on the goblin's collar to keep it from moving toward the corpse. Goblins were greedy creatures, always hungry, and Ixit was perfectly capable of eating the entire Brightworlder all by itself.
Cerbael laughed appreciatively at his Queen's jest. 'I do not think Filendek would be content with this for long—and it's hardly worth his greatest efforts, don't you think, Majesty?'
'True,' Savilla admitted with a fond smile. 'We shall have to find him something worthy of his skill. Well?' she demanded of her other slaves, who cowered back, staring in horror at their fellow. 'Will you clean this up? Or will you join it?'
Her dressing-slaves scuttled to obey.
After Queen Savilla had heard all Petitions of the Dressing Chamber—and acted upon those which it pleased her to act upon—she allowed her surviving slaves to dress her more formally, and went, as was her custom, for a walk in her gardens.
Of course nothing grew here. Savilla would have been quite offended if it had. Elsewhere in the World Without Sun there were vast farms of strange pale fungus in their infinite varieties, tended by slaves and hosts of the Lesser Endarkened. There were soft writhing worms and lakes of glowing blind fish and tunneling insects for whom the kiss of the sun was fatal, all of which the Endarkened considered delicacies.
But Savilla's garden was different.
Here colored crystals had been coaxed from the ground by magic, in much the same way that flowers sprang from fields of rot and decay in the World Above. And within each crystal, Savilla had trapped some moment of agony of one of her special victims, so that she could cherish it always.
She strolled along the twisting paths, brushing her fingers along the stones and wakening the stored memories into life with a touch of her magic.
—Here, the moment when one of her pet Darkmages had torn the horn from a living unicorn. No Endarkened could touch the creature without dying, and so the beast had thought itself safe enough, but it was not safe from Savilla's Darkmage. How it had begged, pleaded, reasoned with the man, telling him what his own eventual fate would be! But all in vain…
—Here, the Darkmage's own death, when Savilla had grown tired of him. How she had enjoyed taunting him, reminding him of how he had killed the unicorn, reminding him that everything it had told him had been true, that he could have saved himself had he only listened to it instead of killing it…
It was so perfect, placing these two stones next to each other, so that they could stand in rebuke to one another for all Eternity, though the minds and souls and deaths that had gone to make them were long expended, gone to fuel her magic.
Which reminded Savilla, once more, of her problem.
She seated herself on a bench cunningly wrought of human bones— some of the younger members of the Court made quite a hobby out of crafting things of what the Endarkened's victims left behind, and some of their pieces were quite artful—and devoted herself to considering the problem.
Problems, really. A ruler had so many problems to deal with, and not one of them could be neglected. Even the tiniest, the most seemingly inconsequential problem, could be the tear in the wing that made it useless in flight.
There must be a way to solve so many minor problems at once. Even Filendek's problems must not be slighted—Cerbael had been quite right to bring them to her attention, for the chief cook was an artist, and his complaints would be seen as setting a certain tone for the entire Court.
Filendek was quite beside himself at the emptiness of the larders, and the lack of delicacies to set upon Savilla's table. No faun, no selkie, no naiad, and the stocks of human and Centaur—in the cold-larders and in the fattening pens—were (so he said) dangerously low. As for unicorn, it had been a long time since that flesh had graced one of the Royal banquets, and no one at the Endarkened Court had tasted Elven flesh since the last War.
It was sad, really, to see the simple elegancies of life dwindle away even as you watched. But let her plans go as she would have them, and all would be well again, the Court returned to the height of its glory. Their larders would be full, and they would have no need to conceal themselves from the notice of Wildmages, lest their plans be discovered before the proper time.
But until that moment came there was much to do.
She thought back over her morning's reports. Their campaign against the Elves was going well, so now it was time to cause Armethalieh to do something foolish. Her agents there assured her that the Arch-Mage had been ever more unreasonable since his son had turned Wildmage and been Banished… perhaps there was something in that she could use to solve her own small difficulties, for as the Arch-Mage went, so went the City.
Savilla smiled, and set the thought aside to ripen.
'WHAT do you suppose, my love, I would do if you betrayed me?' Savilla said to her son.
