Post by Sire Halfblack on Nov 23, 2014 18:59:18 GMT
Plague IM 1013
Mountain rain on upturned faces, the water filthy as it ran from pointed nose and chin. They were wretches of the first order, and they stood with a dozen of the largest men and women there about them with naked sword and wet spear.
“No,” said Selgard letting the thoughts of all those about him buzz in his head. “I’m sorry, but I cannot offer you shelter.”
They were goblins and if their heads were rank as rotten gnoll nuts then the semi-circle of Selgard’s people that stood half hidden in the downpour had an opinion that it wouldn’t have taken a mind reader to pick up on. Being just that only made the growls and grumbles all the more poignant. There was not one chance in ten that his people would stomach goblins amongst them. Fine feelings and spiritual clarity went not an inch towards a greedy knife or a stolen calf. And this lot would have done it. A little kindness and the first night of charity would be turned against him. The life of one of his was not worth the brief relief of these refugees from the mountains (nor the deaths that would result when his people took their revenge). Reluctantly Selgard turned his back and allowed his henchmen to herd the goblins to the borders with the Badlands.
It was later when Selgard, still brooding over the affairs of the morning, watched as his people mixed the wood ash with virgin’s piss to cover their eyes against the pox and fells-ague. It worked too; folklore often did, even if this particular remedy only here. There was none of that in the city, you couldn’t just conjure up or invent such things. But Selgard was not in the city and he did not shed a tear over it now. The best of the new born animals had been slaughtered and hung facing the mountains. They weren’t much for worship here, but they didn’t see the folklore as that no more than a fishwife gutted the catch. It was just what you did.
The air was good and clean out here. And having arrived almost a week before Selgard no longer had to gasp and claw at it each morning after the black soup of the city that his lungs had grown used to.
*
Momentarily the filth that fell from the smog turned silver. The city flashed as metallic rain crashed violently down. Before them, on the square that fronted the Spire, the ground spurted and smoked under the assault. It lasted but briefly before fresh filth washed from above fell upon Deci, but the smoke dispersed to wash disease away (and doubtless into the abyss nearly hidden about that Quarter).
“That was pretty,” said Mojo somewhat scornfully.
Lucrethia Rath managed a tight little smile. Already flunkeys were waiting with oiled sailcloth lined with padded velvet on poles to keep them from the refreshed (such as that could be said) downpour. Child of Deci that she was and brought up to its ways she exhibited a steely patience whilst they readied their selves. That did not mean she was happy; child of Deci as she was again happiness was what fools contented themselves with in the absence of power - or truly fabulous boots. Either one, it didn’t matter which.
*
The crescent bed remained unused and the body servants had left after three consecutive nights of their services not being called upon. The tapestries on the walls were old but in good repair and seasoned wood burned brightly in the grate of a fireplace, the thick bars that caged the flue cherry red from the warming blaze. Lustrous rugs kept the chill from the floor. The chambers like so many above stairs in the Spire were marvellously appointed and if not for the manacles the man might have been some honoured guest.
“You will understand about the chains, I trust?” said King Troy the Faceless. He had arrived with a bottle from the Heartlands, directing the flunkey to leave it on a table beside the two silver cups.
His guest inclined his head. He had no access to paraphernalia and the two plain seeming fellows that stood politely in the corner of the room were there to ensure he did not attempt ritual by other means. They had, Troy knew, said nothing all the time they and their peers had stood duty here. They were loyal and understood their place amongst the nobility; they were simply furniture.
*
Beautiful in that Deci way that was common amongst the noblewomen of the city, Lucrethia Rath was as supple as a spear staff and possessed about as much fat. Inevitably the stays in her girdle would all be pointed, poisoned, and the black skirts that flared out behind her as she walked never quite touched the ground. Her eyes rather larger than most, her nose smaller, she had not quite mastered the pouting look so fashionable. Inevitably she was sharper than a stiletto knife laced through mail to a surprised heart; they didn’t breed them stupid in Deci (or if they did, they never saw enough of life to worry much about it).
She had been in the city less than a year, born and raised here as she had been but then educated in the rural lands in the sort of confines where a young woman might learn all she would need of life in the big city without having to endure it. Children to most of the nobles were something to be produced once they had ended all the childish nonsense that accompanied being a child. She had no head for politics; because she intended to keep it.
“So what was it about my position in House Majius that first attracted you to me?” said Mojo wryly. Within the Bazaar now they had little to worry about the rain. Space was at an absolutely premium hereabouts and with canopy, display, the outward jut of the buildings and the eternal scaffolding of the Guilds the sky being unprofitable was simply unwelcome.
“I have never mentioned an attraction,” said Lucrethia with a raised eyebrow.
Mojo allowed himself a sardonic sigh. The women of the Blood of Deci would have been content to be spiders, he thought. The idea of devouring their lovers doubtless appealed. It had probably happened in one or two cases. There were some that might think that a fair bargain. “And yet here you are with me...”
She shook her head, “No,” she said, “you are here with me.”
*
“What exactly do you think you’re doing?”
Orion was pretty sure he was helping out with the tack and harness for the oxen. Since this was almost entirely chains of different sizes and particular linkages it was heavy work - and the scouring never ended. He had heard that horses took a lot of work to stop them dropping down dead; oxen were no work at all. It was the rig and accoutrements that involved time and elbow grease. In Deci the grease was exactly that. Very new to the Guild he wasn’t sure what he had done wrong, but it was certain as snakes laid eggs that he had done something. He said, “Making myself useful, master?”
Burridge wasn’t a Guild Master but the diminutive was always used within the Guilds to anyone more senior, and now that meant pretty much anyone with a guild patch on his arm. Everyone but everyone that did any actual real work (which meant wastrel or here as well anyone that actually climbed on a cart) had better things to do than common labour. Orion wished his own patch wasn’t quite so obviously new, it made the rest of him look shabbier than usual. He said, “We don’t do such menial work, Orion. We all know you have friends in high places,” nothing uncommon there in Deci, patronage was wine and water in the city (not that you’d drink the water). “But that doesn’t mean you can bring the Guild into disrepute by dirtying your hands. But I’ve not heard a bad word said of you, and believe me – I’ve looked.”
“No master Burridge...” he put the chains down carefully where many like them were laid about the long barn. A dozen others were scrubbing now ever more industriously.
“Back to the tinker hall with you now!”
Orion sighed and knuckled his cap and sloped off in the direction of the room for which ‘hall’ was rather a grand appellation for such a dark, dull sort of room. There he fetched up the tin quill, and there he went back to the important Guild toil of establishing every load was exact. He picked up a square ingot of refined ore no larger than the palm of his hand and placed it in line with many more to be crated at day’s end. “One hundred and twelve identical and exact thumbs of iron,” he said and made a mark on the soft metal set before him, “Check.” He lifted another and set it upon the frame to ascertain weight and size. “One hundred and...”
*
“I had but barely sent the messenger...” said Thul. His languid pose for once more animate he stood within the gates of the cathedral, they having been opened to Davian’s knock. Davian was in no mood for the niceties of civilised behaviour but had steeled himself to it despite how he felt. His every footstep left a bloody trail as if he walked in bare feet upon a field of glass. There was no pain but his every movement was being marked about the city, and which trail the rain had singularly failed to shift. He had been cursed, it would pass, but it was irritating. So irritating indeed that he had taken little notice of the bodies in the square; this was Deci, corpses were birds in the trees. Not that they had trees. Or birds, just snakes (a swarm of which uncoiled to part as Thul led him inside).
Davian said, “Did you?”
“About the fighting?”
“Of course,” Davian set his expression. “I’m sure it was terrible...”
It had not been so bad here but a large number of goblins had entered the city and set about ravaging the Quarter. Even whilst the city had woken to the fact the wolves had been attacked when found and had been only too delighted to fight back. Even now most of the city had not noticed a thing. What came to Dog Town stayed in Dog Town. There was talk of where Sire Berry had been at the time...
“They must have entered through the gate,” continued Thul. It was not like the walls of Deci were defended. The gates were not always closed either. The local trade travelled by night, but trade by its nature came from further afield and so had the habit of daylight. “Several hundred I am led to believe?”
“Interesting,” pretended Davian. “Now then – what ails the Serpent?”
“Such superstition that would have it a dragon has traversed to the opinion that it is now a drake. An attack upon us no doubt from Halgar,” said Thul. He hissed softly at the thought. An attack upon Deci was a wish to be visited at a later date by a quiet little man and his knife, wishing to point out why such an idea had always been ill-advised. Whether it was an actual attack Davian did not know, but Thul seemed to think so. But then anything that Halgar did was to the mind of all right-thinking people in Deci an attack. They were an Empire now, and that meant that Halgar was in charge. Deci had long offended Halgar by not being Halgar. It wasn’t as if Deci gave a nuts how much Halgar wasn’t Deci. Indeed, Deci would have hated the idea; too much competition. The days when no one had enough metal elsewhere to produce a half decent toasting fork could not come soon enough for many here. Flint might make knives, and wood buttons – but both were of little use when it came to putting bread in a state to make the butter runny.
“And what can we do about that?”
“Kill all their first born sons.”
“Will that actually help restore the Cathedral?”
“It can’t hurt...” said Thul with feeling.
Davian nodded and promised to put it before the King, adding, “But more immediately perhaps?”
*
Silver if not polished tarnishes. Here and that had been allowed upon the walls so that the effigies and twisted sigils mounted upon them, more devotedly attended, shone. It was cold. A fire burned high and thin in a grate in one wall but the blue flame gave no heat and seemed if anything to draw it from the chamber. Seven attended him and each was masked, all only moved in sharp jerks between commoner moments of absolute stillness. Here the masks were cast in different expressions; fear, horror, delight, laughter, anger, wisdom, and ecstasy. His hosts were all alike a little too tall, their frames a little too sparse. Somewhere a clock ticked irregularly. Of a tock there was none.
“You know why I am here…” he said. About his filthy boots the dully mirrored tiles had cracked. The puddle made by his dripping rags drained only a little slower than it formed.
They did.
*
The goblin had whiskers and had by stretching enlarged his ears. From a flap in his britches an ugly naked tail dangled to the floor. This was the Gobrat and he looked barely old enough to have throttled his first old man.
“And you is a diplomat?”
“I is a rat-goblin,” said Gobrat. “Summat of both, and so what boss – you is a goblin what ‘as a big pack of rats!”
A point, Sire Berry had to allow. The Gobrat was at least loyal to Deci. He ought to be since he had never left the place. He had heard of the Empire, just he had heard of Talthar. He hadn’t seen either so the reality of both was vinegar in a sieve. “Dat’s lovely, son. And I is the Maggot King of Deci!”
The rats applauded. Ma Berry had gone out to buy a suitable dress. The Gobrat scratched his arse, his face screwed to a point.
“Wot?” the Hat demanded to know.
“Dere’s only one Maggot King, boss. Dere ain’t one of diff’rent places.”
“’Ow many places is there, Gobrat?”
“Well, dere’s Deci... and other places.”
Sire Berry ruffled the youth’s wiry hair. “Dat’s all right den...” he said winningly.
*
Above and the rain was once again black with soot before it even touched the roofs. The poison smog of the city had lifted only enough to make a ceiling into which the many chimneys struck like wobbly brick columns straining to bear the mass suggested. The rain did not make holes in the smog so much as appeared whole and horrible a scant yard or two above. He hated it. Rain was for hearing far away and to rattle on a good iron roof, unseen and easily ignored. He tried to shelter but the chimney about which he huddled with the two Kallah was too low – and for that he was grateful as holding the stick in a pair of tongs he tried not to get too close to the smoke that coughed from it to thicken that above.
“I ‘ate roofs...” said one of his companions to the agreement of the other. Just because they were beggars that did not mean they liked clambering about the pointy bits of the city. Actually, because they were Kallah they didn’t. This wasn’t Sellaville. And they had to beg. And no one was likely to pass here. They were far from the gangs and the only people that crossed the roofs out here were the Sleek’s murderers and the Deci Hunt. Neither was to be welcomed. They muttered and clung on to railing and weather vanes. The vanes were fixed since in Deci the weather was always crappy, albeit to a variety of crappy. Right now it was wet and crappy, and they already knew that.
The stick in the tongs glowed, a faint silver line in the filth. A voice said, “I believe that is it?”
The Kallah nodded, about bloody time too.
*
Great clouds of wastrel passed through the gates of the foundries, both city and the many owned in part or whole by private concerns. The Slurries had broader streets than most of the city and here little that had been built and could be easily seen was older than ten years. Great chimney stacks vanished into the low smoke of the skies. Piles of ore stood heaps. Bells rang and the workers trudged in with leather aprons and helmets tucked under their arms, men and women who though unguilded never had to harry or haunt for their daily work. But it was not these that Wecha had brought the Lord to see, instead taking him through the alleys formed between the blocks and over the high walls that each demanded. Many times they went by the pigs set to notice, guard against and probably eat interlopers – but which pigs seeing them trotted away as if slapped.
Workers shovelled charcoal and ore, others heaved crates and ingots from door to bin, from gate to yard, but none of them whilst unable to miss the pair chose to see them having done so.
“In here, Lord...” said Wycha pointing to an older building hidden amongst all the much taller ones. It had clearly once been something built to be another thing, and patched and smeared by its very nature. Both men winced at the smell.
*
They had been to many places, some grand, some less so, but without great success. Or rather, without such success as laid out in stall and shop. It was a Tree that was rare and apparently had a fiend that hunted its users. That last had become a definite theme and most firmly where here Mojo and Lucrethia stood now in such a way that the horrified little man between them had absolutely no way of passing by.
“Look,” he said, “I don’t want no trouble...”
He got it with a slap across the cheek. “Look my lady,” Mojo snarled. “Show some proper respect or I’ll have it carved into your face!”
The man quailed. He said, “I got to get out, lord, lady. The beast’ll have me. It nearly got that bloody wizard the King keeps as a pet! What bloody chance have I got?”
“You’re a ritualst aren’t you?” Lucrethia yawned.
“A crap one! And the Path don’t do nothing to the beast!”
“And what,” said Mojo, “is in the bag?”
The man fidgeted. Inside was what little he had gathered over the year to do with the Path. He only kept his hold tight momentarily before losing it all to the nobles that had come upon him only a short run from the gate. He watched as Mojo looking inside gave a small nod to Lucrethia. She moved aside without doing anything so gauche as to actually move.
He fled.
*
There were bodies left for the honey, these crated and dismembered for ease of collection in the yard that Gideon could see through the tall windows of the guild. These allowed one to see out if not so easily within and here the nearest had been replaced after a breakage only the night before. The bodies and the window might not be unrelated, certainly the one overlooking the other seemed more than a coincidence in a city where such synchronicity was rarely left in the fickle hand of fate.
“Crime is inevitable,” said Gideon.
The Guild seemed nonplussed by the attempted robbery, for such had it been. It had methods of protecting itself that did not incur upon the expense of the city or council. In this rare intake of breath for the rain Gideon could see from here those fringes of Cheapside where the river had once more broken its banks. That quarter shone silver in the bare light that only ever suggested the difference between night and day in old Deci. The water would drain and recede, it was nothing to what had gone before – the melt of the season from the hard freeze of that before was just especially violent this year.
*
“How is it,” Selgard wondered aloud, “that one so close to nature repels it so wonderfully?”
The druid cuffed a dewdrop from his nose. He grinned with both teeth. He stank. He stank worse than a Cheapside privy in Sunner. He stank so bad that the rain was having none of him. He said, “Norra lotta nature ‘bout now, boy. Carry a lot of it about with me,” he winked.
Selgard smiled, “Passing through?”
“That’s the eggs, boy. Don’t hold with fire, bit modern for me. ‘Sides which I ain’t got the choppers for chewin’, shame ‘bout pork chops. They is rubbish, runny.”
This was not the first druid to pass through the barony of late but he was by far the least pompous, if without doubt the dirtiest. Selgard’s people respected that greatly since being wild folk and having a lot of folklore to clean off all the time they tended to be clean. In the city it was quite the opposite. There everyone knew that only a good stink kept the pestilence away. Selgard blinked, there was a little urban folklore after all! He said, “I don’t suppose you know what sort of shrine my people want? They say I can put up whatever makes me happy because they’re buggered if they’ll worship there. I thought perhaps some sort of totem pole only they said it attracts shaman, and they can do without all the rustling bushes and panting.”
“A tree?” said the druid whose name it transpired was Filthy. It wasn’t actually Filthy, but it was certainly rude, and ‘his name is filthy’ had sort of stuck over the years.
“A tree?”
Filthy had a scratch in what Selgard hoped was his trousers. They might have been legs. It was hard to tell. “You’ve gorra lotta trees, boy,” he said. “You’d be prolly making lots more. Trees gotta come somewhere. Bugger all else anywhere forrem to go otherwise. What with the Forge both cuttin’ ‘em down and then buggerin’ the land with roads.”
“There are trees,” Selgard protested, “Else where does all the charcoal come from?”
“The dark lands of the evil Princes of malign and deadly Deci,” said Filthy.
“The Majius Estate? That’s not a very nice thing to call it.”
Filthy shrugged at that. He was only repeating what he had been told when last passing through that place and had asked where he was. He had come here having walked across most of the land, crossing the Badlands like it was a desert and this the oasis. The trees here were proper trees. Frankly, Filthy was so deep-dipped in druidism that he considered Trovil to be cheating. There was the Shedeff of course but there the trees, whilst prolific, were for beasts to scratch their arses on. “Dunno why you’ve not done more with the trees, boy,” was all he would say again on the matter.
*
It took two weeks to reach Forgetown, all moving at the speed of a lame man one more wound from a peg leg. The oxen would not be hurried. They could not be hurried. They moved at the same constant, dawdling pace before the huge carts that towered over each team but without slowing for hill or valley, for the rivers that remained only for the season, for the broken ground or the wide plains that went on seemingly without end and which for these few weeks at least were nothing but wet clay and the tips of sharp, buried boulders. The carters whose thoughts were as complex cared nothing for the distance that crossed the territory. The guards, paid little enough for their time and less used to the work, had fallen upon the Cart & Hammer with gusto to spend in a night what those weeks had earned them.
No one had attacked the little caravan. The hamlets that had grown by the tracks (or which tracks had grown by them) in years and decades past had been as unwelcoming as they had been sparse. They had scarce seen a real road other than the silvery trails in the distance the city liked – but with oxen that mattered little for loads that would keep.
The twenty guards had begun their career as guards after a lot worse as spearmen. It took a year for most like them to forget what battle had ever been really like, and this had seen like a peaceful sort of gig. At first wary – this was Deci after all where crime was more relative than anywhere, and people paid their taxes as protection against not paying them – but they had not witnessed so much as a single brigand or highway thief. They rather wished they had. Twenty of them against some ratbag without the bladder to take a knife to a city where it was almost expected sounded like the sort of fight they could have handled without any real threat. They were spears after all, even if new to this particular game, and they liked to talk about the battles they had been in a lot more than being there in the first place. Heroes spoke a very good fight, for cause and nation, for god and right – but they got to attend their own funerals if they were quick enough about it. The purse had been better in Keys but they had tired of the city and its Guilds. If they were going to get sneered at then the new guards at least expected the hoity-toity grandees of a city to have some hint of a coronet on their heads.
They had two days until they had a chit to escort more wagons, this time to the city. They were a bit wary about that. Deci had a reputation, one that in Keys came with a lot of cursing and the sort of language the masters and sires there should have left in the gutter from whence they had risen.
*
Her name was Rhyl, but few knew it and less cared to know. The rats liked her well enough though even had anyone cared to ask why – and no one ever did – they weren’t saying. None were present on the night though when the stranger came into her small shop well off the better streets of the King’s Bazaar. It had been there long before the Bazaar had even been a market. Narrow from the squeezing even in this low-rent part of the splendour it was pinched in the middle and from which the shelves selling only the dustiest and poorest wonders clung. Rhyl looked up from the bound scraps of parchment she had been inspecting with a curt, “What?”
“It was suggested I come here...”
“Feckin’ skint is we?” she hissed through a pair of fake silver teeth, black and chipped about the incisors. Who with any real wealth would come here? It wasn’t that what she had was all rubbish, but the pimpy patrons hereabouts now expected more in appearances than they did in tradition.
“I am not a rich man,” he confessed.
Rhyl gnashed her false teeth and set aside the parchments. She wasn’t about to have anyone in her place that didn’t have a wary eye placed on them. Deci was still Deci and she remembered when it had still been Deci.
*
They were rats and to them that meant nothing of cities. None had ever seen a city but their breed and forebears meant they were children of the barn and the ditch; and here the marshes. They still viewed their visitor with suspicion despite his manners and particulars, but they viewed the white rat on his shoulder with respect and to that they spoke. Trundleberry could not help but see the injuries upon them, many fresh. They had been fighting. They were engaged in a little war, their enemies the goblins. Peace and harmony were names of elves for all they knew, and for all they might care.
“Is their princess...” said Mattagan. Mattagan was not their chief. They had no chiefs. They had elders, the oldest of them, many crippled with age and disease but who with tails knotted together picked at such wisdom as there was. Mattagan was a thief, and he had stolen the princess. Some goblins, all of them as far as Mattagan knew to the close limits of his world (a world where even Deci itself was but a legend) that went as far as the marshes had a princess. A girl stolen and raised and who blessed them and made them other than goblins; slaves and chattels, food and fodder for orcs and worse.
“Mebbe,” said the Hat, “Dat’s why dey fight youse...”
The fighting had happened long before that. The goblins were expanding, were fighting. They didn’t know about borders. About Deci and Eartholme and the many that fought to be the Maggot King, and here this one hated that one that came even now upon Eartholme.
Sire Berry nodded. He had gotten out of the city for a while. He had heard that Anath was off in Bildteve at his granny’s funeral. That usually meant trouble at home. Anath must love his granny, the Hat thought. He certainly never missed any of her funerals.
*
“I find it hard to believe you’re a beggar?” said the man of rust and soot. Every puddle they passed was thick with both, set off nicely by the oily scum that painted the streets of Deci in the rain. It was despite all a busy street amongst other busy streets and in which the shops not content to wait for customers had barkers and bunco-boys out in force to attract every passing grull. “I mean to say, look at you!”
Smooth Verily Smooth was fat about the middle but had jacket and coat to match. The buttons and fittings were of the rarer woods, he was groomed and polished and wore a plush cloak and feathered cap all kept dry by charm or alchemist’s oil. “A Hanot not a Kallah, but still yes, a beggar,” he said before adding, “I’m very good at begging.”
“Clearly...” he supposed that where in many cities beggars mostly concentrated on getting good at stabbing things that must be doubly so in Deci. The beggar then that got good at begging instead probably did very well for himself. And this was where he begged. And there was treasure here. Smooth Verily Smooth knew most people and had been sent here by the Master to see to his guest. A pair of local wastrel followed close behind with packages and parcels all wrapped up in oil cloth. So far they had not had to part with so much as a dirty grull.
“Ah, and this is Swine’s,” said the inestimable Mr Smooth guiding the flaking man through a doorway and the double curtains within. Flunkeys darted to see to them so that soon both were seated and sipping on hot tarry wine, a wine that in the Heartlands would have had assassins set upon it by the grape. Swine’s sold furs, most from Alguz where the pelts were of far better quality it seemed than the common stuff that had in recent memory seen an animal. In Alguz there might be difficulties in the territory, and the mountains, but trappers and hunters cared little for politics or the troubles of others.
Soon they were being shown rolls of soft furs and brushed leather. Mr Smooth chose a number of select pieces and asked for them to be wrapped in more sailcloth that he took from a pack carried by one of the wastrel.
“I’m not sure I can afford all this...”
But Mr Smooth was having none of it. He asked for and soon received Mr Swine himself, a fellow of small appearance and the faint smell of peppermint. Mr Swine politely played with a knife curved and made to measure for his hand by a black hat in Cheapside. Mr Swine had once been an assassin. He now owned a very good shop and paid his taxes regularly, the dues to his old Guild likewise and of which he was still a guildsman in good standing.
*
These were the deep catacombs. The old veins of a world whose blood pumped through fresher channels which pick had not shaped nor dwarf plundered. Here were goblins, the cavern seethed with them. An ants nest of bluish hides, big heads with gaping eyes and with hands the size of their chests. They crouched to clutter every lip and ledge. There must have been hundreds even here. Trundleberry had not suspected that so many could even sit in one place. Goblins were hateful, sly things that if they could not be great (and they so rarely were) would plot and bring down others even to their own detriment. The city had made him forget that, but he remembered now so was astonished at how many watched him here. He and his were badly outnumbered – one false move and they would be slaughtered.
There was no throne, no crown, not even a lofty rock. Stood amongst them was their Maggot King. There was only one Maggot King, but a dozen or more across the land and well beyond that laid claim to that title. It had started Trundleberry now knew, in the Braekens. Their former bullies and slavers had died, been driven out or actually been gnolls. The emptiness that remained had seen the goblins prosper; and someone had put the taste of power in their hearts – the title of Maggot King that simply was, without any thought or wish for what that meant. This one, who would claim to be the only one, was no larger than any of them but by the scars and the light of his eyes he was a mean, nasty, but surprisingly sharp example of the kind. He stood amongst three dozen like him, all with wicked weapons and draped in ropes of hair and trophy skulls. The goblins were bald, either they grew none or gave it up for belt and harness. It was very dark so that even the black hat had difficulty seeing. What he smelled was age, and hatred, and a seething sense of the bullied now the bullies.
Between he and the Gobrat he had come up at least with the old sign for truce, such as that might be with goblins. The Gobrat was girded like a shaman. Trundleberry could see no other that looked even vaguely similar. Like the Broken Lands these tribes loosely united in this place were for chiefs and skulkers – there were no gods here...
*
In the rooms above the shop there was lavender and lace. It might have belonged to some maiden aunt or tidy widow. There was clutter of the kind that came from gifts, there were doilies on the tables and the furniture all old did not match. It was nonetheless homely, if the sort of home that one would wish to leave after a day.
Gideon sipped his tea politely. There was cake and tiny pies all made to absolute perfection. Baking was after all the alchemy of the common man, even if there were few bakeries in Deci. People did not have ovens in their homes. Big, stone and elsewhere shared where the baker in other cities allowed others to plant crock and pot in the heat once his work was done. Gideon saw no oven. His host doubtless did not need one.
*
The Sisters Dukkeforer picked at the kitten with teasing prods of their long forks. They loathed having to eat, to drink, to breathe but then long decades in Deci might arguably do that to anyone. Their appearance, should it have been described, would have been most efficiently noted as ‘puckered’. Without a pound of gristle on the three of them they sat together on the single padded bench dressed well and grandly (albeit well and grandly before the word Empire had even been said aloud). They lived in many places and for a week now in narrow apartments in the Invisible Quarter. This was apt since they might well have been just that, passing at need through the city not unseen but ignored to leave only a little frozen rain and swiftly departing snakes in their dry little wake.
By Alan Morgan