There was a time when Khyte approved of her habit of writing bad poetry, because it distracted her from recognizing his faults, although at that time he was so naive that he didn't know what they were. Eurilda had helped him in that regard towards the end, ultimately driving him away with self-knowledge as she cast one epithet after another: bully, braggart, cad, liar, false-face, glutton, cheat, idiot, knave, and then, later, disturbingly, speck, mote, grub, and vermin. By that time, Khyte knew enough about Eurilda to understand that the latter slurs were probably the most honest from her point of view, as the two of them, it turned out, were built on entirely different scales.
"Eurilda," Khyte said, "I'm sorry." As his fear thawed, warmth returned to Khyte's limbs, and a quivering smile to his face, as while she was speaking with contempt, Eurilda wasn't the kind to kill while savoring a laugh at her victim's expense. No doubt he was in this position because he was, in many ways, her opposite: he was carefree, she was thoughtful; he was insolent, she phrased graceful insults that resembled compliments; thoughts became deeds for him, while Eurilda's deeds embodied her thoughts. In anyone else, Eurilda's temperament would set him at ease, but though she was only fair to middling with that sword, Eurilda's reach was at such a gigantic scale that it did not matter. Eurilda was the most dangerous person he had ever met, and when Khyte realized that her growing scorn had begun to rival her raging infatuation, he ran, knowing it would leave an enemy at his back, because every day they shared a bed he risked being crushed by her heel, and most importantly, he was still in love with her.
However, now that it seemed she wouldn't roll him in a cigar and smoke him, he thought that if—a very, very big if, it would turn out—Eurilda took his side, Nahure couldn't muster a force that would arrest him upon his exit from the restaurant's doors. "Eurilda, I'm sorry," he repeated. "I'm happy to see you, considering...well, what happened was entirely my fault."
"I don't want to hear it," she said, standing up from her meal. At a head shorter than Khyte, she looked down on anyone in the Goblin or Human Worlds. "A fine restaurant is the last place I'd expect to see you, Khyte."
"My friends have better taste than me."
"And you still have the same taste in friends," she said, making a show of looking around the empty inn.
"They had cause," he said.
"Cause to flee? Yes. Cause to be angry? Yes. Cause to abandon you? Never. I don't understand this world's appeal to you, Khyte. Maybe you are their poor relation, a brother in the House of Hwarn, though you only stand to inherit their gift for running away."
Maybe, Khyte thought, Eurilda wasn't so happy.
A half dozen goblins entered The Copper Croc, drizzling rain water from their muddy boots and sodden cloaks. On the guards' thick, doubled mail rested glazed, ceramic slabs ornately enameled with the blue and orange horned serpent crest of King Merculo. Each bore a double-bladed pole ax topped with a pike point, and wore a belt with dagger and short sword. Goblins believed fervently in their right to own deadly weapons, and so the guardsmen that policed them were, by necessity, armed to the teeth.
"Begging your pardon," said the lieutenant, a burly and shaggy brick of a goblin that Khyte had met once, a year ago, and promptly forgotten his name. "You can resume your lovers' quarrel after we have a few words. We promise to return what's left of him." When snickers were not forthcoming from his underlings, he snorted at his own joke.
"Your apology," she said. "was prelude to a boast, and your promise insincere."
"My apology was no apology, and my boast was no crime," said the lieutenant. "As to my insincerity, would you tempt my promise, and share his fate?"
"Nothing would please me more," she said. "although I'm the current authority on Khyte's future."
The lieutenant looked at Khyte as if for the first time. "Khyte?" he said, then laughed, but what was to follow would remain unsaid, for Eurilda took that moment to act.
While her face often masked a winning hand, Eurilda would not have made a good gambler, because she always played her ace, even when a deuce would do. As she snapped her fingers, she lunged forward, her arms and legs telescoping and swelling to the size of tree branches, and the goblin lieutenant was carried by her outstretched fist through the wall and across the street, where he was crushed into the bookstore opposite The Copper Croc. Books, magazines, and news sheets fluttered in the air and into the muddy puddles that pocked the street, and the passing goblins screeched and howled at the sight of the outflung giant that had shattered one building and broken through the storefront of another. A carriage swayed as the saw-tusked boars drawing it squealed; one boar went left, the other went right, and the breeching dee and splinter bar were torn asunder, leaving the two-wheeled carriage to roll backward over the unfortunate driver flung from the box seat.
The first time Khyte saw Eurilda's transformation—in truth, not a transformation, but an elastic snap back from a borrowed size to her natural scale—the shock of her enlargement was more numbing than the sorceress's pedantic explanation that this was the reality, that the breasts and buttocks he had stroked were a diminutive, mystical veil over her true flesh, in which he could suffocate like a runt in a litter. Illusion, Eurilda elaborated, could subtract from reality as easily as add to it, and just as she could make a chimerical substance that would delude sight, or make roses smell like rotten bananas, so she could remove the pillars of substance, such as height or weight, from an object. On Uenarak, the island of giants, six hundred year old Otoka had taught her shape and scale changing spells so that his apprentice might better serve him when away from the Monster World, Nymerea. The realization that Khyte's lover was both a giant and a sorceress, and dwarfed him physically, intellectually, magically—and literally—was an emasculating one, and that Khyte stayed with her for some six months thereafter is less a testimony to his character than to the appealing human form with which she clothed herself when traveling The Five Worlds, and the alluring sexuality which she oozed, and to which he was still addicted, though he guessed that it was also illusory, an addition of scents and manipulation of his sense of touch that made of him her thrall.
The roof creaked, resting more on Eurilda's back than the buckling walls. When Khyte and the goblin guards made for the hole in the wall, Eurilda seized Khyte with her other hand, and held him close to her abdomen as she stood, cracking The Copper Croc into rubble.
As goblin-at-arms deal with Nahure's own monsters, they were not untrained for this scenario; the strategies used for fighting wire giants treat each gigantic limb as one opponent, but rather than sectioning up the over-sized combatant like a side of beef, goblins would gang up on one or the other leg until it was incapacitated. At the sergeant's coded order, the guardsmen surrounded her right ankle, and as one, hacked into her calf. She kicked out with the bleeding limb, sending one in a high arc over the city block to be pierced on a weather vane. Then she limped away, which as a twenty-two foot tall giantess, she did as fast as a cantering horse.
"Eurilda," Khyte whispered, not from discretion but from a squeeze far too hard. "You can't win."
"No goblin's my match," she said.
"You're drunk, Eurilda."
Though Khyte was literally drunk, and Eurilda a teetotaler, even disdaining her friends when they partook of alcohol, she knew his meaning. He meant she was drunk with fabulous strength and magical power on a world whose denizens were not famed for having either. But if the giantess was a bull fenced in with tissue paper, she was in a city of toreadors, for goblins smith, own, and wield all known weapons, and she would be a popular target of arrows, bolts, knives, javelins, and axes, as well as chased by goblins armed with pole axes, broadswords, scimitars, and pikes. And if the Nahurians failed to score with steel, they'd soon send her to a dirt nap with a nightcap of poisoned missiles or flammable cocktails.
When the ashen-faced Eurilda swayed, her hand shook, and Khyte's shudder was nearly half sympathetic, if mainly fear to be dropped or crushed under a giant. When the giantess babbled syllables that meshed despite their meaninglessness, she diminished so fast that Khyte staggered when his feet touched the road, and she continued to shrink until she could look up to a doll.
Careful not to touch Eurilda's wound, Khyte picked her up and sprinted down an alley. After three days in The Abyss and crawling up and down mountains, and having overstayed his welcome in a restaurant much too classy for him, Khyte felt that he was back in the sordid element of his childhood in Drydana. He leaped over outstretched beggars, stumbled through musicians exiting a nightclub's back door—causing a commotion of limbs and tinny retorts from instrument cases—and ran through alleys and warehouse lots, before stopping at the wall of the gated residential district that held many well-to-do goblins, including the House of Hwarn, which had ancient crests, ancient arms, heirloom armors, gargoyle-topped crypts, and two illustrious family members well known to Khyte: Huiln and Kuilea.
As Khyte wondered how to climb one-handed while bearing the wounded Eurilda, the diminished giantess spoke another abstruse series of glyphs, and the world's weight sloughed away like cast-off scales. Shifting from one foot to the other, as people do while standing still, Khyte bobbed to the right several yards, and, after struggling to keep his feet, laughed like one intoxicated. Though familiar with this enchantment, as it was one of the substance manipulating spells Eurilda mastered, he had missed the euphoria that freed mind and body. He backpedaled, drifting a yard each step, then sprinted into a running jump. Spell-assisted leaping was a different thrill from riding Baugn, as there was not only the apprehension of trusting to the leap, there was also the panic of gravity reasserting itself in a sudden landing. She had explained the science of leaping and falling until he understood it, so that he was even more cautious while fleeing with the wounded giantess. Since the spell subtracted weight, not mass, a reckless leap could break his arm or crush his face or skull, and mastering it meant falling on his feet, where the calves, shins, and balls of his feet could absorb the impact.
Khyte cleared the wall, landed in a rocky alley, then leaped atop a townhouse. Since goblins favor pyramidal roofs of painted slats, Khyte not only had to stick the landing, but clatter like a goat to the edge of the roof, where he leaped to the next house. When Khyte hoped that rooftop pedestrian traffic would be limited, he lied to himself, as a half-dozen chimney sweeps, thatchers and painters stared at his rooftop run.
As the hour grew late, and the radiation of The Abyss rested on the horizon, street custodians lit gas lamps, and the orange-tinted glass shades filtered the goodwill out of Kreona. It now seemed an evil city.
Upon reaching the House of Hwarn, he dropped over its outer wall to the grass, and seeing the lights off and shutters drawn, entered the veranda, where he laid Eurilda on one end of a wicker divan. As if holding on until that moment, the giantess fell asleep; Khyte's weight came crushing back and Eurilda expanded to fill the divan. Though he knew her first and best in her human shape, at first Khyte thought it odd that she should return not to her natural giant stature. Why should unconsciousness end one spell and allow another to continue? He was distracted from these musings when he noticed blood soaking his leathers and cloak, as well as Eurilda's boots, and none of it his own.
Khyte had nothing to treat a wound except water, but in Eurilda's pack he found bottles of unknown oddments wrapped in cloth to prevent breakage. After he unwrapped them, he removed her boot and pants, washed the wound, then bandaged it with half of the cloth, reserving the other half for re-dressing the wound. Then he sat on the couch's opposite end, lifting Eurilda's feet onto his lap. While waiting for his hosts, he considered that while they may have ulterior motives, and not be as altruistic toward the dryad as Huiln pretended, they would still be willing to host Khyte, if decidedly less glad for his company after the events at The Copper Croc.
He awoke in the darkness, looked at the still-sleeping Eurilda, then turned away. It seemed only moments later that he smelled the welcome aroma of steak and eggs, and as he opened his eyes, his next thought was how rudely lit the veranda had become. The stormy evening surrendered to the crackling radiation of the Abyss rising in a cloudless sky. Though he closed his eyes, the eyeful of morning emblazoned his eyelids with a purple and red web.
It was unlike him to have slept not only through the night, but far into morning. He was sorry to have missed moonset, one of the few inspiring sights on a planet nearly leveled by its inhabitants. Just as to most in The Five Worlds a sun would be an occult idea roundly denied by all reasonable beings, so would most on Hravak contest the existence of moons, as only Nahure and Alfyria had them. In his youth, Khyte would have been one of the naysayers, until Frellyx led him to Nahure for a month of gambling and the blunt fact of the Abyss-illuminated rock, glowing in the skies, stared back. Now he looked forward to moonrise and moonset on Nahure. The illumination of the goblin moon could best be seen in the late evening, after moonrise, and the early morning, before moonset, while during the day its light blended in with the background radiation of the Abyss.
"Help would be nice," Kuilea said through the kitchen window. Khyte thought she must be speaking to her brother, or another of their house—he could never remember them all, only Huiln, Kuilea, and their large breasted cousin, Veirana, whose name stuck when she contrived to block his way wherever he went in the House of Hwarn. When Kuilea rapped on the window, he couldn't read her expression from the veranda's shade, and didn't know whether she was happy or resigned to see him.
"My muscles are unbearably stiff, or I'd be at your disposal," he said. "Also, there's the locks. I considered breaking a window, but feared my welcome may be wearing thin."
"You're always welcome here, brother," said Kuilea. "But breakfast will be served at the table, not the veranda."
Khyte mulled whether he should help or heed his plaintive bones. He yawned, and looked at Eurilda, who slept restfully. He had expected to see her wounded leg's dressing stained clear through, but the half-dingy scraps were stained with only a few dribbles of blood, and her unwrapped wounds showed only pink puckered lines. There was the uncomfortable sense he had already made this discovery, though the deja vu was dim, as if he remembered a road only traveled at night.
"I smell breakfast," said the giantess, and gave Khyte a pensive look, as if she had been only pondering a math proof and not sleeping the sleep of the dead.
"We seem to have misplaced a wound," he said.
Eurilda laughed, the polite laugh of one who seldom laughed. Eurilda laughed with purpose, whether as a remedy for friendship, to set others at ease, or to ingratiate herself to an opponent. "I can't take credit for that," she said. "It's Otoka's home brew enchantment, to ensure that I return to him. While it won't keep my foot from being hacked, remove me from a collapsing building, or protect me from the ramifications of my own ill-will, the enchantment removes minor obstacles from my path, and, as you've seen, heals flesh wounds overnight. Otoka doesn't believe in sick days."
"That doesn't sound fair," said Khyte. "Should I bring your breakfast to the veranda?"
"Don't spoil me, Khyte. I know the real you." She then went inside without waiting for a reply.
Breakfast looked as delicious as it smelled. Since Khyte determined not to remember the grotesque Nahurian livestock whose death donated this meal, it tasted just as delicious, but when a singularly unique and unpleasant odor underlying the delectable meat recalled the hideous carcass, he couldn't keep his gorge from rising. When his soured stomach embellished their meal with some plaintive squeaks, he avoided Kuilea's eyes.
Huiln, having pushed aside his plate, was reading The Kreonan House Journal, a popular news sheet set in a dozen columns of pinhead-sized font that Khyte would need a jeweler's glass to read. Goblins' eyes, superior at peering and close reading, preferred their prose on this minuscule scale, and hence Khyte depended on Huiln or Kuilea to keep him abreast of Kreonan current events.
"There's a report of your brawl," Huiln said. "Fortunately, Kuilea and I left when we did, for it reads 'giant, human, and unknown acquaintances.'"
"I'm glad it's convenient for you, but how is it fortunate for me?"
"Now they have no reason to look for you here."
"Or, the king instructed them to print and deliver that, so as to lull us into a false sense of security."
Huiln's shoulders sagged as he sat down his coffee and looked fearfully at Khyte. "Why would King Merculo exercise that much caution?"
"Have you met Eurilda, the giantess and sorceress? Most consider either threatening, and we have both threats in one package."
"Get on with it," said the giantess in question. "He hates you, you hate him, and she..." here she indicated Kuilea, but then her gesturing finger touched the tip of her nose, rendering Khyte uncertain, "...is indifferent to the two of you."
"And only Lyspera's web knows what moves you," said Kuilea, staring holes into Eurilda. In the original goblin, this is a more horrible thing to say than it sounds translated, as it also implies the spider-god mothered the target of the slur, for web in goblin is slang for the loins of the goblin woman, and move can mean to give birth. But, as Eurilda had been speaking Nahurian since she arrived, Kuilea no doubt knew that her insult found its way.
Khyte and Huiln looked at each other, and Eurilda and Kuilea had a staring contest that looked more deadly than a duel, and all were indignant at the women's aspersions and loath to admit that there were any truth in them.
"Also, do not take my brother so lightly," said Kuilea with a charming smile that belied the rancor in her eyes.
"I was talking to Khyte," said the giantess.
"That's who I meant."
As Kuilea was about to call Eurilda an ogress, a witch, or a less-flattering term that would stick harder, Khyte spoke up.
"Why are you on Nahure, Eurilda?" he asked, hoping she would indulge him with a long-winded response that would distract her from Kuilea's insolence. While magically inclined and well-studied. Eurilda could be tricked and flattered by affairs of the heart. Her capacity for delusion was as great as her capacity for illusion, as she believed they were a couple long after he left a letter that could not be misconstrued. While in her absence, he had built her up into a nightmare creature, now that she was in front of him, his low opinion of her wits was spreading to contaminate his entire perspective of her, so that his rightly-honed fear of the giantess was dulling to a mere apprehension, and a willingness to risk attracting the ire of this plenipotent creature.
The risk paid off, for Eurilda said, "when I cast the runes at week's end, they spoke mainly of you; as the Trindyr rune appeared twice, I swallowed my pride and have come to your aid."
"How did you know this 'trender' was me, or that I would be on Nahure?"
"Trindyr. It signifies either poison or forbidden fruit. Since the human rune was first out of the bag, and the Nahure rune was second, I presumed the only human I like was on the Goblin World."
"As Khyte almost never travels to Nymerea or Ielnarona, the odds on Nahure were 1 in 3, though it was an impressive guess for a bag of stones. But how did you know where on the Goblin World would be?" asked Kuilea.
"This is not my first trip to Nahure," she said demurely. "Nor to this house."
"What does she mean, Khyte?' asked Kuilea with an expression pulled into a tornado of emotions—shame, horror, and puzzlement were the armor of wind circling a core of anger.
Khyte misjudged Eurilda. He thought she was here to win back with her human pet, but instead of playing along, she alluded to the day that would reflect the worst on Khyte's character. Eurilda was here for naught but mischief.
Khyte and Eurilda had parted ways as lovers and adventurers before his maiden voyage to Nahure, where he met and bedded Kuilea the same evening on a dismal rebound bender. In a few weeks, Khyte and Kuilea were living together in the House of Hwarn, which is to say that Khyte was living off of her charity and the largess of the manor, when Eurilda arrived. Which is to say that the size-changing, feather-light giantess floated over the estate wall and darted through the window of Kuilea's room when the goblin woman was not there, to take advantage of Khyte's longing for the giantess, which had begun the moment after the goblin woman had satisfied his lust, for there was a vast gulf between Eurilda and Kuilea on the scale of what a simple man considered beautiful. And Khyte, while smart enough to understand that Eurilda's beauty was enhanced with enchantments, was simple enough not to care.
"Remember Veirana's party? You met Eurilda there." Khyte lied.
"I think our brother Khyte covers another misadventure." said Huiln. "I would have remembered this blonde woman, whether or not you introduced her honestly as a giant, as on Nahure, her height as a human is already memorable."
"No," lied Eurilda with a cold smile, "Khyte speaks true, and it is no small insult that you forget me. As to why I am here, I had come to Nahure to save Khyte from himself and to renew our acquaintance in so doing. And whether you consider me friend, enemy, or competitor"—here she looked at Kuilea—"is entirely up to you, but those are the facts."
Huiln said, "I will let the facts rest, if you tell me about these runes. Since you are right that we are about to risk life and limb, I would hear the rest of your forecast."
"Of course I'm right. The runes reveal or omit, but never lie."
"So Khyte was revealed, and Kuilea and I were omitted, is that how you would put it? Did the runes also school you in the art of truth?" snickered the goblin.
"Nahure was the second rune."
"That signified the Goblin World?"
"It is your world. As you live here, there's little reason to repeat the rune twice, unless..."
"Unless what?"
"Unless you're a significant player in the prediction. But as you said, we'll let that rest," said Eurilda. "But tell me what you are about."
"Why don't we take turn revealing our tiles?" said the goblin. "I'll start. We must pass into a stone egg and remove the gold without cracking the shell."
"Riddle games?" groaned Eurilda. "Being a goblin, you have a hereditary advantage on that battlefield."
"Are giants not fabled for their wits?" This was a two-faced answer, as tales tell of both moronic, nincompoop giants and cagey, sorcerous giants. Huiln's phrasing was aptly coined so as to suggest both responses to Eurilda, who was acting the part of a perfectly rude guest in Huiln's ancestral home.
"Very well," she said. "After the human tile—Ravakra—and the Nahure tile was the Huekra tile, which signifies falcon, eagle, or Baugn, to which I attributed Khyte's travel to Nahure. In the interest of time, I'll play my second tile, Uileqro, which signifies a seed or a hidden meaning, as that matches with your first riddle."
"Many thanks," said Huiln. "The seed puts forth roots, only to have them pruned by a crown's cruel points."
"This is too easy," said Eurilda.
"That's the point," admitted Huiln. "We're sharing information and getting to know the way each of us thinks."
Eurilda said, "I don't understand goblins. Before you eat, do you wash your hands and then solve riddles too?"
"Goblins have shared intelligence with riddles and codes for millennia. Our deepest mystics put riddles to verse."
"Intelligence." Eurilda snorted. "The last one that I remember was the Lyspera tile."
"Which signifies the spider-god of the same name," said Khyte.
"Huiln is better acquainted with her than that," said Kuilea.
"There's no reason to go into that." he said.
"My brother thought he was a priest for a year."
"I was never a priest," said Huiln, "though the Lysperans kindly allowed me to sit in on their ecclesiastical training when I was considering that as a calling."
"Why do you call her 'spider-god,'" said Khyte, "when you call her sisters goddesses?"
"Who cares?" said Eurilda. "Fate, destiny, cause and effect, consequences, and yes, spiders and the spider-god, are signified by the Lyspera rune."
"I'm not sure if your portent makes me apprehensive, or merely curious."
"Trust in your guide, Khyte. Tiles are only half of a portent; a skilled reader fills in the plot."
"Then you're the enigma I must solve," said Huiln. Khyte recognized that Huiln entertained designs on Eurilda, as the goblin never said anything with a double meaning without intending both.
"As you say," she said, with an arrogant nod that indicated Huiln's lofty designs shot over the vain giantess's head. To Eurilda, it was right that a goblin should struggle to understand her, and she took him at face value.
Unless...they really were flirting, thought Khyte. He said, "Huiln, Kuilea—enough of these games. Just tell her our plan. If she arrived today, she isn't an agent of the king."
"I've been here three days," said Eurilda.
"Not helping," said Khyte.
"I'm satisfied that she serves her own agenda, Khyte," said Huiln.
"Yes, tell her." Kuilea's glare at Khyte contradicted her cheerful tone.
"Huiln, tell her," said Khyte. "It's your idea."
"Someone tell me," sighed Eurilda.
"Since no one else can muster a plan or the backbone to speak frankly to a giant," said Huiln, "I'm happy to tell her."
To hear Huiln bare their plan to Eurilda was mortifying, for it came across as less of a plan and more of a poorly conceived and stubborn intention to take their lives in hand for a dubious reward.
"Trindyr twice usually means emphasis, but now I see that your cause is doubly cursed, both by poisonous intent and the forbidden fruit of a dryad princess. Euvoni ni parema bela; scontil deian skastil."
"Ooh. I know that one," said Huiln with a smile. "Charity kills more than greed."
"That is one way to put it," she said frostily. "But in the original giant, it is much more poetic. A closer meaning would be 'goodwill embraces doom; greed saves at least one."
"Don't you want to know how I know that?" asked Huiln with a smug smile.
"Not particularly," said Eurilda. "You can't impress me with erudition when you've proved yourself a bonehead with this idiotic plan. Did I say plan? I lied. There is no plan."
Huiln cleared his throat. "Your tiles were apt, at least by the stamp of your interpretation. Except for the Lyspera tile. Unless you've guessed its significance?"
"Not, until I heard your intentions. Now, it can mean only one thing---the catacombs."
"We are a mining and stone working people, and in the last few hundred years, half of our kings were patiently assassinated by tunnelers. Hence, the king's castle was built on stone, and does not have catacombs or dungeons. There are a few basement rooms where they're needed, cut into the foundation itself, and below them there is at least twenty feet of stone."
"King Merculo might have built on stone for those reasons, and you may not believe there is anything under it. But the catacombs stretch under all Kreona. All Nahure for that matter."
"Because one from an island on the Monster World would know better than two born to this city."
"You're saying I'm disadvantaged for being from Nymerea?" she snorted.
"Only on Nahure. No offense."
"Much taken," Eurilda said. "While you have the empirical advantage by being born here, observations can just as easily lead to superstition as to good reasoning, and the sciences develop by progressing past your provincial assumptions."
"Don't play the part of the enlightened outsider. Giants believe the Five Worlds were vomited from the true reality—the lost lunch of god."
"That's a crude way of putting it, but, it's a good example of what I'm talking about. My superstitious brothers believe The Five Worlds were the most monstrous of all possible worlds, and they were expelled from a perfect creation. The scientific thesis counters that it was random, without malice or purpose."
"Monstrous. Of course people from Nymerea, The Monster World, think all of The Five Worlds are monster worlds," sighed Huiln.
"If we're giving credence to nonsense now, maybe The Five Worlds are just the spider's baubles, strung on a web, like the playground rhyme," said Kuilea.
"What?" asked Khyte and Eurilda, nearly at the same time.
Kuilea recited it:
The spider saw unending string,
and stole five children, singing.
She took them in her web, a ring
of dark gems, a crown for a king.
In seeing the worlds on her string,
she awakened the All-Thing,
and the anger of the string.
"Once again," said Eurilda. "but slower, while I write it down." When Kuilea did as requested with reluctant grace, Khyte remembered why he was attracted to her.
Eurilda continued, "I think that's a fragment of a lost piece of scripture, The Bane of The All-Thing. Legend says that the holy text preceded The Five Worlds."
"Why does this matter?" asked Huiln.
"I'm now certain there are catacombs under Kreona."
"Because of a schoolyard rhyme?"
"Even on the goblin world, the truth was preserved in myth—that a prior reality is embedded in the Five Worlds, like flies in amber."
"You're insane."
"Our own eyes, and our telescopes, tell us that only these Five Worlds exist in the Abyss. Science cannot yet tell us why there are no other worlds, but in the other Worlds there are texts that speak of the Five Worlds passing from one reality—not only a reality, but a plenum, with an abundant variety of worlds and other, colossal, celestial bodies the likes of which we can only speculate—to this one. I had not found such a text in goblin literature until now."
"This only means you're not that well-read in goblin literature," Huiln said, "as I have encountered this thought in Luenara, among other writers."
"That's correct," said Eurilda, "but she read it in The Zolm."
"Speaking of which," Huiln said with some heat, "you're taking a nonsense rhyme as on par with The Zolm and The Alfyrian Coda?"
"Your attentive questions are very sweet, and I'd be grateful for a second set of eyes on my research, but shouldn't we stick to the task at hand? And the reason why the rhyme is so important is that it gives further credence to a theory being developed by the best minds in Uenarak: the catacombs lie under every city in The Five Worlds; only they aren't catacombs or ruins, but living artifacts of an otherworldly reality tangent to our own. As our own worlds spin, suspended, in the spider's Abyss, the ancient worlds are held in abeyance, but their memory leaves an imprint in our soil. Not only do we settle on these points of influence, but we can move through the paralyzed realities like water into a glass, which is how we shall make our way into the king's castle."
"So under us is an otherworldly civilization, and my whole life I've been walking across graves?"
"Except they live."
"That's debatable. A trapped life, waiting for another universe to return, may never resume. And this life in perpetual abeyance may as well be death."
"Shithouses aren't powder rooms," said Khyte. "And catacombs are catacombs. However, Eurilda is always right, so if she says shithouses are powder rooms, or that a goblin nursery rhyme means catacombs under the castle, I believe her until she says otherwise. The more you doubt her now, the more insufferable she'll be later when she's proved that shithouses are powder rooms."
"This is a high-risk venture, and I have no reason to trust her."
"Trust her? Trust me, Huiln."
"I trust Khyte," said Kuilea, "so we will test the giantess's path, whether it leads down ancient roads paved in another reality, or into catacombs we forgot building."
Huiln shrugged, and said, "I agree with my sister. Yuyunil iourta trevek il kapota."
Eurilda answered, "I know that idiom: regret, like agreement, is easily shared. It's like one in giant, except instead of agreement, we say 'bad company.'
After a long silence, Khyte, who would have preferred to build on a different note, finally said "do we have an accord?" Starting with Eurilda, each one nodded.
"How, then, do we enter these catacombs?" asked Kuilea.
Huiln said, "Better to ask how are they being accessed, and why is their existence not common knowledge? Since we're determined to use them, I have an admission to make: I know the answer to both questions. They are protected."
"Protected by whom?" asked Eurilda.
"The Bankers' Guild—my employers. You're correct in at least the material foundations of your metaphysics, giant, as the catacombs exist; not only have I seen them, but I have visited them to serve the interests of the Bankers' Guild. I can take you to these catacombs, but none can know."
Khyte said, "take us there after breakfast."
"There is no more." said Kuilea. "You've eaten all the seconds."
"I'll put on some oats," said Huiln. "I'm still hungry, also, and still a little wiped out from scaling Irutak. Judging by her namesake, Irutak's the strictest god."
"I respect Irtuak more than any other Nahurian," said Khyte. Though there was a little laughter at Khyte's quip, the ponderous mood at the table helped him realize that everyone's best interest, including his own, would be served by playing along with all three, though he didn't yet understand their motives, Eurilda's least of all. That Khyte had witnessed a lot of magic, and was spoiled by Eurilda's powers, made him skeptical about predicting the future, which he considered as efficacious as hope, which is to say, as accurate as the likelihood of what one was predicting. Compared with foretelling the future, other magics followed sensible rules, and while Eurilda talked a good game, and may have been fluent with the runes and glyphs, it looked like she made it up as she went along.
To Khyte, however, most of adventuring was improv; for instance, there was a tit for tat kind of information dealing at which he excelled, and he could tell that while the goblins gave away the farm, Eurilda revealed nothing they didn't know. For all he knew, Eurilda used him to approach Huiln, whose association with the Bankers' Guild she may have known beforehand. And in the sense that they were useful in negotiation, Eurilda's runes were very powerful indeed, as her interpretation had compelled Huiln, Khyte's least forthcoming friend, to divulge this Guild secret. If Khyte was correct, their current plan was merely a strategy to move them like pawns through Eurilda's game, and only she knew the rules and the stakes. Which meant that Khyte had to take every opportunity he could to play to his own strengths if he wanted to beat her, and the goblins as well, because unlike the giantess, he knew not to underestimate either of his goblin friends.