The Goblin Corps (53 page)

“Yes?”

“Whatever Rupert is, your collection doesn’t have one, does it?”

“No.”

“Perhaps you ought to rectify that.”

Rupert pivoted toward the advancing troll. She grinned, her twisted jaw opening, her horrible teeth shifting roughly in their sockets. Her gums brushed against the insides of her lips, and a thin trail of saliva fell to vanish into the carpet.

“Attractive,” Rupert said, raising his hands to point at Katim’s chest.

“Yeah,” Cræosh agreed. “And distracting, too.”

Belrotha drove both fists into Rupert’s robe from behind and began to tear.

An inhuman wail sounded from deep—far, far
too
deep—within Rupert’s hood. His hands thrashed wildly, and even the ogre rocked back as they slammed against her. Cræosh could only wonder, marveling, at the strength contained within that flimsy robe. But Belrotha held fast, ignoring the deep mottled bruises, ignoring the streams of blood that slowly trickled down her face, dribbling over her lips. The form beneath that robe was
wrong
, gave impossibly as she twisted and yanked. No bones broke and no flesh tore, for whatever the robe contained, it appeared to possess neither.

Again Rupert reached out, but this time he was not striking at the ogre. A shimmering rainbow light rose from his palm to burst before Belrotha’s face. Her eyes glazed over, pupils dilating, and her grip went limp. She stood frozen, staring deeply at nothing at all, or at least nothing that any of the others could see.

Rupert yanked himself free of Belrotha’s slackened fists just in time to catch Katim’s
chirrusk
across his head and Fezeill’s blade in his back. Writhing, the robed figure twisted aside, hauling himself off the doppelganger’s sword. Beneath the prongs of the hook, the left half of his hood tore completely off the robe.

Cræosh felt his jaw drop and saw Katim’s do the same as the hooked end of her
chirrusk
fell unnoticed to the carpet. Vaguely, he thought he heard Gimmol gasp, and Jhurpess—who’d just been approaching Rupert with club held high—fell back whimpering.

Staring at Rupert’s head, or rather where his head should have been, was akin to staring down an ambulatory hole. The hallway beyond was visible
through
him, but distant, distorted—like looking through the wrong end of a dwarven spyglass. Cræosh had to lower his gaze, to look at the robed torso rather than through that “head,” lest he be overcome with vertigo.

“I do hope your curiosity is satisfied,” Rupert said. “But it’s dreadfully impolite to stare so.”

The others snapped back to attention, but the phantasmal seneschal had taken advantage of their stunned immobility, drifting some way down the hall, putting himself well beyond reach of the Demon Squad’s weapons. Already his hands were raised for another spell. Cræosh, Katim, and Fezeill bounded forward; Jhurpess dropped his club and was desperately fitting an arrow to his bow; but none of them needed Gimmol’s frightened shout to know that they could not cover the distance before Rupert unleashed his magics.

Behind Rupert, the door to one of the hallway’s many bedrooms creaked slowly open, revealing a single gleaming eye.

Gork had no love for his companions—in point of fact, he hated most of them—but as the battle raged, two thoughts kept floating to the surface of his devious little mind:

If they all die, Morthûl’s gonna be
really
pissed at me.
And…

If they all die, I’m gonna be stuck facing Rupert and Queen Anne on my own!

And so, as he had against the yetis, the kobold waited until he was sure he could make a difference, and then he charged. His
kah-rahahk
remained firmly in its sheath; he’d seen enough to know that Rupert had no corporeal body to stab, and while Belrotha’s tearing at the robe itself had clearly caused him pain, Gork knew that he couldn’t shred it with his tiny blade, not before the creature roasted him like a kitten on a spit.

But thanks to the neatly made bed within the chamber he’d chosen as a hiding place, that jagged dagger was not the kobold’s only weapon.

Gork burst from concealment, pounded down the hall in a matter of seconds, and leapt. Using both feet and one hand, he scrabbled and crawled his way
up
the strangely moving, almost viscous robe, appeared over Rupert’s shoulder, and allowed himself to drop down in front of him….

Dragging, the entire way, the quilt he’d hauled from the bed. The heavy wool draped over Rupert’s head, or whatever it was he had in place of a head, forming a colorful, pastel shroud.

Gork was leaping again even as his feet touched the floor, passing under the robe and between where Rupert’s ankles should have been. Clutching a corner of the quilt in one hand, he reached up and snagged the edge still trailing behind the flailing figure. For just an instant, as Gork clung tightly in the face of Rupert’s bucking, the seneschal was well and truly netted.

Cræosh never slowed his charge. As his pumping legs carried him toward the disoriented foe, he dropped his own blade, reached out with his uninjured hand, and yanked Fezeill’s short sword from the doppelganger’s fingers. Ignoring the sudden yelp of protest, the orc lowered his shoulder.

His own wicked blade, after all, was meant for chopping. And just this once, that wasn’t what Cræosh wanted. Roaring, he slammed the thrashing figure back a few steps, then shoved the smaller blade through the heavy quilt and through the nonexistent “face” below.

For an instant, there seemed no substance, no end, beneath the heavy fabric. On and on the blade continued without hint of resistance. Cræosh’s hand tore through the rent in the quilt; every muscle tightened, as though he were stretching for something he couldn’t quite reach. An impossible cold, worse than anything the Steppes had offered, brushed his skin.

Finally, though, the blade punched through the back of the quilt and into the heavy wood of the nearest door, pinning the seneschal down, a rare and dying butterfly. The wood splintered, squealing, as the sword, driven by the orc’s powerful thrust, sank into the door to the hilt.

Rupert shrieked, and his voice was the roaring wind. On and on, whipping about them, sending clothes and hair to violent fluttering. His hands thrashed at angles impossible for anything remotely human, reducing the quilt to tatters—all save the patch he wore like a hood, nailing him to the door. Ribbons swirled about the hallway in a flurry of woolen snow.

The illumination in the hall flickered, dimmed, and then returned to normal as Rupert’s incantation of darkness faded away.

“You know,” Gork said conversationally, “he might just pull out of that eventually.” Even as he spoke, the short sword shifted, the metal pressing against the surrounding wood with another teeth-grinding screech.

“He might,” Cræosh agreed, kneeling to retrieve his own sword from the floor. “Gimmol?”

The little gremlin stepped forward, frowning. “It must be the robe that gives him substance,” he offered, though he sounded hesitant. “I can’t think of any other reason he’d have avoided your sword, or why Belrotha’s attack hurt him.”

“Me can hurt
anything
,” the ogre said dreamily, only slowly awakening from her trance.

“I’m sure you can.” For once, Cræosh was feeling somewhat magnanimous—perhaps because he’d already gotten the chance to stab Rupert in the face. “After you,” he offered Katim, along with a shallow bow.

Her axe slammed into the twisting seneschal, splitting the door in two. She yanked it down, shredding fabric by the foot. Rupert’s gale-force scream grew even more shrill, until every ear in the hallway throbbed. Ignoring the pain as best they could, the orc and the troll took turns, slashing and slicing with mechanical regularity. The door crumbled into so much rubbish—Rupert was pinned, now, to nothing more than a plank of wood, albeit a heavy one—and still they continued, never letting up for even a single heartbeat.

After a full two minutes of this, Rupert’s unending cry finally wavered and faded away. After five, the robe was nothing more than random scraps of cloth, mixed in with the splintered heap that had been the door. Just for good measure, Gork reached up, swiped one of the torches off the wall, and shoved it into the pile. It caught instantly, and the kobold watched with a satisfied smirk as smoke began to stain the ceiling.

“Have I mentioned how beautiful today is?” Gork asked.

“How’s Belrotha?” Cræosh asked Gimmol, who had gone over to check up on the bewildered giant.

“Definitely coming out of it,” the gremlin replied, relief etched deeply in his face.

“Pretty colors,” the ogre said, blinking.

“I’m sure they were,” Gimmol commiserated.

“Can Gimmol bring colors back?”

“That, uh, wouldn’t be a good idea, Belrotha.”

Gork snorted from across the hall. “She can’t
really
be that stupid, can she?”

Cræosh grinned. “Never overestimate the intelligence of the ogres, Shorty. I once saw one trying to wrestle a tornado.”

Belrotha glanced up sharply. “Who win?” she asked.

The entire hallway shook as Jhurpess slammed his heavy club hard into the nearest wall. “Jhurpess tired of this!” he shouted, waving his arms, glaring viciously at the lot of them. “Jhurpess tired of talking, Jhurpess tired of wandering like lost cubs, and Jhurpess tired of castle! Jhurpess wants to find queen and leave! Now!”

“Ape’s got a point,” Cræosh agreed with a shrug.

“You think the entrance to the tower’s up here after all?” Gimmol asked as Belrotha once more lifted him to sit beside her head. “I mean, Rupert’s the first living thing—well, more or less—that we’ve seen. Maybe he was guarding the entrance?”

Katim’s jaw curled. “I don’t think so. Why…go to all the trouble of building a…secret entrance, and then go and…attack anyone who gets near? It…sort of ruins the secrecy, don’t…you think?”

Cræosh nodded. “I’m inclined to agree with the troll,” he said. Katim allowed her mouth to gape open, and she clasped both hands over her hearts and staggered.

“Funny,” the orc continued, barely even glancing at her. “I think Rupert would’ve waited to attack us until we were
away
from the entrance, so as not to tip us off.”

“Unless he
expected
us to think of that, and so he attacked us when we
were
near—” Gork began.

“Stop it, Shorty, or I’ll have to hurt you.”

“It was just a thought,” the kobold said sullenly.

“Yeah? Well you can take that thought and shove it back up your ass with the rest of your brain!”

“Hello?” Fezeill said, snapping his fingers. “Entrance? Tower? Remember?”

“If we assume that…the entrance is not here,” Katim continued, “then it only leaves one…place. The only place we haven’t…searched. It really,” she added, “should have been…our first guess, now that I think…about it.”

“Oh, fuck,” Cræosh said succinctly.

Katim nodded. “Indeed.”

The squad, after a few brief stopovers in several of the castle’s sundry supply closets, stood gathered at one of the doorways to the queen’s unnatural garden. Each of them peered uneasily at the twisting plants and twisting paths—most of them because they’d seen the unpleasant varieties of vegetation residing therein, Belrotha because she still couldn’t accept the sudden shift of seasons.

“Okay,” Cræosh said, “what now?”

“We still have to find…the door,” Katim told him.

“Yeah, I sort of know that. How do you propose we go about it? Leaving aside the fact that it really
would
be summer by the time we finished searching the whole place, I’m not getting anywhere near that damn ivy. I’ve already had to fight one homicidal shrub this month, and that’s one more than my quota.”

“I agree,” Katim told him, a strange excitement coloring her tone. “That’s why…I’ve got no intention of searching the…garden.”

“So what are we doing?” the orc asked, clearly exasperated.

“
Clearing
the…garden. Why do you think I…insisted we stop on the…way?”

Cræosh glanced back at the haphazard collection of supplies and then grinned. “Queen Anne’s not going to be at all happy with us.”

“You know, I had that…exact same thought.” Then, together, they both called for the ogre.

Belrotha was more than strong enough to ensure that the barrels reached even the farthest corners of the garden, and that they cracked open when they landed. Even five barrels of the stuff wasn’t enough to coat
everything
, but the mess was spread wide enough to serve.

Cræosh began to tear up as the fumes washed over them. “Shall we?” he asked, his nose wrinkling. Katim began striking flint and steel over the end of a torch, a tendril of saliva wobbling from a wide, jagged grin.

“You’re enjoying this,” Cræosh accused.

The troll shrugged. “I’ve found very few problems that…cannot be solved with the proper application…of fire.”

“I swear, you’re as bad as the bugbear.”

Katim’s torch finally caught. “You may wish to…step back.” The blazing brand hurtled over the queen’s courtyard, vanished from sight behind a shrubbery. For a long moment, silence—and then, with a heavy
whumph
, the torch ignited the first puddle of the lantern oil in which they’d drenched the garden.

The fire spread quickly, and plants unlike those found anywhere else on the continent began to burn. Thick, cloying smoke rose from the center of Castle Eldritch, impregnating the high-floating clouds, meshing its dull, greasy black with their pristine ivory. A choking miasma—alien, even obscene—spread perniciously across the city of Sularaam. It crept through cracked windows and open doors, clung tenaciously to clothing and carpets and hair. It would take weeks, perhaps months, before the city could rid itself of the lingering stench. Across the tiny isle, hundreds turned to gawk at the smoke that was rapidly transforming from a column to an umbrella over the castle’s towers. But the doings of Queen Anne had always lurked beyond the comprehension of mere mortals, and though many a curse was leveled at the choking aroma, not one soul dared approach the castle to investigate.

Within the castle halls, the goblins crouched or huddled in the corners, curled up to shield themselves from the waves of heat that poured through the open doorway, hands clasped tightly to ears, lips and teeth pressed together in grimaces of torment. For within that garden, many of Queen Anne’s plants did not go silently as they burned. Across that unhallowed courtyard laired the clinging vines that had required so much more sustenance than soil and sun—and those vines lamented their deaths in a terrible keening that scrabbled at not merely the ears, but at the mind. On it went, and on, unhindered by any animal need to pause for breath, and only when nothing but ash and charred clumps of sticky fibers were left did it finally cease.