The Goblin's Puzzle Read online

  Rodrigo nodded. He stood and walked to the edge of the road. But he did not relieve himself. Instead, he picked up a rock the size of a melon and brought it back with him. The boy was puzzled by this, and couldn’t see why Rodrigo would come to a stop directly behind Tibor.

  “Rodrigo, what are you doing?” said Tibor, but he did not turn to look back at his slave.

  As soon as Rodrigo raised the rock over Tibor’s head, the boy knew what Rodrigo was about to do. He squeezed his eyes shut so he would not have to see what came next. He covered his ears with his hands and sat in silent darkness for what seemed like a long time. When he could take it no longer, he opened one eye and peeked at the scene in front of him.

  Tibor lay on his side in the dirt. His one exposed eye was open. It pointed slackly down at the ground. He did not move at all; even his chest did not rise or fall. The boy had never seen anyone lie so perfectly still before. Rodrigo’s rock sat a little way behind Tibor. Strangely, there were only a few spatters of blood on it.

  The boy opened his other eye and uncovered his ears. He looked up at Rodrigo. It was said that the Foul One sometimes took hold of a slave and made him attack his master. But the boy could see no sign of the Foul One in Rodrigo’s eyes. He just looked a little tired.

  For his part, Rodrigo studied Tibor’s body. “That was a hard choice for me,” said Rodrigo. A little smile crept onto his lips. “But in the long run, it was for the best. I think we can both see that now.”

  The boy realized he was the only witness to Rodrigo’s terrible crime. Slowly, he began to creep away, but this only drew Rodrigo’s attention. Rodrigo looked over at the boy, as if he had only just remembered the boy was there. “Please, I…,” said the boy, but he did not know how to finish. He had never tried to convince someone not to murder him before.

  Rodrigo stepped over Tibor’s body and went back to his bread and cheese. “You’ve nothing to fear,” he said. “I’ve no quarrel with you.”

  “Is he…is he dead?” said the boy. He really ought to go over to Tibor and see if he could do anything for him. But he could not bring himself to go any closer.

  “Should be,” said Rodrigo through his lunch. He stopped chewing and glanced over at Tibor. “Or do you think he needs another crack?”

  “No!” said the boy. It was all so strange, so unnatural, that the boy did not know what to say. Finally, he spluttered, “How could you? He…he is your master.”

  “Was,” Rodrigo corrected.

  “But the law—you know what they do,” said the boy. A slave who raised his hand against his master was tortured and burned alive.

  “They have to catch me first,” said Rodrigo, standing up.

  The boy watched as Rodrigo dragged Tibor’s body deep into the tall grasses so it could not be seen. He took Tibor’s coin purse and dressed in one of Tibor’s suits before untethering Tibor’s horse. Holding the horse’s reins, he turned to the boy and said, “She’ll carry two as easily as one.”

  The boy gasped. Running away would mean defying the fate the gods had picked for him. Of course, Rodrigo had already defied the will of the gods when he killed his master. Still, the boy was not going to follow in his footsteps. “Oh, no, no,” said the boy. “I’ll go back to the master’s estate, if it’s all the same to you.”

  “You know he’ll burn you for helping me,” said Rodrigo.

  “But I didn’t help you,” said the boy. “He’ll believe me when I tell him.” He tried to picture that actually happening.

  “Then he’ll burn you for failing to do your utmost for your master,” said Rodrigo.

  That made the boy queasy. Slaves were supposed to give up their lives to protect their masters. It was the Fifth of the Ninety-Nine Duties of a Slave. He had done nothing to save Tibor. Rodrigo probably would have killed him if he had tried. But then, at least, he would have gone to the gods with a pure soul.

  When the boy had no answer, Rodrigo said, “Maybe you’d have been content to droil away all your days for that fiend and his father. Doesn’t seem like much of a life to me, but I did take it from you without your leave. And for that, I’m sorry.” He mounted the horse. “I wish you luck, boy. You’ll need it.” He turned the horse to ride away.

  “Have you no fear of the Pit?” said the boy. Those who defied the will of the gods were cast into the Pit of Eternal Torment, slaves of the Foul One for all eternity.

  Rodrigo glanced back. “None,” he said. “For if this is truly the life the gods want for us, we’re already there.” He turned away again, and this time, he rode off.

  Plain Alice stalked across the barnyard, milking bucket in hand, the corners of her mouth turned down in an almighty scowl. The list of those invited to the next agon was out. And for the third time, her name was not on it. It was ridiculous. Even Young Hubert was on the list, and everyone knew his head was better suited for driving nails than cracking books. Of course, his father’s favorite aunt was married to the brother of the secretary of the Council of Sages, so it was probably just a courtesy invitation. Surely no one thought he had a chance of winning an ordinary. But Plain Alice could. Or she could if the Council would give her the chance to compete instead of wasting invitations on thickwit boys like Hubert. Instead, she was stuck milking Old Bess.

  The unfairness of Plain Alice’s life so consumed her mind that she never saw the great shadow racing across the ground, overtaking her. One moment, she was stomping toward the barn. The next, she was jerked up into the air, her legs dancing in the nothingness. She screamed, as that seemed like the natural thing to do. But she was a practical girl, so when nothing came of screaming, she gave it up in favor of making a study of her situation. The claws of some tremendous beast grasped her firmly by the shoulders and snagged in her long red hair. She looked up at its scaly underbelly. To each side of her were great bat wings pounding away at the air, pulling the two of them into the sky. Behind them trailed a long thin tail that ended in a spade tip. The dragon, for that was what the creature had to be, lifted her higher and higher into the sky.

  She battered at the dragon’s mighty claws with the milking bucket and screamed, “Let me go! Let me go!” until she thought better of it. At this height, if the dragon let go, she would plunge to her doom. Still, presence of mind can be hard to come by when one is being kidnapped by a monster. For his part, the dragon ignored her.

  After a few minutes of climbing, the dragon leveled off and wheeled to the east. Over her shoulder, Plain Alice watched Middlebury roll away until even the towers of the Earl’s keep could no longer be seen. The dragon flew fast, far faster than a horse at full gallop. Soon she could make out the black walls and towers of Castle Geoffrey, even though it lay nearly a day’s march to the east of Middlebury. The imposing castle served as the seat of Duke Geoffrey, the King’s cousin and potential heir to the throne. People liked to say that Duke Geoffrey was the only man in West Stanhope ambitious enough to want it, rich enough to build it and vain enough to name it after himself. As they passed over it, the Duke’s men scrambled about in a panic. An optimistic few loosed arrows at them, but they were far too high in the air.

  Castle Geoffrey receded as quickly as it had arrived. Beyond it were moors and eventually the Little Dismal. Despite its name, the Little Dismal was a vast swampy forest of cypress trees and hanging mosses. It was called little only because the Great Dismal, just over the Mountains of Fire in East Stanhope, was even bigger. But they did not fly over the Great Dismal, for when they reached the Mountains of Fire, the dragon turned north. Soon enough, they came to a place of strange rock formations. There was a series of natural columns of basalt that rose into the air.

  The dragon set Plain Alice on the tallest of these columns and then landed on the ground. Plain Alice looked around quickly. It was thirty feet down to the ground, and the nearest column was fifteen feet away. “There’s no way I can get down from here,” she said, mostly to herself.

  To her surprise, the dragon responded, “Well, why do you t
hink I put you there?” She had not known that dragons could talk.

  Every man has a fate. Before he is born, the Three Sisters draw a lot from the great stone bowl to see what that fate will be. King or commoner, soldier or scholar, notable or merchant, everyone has a fate, and it is their duty to submit graciously to that fate. It is the will of the gods. When the boy was born, the Three Sisters had drawn slave as his fatestone, so it was only just, decent and proper that he be a good slave.

  And the boy did try. A good slave thanked the gods for his fate. Every morning, the boy went down on all fours, pressed his forehead to the ground seven times and thanked the Three Sisters for making him a slave. And when he was done, he pressed his forehead to the ground another time and asked the Chained Man, the god of the slaves, to help him be a better slave. This was the First Duty of a Slave. A good slave never raised his hand to his master. That was the Fourth Duty, and the boy never had. The boy had sometimes—not often, but once in a while—even loved his master. At least, he thought that it might be love. It was hard to be sure. Still, it ought to count for something because everyone said the Third Duty was the hardest. All of that, the boy got right.

  The trouble was, it took more than that to be a good slave. A good slave obeyed his master in all things. That was the Second Duty. A good slave did not filch food, which violated the Tenth Duty. And he did not smart-mouth his master, which violated the Eleventh Duty. Or maybe the Twelfth. There were ninety-nine, so it was easy to muddle them up. And a good slave absolutely did not waste whole afternoons hiding behind hydrangea bushes, imagining he was a hero from The Tales—a falsely enslaved prince who had to battle three monsters, each more terrible than the last, before being restored to titles, lands and a palace full of slaves of his own. There was no Duty covering that specifically, but it definitely violated several of them.

  A good slave would have died trying to protect Tibor from harm. That was the Fifth Duty. And a good slave would not run away—Sixth Duty—even if going back to Tibor’s villa meant being burned at the stake.

  Being a good slave was not easy, obviously. Still, that was the will of the gods. Deep down, the boy really did want to be good. There had even been days when he was good. Just not this day.

  Wicked as it was, the boy chose not to be burned alive. He was defying the will of the gods. He was a renegade, just like Rodrigo. And like Rodrigo, he would serve the Foul One in the Pit in the next life.

  At least he had the decency to feel bad about it, unlike Rodrigo. And that counted for something. Or he hoped it did.

  He went through Tibor’s bags, looking for something to wear. Heading on to Mossglum seemed like a bad idea. Rodrigo went that way. Also, Tibor was expected there and would soon be missed. Since he could not go back the way he came, that left bushwhacking through the grasslands. For that, he needed more than the simple cotton breechcloth he always wore.

  While he pawed through Tibor’s suits, he tried to reassure himself that he was not really running away. He was only trying to avoid being burned. Once he could prove that he had not caused Tibor’s death, he would go back and be a slave, as he was supposed to.

  Besides, if he burned, Casimir would lose a slave. He might not fetch as high a price as a horse or a good hunting dog, but he was still worth something. So if the boy could somehow prove his innocence, he would save Casimir a needless loss. And protecting his master’s property was the Eighth Duty.

  Of course, there was also the matter of Casimir’s rights as a property owner. The boy’s life belonged to Casimir, and the boy was not supposed to concern himself with what Casimir chose to do with it. That was the Seventh Duty. It was all very complicated.

  He found himself worrying the ring he wore about his neck. He often did when thinking over a knotty problem. He stopped, laid it flat on his hand and looked at it. It was plain and heavy and looked to be made of iron. He always thought of it as his father’s ring, though he knew almost nothing of his father or his mother. At some point, someone had mentioned that the ring had something to do with his father, but the boy could never remember who had told him this. Somewhere along the way, someone had tried to destroy it. It had been smashed over and over again with a hammer, leaving it cracked open and misshapen. His father must have been a very large man, as the ring was much wider around than most. The boy gave it one more rub before going back to Tibor’s baggage.

  In the end, he settled on a green woolen hunting suit, which was sturdy and warm. The leather riding suit probably would have been better, but Tibor was still wearing it. The boy could not even look at Tibor, much less touch him. So the boy put on the hunting suit instead, cinching the belt way down and rolling the arms and legs up to get it to fit. The suit felt strange; he had never worn trousers or a shirt before.

  Stepping into the tall grasses was like being plunged into another world. The grass grew so thick the boy had to use his arms to pull open a path to walk along. It rose over his head, blocking his view of everything but a small patch of sky. The boy’s whole world shrank down to just a few feet around him. The going was hard but helped him keep his thoughts from the enormity of his crimes.

  By nightfall, he was worn out. His arms and back were sore from struggling through the tangle of grass. He ate the little food he had. He meant to save some, but it was gone before he knew it. Exhausted, he threw himself down onto a little nest of grass and dreamed of Tibor with his dead eye pointed slackly at the ground.

  The boy woke early, went down on all fours, pressed his forehead to the ground seven times and then stopped. He felt a clutch at his heart. He could hardly give thanks to the Three Sisters for making him a slave. Nor could he pray to the Chained Man. The Chained Man wanted him to go back to Casimir’s and be burned. He could almost see the Chained Man raging and cursing at him. It was enough to get him up and walking.

  —

  After four days, the grasslands, which had seemed as though they might go on forever, suddenly came to an end in a low range of gray and stony foothills. The hills themselves were mostly free of greenery, though a few scrubby trees halfheartedly tried to grow in the gullies between them. Beyond the hills rose an immense range of mountains.

  The boy knew The Tales by heart. He had eavesdropped on the telling of every one at least a dozen times. Of all of them, the hardest to believe was The Tale of the Seven Silent Gentlemen. In that one, the cooper’s daughter escaped the seven silent gentlemen by jumping from the top of the highest peak in the land to the moon when it passed by. She rode the moon across the sky to safety while the seven silent gentlemen fell to their deaths trying to jump after her. The boy had never believed that Tale, not until he saw those mountains. They started with a wall of snowcapped black peaks rising up into the sky. Behind them lay another line of mountains and then another and another, each soaring higher and still higher than the last, until they were just white peaks floating on top of the clouds.

  This had to be the Spine, the great mountain range that ran the length of the Kingdoms. People traveled to the lands north of the Spine, or so the boy had heard. But he could see no way across. So he turned and followed the foothills instead.

  After half a day, he came to a narrow rut of a road that was little more than a trail. In one direction, it twisted into the foothills of the Spine, slowly rising. In the other, it ran out across the grasslands, where the boy saw a mule train slowly heading his way. Although it would be safer to avoid other people, his belly would not let him. He had not eaten in days. When there had been no prospect of food, his stomach had only troubled him a little. Now that there was a chance, his stomach demanded food. So he sat on the side of the road to see if he could cadge a little bread from them.

  Plain Alice’s father, Oswald the Sage, happened to be watching when the dragon stole her away. He had spent that morning sitting at his desk, stroking his beard and shuffling his receipts about in the hopes that in so doing, somehow, some part of his debts could be made to disappear. It did not work. No matter how many
different ways he added it up, the dispiritingly long column of figures always came to just shy of forty silver sovereigns, as much as his farm was worth. It was a debt that he would never be able to repay.

  On the other side of the window, Plain Alice stormed her way to the barn. Seeing her should have brought him a few minutes’ peace of mind, but her anger only reminded him of another of his failures: he could not get her invited to an agon. He should have had an in. He was a sage himself, after all. And he saw other men do it. At the meetings, they thumped each other on the back and told a few jokes. Then someone would whisper something in someone else’s ear—the right someone else—and a little while later, the Council would vote for it. Somehow, though, he had never worked out which backs to thump, or what jokes to tell, or whose ear to whisper what into. So the Council never invited her, which meant that she could never win an ordinary, which meant that she could never apprentice to become a sage, which was what she wanted more than anything else in the world. All because Oswald had failed her. He was, he thought, as miserable as a man could be.

  Then the dragon carried Plain Alice away.

  At once, Oswald jumped up and ran for the back door. On his way through the kitchen, he grabbed the first thing that came to hand: an old iron soup ladle. He ran out into the yard, waved his ladle as menacingly as he could and screamed for the dragon to bring Plain Alice back. The dragon took no notice. He kept a firm grip on Plain Alice and beat his great leathery wings. Higher and higher he rose, paying no attention to the small, stoop-shouldered man, jumping up and down, waving a spoon and weeping bitterly.

  After a moment, Oswald gave up jumping and shouting. He tried to think what to do. Thinking was the only thing Oswald was good at. It was the reason he’d become a sage. But he could not bring his mind to focus. Seemingly of its own will, it flooded with terrible images of all the dreadful things the dragon might do to Alice.

  Part of the problem was that no one knew very much about dragons. The texts were clear that dragons liked to carry off young maidens, but no one had the least idea why. All anyone knew was that it took at least a knight, if not a lord, to rescue a young maiden from a dragon, and Oswald had no way to attract a knight to his cause. The usual reward for such a rescue was the young maiden’s hand in marriage, but Alice would flay him if he tried to marry her off to some knight. Anyway, knights wanted to marry princesses. Oh, a knight might settle for the daughter of an earl, but the daughter of a penniless sage and the heirship of a bankrupt farm would not be much of a draw. A reward of gold would do, of course, but Oswald did not have any. There was only one course left to him.