when Phasdreille was besieged by a vast goblin horde which crossed the river to sack the White City. He rode with a cavalry force raised here in the borderlands, and they met the goblin ranks as they lay outside the great city.”
“Oh,” I said, trying to head him off. “That’s fine. . ” But he had a glint in his eye, and he was going to finish the story whether I wanted to hear it or not.
“The horsemen caught the goblins unawares and routed them,” said the landlord, “though many tall and fair soldiers fell in the battle. My great-grandfather survived, but he was killed shortly afterward. That was the last time he wielded this, his mighty sword. With it he struck down many dozens of goblins, cleaving a path through their ranks until he came upon their chieftain: a huge brute dressed in red and black, great ugly spikes on his helm and a weapon like a vast cleaver in his massive claws. My ancestor faced the beast and, after many blows were struck on both sides, felled him, cleaving his skull in twain. But the goblin was wearing an iron collar and the great sword was notched, as you can see. A diamond was taken from the dead goblin and set in the pommel, see? Like I said, it’s not for sale.”
Well, thanks for that, I thought. I wondered if he would go into as much detail about dishes that weren’t on his menu. Ah yes, sir, tonight we don’t have steak with grilled mushrooms and garlic sauce, which would be followed by sticky toffee pudding, if we had any, but we don’t. .
I took what weapons we had, and there we were, wading through the elephantine grasses of the pockmarked valley that led through the marshes to the escarpment, the cinder path, and the mountains. It didn’t seem to make a lot of sense to me, but Renthrette was in charge and claimed to know what she was doing.
“Rather than following the path up and through the mountains,” she whispered, “we will cross the valley floor and then veer off to the right, heading east for half a mile. Then we climb toward an outcrop of rock which is overgrown with lichen so that it looks pale green from a distance. From its top, a few hundred yards to the east, we should be able to see a stone lion. This marks an old guardhouse and a forgotten corridor into the depths of the goblin fort.”
All this was said in a hushed voice with a good deal of glancing about, as if we might be overheard by the enemy. Having seen something of the wildlife in this doubtful region, that was probably wise. I found it hard to be so collected. “And the goblins have never noticed this huge stone lion behind their house, I take it?”
“They have not been in the fort long, by all accounts, and do not know all its secrets. It is an ancient structure locally called the Falcon’s Nest, built long ago to protect the pass from invaders, and the goblins have only expanded this way in the last few months.”
“Oh, I see,” I muttered. “I know when I move into a new place it always takes me the best part of a year to find the back door.”
“Sorrail says the goblins have only been inhabiting the parts of the fortress that open onto the pass itself. They are a lazy and shortsighted race who can’t see past an immediate profit or easy conquest.”
“How convenient.”
“Yes,” she said, missing the irony.
“So if they are so lazy and shortsighted, how did they take the fortress from Sorrail’s pals in the first place?”
“Treachery.”
“Of course.”
“Sorrail says that it’s everything in their nature that makes them so terrible-their delight in causing pain and incapacity of thinking beyond their own swinish desires-that also makes them vulnerable. Where we are explorers and nurturers, dedicated to life and learning, they are destroyers, filled with hatred against even their own kind.”
“Who is this ‘we’?” I wondered aloud.
“You doubt our friendship with the fair folk?”
“The what?”
“That’s how they are termed locally, the ‘fair folk,’ because they are tall and pale and golden-haired,” she said, still forging ahead and refusing to meet my gaze.
“Termed by who? The goblins? I doubt it. By themselves, perhaps.”
“Well, Sorrail says. .”
“Can we drop Sorrail for a while?” I said. Her admiration for the blond lancer was becoming pointedly and irritatingly apparent. I marched on through the wet grass, avoiding the sucking, water-filled pits with a shudder of remembrance. My shield and axe were in my left hand and my right supported the crossbow, which was slung about my shoulders on a leather thong.
“It’s a good thing Sorrail is so familiar with this country,” said Renthrette suddenly. “He knows this mountain fort like the back of his hand.”
“I had a feeling he might,” I remarked, bitterly. “Too bad I didn’t have chance to cut it off. We could have used a map.”
It took us several hours to cross the reedy vale, then we veered east and began to skirt the foot of the mountain range. Before, the whole range had been visible and the Armored One had been scowling down at this, our foolhardy approach. Now, flush to the steep slopes themselves, we could see nothing but the granite wall in front of us. The ground was rocky enough to prevent much vegetation, and a species of path had thus developed, tracing its way round the almost vertical sides of the peaks, which rose sharply out of the wetlands.
A cold wind had picked up since we left the inn and it tousled Renthrette’s hair and made her eyes water. She proceeded without a word. I battled on behind her, trying not to think about what we were doing, where we were, how we were going to get back, the bloody miserable weather, and so forth. From time to time we would round a crag and a gust of wind would hit us hard and knock the breath from our bodies like some specter barreling down the mountains to ward us off. There were no birds, nor even any bird calls, but I couldn’t decide if that was good or not. There was only the wind, which, just occasionally, seemed to whine up there in the ramparts of the mountain and through its hidden crevices, so that I wheeled and looked up and about me with momentary panic. Renthrette scowled at me and sighed to herself, as if wondering if it had been such a great idea to invite old Liability Hawthorne along for the ride. Ignoring this unhelpful attitude, I kept my eyes skinned for whatever hostile brute was likely to pop up and rip my legs off.
But the journey passed without event. Renthrette gestured suddenly and stood still, smiling. Above was a great rock face like a cliff, smooth as a sea-washed pebble and green as the shoots of spring saplings. The stone glowed with the emerald light that shafts through a wooded glade, and jutted out like it was the knee or elbow of the crouching mountain. Below that it came down, sheer and unblemished as a frozen waterfall on a winter morning. Getting up it was going to be an absolute bugger.
Renthrette, inspired, no doubt, by the memory of Sorrail, all-purpose warrior and romantic hero, was undaunted. While I slumped into the grass and pawed through my haversack for something edible, she paced the ground, gazing up at the lichen-covered rock face, stepping up onto boulders and testing hand and footholds. Then there would be a little shower of stones and she would jump down, muttering irritably.
“Are you just going to sit there, or what?” she said. “I don’t know why I brought you.”
“I did wonder,” I answered, dragging myself to my feet and starting to pace around as she had been doing, as if this was going to help somehow.
“I looked there,” she said, irritably. I moved east along the rock face and tried to look busy.
“Not that far, idiot,” she said. “Try over there.”
I did. “Over there” was a point directly beneath the great green outcrop. It was, so far as I could see, completely featureless. Still, far from wishing to upset the tyrant queen still further, I snuffled about like a lost dog and listened to her whispering to herself as she searched. And then, while my attention was almost completely on her, a remarkable thing happened. I took a step to the left, a spot I had passed over a dozen times, and the rock face changed. I repositioned myself very carefully and it happened again. When I was in just the right position, motionless, and the light was falling on the rock at a certain angle, stairs appeared recessed into the stone three feet from my face. For a second I stood dumbfounded, then I called to Renthrette, not daring to turn away in case I never found the place again.
They were camouflaged so well that it took her a couple of minutes to see them, and she muttered doubtfully the whole time. I suppose she thought I was pulling her chain. When she finally saw them she grew very still, an expression of mute wonder on her face. Because it was more than camouflage. It was an extraordinary piece of
