The Goblin Corps (26 page)

Um, door?

“And please do not attempt to open that door,” he added, as though reading their minds. “It leads to Queen Anne’s private chambers, and she has certain precautions in place to discourage unwanted visitors.”

“Wait, wait, wait,” Cræosh said, one hand half raised. “You telling me that the queen keeps a private chamber in her
carriage?”

“She most certainly does not.”

“But you said that door led to her chambers!”

“It does.”

Cræosh decided firmly not to ask any more questions.

“Very well. If that is all, I must resume my post.” Robe stepped outside, gently but firmly shutting the door behind him, and the carriage began to move.

“I,” Gork told the room at large, “need a drink.”

The orc nodded. “Make that two, Shorty.”

Grumble, grumble, “Yeah, whatever,” grumble. Rather sullenly, the kobold yanked on the rope. Then, at the rather resounding lack of a chime, he hauled on it again.

“Well, how about that?” he said, stepping away from the rope. “All this splendor, and they couldn’t be bothered to keep the bellpull workiaaagh!!”

He staggered, one hand on his
kah-rahahk
, the other pressed tightly to his chest, as a black, shimmering
something
slid up from the floor. Vaguely human in size and shape, it stared into his eyes, its burning-ember gaze scorching a hole through the recesses of his mind.

“A—ba—dah? Wha…?”

Cræosh laughed, though there was a faint twinge in his voice. “Relax, Shorty. It’s one of King Morthûl’s wraiths.”

“Oh. Oh!” The kobold drew himself back up to his full height and swallowed hard. Twice. “What do you want?”

Silence, not so much a pregnant pause as a dead one. Then, “Well, yes, I did pull the rope. But I didn’t hear—No, I guess I wouldn’t know if—Nothing major, I just wanted—Listen, can I finish a bloody sent—” But the wraith was gone, dropping through the floor from whence it came.

“So?” Fezeill—in human form, at the moment—asked from the divan across the room.

“I’m not sure it likes me,” Gork said.

The doppelganger and the gremlin exchanged looks of utter shock. “No!” Fezeill protested.

“Really?” Gimmol added. “How unreasonable!” Gork glared at them both.

“You didn’t answer the important question, Shorty,” Cræosh said. “Hmm? Oh, no, I’m fine, Cræosh. It just yelled a bit, I think. It didn’t actually hurt—”

“No. I meant, is it still bringing my drink?”

Gork gave up and went to go stand in the corner. The wraith did indeed bring their drinks eventually, but the kobold’s was warm.

The gently swaying room finally drifted to a halt, and Robe hauled the door open. “My friends and honored guests,” he said, bowing low, “welcome to the Castle Eldritch.”

Katim, who had remained standing by the door for the entire ride, was first out. She took two steps and stopped short.

The towering edifice had been home to the royal family of King Sabryen, a wizard of no small power in his own right before Morthûl overthrew him. Once the Charnel King realized that a bride and groom would require their own space if the marriage was to survive for multiple centuries—particularly when both were often involved in rather delicate experiments—he’d granted the old king’s castle to his wife.

All this, Katim had known, but she’d never been here. She had assumed that the appellation “Eldritch” was pure melodrama.

A tangible sense of ages clung to the walls, suggesting not so much the passage of years as the passage of lives. A thick hedge of thorns served in place of a moat, but otherwise the castle’s five towers appeared traditional enough.

Until one drew near enough to recognize that while the outermost buildings were whitewashed stone, the central towers were composed of solid white jade! That the thing didn’t collapse under its own weight was a testament to the magics that gave the castle its name.

Robe ushered the bewildered company through a gate in the hedge, a second gate in the outer bastion—both gaping wide open—and into a well-landscaped bailey. A procession of minor functionaries, merchants, and petitioners flowed in a living stream (or perhaps a parade of ants) through those portals. Small but far more ornate portals of carved jade, allowing access to the interior of the castle proper, swung open at their approach.

Cræosh glanced at Katim as they passed through that last doorway. “I hate magic.”

“You hate everything…you can’t comprehend.”

“So?”

“So it’s a wonder…you can function at all.”

Cræosh swallowed a retort. The damn canine had been snippy ever since they left the Steppes, but he reluctantly decided that the halls of the Queen’s castle weren’t the best place to have it out.

Despite the preponderance of doors and side passages, their brown-robed guide kept to the central corridor. Plush red carpeting cushioned their feet. Mounted suits of gleaming plate armor, joints welded shut, polished to a blinding sheen, stood three rows deep along both walls. Gork, his curiosity ever aroused—and his gaze flitting about for any smaller adornments that might not be immediately missed—casually sidled over for a closer look.

When he rejoined the marching squad, his face was so pale that even Jhurpess couldn’t miss it.

“What bothering Gork?” he asked, his voice hushed.

“Just…don’t go near the armor, okay?”

Jhurpess gave a halfhearted shrug and returned to picking the lice from his fur and flicking them into the thick carpeting. Gork shuddered once more, trying not to contemplate the agony and the terror those men must have felt
as their armor was welded shut around them
, trapping them helpless inside metal tombs. For the first time in his life, he felt a brief surge of sympathy for members of that disgusting, arrogant race.

He was also a little curious as to how Queen Anne had managed to keep the corpses from decomposing and stinking up her castle—assuming, he realized with another shudder, they were actually dead. Gork decided firmly not to think on it any further.

Mercifully, the corridor made a sharp bend to the left, leaving the horribly occupied suits of armor behind. Not that this hall was lacking its own warped splendors.

The walls were covered, end to end and floor to ceiling, in tapestries, murals, and friezes. Each was of the utmost quality, the work of master artisans, and portrayed a tranquil or pastoral scene, the world at its grandest. Here stretched miles of emerald forests, the browns and greens so rich that the passersby could almost have climbed the nearest tree and smelled the earthy aromas. There, depths of ocean stretched from towering cliffs, the white foam climbing halfway up the rock face before falling back to vanish in the waves. Verdant fields sprawled beneath the watchful gaze of a single pristine tower constructed atop a shallow hill. Every last one of them a landscape of peace, contentment, wonder.

Except for the rotting, bug-encrusted visage of the Charnel King, who appeared in each and every image. He strode regally through the forest, his long cloak leaving a trail of swirling leaves in its wake. He towered atop the seaside cliffs, arms outstretched, commanding the elemental tides. And the fleshy half of his visage peered, partially cloaked in shadow, from the upper window of the watchtower. The lord of all, gazing down on the very least of his holdings. A single beetle—a real one, no part of any image—crawled across the surface and vanished behind the fabric, as though the Dark Lord were somehow present even in this very hall.

Finally, they neared another set of double doors of a thick, rich wood, carved just as ornately as the jade had been. Even as Robe reached fabric-wrapped fingers toward the latch, they heard the sound of Gork dry-heaving behind them. Cræosh glanced back as they passed through the doorway.

“What’s the problem, Shorty?”

“Don’t look up,” the kobold said, still gagging.

Cræosh, of course, immediately looked up, but he was already through the door, the ceiling of the hall blocked from view. “What’s up there?”

“More frescoes of the queen’s lord and husband,” Robe said.

“So?” Cræosh asked Gork as the little creature stepped into the room.

Gork shook his head. “They’re the erotic ones….”

Cræosh had always been green, but not that particular shade. Resolutely, the orc determined to find another way to leave the castle once their audience was complete.

She sat upon a golden throne, atop a shallow dais and between two censers of pungent frankincense. Servants and seneschals stood at her side, and Robe quickly moved ahead and took up a position at her left shoulder. The audience chamber—a huge, egg-shaped place—was lined in more white jade and adorned with intricately etched marble pillars. A small line of petitioners—made up primarily of older, flabbier men who appeared to represent the city’s successful merchant class—wound from the dais. A few muttered angrily as the Demon Squad moved past them to stand directly before the queen, but none protested.

“Ah, dear children,” the queen greeted them, beaming down from atop her throne, “I’m delighted that you could accept my little invitation.”

Invitation?
Cræosh scoffed inwardly, but even
he
wasn’t
that
undiplomatic. He dropped to one knee, hoping his companions would take the hint and do the same. “It was an honor, Your Majesty, to—” He gasped as a bolt of lightning (a small one, thankfully) arced into his side. Cræosh glowered at the imp, who was glaring right back, and promptly shut his mouth.

“My apologies, Your Majesty,” Shreckt said—actually standing on the ground, for a change!—and spreading his arms wide. “Sometimes my charges speak out of turn. I command this squad, and I will speak for—”

“Tell me, imp,” Queen Anne interrupted, “are you ranked so highly that you hold yourself aloof from matters of protocol?”

“Of course not, Your Majesty. I—”

“Then get on your knees before I have them cut from under you!”

The slight thump as Shreckt dropped failed to muffle the choked laughter that neither Cræosh, Gork, nor Gimmol could quite suppress.

“Now, my dears,” Queen Anne continued, all gentle smiles once more, “you’ve been on the road for a great while. Relax, refresh yourselves, perhaps have a bite to eat. We will talk afterward, when you have made yourselves marginally presentable. Rupert will show you to your rooms.” A simple gesture, bidding them to rise, and then her attention turned back to the next in the seemingly endless line of petitioners.

Robe—or “Rupert,” apparently—gracefully drifted down from the dais’s shallow steps. “If you will follow me?” Without waiting for a response, he flowed ahead, leading them not toward the hallway from which they’d entered (and thanks be for that!), but down a smaller passage that had been partly obscured behind one of the towering columns.

Two long corridors and a wide flight of stairs with an ivory banister led them to a smaller hall lined with modest wooden doors. Several loud clicks sounded as Rupert passed them by, and several doors on either side of the hallway drifted open.

“These are your quarters,” the queen’s servant told them. “Feel free to fight over them, but I assure you that each is absolutely identical to the others.”

Cræosh popped his head through the nearest doorway. Acceptable enough, in a cushy, over-luxurious, human sort of way. A hardwood wardrobe stood directly opposite a large, four-poster bed (trimmed, the orc noted with no small amount of nausea, in fluffy pink). A large brass basin sat directly across from the door, illuminated dimly by the single flaccid beam of sunlight that penetrated the drape-covered window. (Cræosh allowed himself to note that these rooms shouldn’t
have
exterior windows—they were somewhere in the very heart of the castle—and then chose to file that fact away in the abandoned recesses of his mind, right next to the door in the carriage and the frescoes in the entry hall.)

“Is the room satisfactory?” Rupert asked from over Cræosh’s shoulder.

“You might do better,” Cræosh snarled, willing his heart to cease pounding and his hand to unclench from his sword, “not to creep up on people.”

Then, more calmly, “Yeah, the room oughta do fine. Don’t know why Queen Anne wanted us to come here first, though. I’d just as soon find out why we’re here.”

“I believe Her Majesty felt that it might behoove you to make use of the amenities.”

Cræosh finally turned to peer blankly into the shadowed hood. “Huh?”

“I can have the servants fetch some hot water as soon as you’re ready.”

“Why?”

Did Rupert actually sigh? “I see that you aren’t fluent in Circumspect. Queen Anne feels that you and your associates could each do with a bath. Perhaps two or three.”

Cræosh sniffed. “If you say so. I’ve always thought we orcs smelled kind of earthy, myself.”

“Yes, sir. Earthy indeed. Quite fertile, even. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll have your water up in just a moment. I have to see about getting your ogre friend a larger tub.”

The squad reassembled some two hours later, smelling a great deal less like last spring’s compost. (Gork and Jhurpess were also rubbed raw, where the guards had been forced to hold them down and scrub them with wire brushes.) Shreckt, however, was absent, apparently having decided that his presence was unnecessary.

They sat around a lengthy table, polishing off a feast prepared especially for them. It’s worth noting, in passing, that the chef on duty retired from Queen Anne’s service less than a month later. He moved out into the country to spend the rest of his life raising cabbage, and he never told a soul what he’d been asked to prepare that evening, or why he occasionally awoke screaming in the predawn hours.

“So?” Cræosh asked the room at large, picking a fatty morsel from his teeth with a sliver of broken bone. “We’re here, we’re full, we’re even clean. So when’s the bill come due?”

“Queen Anne will tell…us why we’re here as soon…as she feels it appropriate. You…will simply have to…try to remain patient.” Katim snorted, then, obviously amused by her own words. “Or at least…fake it.”

Cræosh grimaced, revealing the four or five other meaty chunks that he hadn’t yet dislodged from his teeth. “I’m tired of being patient!”