The Goblin Corps (54 page)

And it was long minutes after
that
that Cræosh found himself regaining some sense of hearing through the pounding in his ears.

“Is everyone all right?” he called, somewhat louder than he realized. Some of the replies were more coherent than others, but everyone was alive and not
totally
deaf. He could only hope that by the time the flames died away, they’d all have recovered enough to move on.

Indeed they did—although Katim complained of sporadic ringing in her ears—since it was two hours before the last of the fires sputtered and died. Embers glowed here and there from within heaps of coal-gray ash, and puddles of sap and other fluids bubbled and steamed, but it appeared safe to cross.

It wasn’t even that hard to convince Belrotha to step through the doorway. Apparently, she’d somehow decided that burning down the garden was sufficient punishment for its refusal to follow the law of the seasons.

It was Gork, of course, who gave a victorious shout, perhaps twenty minutes later. Every one of the squad was coated to the elbows in black sludge, where they’d pushed and dug through the clinging detritus that had been the ivies, saplings, and other plants growing along the walls. Gork traced a few lines in the ash, revealing the outline of the door.

Directly behind where the man-eating vines had dwelt. “Of course,” Cræosh said.

Gork peered at the latch, trying to determine if it was locked—and then threw himself back with a rather porcine squeal as Jhurpess, still impatient, slammed his club into the door. The portal flew open, very nearly wrenching itself from the hinges, and slammed against the wall of the corridor beyond.

“Well,” Gork announced sourly, “I guess it’s unlocked.”

Jhurpess grinned at him, then grinned wider when Belrotha said “Good smash.”

“Oh, great.” The kobold shook his head. “They’re encouraging each other.”

The passage beyond the door led to a spacious spiral staircase winding its way up the center of what had to be the tower they’d sought. The stairs themselves were clearly well used and well maintained both. Torches, unlit but ready to go, jutted from sconces at regular intervals. The plush carpet—probably a deep red, though the light of the squad’s own torches wasn’t quite sufficient for them to be sure—remained firm, almost bouncy, and showed the impressions of many a footfall.

After enough winding about to make a wagon wheel dizzy—Gimmol, when asked, estimated that they were probably a good five stories or more aboveground—the staircase finally deposited them on a landing. It boasted the same thick carpeting, and a single door, which Gork swiftly reached out and opened, silently, before Jhurpess could use it for a gong.

The squad gathered tightly around the doorway, staring at what could only be Queen Anne’s bedchamber. Cræosh, literally leaning over the kneeling kobold so as to get a better view of the room, found his jaw dropping in amazement.

It was
ordinary
! Yes, the carpeting was deep enough that Gork could have gotten lost in it. Yes, the canopied, four-poster bed was larger than the hut Belrotha had flattened in Jureb Nahl and trimmed in silks expensive enough to pay, if not a king’s ransom, then at least a baron’s. But for all that, it could just as easily have belonged to any one of a hundred nobles in any of a dozen kingdoms.

Well, except for a single repulsive (but, thank the Ancestors, not erotic!) portrait of King Morthûl hanging beside the bed.

Cræosh scanned the room, as he was certain the others were doing as well. In addition to the bed, the chamber held a huge wardrobe, a table with a gold-framed mirror, and two doors—no, three, counting the one in which they stood.

Except that one of them couldn’t exist. Unless he’d gotten
completely
turned around, that should be the outer wall of the tower itself! It took a moment for his mind to stretch back several weeks and dredge up the relevant memory. “The carriage,” he whispered.

“What?” Fezeill asked.

“The carriage,” Cræosh repeated. “There was a door in the carriage, remember? Rupert said that it led to the queen’s private chambers.” He shook his head. “That’s a hell of a trick.”

“Indeed,” Gimmol agreed, nodding. “I couldn’t even guess at the spells required to pull this off.” He paused. “I wonder if it functions when the teleportation wards are active?”

“I wonder if it matters,” Gork said sourly. “Can we just get this done with and worry about Queen Anne’s parlor tricks later? I don’t want to die here—and that includes of old age.”

“Keep your testicles on, Shorty, we’re moving.”

A perfunctory search revealed nothing else unusual, and they quickly devoted their attention to the last of the three doors. “Queen Anne through here?” Belrotha asked.

Cræosh grimaced. “She fucking well better be. If not, it means we missed something. Else. I swear, this woman doesn’t just have a thing for corpses, she’s also got a bloody door fetish.”

Gork shuffled forward, reached for the door, and promptly flew across the chamber, accompanied by a sizzling sound rather like a lightning bolt coated in bacon grease. Whiskers standing erect, wisps of smoke rising from his fingertips, Gork used the wardrobe to haul himself upright and fixed the others with a baleful grimace. “I think it’s someone else’s turn to open a door.”

No one moved.

“Well, this is just fucking great!” Cræosh snapped. “After all this, we’re not gonna let one damn door stop us, are we?”

“Of course not,” Katim told him blandly. “You go…right ahead and open it.”

“Um…Shut up, troll.”

“That’s about what I…thought.”

To their credit, they certainly got creative. They tried everything, from bashing it open with Jhurpess’s club (the wood somehow conducted the unnatural electricity, and Cræosh and Katim couldn’t help laughing at the sight of the bugbear with his entire coat of fur standing on end) to standing back and letting Gimmol toss spells at it (none were strong enough to open the portal) to standing even farther back and letting Belrotha toss furniture at it (which bounced off).

“Gork!” Gimmol exclaimed suddenly. “The skull!”

“Gimmol!” the kobold replied in the exact same tone. “What the hell are you talking about?”

The gremlin sighed. “The talisman King Morthûl gave you, remember?”

Gork nodded slowly. “What about it?”

“He said it was a focus, to assist him in penetrating the barriers around the castle. Maybe we can use it here.”

“I dunno,” Cræosh protested from a few feet away. “Didn’t he say that it had to be as close to the laboratory as possible? Are we close enough here?”

“No,” Gimmol said. “But that’s not what I meant. Gork, hold the skull up to the door.”

“Not a chance! I’m not getting anywhere near that door again!”

The gremlin sighed. “So don’t get too close, Gork. Just do it.”

Mumbling, the kobold raised the talisman and held it about a foot away from the door.

“A little closer than
that
, Gork.”

Grumble, grumble.

The skull suddenly began chattering and cackling, twisting in Gork’s hand like a live rodent.

“Ouch!”

“What’s wrong, Shorty?” Cræosh asked.

“It
bit
me!”

Gimmol’s eyes went strangely unfocused. “Just hold it for another minute, Gork.…”

And then the gremlin cast his spell. It was a simple spell of opening, not much more than an apprentice-level incantation. It certainly wasn’t powerful enough to open
this
door; he’d already tried it once, and failed.

But this time, speaking through parched and cracking lips now pursed in concentration, Gimmol cast the spell through the Charnel King’s talisman, rather than at the door directly.

The skull ceased laughing. For perhaps a full minute, nothing else happened; and then it
barked.
There was just no other word to describe the abrupt shout that burst from the tiny marble mouth.

The door didn’t open so much as it simply ceased to exist, revealing a narrower flight of spiral stairs, once more leading up.

Gork and Gimmol both stared at the skull, which was once again cackling maniacally, and then at each other. “If you’ve somehow used it up,” Gork said, shoving the talisman back into his pack, “don’t expect me to get between you and His Majesty.”

This particular flight of stairs emitted an odd smell, one foreign to the rest of the castle. The closest that even Katim, with her acute senses, could describe it was as a vague olfactory echo of Queen Anne’s own scent, combined with the dust of ages and just the faintest hint of decomposition.

“Um…” Fezeill stopped abruptly, his feet on two separate steps. “I’m just wondering…”

“What?” Cræosh asked, twisting at the waist to look back and down. “What is it now?”

“If we’re here to stop Queen Anne’s rite, or at least to let, uh, ‘someone else’ stop it…Do we really want to have the Tree of Ever on us? What if she gets a hold of it?”

Silence in the stairway.

“This,” Cræosh grumbled, “is a
fine
time to think of that!”

“Could tree stay here?” Jhurpess asked.

“No way,” Gimmol said before Cræosh could answer. “Leave it lying around the castle? Might as well give it to her.”

“Okay, fine,” Cræosh said, dragging it from his pack. “Belrotha?”

“Yeah?”

“This symbol said bad things about your mother.”

The ogre, who had turned sideways to fit through the staircase, glowered at him. “Me not stupid, Cræosh. Little tree thing can’t talk.”

Sigh…
“All right. I just wanted you to crush it.”

“Why you not just say so?” The ogre reached out, plucked the Tree of Ever from the orc’s hands, and ground it swiftly into sawdust. The squad began tromping up the stairs once more.

“Cræosh?”

“Yes, Belrotha?”

“Why us bother to go to woods and get little tree thing, if us just going to crush it?”

“Shut up and keep climbing, Belrotha.”

“Okay. Cræosh?”

“
What?
”

“You not talk about my mother again.”

The staircase finally opened up onto another landing, similar to the one providing access to the queen’s bedchambers. Again a wooden archway sat in the center of the wall; no doorway, this time, but just an open space. Gork raised a hand, signaling the others to stop, and then crept silently to the gaping entryway. Crouched as low as he could, he peeked around the frame.

The laboratory—for surely this must be it—was perfectly circular, taking up the entirety of the tower’s upper level. Shelves and hooks and cupboards and niches lined the walls, containing, it appeared to Gork, a bit of everything. Books, plants, fluids, stones, preserved body parts from a thousand different creatures, the tools used to extract said parts—these and more were scattered about, in no order that he could discern.

Standing in the center of the chamber was a platform of a rough stone, slanted at a steep slope. Carved into it was a human-shaped depression equipped with manacles of all sizes and shapes. And in the center of that hollow, looking ludicrously small, lay Shreckt.

He was locked down by the smallest shackles the contraption possessed, and he appeared weak and listless, his head lolling with the rhythm of his breath. Gork found himself wondering idly if they could afford to postpone their interference until after Queen Anne had finished with the aggravating little imp.

He tried to jump out through his own snout when Katim appeared beside him, almost as silent as he himself had been.

“Does it strike you as odd,” he whispered, trying to cover until his beating heart slowed, “that we just
happened
to show up when her ritual was going down?”

“Not really,” the troll said softly back. “She probably started…when she learned we were coming, in hopes of…getting it done before we…found her.”

“Indeed, I’m afraid I had to rush things. Do you approve, sweet Gork?”

The kobold and the troll tensed at that measured, feminine voice.

“Oh, dear. I’ve startled you. How rude of me. I know you’re there, of course, just as I know that your friends are crammed rather uncomfortably into the stairway. Why don’t you all come in?”

Gork gave some brief thought to refusing, and then, with a small sigh, he rose and stepped through the door. Katim followed an instant later.

“Hey!” Cræosh hissed in a strangled whisper. “What the fuck are you two doing?!”

“She knows we’re here, Cræosh,” the kobold said in a normal tone of voice. “She’s invited us in.”

“Oh.” Cræosh scowled. “I guess, in that case…”

The squad filed in on the kobold’s heels, several of them aiming satisfied glances at the chained demon.

“It’s a vivisection table,” Gimmol whispered to the others. He held off on mentioning that the tiny straps holding the imp were probably intended for human children. He was afraid that that fact wouldn’t bother his companions as much as it did him.

“How splendid!” It was Queen Anne’s voice again. “It’s so good to get together with old friends.” Slowly, the Charnel King’s bride stepped out from behind the curious stone table.

Queen Anne was completely nude, although it took the squad a moment to realize it. Her long, lustrous hair was gone, her scalp shaved bare, and every inch of her body was covered in swirling runes and intricate sigils. Gork, for one, couldn’t begin to guess if they were painted on or actual tattoos.

“That must’ve taken a while,” Cræosh commented.

“I am patient,” she said simply. Then she frowned. “Up to a point. I’m afraid that after you’d been gone so long, however, I found my patience running rather thin.”

“Yeah,” Cræosh said, “I see you started without us.” He glanced at the laboratory around him, ending on the items scattered by the queen’s bare feet. “I see the bones,” he told her. The others held their breaths, watching for her reaction. “And the flower, and the heart, and the cobwebs. You’ve got all kinds of herbs and shit here—that should take care of the more mundane ingredients. And right there,” he added, pointing to Shreckt, “you’ve got a demon whose soul you can suck.” He grinned. “But what about the relic? We’ve still got that, you know.”