Stealing the Elf-King's Roses: The Author's Cut (28 page)

He waved a hand in front of him as Gelert came scrambling up behind Lee. “And this is it,” he said. “Istelin’ru Semivh.”

Lee looked around. The place where they had stopped was little more than a twenty meter-wide terrace against the mountainside, all strewn with rubble like everything else. Some more of those strange piers of raw limestone stuck up here too, like fossilized Christmas trees, some cracked by the contrasts of heat and cold, or shattered by the fall of stone cracked away from the mountain wall above. Their feet were buried in gray-white gravel and scree; thin, light-colored scrubby grass stuck out here and there in tufts.

“And this is all there is…” Lee said, looking around.

“But certainly this view is enough,” dil’Undevhain said.

It was hard to argue with that. The southern view, reaching down toward what would have been the kingdoms of the Italies in her own world, was a thorny vista of major and minor peaks, snow-free at this time of year, but still blinding white in the full sun. Lee walked a little way down to the far end of the terrace, where the view looked more eastward. There the mountains gave way more quickly to a view of low gray granite hills, the shadows of the westering sun already drowning some of the valleys between and behind them. She stood there, breathing the air, feeling the edge of chill that was beginning to come to it already, though the afternoon still had a ways to go.

“‘Istelin’ru Semivh,’ you said. What’s the name mean?” Gelert said.

Dil’Undevhain looked somewhat perplexed at that. “I am not sure how to translate it,” he said, looking downslope. “‘Last stop? Last hope?’ It is the only flat ground between here and the summit, the last place you can rest before the big climb. Or the only thing that will stop you between here and the valley, if you fall down from the traverse above.”

Lee nodded. “Not much growing here,” she said, walking toward the back of the terrace, where the gravel was piled feet deep against the upward-leaping wall of the mountain. There were some patches of alpenrose there, some rooted in the gravel, some actually rooted opportunistically in cracks in the vertical wall, their branches and pink-red flowers dangling down and moving slightly in the wind.

“No,” dil’Undevhain said, “except in the stories. Indeed in your world—it is Earth, I think?—this mountain is actually called the Rose Garden in one or another of the local languages. But that story keeps appearing in all kinds of shapes in the outworlds. There’s a king of the people who live in the mountains, or under the mountains, and he falls in love with a mortal woman—” Her guide laughed gently at the ridiculousness of it. 
Mixed marriage
, Lee’s memory said to her: 
it’ll never work.
 At the time, she had meant it as a joke. Here and now, her Alfen guide did, too, but for entirely different reasons, ones Lee suspected she probably wouldn’t like. “He steals her away, and makes a great house for her in the mountains, and rears a crystal dome above it all. Then around the house, to please her, the King plants the garden of wonderful roses, and forbids all mortals to come there.”

“But they come anyway,” Gelert said, “and destroy the garden. Then, powerful as he is, they take the mountain king prisoner and haul him off in chains.”

Lee looked sideways at Gelert. 
Don’t rub it in or anything, Gel…

I’m not sure I like his tone. And I don’t care if he knows it.

His hostility took Lee slightly by surprise. Dil’Undevhain looked at Gelert with entirely uncaring amusement. “Fortunately,” he said, “it 
is
 just a story.”

“With a happy ending, as I remember,” Lee said, trying to sound idle. “The trouble between the King and the humans ends, finally, and the princess agrees to marry him. And becomes immortal as well.”

Dil’Undevhain laughed again, more softly this time; but the message behind the laughter was the same, a marginally courteous indulgence of another’s absurd idea. Lee turned away and bent down to one of the scrubby little bushes growing up from the gravel, knelt down on one knee to see if the flowers had a fragrance. They did, but it was most understated, a slight, spicy, heathery smell, almost piny; the scent of a plant that has no leisure to spend more than a minimum of its energy on fragrance, trusting its color to be enough to entice the mountain bees and flies in so monochrome a landscape. “I suppose,” Lee said, “there would be no way for anyone, realistically, to plant a rose garden up here…” For some reason, having to admit it saddened her a little.

“I’m afraid the climate is much too variable for that,” said dil’Undevhain. “And the temperatures here are too cold, even in spring and fall. Snow can come any time between September and June.”

“That wouldn’t be good for roses,” Lee said, “no. And the soil’s not great, either…” She ran her hand over the scree under the alpenrose. No soil there at all; a harsh gravelly bedding, this, though some of the stones had been slightly rounded by many years’ flow of water down the steep mountainside. Lee idly picked up one round, pale pebble, rubbing it in her fingers, feeling the weight of it.

Then she bit her lip to keep from exclaiming in pain, for what she held was not smooth. It was razory sharp to the touch, as if newly shattered from the limestone crags above. Lee dared the slightest sideways glance, saw that dil’Undevhain’s back was turned. She got up, dusting her pants off with one hand, slipping the stone unseen into her pocket with the other.

Dil’Undevhain had been looking at the angle of the sun. Now he turned and said, “Probably we should start back, soon, if we’re to return before dark.”

“Of course,” Lee said, and followed dil’Undevhain as he started toward the path again. For a moment she paused, looked up at the mountain, willed the Sight to come, just for a second.

Nothing… or at least, nothing in the usual mode. As if at the edges of perception, at some half-visible periphery, an aura of trouble hovered; old anguish, unresolved, lurking under the surface of things—a stain of pain, like a bruise. 
But otherwise, I’m blocked
, Lee thought. 
And why?

There were no answers for that. 
So why should I give any credence to
 anything 
I’m being told?
 Lee thought. She couldn’t get rid of the idea that she was being lied to; in words, and somehow, even in images. Witnesses and defendants lied to her all the time, at home; but usually she was competent to detect it. Here, though, the rules seemed to have been changed.

Seemed
 to…

Their guide was heading down the path. As he turned back to see if Lee and Gelert were following, Lee was ready, and she bent her vision on him with all possible intent, willing the judicial state to assert itself in full, in haste, like a dropped rock.

On him, ever so briefly, it worked, at least as far as communicating his uppermost thought. Dil’Undevhain’s eyes said it clearly enough to hers as she met them: 
There’s nothing here for you to
 
steal. Do you finally believe it now? Then go back to your people and be glad you’re not
 
dangerous enough to worry us.

Lee kept her face as still as she would have in any interviewing room, and went after dil’Undevhain, gazing around at the landscape as she came, like any tourist inwardly saying farewell to a place she wouldn’t see again. But her mind was busy with other matters. Dil’Undevhain’s look was a lie, just one more of many. 
He’s ExAff after all
, Lee thought. And the Alfen 
were
 worried about her and Gelert, worried enough to try to “defuse” them by bringing them up here. 
There’s something they’re afraid
 
we’ll find out, so much that they want us to discount it ourselves.
 And as for the landscape around them…

Lee thought of legends left over from the old days, before people actually began normalized travel between the worlds—stories of Elves giving people gold that turned to withered leaves, or turning one object into another with an ease that suggested that the matter and the physical reality of Earth were effortlessly malleable for them. 
Could that ability to shift appearances, even to shift the genuine
 
states of matter, actually be sourced in something they learned from being resident in this
 
universe?
 Lee thought again of the buildings in Ys, that looked one way and felt another; she thought of the mountains that had been there, until they weren’t. She was still blocked… but not entirely.

Something had changed.

Quietly she went down the path behind dil’Undevhain, trying to look like someone who’d had a long, tiring climb that had been a waste of her time…but not like someone who was busily laying plans.

*

The day had been tiring, but not so much so that Lee felt at all inclined to sleep, even when it got late—even when Gelert turned in, yawning, around eleven. She made some concession to appearances by going around her side of the suite and the central sitting area and speaking out all the lights, except for one in her own bedroom; she left that door open, so that the faint light of the globe by the bed, dimmed right down, streamed out the door into the sitting area. There, in the near-dark, Lee sat in one of the massive chairs, with her back to the wall and her eye on the terrace “door” at the other end of the room.

A cool summer wind was now coming in that door, stirring the thin curtains that hung to either side. From out in the city, very faint lights washed up onto the terrace, along with a much fainter, more silver light, the Moon coming up on the far side of the mountains to the east.

Lee glanced at her ring, saw that it was nearly one-thirty. Her other hand was in her pocket, where it had been for a long time, touching the stone that didn’t feel the way it looked. It was immediate, concrete evidence of the glamour she’d suspected, one of unusual power—far stronger than the one they had been subjected to in Ys. 
How are they powering it?
 Lee thought, turning the little stone over in her pocket, feeling its sharp edges. She was afraid to bring it out, afraid of what seeing and listening devices might be planted here. But she didn’t really need to take it out. She knew perfectly well what the contrast between vision and touch had shown her on the mountainside. And within seconds of her touching it, the glamourie had begun to fray.

Lee gave the terrace door one last mistrustful look… then sighed. It seemed to let outside air in, or not, as it pleased; possibly it was simply the local take on air conditioning. 
Or something else
… But there was no point in worrying about it; she had other things to do.

She settled herself comfortably in the chair, closed her eyes, and shut out everything around her.
Assuming that this whole room is full of surveillance devices
, she thought, 
they may be able to see
 
everything I do physically in here. But they can’t see what I See.
 She smiled slightly in the dark. 
And
 
that uncertainty drives them crazy. It accounts for dil’Hemrev’s unusual interest, for the attempt
 
to stick me with a bodyguard here… and for dil’Undevhain’s little performance today. Well, let’s see if
 
this little rock and I can give them one more thing to be uncertain about.

Lee spent an indeterminate time in the setup meditation that she used when Seeing as much as possible in a short time was particularly crucial. 
The stone makes a difference
, she thought, 
though since I don’t
 
know why or how it does that, better not to count on it for too much.
When she thought she was ready, she said silently, 
Lady whom I serve, help me See truly…
 And she opened her eyes.

It took a little while to see anything at all; in judicial mode or not, acclimatizing the eyes to darkness took some moments. But almost immediately Lee realized that there was a lot less darkness around than she’d been counting on. Without moving her head, she looked sideways.

And she Saw that the tower walls were glass. Perhaps not physically glass, but nonetheless transparent to the several Alfen who sat or stood outside them, outside what should have been solid stone hung with tapestries, looking in. One of the Alfen, gazing through the “stone wall” to one side of the door to the suite, was looking straight at her.

Lee dared not look directly at him at the moment; he would realize that she was Seeing him. 
Play it blind
, Lee thought.

She got up, stretched, yawned, went into her bedroom. There, too, the “walls” were glass, and beyond them, more rooms stretched, many empty this time of night, but some few with Alfen sitting in them, looking at commwalls or other types of large display. The whole “residence tower” was an illusion, simply a space enclosed inside a larger building. 
More of ExAff
, Lee wondered, 
or some other
 
organization? The Department of Major Violations of Privacy, perhaps?
…Idly she turned back the covers on the bed, then headed for the bathroom.

Its far wall was “glass” too, and as Lee spoke the light on and looked at herself in the mirror, sure enough, a male Alfen slipped into view on the far side of the nonexistent wall, watching. Lee didn’t react by so much as a flicker. She took a glass from the shelves by the sink, ran some water, filled the glass and took it out into the bedroom with her, speaking the light off again. The far wall there, which should have been tapestries and stone, was now a series of small and large cubicles. Another Alfen was standing there, watching her. Lee looked at him and past him as if he wasn’t there, and walked out of the room again, into the sitting area.

The stone on either side of the massive door that supposedly led to the stairway was also “glass,” and another Alfen shortly appeared there, looking at Lee as she sat down in the big chair again. Lee sat there ignoring him, sipping the water, concentrating on not becoming furious, on not doing anything that would break her Sight. 
I should have been able to see this earlier
, Lee thought. 
With or without the
 
meditation. But something’s happened. It can’t
 all 
be just this little rock! Has someone out there
 
slipped, or relaxed the intensity with which they’re holding the illusion?