Page 95 of The Thrice-Bound Fool

Fine pamphlets made by the printery advertised the details of the visit for such notables as the king had made welcome in his garden. I had pinched one off a table, reading the Erydoni letters with my Cipher’s birth-gift.

Now I watched these ambassadors approach.

They were hard to look away from.

I’ve said before how fucking ugly goblins are with those fishy mouths that you long to hammer the little pointy teeth out of or stuff a hot torch into; but these karks knew better than to show their hateable, stabbable faces in a foreign court.

Instead, they hid their mugs with masks on sticks, these masks graced with very kynd-looking faces, all plump smiling lips and happy, upturned eye-holes. They held these sticks gracefully and made an art of almost but never quite showing their actual faces as they spoke.

Three of the masks were of goblin silver, which gave back eerie and pleasing green reflections; but the leader’s mask was copper.

I was close to them, too, being the fool of the royal court.

Close enough to see what a fine texture their black or gray garments had, and to see the countless, asymmetrically arranged beads of amber sewn into them. You could fall into those garments staring at them, your mind maddening itself to make sense of the disordered ranks of honeyed beads, but it never would. There was a sense of order to it, perhaps, but it was so foreign to our sense of what was natural as to look like chaos while also teasing and trapping the attention with the possibility that some compelling pattern existed and that so much about the true nature of the world could be understood if one could only grasp it.

It would be very easy to let oneself be cut down with one of their asymmetrical poleaxes while marveling at those patterns.

Not only was I close enough to see the Mystery Robes, as I later learned they were called; I was close enough to smell these fuckers.

Mind, I had smelled goblin before, and you never forget the first time that wet, awful funk does violence to your nose. But these being the high holy representatives of the Horde, they had a trick for that, too. There was no hiding their smell; but they had conjured a scent to balance it. Kynd perfumery is a blunt thing. It says, “Oh, you don’t care for the smell of shyte? Well, here’s a pile of rosewater to cover it over.” But of course, rosewater hides shyte no better than silk cushions a mallet.

But they weren’t hiding anything.

The second scent they had conjured was not a veil drawn before the first; it was a counterweight to it. A dancing partner. The first scent said, “Hello! We’re not from here, but you look awfully good to eat, and also here’s something like mold and wouldn’t you enjoy chucking up your lunch and remembering the last time you were badly hurt?” The second said, “Please don’t mind him, he’s drunk; here’s some strange exotic wood to undercut and apologize for the moldy bit, and here’s a current of cool air to harmonize with the hot violence promised by our naughty glands.”

Do you see how much work your mind had to do just to be near these karks?

It was not midday, and moments after they approached, I needed a beer and a nap, or a place to make sick and then have a long think about whether there was only one world or were there several, or countless ones?

Not for the first or last time I missed Hasp.

He would have known what to say about this.

And then, as if in answer to a prayer, I heard him in my mind’s ear.

If I’d never heard of whiskey, I’d invent it now just to help me forget these bewildering little cunts.

They finished their approach and stood still.

Too still.

They made none of the small adjustments kynd or halfies make when they go from walking to standing or sitting.

By contrast, the normally imperious Erydoni seemed like huge children before tiny grands, one adjusting a bracelet, another shifting weight, one clearing a throat.

Not to mention the heat and the sweat on us all.

And the flies.

The dam whose trade it was to fan flies away from the royal court wasn’t bothered about so defending the Horde visitors—as I’d heard said, flies wanted no part of goblin-flesh, living or dead. Neither did the Erydoni. These strange visitors stood in a little knot, like an island that had floated far, far away from their archipelago. The Horde ambassador spoke for the four of them, the others being there, or so I later heard as the king and ministers spoke, to bear witness back to their provinces. I doubted many in Manreach knew as much as I was now learning about the workings and government of the Horde, and for as much as it was upsetting to be so near to these hateful things, it was no less fascinating to learn a few of their mysteries. And it was not so unpleasant, hearing the ambassador. I had found goblin voices hateful and unpleasant when I met them in Gunnish waters an unknown sum of months before, with their rasps and buzzes and whoops. When they spoke Holtish, it sounded like they were at once making and savaging words never meant for their mouths. But those were sailors, soldiers, a wizard.

These before us had long been trained to treat with “the tall races,” as they called us politely. And now I found out the reason that the Horde ambassador’s mask was copper, and not so fine-looking as the others’. Copper, you see, is a fine vehicle for magic.

I felt the magic, of course, the little hairs on my arms standing up from the power of it. One thing it did was to blend the goblin’s natural rasp with a sweet metallic ringing, the end result of which was strangely pleasant to the ear. But that was only part of it; I only figured out the rest of the spell later.

Here’s what the little fucker said:

Good and tall race of Erydon so far from our hives middle and deep