VI. The King
"You got us lost, Rats," Linus stated bluntly, tossing the textile child over his shoulder. He gestured to the massive wall hangings. "I don't recognize a scrap of this."
"Maybe if I could i see /i , you know, I'd be able to i tell you where we are! /i " Rats replied spitefully.
Linus stepped further down the regal hall, eyeing everything with a bit of doubt. Rats had been described what the objects were really made from--paintings that were really just animal scratching on the walls, swords and coats of arms that were just sticks and stones tied together. The rich carpet, according to Linus' new companion, was made from the bodies of children that had come before him and died of starvation, trapped in the thread. It was real, the same way he was.
Nothing was sacred it seemed, and the more he heard about her Ladyship, the more he despised her. She had taken his sister, along with hundreds, maybe thousands, of other children over the years. Now, he wanted not only to save Nino, but to kill her kidnapper, the merciless and immoral goblin queen.
"Shut up, Rats," Linus barked. "You're giving me a headache."
"You talk like that to your brother?" Rats replied, his question echoing in the suddenly silent hall way. Linus didn't answer right away. Sure, he said some brusque things to Lloyd, but Lloyd was usually the one with the headache, the one listening to every little complaint. This must be what it was like, being the oldest brother.
"Nah," Linus said at last. Only a few scant seconds had passed, but the lull seemed to reveal everything. "Not all the time. He's too good to me."
"Must be," Rats snorted. "You're spoiled rotten."
That's not true, Linus thought, but didn't say. The Fangs led a hard life. He'd worked his way to the top by being the best, just like Lloyd had had to do. It was more likely for them to be the best, two of the Four Fangs, since they could learn from the great Brendan Reed directly as his sons. Of course, it was they themselves who had learned what not to do, at some personal cost.
Linus stopped his strain of thought and memory to stare at the massive edifice before him.
"Rats," he said, taking the cloth boy by the corners and hanging him straight out in front so he could see what Linus saw. "I'm looking at a giant stone door. It's engraved heavily with the design of a lord of some sort holding a sword of obvious power and some freakish goblin scrawl down the blade. The lord is surrounded by his vassals in full armor. Blocking out the sun is the face and torso of a beautiful, long-haired woman."
"Her Ladyship," Rats breathed. "I'm seeing the same thing, Linus. This is real. You can't change the appearance of a grave."
"A grave?" Linus raised an eyebrow, bundling Rats up again and haphazardly throwing him over his shoulder once more. Rats didn't complain for once. The carpet was a grave, too--this place was real only in death.
"Yeah. I never thought I'd see it," Rats said in awe. "The grave of the Fae King."
That there had once been a King, a i his Lordship /i , struck Linus as a terrible curiosity. Who had this king of goblins once been?
Neither he nor Rats could decipher the scratching, patternless fairy languages--Linus himself had some difficulty with human letters every once in a while and Nino, he knew for a fact, had never bothered with it. But the door to the tomb wasn't sealed, or if it was, sealed poorly. One of the vassals' hands jutted out, an obvious, ornamental doorknob.
Linus couldn't have thought of doing anything else but pull at the hand and swing the man-shaped door. It seemed so painfully obvious. Rats' objections came a moment too late as the dank, stale air overpowered them.
"Uh . . . " Rats groaned. "I can smell its stink through the cloth."
"It's just a tomb," Linus tried to shrug it away without gagging too hard. "Ugh--let's, let's just keep moving."
"What?! In there?!" Rats exclaimed, apparently disgusted. "It's befouled. Disgusting. The grave of the Fair King. No good comes from that."
"Shut up," Linus commanded and that was the end of it, since neither could speak as they ploughed deeper into the cavernous grave.
More stone vassals decorated the wall. The floor was a mosaic of a sea beast or perhaps a longboat of old, carved into the shape of a monster and decorated even further with geometries. It was hard to tell through the scattering of almost fully decayed bodies, some as large as a house, some smaller than child. Linus was loathed to touch them. Although he'd handled corpses before, mangled from battle, none were quite so terrifying.
From the center of the room rose a dull, greyish edifice, four times as tall as he, with the stairs leading up to the sarcophagus that must contain the king's remains. Unsure of what he might find, Linus held the tapestry of Rats to see. His beady little eyes widened but he shook his head. No dangers apparent. Linus threw Rat's over his shoulder again, gently setting foot on the first step. Nothing.
Another step. Yet another and another and nothing had happened. Gaining in confidence, Linus picked up speed, almost flying up the somehow unending stairs. The steps shrank into narrower platforms, until he stood on a ledge barely widen enough for his feet to balance. Rats whimpered. Linus strove not to look down, for the coffin's pedestal was much higher than he realized.
The lid was made from gold and encrusted with every jewel imaginable in any color under the sun. Linus recognized that the lid probably wasn't gold, but mere stone, and the jewels were probably studs of granite.
"We're going to fall," Rats insisted, the fear forcing him to speak.
"What do you care?" Linus scoffed, although he too felt uneasy at such height. "You're already flat."
The Mad Dog took a moment to steady himself before digging his fingers beneath the lid's overhang. With a grunt and one swift motion, he pried it loose and let go. The golden slab skidded down the narrow steps accompanied by a chorus of racket; it began to tumble as it hit the wider steps and then a there was clear moment as the lid sailed down the side and thumped mightily on the ground. The corpses had conveniently cleared the way for it some decades ago.
The King blinked awake and rose.
Linus fell back in surprise, almost barking like a frightened hound. A skeletal, garishly decorated hand reached out for him and held him steady; the King had saved his life. Chills riveted down the young man's spine, and Rats fell an easy thirty feet to the floor to land folded across the decayed body of a giant bugbear. Linus could only tremble, in spite of himself.
"You," wailed his Lordship. His voice was deep and dead and his jaws seemed not to match his speech, just opening and closing with a grinding of bone on bone. "Hear me, human! I am Grendel, King of the Goblins, Lord of the Fair, and Master of Trolls! Grendel . . .!"
The King shook Linus' wrist, tightening his death grip even more and twisted to survey his surroundings. He moaned, mournful and terrifying. "Oh, woe--this is my army!? Despair, despair! Brought low, brought low by that wretch, that hag, that fiendish harpy!"
King Grendel returned his gaze to the frightened mortal within his clutches. He moved slowly, his tarnished bones lacking the muscle for quick movement. No skin hung to his face, surrounded by a cascade of mangy white hair clinging between his skull and his crown. The King still wore full armor and dress--his cape and tunic were of a good cloth, touched with gold along the edges. The bracers on his forearms clicked dully as he moved.
"You! You, human, shall avenge me," King Grendel commanded, his colorless eyes, miraculously intact, bugging out through his eye-holes. "Avenge my army. Oh, the years have passed, Lilith, but you remain standing. No more! I, your Grendel, hold the key to your downfall. Die, my traitorous wife! I will lie safe in my grave while you rot in our bed! The sword, the sword . . ."
The King loosened his hold on Linus' arm and immediately, he took a step down as his Lordship began to stand in his stone coffin. Slowly, the two descended, Linus wide-eyed and mute. The King's remaining flesh began to tear and fall off as he moved, the rotted muscle and remaining innards showing clear. Across his front was a diagonal slash from a giant of a sword that had dug into his very being. He groaned and creaked as he walked.
Linus thought enough to reach down to collect Rats, but the poor child seemed shock-still and white; the fright had killed him, if he hadn't already been dead. The King glanced at the unfortunate creature unpityingly.
"Human . . . can you see?" the King turned, advancing ominously. Linus underestimated his height before. The King neared seven feet. The stink of death overwhelmed him.
He felt blind for a moment, stumbling back over a dwarf. His sight returned almost immediately but the presence of grime over his eyelids was unshakable. As Linus scrambled out of the tomb, he scratched at his face, using all his discipline not to riphis eyes from their sockets. The world around him was clearer, truer, but he couldn't care less.
King Grendel made to follow him out. Linus hadn't even looked over his shoulder to see; it was like nightmare monsters. They always followed you out.
The King's grave he shut without regret, no pity for the fallen lord. He'd probably been just as bad--the fact that her Ladyship was their common enemy wasn't grounds for an alliance. Linus kept running.
The halls looked different now, all bones and animal skin and decayed fish and spiders'websand blood on the walls. He didn't try to read them. All he wanted to do was find his brother and Nino and get the hell out. He was sick of fairies and the Queen and the lonely, hopeless, despairingatmosphere of her kingdom.
"LLOYD!!" he bellowed. Linus' voice bounced and echoed back to him. "LL--"
Something tiny caught his boot and he fell hard.
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At first, he thought the shrillvoicebelonged to his mother. But no, Maria Reed, bless her departed soul, had spoken softly and hit hard, not the other way around. The soft taps rivaled even Nino's in lack of strength; Linus grunted and tried twisting out of the way.
He was bound, and could barely move his head, much less stand or even roll over. The little bugbears crowding around him were scarcely longer than his forearm, with grey, yellow or green stringy hair and little red caps. Linus swore a muffled oath through a gag. His hands felt asleep, tied behind him.
"Wake up, wake up, wake UP!" shrieked the diminutive brownie woman. Her skin was a dingy blue-grey. So the King had given him the eyes that Rats (bless his soul too) hadspoken of. No matter how beneficial it was to have them be his own,Linus was notsure that the means really made up for the ends."Wakie wake! Tell me, boy, how old? How stale are you?"
Linus didn't so much as answer as cuss unintelligibly. The little woman didn't care. "That's alright, we gonna eat you after she done. If she done."
The bugbears howled, laughing. The hag on his knees hopped down, cackling.
The cold clench of realization hit him then. He, Linus Reed, the Mad Dog of the Four Fangs, was going to die at the sadistichands of her Ladyship, a woman who was probably green.