18

He smiled and gestured once more, and a chair with a beautiful pantsuit and silk shirt appeared from the polar bear. “please take them, they look better than your sweat suit.” “No, dammit, don't you understand what no means!?” He smiled, and gestured and I felt something shift. “That was three refusals, I no longer have to try and catch you Ms. Fatelli, this little game is over. I tell you that all here now are gifts freely given and that you may take without any payment.”
He relaxed visibly. “And thank you for refusing. I do not like some of our games, but the king has decreed them, and so we all must obey.” He took a drink from his chocolate and continued. “Now that you and I have done our duties, would you like to know the extent of your service?”
“Yeah, I want to know, and I hope it's a quick one, I wnat to get out of here and honestly, I don't want to see you ever again after this is done” I said to him. I was tired, and irritable, and still smarting from being trapped so easily by legal mechanizations. that I started trying to push his buttons. All in all, not very smart, I admit it, but that's life, you're never perfect and seldom good, and obnoxious is easy compared to the other two.
To his credit, Cobb didn't bat an eye, nor did I see any tensing of any muscle. He just stared at me like he was sad about something. Sad like a general is sad about sending men to die. That got me. Emotions here in Underhill manifest as smell along with visual cues. It makes it real hard to fool people. Maybe it's one of the reasons the fae don't try to lie.
“If you're done trying to irritate me, we'll get started. I'll ask you a question then. What do you know of the Anolyn way?” He leaned forward as he spoke, and suddenly I was the center of ALL his attention. The answer I gave was what Zhirk had told me years ago.
“The Anolyn Way was a way through the barrier around the island, and a way past all the magickal alarms that Anolyn had set to stop emigrants. There were a series of safe-houses on the island and escapees traveled from house to house to avoid Anolyn's troops. There were a series of safe-houses on the island and escapees traveled from house to house to avoid Anolyn's troops. The final stop was a cave on the island shore at the closest point that the barrier came to shore. The way through the barrier was by boat.”
One wizard got the wild idea to make a giant clamshell made of rock. Once this was done, he rowed the boat out to the barrier, and closed the clamshell. He drifted through the magical alarms and the barrier without incident. Anolyn was enraged by the rock boats, but couldn't alter his barrier spell. It took weeks of preparation on Anolyn's part to cast the barrier the first time, and he didn't dare take it down as the enemies he made would be certain to attack before he could get the barrier back up. So he did the next best thing and patrolled the water himself, burning and sinking any boat he found.
A boat survived Anolyn's attacks and was found by some of the emigrants who took shelter in the cave where the boat was hidden. They had a wizard who was able to spell the clam-boat to be able to swim under water and get through the barrier. It worked, but he was killed before he could teach others how he modified the spell to swim rock boat underwater. This single clam-boat became the Anolyn Way. It ran in secret for years, until the patrols apparently found it and destroyed it” I told him.
He looked at me in surprise. “I'm impressed Ms. Fatelli. Very few humans have recounted the story with that kind of accuracy. Whoever taught it to you is someone I would like to meet.” I went cold inside and my heart clenched at remembering Zhirk as he told that story to me. “You can't he's dead, and his soul devoured by that damn bottle you showed me when you hired me to help you” I spat the words at him like venom.
Zhirk was the best friend I have ever known and knowing that his soul had gone to feed that monster Ahiah, and now to find that the bottle had been re-created really had me angry. “You tell me how you know about that bottle and who the miserable piece of garbage is that made it. When this is all over I want to use that bottle on the damned idiot that made that abomination!”
He actually dared smile at that, and my anger went incandescent. “What the fuck are you smiling about you miserable waste! Tell me who made that damn bottle!” “There is no bottle, I had chatted with you brother-in-law Lawrence Potter, and got the story from him. I used that to get you to agree to take the job I wanted you for.”
I sat down on the rug in shock and relief. No bottle. But I went ballistic again and tore into Cobb verbally for five minutes while he sat there and waited for me to run down. When I finally pulled myself back together, he told me what I was going to do. “I want you to re-open the Anolyn Way.” I blinked. Surely he was joking on this. “You want me to re-open the Anolyn way? Why the hell for? You got a long lost love in there or something?” “Yes” was what he said.