In The Coils Of The Snake (32 page)

One
night, he pulled out his pipe and tossed it back and forth for
a
minute. “This is no life for an elf,” he declared.

Tattoo was reading
Robinson
Crusoe.
“It’s not much of a life for a goblin,” he noted.

Hunter
glared at him. “I thought you goblins just adored caves,”
he
said.

“We prefer the
ones with goblins in them,” replied Tattoo. He grimaced as Hunter began
playing his pipe. “Look, do you mind?” he protested. “That thing
hurts my ears.”

“Your
face hurts my eyes,” snapped Hunter, “but you don’t catch
me
complaining.”

He put away the
pipe, but Tattoo had picked up his bad mood. The goblin put down his book and
began wandering around the fountain with a scowl. For some time he maintained
silence, deter
mined to keep up appearances
in front of the enemy, but finally his
frustration got the better of
him.

“At
least you know why you’re here,” he burst out. “Your lord left
you responsible for Miranda, so you have to be. But me I’m
here
day and night for no reason at all! My
mother’s dying, and I can’t even be there.”

“I
know why you’re here,” announced Hunter casually.
The tall goblin
stopped and stared at him.

“You don’t! You
can’t!”

Hunter
shrugged, picked up his pipe, and started playing softly.
“It’s
goblin revenge,” Tattoo suggested. “And what a revenge!” The
blond elf shook his head. “All right then, why am I here?”

“Because
that lying beast you work for is going to kill Nir as soon
as
he gets home,” responded Hunter, “and then he wants you to marry
Sika.”

Tattoo stood still
for a long minute. “Marak isn’t a lying beast,”
he said automatically. He sat down to give the
matter further thought.
“How do you know he wants me to marry
Miranda?”

“The
elf goblin told her so when he came into camp to fetch
her,”
replied Hunter.

Tattoo
stared despondently into the distance. “I call that meanness,” he
sighed. “Seylin knows perfectly well I’ve wanted to marry
his daughter Celia ever since we were little pages. So
they’re going to
make me marry a
foreigner. They did the same thing to my father.”

“I’d
say your father was lucky to force some poor elf girl to marry
him,”
observed Hunter.

Tattoo pulled his
knife from his boot and began to play with it.
“Technically, Mother forced Dad to marry her,” he said
moodily. “I
don’t know how anyone could force Mother to do
anything. And now I’m stuck here in this boring place, facing marriage with a
human. What did Miranda say about it when Seylin told her?”

Hunter opened his
mouth to convey Miranda’s passionate refusal, but he looked at Tattoo’s
miserable expression and stopped. He hated goblins, he reminded himself, and he
would be happy to face Tattoo in battle, but there were some things that a man
simply shouldn’t do.

“It
never mattered,” he answered with a shrug. “Nir wouldn’t let
her
leave.”

“Oh,”
said Tattoo. He turned his knife blade and studied it. “It’s a
great
honor, being chosen to marry a non-goblin bride,” he muttered.
“I know my
family would be thrilled. But you take it from me,” he
said earnestly to Hunter, “elves and humans
are nothing but trouble!”

After Hunter’s
revelation, Tattoo avoided his potential bride’s
company, leaving Miranda puzzled and hurt at his quick depar
tures.
She came downstairs less and less often. This left the goblin and elf with
nothing but each other for entertainment, and neither one was pleased about it.

“No!”
declared Tattoo one evening when Hunter began tossing his knucklebones
invitingly in the air. “I refuse to play that stupid game one more time!”

“I don’t blame
you,” replied the elf. “You always lose. What do you goblins do for
fun, then? Make faces at each other?”

“I don’t
always
lose,” grumbled Tattoo. He thought for a minute.
“Adding corners is a game we play in the
guardroom.” He retrieved
a piece of meat from the table and laid it
on the ground between
them. “Adding
corners is really just illusion magic, a variation on the
solid shape
manipulation drills you did as a child.” Hunter’s stare
went blank. “Oh, good heavens!” Tattoo
groused. “Didn’t you
learn anything at all?”

“I surely did,”
responded the elf promptly. “I learned how to be
hungry. My mother and father were dead by the time I was nine, and
I
was hunting to feed myself and my little sister.”

Tattoo
was taken aback. Maybe these pretty elf men were tougher
than they appeared. “I’ll show you how,” he
continued more respect
fully.
“You take anything at all” — he gestured at the meat — “and you
change
its appearance into a simple solid shape, like this.”

The
meat became a shiny silver triangular pyramid, a tetrahedron.
Bemused,
Hunter picked it up. It felt heavy and cold, like metal. Each face of the
tetrahedron was a perfect equilateral triangle.

“That’s a game?”
he wanted to know, putting it back down.

“That’s
just the start,” said Tattoo. “The next person has to add
a
corner to it.” As he looked at the tetrahedron, it changed shape. Now it
looked like a silver ax head. “Go on, it’s your turn.”

Hunter studied the
figure. It dissolved and became the piece of meat once more.

“You lose,”
said Tattoo. “That happens when an opponent can’t visualize the shape and
add to it.”

“What a stupid
game,” remarked the elf.

“No,
no,” insisted the goblin. “It’s fun once you learn how.” The
meat
became a tetrahedron. “Your turn.” The tetrahedron became meat again.

“A really
stupid game,” commented Hunter.

“Oh,
come on!” said Tattoo impatiently. “Even our children can
work
this magic.” The meat became a tetrahedron. After a long moment, a spike
appeared from one face.

They played for
several hours, and Hunter always lost, but he improved steadily. They finally
reached the point where the goblin
had to
do more than glance at the figure to change it. He looked over
the spiky
object before him and added another spike.

“Your turn.”

Hunter
stared at it for several seconds. It turned bright pink.
“Hey!”
exclaimed Tattoo. “What happened?”

“I don’t know,”
sighed the elf. “I got a little bored. Our games don’t make you think so
much.”

Tattoo
studied the figure. Then he shrugged. He turned it purple
with
green dots.

When
Miranda came downstairs, her two guards were staring at a brilliantly colored
object that was covered in spikes, nodules, and
twists. A blue eyeball on the end of one spike appeared
to be watch
ing her. She let out a shriek. Tattoo
flinched, and the creature dissolved into an ordinary piece of meat.

“You lose!”
exclaimed Hunter with satisfaction. “Hello, Sika,” he said, smiling
up at her. “I just won a goblin game.”

• • •

In
a quiet room in the palace, Tinsel sat by his wife Sable’s bedside,
his silver face
haggard. Sable’s breath hissed in the room, loud and shallow, as her daughter
Fay chanted the spell that forced the elf woman to stay alive. They no longer
let Tinsel work the lifesaving magic. He was too tired and distraught.

The magic that
sustained the black-haired elf wasn’t working terribly well. The unconscious
figure on the bed had grown gaunt.
Her skin
was dry and dull now, and her lips were cracked. Little by
little, she
was becoming a corpse before their eyes.

The
goblin King and his two lieutenants came into the room,
but when Tinsel looked up with a hopeful expression,
Marak Cats
paw shook his head. The Scholars had
done a full review of every
spell in the
kingdom’s books, and they had found nothing that
would help.

The
silver goblin dropped his head and began to sob. His daugh
ter
put an arm around him as she continued her work. “Don’t keep
her like this,” he begged brokenly. “If
you can’t bring her back, just
let her go.”

“We
will,” promised his sovereign grimly. “But not just yet.
That murdering elf will die before she does. He’s back in
three days.
We’ll surround the camp with the
entire Guard and terrorize it until he decides to attack us. Then we’ll
annihilate him bone by bone. After that, we’ll stop the magic. Sable will die
avenged.”

Tinsel
wiped his streaming eyes. “I want to help,” he whispered.

“You’ll
have to get more rest,” warned Catspaw. “Then we’ll
see.”
He left the room with his lieutenants.

As the door closed,
Seylin turned. “Goblin King, I would recommend that you reconsider this
plan,” he said. “Revenge is one thing, but you must consider the
cost. Your father—”

Marak Catspaw
exploded.

“My
father!” he exclaimed. “Oh, yes, I know all about it. Father
never
hurt an elf. But he’d have hurt this one, and long ago, unless I’m very
mistaken. Father wouldn’t have stood by and watched his ward turned into a
slave, and he wouldn’t have gotten Sable killed,
either. It’s time, gentlemen, that you faced a sad fact,” he
concluded
angrily. “My father is not ruling this kingdom.”

Seylin
glanced away, embarrassed, and Richard studied the floor
with
a frown. Catspaw glared at them both, frustrated and discour
aged, but neither one looked him in the eye. The
King was just open
ing his mouth to
say something far more bitter when a voice behind
him spoke.

“And why is
that a sad fact, dear?”

Kate stood behind
him in the hallway, surveying the three of
them.
Delicate and beautiful she might be, and they were undoubte
dly the
rulers of the realm, but she had watched them grow from boys into men, and her
steady gaze told them so.

“Marak
was a great King,” she said quietly, “but he would be
the
first to remind you that his brilliant plans only worked half the
time. His revenge on my guardian brought disaster,
and he promised a human girl that she would be your wife when he had no right
to do
so. Don’t turn him into something that he wouldn’t want to be. He
would laugh at you for making him into a legend.”

Richard gave a wry
grin at this, and Seylin looked thoughtful, but the goblin King crossed his arms,
unmoved. “You’ve always known it,” he pointed out with cynical
fatalism. “You said yourself that I wouldn’t be a King like my father.”

“Of
course you won’t,” replied Kate with a smile. “Because you’re
more
like your mother. Did you think that would disappoint me? Excuse me now; it’s
my turn to watch with Sable.” And she disappeared through the door.

Marak Catspaw stared
after her for a moment with a very odd
expression
on his face. When he turned around, he found that Seylin
was smiling, as if he were calling to mind an old
and well-loved joke.

“Catspaw,”
he pointed out, “one of your parents saved this king
dom. Sometimes I
make the mistake of forgetting which one.”

The goblin King
nodded thoughtfully, frowning a little, but his
unmatched eyes were alight with satisfaction. “Very well, adviser,”
he said calmly. “Give me your
advice. I’m ready to listen to reason.”

“I
only wanted to point out,” replied Seylin, “that if you take
your whole Guard to the elf camp and carry out a brutal
revenge on
their lord right in front of them,
you’re likely to cause such despair that the elves won’t submit to your rule.
They’ll refuse your commands and die provoking additional attacks.”