by Adam Golden
To bind what cannot be bound.
A surge of formless excitement shot through the sorcerer’s body at those words. A hint, a possibility. He felt Volundr’s nod more than saw it.
“Aye,” the ancient prisoner answered the question the wizard dared not ask. “The net sunders the paths of Seidr, it blocks magic. Among other things, it also promotes docility and allows the overseers to glean your thoughts. It is the perfect restraint.”
A spark kindled Nicholas’ breast. Hope. If the net could be put on him, it could be cast off again. A single grain of optimism lit among the morass of shocked, devastated depression within, only to be promptly suffocated by the wave of pity, remorse, and all but forgotten pain that shuddered outward from the other man.
“Best not to think about it boy,” the ancient said sadly. “The threads of the net cannot be grasped by mortal hands nor seen by mortal eyes. No power of man or god can touch them, it is hopeless. Best to resign yourself to the truth of it.”
The voice was heavy, weighted by old grief and resignation, and yet there was something else, something faint behind the words and images that flickered before his mind’s eye. Nicholas reached out with his mind, summoning all the control and finesse he’d acquired over more than half a dozen decades of meticulous study. He probed the hazy image, reaching for it, and pulled it closer.
It was a forge, but a strange sort of forge, awash in the orange haze of torchlight and molten metal. The focus was an anvil, but not any simple workman’s anvil. This one was massive, easily the size of a small cart and standing near as tall as an average sized man. It was sized for a giant, and had the air of an altar more than a place of work. The whole edifice gleamed in the lambent glow of the forge light, as though made of the finest silver, and was covered with complex patterns of elaborate golden scrolls and runes. The wizard’s mind latched onto the designs as devices of magic, though he had no time to study them before the image changed. Lying atop of the anvil were a set of blacksmith’s tools, hammers, chisels, tongs, and punches all of the same strange variegate substance and all of surpassing quality. Each item seemed carved of fine faceted crystal, and as the brilliant light of the forge played on their surfaces, they shimmered with riotous waves of rainbow light.
“What . . . ?” the sorcerer asked, his voice heavy with awe like nothing he’d experienced since the earliest days of his study of magic. “What was that? What was that anvil? Those tools? That rainbow light?”
“You saw Dain’s Anvil?” Volundr asked, genuine surprise entering his voice for the first time. “How? I can barely recall the sight of it myself, it’s been so long.”
As before, when the old man spoke of the long passage of time, Nicholas got the sense of centuries flicking past like seconds, of long eons and shifting ages. “Why did I see this anvil when you spoke of the hopelessness of escaping this net of yours?” the wizard demanded. “Can the anvil help me free myself of this curse?”
Volundr suddenly seemed smaller and frailer than he had before, as though he’d shriveled in on himself. His shoulders had slumped inward. “No, not the anvil. The tools upon it, or one of them anyway. The Tongs of Eitri. It was with those tools that the great smith, Eitri forged the Gleipnir chain. Only the tongs can grasp its threads. Only they can remove it. Nay, do not grow excited for they are lost to us. The Great Tools, Dain’s Anvil, and the skill and power to wield them, all lost, taken long ago, along with all of the ancient treasures of The Dokkalfar.”
“Lost? Taken? Where? By whom?” the wizard asked.
“Where?” Volundr asked bitterly. “Above, where else? By they who’ve taken all from us, the Godi of the Dawn Temple. The priests of Elphame, God Queen of Alfheim, the one you know as The White Lady.”
The old man spat at the name and hurled a loose bit of stone across the cave and over the grillwork to sail out into the dim dark beyond.
“It was they who looted and razed this place,” he went on. “They who broke and enslaved an entire race, who turned a city of unimaginable wonders into a mausoleum for the living dead. It was the priests, the elite of the wizard class, who stole the birthright of the Dokkalfar, took their history and their identity, all to strengthen themselves and justify their imagined superiority.” The old man’s biting grey eyes bored into the wizard, accusing, judging, and Nicholas, the fearsome Sange Klau, found himself strangely abashed and unsettled.
“But there must be millions of those . . . Dokk . . . those dark creatures down there,” Nicholas ventured. “Why do they not fight? Admittedly, their casualties would be enormous, but not even the strongest magic user can hold out against superior numbers forever.”
The old man gave his guest a long hard look, saying nothing, and then came easily to his feet. No sign of the frailty mere moments before remained in him now. He stepped briskly across the small dugout chamber and took his only torch down from a rough-made iron bracket inset in the living rock.
“Come, there is that which I would have you see,” Volundr said, and then he ducked through a portal Nicholas hadn’t seen before and was gone.
—
The corridors outside Volundr’s little cavern were low, rounded, and raw. The stone rough cut and undressed, looked more chewed than hewn, like the burrowings of some great worm. Crooked, uneven columns cut from the living rock supported the roof at regular intervals, but they were slipshod in their making, covered with ragged tool marks and some seemed near to crumbling. Gravel and loose stone rained down on the two men as they stooped forward, shuffling through the tight space.
The insectile chittering that had assailed Nicholas since his arrival in the Hellish Underworld rose and fell as they passed over crossing tunnels filled with the skittering movement of other bodies, barely seen but always felt.
Nicholas looked back over his shoulder, uncomfortable knots of the spindly, chittering denizens of the tunnels passing so close. He didn’t see the older man stop, and walked square into the taller, more sparely-built man’s back. Volundr took the impact with little more than a twitch and an annoyed crinkling of his wrinkled brow before he gestured for Nicholas to look.
The narrow tunnel let out onto a cavern wide enough that the wizard could make out neither walls nor ceiling. What he did see were dozens, perhaps hundreds of squat single-story structures jammed together in seemingly haphazard knots of three or four and oriented in no pattern he could detect. Each bundle of hovels was separated by a large, foul-looking pit fire in which blazed great bonfires that threw of greasy, noxious reams of smoke. The structures were all of stone, all of the same hasty and sloppy construction as the tunnels Nicholas had seen.
Of those he could see, none seemed to have a single square well-cut stone to speak of. Walls and roofs were in fact rough piles of irregular, uneven stone jammed together without care for proper fit or form. The yawning gaps, some more than big enough for Nicholas to have put his head and shoulders through, were stuffed up with mud and clay, or simply left to yawn open. The slow drip of water sounded somewhere, but Nicholas couldn’t see the source in the gloom of the smoky rancid fires. Everywhere he looked he saw only the huts and the ever-present movement of the bent, shuffling forms that his eye seemed bent on sliding away from. Volundr’s downtrodden Dokkalfar.
“The city of unimaginable wonders you spoke of?” Nicholas asked, with a low chuckle. He never saw the old man move, and he wasn’t able to put together what came next. One second, he was standing on his feet at Volundr’s shoulder, the next he was on his seat in the mouth of the tunnel head spinning as blood poured from his shattered nose.
“How dare you mock?” the old man roared, red-faced and raging as he stood over his fallen guest. “Can you truly look on such squalor and suffering so coldly? This corpse is what remains of those who forged Gungnir, Odin’s own spear! A race that was ancient before the first men crawled out of the muck of creation to stand upright. These are the craftsmen who armed and armored the Gods themselves for eons, yet look on them now. Slaves and beggar
s, thieves and killers. Reduced to . . . Dvergr, and you laugh.”
The older human turned and stalked away in disgust.
Nicholas was still dizzy and swaying as he pulled himself haltingly to his feet and staggered after his erstwhile guide. Their path took them in a wide arch around the dismal shantytown, which the wizard came to realize was a great deal larger than he’d thought. There must have been thousands of the miserable little huts packed together in that cavern, and the deeper the two men journeyed the fouler the stench became. The reek of those greasy polluted fires mixed with the fetor of an army of unwashed bodies, and the sickly damp stink of the unwholesome fungi that rule in the constant damp of deep places.
“Why don’t they fight, you ask?” Volundr said, the first words he’d spoken in more than an hour since his burst of outrage. “Look there and see.”
The old man pointed toward a fire parallel to their winding course, and Nicholas saw his first clear sight of the Dokkalfar, clearly lit by the fire behind. The figure Nicholas saw was black as pitch and thin as a rail. A stooped skeletal ruin hung with bits of filthy cloth that could hardly be considered a covering. It looked to Nicholas like some sort of macabre, leather-wrapped scarecrow. Sparse tufts of long stringy hair clung in patches to its skull and chin, and eyes of a bright yellow blazed out from the deep sunken pits of its sockets. The great bend in the creature’s spine made guessing its standing height difficult, but there was no muscle at all to speak of on its frame. Even a host of such pathetic creatures would be kindling to a magic user of even middling strength, and Volundr had implied that the White Woman’s minions were all sorcerers of some ability.
“I see,” the wizard said.
“Not the half boy, not the half,” the old man grunted and continued on.
—
Nicholas gasped again as some other detail of the chamber came forward to claim his attention. It was stunning beyond belief. The basilicas of Rome, the palaces of Constantinople, the ziggurats of Babylon, they all paled into insignificance in the face of the craftsmanship of this single chamber. The floor made of huge square slabs of breathtaking milk-white marble shot through with swirls of onyx and waves of gold. The living stone of the walls was dressed and carved with millions of exceedingly delicate and intricate relief sculptures. Fantastical animals and birds, scenes of battles, balls, hunts, and funerals. The coronations of kings and queens stood beside pastoral scenes of the harvest and of fish pulled from the sea in great nets. The ascension of figures that must have been gods, led into the fall of hideous and malformed demons and monsters. The history and culture of many peoples were laid out on these walls in exacting perfection. Each and every scene elaborately worked and minutely detailed, each one the work of a master craftsman.
The whole chamber was lit by ranks of ornate candelabra worked out of jutting fingers of living rock that rose up out of the floor or reached down from the ceiling of rainbow-hued quartz crystals. Each of the candelabra on the floor was worked into the form of a great spreading tree Volundr called ‘Yggdrasil’, while those that lowered from the ceiling were carved into the aspect of branches, each holding a pair of ravens so perfect in their detail that Nicholas half expected them to shy as he approached. Each of the great fixtures was fixed with a series of crystals that had, to the wizard’s shock and delight, burst alight when the two men entered the huge chamber.
“The last of the old magic left to us here,” the old man told him mournfully.
While Nicholas goggled at the magnificence of the scene spread before him, Volundr barely looked left or right and never slowed his step. A visible tension had gripped the old man as they walked into the room and seemed to increase with every step until the old man was near quivering, like a bowstring drawn too tightly.
“Once,” Volundr said after what seemed a long age of silence, “this chamber was the gateway between the two great cities of the Aelfkin. The Ljosalfar, the light elves, were great masters of Seidr, sorcerers and sorceresses without equal. Their city, Alfheim was a shining beacon of knowledge and wisdom where scholars and magic users, both human and Aelfkin, worked to enhance and safeguard the mortal plane, our world. It was there that the first wizards of our race learned their craft.”
Nicholas opened his mouth to speak, but found he had no words. Could it be true, could he and all those like him owe their gift to creatures like that pathetic figure he’d seen below? He kept his council, and Volundr went on.
“Far below, in the living heart of the mountain, shone Alfheim’s twin: Svartalfheim, the realm of the dark elves, the Dokkalfar. They were miners, forgers, and builders, craftsmen without peer. A brother race made in the same moment as their light kindred, and for the same ends: to create, to protect, and to work in concert with their brethren. Man was still hardening pointed sticks in the fire and calling them spears before the Dokkalfar brought the first of them to learn the secrets of the forge. They taught our ancestors to work metal, to make tools and weapons, but also to work stone, to harvest the deep places responsibly, and act as stewards of the land.”
The old man stopped and shook his head mournfully.
“It went on for thousands of years,” he said, his low soothing voice growing rough at the edges as he continued. “Slowly, as mankind advanced, the Aelfkin drew back into the mists of legend, but their legacy and their great peace lived on.”
“What happened?” Nicholas prompted when Volundr’s silence stretched. “Whence came the rift between the two races?”
“Magic,” the old man spat bitterly, “power and the greed that such things always bring. Centuries ago, for no reason that they could discern, the magic of the light elves began to shift, to change. It was a small thing at first, a curiosity to be explored, but as time went on, the change grew more pronounced. Magic grew erratic, the ways between the planes, the worlds of mortals and the Gods, grew unstable and dangerous, and collapsed entirely. Despite all their knowledge and their great skill, there was nothing that the high sorcerers of Alfheim could do to stem the changes, to reconnect with the High Plane for aid or guidance. They were bereft. Magic was dying. The soul of their existence was vanishing.
“That was when they discovered the truth that would be the doom of their kin. You see, the crafting magic of the Dokkalfar, the spells they imbued into the greatest of their works, didn’t seem to be as seriously affected as that of their brothers. The dark elves had the last reliable magic on the Holy Mountain. Shortly after that discovery began the whispers. There were those that said the dark elves were not elves at all, not made in brilliance by the High Gods, but rather something lesser, born of maggots and unworthy of their exalted status they’d enjoyed for so long. That was when the first calls of Dvergr were uttered.”
“You used that word before,” Nicholas said. “I didn’t recognize it then, what is it?”
“A pejorative, a racist curse,” the old man said with a sour twist to his mouth, “a way to make their brethren something else, something separate. Something less. The word means something stunted, a misshapen thing, a dwarf. Dvergr, it was said in Alfheim, were changeling creatures who took on the elvish aspect in order to work their vile mischiefs. They were grasping, greedy thieves who cared for nothing but wealth and hoarded both that wealth and power for their own selfish ends. They carried diseases, stole children, and raped good elvish women. These claims came quietly, whispered at first in dark corners, but within a few centuries, open prejudice and violence against Dokkalfar were the norm.
“Light elf raids into the sanctums of Svartalfheim grew more common and costly with each year, and each time they were thrown back by dark elf defenders. The screams about the perfidy and violence of the dark elves grew louder. Finally, a scholar among the Ljosalfar made a groundbreaking discovery. Another source of power, a great well of force had been uncovered. Alfheim would have magic once more. The celebrations went for a year. The Dokkalfar imagined that with their power restored the madness of the Ljosalfar would cease and the balance b
etween the twin cities would return . . .”
“It didn’t,” Nicholas said.
Volundr let out a long woof of breath and shook his head sadly.
“Centuries of bitterness, bigotry, and manufactured fear don’t just vanish,” the old man said. “The high sorcerers of the white city had been pushing their boulder toward the edge for too long. It had too much momentum to be stopped. The armies of Alfheim stormed through this chamber like an armored wave and, with their new magics, the host of the Dokkalfar was smashed like a clay vessel dropped from a height. The wizards blasted Svartalfheim to ruins and then blasted those ruins into craters. They took every ounce of magic and every treasure of their kin.”
The old man’s footfalls finally halted, and Nicholas gasped at the scene before him. They’d come to the rear wall of the great chamber, and were stopped by a massive chunk of black onyx lying in their path. This end of the chamber was demolished, a great heap of toppled stone, iron, and crystal. The huge black stone, Nicholas discovered after a few moments of study, was the head of a great statue. He found pieces of a second one as well. The figure had been tall, broad-shouldered, and muscular, proud-looking. Could this have been what the dark elves had been before their fall? If so, how had they been transformed?
He turned to ask Volundr, and found the old man staring at the ruin, silent tears streaming down his face.
“Before they collapsed the gateway, the High Sorcerers announced that the stolen bounty of the Ljosalfar had been reclaimed and the Dvergr would receive mercy. They would be allowed to go on serving the Holy Mountain, and its new Queen, she who had saved the world by returning magic to its true masters.
“The scholar who’d unlocked the First Force,” Nicholas supplied.
