When they finally left Malakar’s tower, none of them did so with the relief they thought they might have expected from being allowed to leave it. The color had returned. The alarm had gone silent. Elora was back on her feet, pale but steady, and the invisible barrier that had turned the room into a trap no longer stood between them and the open archway. By all appearances, the worst of it had passed. The tower had resumed the sort of quiet that suggested it had been waiting centuries for the pleasure of unsettling them and would be happy to do it again whenever they found time to return.
Still, the silence they carried down the stairs was not the silence of safety. It was the silence of people trying, each in their own way, to arrange what had just happened into something they could live beside. Lira went first, one hand brushing the wall as she descended, not because she needed the support, but because she liked to know where stone ended, and empty space began. Elora followed a step behind, fingers grazing the chain of her holy symbol—a silver disk with a thin line engraved across the radius—as though reassurance might be drawn from contact alone. Zerai came next, restless in the way only a person could be who had nearly killed a friend, turned a tower black and white, and still retained enough curiosity to resent not understanding how she had done it. Tako moved quietly at the rear, ducking the lower arch with practiced ease, his expression unreadable in the dimness. Whatever he thought of Malakar, of the chest, or of the offer now laid before them, he kept it to himself.
There was one absence among them, and it did not improve anyone’s mood.
“Where is Thane?” Elora asked at last, breaking the silence in the careful, apologetic way one breaks glass already cracked.
Zerai winced. “Technically, I think he’s retrieving a goblin.”
Lira did not slow. “He’s doing what to a goblin?”
“It got out of the book,” Zerai said, then, because the sentence sounded more ridiculous spoken aloud than it had in her head, she added, “You were a little busy at the time.”
Elora gave her a long look.
“That wasn’t meant to sound defensive.”
“It sounded very defensive.”
“I’m aware of that now.”
The tower opened at last onto the ground floor, where the missing walls turned the whole place into a draft with ambitions. Outside, Kaethar moved on with the indifference of a city too large to care what occurred in one tower, one market, one alley, one life. Afternoon light slanted across the square in broad golden sheets, catching on wagon rims and polished buckles and the lacquered edge of a fruit seller’s cart. Somewhere to their left, a woman was haggling loudly over onions with the kind of fury usually reserved for betrayals. A mule objected to something with deep personal conviction. From farther off came the iron ring of smithing, the hollow clatter of stacked pottery, and the endless undercurrent of hundreds of strangers making use of the same day.
Lira stopped just beyond the tower’s shadow and looked across the street. “He can’t have gone far.”
“Depends on how motivated the goblin was,” Zerai said.
“Depends on how motivated Thane was,” Elora countered.
At that, Tako made a low sound that might have been amusement. “Dwarf chase long,” he said. “Anger make legs strong.”
Lira turned her head, listening. It was a small movement, but the others learned enough by now to hold their tongues when she did it. Her attention slipped past the open square, past the wheel-rattle and merchants and muttered curses, until it caught on something sharper and uglier than ordinary city noise. Not a scream. Not panic. More a string of inventive profanity punctuated by a wet thumping sound and, beneath it, shrill laughter so delighted it almost circled back to sounding afraid.
“That way,” she said, already moving.
The alley ran between a cooper’s yard and the back wall of a wine seller’s shop, narrow enough that two broad men passing each other would have to negotiate terms. It smelled of spilled mash, old rain, and whatever city refuse had not yet found the gutter. Sunlight only reached the first few feet before surrendering to shadow. By the time the others followed Lira in, the source of the noise had revealed itself in full.
Thane had the goblin on the ground.
That, in itself, was not surprising. Few things short of a rockslide would have prevented Thane from catching a creature no taller than Zerai’s shoulder. What was surprising was the method by which he appeared to be solving the second half of the problem.
Pinned on his back in the alley muck, the goblin squirmed and cackled while Thane knelt over him, one knee planted squarely in his narrow chest. In both hands, the dwarf held the escaped book, now splayed open and being used with all the solemn precision of a man applying a smith’s hammer to a delicate clockwork instrument. Every few moments, he brought the book down flat onto the goblin’s face with a meaty slap, then yanked it back, peered at the creature as if checking whether it had been absorbed, and tried again from a different angle. The goblin’s nose disappeared between the covers once, only for Thane to grunt, adjust his grip, and attempt to sandwich the entire head more firmly inside the volume.
“Get in there,” Thane snarled through his teeth, punctuating the command by thumping the spine against the goblin’s forehead. “Ya came out of it, didn’t ya? Then ya can go back in.”
The goblin kicked his heels against the cobblestones and laughed so hard he wheezed. “Again! Again!”
Thane froze. He looked down at the creature beneath him as if only now realizing the response he had received was not the one he had intended. The goblin, all knobby elbows and wild yellow grin, stared up at him with undisguised delight. His ears twitched. His eyes watered with laughter. One long, filthy hand patted the book cover encouragingly.
“That bit with the nose,” the goblin said, gasping for breath,” that was clever. Very nice. Never had that one before.”
Zerai pressed both hands over her mouth. It did not help. The laugh escaped anyway, sharp and sudden and utterly disloyal.
Thane swung his head toward her. “Don’t.”
“I’m not!” she said, already failing.
“You are!”
“I know, but in my defense, look at this.” She gestured broadly at the scene unfolding before her.
Elora moved around them carefully, more concerned than amused, though the corners of her mouth twitched in open mutiny against her better judgment. “Thane,” she said, very gently, as though speaking to a man perched on the edge of doing something unwise with a loaded crossbow, “what exactly are you doing?”
He stared at her as if the answer were offensively obvious. “Puttin’ him back.”
“With the book.”
“Yeah.”
“By hitting him.”
“Well, talking wasn’t working.”
The goblin raided a finger from the ground. “For the record, no one tried talking.”
Thane drove the lower edge of the book’s spine between the goblin’s eyes.
Lira folded her arms. “Have you considered that he may not go back in by force?”
Thane frowned. “Everything goes somewhere by force if ya hit it hard enough.”
Tako leaned in just enough to study the goblin’s face. “Goblin happy.”
“Goblin ecstatic,” the goblin said. He wriggled a little deeper in the stones, shoulders scraping pleasantly against the uneven cobbles. “You wouldn’t believe how long I was in there. Do you know what it does to a spine? Being folded into literature? This is marvelous! I haven’t felt proper stone under me in—” He stopped, blinked a few times, then broke into another grin. “Long enough.”
Thane’s expression shifted from irritation to suspicion. “Ya like this.”
“Immensely.”
The dwarf looked offended in a way few men ever managed outside of theology. “That ain’t right.”
“No,” said the goblin. “That’s texture.”
Zerai bent at the waist, hands on her knees, staring at the pair of them as if she had stumbled across a performance staged specifically to ruin her ability to be serious. “I don’t suppose,” she said, fighting down another laugh, “you learned anything useful while trying to concuss him back into print.”
Thane glowered. “Sure. I learned goblins are worse than rats.”
“Rats have less to say,” the goblin replied cheerfully.
Lira’s head turned toward the mouth of the alley. The sound reached them a heartbeat later. Boots. Multiple. Metal shifting against leather. Voices already carrying the tone of men who had spotted a problem and were grateful it belonged to someone else for the next few seconds.
Thane, still kneeling on the goblin, heard them, too.
“Well,” he muttered, tightening his grip on the book and the goblin both, “that’ll be the guards.”
The goblin sighed happily against the stones. “This day just keeps getting better.”
The guards rounded the mouth of the alley a moment later, six of them in city mail, tabards marked with Kaethar’s crest and expressions that suggested they had expected drunks, thieves, or a stabbing. What they found was somehow worse. A dwarf kneeling on a goblin with a blood-spattered book in both hands. A gnome trying not to laugh. An elf who already looked tired for the whole city. A priestess whose patience had clearly been tested before noon. And Tako, who stood at the back of the alley like a patient landslide waiting to happen.
The guard in front stopped dead. He had a narrow face, a trimmed beard, and the deeply unfortunate look of a man whose day had just become paperwork. “What,” he said carefully, “is going on here?”
Thane shifted his weight on the goblin’s chest and held up the book like evidence in a murder trial. “Putting him back.”
The guard blinked. “Putting him back where?”
“In the book.”
The goblin lifted one hand. “I did come out of the book. He’s not lying about that.”
The guard stared at it. “Why is it talking?”
“Because it’s a goblin,” Zerai said. “That’s generally one of their more persistent traits.”
The second guard, broader and younger, took a step forward and pointed the butt of his spear, “Off him.”
“He runs if I get off him.”
“I will,” confirmed the goblin.
“You’re assaulting a citizen.”
The alley went still for half a breath.
Then the goblin barked out a laugh so sharp it bounced off the walls. “Citizen! Oh, I like this city.”
Thane looked up at the guard. “That thing ain’t no citizen.”
The goblin wriggled under him, almost purring at the scrape of stone beneath his back. “I could be. I feel civic already.”
Lira stepped in before Thane decided a firmer demonstration was needed. “This is a misunderstanding.”
The narrow-faced guard looked at her, then at Thane, then back at her. “Is it.”
“It is.”
“Because from where I’m standing, your friend is beating a goblin with literature.”
Thane scowled. “I’m not beating him. I’m solving a problem.”
“With a book,” the younger guard said.
“With the right book.”
Elora closed her eyes for the briefest moment, gathered herself, and stepped forward with a calm that made people feel rude for interrupting it. “The creature escaped from an enchanted volume in that tower over there.” She pointed to Malakar’s tower. “We were attempting to recover it before it caused harm.”
The first guard’s eyes flicked toward the tower. That did something to him. Not enough to calm him, but enough to make his next words more careful.
“From that tower.” He nudged his spear accordingly.
“Yes,” Elora said.
“And the owner knows this.”
“He does now,” Zerai muttered.
The guard heard her. Of course he did. “He does now.”
“He told Thane to put him back,” Zerai said quickly, then lifted both hands. “More or less. That may not have been the exact phrasing.”
“It wasn’t,” Lira sighed.
The goblin craned his neck as far as Thane’s knee allowed. “For the record, I don’t think anyone involved has a proper plan.”
“That’s enough out of you,” Thane snapped.
“Then stop jostling me. This is almost therapeutic.”
The younger guard looked genuinely offended on behalf of reality itself. “You’re tellin’ me this goblin came out of a book.”
“Yes,” said Zeari.
“And your answer was to hit it with the same book until it went back in.”
“Yeah,” said Thane.
“That’s not how books work.”
Thane’s face hardened. “Ya got a better idea?”
The guard opened his mouth, closed it, and glanced helplessly at his superior.
Tako, who had thus far watched the exchange with solemn interest, spoke at last. “Book maybe miss goblin.”
Every head in the alley turned toward him.
The goblin’s grin widened. “Exactly. Thank you, giant man.”
“Tako not giant man.”
“You could have fooled me.”
The first guard rubbed a hand over his face, then pointed at Thane. “Get off it.”
Thane did not move. “No.”
The guard’s tone chilled. “That wasn’t a request.”
Lira stepped closer before the alley found a worse shape. “If he lets go and it bolts, are you prepared to chase it through the market?”
The guard said nothing.
“Are your men?”
Still nothing.
“Because if the answer is ‘no,’ then all we’re arguing over is whether a naked goblin runs rampant through the city streets before or after you feel righteous about procedure.”
That landed. Not perfectly, but enough to buy a breath.
The goblin took the opportunity to look up at the guards with bright, eager eyes. “I can make for the rooftops, if that helps anyone decide.”
The younger guard lowered his spear a fraction, then snapped in unison with Thane, “Shut up.”
“Rude.”
Elora pressed on while they still had ground. We are taking it back to Malakar now. He can secure it properly.”
At the wizard’s name, the guards exchanged a glance that needed no translation. Nobody in this part of the city wanted to be the man who interfered with Malakar’s business unless he had written instructions from someone very important or a death wish broad enough to pass for courage.
The narrow-faced guard let out a slow breath through his nose. “You’re taking it straight there.”
“Yes,” said Lira.
“No more alley wrestling.”
Thane frowned. “That part’s over anyway.”
“No beating it with books.”
“That depends.”
“Thane,” Elora said.
He looked at her, then at the goblin under his knee, then back at the guard. “Fine.”
The goblin sounded almost disappointed. “Pity. We were bonding.”
The younger guard took a half step back, clearly surrendering the problem to a higher authority the moment he could justify it. “Get it out of my sight.”
Thane rose in one hard motion and seized the goblin by the ankle before it could test anyone’s patience or speed. The creature let out an undignified yelp as its shoulders thumped onto the cobbles, then dissolved into delighted laughter as Thane started dragging it toward the street.
“Oh, this,” the goblin said, stretching his arms over his head as though settling into a bath, “This is wonderful! Little rough on the shoulders, but the back? Oh, the back is singing.”
Thane hauled the book under one arm and kept walking. “You say one more thing, I’m using the spine again.”
The goblin turned his head enough to grin up the alley at the guards. “I like him.”
“No, ya don’t,” Thane muttered.
“Maybe not,” the goblin said, bumping pleasantly over the first lip of uneven stone as they reached the sunlit street. “But I’d hate to lose whatever this is doing for my lower back.”
By the time they reached Malakar’s tower, the spectacle had settled into something almost orderly. Thane mounted the steps first, book tucked beneath one arm, goblin gripped by the ankle in the other hand. The creature’s shoulders bumped over the stone with a rhythm that ought to have worn the smile off its face by now. Instead, the goblin looked half-drunk on the experience, eyes bright, mouth split in a grin so broad it seemed to occupy more of his head than nature had intended.
“I cannot overstate,” he said as another stair jostled him hard enough to knock his teeth together, “what this city is doing for my back.”
“No one asked,” Lira said.”
“That’s what makes it generosity.”
They crossed beneath the open lower level of the tower and into that strange, deliberate quiet that seemed to gather around the place like a second architecture. The city’s noise remained outside where it belonged. Inside, even the goblin’s chatter felt smaller, as though the tower had already begun deciding what it would tolerate.
Malakar was waiting for them halfway down the stairs, one hand resting lightly against the rail, his expression unreadable in the dimness. He looked at Thane, then the goblin, then at the book beneath the dwarf’s arm. His face did not change. If anything, that made it worse. His gaze drifted to the goblin with the sort of weary disappointment one might reserve for a recurring stain. “I see you’ve been recovered,” he said.
There was no approval in it. No relief. Only the flat acknowledgment of a man noting that rain had, in fact, made the ground wet.
Thane let the goblin’s ankle drop. “I’ve been pampered,” the goblin said with a grunt.
Zerai shifted her weight. “In fairness, we did bring him back.”
Malakar looked at her.
She did not wilt exactly, but the effect was close enough to count.
“Did you,” he asked mildly, “attempt to return him to the book by striking him with it?”
No one answered. The goblin grinned and a tooth fell out of his mouth.
Malakar’s eyes moved, one by one, over the party. Elora looked away first. Lira held his stare, though only just. Tako, unconcerned, studied a crack in the opposite wall. Thane folded his arms, which was as close as he ever came to admitting embarrassment without a knife involved.
The goblin lifted a finger from the floor. “For the record, it was inventive.”
“Silence,” Malakar said. The word was not loud. It did not need to be. The goblin’s mouth snapped shut so fast his teeth clicked. And another tooth clattered to the floor.
Malakar descended the last few steps with unhurried grace, then extended his hand toward Thane. “The book.”
Thane handed it over after the briefest pause.
Malakar took the volume, brushed an invisible speck of dirt from the cover with his thumb, then opened it not with force, but with familiarity. Symbols slimmered briefly along the inside seam, so faint the party might have missed them if they had blinked. With his other hand, he made a small, almost absent motion toward the goblin, as though beckoning a servant closer to refill a cup.
The goblin’s eyes widened.
“Oh, no,” he said. “I liked it out h—”
He vanished. Not dramatically. Not in a flash or burst or scream. One instant he lay sprawled on the floor in all his filthy, glorious delight, and the next he was gone, pulled into the waiting page with inulsting ease. Malakar closed the book with a soft clap and handed it back to Thane.
“That,” he said, “Is how books work.”
No one spoke.
Malakar let the silence settle before continuing.
“Power is dangerous,” he said, his tone calm enough to make the words feel less like instruction than diagnosis. “Poeple enjoy saying that because it allows them to treat disaster as something grand and distant. It rarely is. Power misused can be catastrophic. Power misunderstood is usually worse. Incompetence kills far more efficiently than malice ever has.”
His eyes settled, finally, on the party as a whole.
“Now,” he said, “if we are done assaulting enchanted literature in the street, shall we discuss the terms of your acceptance properly?”
No one answered. He looked from one face to the next, measuring not their strength, but the fatigue, their pride, and the particular shape of their uncertainty. The room had gone still again. The chest said nothing. The fire resumed its ordinary crackle. Even the tower itself seemed to have settled into the kind of silence that implied it had already seen this sort of foolishness before.
“You came here for answers,” Malakar said. “I have offered you a path toward them.”
Lira folded her arms. “Then discuss them.”
Malakar inclined his head, just enough to acknowledge the correction in tone without giving ground. “You will bring me the grathok intact. Not butchered. Not harvested for parts. Not reduced to a bag of useful organs by some eager…” he gestured air quotes with two fingers on each hand,”…‘specialist’ with a clean apron and poor restraint.”
“Why you make hand bunnies?” Tako asked.
“Varna and Saren…” Zerai stopped and looked at Tako with a confused look on her face. “Hand bunnies?”
Tako pantomimed the air quotes he saw Malakar make.
Zerai rolled her eyes and continued. “Varna and Saren already have it. That complicates things.”
“No,” said Malakar. ”That merely means there are now more hands available to ruin it.”
Zerai’s mouth twitched despite herself. “Isn’t that what I just said?”
Elora stepped in before the conversation could turn into another contest of irritation.”What exactly do you need from the creature?”
“The body as a whole,” Malakar said. “The heart matters, yes, but not in isolation. The grathok is dense with wrongness. Stone, flesh, instinct, old force. It can bear strain that would unmake a cleaner vessel. A sylphid heart would permit the ritual. A grathok allows it to survive being done by someone competent.”
Thane’s expression hardened. “You keep sayin’ that like we’re supposed to be grateful.”
“I am saying it because it is true.”
Lira did not take her eyes off him. “And once we bring it to you?”
“I perform the ritual here.”
“We get to watch,” Lira said.
Malakar considered her for a moment. “You may observe. You may ask questions at appropriate times. You may not interfere.”
“Convenient,” Thane muttered.
“No,” said Malakar. “Necessary.”
Elora shifted her weight. The color had returned to her face, but not fully. There was still a faint drawness around her eyes that made Lira angrier the longer she looked at it. “And the payment?”
“Ten thousand gold,” said Malakar. “After the working is complete.”
Thane gave a short, humorous laugh. “So we haul a dead monster across the city, hand it over, and trust you to pay after.”
“You are free to distrust me,” Malakar said. “Distrust is often healthier than faith. But ask yourself whether I appear to be a man in need of your carcass badly enough to swindle you for coin.”
That shut Thane up, though not happily.
Zerai tilted her head. “What’s in it for you, then? Really?”
Malakar’s gaze settled on her. “You continue to ask the useful question second.”
“Try me.”
He let the silence stretch just long enough to become deliberate. “If there is a force operating through Dunmoor, I prefer to know its shape before lesser minds panic, improvise, or feed it further. Stability is easier to preserve before frightened people begin calling their fear conviction.”
Lira caught that immediately. “Meaning us.”
“Meaning everyone.”
“That sounds like the same thing from where I’m standing.”
“Yes,” Malakar said calmly. “That is one of your limitations.”
The line landed hard enough that even Zerai did not rush to fill the space after it.
Elora broke the silence. “And if the ritual confirms what you suspect?”
“Then you will have your answer,” Malakar said. “Whether you like it is another matter.”
Lira held his gaze for a long moment. He did not blink. Did not fidget. Did not perform certainty. He simply stood in it. Behind her, the room remained too still. The chest too quiet. The book too close to hand.
“We’ll do it,” she said at last.
Malakar inclined his head once, as though she had confirmed weather he had already accounted for. “Of course.”
That should have felt like relief. It did not. The conversation was over. Lira knew it because there was nothing left in the room to win. Elora turned first after her, thoughtful rather than reassured. Zerai lingered by half a second, not because she trusted Malakar, but because she hated leaving questions unanswered. Tako moved when the others did, and his silence had begun to feel less like patience and more like distance.
Thane was last to the stairs.
The book still sat near the edge of the table, plain now, innocent in the way dangerous things often were when closed. He bent as though adjusting his coat and scooped it up with a motion that would have looked subtle if he had not been built like a siege engine. He tucked it beneath his coat.
Malakar said nothing. That was what made it worse.
They had almost reached the stairs when his voice followed them, mild as dust.
“If you intend to keep it,” he said, “do not try to strike anything else with it.”
Thane stopped. “Wasn’t plannin’ to.”
“No,” said Malakar. “That is usually when the real damage begins.”
Lira looked back then, and there it was. Not a grin. Something smaller. Colder. The faintest turn at the corner of his mouth, as if he had watched a piece settle on a board exactly where he expected it to. It sat badly with her all the way down the stairs.
Outside, Kaethar was still loud with carts, arguments, trade, and sunlight. The goblin nonsense had bought them a breath. Nothing more. The air tightened again the moment they stepped back into the street. They had accepted Malakar’s offer. That did not mean they understood what they had just put in motion.
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