Vashti Valant - Slave of the Goblin

“I know the way. I won’t get lost. But thank you for the escort,” Akraz said. He refused to allow any fear to show in his mien. “Allow me to give my slave instructions for what she is to do while awaiting my return.”

The six Secret Police laughed, Yaguz hardest of all. Snot came out of his potato shaped nose. “She’s wanted too. Zathstragomal has a special surprise for you both.”

Laya hoped the vile guards would not notice she had slipped her hand into Akraz’s. It was as much to steady her nerves as his steps. Her heart pounded in her chest. Had Zathstragomal discovered their attempted escape? Would poor Hwega or Akraz’s fellow officers be implicated too? What tortures waited in the wizard’s tower that it made even goblins who took daily poverty and brutality as a matter of course quake at the mere mention of it?

The upper reaches of the subterranean citadel were not hewn from raw stone as were the domestic warrens below. Fitted stone blocks and polished floors, with torches along the walls at regular intervals, distinguished this section of the underground city. Stairs, rather than winding ramp ways, linked one level to another. Almost all the goblins here marched in uniform. Non-goblins also scurried to and fro, humans and elves, slaves whose bony, twisted bodies and lowered eyes bespoke broken spirits after years of brutal captivity.

At the end of one large corridor, an iron portcullis lifted in front of them at a barked order from their guards. A cold breeze swept under Laya’s black tunic, raising goose bumps on her bare legs. She had no undergarments and the fresh air tickled her pubis. She shivered at her own vulnerability. Not even Akraz would be able to protect her where they were going.

Only as they passed through the portcullis did the significance of the breeze strike her. Fresh air. Outside. They had emerged into the open air.

Laya drew in a deep breath. She had not been outside since she’d been brought to Mount Murk. The guards did not let her linger to savor the moment, but kept the prisoners moving forward at a brisk pace. Still, Laya turned her head this way and that, drinking in the unexpected and longed for sight of the sky.

The heavens roiled with red and black clouds. The setting sun accounted for the deepening violet on the far horizon, but the thick haze of billowing clouds trailed from the concave summit of the tall, jagged peak from which the citadel was carved.

Mount Murk. Laya had not really absorbed it before, that she was here, in the heart of the dark forces’ stronghold. The journey here had seemed short because, merely for a whim of impatience, Zathstragomal had pushed his army to a pace no human or elf lord would ever demand except in dire emergency. They had traveled day and night, killing horses to force the wagons to keep pace, while the goblin foot soldiers had taken the entire journey at a double-time jog with few rests. After they arrived, Laya had spent most of her time ensconced in Akraz’s den, deep beneath the mountain.

They climbed more stairs. The tower, actually an entire castle in and of itself, crouched like a vulture over the caldera at the top of Mount Murk, which was an active volcano. After the fifteenth or sixteenth hundred step up the staircase, ever higher up the ramparts toward the castle, Laya’s calves began to cramp. Akraz, who could have taken the exercise in his stride in full health, also grew strained from the ordeal.

At the top of a final flight of stairs, another portcullis lifted to admit them into the castle grounds. The stone here was polished black rock of various types—basalt, marble, obsidian. Though bleak, it had a certain beauty. Laya sighed with relief at the series of flat, interlocking courtyards and corridors. She never wanted to climb another step in her life.

The guards halted in a courtyard indistinguishable to Laya from the others.

“Our Master wishes you to be properly prepared for the surprise he has in store for you,” said the lead guard—the others had saluted him as Chief Yaguz—with an evil grin.

Laya didn’t understand until the guards yanked her hand from Akraz’s that the guards meant to separate them.

“No!” she cried. Chief Yaguz slapped her so hard she fell to the basalt floor of the courtyard.

With a roar, Akraz slugged Chief Yaguz in the snout. The other guards leaped on him, restraining his arms. It took all five of them to barely contain him, and even then, they never would have succeeded if he had not been weak from the spider poison and the grueling climb. Rubbing his nose, Chief Yaguz scowled.

“Hold him, boys,” ordered Chief Yaguz. He lifted his black bully club and smacked Akraz across the face. Akraz endured the blow without a sound of pain. He spat at Yaguz.

“Watch yourself, General,” said Chief Yaguz. “Your use to Zathstragomal won’t last forever. Then you will be mine. I have broken harder goblins than you.”

Laya knew Akraz would not want her to give Chief Yaguz the satisfaction of seeing her cry. Still, she had a hard time keeping tears from pricking her eyes as she and Akraz were dragged away in opposite directions. She did not know what she dreaded more, that she would never see him again, or that when she saw him, it would be only to watch him suffer.

The terrible dungeon where Laya expected to be incarcerated turned out instead to be a graceful obsidian tiled pavilion in the middle of an exotic garden. The guards left her there alone and mystified.

Tall, black walls enclosed the garden on six sides, yet there was enough space for an artificial lake surrounded by sculpted, grass-covered hills. Little trees, shrubs and flowers artfully arranged into bowers, dotted the hills. Laya recognized a few of the plants—belladonna or deadly nightshade, hemlock, oleander, black snakeroot, wolfsbane, bloodroot, poison ivy, poison oak…all poisonous plants. The ones she did not recognize looked, if anything, even more deadly, for they were obviously unnatural growths under some perverse enchantment—flowers with snapping teeth, trees with tentacles, black blossoms that dripped blood. Giant mushrooms and lichens also abounded.

The black pavilion abutted the lakeside. To one side of the pavilion, a playground arose out of a pooled off section of the lake. Laya could not imagine loosing children in this garden, yet there was a slide into the water, a merry-go-round, a large swing, also over the water, and various funny shaped sculptures protruding from the shallows which might be meant for climbing and playing. All the “play” equipment had been mosaiced in black. To the other side of the pavilion, a bridge adorned in the same matching obsidian tiles connected the pavilion with the far side of the lake.

Swans, chained together in a meandering line by slim gold cords and black collars, drifted gracefully in the lake. They looked like white ghosts against the black water. On the grassy hills, peacocks, similarly chained by collars around their slender blue throats, strutted on the grass.

The garden appeared empty of humanoid denizens. Bemused, Laya searched for some sign of watching eyes. The walls of the garden were all blank stone overgrown with climbing thorns, except for one wall, which sported a dozen casement windows some fifty feet above the garden. The windows were all dark, curtained, except one, which was lit. It was too high to tell for certain, but Laya fancied she caught the glimpse of a silhouette at the window, gazing down upon the garden.

Strange.

The last tendrils of twilight gave over to the velvety darkness of night. A break in the clouds showed the full moon on the rise against the starry sky. Another swan, a black one, fluttered from an unseen part of the garden to the grass beside the lake.