decay-gentle paths, to be sure, once one gets used to the stench. And before long, the body begins to fail. Weakness, illness, aching head, a certain lassitude. Death beckons, and by this alone one knows that one’s soul has died.”
“My lady,” Tulgord Vise ventured, “this tale of yours demands a knight, sworn to goodness. Tis a fair damsel in deepest distress-”
“Two knights!” cried Arpo Relent, although with a zeal that sounded, well, forced.
Tulgord grunted. “There is only one one knight in this tale. The other knight is the other knight.”
“There can be two knights! Who is to say there can’t?”
“Me. I’m to say. I will allow two knights, however. The real one, me. The other one, you.”
Arpo Relent’s face was bright red, as if swallowing flames. “I’m not the other knight! You are!”
“When I cut you in two, “Tulgord said, “you can be two knights all by yourself.”
“When you cut me in two you won’t know which way to turn!”
Silence has flavour, and this one was confused, as follow certain statements that, in essence, make no sense whatsoever, yet nonetheless possess a peculiar logic. Such was this momentary interlude composed of frowns, clouds and blinks.
Purse Snippet spoke. “She came to a belief that the gods set alight a spark in every soul, the very core of a mortal spirit, which mayhap burns eternal, or, in less forgiving eyes, but gutters out once the flesh has fallen beyond the last taken breath. To sharpen her need, she chose the latter notion. Now, then, there was haste and more: there was a true edge of possible redemption. If in our lives, we are all that we have and ever will have, then all worth lies in the mortal deed, in that single life.”
“A woman without children, then,” Apto murmured.
“What gift passing such beauty on? No, she was yet to marry, yet to take any seed. Only within her mind had she so aged, seeing an end both close and far off, ten years in a century, ten centuries in an instant. Resolved, then, she would seek to journey to find that spark. Could it be scoured clean, enlivened to such bright fire that all flaws simply burned away? She would see, if she could.
“But what manner this journey? What landscape worth the telling?” And upon that moment her eyes, depthless tunnels, found me. “Will you, kind sir, assemble the scene for my poor tale?”
“Honoured,” said I mostly humbly. “Let us imagine a vast plain, broken and littered. Starved of water and bare of animals. She travels alone and yet in company, a stranger among strangers. All she is she hides behind veils, curtains of privacy, and awaiting her as awaiting the others, there is a river, a flowing thing of life and benison. Upon its tranquil shores waits redemption. Yet it remains distant, with much privation in between. But what of those who travel with her? Why, there are knights avowed to rid the world of the unseemly. In this case, the unseemly personages of two foul sorcerors of the darkest arts. So too there are pilgrims, seeking blessing from an idle god, and a carriage travels with them and hidden within it there is a face, perhaps even two, whom none have yet to see-”
“Hold!” growled Steck Marynd, looming out of the gloom, crossbow held at rest but cocked across one forearm. “See how the colour has left the face of this woman? You draw too close, sir, and I like it not.”
Mister Ambertroshin relit his pipe.
“Lacks imagination,” purred Nifty Gum. “Allow me, Lady Snippet. The village of her birth is a small holding upon the rocky shores of a fjord. Beyond the pastures of her father the king, crowded forests rear up mountain sides, and in a deep fastness there sleeps a dragon, but most restlessly, for she had given birth to an egg, one of vast size, yet so hard was the shell that the child within managed to no more than break holes for its legs and arms, and with its snout it had rubbed thin the shell before its eyes, permitting it a misty regard of the world beyond. And, alas, the egg monster had escaped the cavern and now roved down between the black trees, frightened and lost and so most dangerous.
“In its terrible hunger it has struck now in the longhouse of the king, rolling flat countless warriors as they slept ensorcelled by the child’s magic. Woe, bewails the king! Who can save them? Then came the night-”
“What knight?” Tulgord demanded.
“No, night, as in the sun’s drowning in darkness-”
“The knight drowned the sun?”
“No, fair moon’s golden rise-”
“He’s mooning the sun?”
“Excuse me, what?”
“What’s the knight doing, damn you? Cracking that egg in half, I wager!”
“The sun went down-that kind of night!”
“Why didn’t you say so?” Tulgord Vise snorted. “And the monster set a deep magic upon the longhouse. Bursting down the stout door-”
“He ran into the knight!”
“No, instead, he fell in love with the princess, for as she was ugly on the inside, he was ugly on the outside-”
“I’d suspect,” Apto said, “he’d be pretty ugly on the inside, too. Dragon spawn, trapped in there. No hole for the tail? He’d be neck deep in shit and piss. Why-”
Brash Phluster, working on his second supper, having lost the first one, pointed a finger bone at Nifty and, with a greasy smirk, said, “The Judge is right. You need to explain things like that. The details got to make sense, you know.”
“Magic answers,” snapped Nifty with a toss of his locks. “The monster walked into the main hall and saw her, the princess, and he fell in love. But knowing how she would view him with horror, he was forced to keep her in an enchanted sleep, through music piped out from the various holes in his shell-”
“He farted her a magic song?” Apto asked.
“He piped her a magic song, which made her rise as would one sleep-walking, and so she followed him out from the hall.”
“What’s that story got to do with Purse Snippet’s?” Was that my question? It was.
“I’m getting to that.”
“You’re getting to the point where I vote we spit you on the morrow,” said Tulgord Vise.
Arpo Relent agreed. “What a stupid story, Nifty. An egg monster?”
“There is mythical precedent for-”
“Make your silence deep, poet,” warned Steck Marynd. “My Lady Snippet, do you wish any of these pathetic excuses for poets to resume their take on your tale?”
Purse Snippet frowned, and then nodded. “Flicker’s will suit me, I think. A river, the promise of salvation. Strangers all, and the hidden threat of the hunted-tell me, poet, are they closer to their quarry than any might imagine?”
“Many are the stratagems of the hunted, My Lady, to confound their pursuers. So, who can say?”
“Tell us more of this quest, then.”
“A moment, please,” said Steck Marynd, his voice grating as if climbing a stone wall with naught but fingernails and teeth. “I see that unease has taken hold of Mister Ambertroshin. He gnaws upon the stem and the glow waxes savage again and again.” He shifted the crossbow, his weight fully on the one leg whose foot had not suffered the indignity of a quarrel through it only a short time earlier. “You, sir, what so afflicts you?”
Mister Ambertroshin was long in replying. He withdrew his pipe and examined the chipped clay stem, and then the bowl, whereupon he drew out his leather pouch and pinched out a small amount of stringy rustleaf, which he deftly rolled between two fingers and a thumb before tamping it down into the pipe’s blackened bowl. He drew fiercely a half-dozen times, wreathing his lined face in swirling clouds. And then said, “I think I’m going to be sick.”
“Ordig was something sour, wasn’t he?” Brash Phluster opined, and then he laughed in the manner of a hyena down a hole, even as he wiped grease from his hands.
Grunting, Steck Marynd limped away, and over one shoulder said, “It’s suspicious, that’s all. Suspicious strange, I mean. Diabolical minds and appalling arrogance, aye, that spells them sure. I need to think on this.” And with that off into the darkness he went.
Tulgord Vise was frowning. “Addled wits. That’s what comes of living in the woods with the moles and pine beetles. Now then, Flicker, you have a burden to bear with your tale, for it must carry this Lady’s charge. Tell us
