Goblin Moon
Authors: Teresa Edgerton
Tags: #fantasy, #alchemy, #fantasy adventure, #mesmerism, #swashbuckling adventure, #animal magnetism
“The characters of
Goblin
Moon
are always in motion, always playing off something or
someone, always acting and reacting as circumstances demand.
Edgerton has effectively filtered the classic styles of Charles
Dickens and Alexander Dumas from modern and screen adaptations back
into prose . . . A fascinating accomplishment.”
• John Bunnell,
Dragon Magazine
“Teresa Edgerton works with the deft and loving touch
of a Renaissance painter. She has the bold vision that makes epics,
but never loses sight of the details where the true stuff of magic
lies. Her characters are more than merely believable, they become
intimate acquaintances of the reader, close friends and bitter
enemies. I wish all fantasy writers had her gift for creating real
places and real people.”
• Tad Williams, author of
Tailchaser’s Song, Shadowmarch
,
The Dragonbone Chair, Otherland,
&c.
“A delightful book, set in a world where magic adds
intrigue to a society much like Georgian England.”
•
Out of
This World Tribune
“Teresa Edgerton has written a fantasy that is fresh
and appealing, and completely original in conception. She has drawn
on history and folklore with a discerning and inventive eye, and in
Goblin Moon
creates a world that is
strange and grotesque and wonderful and familiar, all at the same
time.”
• Kate Elliott, author of
J
a
ran, Crown of
Stars, Spirit Gate,
&c.
“As satisfying a modern novel as one could wish.
Stylish and inventive, with a unique flavor interweaving the best
of the romantical reality of a particular period of history with a
highly original use of fantasy elements.”
• Baird Searles,
Asimov’s
Teresa Edgerton
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 1991 Teresa
Edgerton
This book is available
in print at most online retailers.
Smashwords Edition,
License Notes
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Acknowledgements
The Whensday People provided invaluable critiques and
insights while this work was in progress: Kevin Christensen, Bob
Levy, ElizaBeth Gilligan, Ellen Levy-Finch, Joy Oestreicher, Dani
McKenzie, Alis Rasmussen, Delores Beggs, Mike Van Pelt, Ed Muller,
Rich McKenzie, Dean Stark, Kimberly Rufer-Bach, Leslie Lundquist,
Jeanette Hancock.
Special thanks to my research assistants, John
Edgerton and Ann Meyer Maglinte, and to Daniel Martinez for
appearing on the cover.
And last, but very far from least,
this reprint edition would not exist without the assistance of
Jennifer L. Carson, Carolyn Hill, and James Keesey. Over the years,
their friendship and encouragement have meant more than any words
of mine could possibly express.
Table of
Contents
Of the Goblin Moon
A quaint Superstition still
current in the Rustic Villages and indeed among many Ignorant Folk,
personifies the full Moon as a Loathsome Hag with a prodigious
Appetite, who, roaming the country lanes and byways, Devours all
whom she meets: Men, Women, Children, Horses, Cattle, Sheep, Goats,
&c., all without Discrimination and sometimes at a Single
Gulp.
This Superstition, our Colleague,
Dr. Finsbury, hath traced back to the days of Dark Evanthum, and
indeed, it is well known that Moon Worship was a feature of all the
Ancient Religions. Whereas the Enlightened Pagans of Panterra
worshipped the Moon Goddess as a stately white Woman, the Magicians
and Adepts of Evanthum depicted her as a ghastly Giantess who,
swelling ever greater at the time of her Monthly Approach, and her
Appetite increasing in proportion, required to be Propitiated and
her Blood-Lust sated with divers horrid Sacrifices, Rituals, and
Ceremonies—the which neglected, her Anger was Terrible, and great
Mutations, Quakes, Fires, Tempests, Deluges, and all manner of
Disaster both Natural and Civil the Inevitable result.
Such Upheavals are not unknown in
Our Own Day, but Modern Philosophers attribute them to another
Cause, which is: to the Magnetic Attraction between the Earth and
the Moon, whenever that chilly orb draws Nigh.
From
Magica Antiqua, a Complete
System of Magical Philosophy, containing both the History and the
Principles of the Art, along with many Curious Anecdotes concerning
the Beliefs and Practices of the Ancients
by Horatio Foxx,
F.G.G., Doctor of Alchemy, of Natural and Occult Philosophy,
&c., &c.
Printed for Darrington, Dover, and Zabulon, at
Porphyry Lane, Lundy, Imbria
Chapter
1
In which a Discovery is made.
The moon wallowed, pale and bloated, on the horizon.
The tide, running abnormally high even for this time of Iune’s near
approach, had turned; no longer reversing the river’s natural flow,
it swelled and accelerated the headlong rush of waters down to the
sea. Oars creaked in rusty oarlocks as a flat-bottomed rowboat
carrying a grizzled old man and a sturdy youth headed across the
current, pulling for the dark western shore.
The old man sat on the stern thwart, scanning the
river, while the boy rowed. At first glance, they might have been
mistaken for sea-faring men, for they dressed much alike, in cloth
caps and long full-skirted coats of some rough fabric so worn,
patched, and stained that it could no longer be identified; they
wore their hair in short tarry pigtails, sailor-fashion. But their
pale faces gave them away, and their wide dark eyes, like the eyes
of some nocturnal bird of prey. They were river scavengers, Caleb
Braun and his grandnephew Jedidiah: men who slept by day and worked
at night, rowing out on the river after dark when the fishing
scows, barges, and pleasure craft that plied the river Lunn by day
were all tied up in dock.
Near the middle of the river, Caleb reached out with
the gaff hook to snag a piece of floating wood. It proved to be a
piece of decorative molding depicting one of the Seven Fates, a
gilded figure like to a naked man with outstretched eagle’s wings
sprouting from its shoulders. The gold paint was beginning to flake
away, giving the features a leprous cast, but the wood was still
sound. With a grunt of satisfaction, Caleb dropped the molding in
the bottom of the boat.
When they reached quieter water near the shore,
Jedidiah rowed upstream, turned the boat, and started across
again.
“Upriver!” Caleb’s hoarse warning barely allowed Jed
time to reverse the stroke of one oar and turn the boat so that the
bow took the impact. There was a dull thud and the boat rocked
wildly as something heavy glanced against the bow and scraped along
the side. Jed caught only a glimpse of a blunt-ended shadow riding
low in the water and a gleam of moonlight on ornate brass fittings,
before the current caught the coffin and sent it bobbing on
ahead.
“Pull, lad, pull,” Uncle Caleb called out. “Blister
me, we’ll lose it, you don’t move sharp!”
Jed plied the oars frantically, spinning the boat one
hundred and eighty degrees, then rowing with all his might to get
down-stream of the coffin. Then it was Caleb’s turn to move
swiftly, using the gaff hook to draw the long black box closer,
then tying ropes through two of the handles.
With the coffin securely in tow, Caleb sat down
again, rubbing his hands on the sides of his thighs. “Ebon wood, by
the look of it, and see them fancy handles? Some fine country
gentleman, or a baron or a jarl inside, maybe. Should be money and
jewels as well.”
Jed nodded glumly. If not gold coins or a jeweled
brooch, the long black box would likely contain something of value.
Yet at the thought of opening the coffin and claiming those
valuables, he could not repress a shudder.
“You got no call to be so squeamish,” snorted Caleb.
“You was bred for this life, which is mor’n I can say for some of
the rest of us. You got no call to quake and rattle your teeth at
the sight of a box of old bones.”
Jed knew it was so. Just about as far back as he
could remember, he had been accompanying his granduncle on these
night-time expeditions. But even before that (as Caleb was fond of
reminding him) he had been a dependent of the river and the tide.
The very cradle that had rocked him as a baby was constructed of
planks from the wreck of the
Celestial
Mary
; his first little suit of clothes—in which he had amazed
the other urchins, in velvet and lace—his mother cut from the cloak
of a drowned nobleman. And much of the food and drink which
nourished him since had been purchased with deadman’s coin.
Old Lunn, she was a capricious river, as Jed well
knew: restlessly eroding her own banks, making sudden leaps and
changes in her course, especially upriver in the country districts
where there were no strong river walls to contain her. Swelled by a
high tide or by the rains and snow-melt of Quickening, she swept
away manors and villages, churches and farmhouses, crumbled old
graveyards and flooded ancient burial vaults, dislodging the dead
as ruthlessly as she evicted the living. No, the Lunn respected no
persons, either living or dead, but the crueler she was to others,
she was that much kinder to men like Jed and his Uncle Caleb.
For by river-wrack and by sea-wrack brought in by the
tide, off goods salvaged from water-logged bales and salt-stained
wooden chests, by an occasional bloated corpse found floating. with
money still in its pockets, the scavengers gleaned a meagre
existence year ‘round, and—especially when the full moon brought
high tides and other disturbances—were sometimes able to live in
comfort for an entire season off the grave offerings of the pious
departed.
Despite all that, Jed always felt a cold uneasiness
robbing the dead.
“Willi Grauman opened a coffin once—found the body of
a girl inside: her hair down to her feet and the nails on her hands
mor’n a foot long, and the box all filled with blood—Willi says she
was fair floating in it.” Jed spoke over the continued creaking of
the oars. “It weren’t a natural corpse at all, it was a
blood-sucker. Willi slammed the lid down, and—“
“Willi Grauman is a liar. I thought you knowed that,”
said Caleb, speaking with calm authority.
Jed hunched one shoulder. “Erasmus Wulfhart ain’t no
liar. He says his granddad opened a box once, and there weren’t no
body at all, just a white linen shroud and a great heaving mass of
worms and yellow maggots—one of them worms crawled out and got into
old Wulfhart’s clothes, and while he slept that night that worm ate
a hole right through his leg: flesh and bone and all. Erasmus seen
the hole hisself, or the scar, anyways, and the old man limped to
the end of his days.”
