"What kind of nonsense is that?" Orian Thornapple struggled up out of his chair, stumbling a little. He loomed over the goblin. "What kind of story was that… that rubbish? It made no sense!"
Startlingly, a wide, sharp-toothed grin appeared in the goblin's face. "For the price, it seemed a very sensible story to me, Master."
"Why were they just sitting there drinking tea? What about the flax seeds the goblin was supposed to count?"
"The boy had come down in the night and found the seeds scattered on the floor. Fearing that his father and grandfather would be angry over the clutter, he had swept them all up."
"But…" Young Thornapple scowled. It made his face much less handsome, and much less mature. "What was that babble at the end — the child sold the house? Where was his father? And you said two gold birds, but there was only one!" He grabbed the goblin's shoulder.
"Such are goblin tales," said Button, even as he swayed in the other's grip. "Can you really not guess what it was that happened to the child's father, who had tried to trick the goblin and failed? Can you not imagine where it was the second gold bird came from?"
The woman who had laughed earlier did it again, and this time she was joined by a few others, including the table of older Flower-folk. Orian Thornapple turned and glared at them, then seized both the goblin's shoulders and shook him. "You think you have made a fool of me, do you?" The little creature did not make a noise, but Mary could feel the storm-precursors of violence crackling in the air. She turned to pull the package out from beneath the register, shook off the covering cloth, and dropped the Cuckoo automatic into the pocket of her smock. "That's enough… !" she called, turning back to Thornapple and the goblin.
"So!" The Flower lordling's cry was triumphant. Even as his friends came forward, perhaps trying to prevent what was about to happen, the youth bent and snatched up something that had fallen loose and clattered to the floor near the goblin's feet. Thornapple held it up; it gleamed a smoldering yellow-green, making his fist glow. "What is this? What is this?"
"It is nothing," said the goblin, tugging at the youth's wrist in an ineffectual struggle to get it back. "It is only something to light my way home through the dark — a witchlight."
"Leave him alone," Mary said, but so quietly she barely heard herself.
"Hmmm, I'd say it looks like a weapon." Thornapple turned to his friends and the other patrons. "Wouldn't you all agree? Hasn't the Council spoken very firmly about the penalties for goblins and other noncitizens owning weapons?" He turned, holding the struggling Button at arm's length, and called to one of his companions, "Go fetch the constables. I think they'll be interested…" Suddenly he shrieked and began to shake the arm, trying to dislodge the very creature he had held captive a moment earlier. "Cursed thing! The little skin-eater bit me! He bit me! I'll kill him!" Thornapple flashed something out into his other hand — a blade, thin but wickedly long.
Mary yanked the pistol out of her smock. She was only planning to wave it around in a manner purposeful enough to stop everyone in their tracks, maybe fire it into the ceiling if necessary, but as she turned around a tall, scrawny stranger in tattered clothes came lurching up the aisle of the tavern, his eyes and mouth stretched wide with terror or pain. She lowered the pistol, confused. The newcomer staggered moaning toward the goblin and Orian Thornapple, his hands pressed against his ears as though someone had laid the grandfather of headache-curses upon him. The Flower lordling let go of the goblin, sizing up this bizarre new threat with a smirk that suggested he didn't think it amounted to much.
"Some kind of goblin-lover, eh?" Thornapple asked, lifting his long knife.
"Stop!" the apparition shouted at him. "Leave him alone! Stop all your voices! Get out of my head!" His voice rose to a shriek and something exploded with a krrrooom! like indoor thunder, turning all the world into pure white brilliance followed by utter blackness.
For a single mad instant Mary thought she had pulled the trigger of her gun by mistake, but even a Cuckoo automatic didn't make a bang like that, and after the echo died down to a painful ringing in her ears she was still sightless, down on her knees and scrabbling absently with her hands for something she couldn't even imagine. People were screaming. A lot of people were screaming.
"Who turned out the bloody lights?" Someone grabbed her leg. "Who's that?"
"Juniper? The lights are off? You mean I'm not blind?"
"The bloody power blew out."
"Thank the Grove for that. I thought I lost my eyes."
The power came back on a few minutes later. Surprisingly, almost no one had left. Orian Thornapple certainly hadn't. He was lying on his back beside his table with his throat ripped out, surrounded by an extremely wide puddle of blood and beer. The hand that had held the goblin's witchlight no longer existed: the arm now ended at the wrist, a scorched stump.
The corpse looked quite surprised.
"Bad," Mary told Juniper. "This is very, very bad."
The goblin and the scrawny fellow were gone, of course.
The bad stuff started slowly, although Mary Mosspink had no doubt it would pick up speed soon enough. The leading Councillor's son had been murdered on her premises, even if no one quite understood all that had happened. The mere fact that she was completely innocent and that the young idiot had brought it on himself would be of little account when the wheels of officialdom began to turn. But the detective constable who interviewed her did not seem unduly vengeful and she allowed herself a little hope. When Mary told him what she remembered about the goblin, he quirked his mouth in a sour smile.
"But you know his name, if he didn't lie," she said. "People always say goblins never lie."
"Everyone lies," the constable said. "I don't care what they say about goblins. But it doesn't matter." He explained to her that there were some twenty or thirty thousand members of the Button clan in the city, and that at least half of them had been called "Mud" at some point in their lives. It was a bit like saying someone was named "Hey, you."
The constables extracted statements from all the employees and customers before leaving Mary and old Juniper to clean up the mess. It wasn't until hours after young Thornapple's body had been taken away that she realized that despite what must have been a fairly pressing need to escape in the darkness, the goblin had not only taken the time to finish off Orian Thornapple, he had also remembered to take the stew and the bottle of ale he had earned with him.
12
THE HOLLYHOCK CHEST
As consciousness sluggishly returned, all Theo could remember at first was what seemed an odd dream in which he had been a sack of potatoes. No, a sack of wet potatoes, and a sack being handled rather roughly, at that.
He kept his eyes closed and tried to figure out where he was. The bed was big and soft, so it wasn't the cabin. But he didn't live with Cat and her quilts-on-top-of-quilts fetish any more, unless the breakup had also only been a dream, like the potato-sack nightmare…
Wait a second. He had been a wet potato sack carried by a two-legged elephant. And there had been a bumblebee flying around his head, talking to him in a funny little buzzy voice. All of which meant…
… Absolutely nothing. Except that it had obviously been a really weird dream…
Hold on. Buzzing. Flying. Fairy. Fairyland. Applecore!
The whole grotesque adventure came flooding back as Theo's eyes popped open. A huge white comforter was draped over his legs, and beyond that was the footboard of a large wooden bed. Good so far. But beyond the footboard sat a gray, lumpy person the size of an industrial refrigerator.