Page 113 of Fortune's Blade

They sent a slight shiver up my back despite the heat and the ogre noticed. He paused to scratch the itch that my reaction had caused on the brickwork by an archway, threatening to crumble it under his weight. Until a duergar came out and shouted something at him, and gave him a coin to go away.

He pocketed the coin and ambled on, passing into an area of mostly trolls. They wore the homespun, rough leathers and old furs that their kind seemed to prefer, with the exception of a dandy showing off a cape made out of scraps of velvet and satin. Most of their clothing was practical, and some was strangely beautiful, but none was what could be called elegant.

Unlike their surroundings.

I gazed up at soaring, arched passageways carved out of pale, sand-colored stone that were spacious but seemed slender because of their great height; at delicate lamps swinging on gossamer chains; at cooking fires laid in tall arches where statuary had probably once stood; at slabs of wood with crudely drawn pictures serving as shop signs and hanging outside of doorways with finely carved vines twining up the sides; and at lines of wet clothes flapping overhead like colorful flags, and cutting down the lofty ceilings to something cozier.

If troll height could be considered cozy.

The inhabitants didn’t match their environment, an impression that was only heightened when we passed into a courtyard with an exquisite central fountain featuring marble cranes, where some troll women were doing their laundry. They had their sleeves rolled up and pipes dangling from their lips, while children gamboled about, the toddlers already almost as tall as me. One of the huge babies bumbled into the ogre and he grasped it by the head, causing me a moment of panic.

Only to see him turn it around and send it back to its mother with a light swat on the backside. It waddled off happily, looking for new adventures, and she raised a hand in thanks. And to my surprise, the ogre raised one back.

Unlike on Earth, where old grudges often died hard, here the two groups seemed to have reached a truce. To the point where a sole ogre in less than full command of his faculties could wander these halls without fear. And pass unmolested through to the entrance of a wide staircase going up.

It was as broad as the hallway, with large windows cut into the walls, following the slope of the stairs and allowing me to see out. And there was much to see, with a huge open area sprawling out below us that confused the brain, as it seemed too large to be inside anything, even a palace. Maybe because it was, I realized, looking back over my shoulder.

It seemed that we had left the palace when the stairs transitioned into what I now recognized as a bridge overlooking a city at night. But not like one I’d ever seen or even dreamt about. And which appeared to be built around an immense hole in the ground, the bottom of which disappeared into darkness, while the pale colored, strangely striated sides supported the buildings.

And there were plenty of them.

The palace set atop one towering sweep of stone, right on the edge of the chasm, and hundreds of buildings were clustered around the entire extent of the rest. For as far as I could see at least, because the sides, too, were lost in the night. Or hidden behind other buildings, as the chasm was not a perfect circle, being stretched here and elongated there, like the banks of an irregular lake.

But everywhere I looked, were buildings and roads and people and life.

So much that it was impossible to take it all in at once, and left me feeling slightly overwhelmed. But one thing I couldn’t ignore was directly in front of the castle, between it and the bridge. But its proximity wasn’t the main thing that had caught my eye.

I felt the ogre’s feet slowing as I stared in awe, but not because I had suggested it. But because no one could have passed by and not stared a little. If for no other reason that to figure out what, exactly, they were looking at.

There were islands of greenery atop slender, white columns spearing up out of the darkness below. Some were short enough for me to look down onto their tops, while others were taller than the bridge itself and partially hidden from view by its roof. They would have been pretty enough on their own, having the same deceptively delicate looking architecture of the troll area we’d just left, but these had an added feature.

A cluster of them had been designed to fall at varying heights, allowing a stream of water to cascade down them from some unseen source above, creating a waterfall in stages. I blinked my eyes at it, not sure what I was seeing, but yes, I’d gotten it right. It had been cleverly made so that the water hit, not the greenery itself, although that was doused with the spray, but stone platforms which were angled to send it flying onward to the next little island in the chain.

The result was that the water hopped from base to base, creating a silvery river untethered to anything but gravity. And it was visible despite the darkness as the islands had flowers and rock formations on them that provided illumination. The flowers glowed dimly, and were only bright where many of them clustered together, but the rocks had cracks in places, deep fissures showing off crystalline formations that blazed with light and lit up the whole fantastic structure.

I stared at it in surprised delight, the relative brightness allowing me to enjoy the strange floating river that the fey had made. The islands of greenery atop the towers served as its flower strewn banks and all of it appeared to float in midair. I knew that was an illusion, but it was a convincing and beautiful one, so much so that it took a moment for me to recognize that there was something else dotting the islands.

Something far more unsettling.

Ravens, what must have been hundreds of them, were everywhere. I hadn’t immediately noticed them, as the bright, sparkling river drew the eye and their coloring allowed them to be almost invisible against the night when they stayed still. And most of the ones on the islands were motionless, having bedded down for the night, save for a few who were strutting about with their chests thrown out as if they owned the place.

But now that I’d noticed them, they were everywhere, swooping together overhead as if the darkness had grown wings and chose to fly. And it was a great deal of darkness, as these were not Earth birds. They had to top six feet, reminding me of the massive stone carvings about the fireplace in the Great Hall, which I had assumed were exaggerated in size.

But perhaps not.

But they were as mischievous as the smaller birds I knew, with some soaring and diving and chasing each other around the vast open space, while others were playing with some trinket they’d stolen from a guard. I couldn’t see what it was, just that it flashed gold in the night, but the troll clearly wanted it back. He was yelling at them from a walkway a good distance off, clearly demanding the return of his possession, but the birds didn’t appear impressed.

Several dove at his head, causing him to stumble backward and bat at them, while the one that currently possessed his property dropped it from a height as if meaning to return it. The troll somehow spied it through the flapping feathers and made an impressive leap, trying to grab it before it disappeared into the darkness below. And he almost had it, was just about to close his fist on it—

When another raven swooped in and snatched it away.

“Bastards,” my ride murmured in his own language, but I saw the meaning in his mind.

Perhaps we should walk on, I thought, letting the suggestion glide lightly along the surface of his brain, and I didn’t have to do it twice. He might get along with the trolls these days, but he clearly drew a line at huge, badly-behaved birds.

And, frankly, so did I. There was something uncanny about them, with their actions a little too alien, a little too . . . non-bird-like . . . although I couldn’t have said just how. But it caused me to feel uneasy, and then there was the fact that there were so many.

We started climbing again, with the ogre staring about suspiciously and clutching his barrel to make sure that no rogue bird tried to steal it away. It gave me a chance to gaze about a bit more, including back at the palace, which had a strange mixture of almost Grecian columns and medieval arches. It stood out from brick, wood and darker-colored stone buildings surrounding it, glowing ghostly pale in the low light.

---