“Let’s get downslope, anyway,” Lee said. “Down shouldn’t be hard.”
“Not doing it all at once is the problem,” Gelert said. He dodged off among some of the smaller boulders, finding something that would serve as a path to parallel the main one. Lee put her arm around the Elf-King again, but was surprised when he froze under the touch, then pushed her away, gently, but firmly. “No,” he said. “Thank you. A bad idea, right now. I can manage.”
She nodded, went after Gelert: the Elf-King followed them. For some minutes there were no more sounds than the grunts and soft curses of people banging their shins on half-seen rocks, recovering themselves, moving on in haste. For ten or fifteen more minutes they worked their way down the steep slope around the shoulder of the mountain, falling sometimes, sliding sometimes, while the terror sang in the back of Lee’s brain, what if they come again without us knowing, without us seeing, the way they just did— But Gelert had spotted them; and as she turned to see how he was doing, the Elf behind her had his eye on the sky as well, grimacing with the pain of his injuries, but looking more alert every second.
Up ahead of them, indistinct in the darkness, was a little stand of arolla pine, several wind-twisted trees with a cluster of shattered boulders trapped among them. Here the three of them stopped again, briefly, kneeling or crouching on the downhill side of the trees to catch their breath. Lee looked up at the castle, scanned the sky, and could see no pursuit; not that she felt that much better because of this, or entirely trusted her perceptions. It was an uncomfortable feeling, especially at a time when their lives might depend on her Seeing truly.
Gelert was holding his nose up into the wind, Scenting. “Nothing new coming,” he said. “You may have surprised them more completely than you thought.” He let out a huh of laughter. “You sure surprised me. If more heads of state could do that kind of thing, politics would be a much more interesting field…”
“It’s how kingship works here,” the Elf-King said. “A ruler has to feed his people. Those of us who could understand the World well enough to make the weather do what the crops needed, lived to breed descendants who could make it do that even better. Those who were no good at it—” He shrugged. “The gift got strong in the families that fought it out to become the royal lines. These days we can do a lot more than just make it rain.”
Lee shuddered, and sneezed, still smelling ozone. “So we saw.”
“But if you did that to them,” Gelert said, glancing back up at the wreckage of the destroyed aircraft, “why don’t you just do it to all the Alfen who’re against you?”
“Because even I can’t do it constantly,” the Elf-King said, “and I certainly can’t do it in my sleep. Besides, they’re my people. I shouldn’t be killing them. Normally I don’t have to: normally they have some respect for my power. But right now it’s drowned out by fear of what I may do if they leave me alive. Yet if I kill them, it’s hard to convince them that they were wrong to be afraid of me.” He glanced up into that dark sky, where the smoke of the crashed craft rose pale, fading against the night. “And if I can’t convince them otherwise, there won’t be much left here when the armies of the multinationals arrive to take control of the source of fairy gold…”
“You know about that,” Gelert said.
“I’ve feared it for centuries,” the Elf-King said. “I’d hoped perhaps it wouldn’t come for another century yet. By then perhaps I’d have prepared my people for what had to happen to prevent it. But hope’s failed; the time is now, and the world’s not ready yet…” He looked down at the ground. “If in fact I haven’t simply been deluding myself all this while.”
Everything had been happening so quickly that Lee couldn’t do much but sit back on her haunches and shake her head. Right now, all she could think of to say was, “And as for you and your midnight commcalls. You and your roses! Was there anything more dangerous you could have sent me here to snoop around for?”
The Elf-King nodded. “Maybe not. I was sorry I couldn’t have been more forthcoming with you, but my own comms were being monitored…and it causes talk if the King of all the Elves is seen too often to sneak out and use a public comm box. You were a last chance, and I couldn’t even explain why—”
From behind them and above there came the sound of an explosion, somewhere inside the castle walls. The three of them looked up, startled; the Elf-King shook his head. “So much history, up there,” he said softly. “And how it repeats. For every ten Elf-Kings or Elf-Queens who’ve been made up there, two or three have been destroyed. But in the old days the fights tended to be fair. Now my House is where knives are stuck into backs and plots are hatched in the dark, where the betrayals happen.” He looked up at the castle walls, and laughed one harsh, bitter laugh. “Though they’d tell you I was pondering a betrayal worse than anything they could have thought of, and so I deserved to die.”
Above, on the castle walls, lights ran to and fro, there were shouts, indistinct reports, the sounds of weapons being discharged. “Some of them must not even know you got away,” Gelert said, looking over his shoulder at the light of energies tearing the night above them on the castle walls. “Or maybe some of them don’t care…”
“Old scores are being settled,” the Elf-King said. “Too many of them. They’re fighting in a burning building, and they don’t even know it. Let’s get away.”
They kept on heading down the mountainside and across the lower face of it, half-sliding, half-stumbling in the dark. Once or twice they came across something that seemed like a path, but they were wary of taking it, and just kept on slipping and staggering down through dwarf oak and pine scrub and alpenrose, and the splintered limestone and scree of the cliff face. Finally Lee came down on a ledge and glanced around her. The moon was still behind some of the tattered remnants of cloud, but her Sight was sufficient to confirm her sense of where they were. “Gel, we need to head upslope from here—”
“Five minutes to rest,” Gelert said, scenting the wind again, and turning away, satisfied for the moment.
“But we don’t dare wait much longer than that. And we’ve got to decide what to do now. We can’t just keep running this way.”
They crouched in the lee of a nearby boulder. Lee glanced again at the Elf-King, having for the first time a few moments really to take him in—the torn suit, the bruises, the cuts, and the black eye. Yet the beauty was still there, overwhelming, almost frightening, something it felt dangerous to be near—for somehow, here on its home ground, it hinted at the lightning.
Lee shook her head. “She got you a good one there,” she said.
“Dierrich?” The Elf-King’s expression was too grim to be a smile. “She won’t do it again.”
There was no arguing that. Lee still couldn’t stop looking at him, and glancing sideways at Gelert, she was somewhat surprised to see his gaze lingering on the Elf-King, too, with an expression that under more normal circumstances would have been unbelieving. “It wasn’t an accident, that evening in the restaurant, was it?” Gelert said.
Laurin looked wry, like a man who’d become the victim of his own joke. “Do you mean, did I plan our meeting? No. But unfortunately, being the ruler of an entire universe doesn’t always mean you get to say how things go. Often enough the universe itself makes its wishes known. The places I go, the things I do, are most often on Alfheim’s business in the truest sense. When I went to Le Chalet Perdu that night, I had no idea why I’d agreed to attend that dinner…why I was sitting and being polite to people who bored me. Even when I saw you looking at me, and Alfheim spoke in my ear and said ‘That’s the one whose help you need,’ I still had no idea why.”
“I’d be glad of any hints you might have on the subject now,” Lee said.
“Hints I’ve got,” Laurin said, “but answers are still scarce. That you got me out of there seems to be proof that my World was right that I would need you. Yet how much further this will take us…” He looked around them.
“I don’t want t
o hang around, Lee,” Gelert said. “These people have at least some ability to sense psychospoor.”
Lee looked over the top of the boulder, scanning in all directions for any sign of pursuit. “That was quite a stunt, up there at the castle,” she said.
Just for a moment, as she turned back to it in the cloud-dimmed moonlight, that inhumanly handsome face was transfigured by something that to Lee looked purely human: pride. “I’m my ancestors’ son,” the Elf-King said, “and no Alfen of this continent was ever able to match the mastery of my side of the family over our world. North American weather was always more of a challenge than this soft European stuff. And my own family learned to go deeper into mastery than others had… into give-and-take, rather than just forcing the world into submission. So when my people became rai’Laurinhen, we did it the old fashioned way, by right of sheer power, not manipulation of the old Elves’ network.” The grin made the split lip bleed again. “They’ve never cared for that, some of these old-worlders. But the World knows its true master…eventually.” The blood dripped; he felt the itch of it, wiped it away. “Whether that’ll be enough to save me now, though, I don’t know. I can’t do such a work again for a while. I need some hours to recover my strength and take care of other matters. And if we try to stay here long enough for me to recover fully, they’ll find us before it happens.”
“We’ll go for a nice long walk, then,” Gelert said.
“Where, madra?”
“Where we came from, if we have to.”
“Earth,” Lee said. “Maybe even LA, if we can manage it. At least we can get you to the authorities there… keep you safe, until you can find a way to get back here again.”
Just before the darkness that fell again as the moon went behind a cloud, Lee caught an odd anticipatory glint in his eye, a look of which she could make nothing. “On one side,” he said, “I can’t argue that we must move. Yet your Ellay on Earth is one of the first places they’d look. Also, if I leave here, there’s a chance I won’t be able to get back in again and do what I have to—”
“But what do you have to do?” Lee said. Inexplicably, she shivered; so did he, and all Lee could tell was that it didn’t look like his trouble was with the cold.
“Destroy Alfheim as we’ve known it,” he said. “All my people must become mortal, and our world must be changed, or we’ll all die. And so will everyone in all the Worlds, everywhere.”
Lee and Gelert stared at each other.
“You wouldn’t be exaggerating a little, perhaps?” Gelert said. “Stress can make people do that…”
“There’s much to tell,” the Elf-King said. “But not here. We’ll have to come back to Alfheim before too long, but for the meantime we need to elude pursuit. Right now climbing will do…and once we’re up the mountain again, there are other possibilities.” He grinned, a slightly feral look. “Istelin’ru Semivh and I have considerable history. Once in contact with its stones, even though I can’t walk, I may be able to surprise them—”
Lee raised her eyebrows at that. “This wouldn’t be any help to you, would it?” she said. She reached into her buttoned pocket, unbuttoned it, and gave him the little stone she’d picked up from under the alpenrose.
As it dropped into his hand, the Elf-King’s face became so torn between rage and delight that Lee had trouble looking at him. He burst out in angry laughter. “What made you take this?”
“I don’t know.”
“I do,” he said. “You did it because the World spoke to you; because it needed something from you.”
Even in the dimness, Lee could tell there was something else he wasn’t saying. And also because I needed something from you, Lee Saw him thinking; but then they’re the same thing.
The concept was peculiarly phrased, and Lee wasn’t even sure she’d understood it correctly. “I do things for the same reason,” he said, “and sometimes don’t know why.” He shook his head. “But I still can’t believe that they took you up there on purpose. They can only have done it to taunt you—and through you, me. The arrogance of them! That place is mine.” The fury blasted off him like a wave of heat. Lee almost felt inclined to shield her face from it.
“But the whole place is yours, I thought,” Gelert said.
The Elf-King looked at Gelert in sudden surprise. Then he laughed. “Some parts of it more than others. That place, that side of the mountain, has its own history. No matter what they told you, there was a garden—though few Alfen like to think about it. My people’s first great downfall happened there.” He gave Lee a wry look. “It may have established an archetype. Anyway, let’s get away first. There’ll be a little time to tell you the tale: not much, for they’ve forced my hand.”
“Do we still need to go all the way up there?”
“No,” the Elf-King said, though as he looked up and over his shoulder, it was plain that he would have liked to. “The power of my ancestor is in this for me.” He gripped the stone. “This was part of the old garden, where he invested so much of his strength—the right to which passes to me. With this, we can go from here, drug or no drug; and we’ll go a way they won’t think we’ll go.” He briefly looked concerned. “I saw what Dierrich did to the weather. I’m sorry to have to take you back into the cold, but it’s a way they won’t expect, and it’ll buy us some time. Are you willing?”
Gelert looked up in the direction of the castle, around the shoulder of the mountain. Lee followed his glance, and saw the lights lifting into the sky. “Willing or not, we’d better go.”
The Elf-King cupped both hands around the little stone, closed his eyes. The air off to one side rippled obscurely: not a big opening, not very steady-looking. “Go,” he said.
Gelert wasted no time in going through the shimmer in the air. The Elf-King went after him, vanishing almost entirely, holding out a hand to Lee through the shimmer. She took it, and vanished after him—
—into the dark again. It was as well that she had been warned about the cold. Maybe it was the contrast with the warmer air on the mountainside, maybe it was her body’s reaction to being so cold again after nearly dying of it earlier; but the bitter stillness of the air stung her all over, and burnt Lee’s face like cold fire.
Gelert was shaking his head again, wincing with the pain in his ears. “I’m sorry,” the Elf-King said. “We won’t stay here a moment longer than we must: just long enough for our trail to go cold.”
“That shouldn’t take long,” Lee said, hugging herself again, looking up and around her. They stood in a vast pale waste of snow, utterly still, utterly quiet. Just the little dry squeak made by Lee’s shifting her stance on the snow seemed terribly loud. And the terror was a subtle thing, creeping up in the back of her mind, a sense that she shouldn’t make sound, shouldn’t attract attention, for something, someone awful was watching—
Gelert was looking up into that utterly black and crystalline sky at the stars there. The constellations were strangely altered, and the aurora danced high in that sky, great green and violet curtains, hissing softly. As they started to walk, that hiss was the only sound besides the squeak of their footsteps in the snow, and the strange small tinkling sounds each exhalation made in the terrible cold of the air. “Is this where I think it is?” Gelert said.
“Midgarth,” the Elf-King said. “Yes.” He looked around him as if trying to find a landmark. Lee thought that would be a good trick, in this landscape as bald as an egg.
“Over that way,” he said softly. “I know what you’re feeling. That sense of watching… But it’s usually spurious. We’re not likely to attract any attention at the moment. The Battle hasn’t started yet, and when it does, it’ll be far south of here.”
If Lee hadn’t been shivering already, she would have started then. This would be the middle of the Fimbulwinter—absolutely the last time any but the most foolhardy tourist would want to visit Midgarth. All those of its normal inhabitants who didn’t desire to take their chances fighting at the side of the Gods were else
where in the worlds now, on work permits, or lying on the beaches of Huichtilopochtli or Tierra, soaking up the rays and giving thanks for worldgating technology.
“We’re probably lucky that all the worlds aren’t like this,” the Elf-King said, beginning to walk. As he went, he turned and looked over his shoulder, and saw Lee shivering, and without breaking stride, took off his jacket and gave it to her. “But something went wrong with Midgarth’s entropy patterning when the core of the sheaf rotated. So it keeps repeating and repeating this cycle…”
“While this may be the beginning of the story,” Gelert said, “maybe it’s a little too far toward the beginning?”
“Maybe it is. But then you know at least half the story already. I know you do because Hagen knew you did. And I have, or had, other operatives in his organization, tapping his comms and feeding me information about his doings, besides the one that Dierrich’s people killed.”
“Omren dil’Sorden,” Lee said softly, as she slipped the Elf-King’s jacket around her.
The Elf-King nodded. “No one bids for fairy gold at a price as low as that big contract he found out about,” he said, “unless they know the price is about to fall. And the way that ExTel, and the various other multinationals and supranationals colluding with it, know that the price will fall, is that they have an invasion scheduled for eighteen months from now. They will enter Alfheim by force, and—” He broke off, rubbing his eyes briefly. “There are aspects of this I still find hard to discuss. They will at the very least overthrow our government and take control of fairy gold production themselves. But let that wait for a moment. Dierrich and her party knew about the multinationals’ plan for a while, but they never took it seriously. Mostly they amused themselves with hunting down Alfen double agents working in the outworlds, or Alfen whose loyalties they find questionable, even doubtful. They’ve killed many innocents in this way—and drawn to themselves exactly the attention they were hoping to avoid.”