head was bowed, but there was nothing hesitant about her posture, no doubt on the fierce face I glimpsed as she turned.
Once their backs were to me I tested the portal anyway. There were no natural seams in the dimensional fabric around here, but if my power had been dulled I couldn’t tell – I opened an artificial gateway without trouble.
Shrugging, I continued limping after them. It was pretty much as I’d expected. The demi-plane of the goblin-queen was far less restrictive than the nightmare of the slumbering guardian beneath Mund. Doubtless this Queen of Moths was powerful in her own right – she could see us coming, to one degree or another – but there was power, and then there was someone-ancient-installed-me-to-kill-renegade-archmages power.
The tower’s door didn’t face the entry, so we trailed Blofm around the big stony edifice for about a minute until the ramshackle wooden portcullis came into view. Why exactly a portcullis was being used, when it was clearly hinged on the side like any other door, was quite beyond me. The spiky teeth along the bottom, sunk into the soil, were hardly going to give an invader any trouble – but they had to make it a right pain in the backside to swing open.
Before the mesh of wooden beams serving as the last line of defence, protecting this queen’s dubious palace from the open otherworld, stood two of the least-fierce looking sentinels I’d ever seen. One of the goblins was sitting in a daze, his tin-pot helmet pulled down over his eyes, and a sharp word from his colleague wasn’t enough to rouse him; a pointy shoe in the ribs, however, brought him clattering to his feet.
The pair of goblin guards, armed and armoured out of a rusty kitchen, eyed us in alarm.
“Yer nah…” the more alert of the two started “… nah ‘upposed ter bring the growed-up!”
“Shut it,” Blofm said promptly, and quickly covered the ground between them, finally coming to a proud slouch before the guards. “He’s a saucer. I belong to ‘im now. Lookit, or yer’ll join me.”
“Indeed.” I used a lofty tone, a touch deeper than my usual voice. “It’s difficult to think of a reason not to take you.”
It made sense, didn’t it? If I left them here to raise the alarm – wouldn’t I just be making things harder for myself? Why should I have to take the high road when the stakes were suddenly so high? I couldn’t send the twins home without some overt danger as an excuse, but inviting it made even less sense.
Their beady little goblin eyes met mine, and I realised just how easy it would be, how tempting, to just, snatch out their wills… They were so weak! Their names started to swim into view before my inner eye…
I looked away before my subconscious desire to own them could override my own willpower, casting my gaze over their heads instead. I put on a haughty expression, as if they meant nothing to me.
Maybe they’d felt how close it’d been just the same way I had. Or not just the same way: the near-miss appeared to send them into fits of terror. They wrung at the portcullis, whimpering softly and keeping their heads averted, tripping over themselves and almost getting their feet trapped in the gate’s row of teeth as they heaved it open.
I said nothing, letting the others fall into line in front of me as I dragged my leg in the rear-guard. I could keep a better eye on the twins like this.
We entered the palace of the goblin queen, and whatever I hoped to achieve here, I could only pray to the gods I wasn’t putting the twins on the line for it.
* * *