Chapter 20: Darkness in the Rocks

Reads: 125

“What’s the story they tell about her?” the porter asks. His mate leans against the wall, nodding, but the first porter is wild-eyed. “I haven’t heard the whole thing. It’s about bad people who did bad things. They tasted the darkness in the rocks.”

“Don’t tell the boy faerie stories,” Grammy says. “You’ll upset his tummy and he’ll sleep bad. There’s nothing to licking rocks. They’re just rocks.”

“Rocks, Grammy? Sir?” I ask.

“It’s not any rock,” Peng says. It seems he’s tired of playing his flute.

The door to the parlor opens and I expect to see the peddler, but it’s a woman child, taller than me, but still fourth circle.

“My father wants to talk to Elias alone,” she says. That’s the peddler’s name. She pulls the door closed behind her. “What about rocks?” she asks, taking a seat on the bench with the porters.

“It’s nonsense, all of it,” the sleepy porter says.

“It’s dark rocks in dark places,” Peng says. “You find the place where they sweat. It’s a meaty smell, cooked slugs almost gone off or really good mushrooms. You lick the black slime off the rock, just at that spot. Then you can look straight at the sprites. You can hear the dragons, way off, beyond the skerries. Hear ‘em singing. See things. Know when something’s behind you.”

“Is that so?” Sabill asks. That is the name of the girl. I don’t remember when she’s introduced to me.

This is what happened in Fearsmere, in a certain house. Grammy holds me tight as Peng tells the story, as if to protect me from the truth. I sneak looks, now and again, at Sabill, her face round, her skin healthy, dressed as she was in a simple frock, but embroidered in front, across her -

There was a house high up in the cut, not the highest, but near the top. An old woman lived there, alone once her husband died. The headman assigned the house to a leather worker, whose shop had three apprentices. It won’t do to have a house almost empty.

An unused knife rusts and an empty house goes to goblins.

(We all repeat the saying.)

Of course, the old woman is kept on by the leather worker, as the law requires. She lives there with the man, the wife, and their two grown sons (one an apprentice, the other a layabout), and their wives.

It’s the old woman who knows about the dark stone. All the stone in the skerry is one piece and through it runs cracks and furrows. A footfall on a path in Beshof rings the skerry like a bell.

And there are dark things that could only live in the permanent darkness down in the rocks. They reach out like a spider’s web touching many dark places.

Peng splits another ladle of ale between me and Sabill. It’s a sweet ale from berries that I think must grow only in Fearsmere.

All those years, living in the house with her husband and boys, the old woman doesn’t lick the stone. If she had, she would have curdled long ago.

The spot of stone, Peng tells me on good authority, is not in the common room of the house. Rich people have a separate bed chamber. This house had two such chambers, one for the leather worker and one for the apprentice son. The layabout and his wife and the old lady sleep in the common room.

The old woman is to be treated with respect, even if the house was no longer hers. She cannot, though, simply walk into the leather worker’s chamber when she wants to lick the stone. And the house always had folk there, the wives or the layabout, when the leather worker was at his shop.

The layabout son says that the old woman always shakes out the quilts after the sleep. “I must be useful,” she tells them, so every morning, she hangs up the quilts of the house and shakes them up good.

And finds a moment alone in the master chamber when no one is looking.

She’s hard of hearing. Had been for a time. She has to look right at her sons to make out what they say. Before he dies, she stops listening to her husband altogether, even when he cuffs her upside the head.

But sometime after he dies, after the leather worker and his folk move in, she starts to visit that dark stone and listen to the unseen world.

“What’s hearing got to do with the unseen world?” I ask, head spinning with the second ladle of ale. “I hear that it’s about the bad light.”

“It’s both, little mackerel,” Grammy says, squeezing me to her.

“The light is a thing of the sky, but the unseen world lives in the rock.” says Peng. “It’s the voice of goblins, the whispers of giants.”

“Goblins have no voice,” I say, although I still hear their hissing, now and again, around Peng’s words. I mean to go on, talk about how giants cannot talk, but he shushes me. Good thing, I guess. I had never seen a giant by that time.

“It’s not voice as men have voice,” he says. “The darkness in the rocks.”

Submitted: June 22, 2023

Fantasy sprite goblins bones