Stealing the Elf-King's Roses: The Author's Cut (34 page)

Dierrich laughed, a great angry shout of laughter like the cry of a bird of prey. “You think the one thing that guarantees our survival as a people is a 
disease
, something to be cured? You’re even madder than I thought! If there’s to be a war with the ephemerals, our immortality’s the only thing that will ensure our victory!” Her voice went grim. “But it will never happen, because you won’t be Laurin for much longer.
Rai’lauvrin hetsuuriul
, worldmasterer that was and shall be no more, stand forth and end your reign!”

The feeling of gathering fury in the air, in the ground, gathering and growing, was difficult for Lee to bear. “I stand forth with my world in my hand,” the Elf-King said, very softly, “but whether my reign shall end or not, the world itself decides.”

The people among whom Dierrich had been standing now backed away from her. She stood there, proud and alone, fists clenched at her sides, holding herself like a weapon that has waited a long time to be unleashed, and is ready now. The Elf-King did not move at all.

The wind began to scale up to a scream again; just the wind, this time, no snow on it, howling among the parapets, battering at the front of the castle. The Alfen watching her were pushed back by the force of it, against the inner wall of the castle. But the Elf-King didn’t move. He let the wind rise, screaming, until first grit and then gravel and then even stones from the mountain above the castle began to be thrown through the air by it. Then he shook his head, and once again the wind fell away, silent in a breath’s time.

Dierrich stood there, breathing hard. “All right,” the Elf-King said. “Water next? Or fire?”

She didn’t say anything, didn’t move either.

Under them, the ground began to vibrate. A slow, low rumbling built, a sound like the deepest possible note on an organ, terrifying to feel, terrifying to hear. The stones of the mountain began to tumble again, down the jagged wall this time; great slabs and flakes of stone the size of vehicles, the size of houses, fell toward the castle, and the roots of the mountain shook. The Elf-King moved only so much as it took to glance up at the mountainside, an offhand look. The falling stones were aimed right at him; but as he glanced up, they fell to the left and right of the castle, as if hitting some high invisible barrier, and bounced away in a thunder of ruin, down the mountainside. At the same time, the clouds began to rush together above the castle, and rain began to fall from them, lightly at first, then harder, until the shower became a downpour, and the downpour a torrent.

In the cave, Lee could hear water splashing into the snow, and started to worry. 
We could be flooded
 
out of here
, she thought, 
we could drown!
 “Gelert—”

He was already scrabbling to his feet, wobbly as a foal. “Can you get up?” he said, but Lee was halfway up already, having kept hold of him as he stood. “Come on—”

She went with him, letting him lead, still unable to see except with the Sight, and unable to See anything with that but the terrace high above them on the mountainside. The Elf-King, who until now had moved not at all, now moved to the parapet of the castle and rested a hand on it, stroking the stone; under his touch the shuddering mountain slowly went quiet. Then he glanced up into the sky. He should have been wet, but the water storming down out of the sky never touched him. As he looked up, the clouds curdled, flattened, began slowly to stream away; and the rain stopped as they did so.

His face looked strained now, and Lee could see the sweat standing on his brow. But his expression was still composed, almost sad. “I don’t think we need to go through the rest of the moves, Dierrich,” the Elf-King said. “There’s more to this than just weather…but you never understood that, no matter how often I told you. Mastery of a world means more than just making it do what you want. Mastery goes both ways, but you were never willing to accept the world’s mastery of 
you
. That’s why you have no idea what it needs now… and what it fears.”

“And 
you
 do?” Dierrich shouted. “You’re the one who wants to destroy our people’s basic nature, make it over into something the world never intended! They’ll have no choice in the matter if you have your way. But they’ll find a way to kill you first, Laurin! If I fall here—”

“I am afraid,” the Laurin said, “there’s no ‘if.’ ”

Over them, around them, a darkness began to gather. It was not the dark of night; this darkness excluded that, and was a different shade, of a different quality. It shut away the view of the clouds, the view of the city down at the mountain’s foot. Dierrich looked up and around at this, and for the first time her face began to show fear. “It doesn’t matter what you do to me, Laurin,” Dierrich cried. “It doesn’t matter if I die! The Alfen will still rise against you! Those of us who know what you’re planning will make sure that everyone else does—and afterward, no Alfen anywhere will refrain from trying to kill you, not even those who’ve been in the pay of the UN and the supranationals all this while. You think this whole business of transparency, of cooperation with humans, will buy you the ephemerals’ protection? It won’t be enough! Sooner or later, in mastery, or just with a gun, one of us will take you out of Alfheim’s history forever. There’s nowhere you can hide, now that your own people fear you and the change you threaten, more even than they ever feared being without a worldmasterer—”

“It’s not change I threaten,” the Elf-King said, as the darkness gathered in the air around them. “It’s something that would frighten you much worse, frighten you the way it frightens me, if you had the wit to understand it. But it seems you never have. In the meantime, what mastery you possess isn’t nearly enough, though you do come of the line of the old Elf-Kings. For all that you grew up here, in the very heart of the Land, in the shadow of Istelin’ru Semivh itself, you still don’t understand Alfheim.” He was almost invisible now in that darkness, and outside the cave, in air no colder now than that of a normal summer night, Lee and Gelert staggered into the lee of the spine of stone where they had sheltered, both of them gasping with the sudden sense of pressure in the air.

“Have you forgotten what this place once was?” the Elf-King said. “I haven’t. And 
it
 hasn’t. But my memory for its buried realities has always been longer than yours…even though it’s you who’re supposedly old-world Alfen, superior to us outcasts, we ‘foreigners’ from the lesser realms west over Sea.” His voice was suddenly amused — though the amusement had something under it so dark that Lee would have given anything to turn her Sight away. “It makes you too uncomfortable, that oldest reality. Now comes the time when you pay for being unwilling to face that discomfort… and say your farewells.”

The darkness gathered there about the castle became a solid thing, fathomless green depths that came real out of the night, and all remaining light wavered and went out in a sudden crushing night of water, a night half a mile deep. Lee couldn’t close her eyes, couldn’t stop seeing, as only one shape remained standing upright in all that darkness—and everywhere else around it, bodies floated and flailed, bubbles rose in hectic streams until the lungs that gasped them out were crushed, and cries echoed bluntly through the massive weight of water until there were no cries left in it, and no more life. One last shape tried to stand, tried to fight, pushing the water away; but the sea knew its weight and its place, and nothing she did could dissuade it. Dierrich dil’Estenv crumpled to the stone of the parapet at last, the life crushed out of her; and when that was done, the waters ran slowly back into the past from which they had come, still leaving only that one form standing.

How long he would stay that way, Lee had her doubts, for she could see in his face the awful toll taken by what he’d just done. “I am the Laurin,” the Elf-King said in a voice that itself sounded half-drowned, “and my world is in my hand; yet am I still its servant, until it needs me no more.”

Then he fell.

The lock on Lee’s vision began to give. Had he held it there, Lee wondered, or was it again the world that was turning its attention elsewhere? From elsewhere in the castle, from a doorway on the terrace, other Alfen began to come running. The Elf-King turned, would have spoken to them—but before he could get more than a word or two out, he had fallen to his knees, then onto his face. They stood over him as the vision faded. Lee tried to keep it for a few seconds longer, could only manage to catch a few words.

“—put him somewhere secure—”

“Just kill him now! You see he can’t do anything.”

“Are you crazy?” The first voice was more frightened. “The World just said it wants him as Master. You kill him now, you could destroy everything as surely as
he
wants to. Lock him up, and then we’ll get the other candidates for mastery and bring them here. Once the Land’s accepted someone else, you can kill him all you like—”

They picked him up, hauled him away; and then the Sight was gone. Lee sagged against the stone of the rock spur where she and Gelert had sheltered, shaking her head until something like regular sight returned. She and Gelert stood in the dark, in a rocky landscape where snow was melting fast, helped by rivers of water running fast enough down the trail past them to roll small rocks along.

It took her a few moments to tell Gelert what had happened. He shook his head, wincing at the pain from his ears. “And now,” Gelert said, “we go rescue him, I suppose.”

Lee looked up at the castle, in the darkness. She took a moment to test a theory, leaning her will against the world again. It gave, ever so slightly; all resistance, with Dierrich, was gone.

“I don’t have anything else planned tonight,” she said. “Let’s go.”

*12*

It was like Lee’s excursion into the building surrounding the “residence tower” all over again, except that the Laurin’s House was much older, much more complex, and—instead of being middle-of-the-night quiet—alive with frightened, confused Alfen running in all directions. But this time Lee wasn’t alone. This time an alert, angry Gelert was with her to help her sense what was going on around them; and this time both he and Lee had psychospoor to follow.

The Alfen presently in the Laurins’ House were a mixed batch. Some, to gather from snatches of conversation Lee caught as they slipped from hiding place to hiding place in the ancient hallways, were loyal to Dierrich, and furious at her death; some were loyal to the Laurin; some wanted neither of them, but were stuck with the Laurin for the moment. It was in its way a perfect time to be attempting a rescue.

Lee, though, was increasingly afraid that some ill-intentioned Elf was going to recover enough from the shock of the past half hour’s occurrences simply to go to wherever the Laurin was being held and put a bullet or a forceblast through his head.
Are they gone yet?
 she said silently to Gelert.

Not yet. Hush up.

They were crouched together behind a door that gave into a long, cold, dim stone corridor, somewhere in the depths of the castle. The room in which they were presently hiding was a wardrobe, full of Alfen ceremonial clothing, all very neatly hung up on clothes rack after clothes rack, the bags and carriers all tagged with numbers and notes written in the spidery Alfen diagonal cursive. The other rooms on this level seemed to be storerooms, as far as Lee could tell, not residential. They would normally have been of zero interest to Lee, except that her Sight and Gelert’s Scent told them both that the Elf-King was in the room down at the end of the corridor. The problem at the moment was that there were at least four people standing in front of that door, all with guns, arguing with one another in Alfen.

Do you think that thing will fire?
 Gelert said to Lee, his nose working as he peered out through the crack of door opening that Lee was holding ajar.

Lee looked dubiously at the Alfen weapon she’d brought up from the cave. 
After being snowed on, and
 
rained on, and all the rest? God knows. It’s not showing a charge light, and I don’t know whether
 
that’s good or bad. Can’t we just “walk” in there, using his spoor as an anchor? It’s strong.

Lee, it takes a lot out of you. I’d sooner save it for a larger distance. Ah—

Are they leaving?

Two of them.
 Gelert was silent for a moment. 
No, three. They’ve left one guy outside the door.

Armed?

Yes.

Damn!

It’s not going to help him. I’m betting I can cover that distance before he can react.

Gelert—

Lee suddenly found she had no one to argue with: Gelert had slipped out the door in perfect silence and was running down the hall. She went out the door after him, leveling the weapon above Gelert’s head-level at the Alfen standing in front of that metalbound wooden door, feeling for the recessed trigger and praying that the thing would fire if it had to—

Gelert hit the Alfen chest-high and slammed him back against the stone wall by the door with terrible impact. The Elf with the weapon went down hard, the weapon practically leaping out of his hands. Lee wasn’t in time to catch it before it fell to the stone floor, but it hit Gel first, and she caught it on the rebound, first glancing down at the unconscious Alfen, then at the short hallway they presently stood in.
Nowhere to hide him—

Drag him back the way we came, around the comer there.

She did that while Gelert stood guard, then hurried back to the doorway the Elf had been guarding. It had a simple throw bolt, not even keyed. Lee opened it; she and Gelert stepped inside, and she pulled the door to behind her and held it nearly closed.

It was another wardrobe, though this one had a single small translucent window, and only one or two racks of clothes, which to judge by the dust on the clothes bags hadn’t been used in a while. The room was otherwise empty except for a business-suited form that had been dumped unceremoniously against the far wall.

He lay there lax, unmoving. Lee’s stomach twisted inside her: 
they’ve killed him already!
 But then she saw his chest rise and fall. “Oh, thank God!” she said.

The Elf-King twitched, then. After a moment his eyes opened, and he looked at the ceiling.

He lay there a moment longer, then turned his head to look around at his surroundings, and at Lee and Gelert. The look was uncomprehending.

Slowly he sat up, looking around him again. “It’s a closet,” the Elf-King said, sounding and looking at first bemused, then indignant. “They put me in a 
closet
!”

“Probably because they thought you knew the way out of all the dungeons,” Gelert said.

The Elf-King sat still a moment, as if considering this, and nodded. He got up then, slowly and with some difficulty, and brushed himself off. Finally, he came shakily over to Lee and Gelert, looking at them curiously, but with no surprise at all. He was as Lee remembered him, tall even for an Elf, dark-haired, dark-eyed, with a face like something the old Greeks would have sculpted as a god’s—except that not even the Greeks could have rendered with sufficient perfection the face Lee had first seen when curiosity at the sound of someone’s voice made her look up from a fondue pot. And not all the processing in the Worlds could have kept Lee from recognizing his voice, now that she’d heard it not just twice but four times.

“I would ask what’s kept you,” said the King of All the Elves, “but that might sound ungrateful. Which I definitely am not.”

Lee would probably simply have relapsed into staring at him again, for the effect of being close to him was very like that of her first view of Alfheim, and even more concentrated, for some reason; and the black eye and various cuts and scratches he had picked up since the battle on the terrace did nothing to lessen the effect. Lee wanted to weep, to turn away in shame at how little she looked like one of these people. Yet perhaps because she had been here for as long as she had, she was able to resist the urge.
Probably a good thing, because there’s not a lot of time for standing around staring or crying
 
right now
, she thought. The sentiment was reinforced by a sound that raised the hair all over her: small arms fire coming from somewhere nearby, perhaps the next hallway over.

“That’s nice to hear,” Gelert said. “Meantime, maybe it would make more sense if we all got ourselves out of here before the war zone gets any closer…”

The Elf-King shook his head again as he looked at them, as if not quite sure yet that he believed in them. “How did you get in?”

“We ‘walked,’ ” Lee said. “Maybe you have an idea as to the best way to get out? Seeing that you do live here.”

“I’d walk you out myself, but I can’t,” he said. “They’ve given me a drug—”

“I know that drug,” Lee said. “You have any idea how much they gave you?”

“There’s a maximum dosage, which I haven’t had, or I wouldn’t be talking to you,” the Elf-King said. “So it’s less than that. They assume I won’t be able to ‘walk’ unassisted for perhaps two days.”

“Is there an antidote, by any chance?” Gelert said.

The Laurin shook his head. “It wears off—”

“It doesn’t matter,” Lee said. “They’re not expecting anyone to help you get out. Let’s go. Gel?”

“Where? Down into Aien Mhariseth?”

The Elf-King wobbled again, braced himself against a wall. “Not into the city!” he said. “They’d find us there in a minute. But if we can go around the mountain…”

“Where the rose garden isn’t,” Lee said. “I remember the way. Come on—”

He stared at Lee in utter shock.
“What did you say?
 Did you actually get there? Did you see it?”

“What?”

“The garden!”

It was Lee’s turn to stare. “There’s nothing up there but stone and alpenrose,” she said. “Nothing I could see, anyway.” Then she added, “But there 
should
 have been something. I could feel it, even if I couldn’t see it.”

“It was as I’d hoped,” the Elf-King whispered. “I spoke to the World, told it to reveal the truth of itself to you, to help you every way it could. I didn’t know how well it would work, if at all, for Dierrich’s people were bringing all their power to bear on you, to keep you from Seeing.” He rubbed his face. “You’re lucky to have survived: if they’d thought you could See anything worth seeing, they’d have done their best to cause you to have an ‘accident.’ ”

“They did. But then people we’ve met over the last few weeks who 
don’t
 want us to have an accident seem to be in the minority,” Gelert said. “Will we be safer where you want to go than we are here?”

“Marginally,” the Laurin said. “But nowhere’s going to be safe while you’re with me.”

“It’s you we were trying to find,” Lee said. “We’ll take our chances. Come on!”

He took another step, staggered. Lee reached out and took him under one arm, and was briefly staggered herself by a sense of being abruptly out of circuit with her own body, forced into contact with a whole range of sensation that she didn’t know how to understand—blurred and confused imageries, and a vast and looming presence that was watching her,
watching
—

Lee closed her eyes for a second, enforced control on herself as if during a Sight that had gotten out of hand, then opened her eyes again. The alien feelings receded, not completely, but enough for her to get on with business. “I don’t even know what to call you,” she said. “Are you only ‘the Laurin’?”

‘That you’ll know before the end. If we live that long…”

Lee gave him a look, wondering what that was supposed to mean. “Before we do anything else,” she said, “I just want to say I’m sorry I stared at you in the restaurant.”

“I’m not,” the Elf-King said. “But let’s wait to discuss it.”

“Agreed,” Lee said. “Gel?”

Gelert was standing by the door, his nose working, his eyes half closed. “Three of them down the hall to the right,” he said. “They’re all armed. Getting ready to advance.”

“No way we’re going out the way we came in! Gel, the cave—”

“It’ll do. Anything’s better than going out in that hall,” Gelert said. He paused, then said, “They’re moving, Lee!”

Lee looked at the door and leaned her will against it, expecting to see the stony ground and the cave-spine in the midst of it, melting snow still piled in its lee. The image resisted her. Through her concentration, somewhat remotely, she could hear voices outside the door, getting closer, shouting in Alfen.

Come on
, Lee said to the World, 
this is important; cooperate!
 She closed her eyes to See better, feeling the resistance begin to fray and weaken. Then it started dissolving much more quickly as Gelert once more found the key to the full shift before she did and augmented her vision with his. The changed world flowed around them, that brief chaos-stage briefer than ever this time, barely more than a flicker of color before the darkness around them was overtaken by a lighter darkness—a sky still overcast, a landscape streaked with shadows cast from a fitful light above.

The three of them plunged forward, collapsed to the ground together. Lee caught the impact hard on her knees as she came down on them, and gasped with the pain of it. But the sound of gunfire, now farther up the mountainside, above and behind them, was extremely motivating. Lee managed to scramble upright again and got herself and the Elf-King crouched down behind the stone spine that once more loomed in front of them. In its lee, amid the snow that still lay there unmelted, the three of them sheltered for a few breaths. Then Lee put her head a little way around the side of the spine, cautiously, not sure who might have seen them arrive and be targeting them.

Up on the walls of the Laurins’ House, the gunfire continued, the energy weapons illuminating the space behind the parapets like localized lightning. “Nasty,” Lee said softly. “Were you expecting a 
coup d’etat
?”

“For a century or so now,” the Elf-King said. He was sitting with his back to the stone, still gasping with even the slight exertion that getting here had required.

Lee glanced at Gelert, concerned. 
He’s in bad shape, still. We’re not going to be able to get out of
 
here in much of a hurry if we have to…

And we have to, Lee. As soon as someone who can sense psychospoor turns up there and works
 
out what we’ve done, they’ll be right behind us.

“Poor timing on our part, I guess,” Lee said. “Never mind. We’ve got to get you somewhere safer than this.”

“I doubt anywhere—in this universe—will be very safe for long,” said the Elf-King. “We need to leave. But I can’t do it yet.”

“We can,” Gelert said. “But it’s going to take a little preparation. We’re still beginners at this.”

Lee nodded. “The only reason we’ve done so well this far is that the place is so malleable…”

The look the Elf-King turned on Lee, then, was an odd one: both hopeful and frightened. “You understand,” he said. “I was right. About this, if nothing else. I was 
right
…”

“We’ll congratulate ourselves later,” Lee said. “We’ve got to move again. Where?”

“Lee!”
 Gelert barked, and threw himself away from the spine, straight at Lee and the Elf-King. The two of them tumbled over on the stones, feet away from the spine, Gelert coming down on top of them; and blaster fire from the silent craft that had come down on them now glanced off the spine and blew the top of it to chips and stinging splinters. The three of them scrabbled away in the direction from which the craft had come as it swung around for another pass. Lee stared at the ground beneath them, willing it to open and drop the three of them somewhere else, anywhere else: but as she reached out to grab the Elf-King’s arm, pulling him after her, something caught her and held her still. He had pushed himself up on hands and knees, and was looking at the craft as it swung around, simply looking at it—