The Cutting Edge (16 page)

Watches. Whose idea was it to go visit at the Vool Place?"

His rapid changes of subject bewildered her. "Idea? I don't know! That was ages ago. "

He scowled. "Maybe it was only coincidence, then. But at the College there's tales of a Faculty so strong it can actually seek out words. That's very rare, if it's even possible. The most powerful of sorcerers can't detect words directly! So maybe your case was just coincidence. "

She didn't think he thought it was, though.

"Just in case," he said, "you must stay away from old people and sick people. You don't want to go picking up any more trash words. Can't lose a word, once you know it!"

He smiled again, but then her attention was grabbed away by a huge explosion of terror and pity from Frial and an upwelling of anger and pain from Gaib.

"Your mother's home," Jain remarked, rising.

Thaile sprang up also and backed away a few steps, nauseated by her parents' distress. "Tell me! Tell me what you did to him!"

The recorder snapped his fingers and his cloak floated up from the ground to adjust itself on his shoulders. The dishes and food had all vanished without Thaile noticing.

"You'll be working party tricks of your own in a year or two, you know. " He smirked cheerfully and placed a broadbrimmed hat on his head at a jaunty angle.

"What did you do to my father?" she shouted.

"I gave him a fright," Jain said sulkily. "If you want to cheer him up, you can tell him that it'll wear off by morning. I'm only a mage and that's the best I can do on transformations. Thane!"

She had started to run. His command seemed to root her toes in the turf, but she did not turn.

He came closer, right behind her, and she began to shake. She had become so used to Feeling other people's emotions that he frightened her, because he was masked from her. She could smell a strange flowery scent about him, mixed with sweat.

"Forget them, Thaile. Your father is an ignorant, smallminded peasant. Your mother can't be much better, if she has tolerated that oaf all her life. They live like beasts and they've brought you up to think that's the right way to live. Well, it's not! Come to the College as soon as you can. Don't wait until you're sixteen. Come soon. Come and learn how to be a human being. Come and learn your destiny. Forget these churls."

Forget her family, her home? Never!

"There is more to life than rearing babies, Thaile!"

She listened to the silence for a whole minute before she realized that the recorder had disappeared and she was alone. She took off down the hill as fast as she could run.

Destiny obscure:

Let not ambition mock their useful toil,
Their homely joys, and destiny obscure;
Nor grandeur hear with a disdainful smile
The short and simple annals of the poor.

— Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

The sun was returning to Krasnegar.

In midwinter there was almost no daylight at all. Sunlight appeared as a bright blur in the south for a short while at noon and then was gone, like a brief candle in a crypt. At the dark of the moon, the sky was an iron bowl bearing only a glitter of stars and the nightmare twitch of aurora. Those were too arrogant to illuminate human affairs, as if the sins of the climate were none of their business.

A full moon, though, never set. The stars and aurora fled before it. It soared through the sky, big as a silver plate, shedding a helpful blue light on the snow, so that men could emerge briefly from their lairs to view the stricken world.

The second full moon after midwinter was the traditional date of the Timber Meet, a custom that had developed in Inos' reign. She had instituted winter expeditions to obtain lumber from the forests to the south, using horse sleds to bring the trunks over the bare hills to Krasnegar. Unfortunately, the forests belonged to the goblins. Goblins, as Rap had been known to remark, were green but not stupid. By the time he had married the queen and taken charge of such masculine matters as tree-cutting expeditions, the goblins had awakened to the value of lumber as a trade item.

That winter the first Krasnegarian team to venture south was quietly surrounded by about five times as many goblins, all armed with spears or bows and anxious to discuss the matter of stumpage. Goblins' well-deserved reputation for being enthusiastic torturers added a certain urgency to the negotiations.

A mutually acceptable method of payment was devised, and it had since evolved into an annual event. The goblins themselves were far more efficient in the cold than even jotnar, worlds better than either imps or horses. Teams of goblins cut the trees, then hauled the sleds by moonlight to Krasnegar. Rarely a blizzard would cause postponement, but if the weather behaved itself, the goblins would come to the Timber Meet without fail. They scarcely seemed to notice the cold, although it could bum a man's lungs. The sled teams were rumored to hold a nonstop three-day race all the way from the edge of the forest. The token prizes awarded in that annual event were said to be fingernails, or ears.

As Rap trotted across the causeway, the sun was a brilliant blur in the ice fog, low to the south. The moon would rise right after sunset. His path wound among a nightmare jumble of ice floes, but the bay itself was worse, with the added danger of falling through to certain death.

Ahead of him, a single line of smoke rose vertically from one of the little cottages that marked the shore. Three sleds of lumber stood waiting for unloading, and forty or fifty goblins formed a dark pattern against the whiteness. Some of them were moving, but most were just sitting in the snow, talking. If Rap tried that, he would be dead in ten minutes.

Panting hard, he reached the shore, where the going was easier. Across the bay, the improbable peak of Krasnegar jutted skyward, blurred by all the smoke from its chimneys, crowned by its castle. His castle. The town seemed to shine in the watery sunlight, glittering behind the ice haze.

A group of three men had separated from the others and he headed toward them, wondering if the one in the middle could be Death Bird himself.

Yes, there were times that Rap regretted his decision not to be a sorcerer. Even with the feeble powers that were all he could summon now, he would know at once whether the middle goblin was Death Bird. Of course he would also know what the man was thinking and that would take all the fun out of the negotiations. He sometimes wondered how long his resolution would last if a meeting such as this one ever turned nasty. Did he have the courage to die a mundane as a matter of principle?

He came to a puffing halt, blowing outrageous clouds of steam and running sweat under his furs-he was not as young as he used to be. Three sets of unfriendly, oddly angular eyes regarded him through the slits of the buckskin masks. Of course they could see no more of him than he could of them. They were short, broad, hard men; none of the three was tall enough to be Death Bird.

Rap dragged up his memories of the rasping goblin dialect. "Am Flat Nose. Speak for town. "

"Speak chief!" the middle goblin snapped. "Am chief."

Mollified, the spokesman announced himself, "Blood Needle of Porcupines." He and Rap each advanced a pace and embraced. Rap winced at the pressure, almost gagging at the reek of the bear grease that goblins used as winter underwear.

Blood Needle introduced Silver Flash of Salmon Totem and Busy Tooth of the Beavers ... more bone-grinding hugs and stomach-turning whiffs of rancid fat. Although they must have ordered the fire lit in the nearest cottage, they were not inviting Rap into the warmth. That meant the negotiations must be completed quickly.

"Have seen trade goods?"

"Trash! " Blood Needle unhooked his mask for a moment so he could spit in disgust. Rap thought he saw the spittle bounce on the ice.

"Good salt!" he said. "Fine glass. Rich spices. Useful buckles . . ." He paused, running through a mental list of the goods he had left stacked in the cottage the previous fall. His feet were chilled already.

"Need swords!" the goblin said, stepping forward a pace. "Axes. Many many heads for arrows."

This was where things always got sticky. Krasnegar was bound by treaty with the Impire not to give the goblins weapons. If Rap abrogated that pact, then the Imperial trade would be shut off and the town would soon wither away, even if it did not starve in the first winter. If he angered the goblins, on the other hand, then Krasnegar might vanish overnight in a storm of blood. Long ago, as a sorcerer, he had made the causeway goblinrepellent, and goblins disliked water, but that did not mean they couldn't grit their big teeth long enough to charge across the ice.

Whatever geography might say, economically his kingdom lay directly between the two sides.

"Have no swords. Imps keep swords." His goblinish was rusty. "Not trade us swords." He went back to extolling the virtues of his offerings.

Blood Needle kept calling them trash and offal and worse. "Wolverine scats!" he concluded definitively, folding his arms. "Are not. Will not speak more." Rap folded his own. Despite all he could do, he had begun to shiver.

The goblins' angular eyes flashed. "Will keep trees and take trash, too!"

"Are thieves? "

"Will take trash and chief, too! Trade back to town for swords."

Blood Needle was a hard bargainer, obviously. Kidnapping and ransom and next he would be threatening to bum the town, no doubt. Rap decided he had played the stupid game long enough. His teeth were chattering.

"Will ask Death Bird if thief!" He spun around on frozen toes and crunched off to the cottage where the fire burned. He marched in and slammed the door. It was only a box of four stone walls with a hearth and a couple of small windows. It contained nothing except Death Bird and a tub of grease.

Stripped to a rag, the goblin king was sitting on the dirt floor, anointing his feet with bear fat. The stench of it would make a man's eyes water. On the hearth a driftwood fire blazed and crackled cheerfully. He was staying well away from it, but its glow made him shine slickly green all over.

"Playing tricks!" Rap said, by habit stamping his boots to remove the snow. Even in here, his breath smoked. He moved over to the fire and stood as close as he dared, gasping with relief as he thawed.

The goblin chuckled, a low, brutal sound, full of menace. "Are not sorcerer? See through walls?"

"Not see through walls ... Oh, let's speak impish, you big lunk! I didn't need sorcery. I knew you must be around somewhere because Raven Totem owns the trees and there was no spokesman from the Ravens. How are you, you ugly green horror?"

Death Bird laughed at the compliment and scrambled to his feet. He was big for a goblin and growing bigger year by year. He was shorter than Rap, but with the muscles of a troll. His black hair was greased into a rope that hung over his left shoulder, dangling to his bulging belly, and he had much more mustache than most. His eyes seemed almost square, although that was partly an effect of the tattoos around them. Grinning a set of tusks like a timber wolf 's, he strode forward to embrace his old friend. Rap threw all his strength into the hug, but he felt his ribs creak.

The first king of the goblins.

A man with a destiny decreed by the Gods.

Reflecting that he would have to burn his soiled furs as soon as he got home, Rap squatted down by the fire and smiled at his former slave. Death Bird moved away from the heat to begin replacing the grease he had deposited on Rap.

"You're getting fat!" Rap remarked smugly, aware that his own midriff was well concealed.

The angular eyes narrowed. "Want to try a best of three?"

"Not likely!"

"You put some beer in with that junk you want to palm off on me? "

"No, but I'll send over a few bags of beer for you." Rap knew who would drink it when it was thawed out. Nobody else would get as much as a sniff at it. "Mostly I gave you alum."

The goblin grunted, although that might have been less a comment than just the result of trying to reach an awkward part of his anatomy. "Why alum? I got no use for alum. Don't know what anyone does with alum!" He shot Rap a suspicious glance.

"Something to do with dyes. But I'm told the dwarves prize it highly, and who makes better swords than they?"

The goblin interrupted his toilet to stare at Rap with an obvious anger that would likely have terrified anyone else. And even Rap had known more pleasant experiences.

"You still claim you're not a sorcerer?"

Warned by a smell of burning fur, Rap edged away from the fire. "No sorcery. I hear the imps are building a wall across Pondague Pass. "

Again the big tusks flashed. "Keeps them out of mischief."

"While you trade with Dwanish! Come on, Death Bird! It's obvious. You've been feinting at Pondague all these years until you've got the Impire convinced that there's no other way across the mountains. But you'll never persuade me that you haven't scouted out a few more passes by now! Moreover, the dwarves are your natural allies. That's no big secret, either. When do you strike?"

Death Bird was glaring. "You're the one who told me of my destiny. Prophesy for yourself. "

Rap had not really expected to be taken into his confidence. It could not be long now, though. Death Bird had picked up just enough impish culture to become a deadly foe to the Impire. He had spent seventeen years uniting his people and preparing his war. All the border struggles that the Impire had considered important had all just been training for the big one. This year? Or next? Or the year 3000?

Rap shivered. "It so happens I do have a prophecy for you. There's an old belief that Emine's Protocol will fail at the end of the millennium. That's in two more years. I am informed on excellent authority that there's something to it. "

The goblin chortled, giving away nothing at all. Satisfied with his grease coat, he began pulling on his buckskins. "Be nice to see Hub again. Throw a party for them. Er, with them, I mean."

"You just may. But it means sorcery trouble."

"Bright Water's dead, you know that?"

"No. Hardly surprising." The mad old loon had been witch of the north since 2682. "Who's her successor?"

Death Bird's square eyes twinkled amid their tattoos. Somehow his face seemed even greener with the rest of him covered in buckskin. "A dwarf, named Raspnex. "

"The one we met?"

"Zinixo's uncle," the goblin agreed, grinning like a hyena. Of course he would be pleased to have a dwarf on the White Throne if he'd been making treaties with the dwarves. North's official prerogative was the jotnar raiders, but Bright Water had favored her goblins, also, although shed been too crazy to be reliable.

Rap thought back to his days of sorcery. "I wouldn't have judged Raspnex's heft to be quite up to warlock standard, but he's not a bad man. He was the strongest of Zinixo's votaries in Faerie. After I broke Zinixo and went back there, he hadn't tried to imprint any of them. I was impressed."

South, of course, was an elf. Elves and dwarves were born enemies, so there would be trouble within the Four again. Face it-there was always trouble within the Four! The witch of the west was a troll, Grunth. She was not especially powerful. Nor was Olybino, warlock of the east. Lith'rian was probably the strongest now, so it was odd he'd agreed to Raspnex ...

Rap shrugged and left the matter to simmer on the back of his mind while he tackled other things-like his smoking left leg, for instance. He shifted around.

"How's that little lovely you had with you last summerBluebell?"

"Fine. Not so little now. "

"How many wives does that make?" Death Bird became cagy. "Several."

"How many children?"

The goblin grinned. "State secret. How is your woman?"

"Oh, she's fine," Rap said. "Just had the cutest little son. We think he's going to be sort of fair-haired impish, which is fine because we have a jotunn son already and one of our daughters is impish and the other is jotunn and thank the Gods none of them really looks like me, but just let me tell you what Kadie did the other day . . . "

Death Bird waited with ill-concealed impatience until Rap's tale was complete. Without even a smile at the punchline, he launched into a dull and pointless account of how his oldest son, Blood Beak, had killed his first bear.

Even a pixie could be lonely, and a pixie with no place of her own was a lost soul. As the dry season grew drier and hotter, Thaile felt the call of the faraway College more strongly every day. Already it seemed to have stolen her from her friends, her family, and her familiar surroundings. Already it had enfolded her in its own occult, invisible embrace. She could make no plans; she could think no farther ahead than the onset of the next rainy season, because by then she would be sixteen and somewhere else and a different person, leading a wholly different life, which she could not even now imagine. The Gaib Place was no longer her home. The road ahead disappeared over a cliff.