“You want this?” he said in perfect Thrusian. “Here. Dry yourself off. The swamp may freeze tonight.”
I gaped at him. It was as if I had sat down to milk a cow and the beast had turned to me at the first squeeze of its udders and said, “Gentler, if you don’t mind.”
There’s something about hearing words come out of someone’s mouth that changes the way you look at them. I guess it’s the casual ease with which the lips and tongue shape sounds so intimate and meaningful to you, putting the two of you on the same level, establishing an equilibrium of sorts. A talking cow, then, would not merely be a curiosity; it would violate your understanding of the universe and your place in it. It would force you, I suspect, to rethink every action you had ever performed. It would change more than your attitude to steak, I’ll tell you that.
This was where I found myself now. The goblin unfastened the buckled straps and tossed me the rolled blanket without another word. I stood there doing my world-famous impersonation of a fence post, waking only when the parcel hit me in the chest and fell into my hastily raised arms. It-or perhaps I should say he-grinned broadly and walked away. I watched him go.
His grin had been genuine and yet somehow alarming. It reminded me that he was a goblin, for his jaw was heavy and his teeth were over-large, but it also seemed so ordinary, so human. Before I could take my eyes off him, Lisha appeared silently beside me.
“Will?” she said. “Are you all right?”
“I’m not sure,” I said, my eyes still on the back of the receding goblin. “I. . I’m really not sure.”
“We should talk,” she said.
“Yes, we should,” I echoed distantly.
“Will! Look at me!”
I turned slowly and met her eyes. They pooled at me in the twilight.
“We made a mistake,” she said. “That’s all. We were given false information and, without any reason to doubt it, we believed it.”
We. The extent of her mistake was getting mistaken for one of them. I, however, had. .
Don’t think about it.
I nodded and managed a smile, but it was a thin ruse. She knew as much, knew also that, for once, I didn’t feel like talking after all, and she respected that. She touched my cheek and walked over to where Mithos and Orgos were studying a map.
I sat on a log, dazed with shock. How could I have been so stupid? I had trusted my eyes and ears and, as a result, fallen for the oldest theatrical ploy there is. I was taken in by the desire to believe something preposterously convenient was real. I had forgotten to read between the lines. I had known something was wrong but I just went on standing there like the idiot in the pit who thinks everything on the stage is real because a few paid con men tell him it is. It had all been a show, just storytelling and spectacle, and I had fallen for it hook, line, and sinker. I had risked my life for the “fair folk” and-and here was the scorpion in my underpants-I had killed for them.
Now morals aren’t my strong suit, and I still had a hard time thinking of the goblins as people exactly, but my glorious ride with the cavalry, my brave defense of the city, and my valiant raid on the Falcon’s Nest fortress were beginning to look a little tarnished, as if my heirloom silver tankard had turned out to be made of oven-baked cow dung. The “fair folk” had said that all the light-against-dark, good-against-evil rubbish that I’d been laughing at my entire life was actually true, and I had believed them. They had told me that every old tale, every fairy story about ogres and goblins, every half-baked morality play aimed at children and the mentally deficient was right, and the world as I had always known it was wrong. Beauty (of the right kind) really is virtue, they had said, and ugliness (someone else’s) is evil. And I had believed them. Cynical Bill, Will the realist, had polished up his sword and gone out goblin slaying, glad to be doing his bit for goodness and light and fluffy bunny rabbits. I should have known Garnet couldn’t be right.
I had known, too. Kind of. A bunch of things had not seemed right. I should have just listened to my hunches and not to those dandified idiots in Phasdreille. Well, from here on it would all be Will Straight-from-the-Gut Hawthorne.
“Feeling better?” said Orgos.
“Yes,” I lied. “The blanket helps. How long did it take you to realize what was going on?”
“Not long,” said Orgos. “But that was because they told us and we believed them. Maybe we would have believed Sorrail if our positions had been reversed.”
“You don’t really think that,” I said.
Orgos shrugged. “Well, we also had the evidence of how they treated us,” he went on. “They were suspicious because we had been caught in the company of one of their greatest enemies, but we had our looks on our sides, which, frankly, helped.”
“They believed you because you’re black?” I asked, eyebrow raised.
“It made it a lot less likely that we were working with the so-called fair folk, said Orgos.
“But they kept you locked up,” I said, not sure who I was trying to convince or what I was trying to justify.
“Like I said, they were suspicious of us, and most of that fort hadn’t been lived in for decades. Their rooms weren’t much better than ours.”
I frowned and said nothing.
“Come on,” he concluded. “The sooner we get there, the sooner we can eat. I have a feeling you’re going to like these people.”
I gave him a quick look, but the remark seemed to have been genuine enough, so I said nothing and followed him.
We wended our way through the swamp trails and the light faded fast. In half an hour it was almost too dark to see. Since no one produced a torch or lantern, I edged closer to the pack and studied the ground ahead. Orgos said that “they” had good night vision. I grunted and kept walking without even bothering to ask where we were going.
We came upon a thicket of healthy young pine trees, all slender and stretching skyward like wading birds, and as I paused to study the trees, the column of goblins dwindled to nothing. I stopped, glancing wildly about and wondering if I had been led out here as part of some elaborate and ghostly hoax. Even Orgos had gone.
“What the?. .” I began. Then what I had taken to be a dark pool showed movement and Orgos was there.
“Come on, Will,” he whispered. “You’re the last.”
I approached cautiously.
“I can’t see you properly,” I said. “It’s a tunnel?”
“Kind of,” he said. “Here, take my hand. I’ll show you the way. You’ll like this place. It was hollowed out of the rock perhaps a century ago, maybe longer, and has been carefully maintained so that the swamp water is sealed out. Lately the damp has become a greater problem as the forest above it has fallen into decay. How much longer it will be livable, I don’t know. But, for the moment, it is more than just a hiding place on the enemy’s doorstep.”
“Assuming the ‘fair folk’ are the enemy,” I muttered.
“That, you will have to figure out for yourself,” he said, with the carelessness that suggested the matter was self-evident.
“As you have done?” I pressed.
“Yes, Will. As I have done. You still aren’t sure?” He asked this with a note of surprise in his voice and turned toward me so that I could just about make out the light of his eyes in the gloom.
“Not yet,” I replied a little frostily.
He was unaffected by my tone and, in truth, I didn’t know why I had taken it. He just shrugged and turned back to the descending passage, pulling me slightly toward him as he stepped down. There was a hole, no more than a yard across and almost invisible in the long grass, and in it was a tightly spiraling stairway. I fumbled for a rail, grabbed an outcrop of bare and polished rock, and lowered myself in. Feeling for the edge of each step with my foot, I descended slowly into the darkness, until I could smell smoke and candle wax. Then, quite suddenly, a yellowish light played over my feet. I took two more steps and then bent down to peer into the chamber below.