An Inspector Camden Ironbell Story
by
Martyn Winters
The Ballad of the Field at Caer Dhun. James Jones-Jones Pryce
High over Caer Dhun, the dragons wheeled,
Indifferent to the men below,
Curious only how the field
Would turn, and which way bones would go.
A ragged army, one hundred strong,
Faced down a foe of teeth and song.
A last redoubt
A final stand
A line where Men and Gnomes,
Shoulder to shoulder,
Cried “Onward!” with one voice and hand
A singular band
To defend their homes
Take no prisoners, show no fear
This is the place, this is here.
The goblin host came down the hill,
Ten thousand strong, and louder still,
With trumpets cracked and banners torn
And every weapon ever worn.
A tide
A flood
A press of teeth and rusted blade
That broke against the line we made
Of mud
And blood
And men who would not stand aside.
By noon, the field was dark with crows.
By dusk, the crows had ceased to come,
For even crows will turn from those
Whose names are sung, but not by some.
Above it all, the dragons watched.
They did not stoop.
They did not call.
They marked the field, and marked the cost,
And took no side, and saw it all.
Ask the goblin, where your fathers fell?
He will not answer.
He knows well.
Ask the goblin, where your brothers lie?
He will not meet a stranger’s eye.
There is a field he will not name,
There is a wind he will not face,
There is a song that bears the shame
Of all his fathers, all his race.
And we who stood, and we who fell
At Caer Dhun field, where dragons low,
We do not boast, we do not tell.
We do not need the world to know.
But mark this, goblin, mark this well:
The gnomes remember.
So do we. The field is green.
The wind is still.
The bones beneath remember thee.
Part 1
Ironbell paused outside the council chamber long enough to assess his potential escape routes. Preparedness, even in friendly territory, came as second nature to him. As a practitioner of Gnome-Fu, he lived by the motto, “Better to forestall than to forsake.” It’s why he still wore his original skin.
He noted the doors were oak, banded in iron, and stood half a head taller than was strictly necessary. The brass handles had been polished that morning, Ironbell could see faint traces of Brassie on them, but not the hinges, which meant, he realised, the council’s budget was being watched. He could hear voices through the wood. Four of them. One was raised, the second was placating, another was coughing in a manner that suggested forty cigarettes a day and no intention of cutting back, and one said very little, just interjections in careful, measured tones. That last one interested him most.
He pushed the doors open and strode in.
The chamber was warmer than the corridor and smelt of burning paraffin, stale cigarette smoke, and the faint almond note of a recently opened tin of Cherry Bakewells. Through the western windows, sunlight fell in slabs, lighting up motes of dust as they turned in the air above the council table. Ironbell registered this automatically, without any conscious effort of will. A trained reflex. Without looking up, he crossed the parquet at his normal pace, the click of his heels announcing him. Stealth was not a requirement on this occasion.
Heads turned. Four of them, as he expected. The Queen was at the top of the table, a sheaf of papers in front of her so thick she had been forced to pinion one corner of it with a dagger. She had been reading, and Ironbell could see she had not been enjoying it. There were dark patches under her eyes that powder had not entirely covered, and she had been twisting the ring on her left hand. Ironbell put both observations in his cognitive reserve.
She glared at Ironbell.
“This,” she began, with the chilly precision of monarchs everywhere, “is a meeting of the Royal Council. To which only members and invited guests are admitted. And what in the seven cauldrons of Baphomet’s laundry do you think you are—”
He pulled back his hood.
He watched the emotions on her face shift from imperious dismissal to recognition and acceptance, followed by a brief and very private relief that she covered almost immediately.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh, Inspector Ironbell. I hadn’t expected to see you. Hoped, perhaps. But not anticipated.”
He knelt at her side, took her hand, kissed it, and rose again. The kiss lasted exactly as long as protocol required. The fine line between familiarity and insolence.
“Ma’am,” he said. “I believe you have a problem.”
“Ironbell?”
The voice came from his left. Ironbell turned and considered his new interlocutor. The man was tall, fair, and forty, with the slightly stooped posture of someone who spent his days reading. The manner of his attire was county practical, a season or two out of date, but otherwise good. The man had stood up from his chair and leaned forward while pressing both palms on the table. Theatrical, thought Ironbell, almost practised courtroom manner.
“THE Inspector Ironbell? Of the Gnome Office?”
“I have that honour, sir. To whom am I speaking?”
“Nathaniel Clarke. Chief Liar to the Court of Queen Lysandra Elowen Lumina.”
Ironbell allowed himself a single raised eyebrow. “Liar?”
“Ye-es.” Clarke’s mouth tightened.
A faint twitch of Ironbell’s eyebrow nearly gave away his amusement. There it is, Ironbell thought; the grievance. The man obviously kept it polished and ready to hand.
“I am, in fact, a lawyer,” Clarke continued. “It’s a long story, but suffice it to say the public was permitted to vote on our titles.”
“Ah.” Ironbell nodded. “One should never let the public loose on anything. Not without first controlling the options.”
He let his eyes travel along the table. The chamber, he noted, had been constructed for humans; as had the chairs; even the inkwells had been placed at human-reaching distance. Brycheiniog’s council had not been adjusted in some time. He filed that away, too.
Halfway down the table sat a small, but sturdy woman, wearing a black high-necked coat. She was smoking a cigarette. Ironbell estimated her age as between late thirties and middle fifties, though it was difficult to be certain through the smoke. Her hands were small and motionless, resting on the surface of the table, but somehow, Ironbell thought, they looked as capable as finely tuned instruments. Her eyes were anything but small; dark brown, large, and crystal clear, displaying an intelligence the rest of her appearance belied and a sense of danger constrained only by the thinnest of skins. She was clearly Chinese by ancestry, which was in itself a curiosity this far west of the trade routes. An open biscuit tin sat in front of her; it was a battered red container imprinted with dragon motifs. Next to the tin sat an overflowing ashtray; Ironbell counted twenty-two cigarette butts in it. This took him less time to observe than it would have taken the woman to draw breath. However, and this was his final and most startling note: she didn’t. Draw breath, that is.
Ahah, he thought. A vampire. He amended his estimate of her age by a factor of five.
“Jin,” she said, her voice a thin whisper. “Hua Jin.”
She slid the tin across the polished oak towards him. “You wan’ a sweet-n-sour Cherry Bakewell?”
“Jin represents the trades on the council,” the Queen said, answering the question Ironbell had not asked. He recalled, from somewhere in the back of his mind where he kept information of that sort, that she had done this since she was a child. There had been a troll-wife nanny called Brog who had tried to break her of it, with significant lack of success and a notable amount of shouting. Brog was, the last he had heard, a stanchion on the Newport bypass. The fae, especially the Tylwth Teg, did not forget. Trolls, regrettably for trollkind, were mostly too stupid to realise this. “Please, Inspector. Take a seat.”
He sat. The chair, being constructed with humans in mind, was too tall. Shifting forward until his boots touched the floor, Ironbell ignored this. He was used to making accommodations with humans’ propensity to overlook the broad physical variances of the new age.
The fourth man at the table, on Ironbell’s left, had not spoken. He was portly and pink, sixtyish, with the soft hands of a man who had not done physical work in a long time and the patient eyes of someone who had been told a great many things in confidence. A priest, then, Ironbell decided even before the introduction. The cassock, when revealed by the man leaning into the lamplight, confirmed it.
“Father Alaric Lysander,” the priest said, extending his hand. “I represent the spiritual dimension of the kingdom on the council.”
“Not for the bloody Confucians, you don’t,” said Jin, around her cigarette. “They can’t stand you.”
“There is only one Confucian in the kingdom, madam,” returned the priest mildly. “And that, I believe, is yourself.”
“Damn right, papist bottom-tissue.” Jin stubbed out her cigarette in the overcrowded ashtray and lit another.
Ironbell shook the priest’s hand. The grip was firmer than he had expected. He revised his estimate of Father Alaric’s career upwards by some years and one or two parishes. The priest pressed a note into his hand, one which, upon later examination, just said, “Beware the undead” in the neat hand of a writer familiar with using a pen with great regularity.
“Now, now,” said the Queen, her tone that of a woman who chaired this meeting fortnightly. “A little order, please. We have serious matters to discuss.”
She turned to Ironbell. “Inspector. Allow me to bring you up to speed.”
He made a sound that was neither agreement nor encouragement. He had two reasons for the noise. The first was that he already knew most of what she was about to tell him; the second was that he wanted to hear it told in her words, and in front of these three, because the way a story was told in company was almost always, in his estimation, more useful than the story itself.
She drew a breath. “It’s the Goblins. They have kidnapped Princess Tolymundy. And they’ve sent a list of demands.”
“I see.” He stroked his beard, slowly, partly because it gave him something to do with his hands and partly because people tended to keep talking when he did. No one spoke. He went on. “Tolymundy. Your eldest. Heir to the throne of the Tylwyth Teg?”
“Correct.”
He watched her eyes. There was a wet shine at the rim of them that she blinked back at once. Anger, mostly, with the fear underneath it. He had seen this before in the parents of missing children; what he had not seen was the same emotion in a queen, especially not the queen of the Tylwth Teg.
“If they harm her, Inspector,” she said, “I will have no choice. I will wage war upon the vile bum-fringes.”
Ironbell let the silence linger for a moment. Then, with a degree of caution, he said: “Could you not accede to their demands?”
He had asked the question in order to watch the answers, not because he wanted one. He got what he had come for.
Clarke went up first, which was about what Ironbell had expected. “I say, Inspector. Do you have any conception of what you are asking? The spike-heads have sent a twenty-page list. Ranging from the right of droit du seigneur over every maiden in the kingdom, to an unending free supply of Madam Jin’s Chow Mein Welsh-cakes.”
“Yeah,” said Jin, exhaling smoke. “Not gonna happen, bucko. No-one is gonna droit this maiden.”
“I’m sorry, Inspector,” Father Alaric added, folding his hands across his cassock. “But if we accede to the demands of terrorists, where, pray, does it end?”
Ironbell did not answer at once. He had what he needed to place his witnesses into neat categories: Clarke would frame the situation with lawyerly precision, Jin would refuse to accept defeat, and Father Alaric would frame the refusal in moral terms without actually presenting an alternative. The Queen, when the moment came, he realised, would not stand in his way, and back him to the hilt. Reading these four faces took less than three minutes; even if reading faces was his métier, he congratulated himself on the rapidity of his assessment.
“I think,” he said, when he judged the silence had run the course of usefulness, “I may have an answer.”
All four of them looked at him. He noted, with quiet satisfaction, that even Jin had let her cigarette burn untended for the first time since he had entered the room.
“I shall require,” he said, “a camel. Two bags of sawdust. A train ticket to Manchester. And a complete set of James Jones-Jones Pryce’s war poems.”
The Queen’s hand went to her mouth. “You’re not going to—”
He waited.
“I mean. You can’t. Not even I would dare—”
“I can,” Ironbell said, and reached across to the biscuit tin. He chose a Bakewell with care, lifted it, and bit into it. The pastry was good and the filling was excellent. The chilli, when it arrived, was as unmistakable as it was unexpected, and somehow, judged entirely to perfection. He made a small adjustment to his existing assessment of Madam Jin. Not just any old vampire. “And I must.”
He chewed. “Mmm. Very nice, Madam Jin.”
“You knows it,” she said, and winked at him. He inclined his head a quarter of an inch. From the look on her face, Ironbell guessed Jin believed goblins were only good for one thing: kindling. And she had spotted that he intended to be the other thing: the fire. Judging by her smile, Jin approved.
“Do we,” asked the Queen, and he heard the change in her voice before he turned to look at her, “do we get a modicum of retribution afterwards?”
He considered her properly for the first time since he had sat down. The tears were gone now. What had replaced them was something he had been hoping not to see but had expected anyway. He had been attending a function at Elowen’s court the summer of the market town incident in the Vale. Or more pointedly, the former market town. Subsequently, he had read the reports of what happened on the southern coast. They weren’t pretty, and he had reasons of his own to wish that the words “Elowen Lumina” and “retribution” should not appear in the same sentence, or at least, as rarely as could be managed.
“You shall, ma’am,” he said. “Only—”
“Yes?”
“Please tone down the fireworks. If you would.”
She smiled. He had been hoping she would not, and was not surprised that she did. It was a smile that augured poorly for someone, and on the present evidence, he thought, for a great many someones. Across the table he saw Father Alaric cross himself, which suggested the priest had also been at court the year of the market town incident. Clarke was making a note in the margin of the demands. Jin, with the unhurried economy of a woman who had decided some while ago that very little in this world was worth hurrying for, lit another cigarette and watched him.
Ironbell finished his Bakewell, set the napkin down, and stood. The chair, he noted, had been worse than it had looked.
Somewhere over the northern hills, Ironbell reflected, a goblin warlord was at this moment composing his twenty-first demand. He intended that he should not get to send it.
“About that camel, it has to be obedient,” he said. “And while we’re on the subject of supplies, may I have a word with your majesty in private about the composition of the sawdust? I have a very specific requirement.”
Part Two
Ironbell crossed the border into goblin country on the third afternoon, about ten after three owls, but he noticed it sidling up to his awareness in the morning. It was like a springtime upper respiratory infection: very few symptoms at first, but as soon as you think it’s gone away, it pours hot lava into your chest. The grass grew shorter and spikier, the trees thinned into random sticks, mostly pointing the way out, and the flies increased both numerically and in persistence. He swatted one away as it tried to land on his nose.
“Oh, very nice,” it said, buzzing around his face in haphazard orbits that a perceptive geometrist would recognise as satisfying an arcane implicit equation in Cartesian coordinates. “There I am doing my very best to draw your attention to the Conchoids of de Sluze, and you deflect my arcnode into a non-polar form.”
“Are you making references to the bulbosity of my nose?” Ironbell asked it. He raised an eyebrow.
The fly perched between the camel’s ears. “Might be.”
“Because,” Ironbell went on, “that might be regarded in some parts as being dangerously terminal.”
“Consider it advisory,” the fly responded as it rubbed its front legs together. “You might want to contemplate a prosthesis before continuing on your present sojourn.”
“Do you think I might be recognised?”
“Far be it for me to say, Inspector, but the gobs might not want a Lundeinjon DI poking around in their affairs,” it said, giving a quick buzz of its wings.
“And if I do want to be recognised?”
“Ooh, gotcha,” the fly said. Flies can’t wink, but this one did a fairly good simulacrum of one. “Anyway, consider yourself warned. Now I’ve got to…”
“Fly?” Ironbell said as he watched it zig-zag away in a neat Folium of Descartes, towards an emaciated cow masticating its way through some scrub.
“You don’t wanna do that…” the fly said to the cow.
Ironbell let the camel choose its own pace, which it did with grim determination. Hurry was clearly not in its vocabulary, if indeed it had one at all. In his experience, few animals resisted conversation quite like a camel. Sullen silence was bred into them. No-one wants a voluble ride when crossing a desert.
For the twenty-sixth time that morning, he patted his coat, assuring himself that buttoned inside his inner pocket sat the Manchester train ticket, where it would stay dry no matter what the weather brought. The bags of sawdust rode behind him. He checked them at intervals. They weren’t going anywhere, but the act of checking kept him busy, and Ironbell found busyness a useful distraction. James Jones-Jones Pryce’s war poems, in a leather wallet, rode in the saddlebag on his left. A glance sufficed to reassure him that the bag was still buckled securely.
Reaching down, he unbuckled it and slid the slim volume out, flicking through the pages. He had already read the poems twice on the road, looking for one line in particular. Finding it on the first morning, he reread it on the second; Ironbell thought of it as checking the edge of a knife he intended using. Once more to fix it in my head, he thought.
The road wound north-east through low hills. Half a mile after the border, behind a ragged hedge to his right, he caught the low buzz of an argument. He let the camel walk on without turning his head. The argument concerned, he gathered from the fragments, was about whose turn it was to hold the map. The map itself appeared to be in dispute. There was also some question about whether the map was the right way up. A goblin scouting party, then, Ironbell thought. Two men short of a working compass and one rank short of a captain. He filed the observation.
At the top of the next rise, a sign hove into view.
WEELCOME TO THE GOBLIN PATRIARCHAL INSUBSTANTIATE
TRESSPASSERS WILL BE IMPOUNDED
The lettering had clearly been done by a hand more confident with quantities than with words, with a demonstrable lack of familiarity with the direction letters should point, and a large, double-outlined W that fell off one side of the sign.
Beneath, in smaller script, were the words:
BY ORDER
DISOBEY AT YOUR PERIL
Ironbell read it with mild amusement. Goblins practised bureaucracy with an artistic endeavour even humans would gasp at, and they invented the Ministry of War Pensions. It was said there were two kinds of goblin: warriors and filers. Contrary to expectations, the former lived in fear of the latter.
He stopped on the rise to adjust the camel’s saddle. The wind, which had been working steadily at his cloak all afternoon, dropped. He waited a moment, hand on the girth, listening. The wind, in his experience, did not drop on its own account in the countryside when it was this open. He listened carefully, but heard nothing further. That, too, made a telling point. Only one kind of being could make the wind drop with just their proximity. He had been aware of her since the second mile but had decided not to say anything. A second pair of fangs was no inconvenience in goblin country.
Resuming his journey without looking back, he checked the sawdust a third time, and his mind, by the route minds take when they are travelling and have time to spare, returned to the council chamber, specifically to the moment when he had risen to leave. The Queen had risen at once. Madam Jin had risen and was lighting a fresh cigarette. Clarke had risen and was already gathering his papers. Father Alaric had been the last to step away from the table, and Ironbell, half-turned in the doorway, had registered that the priest was looking down at the demands. He wasn’t reading them, just looking at them, the way a man looks at a page he has read before and is committing it again to memory. The priest looked up and narrowed his eyes, just as Ironbell placed his Manchester ticket carefully into his inner pocket.
Ironbell had not commented; he had merely filed it away.
The goblin stronghold came into view in the late afternoon, against a sky the colour of cold ash stretching from horizon to horizon.
It was a fortress in a loose and generous sense of the word. Four crooked towers, each leaning slightly towards a different neighbour, were connected by rope bridges that swayed in the still air. A trebuchet, painted in jarring colours, bore the legend NOT FOR THROWING GOBLINS, BY ORDEER. A stack of empty mead barrels, hurriedly rolled against the southern wall, suggested post-revelry incapacity was a greater determinant than planning in their placement. Ironbell didn’t bother counting; one glance told him there was enough to befuddle the entire horde several times over.
He was greeted at the gate by a goblin herald whose helmet had been issued for a larger head. “Where do you think you’re going, fatso?”
The helmet’s eye-slit covered the bridge of his nose and rotated as he looked from side to side.
A second herald pushed him out of the way and produced a scroll, which unrolled itself down his front, across his boots, and into a small puddle. He read from it in the unsure voice of a creature who had memorised the opening sentence and was hoping it would suffice.
“Not like that, Horval,” he said, straightening up to his full four feet eight inches. “Halt. Who approaches the gates of—”
“Ironbell,” said Ironbell. “Inspector. Of the Gnome Office. I am expected.”
The herald considered this, his mouth fringes quivering in confusion.
“You’re not on fire,” the first herald said, with obvious disappointment.
“No.”
“We were told there would be a dragon.”
“I am afraid there is no dragon.”
“Oh.” The helmet shifted as he looked at his colleague miserably. “Well, you’d better come in then.”
Ironbell led the camel through the gate at a steady walk. To one side of the entry, on a small wooden box, sat a sentry. The sentry was looking past Ironbell, out into the dusk beyond the road, with a small frown of mild puzzlement. As Ironbell drew level, the sentry shrugged, just slightly, and went back to picking at something on his thumbnail. The sentry, Ironbell noted, was probably paid by the hour, hence his lack of curiosity towards the hints of an eerie presence hovering in the near distance. He filed it. Lack of commitment was usable.
Adjusting his hood, Ironbell walked into the courtyard and looked around. What he saw did not surprise him. The negotiation tent stood at the centre of the encampment, larger than the towers and noticeably better-maintained. He rather liked the freshly brushed tassels, in fact, although the gold lamé outer drapery was, in Ironbell’s opinion, ever so slightly gauche. He stepped inside the tent and came face-to-face with Determiner Chaq Bombastic, Herder of the Unwearied, Eyes of the Far-seeing, Lord of the Horde. All this was announced by the herald who had followed Ironbell doggedly, from the gate to the tent, dodging past him at the last second to position himself to make the announcement.
Chaq sat at an extended trestle table, his long nails tapping out a rhythm on the surface, and his lip fringes moving slightly to some unheard melody. Chaq was a goblin of standing in his community, by which one means that he was the only one of them tall enough to see over the table, but only when actually standing, which is why he sat on three five-inch-thick cushions atop his chair. Ironbell wondered why the goblins hadn’t just made the chair taller.
He had a face like a hatchet, with a nose that clearly belonged to someone else, possibly another lifeform entirely, and the close-set, calculating eyes of somebody who had spent his life selling things he did not own. The table in front of him was covered with the debris of a long afternoon: three half-eaten fricasseed rats, a map drawn in crayon on the back of a parking summons, a small bell labelled PRESS FOR ENFORCEMENT, and the list of demands, now expanded to twenty-seven pages, and held together with what passed for a bulldog clip, inasmuch as it was an actual bulldog, albeit one that had received the attentions of a taxidermist.
At the back of the tent, on a low stool, sat the clerk. He had a ledger open in his lap, two more on the floor beside him, and a stack of completed forms on a small writing board across his knees. He was muttering. Ironbell, who had a long-standing respect for clerks of all species, made a polite half-nod in his direction. The clerk did not look up.
“Ah,” said Chaq, with a wet smile. “The famous Inspector Ironbell. We have heard much.”
“I gather you have the princess,” Ironbell responded, his voice firm but flat.
“Oh yes, dammit. We do. We have A princess, anyway.” Chaq gestured grandly to his left, where a goblin in a long blonde wig and an ill-fitting dress sat in a chair, holding a teacup. The goblin essayed a curtsey, which is a difficult manoeuvre when seated. “Her Royal Highness Princess Tolymundy, of the Tylwth Teg.”
Ironbell looked at the goblin posing as Tolymundy. The goblin looked back, defiantly, from beneath a fringe of horsehair. Ironbell raised an eyebrow and cocked his head, but said nothing.
There was a small, alarmed scuffling at the back of the tent. The clerk made a mark in his ledger, and, Ironbell noted, Chaq’s wet smile became fractionally drier. He had caught Ironbell’s look and realised his plan to infiltrate the royal court with an injudiciously contrived facsimile didn’t have legs.
“A stand-in,” Chaq said hastily. “For security reasons. The real princess is, ah, elsewhere. Quite safe. Quite comfortable. In a tower of the utmost—”
“Scaffolding,” said Ironbell.
Chaq paused. “I beg your pardon?”
“I saw it through the gap in your rear tent flap. The scaffolding tower. Behind the kitchen. Held together, if I am not mistaken, with Gaffer Tape.”
Chaq’s eyes flickered briefly to the tent flap, then back. He grinned sheepishly.
“That is a different tower,” he said, trying to sound firm and decisive. Failing, but points for trying, thought Ironbell.
“Of course,” said Ironbell, stroking his beard. “My apologies.”
Ironbell let his gaze travel across the table while Chaq recovered, and while he was at it, he catalogued the rest of the tent. The furnace in the corner was overheating; the canvas above it had taken on a slight scorch. The fireworks crate by the kitchen tent next door was visible through the same gap as the scaffolding, stored, with goblin tidiness, directly beside the stove.
The camel, outside, had begun to chew through its rope with an air of long-considered intent.
The herald’s left boot, where it appeared in Ironbell’s peripheral vision, was smoking. And the clerk’s pile of forms, Ironbell saw, was shrinking. As he watched, a small goblin in a green sash crossed the back of the tent, took a single completed form from the top of the clerk’s pile, and slipped out through the rear flap. The clerk did not look up. He was used to it. Ironbell catalogued the goblin’s face, the green sash, and the direction of his departure.
On the top of the clerk’s remaining pile, just visible at this distance, sat a single sheet of correspondence. The handwriting was familiar. Ironbell did not look at it twice. He had trained himself not to react to the things he most needed to remember.
On the corner of Chaq’s table, half hidden behind one of the rats, sat a small silver pyx, and, Ironbell noted, it had been recently polished. He registered it without expression; goblins, in general, did not own pyxes.
Chaq had recovered. He folded his hands in front of him, with the expansive air of a man about to make a rehearsed speech.
“Inspector, you have come to negotiate. Some would say that is very brave. I regard it as very gnomish. But you have made one small error.” He smiled, caught Ironbell’s eye, and allowed his smile to widen. The smile, Ironbell noted, had several more teeth in it than seemed structurally necessary. “You have come alone.”
“I have.”
“And so, Inspector, we shall ransom you also. We shall demand,” and here Chaq began to count off on his fingers, “firstly, more concessions. Secondly, the camel, which we shall keep as a war beast. Thirdly, the train ticket to Manchester, which is hidden in your coat pocket. I can see no use for it, except perhaps that I can use it as a bookmark. And fourthly—”
“The sawdust?”
“The sawdust,” Chaq agreed. He paused, suspicion creeping across his face. “We have not yet decided about the sawdust. Tie him up.”
Two goblin guards, who had been waiting for this moment with the patient stillness of goblins who had been given specific instructions they could not only comprehend but could, in reasonable circumstances, carry out, came forward and tied Ironbell to a chair. The chair, even before they had finished, creaked ominously under the weight of its own modest construction materials. Ironbell did not resist. Instead, he sat with the calm of a man who had planned for exactly this contingency, and watched the goblins congratulate themselves on their brilliance.
The gnome waited until the celebration had subsided, until the clerk, in the back of the tent, had paused his muttering, and in particular, he waited until the small goblin in the green sash had slipped back in through the rear flap and resumed his work.
Then, in a voice pitched just a fraction louder than the conversation in the tent required, Ironbell said:
“There is a field he will not name. There is a wind he will not face.”
The effect was as immediate as it was instructive. Silence descended. Chaq’s smile, which had, until then, been as radiant as it was possible for a goblin to achieve, faltered. The two goblin guards exchanged a look. A goblin standing near the central tent-pole, who had not previously moved, took a small involuntary step backwards. And at the rear of the tent, by the back flap, a second goblin shivered and glanced out into the dusk. He looked for slightly too long, and then back, and then out again. He could not seem to decide whether he had seen something or merely thought he had.
Ironbell did not need to look at the tent flap a second time. He had already confirmed not only the line of poetry’s effectiveness, but also the goblins’ weakness, and his own second pair of eyes.
He allowed himself a small smile.
“If it is not an imposition,” he said, his voice cutting through the indrawn breaths, “I wonder whether I might trouble you for a glass of water.”
The already silent tent went still.
Chaq, who had been on the verge of saying something he might have regarded as smart, hesitated. He looked at the guards, and they looked back at him with the blankness of men whose job description did not include fetching water. Chaq turned his gaze to the clerk, who did not look up, his pen paused over the ledger. Chaq looked at the fake princess, who had been trying, with limited success, to hold her teacup elegantly. The wigged goblin glanced around the room, humming to herself, and settled her eyes on the tent wall.
“No,” said Chaq finally.
“Ah,” said Ironbell. He nodded slowly, as if a small but useful confirmation had just arrived. Which, of course, it had.
Outside the tent, a small commotion erupted. The camel, having spent some minutes considering its position, had concluded that it was no longer tenable. So, it had chewed through the last fibre of its tether and strolled, with the patient inevitability of a creature who had decided enough was enough, past the open tent flap, across the central square, and out through the main gate. No goblin moved to stop it, largely because none of them had been issued the form for stopping camels. Well, none but Ulk, Chaq’s personal enforcer, but he was dealing with other matters in a small shed near the rear of the compound.
Ironbell watched it go. Then, for the first time since he had entered the tent, he allowed himself a small frown.
The handwriting on the clerk’s correspondence had been troubling him for some minutes. He had the data, in fact, he had it from the moment he sat down. He could not, as yet, make it fit. He let the puzzle rotate in his mind, viewing it from all sides, turning it gently, the way he would turn a stone to see which side has the fossil. There was either a piece missing or one in the wrong place, and at present, he could not tell which.
He tucked the puzzle away, behind everything else, to be returned to.
“Very well,” he said.
Part Three
Chaq, who had been on the verge of saying something triumphant, was, for once, lost for words. Ironbell had capitulated too easily. He paused, considered his options, and made the only decision a goblin warlord of his standing could make under the circumstances. He rang the small bell labelled PRESS FOR ENFORCEMENT.
Nothing happened.
He rang it again, trying to suppress the burgeoning sense of irritation that was flowering in his chest.
“Ulk!” he shouted, after the third unrewarded ring. “Dammit, where is that lumbering oaf, Ulk?”
“Retrieving the camel, Determiner,” said the clerk, without looking up.
“The what?”
“The camel, sir. It has, ah, departed.”
Chaq’s eyes swivelled towards the open tent flap, then back to Ironbell, then to the clerk, then to the bell, in a sequence that suggested his brain was akin to a small administrative department experiencing a sudden circumlocutory policy statement handed down from above. He set the bell down with deliberate care.
“Why,” he said, “is Ulk retrieving the camel?”
“You issued the order, sir. Form GP-114, sub-clause B. Strays and Unauthorised Departures.”
“I didn’t issue any such—”
“With respect, Determiner, you did. Last Wednesday.” The clerk paused, turned a page, and read in the careful tone of a man who had spent his life being correct in small ways at the expense of being liked in any way at all. “‘Any beast departing the encampment without due cause shall be retrieved by the duty Form Officer, who shall not return without it on pain of demotion.’ Ulk is the duty Form Officer, sir. He has, accordingly, gone.”
“Dammit, just send someone after Ulk.”
“That would require a Form GP-114-A, sir. Sub-clause D. Pursuit of a Form Officer in pursuit of—”
“Just send someone.”
The clerk inclined his head, made a small note, and did not move.
Ironbell, in his chair, allowed himself the briefest internal smile. The clerks, in his experience, were always the most interesting people in any room. The warriors fought because they had been told to, and the leaders led because they had been lucky, or unlucky, enough, depending on your perspective and proximity to sharp objects, to clamber over everyone else to get to the top. The clerks, however, wanted to do what they did. It took a special kind of petty, stubborn, parentless entity to want to be a bureaucrat. They ran the world, and did so by means of the patient application of forms that no one had read carefully enough to argue with. This one, Ironbell observed, had a particularly impenetrable barrier. Defying the Determiner would have consequences, usually of the ceasing-to-exist kind, but here he was not just showing insubordination, but actually calmly ignoring the raging goblin.
As was his practice, Ironbell filed this observation.
The fake princess in the chair beside Chaq lifted her teacup, sipped at it with rehearsed delicacy, set it down, and met Ironbell’s eyes. There was, he noted, very little of the princess about her, and a great deal of someone who had been doing this job for three days but had reached the end of her patience with it on the first morning.
Ironbell noticed the goblin in the green sash had returned with a fresh form clutched in his fist, and was now slipping it into the clerk’s pile.
Outside, the camel was making its way south down a country lane with the serene certainty of a creature that saw things in binary form, comprising its problem and not its problem, and had concluded the present arrangement no longer suited it. Chaq’s enforcer, Ulk, somewhere behind it, was running, shouting, and panting in roughly equal measure. Even at the camel’s measured stroll, Ulk was losing ground, mostly because his boots were half a size too small, and he was weighed down with roughly fifty pounds of armour.
The fireworks crate, by the kitchen tent, had begun to smoulder.
Ironbell had observed it upon entry. He had noticed the furnace, the canvas, the proximities, and the angle of the wind, and he had arranged his chair — just prior to the guards tying him to it — so that the crate was in his peripheral vision and the rear flap was directly behind him. The chair had been worse than it had looked: too big for a gnome, like the council chamber chair, but unlike its very distant cousin, it was not constructed of solid, trustworthy oak. In its way, however, it was exactly bad enough for Ironbell’s purposes.
He shifted his weight, very slightly, and the chair, with the long-suffering creak of cheap and badly seasoned pine, gave another quarter-inch.
The first firework went off at approximately the moment Chaq was instructing the clerk, for the fourth time and at steadily increasing volumes, to send someone after Ulk. It went up through the kitchen tent’s roof, taking a substantial portion of the canvas with it, and exploded directly above the negotiation tent in a shower of green and gold sparks that the goblins, despite themselves, would later agree had been rather pretty. The second firework went sideways, on a trajectory of its own choosing, and embedded itself in the trebuchet labelled NOT FOR THROWING GOBLINS. Unfortunately for Abink, a trainee warrior, who was having a break and eating his mouse and pickle sandwiches while lounging in the cradle at the business end of the device, the firework burned through the retaining rope, launched him over the ramparts and out across the fetid lake bordering the encampment. He got about halfway. Goblins aren’t good swimmers, and certainly not when weighed down by iron breastplates. The last thought to pass through Abink’s head was, “I’m sure I’ve forgotten to turn the gas off.”
The third explosion, which had not been a firework but a bag of decorative flash powder stored adjacent to the crate for reasons no goblin could subsequently account for, did not so much explode as redistribute itself across the encampment in a single, unanimous bang. That’s when Abink’s last thought proved to be accurate. He had been making toast that morning by holding mud-brod slices over a naked flame. When he finished, he had indeed forgotten to turn the gas tap to the off position, largely because the intermittent supply had failed and the flame had died. The thing about intermittency is its propensity to change its state unexpectedly. The gas turned back on again, only this time without the flame to check its flow. The kitchen tent roof filled with gas, which was fine, until fireworks started streaking through it. The subsequent explosion was as glorious as it was unexpected.
In the negotiation tent, several things happened at once.
The two guards turned, by instinct, towards the noise. Chaq leapt to his feet, knocking over a fricasseed rat. The clerk, who had not flinched, made a small note. The fake princess reached down beside her chair, retrieved a small paring knife she had stashed beneath the cushion, and sliced through the ropes binding Ironbell’s wrists in a single motion.
“Go,” she said, in a voice quite unlike the one she had been affecting. She held out the horsehair wig. “And take this with you, you might find it useful. I’m done with this nonsense.”
“Madam,” said Ironbell. “I am in your debt.”
“Try the back flap,” she said with a wink. “Mind the clerk.”
He was, in fact, already moving. He rose from the chair, which collapsed behind him into broken shards of pine. The goblin in the green sash, halfway through conveying another form, registered Ironbell’s freedom rather belatedly, but still managed to launch himself across the tent with a small shriek and a paper-knife held in approximately the way someone who had heard about stabbing but had never practised it.
Ironbell, who had spent some years in the Gnome Guards and had progressed through the various levels of physical instruction expected of officers in the field, sidestepped the leap with a movement so economical that the sash-goblin passed entirely under his arm and into the central tent pole, which he struck with his forehead, knocking him senseless. Ironbell relieved him of the paper-knife as he went, and tucked it into his belt.
The small silver pyx was on the table. Ironbell collected it without breaking stride. The handwritten correspondence, on the corner of the clerk’s pile, took rather less time to acquire than to identify. He folded it once, placed it inside his coat, and was through the rear flap of the tent before Chaq, who was still shouting at the clerk about Ulk, had finished his sentence.
Outside, Ironbell found the scaffolding tower was empty.
“Well, that’s a bit of bugger,” Ironbell thought. He wasn’t used to his carefully laid plans running into the buffers, but he regarded it with equanimity and set about revising on the fly.
The plywood door at the base of the tower hung open. The Gaffer Tape, which had been securing the third stage of scaffolding to the second, had been recently cut. A small ladder, of the sort goblins kept for emergencies and the changing of lamp wicks, had been propped against the flaming remains of the kitchen tent.
He turned in time to see Chaq Bombastic emerging from the side of the negotiation tent at speed, on a horse, with a slim figure trussed and laid across the saddlebags before him. Chaq had a blunderbuss in one hand, a sheaf of demands in the other, and an expression of administrative triumph on his face. It was the look of a goblin whose contingency plan had been Form GP-216, sub-clause C, which he was now executing to the letter.
Ironbell put two fingers to his lips and whistled.
The camel, half a mile to the south, paused in its disdainful southerly progress, considered the whistle on its merits, decided to ignore it temporarily, just to make a point, and continued walking.
Ironbell sighed and whistled again. This time, it was shriller and more insistent.
The camel turned its head, sighed, and began to amble back up the lane at a pace that suggested it was doing him a favour, one it would expect to be acknowledged later, preferably with oats. Behind it, Ulk appeared briefly over the brow of the hill, saw that the camel was now coming towards him of its own accord, and sat down in the road with the air of a man whose afternoon had been comprehensively ruined and watched the beast amble past him, leaving a trail of what camels always leave in their wake.
Ironbell met the camel at the gate. He unbuckled the left-hand saddlebag, the one marked SAWDUST in his own neat hand, opened it, and took out a generous handful of what was emphatically not sawdust. The oats glittered faintly in the late light. They shone with the dull gold of level 3 magic. The incantations necessary for this were the preserve of fae of royal heritage. Ironbell silently thanked the queen for her indulgence. He held them up to the camel’s mouth.
“I appreciate,” he said to it placatingly, “that this is short notice.”
The camel regarded him with long, slow consideration. After what seemed to Ironbell as some internal debate, it ate the oats.
There was a pause of perhaps two seconds, during which the camel’s pupils dilated, its ears flattened, and a small note of musical interest issued from somewhere in its sinus cavity. Then it lowered its head, snorted once, and went from a standing start to a flat gallop in the space of three strides.
Ironbell, who had mounted in the second of those strides, settled into the saddle and gave the camel its head.
Chaq, half a mile down the lane and confident of his lead, did not look back immediately; he was too focused on straight-line escape. When he did look back, he did so twice, the second time with his mouth open. The camel was closing on him at a speed that no camel had any business achieving, and very few horses could match. He raised the blunderbuss, sighted along it in the general direction of Ironbell, and pulled the trigger.
The Bombastic Special, as Chaq’s armourer had christened it the previous spring before being demoted for over-familiarity, did not so much fire as explode, albeit in the form of a singularly committed and directional shaped charge. There was a noise like a four-gallon kettle being struck with a hammer, a billow of black smoke that briefly obscured the entire south of the lane, and a discharge of assorted ironmongery, glass fragments, three small nails, and what appeared to be the sharp end of a butter knife, in a cone of effect roughly thirty degrees wide and pointed in approximately the right direction.
A single nail struck the camel’s saddle just behind Ironbell. A glass fragment grazed his cheek. The teaspoon, by some inscrutable principle of ballistics, passed clean through his hood, and a fragment of horseshoe nail caught him across the temple.
He fell.
The camel, which had been having quite the best afternoon of its life, did not notice for several strides, and by the time it did, the distance between camel and rider had grown beyond the camel’s interest in addressing it. It snorted once, lowered its head, and continued the pursuit with the single-minded focus of a creature on the best oats it had ever encountered.
Ironbell, lying in the dust of the country lane with a small ringing in his ears and a substantial bruise developing on his left temple, watched Chaq disappear over the next rise in a thinning trail of black smoke. He pushed himself up onto one elbow. The princess, trussed across the saddlebags, had not moved. The camel was closing, but not fast enough.
As Chaq and the princess disappeared into the dust, Ironbell said a word that he had been keeping in reserve for some years, and has no literal translation from the original Gnomish to any human language, but approximated to reservations about the antecedents of all your family, and especially the maternal line, which was called into question in the severest possible terms, while intimating your own personal familiarity with certain unedifying practices associated with five-string banjos and Country and Western music.
The shadow passed across Ironbell before he heard the wing-beat, which was barely a wing-beat in the normal sense, more of a swish; an organised disturbance of the air at altitude. Madam Jin, in a coat that was longer than she was and travelling at a speed that was difficult to estimate against the late afternoon sky, overtook the camel, overtook Chaq, banked, and dropped.
She hit Chaq across the shoulders with the precision of a woman who had spent some centuries fostering opinions about goblins and had been waiting for an appropriate moment to express them. Chaq parted company with his horse in a flat trajectory that took him over the hedge, into a ditch, and out the other side of the ditch into a patch of nettles that were generally agreed to be the meanest in this hemisphere of SPOWK.
Jin landed lightly, brushed the dust from her coat, lit a cigarette, and considered him.
“Droit du seigneur,” she said, exhaling, a dangerous grin on her lips. “Ye grimy little spike-head. Try it. I dare you.”
Chaq, from the nettles, made a small sound of complaint. It wasn’t so much a complaint in the sense of an expression of dissatisfaction, more a bodily disorder or malady.
Ironbell arrived a few minutes later, on foot, having declined to whistle the camel a third time. He looked down at Chaq, who looked back up at him with an expression suggesting his afternoon had taken on a quality of disappointment he had not previously believed possible.
“Determiner,” said Ironbell. “A word.”
Chaq attempted to rise. Ironbell, who had spent much of the previous two minutes considering the precise nature of the moment he was now in, allowed him to make it as far as a crouch before reaching down, taking his wrist in what looked like an entirely unremarkable grip, and rotating it through a small but specific arc.
Chaq sat down again. Quickly.
“Gnome-Fu,” said Ironbell, mildly, “third form. Lower Wrist of the Patient Magistrate. There are four further forms, Determiner, and we need not visit them this afternoon, but I would consider it a personal favour if you would remain seated.”
Chaq, his face pale beneath the green, remained seated. All he could say was, “Dammit.”
Jin, who had been watching with the professional interest of one practitioner observing another, nodded once, blew out a long thread of smoke, and went to retrieve the horse, which had stopped some yards down the lane and was eating from the hedge with the air of an animal that had had, on balance, quite enough excitement for one afternoon.
She returned with the horse and the princess. The princess, when untrussed, proved to be a slender, dark-haired young woman with her mother’s eyes and her mother’s anger, and rather more dust on her than a princess of the Tylwyth Teg generally accumulated in a working week. She looked at Ironbell, at Jin, at the goblin in the nettles, and at the camel, which had returned of its own accord and was now standing nearby with the satisfied air of an animal awaiting further oats.
“Inspector Ironbell, I presume,” she said.
“Your Highness.”
“Mother sent you?”
“In a manner of speaking, ma’am.”
She considered him for a long moment. “I am going to need a bath.”
“I have made arrangements, ma’am.”
Part 4
They rode back to Caer Dhun by the long road, because the short road went past the goblin encampment and Ironbell had decided, on reflection, that he had spent quite enough time there for one trip. Chaq, tied across his own saddlebags, did not speak for the duration of the journey, except once, to ask whether anyone had thought to bring water, to which Jin’s reply was sufficiently inventive that the princess made a small note of it for future reference.
The Queen met them at the gates of the palace. She did not run, that wasn’t the regal thing to do, but Ironbell, who had been watching for the signs, saw the moment when her composure ceased to be a posture and became, briefly, a sincere look of relief. He glanced away to allow her a moment of privacy.
Part 5
The council chamber, when they reconvened that evening, was warmer than before. The papers had been cleared from the table. A fresh pot of tea stood at the Queen’s elbow, and the dagger had been returned to its sheath. Madam Jin’s biscuit tin was open. Clarke had a fresh notebook. Father Alaric, in his cassock, had a slight pallor about him that he had not had three days previously, but his hands were folded calmly in his lap and his face had composed itself into the patient attention of a man who had been told a great many things in confidence and was prepared to be told one more.
Ironbell took his seat. He did not, this time, struggle with the chair, having arranged for a cushion.
“Ma’am,” he said, “before we proceed to the formal report, I would like, if I may, to address one outstanding question.”
“By all means, Inspector. What do you have in mind?”
He laid two pieces of paper on the table.
The first was small, and folded, and had been pressed into his hand at their last meeting. It read, in a neat clerical hand, Beware the undead.
The second was a single sheet, larger, of correspondence written in the same hand. He did not, for the moment, allow it to be read. He laid it face-down, beside the first.
“Three days ago,” Ironbell said, “I was given this note.” He tapped the first paper. “Beware the undead. A warning, I was given to understand, regarding Madam Jin.”
Jin, around her cigarette, raised an eyebrow.
“The warning, however, was redundant. I had identified Madam Jin’s condition within forty seconds of entering this chamber. She was not breathing, she had not breathed, and she was, by my estimation, in her third century. The note told me nothing I did not already know.”
He paused.
“Which raised the question of why it had been given to me at all.”
He turned the second paper over.
“This,” he said, “I retrieved from the desk of the goblin clerk in the negotiation tent at the Goblin Patriarchal Insubstantiate. The hand, you will note, is the same as the hand on the first note. The content I will not read aloud in full, but I will summarise it.”
He let the silence settle.
“The author proposes, to Determiner Chaq Bombastic, a sustained arrangement. The goblins are to take and hold the Princess Tolymundy. The Queen is to be presented with twenty pages of demands so insulting in their formulation that no monarch could accede to them. War is to follow. The kingdom is to be weakened. The Queen, it is suggested, may not survive the conflict. In the event that she does not, the author offers his services as a steady hand in the interim, and proposes, as part of the resulting settlement, that South-Eastern Orthodoxy be established as the sole permitted religion of Brycheiniog.”
There was a small clatter from Madam Jin’s side of the table. Her cigarette had fallen from her fingers and was burning a slow brown spot in the polish.
“In return for which arrangement,” Ironbell continued, “the author has, over the past several months, been remitting to the goblin treasury a number of items of liturgical silver. One of which I have here.”
He produced the pyx, and placed it beside the two letters.
“The pyx, ma’am, is a vessel for the consecrated host. It is, by definition, the property of the Church. It does not, by any normal process, find its way into the tents of goblin warlords.”
Father Alaric had not moved; his hands remained folded in his lap, and his face had not altered. Only his eyes had changed, and that was only very slightly, in the way a window changes when the lamp behind it is extinguished.
“Father,” said the Queen, and her voice was the voice of a queen and not, this time, of a mother. “Have you anything to say?”
The priest considered his hands for a long moment. Then he raised his head and met her eyes.
“I shall require,” he said, “an advocate.”
“You shall have one, Father. From Manchester, in fact.”
The priest’s eyes flickered to Ironbell.
“Inspector,” said the Queen, “would you do the honour?”
Ironbell rose. From the inner pocket of his coat, where it had ridden dry through the entirety of his journey, he produced a single railway ticket, third class, Manchester, one way. He placed it on the table in front of Father Alaric.
“The seven thirty-two from Caer Dhun Halt, Father. Tomorrow morning. The ecclesiastical court at Salford is, I am informed, very thorough. They will, I expect, wish to discuss the pyxes.”
Father Alaric looked at the ticket for a long time. Then he picked it up, folded it carefully, and slipped it into the inside pocket of his cassock with the flourish of a man who had handled a great many small important pieces of paper in his life, none of which, he now appeared to understand, had been quite so small or quite so important as this one.
“You purchased this,” he said, “before you entered the council chamber.”
“I did, Father.”
“You knew.”
“I suspected. Suspicion, on its own, purchases nothing more than a ticket. The conclusive evidence, you were good enough to provide me yourself.”
The Queen rose. She did not look at the priest. She looked at the Captain of her guard, who had been standing by the door throughout, and she nodded once.
The Captain stepped forward. Father Alaric rose with the dignity of a man who had made his choices some time ago and was now required only to honour them. He inclined his head to the Queen, to Ironbell, and to Madam Jin. All but Jin returned the nod, she merely flashed her fangs and mouthed the words “Bottom wipe”.
Alaric walked out of the chamber ahead of the Captain.
The chamber was quiet for some moments after the door closed.
“Inspector,” said the Queen, at length. “How long had you known?”
“I had suspected, ma’am, since the moment he warned me about Madam Jin. A man who warns you against the obvious is, in my experience, usually concealing something less so. By the time I had reached the goblin camp and had seen the pyx, I was reasonably confident. The handwriting, this afternoon, confirmed it.”
Jin, who had recovered her cigarette and lit it again, exhaled slowly. “Inspector,” she said, “you’re a piece of work.”
“Thank you, Madam Jin.”
“Wan’ a Bakewell?”
“I should be delighted.”
He took one. The chilli, this time, he had been expecting, and he was pleased to find that this did not diminish his enjoyment. He chewed slowly.
The Queen watched him for a moment, then turned to the princess, who had been sitting quietly at her side throughout, and took her hand.
“Inspector,” she said, without looking up, “what is the customary fee, in such cases?”
“The customary fee, ma’am, has been paid. By the existence of the case itself.”
“That is not an answer.”
“No, ma’am. But it is the one I shall be giving.”
She smiled. It was not the smile she had given in the previous meeting. It was a smaller smile, and a more private one, and Ironbell, who had been watching for it, allowed himself the satisfaction of having seen it.
Somewhere over the northern hills, a goblin warlord was being introduced to the concept of a holding cell. Somewhere else, a priest was packing a small valise. Still somewhere else again, a camel was eating the last of the magical oats and would, in approximately one hour, fall asleep where it stood and remain asleep for two days.
Ironbell finished his Bakewell, set the napkin down, and stood.
“By your leave, ma’am.”
“Inspector. The kingdom is in your debt.”
“The kingdom, ma’am, is in no-one’s debt. It is merely in office for the time being. As are we all.”
He bowed, briefly, kissed her hand for exactly as long as protocol required, and was gone.
Outside, in the courtyard, the wigged goblin (whose name, it turned out, was Snerg, and who had taken Ironbell at his word about the arrangements) was waiting by the gate with a small bag and a slightly hopeful expression.
“Where to, then, Inspector?”
“Manchester, in the first instance. There is a position, I am told, for a clerk of unusual capacity at the ecclesiastical court. I have written you a reference.”
“Cor,” said Snerg.
“After that, Snerg, the world is rather your oyster. I find oysters, on the whole, overrated, but the principle stands.”
They walked together towards the gate. Behind them, in the council chamber, Madam Jin was lighting her thirty-eighth cigarette of the day, and the Queen of the Tylwyth Teg was looking at her daughter as if she had only just remembered, after some considerable interval, what daughters were for.
Above the palace, very high up and quite indifferent to any of it, the dragons wheeled.
END
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