Post by Reede on Mar 10, 2024 13:29:39 GMT -5
The rules of Nattbyen (known in a slightly different form as the Bad Ideas by the British team), as best everyone at Trollveggen now understood them, were as follows:
Accept neither food nor drink; beware smoke of strange scents and colors.
Bear no iron, and leave behind charms of warding.
Never go anywhere alone, not in the hollows and stalls, and not on the open streets.
Be restrained in all speech to avoid giving insult, and at all costs avoid violence.
If it sounds like a riddle, it is, so back out of the situation.
If it sounds like a bargain of time, spirit, or autonomy, it is, so back out of the situation.
Do not gamble.
Do not lie.
Harry knew that every one of these rules had been discovered the hard way.
Two of those who’d discovered them were still visible every day and every night. One of the Austrians, a man called Lukas, had lied while trading with a very small troll (trading what? The British had yet to find out), and was frozen on the third tier of the town, a statue of himself in the same soft grey stone that formed Nattbyen. He’d tried to run from the diminutive creature’s rage; his feet were now one with the street, and he’d leaned into a terrified sprint. The Austrians were still trying to negotiate his restoration (they had been told “rock is rock”), and failing that Harry knew they didn’t want Lukas there horrifying future teams and humiliating his family and himself, so they’d negotiate to have him crated up and taken back to Austria. Higher up, it was Harry’s own partner, now a smeared banner whipping in the chilly summer winds, who could be seen from halfway across the crag. Harry had been keeping watch when Burton had gone down the rabbit hole with a two-headed troll matron that had to stoop to fit through her own doorway. She’d offered power on three throws of a marked-up alien die, and Burton, counting the sides, thought three throws sounded like reasonable odds. And what had she wanted in return? She thought her stoop looked bare compared to the other brightening stalls and shops.
First reactions were all the same: bring the guns!
Bring the ships.
Bring the blood.
The Austrians, the British, and all the others from the international teams that had stumbled into these horrifically easygoing displays of magic roared in the same primal language, they’d get back their own, they’d show these bastards that they couldn’t just snap their fingers and–
Except that they could just snap their fingers and do whatever they wanted, it seemed, and outrage that burst ideas of curiosity and diplomacy was quickly subdued.
It took a while for the teams, for the priests sent from Uppsala, for the Swedish Crown, to register that the Folk of Nattbyen considered their responses to be reasonable given circumstances, not declarations of war. When that had been realized after lengthy yawns from the Muut (which seemed to be some kind of merchant council made up not only of trolls, but other fairy-like creatures as well), it had taken another length of time for the human delegations to confer with their governments, nursing what felt like slaps and pinched cheeks. They’d lost agents, and the trolls and less recognizable beings had barely put forth the energy to shrug over it, and did not care one whit for the protests that no one had told them minor offenses could result in death, enslavement, transformation. There seemed to be a droll puzzlement from the Folk as well: how could the humans dismiss a lie during a deal of good faith? How could the humans not see that the boy (the Muut hadn’t bothered to learn Burton’s name) had agreed to the terms? “Have a nectar bread,” one of the fae had cooed to Harry’s team leader, as if she’d been patting him on the head over his dead agent.
Harry had watched the man redden under his beard and hold himself perfectly straight as he forced out the polite words:
“No, thank you.”
Harry understood why Burton had found the game alluring. The two-headed troll had effortlessly worked magic that had his head spinning, and Harry’s too. No one left from their office was much of a “Merlin,” it turned out, with Doctor Goldener dead and Esteban Himself vanished. Goldener had been a snobbish, flatulent, pushy man, detested and feared by nearly everyone. Harry’s memory of Himself, the two times he’d laid eyes on him, was that the tall fae had always been smirking to himself. Harry had felt like a cringing flea beside the latter, and like a filthy-fingered urchin beside the former. But Harry and his comrades each carried a lantern that was lit all day and glowed a soft lavender, its light shining through illusion and sometimes into “spaces adjacent,” and Harry had a knife inscribed with words he didn’t understand that could cut through brick and stone, and, performing the right ritual, in the right circle, and spilling the right blood, Harry could render himself invisible, and these were his greatest powers. Every one of them had been fashioned by Goldener, with input from Himself.
On his own, Harry had a gift for finding hidden paths, and sometimes hidden trips and traps, and that was not nothing, but it sure as Hell was not the ability to turn someone to stone with a snap of the fingers. Burton, he knew, had been feeling his own smallness, too. Nattbyen was bright with wonders. Nattbyen was a lure.
With deaths and abductions beginning to define the local etiquette, what kept the peace was that everyone involved wanted things.
The locals were overjoyed at the potential for trade of things easy to get by mortals (evidently including mortals), which apparently had been extremely rare previously. And of course every one of the teams that had arrived from Britain and the rest of Europe, salivated at the promise of this knowledge, and the power it could bring them. In the face of deadly insult, greed kept them all talking. All the while, the humans and the Folk of Nattbyen measured each other like pacing tomcats, seeking to learn ways and weaknesses.
But Harry thought not all of them were doing that.
Maybe it was wishful thinking, but some of the Folk just seemed happy to have fresh company.
Was that a Bad Idea, too, he wondered? Thinking such a thing?
Accept neither food nor drink; beware smoke of strange scents and colors.
Bear no iron, and leave behind charms of warding.
Never go anywhere alone, not in the hollows and stalls, and not on the open streets.
Be restrained in all speech to avoid giving insult, and at all costs avoid violence.
If it sounds like a riddle, it is, so back out of the situation.
If it sounds like a bargain of time, spirit, or autonomy, it is, so back out of the situation.
Do not gamble.
Do not lie.
Harry knew that every one of these rules had been discovered the hard way.
Two of those who’d discovered them were still visible every day and every night. One of the Austrians, a man called Lukas, had lied while trading with a very small troll (trading what? The British had yet to find out), and was frozen on the third tier of the town, a statue of himself in the same soft grey stone that formed Nattbyen. He’d tried to run from the diminutive creature’s rage; his feet were now one with the street, and he’d leaned into a terrified sprint. The Austrians were still trying to negotiate his restoration (they had been told “rock is rock”), and failing that Harry knew they didn’t want Lukas there horrifying future teams and humiliating his family and himself, so they’d negotiate to have him crated up and taken back to Austria. Higher up, it was Harry’s own partner, now a smeared banner whipping in the chilly summer winds, who could be seen from halfway across the crag. Harry had been keeping watch when Burton had gone down the rabbit hole with a two-headed troll matron that had to stoop to fit through her own doorway. She’d offered power on three throws of a marked-up alien die, and Burton, counting the sides, thought three throws sounded like reasonable odds. And what had she wanted in return? She thought her stoop looked bare compared to the other brightening stalls and shops.
First reactions were all the same: bring the guns!
Bring the ships.
Bring the blood.
The Austrians, the British, and all the others from the international teams that had stumbled into these horrifically easygoing displays of magic roared in the same primal language, they’d get back their own, they’d show these bastards that they couldn’t just snap their fingers and–
Except that they could just snap their fingers and do whatever they wanted, it seemed, and outrage that burst ideas of curiosity and diplomacy was quickly subdued.
It took a while for the teams, for the priests sent from Uppsala, for the Swedish Crown, to register that the Folk of Nattbyen considered their responses to be reasonable given circumstances, not declarations of war. When that had been realized after lengthy yawns from the Muut (which seemed to be some kind of merchant council made up not only of trolls, but other fairy-like creatures as well), it had taken another length of time for the human delegations to confer with their governments, nursing what felt like slaps and pinched cheeks. They’d lost agents, and the trolls and less recognizable beings had barely put forth the energy to shrug over it, and did not care one whit for the protests that no one had told them minor offenses could result in death, enslavement, transformation. There seemed to be a droll puzzlement from the Folk as well: how could the humans dismiss a lie during a deal of good faith? How could the humans not see that the boy (the Muut hadn’t bothered to learn Burton’s name) had agreed to the terms? “Have a nectar bread,” one of the fae had cooed to Harry’s team leader, as if she’d been patting him on the head over his dead agent.
Harry had watched the man redden under his beard and hold himself perfectly straight as he forced out the polite words:
“No, thank you.”
Harry understood why Burton had found the game alluring. The two-headed troll had effortlessly worked magic that had his head spinning, and Harry’s too. No one left from their office was much of a “Merlin,” it turned out, with Doctor Goldener dead and Esteban Himself vanished. Goldener had been a snobbish, flatulent, pushy man, detested and feared by nearly everyone. Harry’s memory of Himself, the two times he’d laid eyes on him, was that the tall fae had always been smirking to himself. Harry had felt like a cringing flea beside the latter, and like a filthy-fingered urchin beside the former. But Harry and his comrades each carried a lantern that was lit all day and glowed a soft lavender, its light shining through illusion and sometimes into “spaces adjacent,” and Harry had a knife inscribed with words he didn’t understand that could cut through brick and stone, and, performing the right ritual, in the right circle, and spilling the right blood, Harry could render himself invisible, and these were his greatest powers. Every one of them had been fashioned by Goldener, with input from Himself.
On his own, Harry had a gift for finding hidden paths, and sometimes hidden trips and traps, and that was not nothing, but it sure as Hell was not the ability to turn someone to stone with a snap of the fingers. Burton, he knew, had been feeling his own smallness, too. Nattbyen was bright with wonders. Nattbyen was a lure.
With deaths and abductions beginning to define the local etiquette, what kept the peace was that everyone involved wanted things.
The locals were overjoyed at the potential for trade of things easy to get by mortals (evidently including mortals), which apparently had been extremely rare previously. And of course every one of the teams that had arrived from Britain and the rest of Europe, salivated at the promise of this knowledge, and the power it could bring them. In the face of deadly insult, greed kept them all talking. All the while, the humans and the Folk of Nattbyen measured each other like pacing tomcats, seeking to learn ways and weaknesses.
But Harry thought not all of them were doing that.
Maybe it was wishful thinking, but some of the Folk just seemed happy to have fresh company.
Was that a Bad Idea, too, he wondered? Thinking such a thing?