“It has little choice,” the Elf-King said absently, as he finished the circle he was making in the little concreted space. “All spaces are continually trying to become all the other spaces that were created at the same time the core of their sheaf rotated. The difficult thing isn’t bringing them together, as a rule; it’s keeping them apart…”
He stood up straight, then, with a grim look on his face. “Crude,” the Elf-King said. “But it’ll work. You saw the circle? Step in, and we’ll go where my own power is centered.”
“Where,” Gelert said, “Aien Mhariseth?”
“Not at all. Ellay.”
Lee blinked at that. “Or rather, the version of Ellay that lies in Alfheim,” the Elf-King said.
“You have a house there, don’t you,” Lee said. “I remember reading about that somewhere.”
“The gossip columnists are fascinated by it,” Laurin said, looking faintly annoyed. “They’re sure the place is full of fabulous treasures. But they wouldn’t know the real ones if they sat on them.” He let out a breath of laughter. “Never mind that. Come into the circle—we have work to do.”
“What work?” Gelert said as he paced into the circle and sat down.
“As you do,” said the Elf-King, “I have a case to make…and a job to do.”
Lee went to stand beside Gelert, wondering what to make of this. “You said your people feared to kill you,” Lee said, “but feared even more what you might do if they left you alive…”
“I told you,” the Elf-King said. “They think I’m going to destroy my world.”
Gelert flicked his ears back and forth, so incredulous he forgot to wince. “Are they crazy?”
“Not in the slightest,” Laurin said. “I will destroy it. That’s why I came to Earth: looking for a way to do that.” He glanced over at Lee. “And I think I’ve found it.”
She found herself shaking. “It’s not them that’s crazy,” she said. “It’s you.”
The Elf-King shook his head. “The problem is that I’m still not sure,” he said. “There’s a factor in the destruction that hasn’t been fully resolved yet.”
“What?”
“You.”
*13*
They stepped out into heat even more fierce than midsummer in New York. “At least it’s dry heat,” Lee said, as she looked around her, relieved, though still profoundly disturbed by what the Elf-King had been saying.
“What an Angeleña you are,” Gelert said, and gazed around him too. They were standing on a hillside that in their own Ellay would have been up on one of the hills behind Pasadena, with the view of Lake Val San Fernando stretching down in front of them towards the sea, and Ellay proper off to the left. But here there was no lake. Lee looked down at the San Fernando Valley as it had once existed hundreds of years before on Earth—a great basin of widely scattered sagebrush, pinion pine, and wild walnut trees, still a desert dappled in olivegreen and gold, barren but beautiful. Beyond the Santa Monicas to the southeast, the Alfen version of Ellay rose: a smaller city, still a fairly substantial gridwork etched on the Ellay basin, with the shimmer of the Pacific beyond it.
The whole hill on which the three of them stood was part of a walled compound that stretched far down below them to a terrace scooped out of the hillside. On the level ground there, a big white stucco house with many wings and many red-tiled roofs sat toward the back of it; in front of it, between the house and the view, were formal gardens, patios, and paved terraces, a swimming pool. “We won’t have long at peace here,” the Elf-King said, leading them down the hillside by a little path that switched back and forth along its face. “When they realize how we’ve fled, this will be one of the first places they’ll think of coming. But it has certain protections around it. No one but I can come here by gating; flying craft are also inhibited for some miles in all directions. And to a lesser extent, the World also takes care of the place.” He looked troubled.
“But you think it might not now,” Lee said.
“Everything becomes uncertain now,” the Elf-King said, and suddenly looked very tired. “All the imponderables come together here. But come on…I can at least give you something to eat and drink before the trouble starts.”
Before I die, Lee Saw him think. Her sudden realization of how very hungry and thirsty she was, and how tired, was somewhat blunted by the realization that she did not normally See what people were thinking so clearly. Is it Alfheim? she wondered. Or is it him? But then she’d been doing it in Terra, too—
They made their way up onto a patio behind the house, then up onto a deck that surrounded the house completely. The back wall of the house, looking onto the hillside, was one big wall of glass; the Elf-King led them over to a set of patio doors in the glass, spoke them open. Lee thought longingly of her own patio doors as they went in.
A huge living space opened out in front of them, down a few steps—painted tile, glass, massive pale-stained furniture, a huge dining table. The architecture was surprisingly Southwestern, in stucco and distressed oak beaming, except that the characteristic Alfen buttressed “neoGothic” arch was repeated in the windows on the valley side. “Palatial,” Gelert said. “But then I guess there’s a certain expectation that you of all people might live in a palace.”
Laurin laughed at that “This isn’t anything,” he said. “You should have seen the style in which my ancestors lived. This would have been a rustic country lodge to them. In fact, it was a rustic country lodge. This house is built on the foundations of one my grandfather built when he arrived with the first Alfen who came here for the gold rush.”
Lee looked around her, bemused. “It seems a lot older than that…”
“Our gold rush,” the Elf-King said. “Around your year one hundred fifteen of the common era. This house has been remodeled many times—the last time would have been in the seventeen hundreds. Come on along this way.”
They followed him into a kitchen that opened off the living space. Lee immediately fell in love with anyone who could design a room so big, so useful, and so humane. The Elf-King went over to the fridge and looked inside, then made a face. “I knew I should have gone shopping last elevenday,” he muttered. “Nothing but mayonnaise and mneush…”
“What’s mneush?” Gelert said, sticking his head into the fridge.
“An acquired taste, and I don’t think you have time to acquire it today,” Laurin said, going over to a nearby floor-to-ceiling cupboard and pulling it open.
“I’d have thought you could just snap your fingers and have things appear,” Gelert said.
“I’m the king of the world, not a magician,” the Elf-King said, rather irritably, though the irritation, Lee thought, was more for the cupboard than for Gelert. “Well, there’s some bread here. Some wine, some sparkling water…”
He brought them out, with a board and a knife to cut the bread. “I meant, you must be able to send servants out for that kind of thing,” Gelert said.
“I don’t have any servants here,” Laurin said. “I keep this house as a retreat from all the roles my people try to push me into back in Aien Mhariseth. No scepter, no throne. The one aspect of royalty I keep here is the one they wish I didn’t.” He poured a glass of wine, a rich dark red, and held it out to Lee.
“I couldn’t drink…” Lee said.
“You should. Our wine is very strengthening; this vintage comes from the slopes just to the south of Istelin’ru Semivh.” He poured a small crystal bowl of it for Gelert; then he poured his own glass and held it to the afternoon light coming in the valleyward windows. “Welcome to my hearth,” he said. “For however long it’s mine…”
They drank. “Dierrich said that,” Lee said. “And later I heard her imply she wasn’t happy about it…”
“Nor will the rest of her followers have been, and I’m sure they’re going to let us know about it when they get here shortly,” the Elf-King said. “Unless we can present them with a fait accompli.”
Lee drank a little more of the wine, trying to k
eep her composure in the face of the fear she now saw growing, from moment to moment, in the Elf-King’s eyes. “What is it you intend us to accomplish? You said ‘the destruction of your world’…but you had to be speaking figuratively.”
Slowly he shook his head. “Lee,” he said. “May I call you Lee?”
She nodded.
“My world has to change,” he said. “It can’t stay the way it is. With its connivance, in a way, my people have created a situation over the millennia that has caused the people of the other worlds to hate us. In other times, when we had little congress with other worlds, or when their technologies were insufficient to destroy us, or each other, wholesale, this would have made less difference. Now it has to become different…not just because the anger and greed of mortals can destroy us, but because it can destroy them, too. All of them—everything that is.”
He drank his wine and looked down into the glass. “For many years I looked for a solution… then, after we discovered Terra, I looked much more urgently. Finally, it came to me, a decade or so ago. As I go,” he said, “so go my people. So goes my world. If I could become mortal… then so would they. The danger would be defused.”
Lee drank a sip more of her wine. “They would not be very happy with that idea.”
She watched him carefully. He lifted his gaze to meet hers, as if knowing what she wanted to See. “Not at all,” Laurin said. “So I was cautious, sharing the idea with no one for a long time. Then I erred grievously by sharing it with Dierrich. She wasn’t anywhere near my level of mastery; she couldn’t feel the ache at the heart of the world. Or its ambivalence, which may yet trip us up.” He turned the glass in his hands, staring down into it again.
Gelert had finished his wine and was now lying near Lee, his nose working, as intent on the Elf-King as she was. “All universes,” the Elf-King said, “share their most basic qualities with all the others, if only in the potential that those qualities might come to fruit in one world or another. All worlds have the seeds of our immortality in them, dormant—or irrupting in certain special circumstances. So it stands to reason that we in Alfheim have, buried in ourselves, the seeds of mortality, for those who can See them.”
He looked at Lee. “You Saw that in me,” he said. “That night in Perdu; you saw dimly, and would have Seen clearly, exactly what someone needed to see—exactly what I had been seeking. At first I was horrified. I thought the change might happen right there, before I was prepared, when I was in the wrong place.”
Lee opened her mouth and closed it again, uncertain of what to say. “Where’s the right place?” Gelert said.
“The rose garden,” the Elf-King said.
“What, back at Aien Mhariseth?” Gelert said.
“No. We’d never get near that one now; they’re certainly guarding it. But some of those roses are preserved here. And since we’re still in Alfheim, at the center of the worlds, your Sight of me as mortal, with my consent, becomes enactment—it would write mortality into Alfheim’s structure; the change, experienced in my own body and soul, will change everything else.” His smile was wry, and also frightened. “A certain irony there, that to save my universe I have to give up what gives me power over it. But I can’t do that by myself. I need you.”
“Oh, my God,” Lee said, and sat there in shock.
“What would have happened if she’d finished Seeing you in New York?” Gelert said.
“Nothing useful,” the Elf-King said. “Earth isn’t a coreworld. I left there in fear—most of it Alfheim’s: my world still fears this change, though it knows it needs it.” He turned to Lee again. “After that I intended to approach you privately, broach the subject with you over time, give you time to get used to the concept. But events began to move too quickly, both in your world and mine; events forced my hand.”
His smile was grim. “Was Alfheim trying to sabotage my intentions, both in my own world and indirectly in yours? Could be. I did what I could to try to direct you toward enough power to protect you. My own people, my own world, resisted that. They couldn’t keep you out of Alfheim, because I wanted you there. But you couldn’t see the roses at Istelin’ru Semivh, no matter how much I wanted you to; Dierrich and her party made common cause with all the others who fear what I had in mind, to prevent it.”
“It wasn’t just blocking Lee’s Sight that they tried,” Gelert said. “They got a little more personal than that. Twice.”
“Yes. The first time, because they suspected Lee might be able to See what was going on; the second time, because they were certain she could.” He turned to Lee. “By the second time, you’d already proved that you at least had a chance of being able to do what I had in mind—Seeing the reality beneath things native to Alfheim. When the second attempt failed, they decided the simplest thing to do was ship you back home and deal with me separately when I arrived.”
“I’d say they underestimated you,” Gelert said.
“They always have. But this time they won’t. This time I’ve killed too many people who have too many powerful friends, others who think they could command mastery more to our people’s advantage than I’ve been doing. Though Dierrich’s gone, there’s no point in trying to go back to Aien Mhariseth: it’ll be too well guarded now. But we can force the issue here. If we have time. If you agree.” He put the glass down, gazed into her eyes. “I ask you to look at me now, Lee, here where my power’s strongest. See me as mortal, now, quickly. See it, and save my people!”
Lee gulped, and put her wineglass down. “If I See it incorrectly—or too strongly—you might die.”
His gaze didn’t waver. “That’s a possibility I’ve been considering for a good long while,” he said. “But one life for eleven universes? It doesn’t seem like too bad a bargain.”
The look in his eyes seized Lee by the heart, but possibly had the wrong effect. It made him the being Lee least wanted to see die in all eleven worlds, or however many more. I won’t do it. I won’t be his executioner!
And then she paused. Is this Alfheim’s ambivalence? Lee thought. Or mine?…
A sudden faint sound from outside brought all their heads up.
“Gunfire,” Gelert said. “They’re here.”
The Elf-King looked at Lee.
Her heart was hammering inside her. I am just a tool to this creature, something said inside her. A tool to be used to a purpose.
The answer felt like it took an eternity coming back. And if the purpose is worthwhile, Lee thought, what’s so damned bad about being a tool—the right tool for the job? It’s how Justice uses me, after all—
Her mouth was dry. Lee worked for a moment to swallow, then got up. “If the world’s got to be changed,” she said, “we’d better get on with it. What do we do?”
“Outside,” the Elf-King said.
They hurried out the patio doors. The sound of small arms fire was louder. “Someone’s shooting at the gate,” the Elf-King said. “It’ll hold… at which time they’ll try something more assertive. Come on—” He headed toward the hillside.
Lee and Gelert followed him. “Now,” Lee said, “I’m not sorry I said a big soppy goodbye after all. See all the time I’ve saved?”
“Pragmatist,” was all Gelert said. He looked back down past the house. “It’s starting,” he said.
Lee looked out into the thundery day. Past the mountains, Ellay now lay looking scratchy and scarred, a hatchmarked cicatrix on the dusty earth, livid in the threatening light. And the weather off to the west had started turning abruptly ugly. She’d seen it do this before, sometimes, when the Santa Ana was blowing against bad weather out on the sea. The clouds would roll up, piling higher and higher against the resistant wind, like some insubstantial mountain range; and sooner or later the wind would blow itself out. Sooner or later those clouds would come rolling across the land with the lightning crashing amongst them, and unless the conditions were right for rain to follow fast, there would be brushfires in the hills.
Ahead of them, the Elf-Ki
ng paused, looked westward, nodded. “Changing the world doesn’t look to you the way it does to me, does it,” he said. He sounded most unnerved. “I never thought you would find this so easy. As if you think it’s something you should be doing all the time.”
“For the better, yes!” Lee said.
“But the worse still happens—”
To a small extent Lee’s Sight was already upon her, unsummoned, and she knew better than to reject such insights as came to her now. “Laurin, listen to me. Alfheim’s going to use you as it can to keep things the way they are. It’s self-preservation, for a universe, the same way it is for a mind: to keep itself the way it is, to keep things running the way they are… even when that way is the wrong way—toxic, or doomed. Your world wants you to be the Devil it knows! You can’t let it do that. You have to make a choice; who’s running this place, really? Who’s King here: the Elf, or Alfheim?”
He looked at her as if she’d struck him across the face—white, staggered. “So long we’ve believed, we’ve been taught, they were the same…”
“So long things have been going to Hell in a handbasket,” Lee said. “We may have a few minutes yet to change that. But no more.”
Laurin looked at Lee rather narrowly. “I hadn’t seen your role in this as being quite so—proactive.”
“You hadn’t seen yourself as being quite so out of control, you mean,” Lee said. “Sorry about that. But the moment’s on us, and we don’t have a lot of time now to argue roles. I See the way through. You have the power to implement the solution I See. So let’s get busy. What do you need to do?”
He turned toward the hillside. From the far side of the gates, a faint hubbub of voices could be heard.
The Elf-King turned away from them, looked up the hill. “First,” he said. “I’ll have one more look at these before I die, no matter what they do.”
Lee watched him, uncomprehending.
There on the hillside, the sunset began to spread. Or rather, it was a light like a sunset’s, for to the west the sky was all leaden, except where it was beginning to be lashed with lurid fire. On the hillside, though, the spaces between the paths now darkened as if with coast fog or cloud—an indistinct gloaming at first, then something more solid; and in that darkness, which started to gather itself slowly together in shadowy leaf and branch like growing things, light began to flower, coming out gradually, like stars. Mostly it was a red light, growing thicker in every shrub of shadow, glowing like coals breathed on, brighter where the Elf-King turned to look. But the coals burned peach and yellow and white as well, brighter every moment. Farther up, the effect was more like a blanket of light against the hill, a mist-veiled rosy brilliance massed and clustered. But here the points of radiance were close enough to be individual: red stars and golden ones and white ones, fierce-burning and distinct.