After Eurilda and Frellyx mushroomed to giant size to clear the rocks, they poled their raft into the grotto. The narrow stretch of smooth stone was streaked with copper stripes and bright fungal inflorescences spreading in crevices and corners. Along ridges creeped the ugliest examples of Ielnarona's acephalous animals—headless toads and frogs that seemed all belly and stubs of toes, and chirruped like locusts; sinuous reptiles that were all tail, slithering on serpentine underbellies, or skittering on six padded feet; and, snapping insects with twelve legs and abdomens like buttons.
When the underground river widened into an underground lake, with a high ceiling vaulting eighty feet overhead, the flow buoyed them to a stone gatehouse built on an obsidian ledge. Dozens of Tree-Women, in varied iridescent noble dress, held aloft torches, spears, and shields. With a smile that was both admiring and a sneer, Eurilda noted that the bony but vegetal grain of their masks seemed to have been carved from Tree-Woman skulls.
When the warlike dryads lowered their spears, Huiln and Leitara strove to brake the raft with their poles, but when their momentum was not lessened, and their impact assured, Sarin Gelf shrieked a womanly scream, and Kuilea loosed her arrow, splitting a dryad's head like a coconut, with masses of fine, white hair exploding from the breach, not unlike the hair of milkweed or dandelions.
Eurilda stepped off, releasing the hold on her diminishment spell simultaneously, so that she towered as she waded onto the coarse, glassy sand. When she lifted Khyte aloft, her hand around his neck, the spear-points parted.
"Stop," she commanded, "or your ruler's consort will draw his last breath." In answer, there was only silence—not just from the array of Tree-Women, but also from Frellyx, Huiln, Kuilea, and Sarin Gelf, who turned their attention from the small army to the one who dangled their friend by the neck clenched in a gigantic closed fist. Khyte's eyes were squeezed shut, his puckered mouth tried to suck in air, and his face was blotted, nearly purple.
"Eurilda," started Sarin Gelf.
"Speak anything but what I want to hear, you vile abomination—a dryad whose prolonged life made it a sexless non-species—and your twittering may hasten Khyte's death." Khyte's strangled breaths thinned and wheezed.
When the old dryad stayed silent, Eurilda said, "I only want to know one thing—where does this gatehouse lead?"
"This is Inglefras's private dock, and leads to her private estate."
"Why does a princess need a smuggler's cove?" asked Huiln.
"Don't answer him," said Eurilda. "I don't care."
Their leader removed her skull-shaped mask to reveal the image of Inglefras, only this one had yellow hair, not the color of flax, but the bright yellow of tulips or ripe bananas. "You may not pass, and no harm will come to the Prince Consort."
"That's up to me," sneered Eurilda. "Stand aside."
When yellow-haired Inglefras murmured, the others parted in a V to allow the giantess through their ranks.
"I'm not going through there unless they drop their spears," said Eurilda. As yellow-haired Inglefras spoke only two words in dryad, this time the giantess caught their meaning: 'yield arms.' The spears clattered to the embankment, and many of the Tree-Women clutched their sword hilts.
"Now," said Eurilda, "open the gate."
When Khyte gasped and rattled, Eurilda dropped Sarin Gelf roughly onto the obsidian ledge, then switched Khyte to the center of her other palm, where he wasn't being hung but might still find the fatal closure of her crushing hand. Taking this for her opening, a Tree-Woman rushed with sword out-thrust, but fell with an arrow sprouting from her eye.
"Do not attack!" Inglefras shouted, then turned to Eurilda. "She acted not on my orders. Do nothing rash, and I will let you pass." At her shrill yell, the gate inched open, creaking and rattling.
The angry Tree-Women stood less like impassive trees than quivering grasses as Eurilda carried Khyte to the gatehouse, where she shrunk to twelve feet in height, shifted Khyte to a two-handed grip, then stooped under the brace. As she filled the hall, it would have cost too much effort to turn, so she only roared, so that even those in the stairwell might hear: "if Inglefras wants her consort, she will bring my children to the roof of The Orange Hotel."
"Eurilda." Khyte's rasping breaths shook his chest. "You can't win."
"I now live for only two things, and my former lover is not one of them: serving my master's will, and punching that dryad's face as often as I can."
Though Eurilda glimpsed spear points through narrow murder-holes, none stabbed her as she walked through the entryway. Every portcullis was raised to allow her passage.
When Huiln, Kuilea, and Sarin Gelf followed, Eurilda tensed, thinking it less likely that they were here as allies than to rescue Khyte.
"Where is Leitara?" asked Sarin Gelf.
Frellyx and Eurilda exchanged a glance.
"Leitara is a tree in the woods," Eurilda said, "but if you mean her Tree-Women, some returned to enrich the tree with knowledge, some are dead in a ditch, and still others fight a losing battle against death." When Frellyx snickered, she loved him a little.
Huiln ignored her and answered Sarin Gelf in earnest. "Perhaps she fled the moment all eyes were on Eurilda, with the plan to lead the Councilor-Generals' troops through this smuggler's cove."
"That is a good plan," said Eurilda with equanimity, so that you might not know she despised dryads. "Will the giants allow it, or are her kindred already smashed into kindling wood and matchsticks?"
"Whose side are you on?" asked Huiln. "Never mind, I know the answer: yourself, as always."
Eurilda said, "that hurts, old friend. If she was ordered to accompany us, and chose to disobey, which of us is faithless and which is loyal?"
When the hall of portcullises ended in a narrow stairwell, and a cargo elevator on the left, Eurilda opted on the latter, hoping that dryad ingenuity might support a half-size giant.
Huiln and Kuilea also had their reservations, as to the agoraphobic and acrophobic goblins, the thought of not only a dizzying mechanical ascension, but a dizzying chasm of air above their heads, triggered both inborn fears. While you would never know it if you heard his even and succinct conversation, Huiln's phobias were ameliorated by a rarer madness in goblins, a fear of stagnation and inertia that translated into constant travel. Though he still goggled at the abysses of the universe, an unquenchable passion shot him through it like an arrow, and though his soul quailed in the shadow of the elevator shaft, his lust to surpass it burned like a comet. Though Kuilea's heart was larger than her brother's, and her skill at arms more fearsome, when her run of the mill goblin eye dressed up stairwells and elevators like terrible, inconceivable monsters, she fainted.
"I'll man the winch," said the giantess, "one of you will carry her."
"It's no bother," said Frellyx, who enlarged to match Eurilda's height, stooped to scoop up Kuilea, and joined them inside the cargo elevator. Though there were handles on either side of the winch, the elevator was so balanced that Eurilda raised it with little effort with one hand. In fact, since she had changed her grip on Khyte, his struggles became a more distracting nuisance, as his right shoulder kept wrenching against her palm, until there was a dull ache in her fingers, and Khyte's clothes dampened from the sweat of her palm.
"Believe it or not, Khyte, I bear you no ill will, and do not want to kill you."
"You have no ill will?" Khyte snorted. "You raped me by spell."
"That's a strong word. You're too manly a warrior to make that accusation," Eurilda laughed.
"So I should just enjoy it? I can't—you stole the memory. Not only did you take a piece of my mind, you took my peace of mind, for in keeping your pregnancy a secret, you ensured my alienation from my own flesh and blood, and I did not grow into a father's love as I ought. Though their lives are rooted in these days of anguish, I will learn to cherish these innocents, but my mother and father will never love these children."
"You mean your not-mother and not-father?" snickered Eurilda. "I mean no insult. I have a not-mother and not-father too, though mine did bear me naturally. I hope you mean what you say, Khyte, because it's better to be a bastard, an orphan, or even an abortion, than to have loveless parents by nature, criminals that think only which itch to scratch, and how hard."
"Better that your words died stillborn," said Khyte. "My parents are good people."
"So good was your not-father that he murdered your true father, Khyte. As you grew into a strapping warrior, and proved worth the bloody purchase price, you pleased them, but that was pride you felt, not love."
"I should not have spared you," said Khyte sullenly. "Not that I doubt you--in fact, I can cut even closer, and admit I have only known love once. Confessing this to the author of my misery and the artificer of my illusions, and knowing only your unlikely death will bring me relief, I crave only oblivion."
When the cargo elevator's gears locked, the giantess flipped the brakes, and as their platform shook, Khyte at last pulled his shoulder free, dragging his sword from its sheath to gouge Eurilda's palm. She dropped him and screamed the first runes that came to mind—and an Uenarakian marching spider glided into the corner.
Though the monstrous arachnids are nearly invisible even in motion, she feared that Frellyx glimpsed her, until his eyes passed over her without blinking. Still, as the elf was ancient and clever, it would be prudent to assume that the elf did not disclose her whereabouts to advance his own agenda. In moments, all intelligent observation of the Alfyrian were subsumed by the baser cravings of her spider gut. How much did marching spiders eat, she wondered, then hoped this hunger was a symptom of the spider, not a stimulation of her atavistic, repressed giant appetite.
"Quickly," said Frellyx. "As Khyte is no longer Eurilda's hostage, they will be on us in moments." Carrying Kuilea under his arm, he stepped from the elevator platform, stooped through double doors, turned left, and disappeared from view. When Khyte, Huiln and Sarin Gelf followed, spider-Eurilda tailed them on the ceiling, crawling over jambs, and becoming pinched with hunger as she regarded her allies. Though her hand was slashed less than a minute ago, none of her limbs faltered in this ceiling run, or were pained in any way.
Passing through another set of doors, they came out under a curdled red sky radiating vermilion light upon a flower-bordered promenade that wended to a vast manor, three stories high and as long as a city block, which was the center of an estate walled off from Wywynanoir. From the surrounding groves, dozens of dryads charged, brandishing jagged black iron swords topped by a serrated star. These Tree-Women were identically armored with alternating strips of laminated wood and bronze, so that they seemed layered in moving cages. Before anyone could move, Khyte was circled, and looked out from inside the dryad wall with a stupid look on his face, despite that his sword was smeared with giant's blood. Others seized Sarin Gelf, then Frellyx. Though the elf was half a giant's height, and weighed as much as the six that surrounded him, they snagged the folds of his clothing with their swords' serrated stars so that a twist might gouge his flesh, and by this manner held him fast. Lastly, two moved to incapacitate Huiln.
It would prove to be a mistake to underestimate Huiln.
Huiln had long ago earned the respect of both Khyte and Frellyx, two of the doughtiest warriors on The Five Worlds, not because he was book smart and street smart—a rare combination even where magic was commonplace—but because the goblin could hold his own, whether on a battlefield or in a backyard brawl, not due to excellence with a blade, but due to being both faster than he looked, and such a dirty fighter that dirty didn't begin to cover it.
Huiln held out his hands obligingly, then twisted his wrist, grabbed a Tree-Woman's grasping hand, and bit her fingers off. She screamed, and Huiln pulled her—already dazed, maimed, and unbalanced—into a ferocious headbutt against his rock-hard head. By the time another drew her sword halfway to en garde, Huiln shoved the mauled, broken-toothed Tree-Woman to be impaled on its point. When the goblin sprinted for the walls, Sarin Gelf also wriggled free, but fled towards Inglefras's mansion.
As neither spider nor giant could wrest Khyte free from dozens of armored, armed Tree-Women, Eurilda followed Huiln to the groves, where she found the undergrowth too slow-going for arachnid legs, changed into a durkortu, and the Beast World dog loped like a pony over the grasses, flowers, and shrubs. When she attracted the cries of the dryads. she outstripped Huiln, clenched him in her teeth like a bitch would her pup, covered the distance in less time than it takes to tell, and leaped the wall.
On the other side was a cobblestone street, and more walled estates. Dukortu-Eurilda opened its maw, and the goblin spilled to the ground, covered with dog drool. And as the immense dukortu was not only a good shape for running, but a good target for javelins, she reverted to her own form, still clad in the red Alfyrian robes, though her hand was gloved in the excruciating throb of Khyte's slash. She feared to look at the damage at first. When she pried open her eyes, her breath caught in horror, for her wounded hand was further mangled by the magic into an unrecognizable amalgam of hacked hand, Uenarakian marching spider's foot, and dukortu paw. She could only pant and shake, for though she flashed through Otoka's lectures, and her copious reading, she had neither the knowledge nor the mastery to untwine this grotesque knot of shape-shifted flesh."Eurilda?" said the shaken, slobbered-on Huiln. Then he looked again. "Eurilda!"
"It's nothing," she said, swallowing her fear. "Run, you foolish goblin."
While running as hard as they could, Huiln and Eurilda kept to the shaded side as they passed through the upscale cobblestone thoroughfare. Though she was not really in her own body at human size, she was in her own shape, and her body hurt where it should, not only her gashed, magic-mauled hand, but also her loins, which birthed two children only days ago. Though her body yearned to rest, she was driven by love, rejection, revenge, and an unwanted, bastard desire to clasp and caress her mongrels. All babies were mongrels, she reasoned, not one would be cast in her unblemished image. These would suffice as vessels for her mother's love, since she knew not where else to put it, and could no longer contain it, it having been tapped by the vicious weed and drank by that counterfeit man, who lived only in the long shadow of his sword, and the shield of unreciprocated love and friendship.
On reaching the hotel district, they looked from across the street and around the corner at the facade of The Orange Hotel. Its crowds of travelers, merchants, and ambassadors had thinned.
"There are no guards. It's a trap," said Huiln.
"Or we arrived first, and waste away our advantage," rebutted the giantess. "I say we go in. Strange that a mad goblin should hedge his bets when his father is so bold."
"Though my mad father, Lord Hwarn, traveled for many years in The Five Worlds, he's even shrewder and less trusting than me. Why do you think him bold?"
"When I was looking for you, I ran into Lord Hwarn. Not only was he happy to see me, he was indifferent to the siege. In fact, I didn't hear any fear in his voice."
"And I do?" said Huiln, with some consternation in his voice. Seeing the light green dryad blood in his beard, Eurilda revised her opinion of him. The goblin continued, "giyune fidera, aral giyune catalia; aldeo minoth."
'You can be old or afraid, but not both,' translated the giant. "Like most Nahurian proverbs, it's colorful but unreliable and reversible. That one suggests so many variations: You can be young or afraid, but not both. You can be old or brave, but not both. You can be young or brave, but not both. Though all of these hold water in real life, your blandly symmetrical and transposible adage is watered down to the commonplace by a little mental distillation; I shouldn't even mention such banalities as 'you can be both old and afraid' and 'you can be both old and brave.'
"Perhaps real life on Nymerea is too banal to value a good aphorism. Goblins hold them to be as incontrovertible as physical laws, and in this case it is backed up by our ferocious, foolhardy elder goblins, whom we dote on, tolerating in them foolishness we won't allow in our children."
"Though good aphorisms are as rare as suns and stars, and extinct in The Five Worlds, foolhardiness and foolishness in goblins I have seen with my own eyes," said Eurilda, "so I expect that you'll follow me." She stepped from their hiding place and walked towards The Orange Hotel's portico, where unshaven elven, human, and goblin ministers and ambassadors lazed, shaded from the setting, orangeish Abyss.
"That's my robe!" The half-naked elf's angular limbs jutted from his undershirt and shorts to make him look not only stripped down, but taller and skinnier, outside of his stolen robe.
Though she was more embarrassed for the ambassador's sake than afraid of discovery, Eurilda sprinted through the doors, past the desk and up the stairs, and hoping that the footfall that followed her was the burly goblin, who still carried the yellowed letter from Glesingren's shards. When she cleared the third landing, Huiln was at her heels.
"For all your talk, you have no plan." Though Huiln huffed as they ran up the stairs, his face was red with angry exasperation, not exhaustion, and he passed her easily and nimbly. While neither their flight from the battlefield, his rowing of the skiff, his fight with the dryads, nor their flight across Wywynanoir had winded this well-conditioned Nahurian, Eurilda's breath was ragged and her heart was punching her ribs.
"I know I'm a fool," she panted. "I'm a snob, too, but I'm not pretentious. I know what I am."
"Giants are so ill-mannered," said Huiln, then spit over the balustrade, so that the trail of saliva dribbled several flights to the lobby. "Siesha triuela giyana telanak, aral triueka giyana triuedela."
If Eurilda had the strength for a retort, she might not have contradicted Huiln. It is good to be yourself, but best to be better. Sage truth for one who let herself down on many occasions; whose first love betrothed a vile tyrant; whose children were hidden not as hostages, but as a grudge; who maimed herself by neglecting the cardinal rule of shape-shifting, that only a whole can refract a whole; and, worst of all, whose beloved master made her a pawn in an inscrutable political gambit.
The stairs ended on the top floor, where they opened several doors before they found metal rungs leading to a locked trap door. When Huiln's blade would not snap the lock, Eurilda tried to pierce the wood with her sword and saw around the lock—one of Khyte's brutish tricks, which she had observed in Merculo's castle—but with the door overhead, the leverage was not in her favor. The giantess expanded to eleven feet in height and shoved at the trap door with both her good hand and the coarse combination dog's paw and spider's foot. Though her healthy fingers strained and shook, the ugly extremity braced unflinchingly, and on pushing up with her legs, and expanding a few inches taller, the door buckled, then burst.
Having reached the roof, Eurilda noticed the dampness between her legs. Though it wasn't as thick and wet as before, the bleeding was troubling nonetheless. Would she ever mend the wounds of false love and dryad medicine? Before she lived through the villainy of the dryads, the giantess might have marveled at The Orange Hotel's roof, a single megalithic sheet of stone. That such verminous, mindless weeds were capable of this engineering feat would have once enthralled her. Now she only joined Huiln as he circled the roof, their hands in the air, groping for the invisible first rung of the Alfyrian Ladder.
When they didn't find it, Eurilda approached the mound of hot bricks and vaporous pipes at the center, that looked to be the tip of a column that combined the virtues of central pillar and chimney furnace.
When Eurilda walked around it, looking for handholds, there was Inglefras—not Princess Inglefras, nor Captain Inglefras, but a new, unfamiliar Inglefras in a green, gown-like efflorescence of cilial grass that reflected the light in satiny ripples, draped in a wide, brown shoulder sash that pillowed thick on her chest, wrapping a tiny bundle that squalled at Eurilda's cry.
"Give him to me!"
Forgetting her spells, Eurilda clenched her fists—then stopped in her tracks when the dryad parted the sash, grasped the swaddled sphere in one hand, and lifted it overhead.
The eight inch wooden sphere had dryad script and eight hexagonal windows on an aqueous fluid that turned as she held it aloft. It was a portable ciupla, suspending her fragile giant offspring in this viscous medium. Her mind had played tricks on her; though her heart hammered and the breath burned like a furnace in her nostrils, she came to her senses--he was only six months into a two year gestation, and could not have possibly howled.
"While you could easily take him from me," said Inglefras, "whether you clutch a dead or live son is in your power."
Eurilda narrowed her eyes. "What son? That's just an egg, in another egg. Though you delivered it by dryad magic, my son won't be born until and unless that thing vomits him out after eighteen months of growth. If I did submit to your empty threat, I would be beholden to you until he hatches twice-over. Where is my daughter?"
Though the bluff pained Eurilda, the changeable dryad was her master at cruel deceit, having learned first-hand from nature. "Did you ever have a daughter," said Inglefras, "or did I lie? I cannot so easily produce the fiction I concocted to scourge you as I can this very real Tree-Woman that you grew to terrorize Khyte, though its life is so faint that it neither breathes nor sees."
"Where is she?"
"If you want the boy, you will promise to never know the answer to that question."
Eurilda scowled and bit her lip. "You would give him to me?"
"Call him a purchase price. I'm buying your disappearance." When the giantess did not answer, Inglefras continued. "Alfyrian Ladders are wondrous devices you know, much more fascinating than their brilliant and complex inventors. The way Alfyrian Ladders fold the distance between worlds over and over, so that one rung hurtles a climber miles through the Abyss; the way hunger and thirst is put into abeyance. Though I've never heard of anyone taking a ciupla up an Alfyrian Ladder, I think the thought might give a goblin mother a heart seizure, don't you, Huiln?"
Though he nodded politely, the goblin seemed taken aback by the question and unsettled at the thought.
Inglefras said, "You will crawl through the Abyss and never return. Swear it, Eurilda, or your son will die."
"I could say anything you like and kill you thereafter."
"If you had attended to Otoka's studies, you would not mistake me for the true Inglefras. You may break me if you like, but my Tree-Mother will live, and the only true death will be your own flesh and blood."
"Fine, killing your kind is never satisfying. I so swear. Give him to me."
"I will help you. There is a trick to this knot." While cradling the ciupla in her outstretched hand, Inglefras unlaced the sash with the other, and then a third, older hand lacerated her neck with a curved, bronze knife to unloose light green dryad blood. When Inglefras fell, choking on the green bubbling from her slit throat, the fourth hand seized the sphere. Though these interloping hands were older and languorous there was no doubt they were the same hands, if centuries older, for it was Sarin Gelf that slew the other Inglefras with a lascivious self-love, assisting in the suicide of this younger self by the paradox of dryad identity.
As if Sarin Gelf had tied the sash not dozens, but thousands of times, in the space of a breath the ancient iconoclast deftly grabbed its fluttering ends, trussed and slung Eurilda's future son, and with a spryness belying his years, dashed off the roof, outflung his hands, and vanished.
Eurilda committed to the jump without thought or spell. Though she was just a footstep behind Sarin Gelf, and leaped without faltering, it was frightening to blow across the chasm ten stories above the concourse, in that half-second before her hybrid hand clung to the bottom rung of The Alfyrian Ladder. When Wywynanoir disappeared into the swiftly upwelling green and orange patches of The Dryad World, she knew was already miles into the Abyss. Above her were countless rungs and no sign of Sarin Gelf. Everything dissolved in the bewildering, effortless speed of her climb, as if she was pulled through The Abyss by a divine thought, or lacking the existence of one, by the force of her denial.