"Where is the little goat?" Freed of the mud, the python mouth formed words mellow and clear as the ringing of the purest crystal. His voice was completely at odds with his hideous appearance and peculiar enough to send an atavistic shiver down my spine.
"Goodfellow had a previous engagement," Niko said, stepping up to my side. "He sends his apologies."
"Destined to forever be forsaken," was the doleful reply. It was accompanied by a sigh as mournful as the sound of crying angels. "That is my fate. My everlasting sorrow."
He'd said that before… that he was forsaken. But then he'd said it about the Auphe. Nearly as ancient as they were, Abbagor had the original love/hate relationship with the Auphe. He loved to hate them. Loved to mutilate… to rip limb from limb, whatever he could manage. And to his pleasure, the Auphe were a good match for him. Apparently, Abby had a problem with boredom, and he'd do anything to relieve it. That his own blood was often spilled in the battles didn't bother him at all. When we'd come to him for information before, he'd attacked in the hopes of provoking the Auphe. He'd known they wanted me badly and would come to retrieve me. But he'd been denied that festive little party and had ended up with a head only a mother could love.
"That's a different look for you, Abby." My finger was taut on the shotgun's trigger. "New hairdresser?"
For once Niko didn't bury a pointed elbow in my ribs. He knew that manners alone wouldn't bring us Abbagor's cooperation. The monster had to be entertained. A bored Abbagor would no doubt try to kill us, but an amused one might play with us first. Give us what we wanted to know. It would make our despair sharper when he took us… more enjoyable.
"A memento, Aupheling, keeping your memory forever warm in my heart." He continued to float with all the grace and charm of a corpse bobbing in the river.
"I don't know what pumps your blood, Abby," I gritted with disgust, "but it's not a heart."
Niko jumped into the conversation before I could "entertain" the troll further. "We're looking for something, Abbagor. A crown. Goodfellow says there is very little that passes in this world that you are unaware of."
After a long stretch of silent contemplation, Abbagor commented with melodious complacency, "True. All falls under my benevolent eye." He stood upright, in all his self-proclaimed benevolence. Nine feet tall and nearly as broad, he might have been vaguely man-shaped, but he towered over us like a tree. Granted, it was a flesh-eating tree from hell, but I stand by the analogy. The liquid earth cascaded off him, showing more of the twining slate-colored flesh than I wanted to see. The shifting and the rustling of the tendrils made my stomach do a slow nauseated turn. With every unnatural, sinuous movement, I expected to see a flash of pale skin… human skin. Slave skin. "You may describe it to me."
Okay, it couldn't be that easy; nothing in this life was. And neither was this. We'd come here expecting the troll to put us through our paces, and the game was already under way. Abby wasn't wasting any time in screwing with our heads. "I have a picture." Niko held up the sketch with his free hand.
"Ahhh, the Calabassa," Abbagor said with instant recognition. "Barely ten thousand years old. Modern trash," he added scornfully, "from a refuse race."
And now we had a confirmed name for it. That was just peachy. "And that would be?" I asked impatiently.
"The Bassa." The head, equally as massive as the rest of him, with the upswept ears of a bat, fixed me with its unnervingly unblind gaze. "Your kind, uneducated Aupheling, wiped them out not long after that crown was made. Every male and female, every child, every egg. .And then, if I remember correctly, you ate them." His jaw unhinged into a gaping grin. "Quite tasty the Bassa were, once the poison sacs were removed. The most tender of meat, sweet and mild."
I ignored the yank of my chain. It wasn't news to me that in their day the Auphe had maimed, tortured, and killed anyone or anything that had crossed their path. They had; I hadn't. I didn't. I wouldn't.
Whether Flay agreed with me or not was a different story.
"I'm sure it was a hell of an all-you-can-eat buffet, but that's not what we want to know. If the Bassa are gone, where is the crown now?" Niko and I had decided it was best not to bring up the fact I'd already lost one. If there were two, we might luck out and Abbagor would know the location of the other. If we told him what had happened, he would no doubt lie out of pure capricious spite.
"Its purpose, if it has one, would be helpful as well," Niko added.
"Both hands out begging." The troll expelled a huge sigh, the scent of which nearly dropped me. The ointment on my lip didn't have a prayer of blocking that out. I smelled… God, so many things. Vomit and bile, blood and the adrenaline of hearts terrorized to their physical limits. Ripe decay and the sloughing of rotting skin. I smelled a graveyard of the half-dead, I smelled Abbagor's victims. Viciously, I bit my lower lip until I reached a precarious truce with my own bile.
He was looking at me. I don't know how I knew that, but he was. "You want and want, greedy little half-breed, but what do you give?" Tendrils began to loosen from Abbagor's torso with their questing tips twitching in parody of a sniffing motion as they hung in the air.
"I don't know, Abby. You have my charming company. What else do you want?" I demanded, baring teeth in a humorless rictus of a grin. He wanted to play all right. But for every minute he amused himself, George spent that same minute with Caleb. And that put a serious crimp in my Abbagor fun-and-games tolerance level.
"I want… I want…" he mused as the tentacles crept closer to us slowly and cautiously, showing none of the speed of before. "I want to touch. I want to taste. I want to know what I knew before. I want to know the part of me that is gone." The tendrils began to drift toward Niko and it hit me in an explosion of fear and rage.
Nik. He wanted Nik.
"No way," I snarled, immediately putting a pound of pressure on a two-pound trigger. "No fucking way."
"Be calm, Aupheling." Soothing, so soothing… not. "I only wish to touch. I've missed my fair-haired thrall."
I didn't need any college to know that "thrall" was a fancy word for slave. I'd have to remember to tell Niko that the next time he nagged me about higher education. "Then touch yourself, you piece of shit. Just wait until we're gone to do it." The shotgun was already cocked and I raised the muzzle to point directly at Abbagor's face.
Suddenly disinterested, the troll turned his head away. "That is my price. A touch for what only I know. Pay or no, I care not."
"I could make you care, you son of a bitch." The pound of pressure had gone to one and a half when Niko's hand closed on my shoulder.
"Wait," he ordered calmly.
"No, Nik. Absolutely not." I didn't have to hear the words to know what my brother was going to say. And I didn't have to hear them to say no.
"It's only a touch, Cal," he pointed out in his most practical tone. Reasonable, logical, and a complete and utter lie. The lightest of brushes from Abbagor's tendrils could and had resulted in less-than-innocent things. On our first meeting, he had dragged me at a breakneck speed by my ensnared arms and had cocooned Niko so quickly that my brother had disappeared right before my eyes. He had been lost inside Abbagor. He had been gone. A touch wasn't simply a touch with Abbagor, creepy PSAs aside. And no matter how composed Niko might appear on the outside, he had to be screaming on the inside. I know I would've been. Shit, I was, and I'd only seen what had happened to Niko. I hadn't lived through it as he had.