Dragons & Dwarves (29 page)

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Authors: S. Andrew Swann

BOOK: Dragons & Dwarves
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I walked into light, as if a curtain was drawn aside.
For a few moments I was blinded. I blinked a few times, and the first thing I noticed was the unfinished stone floor.
I looked up to see Ysbail standing against a curving stone wall. The wall was unfinished stone, like the floor, and inscriptions in some alien language were carved into the rock. Light came from a Coleman lantern that hung incongruously from a bronze sconce set into the wall.
I looked around and saw no trace of the mausoleum we had entered.
However, hanging in the air behind us was a sphere of inky blackness that seemed to hold a reflection of some space that wasn’t
here.
As I watched, the sphere shrank, as if it was deflating or fading into the distance. In a moment, it was gone.
I turned around to face Ysbail.
“Welcome to Ragnan,” she said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
 
I
SHOOK my head. “No. Don’t play games with me. Where are we?”
 
“The catacombs beneath the city of Galweir. I assure you that I am not playing any game.”
I looked back to where the sphere had disappeared. “Was that what I think it was?”
“A Portal? Yes, though a short-lived one.”
“That’s not supposed to be possible.”
“Many from your world wish that were so.” She picked up the lantern, and the shadows shifted around us. “Come,” she said, leaving me with little choice. She led me through twisting corridors of stone, all inscribed, most with niches in place to receive the dead. The air here was cool and dry, and—now that the mini-Portal was gone—still.
I looked at the skulls piled into some of the niches, and it didn’t seem so far-fetched that we had left the shores of Lake Erie.
“Why are we here?”
“Because the people who threaten your life are not here.” Ysbail said it as if she was explaining things to a child. She followed a narrow staircase upward.
“What’s my life to you?”
“We used you. Invested what was left of our cause in you.” Her voice changed tone slightly. I didn’t know if it was the elvish equivalent of compassion, or irony, when she said, “We bear some responsibility for your safety.”
“Used me?” I said. “Everyone and their brother have been using me.”
“Yes,” she agreed. I could swear she gave me the ghost of a smile. She pushed open a large oaken door and led me out into our partner universe. I don’t know exactly what I was expecting.
What I saw was decidedly surreal.
The sky was just purple with dawn, which allowed me to see the mountain first. It towered over us, a rocky mound covered by trees until, about halfway up, someone had decided to turn the mountain into art. The bluff on which we stood, and looked upward from, turned into a muscular leg. The ridge where it led toward its sister mountains, became a tail leading into a serpentine torso. One wing still rose on the far side, but on our side, the stone dragon’s remains were buried chest-high in rubble, on top of which lay a carved head the size of a five-story building.
I looked around and saw our surroundings were in similar disrepair. We stood on flagstones that could have once been inside. Stone walls on either side of us were draped in vines and moss and only seemed to go halfway up. Behind us I saw the shell of a ruined tower, collapsed so all that was left of the upper levels was a semicircular wall whose concave side faced us.
“What is this place?” I asked.
“Our capital,” Ysbail said. “The home of the elves.”
I looked at her, and I could see the same aspect of mourning that I had seen in Caledvwlch. I looked back toward the catacombs we had walked through. “You’re supposed to be immortal.”
For the first time in my life, I heard an elf laugh. It was a quiet sound, and somewhat sad. “Your word, Mr. Maxwell. Not ours. We do not age, but all but the most prideful of us know death is no stranger to us. To one as short-lived as you, we must seem forever unchanging, eternal. Our greatest sin was believing that was so.” She cast an arm back toward the catacombs. “Our ancestors, and their ancestors. Generations before memory.”
“What happened here?”
“You did.”
“What?”
“Mankind. Mortals more familiar with death, and much more willing to face it. They could not abide us, so they destroyed us. Our people are so scattered now that in a few of our generations we will cease to exist.” She reached out and took my arm. Her fingers were long, pale, and cold. “Come see.”
She took me to the edge of the flagstone courtyard, which was once a great hall, and stopped at the edge, where the floor fell away. We stood at the top of a hill that sloped downward about a mile. There was a road coming from what must have been the front of this place, snaking down the hillside to a city.
The road had once been lined with statues, but the sculpture lay in dismembered piles along the gutters. Large segments of the road had fallen away into gullies that now dug into the hillside. The buildings, whatever remained standing in the town, were roofless. Most had only two or three walls left. Plants covered the stone, giving everything a weathered, softened appearance.
I expected to smell death here. Perhaps my psyche needed that kind of tangible sensation to bring home the gravity of what I was looking upon. The world, of course, didn’t cooperate. The smell here was the smell of a meadow at dawn, dewy grass and wildflow- ers. The mortal wound inflicted here happened too long ago to leave such a sign. The ruins here were centuries old.
Still, I asked, “Valdis?”
“No,” Ysbail said. “He was only the most recent.”
“How long has it been like this?”
“An instant—” she turned away from the dead village. “I remember when these halls smelled of incense and lavender and proud men argued about the most enduring values of aesthetics.”
“Why haven’t you rebuilt?”
“Here? No. The magic here is alive with the atrocities still. To remain here overlong would be death. To build here would be to desecrate a tomb.” She shook her head. “Elsewhere? Until now, it has been all that we could do to survive in the face of the human realm here.”
“Until now?”
She nodded. “To begin again—that has been what has made such bitter enemies, Mr. Maxwell. The great beast, Mankind, cannot forgive us for refusing to die, or be forgotten.” She turned to face me, and I could almost see tears on her cheeks, though her voice didn’t change timbre. “Your world as much as mine.”
 
I was a journalist again, asking questions, taking notes. Ysbail, for her part, was like any partisan who’d suffered the loss of land, home, people. I don’t know if she’d appreciate the comparison, but the voice that came from her belonged to every dispossessed person I’d ever heard. Croat, Irish, Palestinian, American Indian—it only really varied in intensity, which was a function of memory, the severity of persecution, and of the individual personality.
Ysbail’s personality was cool, but more passionate than any elf I had ever met. If she’d been a human, I would have assumed that she was still in shock over the events she described, that any moment, when the reality sank in, she would break down.
Maybe that’s it, the entire species is still in shock.
Before Ragnan existed, when humans were still grubbing in the mud, killing their food with well placed stones, this—Galweir—was the soul of civilization of this world. It was a city of philosophers, scholars, mages, artists, and poets. It existed in peace for uncounted millennia, unchanged. Even the anarchic dragons paid tribute to study from the hoard of knowledge Galweir represented.
This place was so far removed from the lands of men that even the most learned among the elves thought that mankind would never become a threat.
According to Ysbail, it was the elves’ inhuman pride that kept that belief alive long after it was apparent that mankind was growing too fast beyond anyone’s ability to contain it.
The citizens of Galweir had been convinced of their own invulnerability even as their city was falling down around them. The men were ruthless in their slaughter. To the humans, death was an inevitability. To the elves, any death was a ghastly accident. Every elf who fell in battle was a festering wound cut into the body of their kind. Their choice became surrender or extinction.
Those whose choice was surrender were the only ones left. The damage, however, was already done. The scars ran deep into the elvish psyche. Their nobles were executed, individuals who had defined the elves’ destiny for centuries. Their cities ruined, so soaked in the blood of their immortal dead that if any elf stayed there for any length of time the spirit of the place would drive them mad. Their people scattered so that the elvish community no longer existed, only singular individuals humbled by defeat and guilt-scarred by their own survival.
According to Ysbail, not one elvish child had been born since the fall of Galweir, while half of these supposedly immortal creatures had since died.
“There is no word in our language for ‘suicide.’” Her voice was thin and hollow in the wind. Dawn was leaking over the ruined dragon, the light reflecting off of the skull, picking out what might have been gems encrusting the massive sculpture.
“Caledvwlch said that.”
“A motto,” said Ysbail, “for those of us who want to survive. Many of us saw this,” she motioned to the ruins below, “as our end. To them, we are already dead and all that is left is the wait for the inevitable.”
“You and Caledvwlch?” I asked.
Ysbail shook her head. “My brother is not me. He sees salvation in holding on to the old ways in the face of everything. He sees the survival of our culture as the survival of ourselves. Even if he has to call a human Lord.”
“He is your brother?”
“In the ways that matter to my kind.”
“You don’t think he’s right?”
“Pretending this did not happen does not undo it. He sees himself—all those who do as he does—as preserving us.”
“And you?”
“I know better. Caledvwlch is simply looking for a way to die with some dignity.” Ysbail turned to face me. “I do not accept our end. I rebel against it. I will fight it as a wounded she cat defending her young. I do not care about our dignity.” She had grabbed my upper arm. The touch was light, but it shocked me, as did the sudden violence of her words. “I do not care to leave a dignified corpse.”
She looked at me, and the expression on her face could have been that of a fanatic, or a visionary. The eyes, metallic and expressionless, could have hidden either.
“What does this have to do with Aloeus’ death?”
The hand left my arm as she turned to look at the broken dragon. “The elves were first. But the dragons suffered as well. Even though each dragon was a nation unto himself, by then, mankind had great experience in subduing nations. Aloeus gave us an alliance, a chance to bridge the gap between worlds. To find a sanctuary.”
I shook my head. “My apologies for the state of that sanctuary.”
“You misunderstand. Cleveland was never the destination. The term in your language that best fits our purpose there would be ‘re connaissance.’”
“Recon . . .” My voice trailed off as switches began flipping in my brain.
Fact one, the Portal was not a natural phenomenon, as the general public seemed to believe.
Fact two, Aloeus created the Portal to give the elves a homeland. Cleveland, Ohio, while adequate, had the disadvantage of being populated by the mortal types who’d been giving these people the shaft.
Fact three, ten years to these creatures was a very insignificant span of time.
Fact four . . .
“Mexico,” I whispered, looking at the mountains surrounding us. A plot of land the size of Cleveland with no commercial value, no easy access, little in the way of natural resources. A property completely worthless to Aloeus, Inc.
Until you opened a Portal to it.
“He was teaching us, Mr. Maxwell. Helping us. He had been since he opened the doorway into your world.”
“Helping who?”
“The few remaining elves who want to survive.” Ysbail looked away at the ruined dragon. Dawn was cutting the sky into ribbons of red and purple. “The land was ours. More than enough to rebuild our city. Enough to serve those who are left.”
I suspected the answer, but I asked anyway. “You can move now, can’t you?” I waved back to the catacombs. “You don’t need the Portal.”
Ysbail shook her head. “We learned enough from him to open a temporary doorway. It lasts hours at most . . . We cannot survive in a world devoid of magic, Mr. Maxwell. We need a permanent source.”
Aloeus’ death, his
murder,
made too much sense now. There were dozens of interests involved in having the Portal as a monopoly.
Everyone
in the city, from Rayburn on down, had a stake in our Portal being the only game in town. Christ, what would happen to the tourist money if an entire nation of elves decided to open up shop south of the border? What would be the draw if there was the same thing available in a better climate, and without the remnants of the twenty-first century hanging around obscuring the magic. Disney was ready to drop billions to build that kind of environment out by Sandusky.

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