Book: 4

  Chapter 9

  Gone Hollywood

  The palisade town below the castle bustled all day and into the night, as changes swept over the valley. Witnessing and assisting the goblins as they discovered one new thing after another was a fascinating and diverting experience, which turned out to be highly profitable. Wilf, Harry and Larry sequestered themselves in the main house’s workshop, polishing and cutting stones into gems at a fevered and excited pace.

  Sparkling cut stones spilled out of their hands in a steady trickle, landing on the workbenches of Barry, Perry and Amy, who found themselves awash in precious materials and delightful things.

  After those first frenetic days, trade evened out, as Rio and Shai managed the sales floor with help from Lindsey; serving a steady stream of goblins eager to see the new things and experience this interesting trade thing.

  “So, I gives you these hides and bones and this shiny rock, then you gives me a long-knife and a spear?” Joan asked warily, seated on a bundle of dried pelts, with a basket of bones at her feet.

  “Yes, dear… The stone is turquoise and very fine. All of your hides and bones are all excellent examples and well prepared… I feel this is a fair value.” Lindsey explained gently and carefully. “My friends will make things from what you’ve brought us, which we will trade with others, once they are finished. My crafty friends can work their arts, without needing to hunt these things for themselves.”

  “So… Hunters and gatherers hunt and gather, while crafters craft…” The lanky goblin huntress murmured placidly, contemplating the new idea. “Is good-good idea! Most crafters are for shit in the woods!”

  “Yes, they are bumbling clowns… But you cannot make a long knife and metal spear, can you?” Lindsey asked sweetly, holding up a sturdy hunting knife and a short, wide bladed spear. “So sharp and it won’t shatter on bone or shell… When it dulls or breaks, a smith in town can repair it for you, as good as new.”

  “Oh, so I use new pointy things to get more hides and bones…” Joan cooed excitedly, beginning to see where this was going.

  The long legged desert goblin was out the door with her new tools before Lindsey finished un-bunding the bale of pelts and hides.

  “I’d say ye should have looked at the hides first, lass, but that python skin alone is a fair bit of value on top!” Shai purred, drawn from her finished trade to check the goods. “Ye dealt the poor lass too sharply, Lin! Tis the hides alone I’d have taken and felt a skinflint then, even so. Look at this golden adder hide… and so well dressed!”

  “I’ll make it up to her when she comes back from playing with her new toys.” King Ghnash whispered from the corner, where he’d been watching the doings for a while, completely unnoticed. “Sorry, I’m naturally sneaky.”

  “Gods above and below!” Lindsey gasped, while Shai sheepishly slipped her sword back into her storage gift, once she recognized the intruder.

  “Joan has visited me before, we get along, she and I.” Ghnash muttered when both women settled down and had their heart rates back under control. “Her tummytime starts soon and she hopes for one of mine to nurse at last.”

  He sighed fondly, gazing off into the distance while making an elaborately winsome expression. “Perhaps a third queen? Though, she’ll never settle down like Sabrina, or dedicate herself to making my babies, like Chelsea…” He mused thoughtfully, while the women just rolled their eyes so hard, even their well exercised ocular muscles began to burn and ache under the strain of the king’s bull-shittery and cheerfully wicked horn-doggery.

  Lindsey and Shai nodded in silent agreement; something had to be done, but what? The unspoken plea in the younger girl’s eyes was met with the cool confidence of a veteran Adventurer, Wife and Mother.

  “Is that a comically huge paper fan?” Ghnash remarked, interrupting himself, mid-semi-erotic, rambling dissertation on goblin mating traditions and the political ramifications of smushing too many girls babyful at once.

  “Baka!” Shai struck without warning; the only answer the king received was a single, sharply spoken word and a heavy blow to the crown of his head with the folded paper prop.

  “I should get all the girls some flowers and chocolates…” He muttered, switching gears instantly and becoming far more docile.

  “Can you teach me this art, sensei Shai?” Lindsey whispered in quiet awe of the display of magical mind-fuckery and mild physical comedy.

  “I’d nae see my own son abused so…” She purred sweetly, while directing Ghnash to the appropriate section of the sales floor, to begin browsing possible gifts for his many, long-suffering wives. “Well… Perhaps a trick or two would be fine, I suppose.” Shai caressed the smaller woman’s cheek and sighed. “Keep a firm rein on that boy of thine, my love. Those silly Ward lads are ever troublesome.”

  /

  Grexish the thief of eyes spoke very calmly and clearly, as he made his report to the supreme pontiff of the light. “LightGlen has been sealed, lord pontiff. I fear that pontiff Luce has been overthrown, somehow… and a mortal is now in control of that domain. Our final reports indicate that the Tarots have installed one of their own as dungeon lord.”

  Pontiff Luxor fumed and raged inside, the vessel’s face remaining impassive as the depth and breadth of his troubles slowly became clear. Another world lost, another pontiff vanished… not simply between bodies or awaiting a vessel; gone entirely. It was almost as if his allies and subordinates were being… killed. The prospect was nothing but rank impossibility, of course, no immortal could simply die, or be slain; such a thing could not occur, despite some persistent rumors.

  There remained no sign of pontiff Lumos and now Luce was vanished from the collective in the same inexplicable way that so many other allies had over the last few turnings of the mortal seasons, or whatever. Even the absolutely vital slave trade was faltering under the relentless assault of the accursed Tarots; terrorists and murderers every one of them.

  “And what is your assessment of the situation?” The pontiff asked his chief of spies, just as carefully.

  “Dire, desperately dire. We control a number of domains still, but our hold becomes tenuous as ritual materials become less abundant. Reestablishing the slave trade should be our primary focus, once the Tarots have been dealt with.” He declared confidently, twisting his tentacles and squirming with excitement.

  “How exactly shall we ‘deal with’ the Tarots?” Luxor asked as calmly as he could manage. “They remain elusive, impossible to infiltrate and unpredictable.”

  “Not entirely unpredictable, my lord. For approximately the last fifteen years… since the disappearance of pontiff Lumos, one domain has been at the heart of our troubles. The realm of the fae… and its vassal realm have been the source of our troubles.” He answered smugly, dribbling a little toxic mucus onto the floor in his self-satisfaction.

  “Yes, the realm in which pontiff Luce recently threw away a not inconsiderable quantity of human cattle and a valuable strike-force of undead.” Luxor’s voice remained under control, but the signs of his fury were there, as the vessel’s eyes became bloodshot and jaundiced as the entity possessing the fragile, human body roiled with fury and rage.

  “Brute force solutions have… not been successful. I suggest we use less obvious methods to discover the truth of this matter and perhaps, locate the missing pontiff Lumos.” That got Luxor’s attention and held it.

  “Yes… I suspect that Lumos has been somehow isolated from our concord by some new art or spell of the Tarots. Finding and eliminating this threat is paramount, before more of us can be taken!”

  “Taken?” The pontiff asked sharply. “What do you know?”

  “Since the mass disappearance of lady Morrigan and her allies, several of us have vanished; always from worlds where the Tarots were operating, or began operations soon after.” Grexish writhed with pleasure and lost a bit of slime coating as his tentacles knotted and squirmed. “I have identified a target, a minor human lord who has been involved in all of our current troubles. A covert operation will at the very least prod the Tarots into action, my lord pontiff. Mortals are often unduly distressed when one of their allies is destroyed, even useless ones. It is one of their least understood quirks.”

  “You believe slaying one human will cause the Tarots to expose themselves? Unlikely.” Luxor scoffed and sighed.

  Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  “Oh… Perhaps, my lord; in my investigations I have discovered many anecdotal reports of the Tarots acting irrationally and even expending valuable resources in the interest of protecting, avenging or, best of all, in recovering an ally.” The cephalopod oozed a bit of ink in his excitement. “To reclaim a taken ally, they will do almost anything, risk almost anything. Mortals will often behave this way, I have observed.”

  “Fascinating… That does agree with my observations of the filthy things.” Luxor mused thoughtfully, pinching at his vessel’s chin until blood flowed freely, so deeply lost in thought. “Very well. My authority is yours for this project. Find this human and capture him. Do not fail me, Grexish.”

  “Don’t you wish to know the human’s name, my lord?” The squidly, slippery creature hissed, simply too delighted to contain himself.

  “Does it matter?” The pontiff sighed, too weary to continue listening… and his vessel’s damned chin wouldn’t stop bleeding. “I await news of a successful mission, Grexish. All else is inconsequential.”

  /

  “So, if you rule the goblin dungeon, why do goblin attacks still occur?” Amy asked the king, one lazy night as the family jammed together under the stars and two moons.

  “Goblin men roam wild and untamed, untameable and primitive. When one stumbles on a natural void opening, he will avoid it, by instinct… but if forced through, or if he passes into the ether by accident, he will be changed.” Ghnash sighed and stroked his chin, a gesture too familiar from their father to be comfortable, when seen in the little green man.

  “Such a one will become an orc, ogre or troll, most often, but they also become driven and wicked. Often they will band together a party of gobb men and drive them through to raid or plunder some nearby world, infecting those gobbs with their filth. Goblin women do not survive passing the void, ever.”

  “What about Daisybelle?” Amy murmured, while the king strummed his shamisen, lost in the magic of her voice. “She crossed the veil.”

  “Of all goblins, only my daughters can endure it and remain whole; just as I too, am now able to pass the veil with my mind intact, through the intercession of the gods and my admission to the goblin akashic record.” He answered, sounding half-hypnotized by the music and the soft, trilling voice of the girl with the guitar.

  “That’s another thing, how did you have daughters? I thought all isekai were sterile. My papa surely is, auntie Tawny confirmed it with her arts.” Amy asked softly, pressing him for more.

  “I killed and consumed many outsiders and extraplanar beings… but the first was the daughter of Ungoliant, spider queen of utter darkness. From one of them, I stole a flickering remnant of true goblin fecundity. Rarely, so terribly rarely, but from time to time, I could give life, after devouring so many.”

  He swayed side to side, tears gathering in his big goblin eyes as he played, lost in memories like an old, old man.

  “I witnessed part of that battle…” Wheel of Fortune mumbled from a seat by the tea rose bush, where he certainly hadn’t been a few minutes before. There had certainly not been an accordion in the family band, either… Yet, there he was; squeeze-box in hand and a smile on his face.

  “It was a hell of a fight, until they poofed into a shadow dimension together. Pretty badass, fighting a shadow spider of pure hunger and instinct with nothing but stone age tools and a swinging dick.”

  “I didn’t fuck her, jackass! I ate her alive, or whatever.” Ghnash grumbled, Amy’s spell broken by the intrusion.

  “You fought a daughter of Ungoliant?” Perry asked from behind a banjo. “Thirp’s patron is her husband, Aclintherios, the weaver of life.”

  “Ungoliant dwells beyond the light, lingering in the darkness of the void.” Gary answered for the goblin, who was sipping his tea and looking a little confused. “Her ‘children’ are proto spirits, mindless and harmless in their natural environment. Only when forced into a physical form by mortal spells are they dangerous or violent.”

  Gary shrugged and kept on playing, working steadily to rebuild his rusty skills after fifteen years idle.

  “Ungoliant isn’t evil or bad; she’s just kinda… Most humanoids just assume all spiders and spiderlike entities are scary or evil, just like we almost always associate darkness and death with evil and scary things. She’s all about spiders, darkness, life’s endings and entropy.”

  “She sounds medium-evil, at least.” Ghnash grumbled happily, as he switched to a ukulele. “Besides, I didn’t pick that fight, she came looking for me. It was around two hundred and some years ago… Wheel, help me out.”

  “Closer to three hundred years, buddy. I didn’t know you were one of us until years later… I thought I was just watching the magnificent death of a goblin hero.” He sighed and smiled, beginning a slow polka on his noisy machine.

  “Picture this, kids. One foggy night, a splendid goblin man, long, lean and green; he battled the demonic shadow spider of every nightmare’s final scream. He fought with grace and skill, leaping and battling for his life in the mist and silence beside a waveless sea. He fought that thing up and down a rocky beach until dawn came, when they both vanished into the first shadow cast by the sun. A beautiful ending to a brave warrior, or so I supposed, then.”

  Wheel let his tune devolve back into the jazz ramblings of the band, as they chased melody and harmony around the tonal scales until something caught fire for a while.

  “That was the beginning of my journey to becoming the goblin king in truth.” Ghnash mumbled over a twelve-string small-scale banjitar. “Someone pass me a mandolin, this thing is nuts.”

  With a more suitable instrument in hand, the king sighed and strummed some bluegrass riffs. “I spent a decade or more hunting down the wizards, demonlings and undead shitbags infesting this place back then. Each one had a piece of the dungeon lordship; all broken up and stashed away, keeping my domain broken and fractured. It’s still a little chunky, here and there.”

  “I slipped in once in a while, searching for the lost brother my cards kept insisting was here, in the goblin dungeon; yet I could never find him, not a trace in all my divinations. Ghnash was a sneaky git then, too.” Wheel mused thoughtfully, gazing up at the moons. “You really should talk to that god, brother.”

  “Who, me?” Both Gary and Ghnash asked together, in perfect harmony.

  “Yes, both of you. He’s not going away, no matter how long you wait.” The most inscrutable weirdo, even among so many goofballs, murmured quietly. “I never interact with gods, as a matter of policy; so far be it for me to suggest you do… but this one seems insistent and stubborn beyond belief.”

  “Yeah, he sucks super hard. I really should do something about that guy.” Gary grumbled unhappily, glaring up at the

  silver sickle and the leering skull grinning down from within that wickedly sharp, thumbnail moon.

  “I did mean both of you…” Wheel insisted, as he began shuffling a deck of cards. “Let us see what wisdom can be found in this time and place, under these moons.” His hands flickered and danced over the colorful pasteboard chips, deftly and gracefully casting first one, then a second image onto the low garden table, among a scattering of snacks and small musical instruments.

  The cheerful, pastel face of Danny Kaye smiled at them from a tiny, painted lithograph entitled ‘The Court Jester’ rather than one of the usual tarot cards of the nearly universal deck most humanoid civilizations shared.

  Beside it stood Errol Flynn in ‘The Adventures of Don Juan’ in technicolor splendor.

  “Old time movies?” Gary asked, smiling with amusement as ‘A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court’ appeared next.

  “Can’t use regular tarot cards around us, I learned that lesson with Ghnash; so I came up with these. Golden age movie posters work just fine and are hilariously occult to everyone but us…” He smiled at the gathering of Wards and their friends.

  “Isekai are rare indeed in the broader ether and those with significant memories of their prior lives even more so. Then we must remember, isekai are truly random. They come from any time, any place and any race, in all the endless ether. I have yet to meet an isekai from earth who isn’t one of us.”

  “So why the old time movies? If nobody else understands?” Amy asked the weirdest Gary.

  “Good question!” He murmured as Claude Raines and Steve Reeves spilled onto the table, bringing ‘Hercules’ and ‘The Invisible Man’ out under the moons.

  “The inexplicable, transitive nature of the images increases their power, among both those who recognize them and those who don’t. Magic is crazy stuff!”

  More cards fell to the table, spreading in a complex pattern among the odds and ends lying around. Tyrone Power landed beside a bowl of guacamole, glaring at all evildoers from behind Zorro’s mask, beside the ‘Scarlet Pimpernel’ inverted.

  “If a witness fails to comprehend the images, they become more potent and mysterious in that person’s mind, while those who know are able to reference the subtle cues and references of the hidden narratives they represent and the cultural touchstones they hold.” He grinned after that run of utter nonsense, while ‘King Kong’ and ‘The Black Swan’ appeared on the table beside ‘The Longest Day’ in a compact spread of their own.

  “See? The king of monsters and the pirate crew you’ve gathered here shall face a great battle and adversity together… When did I put ‘Saving Private Ryan’ in the mix?” He mused thoughtfully as another card landed among the others.

  “Come on, Ghnash… let’s go visit a huge ass-hole.” Gary grumbled as he surrendered to the inevitable.

  /

  “I don’t know how much you’ve been snooping, or how much you understand of what you’ve seen, War.” Gary said, calmly and firmly from behind the enormous, blood drenched man in idiotic armor, leaning on a sword of ridiculous proportions and ornamentation.

  “What you need to understand right now is simple. I don’t have the time or energy to screw around with you.” He held up a single finger, silencing the divine in an instant, through some despicable means.

  “I haven’t cast you out into the void, because… Well, I’m not really sure why I haven’t, I suppose.” He drifted off for a moment, chasing some stray thought through his dreams.

  “Gary Ward, the Fool…” War began, his booming voice faltering as he attempted to speak in anything but a bellow fit for the battlefield. “I am in an unfamiliar position, mortal filth. I am in your… debt, or something…” The giant fumbled for words and fell silent, draping the barren, lifeless surface of Luna with an air of even more profound desolation.

  “Hmm…?” He mumbled abstractedly. “Sorry, I wasn’t paying any attention to you… Why Earth’s moon, I wonder?” He mused, seeming uninterested in the deity, until his voice sharpened, growing cold and hard.

  “I already know what you want and you can’t have it. I’m here to speak, not to listen, War. I will not Contract you; nor will I help you back into the realm of the fae.”

  “I can’t Contract you, Fool!” War spat, fury and outrage expanding his form to even more absurd dimensions, towering over the mortal’s soul in the endless void. “I wish only to be free of this place and return to Dana’s side!” Gary stared at the massive being and blinked up at him stupidly.

  “Seriously?” He demanded gently, as the god began shrinking rapidly, accompanied by a sharp, whistling sound and a distinct wiggly-wavy-wobblyness in the divine form.

  “Can you make him into any balloon animals? That would be fun on a bun.” The goblin king mumbled angrily at the god, who hadn’t noticed his presence at all.

  “I dunno, Ghnash. He’s never managed to be anything but a problem, so far as I can tell.” Gary grumbled at the much smaller divine form standing before them, suddenly very mortal sized and a little wrinkly.

  “War, my old pal… Don’t try to throw your weight around, here. In this place I am the divine being and you are a guest who is not entirely welcome. We came here to talk to you because a friend suggested it.”

  “Why did you even keep him around this long, brother?” Ghnash demanded sharply, glaring at the being with undisguised contempt.

  “To be honest… I don’t relish killing sentient beings, even shitty ones. I have friends who once Contracted this clown, people I respect. They make me want to give this guy a chance to turn his existence around.” Gary mumbled. “Really, it’s mostly ‘cause Ducky asked me to spare him.”

  The diminished god raged and spat silently while the Fool and The goblin king chatted on the surface of the moon, discussing the fate of a divine while enjoying a jam session while the earth crested the horizon.

  “Can I have him?” Ghash asked calmly, a sly smile on his face. “I think I can make something of this guy.”

  “You wanna Contract him?” Gary asked, obviously unsettled by the suggestion.

  “Nope, I’ll take him in. We need a pantheon and he’s a good start. Toss in that troll spirit too; I see him haunting around over there.” Ghnash declared firmly.

  “We are building a religion… A limited edition…” He droned through a wicked smile.

  “Nice one, Ghnash. You got me with a ‘Cake’ lyric…” Gary declared in unalloyed mirth at the goblin’s grinning foolishness. “Take them with my compliments.”

  War’s complaints and objections went unheard, as the face of Luna rotated just a little more toward the wrinkle in the ether that allowed her to shine on a new world, after so long.

  /