The Hotel !! (2000) Five Star Production

Wolpec was little, though wise; candles had sufficed in which to pen him. Fegrim was vast, and underlay a mountain. But he had seen among the snag-toothed peaks of Kanish-Kulya how his volcano slumbered now beneath a cap of white, where once it had spouted smoke a mile high. No ripples stirred the pool of Horimos, and after untold eons the river Metamorphia had changed that nature it once had of changing things.

Wives rinsed their laundry in the spring at Geirion, and the eldritch song Jorkas had been used to sing was turned a lullaby with nonsense words to soothe asleep happy babes in wicker cradles. Even the names of the greatest ones: Tuprid and Iaschalanva, Juorril and Lry-were one to speak them, folk would answer, "Who?"

They had departed, to fret powerless among the stars, and sometimes hurl futile spears of flame across the night... at which sight lovers, hand in hand, would cry merrily, "Look, there's a star to wish on! Wish for early marriage and long happiness!" And kiss, and forget it in a moment.

Except here, and that was very strange. Disquieting! It was indeed in Cleftor country as had been described to him: as though the black of night could filter through the walls and dull the fire. Flames here were sullen red, and their heat was muted. This was not true of the new lamp, but there were reasons for that.

It would be politic, the traveler reasoned, to behold the dawn.

Therefore, dissolving one of the forces that curdled the light-beams of his staff, he picked his way across the hut's floor silently, abandoning the thick warm fleece he'd been allotted for a coverlet. Outside, the last hour of the night was oppressive with mephitic stench, as though every home in the valley had kept a fire ablaze all night against the mantle of blackness, and all their smokes had come together in a foul miasma. Even the blade of light from his staff was foreshortened a pace or two ahead of his toes.

The trade of lamp-maker hereabouts must indeed be a profitable pursuit.

What this blackness was not was easy to define. It wasn't smoke, although much was now mingled in it. It was not fog, clammy and opaque, yet cleanly, being drops of fine-divided water. It was not cloud, which is of the same substance. It was-well, it was an inverse of brightness.

When dawn came, belatedly by the traveler's calculation, it behaved moreover in a peculiar fashion. Rather than thinning and being dispelled, as night ought to be by the rising sun, it drew in on itself, lying bare yard by yard the countryside, as though one could make thick black tar flow uphill. And uphill was its direction, out of the vale and towards the ragged pinnacles of Cleftor Heights. There, at some point almost beyond the traveler's range of vision, it gathered itself as it were into a ball, into a spiraling cone, into a wisp... and nothing.

Yet it had left, over every inch of ground where it had lain, a brooding aura of dismal foreboding.

Going by ordinary ways, he later came on some children turned out of the house to play, who were listlessly tossing pebbles at a target scratched on a tree-bole, and seemingly cared little whether they hit it or not; at least, none among them was keeping score.

"Who rules these lands?" the traveler inquired, and one of them answered.

"I think his name is Garch, sir. Would you that I go home and ask my mother? She would know."

"Thank you; the name's enough," the traveler said.

IV

At the full moon Garch Thegn of Cleftor Heights held certain audiences that differed markedly from the common run of his daily business. One day before the full, he spoke to no one, but locked himself away in private rooms to pore over great tomes and crumbling scrolls; one day after, it was never sure-even to his chief counselors and stewards-whether he would be fit to resume his normal court, in his great hall tiled with chrysoberyl slabs.

Yet withal his was a domain envied far and wide in this country; by all criteria it was improbable. Though most of it was rocky and its soil was thin, its kine were famed for their fatness and the richness of their milk. Though their roots were shallow, often planted in mere crevices, never a hedge but yielded nuts and fruit to be preserved by boiling down in honey. Though it was unpopulous, with villages few and far

between, its folk were tall and strong and raised healthy children; what was more, garments elsewhere reserved to the grandest ladies might here be seen gracing a farmer's wife driving her trap to market, or her daughter on a high-day bound for the wife-taking dance. Velvet and suede, samite and purple plush, were donned as casually as homespun, and only at the very fringes of the Garch estates-as for example hard by Rotten Tor-did families lack for silver spoons and porcelain dishes to entertain company at table.