Red

The paving was the first thing he read, because his feet reached it before anything else did.

It was flat. That was not remarkable in itself; Grennet had flat stone at the crossing. What was remarkable was that it was flat everywhere, in the same way, with no track worn into it.

Every road he had ever walked told him where people went. The crossing at Grennet had a pale groove down the middle where a few hundred feet a day took the same line to the smith. The yard under the stable had a hollow by the trough. Even the old country north of the posts had its ways through, where feet had chosen and kept choosing.

This told him nothing. Nobody had chosen a line across it. There had not been time.

He crouched and put his hand on it. Cold, and dry, and so clean at the joints that the joints were barely there.

Somebody had laid this recently, all of it at once.

He got up and went in.

* * * *

The tags came back in the first street.

He had walked a day and a half through country that returned nothing, and he had come to dread the not-returning more than he would have dreaded red. Now a label rose over a small shape sitting against a wall, and then another over the shape beside it, and then the whole street lit up with them, and his chest let go of something he had not known it was holding.

Green. Pale green, most of them, the colour Maren had taught him to walk past.

Goblins.

Dozens in that street. Hundreds, when he came out into the wider ways and could see further. They were sitting in doorways and on the paving and on the low walls, in the open, in the last of the light, and they were eating.

He had seen one goblin in his life. It had been on a forest track on his second morning, thin and alone, and it had looked at his sword and then at his face and then at his sword again, and then it had run.

None of these ran.

* * * *

They looked up as he passed. That was all, at first. Heads turning, one after another down the street, the way heads turn toward a cart.

Then they started to come.

His hand went up over his shoulder before he had decided anything, and the grip was in it, and his weight had gone to the balls of his feet. He stood in the street with his arm up and the blade half drawn and waited for the first of them to commit.

None of them committed. They came the way children come toward a strange thing at a market: slowly, in a loose drift, stopping when he stopped and starting again when he started. The nearest was perhaps six feet off. It had a crust of bread in one hand and it was looking at the plate on his chest with open interest.

It put its free hand out toward the breastplate. Not to strike. To touch.

He stepped back. It let its hand fall and did not follow the step.

He let the blade back down into the scabbard, slowly, watching all of them, and not one of them did anything about it.

* * * *

He worked it through while he walked, because the arrow still pointed at the mouth and walking was what he had.

The trial said the goblin leader. It did not say goblins.

He checked every tag he passed. Green, and green, and a pale green that was nearly white. Not one of them was anything more. A leader would have to be something more, he reasoned, in the same way a warlord in one of Poppy's stories was always the largest thing in the room. None of these was the largest thing in any room.

So none of these was the thing he had been sent for.

He found that he was relieved, and he did not examine the relief. He had come north to kill one thing. He had not come north to walk through a street of small creatures eating bread and decide which of them to open.

Twenty of them were behind him by the time he reached the open space at the middle. He could hear them. Bare feet on clean stone, and the small sounds of eating, and no voices raised at all.

* * * *

The things stacked in rows were crates.

He walked past the end of a row and looked into the nearest one, because it was open and a goblin was taking something out of it.

Bread. Every loaf the same size. Every loaf the same shape, to the fold in the crust, as though a single loaf had been made with great care and then repeated until the crate was full. Beside it a barrel of water so clear he could see the staves at the bottom.

He stood and looked at the loaves for longer than a man needs to look at bread.

He had eaten a great deal of bread in five months. No two loaves had ever been the same. This was what bread would look like if somebody had described bread and never baked one.

* * * *

One of them did not follow.

She was at the edge of the open space by a crate she had stopped eating from, and she was older than the others, and her hands were the thing he noticed. They were opening and closing at her sides, slowly, the way a person tests fingers that have lately been hurt.

She was not looking at the plate. She was looking at him, at his face, and then at the arrow he could not know she could not see, and then at the mouth in the mountain.

She turned to the nearest of the others and said something.

It was not a word he had. It came out of her short and hard and twice, and he understood the shape of it without the meaning, because it was the shape of a warning, and it was the only sound in that whole town that had any force behind it.

The goblin she said it to looked at her. Then it went back to its bread.

She said it again to another, and then to a third, and none of them moved, and after the third she stopped saying it and stood with her hands opening and closing and watched him walk to the bones.

* * * *

There was nobody at the door.

He had expected somebody. A mouth like that, in a town like this, ought to have something standing at either side of it. And there were places either side where the paving was marked: two broad scuffed patches, one at each rib, where something heavy had stood still for a long time and was not standing there now.

He looked at the two patches. Then he went between the ribs and into the mountain.

* * * *

The corridor walls were skulls.

They were set on iron spikes, one above the other, as far up as the light went and as far along as he could see. Goblin skulls, mostly, by the size. Others that were larger and the wrong shape, and he did not look at those for long.

The light came from iron bowls at intervals along the floor, and it was blue.

He stopped at the first bowl and held his hand over it.

No heat. None. He lowered his palm until it was nearly in the flame, which no man does with a flame, and felt nothing but the cold of the corridor. There was no smoke either, and nothing in the bowl that could have been burning.

He watched the flame. It went up in a tongue and leaned left and fell back. Then it went up in a tongue and leaned left and fell back. He counted, because he counted things, and the flame did the same three things in the same order on every count of three, exactly, and had presumably been doing them since before he was born.

He took his hand away and went on down.

* * * *

Forty feet in, something was lying against the wall.

He saw the tag before he saw the shape, and the tag was so pale a green it was nearly white, paler than the rat in the stable at Grennet. He slowed.

It was a goblin. Small, and stringy, and curled on its side against the base of the skull wall with its knees drawn up to its chest and both arms wrapped over its head. It was making a sound. It was not a word. It was the thin continuous sound a small animal makes when it has been making it for some time and no longer knows it is doing it.

It did not look up at him.

He stood over it longer than he needed to.

Something in him knew that shape. Not the goblin. The shape. Knees to chest, arms over the head, the whole body made as small as a body can be made, and held there. He had never lain like that in his life and his body understood it from the inside, the way his hand had understood a sword grip on a forest track, and the understanding came up in him without any memory attached to it and sat there.

He stepped round it, carefully, so his boots did not touch it.

It went on making the sound behind him until the corridor turned.

* * * *

He stopped at the threshold of the chamber, because Maren had taught him to, and read it before he went in.

There was no floor.

Where the floor should have been there was a lake of something molten, bright orange and thick, moving slowly under a skin that cracked and closed. It lit the chamber from below and threw the whole ceiling into relief. The ceiling was hung with points: not stone, too regular for stone, dark and metal and every one of them aimed down.

Out of the lake, at uneven intervals, stood stones. Flat-topped, a pace or two across, leading away from where he stood toward the far side of the chamber and splitting as they went, the way paths split in a wood.

Along both walls, at head height and higher, crystals hung in the air. They were the size of a man's head and they were turning, slowly, each on its own. As he watched, they stopped turning. All of them, one after another, until every one was facing the door.

It had the look of a room that had been built for somebody who had been here before.

At the far side of the lake, on a dais that stood out of the molten stuff like an island, there was a throne.

* * * *

He stepped onto the first stone to see how the room would treat him, and the room made him heavier.

It was immediate. His legs took the plate as though somebody had doubled it while he was lifting his foot, and the breastplate pulled forward on the straps, and the shoulders that were a finger loose shifted on him. He locked his knees and stood still on the stone until the weight was a known thing instead of a surprise.

He looked at the stones ahead and read them.

Some sat slightly lower in the lake than their neighbours. Their edges were darker, where the heat had got in under them and was working at them from below. Those would not hold. He could not have said how he knew it at that distance and he did not stop to ask; it was the same reading he used on moss over nothing in the wet country, the same reading that told him a reed bed would carry him for six paces and not the seventh.

There were three ways across that he would trust. He chose the one that kept the throne on his weak side the longest.

* * * *

On the throne sat a goblin.

He did not believe it at first, and he looked at the throne again to check.

The throne was made of skulls, larger ones at the base and smaller worked into the arms, on a dais built too high for the room, for being seen in. It was made for something four times the size of the thing sitting in it.

The thing sitting in it was small. It was thin in the specific way he had seen once before on a forest track: the arms the width of branches, the chest showing its own architecture through skin that was not green at all but silver, dull as an old coin. It looked worse fed than that one had. Something black hung on it that might have been a robe, and the air over the lake shimmered with heat all the way up to the dais, and the black thing did not stir in it at all.

It was sitting forward with its elbows on its knees and its head down.

The label above it was red.

* * * *

He read it again. Then he stepped sideways on the stone to change the angle, which cost him balance under the doubled weight, and read it from there.

Red.

Green means you will manage. Yellow means think before you commit. Red means walk away, and if you cannot walk away, run, and if you cannot run, you were dead when you saw it.

The tag was the gap. He had worked that out on a road in his third week. It said nothing about the goblin and everything about the distance between the goblin and him, and the distance, according to a system that had never once been wrong in five months, was a distance he could not cross.

He looked at a creature the size of a half-grown boy, sitting in a chair with its head down, and the world told him to run.

He considered whether the tag might be wrong, honestly, and put the thought down again, because he could feel how much he wanted it to be wrong and he had learned that wanting was not evidence.

He put his hand to his collar, where the cord was, and kept it there while he thought about leaving.

He could go back past the curled thing in the corridor and out between the bones and be on the road south before full dark, and nobody would know. And then Maren would look at him, and it would not be an unkind look, and that would be the worst of it.

And underneath that, smaller: he wanted to see. Five months of a world that explained nothing, and here was the strangest thing in it sitting in a chair with a red label, and he had never once walked away from a thing he did not understand.

He took his hand off his collar.

* * * *

He was halfway across when the stone under his lead foot stopped holding him.

It did not sink. It did not tip. It had held him a moment ago, and he had tested it with his weight before committing, and then his boot simply went on in the direction he had sent it, as though the top of the stone had turned to wet ice.

He went down onto one knee at the stone's edge. The heat came up off the lake into his face, close enough to tighten the skin, and his hand found the far lip of the stone and held.

He stayed there, breathing, with the orange moving an arm's length below him.

Then he put his hand flat on the stone. It was rough, and it gripped, and it was exactly the stone it had been before.

He looked up.

The goblin on the throne had lifted its head. It had not moved otherwise. It was looking at him across the lake, with a face he could not read at that distance, and it was not surprised.

The stone had not failed. Something had been done to it, and then undone, and he had been shown the doing.

He got up. He crossed the rest of it on the path he had chosen, testing every stone, while the crystals along the walls turned to follow him and did nothing else, and the goblin watched him come the whole way.

He stepped off the last stone onto the dais, in a suit of plate that was a finger loose in the shoulder, and the thing in the chair put its hand on the arm of it.